Bees and wasps
Arachnids and insects. Two different evolutionary branches. The same small bundle of chitinous nastiness in practical terms.
Wasps. There’s something my friend (lets call her Katy Kitten) doesn’t like. Lots of girls don’t like wasps. The standard feminine reaction to bees and wasps at my secondary school was to run away screaming loudly with flapping arms. Just to enrage them further, as everyone well knows.
I never did that. I preferred the “stay perfectly still and pretend it’s not there,” masculine reaction. Or should I say, “I’m frozen with fear and I’m trying not to show it.”
Why are my fears so closely linked to the space where I slept as a child?
Summer in my childhood attic bedroom was much too close for comfort. I always left my window open all night just to breathe. Wasps nest in the eaves below my room. They would float up lazily through my window. Often I would awaken to an irritable buzzing as they banged against the glass pane, trying to get back out.
I was always taught never to move. Sometimes this knowledge leads me into difficult scenarios.
Many times during the summer the wasps in the eaves caught me naked.
In the middle of getting dressed in the morning, there they are, buzzing around my face, my bare legs, investigating my exposed armpits when I have paused in mid-action at the sound of their wings.
They drip venom on my sheets whilst I squeeze my hands into fists and remain statue-still until they have satisfied their curiosity, flown back out of my window on other errands.
Never scream. Never flap. Some fears come too close to comfortably indulge.
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