'The Swan, N°16, by Hilma af Klint.
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The Feeling

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By now, we should know it by name. By now, we should know better what’s happening to us but instead all we know is an unquenchable desire for destruction. The stomping behind my eyes, a lightning bolt shingling along my legs. My feathery flagella have been hijacked by a stunning panic, the rest of the world dulled and dimmed. Now everything is the feeling, the flowers and garbage and dog shit have a banal lifelessness.

I can’t find the world anymore; the shape is turning away from me.

Its potency is so strong it practically speaks to you, though its tongues are unintelligible. It is not like birdsong. It is not like a mosquito’s whine. It is a sound like yours, like an amicable greeting and at times like an aggressive call to back the fuck off. It is a curse and a prayer. It is a whisper you might catch on an August breeze, the latter half, the sound of Summer as it dwindles and drips dry.

Call it: a peach shriveling up, sinking into its wooden center. The pit betrays dark magic, there’s no way around it, pockmarked like a dying star or a preserved brain. The flesh is the planet, the pit its fiery core. There is a tremor of power in the pit, a throbbing bass note, a promise of destruction and new life but only at the sacrifice of sunlight. Cool dark earth. Nothingness.

It makes you fly wrong, filling your senses with conflicting information. Something is hunting you, you’re trapped, you’re on the run, but when you can turn around to look it in the eye it reminds you of freedom. You can ask no one about how they’re coping with the feeling because wasps are proud and private and embarrassed to admit the answer is: Quite poorly.

The feeling belongs to Fall, it smells like turning leaves and the beginning of cold. Our world is shrinking to a spiked point. The feeling pokes and pricks. You should be able to escape it, sure, but “Free Will” is just a clever myth that makes us easier to murder. I knew a wasp who crawled inside a narrow plastic tube for a shot at the overwhelming slurry of simple syrup at its bottom. It was a hummingbird feeder. The wasp drowned and now the birds won’t eat: the sugar’s gone sour with rotting ambition. We are beholden to our kind’s destiny.

Fall must have been the subtext of all our pop culture, the churning abyss we were circling. Right out of sight. But of course, I should have known. A wasp’s love for garbage is an infatuation with all we lack: infinity, immortality as glimpsed in all that warm black eternal plastic. A moldy pizza crust doesn’t call to mind a cadaver but new life: that grey blue colony of micro-existence.

Bacteria blossoms as beautifully as a flower. Garbage is vibrant in every sense, smelly and bright, deeply flavourful. Death is antithetical. Day and night.

What a wasp knows of day: Big skies showering crisp leaves with hot sun. What a wasp knows of night: The same as you—car alarms, ambulance sirens, raccoon sex.

To distract from the feeling, I compose my memoir. Reflection is my favourite labor.

I hatched in the city underneath a metal eavestrough. The homeowners were absent and nearsighted and late to our invasion. Atop a rusted old ladder, they tottered left and right in an attempt to spray us into submission. Aerosol ambush. Their frail arms could barely reach above the ladder’s lip.

The house was built in 1968. The couple moved in the following winter with a baby. The baby’s name was Grace, it was written across her forehead in lavender wool. The hat had ears different from the baby’s which were hidden underneath. A baby’s ears hide easily. A wasp has no purpose for ears except perhaps to crawl inside someone else’s. Personally, no need.

The mammalian ear has always depressed me in its stationary flabbiness. Where my antennae swivel to attention with acute awareness, dynamic and nuanced as a pair of fingers, the human ear lays dormant awaiting penetration. I’m told sound waves squirm around inside and then the rain sews all that sensory haberdashery into fully realized forms—ah beautiful, a dog in heat! —whereas my feelers find the shape for themselves, attending to the world, molding the gaseously vague around me into fine-tailed clouds racing across an ever-widening sky. Where I am attuned, a human is bothered and swatting at an uneven buzzing near their lobes.

It’s ears in their fatty uselessness that made humans sympathetic to me. The very fact that baby Grace possessed two sets, one merely for show as if to persuade us of her auditory alertness in pathetic clumps of lavender, got caught in my memory. I’ve struggled to shake the idea free since. Learning of Grace’s ears was a key moment in The Life of Me.

