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The Curious Nest

Jennifer Ihasz

    The best time to kill wasps is when it is coldest. That is why he and the little girl waited until nightfall to go out, waited until it was darkening, as if even the atmosphere itself had turned a blind eye to what they were doing.
    The night before, the sound of men woke her from her curled sleep and she had silently crept out of her room and into the hall. There, she could watch their shadows on the wall, cast from the sputtering of pale, dusty light, without fear of being caught. Their voices were loud, carried by beer and moonshine bravery. She could smell their yeasty breath as their stories rose in excitement. A question had been brought to this rugged council, and the men were eager to top one another, aching to be the one who answered.
    They went on, until deep in the night, just as our ancestors had probably done as we evolved, gathered around their own sputtering flames, smelling of men and the night and all things heavy. The girl listened as they went on, telling of nests the size of boat bobbers, the size of engines, engulfing entire rooflines, and of pouring gasoline onto ones underground and lighting them on fire. Nestled within their stories, lingering among the loud words and bragging, there ran a thread of something the girl had not expected, fear. They could have been gods that night, with their big shadows stretched out on the walls and their daring and laughter, yet their plan was to sneak up on something smaller, subdue it and attack.
    The little girl had never known that wasps could build their nests under ground. She didn’t bother to wonder why they would do that. What she did wonder was why all those grown men, all those big men, were afraid of tiny wasps that you could smash with your hand.
    Her Uncle had told her, when she asked, that wasps were right bastards, that they would swarm on a man and sting him over and over, filling him with poison. He told her that when a bumblebee stings someone its barbed stinger got stuck and tore them apart as well. A bumblebee, he had said, would have to be really serious about stinging, but a God Damn wasp could sting whatever it felt like. Its smooth stinger would pull out over and over again, poison-filled and endless. And wasps was mean, he told her, rather kill a man as soon as look at him. Wasps, he told her, had a real problem with authority.
    The girl had found the nest the day before, wedged into the side of a large tree by the side of the house. She hadn’t been playing, but sitting under the tree when she had looked up to see something that looked like grey foam wedged into the crotch of one of the branches. It reminded her of the rough, striated arc of the seashells the man at the thrift store had shown her. They were sealed inside a smooth, glass bubble with gentle sand and a tiny thing meant to look like a sign that said Ocala Fla. on it. The old man had twisted it in his hands, making the shells tumble like a dry surf and told her about the seashore until her mother had noticed her missing and dragged her away. She had told her mother about the nest, who in turn told the Uncle, who proceeded to find out how to kill it.
    Her mother had gushed on a bit about how lucky they were that the Uncle was there to save them, there to take care of them. She slurred these accolades a bit as she leaned down to speak to her little girl, her elbow slipping off the side of the table making her jackknife alarmingly close to the girl’s face before she caught herself. Her hair, lanky and shriveled into tendrils from its weight and grease, swung into her face. The girl had never known her mother’s hair to be any other way. She could not remember a time when it didn’t smell like old smoke and something fermenting. It was hard like her face, eyes, and the shriveled frame her faded dresses hung from. The girl suspected she had shot from the womb just as she was, stiff and unchangeable. She brushed away the careless hair in a practiced, shaking motion, pushing herself upright and seeming to forget what they had been talking about in the first place. Her eyes locked on to the girl, trying to focus, like some lusty bird attracted, so the girl got out of the kitchen as quietly as possible.
    Since her Uncle had come, he and the mother had often sat at the old kitchen table, two bookends without any books, and drank. They spoke in loud voices, often waving their glasses around, their pointing finger sticking out as they jabbed it in the air to illustrate their strong feelings on something. As the night wore on, their words stretched like elastics then wore themselves down into shadows as their heavy eyelids threatened to close. The mother often fell asleep before the Uncle.
    Sometimes, the girl imagined herself to be a wasp, being able to sting and sting until she killed someone, then fly away and build a nest wherever she pleased. She imagined being filled with poison, being hard. She could hold her body rigid, making herself into a stinger, but it never seemed to help.