Our nest was recent in the history of Grace, affixed to the house only that past spring. But we had learned of our world. We had taught our children about the couple and Grace’s purple ears. Grace, now grown with a lined forehead and twenty-seven silver hairs along her scalp’s crest, lived across the city in a condominium that smelled like the inside of a vacuum bag. She still came down when her mother, watery and wavering, called her on the landline and begged her to bat us down off the roof.

She did bat us down. It was a real bat, not a figure of speech: Grace played softball once.

We learned all these things by intergenerational osmosis. There had always been a nest along the roof, or at least once, and all that culture had survived the years and remained in the rafters. Grace and her parents were the religion of our tribe, inscribed along the inner edge of our stripes. Stories as treasured as scripture.

Grace’s return was our Day of Judgment, a passage we’d dreaded for generations. Our dread was genetic. We fled with force, stung like mad. Instinct smothered reason and we took the energy reserved for rebirth and spent it on revenge. Grace was strong. Her only weakness was glucose, ours too. A patch on her arm pumped her with insulin. We were not so clever.

Our stings landed on deaf, virulent skin, pink and flat as deli meat. Slices of ham, pig pressed into uniform disks, an entire pig in a quarter inch curve—Grace too was compact in her power, matter collapsed to fit between the soft breaded sides of a ham and cheese sandwich.

I hated Grace, though I knew her purpose. The bat swung and my childhood shattered to dust.

Did we know the feeling then? We knew of massacre and divine reckoning but not the feeling. Not yet.

Our new nest leans along a green and white overhang, fresh pizzas baked and sold beneath. Tomato sauce is divine but chili oil in a tiny plastic container is supernaturally awesome. If we were still doing cave drawings, they would all be of that spicy orange oil, glittering like amber or tree syrup, Aperol spritz oceanside, perhaps exactly the colour gold was when it first oozed out of the universe, red-hot and delicious. Chili oil isn’t a meal, it’s heavenly transcendence. Fuck! Now, we have known bliss.

We finished construction at Summer’s end. I was an adolescent, marveling at how the line-up for pizza snaked around the block. The way people were melting like ice cream, sunscreen tears and slobbery breasts, beer guts slick like icy ski hills. I went from being a wasp who dreams to a wasp who has seen more of the world than you’d think. A wasp who observes, takes notes, finds truths. A wasp who philosophizes, poeticizes, pontificates.

A wasp unlike other wasps, as unlike as unlike. An unliked wasp, forgotten on purpose.

Similes have become my specialty. Poetry, my first love, but unrequited. As I’ve learned, in somber resignation, a poem is more than a series of comparisons, however superbly compared two things may be. It’s a criminal distinction, one I resent and detest. A misunderstanding about the pure value of comparing like and unlike things. For comparison is how we glance knowledge flitting between the banisters in its pjs up way past bedtime. Law & Order: Special Victims Unit glitters darkly on the TV and knowledge is stealing a soundbite to cuddle in bed. Could it be poetic if I let out more of the logic, moist air squeezing free through the flaccid lip of a party balloon? Poetry can’t be taught. Comparison comes commonly. Any insect can conjure an observation of “like” and “as.” This is what experts will tell you, smugly, like it’s always been so.

But I believe I’ve seen more broadly. Fondled more bits. Possess an extraordinary catalogue of like and unlike things. Wasps are poor flatterers. Humans save theirs for themselves. Ants are boring, spiders scare me. No one’s curious about my suspicions.

Oh. And don’t get me started on bees.

A wasp’s world is only as wide as its human neighbors will grant it. We dove and danced above half-eaten pizza slices, sending patrons screaming and swatting left and right. Some people will say, Wasps will be wasps, ’tis the season. A resting distrust, threatening to bubble into disgust. But some people have never learned how to live in the world or rather more precisely, with the world. And those people will murder you for your infatuation with chili sauce.

It didn’t matter, in the end, because the end was approaching as swiftly as sunset, surprising us in shadows. Our antennae picked up the feeling with optimism. Foreign signal from a past life. A new shape, freakish but intriguing. It took weeks to understand after we’d sorted through the disparate pieces, the softness here and the short, sharp squiggles there. We were unprepared for a whole of this magnitude. The message tore through us, scalding and noxious.