    The girl didn’t remember her father. He had left when she was just a baby. Her mother only told the girl that he was a bastard. The girl had learned not to ask about him. Sometimes her mother would talk about him anyway, and she would spit when she talked. The words would drop out of her mouth as if racing, short and wet, inflicting themselves on every surface around her. Sometimes she would scream and throw things and the girl would hide in her room. Sometimes she would tell the girl a happy story and, with the exaggerated steadiness of someone drunk, would touch the girl’s face.
    The night was almost full dark when they headed out, the uncle and the little girl. She had on jeans under her flimsy nightgown. It had become more of a shirt as the girl grew, its pink pony with the sparkles had washed away almost entirely from the front, and what once had been a ruffle on the bottom was now a static, limp roll that had collapsed in on itself over time. It was all over pills and the sleeves rucked up over her growing arms. The Uncle should have told the girl to get a sweater, but he wasn’t the type of man that would say something like that.
    He rounded the side of the rickety shed with a red plastic gas can. It was red and battered like the suitcase he had brought with him when he had showed up there. Her mother had not been happy to see him, but had taken him in. He was family, after all, she had told the little girl, and you had to take care of family. The girl knew he kept a wad of cash in that suitcase and she was pretty sure that was what her mother had welcomed into her home. She had never even mentioned having a brother before that, and the little girl knew nothing about her mother’s family. Since her father had left it had just been the two of them and the occasional boyfriend, until he left and then it was just the two of them again.
    Her uncle set the gas can down and hooked his thumbs, one neatly on either side, over his shiny gold belt buckle. The girl tensed and relaxed. The uncle fished through his pockets and pulled out a crumpled pack of cigarettes and a lighter. If the girl thought it was dangerous for him to smoke near the gas can, she didn’t mention it.
    The cigarette he managed to fish out of the pack after a few tries was also crumpled, but the uncle didn’t seem to notice. The flame jittered as he tried to light it with his shaky hands. When he finally did, he took a long drag, then blew the smoke out of his nose in stream. Satisfied after a few drags, he pinched the end off the butt and carefully placed it back in the pack, then placed the pack back into his tattered, loose jeans. He had a scar roped across one forearm that he had once told the girl he had got from roping bulls, but her mother had laughed when the girl had brought it up and told her it was more likely he got it in a bar fight, or in prison.
    Tonight, with the gas can banging against his hopeful leg as he walked, it was almost as if he were signaling all the bulls in Pamplona. It was, after a fashion, the only thing the girl could see of him in the dark. That red can and, once in a while, the glint of that big, ugly belt buckle.
    The nest was silent in the night. She imagined the inside filled with fragile hallways and tiny chambers, a slumbering wasp curled in each one. She imagined they felt safe there, in that nest. They didn’t know that bad things were looming in the dark.
    The girl knew that her Uncle really wanted to burn the nest. She knew he wanted to stand there, in the light of that fireball listening to the soulful ruffle of their papery damnation. But this nest wasn’t in the ground. It was higher, and hung there more like the product of some long, organic growth. It didn’t look a bit rebellious, but the girl knew the Uncle felt there was danger in it, so it would have to go.
    He pulled a cylinder from his pocket. The girl couldn’t see it in the dark, but she knew that on the side was a red circle with a line through it and a black wasp on its back, x’s where its eyes should be. When her uncle had showed it to her earlier, he said that it was filled with poison smoke that would kill the wasps while they slept.
    The girl thought that sounded like an easy death. She thought, in this case, it was a good death. She had no quarrel with the wasps.
    He handed the little girl the gas can as he wedged his foot between a rock and the tree, giving himself some height, some closeness to the nest. The girl watched him, saw the flatness of his belly as his shirt hitched up, saw the glint of that belt buckle again. He was twisting and reaching, trying to propel himself closer to the stars, to that curious nest, so it would be easier to destroy it.
    The girl watched for a few moments, amazed by his loose and drunken grace, sloshing the gas in the can as if judging its weight, and fingering the stolen lighter hidden in her pocket.

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