Now, I knew with certainty: I was born in the wrong season.

I matured from my larval state in the bitter fading rays of Summer’s end. I was prematurely catapulted into adulthood by Grace Day. Wasp adulthood is ten days, twenty-two at most. My duty was to mate, work, and with the feeling I realized: watch my colony die as warmth waned. Even our Queen could not survive the winter. Only the fertilized females had the privilege of hibernation. Me, if I got lucky. Woe to the woman defined by her sex! I knew now I would burn bright and early.

What kind of survival waited for me? To awaken in a new world, thawing and abandoned? Was I to rewrite my colony’s history in the few moments I had mid-egg-laying before ultimate expiration? I alone to find the right comparisons to tell our stories?

Would hibernation hurt?

I return to the memoir, my only salvation. I love retelling myself to myself.

I longed for the comfort of larvae-hood as soon as I’d left it. As an undeveloped goop, all I wanted was a shot at the sun. Adulthood sparkled before me, a transformation of unimaginable opportunities. I was frantic with anticipation of sky. I would have killed our queen if I considered myself prisoner. I was a child of restlessness, directionless and disarmed. I dreamed of horizons I had never seen. Borrowed an ancestor’s fantasies.

Humans have decades sprawling out before them like naked sunbathers on a closely trimmed lawn. My ten days were being rounded up for slaughter, mewling glassy-eyed sheep.

Infinity turns my hemolymph cold.

It was an unimaginable loneliness, to be the last of your kind burdened with new beginnings. I wanted it still, anything over the feeling, that horrifying emptiness. I wanted my half-life, its precarious vagueness. I needed more. Time was always being taken from me.

I flew about in a daze searching for my mate. I made up comparisons for the memoir. Ways of remembering the world. Sometimes they rose before me as illegible phantoms, so deafened was I by the feeling.

The feeling. The feeling. It’s screaming: Death is coming for you! And then it’s whispering, in a sexy, breathless way: and she will not wait patiently. I am crazed, I am intoxicated, I am a cyclone of vengeance. I could stab a car’s windshield if I wanted, crack that glass right in two, so powerful and insatiable is my need to stain the world my colour, chew a hole in it my shape. I knew only anonymity until the feeling crept inside my exoskeleton, crawled under my organs and churned back oxygen’s shadow, an echoey warning. Autumn smells have sent me into strangeness and suddenly I want legacy, I crave it like the feeling.

There are no comparisons. The feeling is like the feeling.

When a bee stings, it loses its entire interior. Whoosh! —right out the back like a fatal shit. The organs are literally torn from their casings. The bee is ripped from time by the fist of God. It must be a pain so great it strikes up its own corporeal existence. A second bee hanging lifelessly alongside the first. Wasps got off easy, we can sting like sneezing. It’s why we’ve never been welcomed into the human’s world, please, let us steal your labor and sell its fruits, we’ll build gardens for you and stage protests about your extinction. Sometimes wasps get invoked in sports, we’re supposed to be quick to action and ruthless, ideal for a high school basketball team. Bees get all the poetry and nuance. Bees get cuteness and genuine admiration. A wasp is a villain—a thief—a conniving son of a bitch. If we died like bees we’d know redemption.

I came to screwing my stinger into the fatty palm of a stray toddler, pizza sauce smeared on her sweet mouth.

She reminded me of Grace when she was young. I remembered—I had never known Grace as a child. It was someone else’s memory of Grace, but no less vivid. Grace was the only human I had known by name and only because it had been written on her. And thus, she was the only human I felt I had known, because without names they all became them and never her.

Grace. She had ruined my life. And now I was returning the favour in her doppelgänger. I had done it subconsciously but still I felt evil. The child was seeing me now, registering my act of violence in her innocent flesh. Her face was tearing in two, twisting with fear, tears welling along her heavy dark lashes. Toothless, slobbery, all brand new. Her hand was soft, like a petal.

And then she squeezed with an unexpected strength. Her fingers closed in. The world smeared before my ocelli. My legs snapped. The feeling ended and I was as happy as a bee.

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