This is the only reason I didn't get kicked out.

This was my final creative project for class.

Only female wasps have stingers. Only female wasps build the nesting area. Only female wasps remain after autumn, when the majority of the nesting colony dies off.

A wasp crawls down the window, its legs seemingly conjoined to the pane like she is hovering on water. Bubbles in the liquid glass create pools around its feet as it unobtrusively creeps towards the wood, chipped paint warping upwards; a dream of a result of a tiny earthquake. I wonder where her home is. If she is a social wasp- a hornet, maybe- her queen constructs the nest until it is walnut-sized. After that, the rest of the female population of the colony takes over, building off of the careful pulp mold that will eventually house her young. A solitary (predatory) wasp lays a single egg in each cell and then seals it, making it impossible for interaction to occur among the larvae and the adults. I think of Wesley, who is dead now.
The wasp tiptoes around my finger when I press it an inch or so in front of her path. Multiple oily smudges are left in the shapes of my thumb, my index finger, my middle. She figures out how to avoid the residual obstructions altogether by diagonally sidling downwards; she does not want to have to physically move me with violence. She is probably tired. It's surprising how quickly the mind is able to learn things, to be trained- in language, the familiarity of an area, to eat more slowly. Colloquial speech with an acquaintance. To obliterate from memory. I stop bothering her and manage to loll my head to one side, so I can barely see her out of the corner of my eye. All tangible material in my dwelling is noticeably dishwater gray. Counter melts into refrigerator melts into unused Kitchenaid mixing machine. The radiator is too hot against my side. Heat never relents in this building.
I love this wasp because she would never need me. Not only do female wasps rely on males merely for reproduction, they never consider clockmakers twice. What am I talking about? Sleep is important.

Funny thing about the fig wasp, though. An Agaonidae female enters the fruit through an opening called the ostiole, laying her eggs inside a host fig. While depositing eggs, she carries some of the pollen from her original birthplace, pollinating some of the female flowers. After exiting the pupal stage, a male's primary function is to mate with a female. Since they lack wings and are unable to function outside of the fig for any prolonged amount of time, the male relies on his reproduction with the female as the only culmination of his being. After mating he digs a hole out of the fig for the female to escape, then dies quickly. The female, claiming wings that the male does not possess, flies to a new fig to begin the process over again. This is funny to me.
All my clocks have been smashed, the pieces strewn pathetically across the hardwood, some sticking awkwardly at random from the cracks. Every product of my creativity, every ounce of my passion and work has been effortlessly fragmented into bits. Without clocks, my apartment is noiseless. The silence becomes unbearable, the insanity evoked by a room so pointedly taciturn it becomes excruciating. I tap the sides of my head. Distorted clock hands stretch lackadaisically from bent faces; gears have flown into the corners of the room.
"Cowards!" I yell halfheartedly, making a path by sliding one of my useless legs through the pieces, kicking at my crutch, which is now irritatingly far from me. The wasp remains unaffected, either by my yells or by the mess or the heat, carrying through with her plan which I know nothing of.
In the species Chalcididae, the parasitic females use their characteristically muscular hind legs to lock onto a larvae of an ant lion, proceeding to secure its jaws (or mandibles) apart and lay an egg down its susceptible throat. I yawn. In the Cicada Killer Wasp, or the Sphecius, the female paralyzes a large cicada with its sting, drags it up a tree (not unlike some types of jungle cat) and saves it as food for her young. Again, the male is useless. I look at my legs, my crutch lying amongst the clock parts, the effects of my impairment.

Again, the male is useless.

My small friend busies herself cleaning, her tiny legs rubbing together and stroking the length of her antennae, one by one. I'd once thought only flies did this and I marvel at the thought of an insect possessing enough dexterity to keep itself clean. Though wasps are somewhat garish, her wings seem to me particularly exquisite. Lavender twilight glows through the wet silk stretched between the threads of her wingspan; they quiver lightly while she washes.
Clouds of gall wasps can be seen hovering around dead bodies for no specific reason at all. Before his study on human sexuality, Alfred Kinsey focused his work on gall wasps. These facts probably have little relation.
Trichogrammatidae males, like fig wasps, are wingless and spend their entire lives inside their host egg with sister wasps, mating and never having the chance to leave the egg before they die. The female escapes and, because of her petite size and the fact that her wings are characteristically short, is generally moved about by wind.
Wesley is the reason I began making clocks. She told me to use my hands whenever I was sad. I have no concept of time and they always ticked at all random hours, which made her snort.
Her father was a flight engineer, which may have led to her enthrallment with all things winged- alive or inanimate. She carried a brown leather satchel with a brown leather-bound sketch diary inside; she used this to render somewhat credible sketches of insects, hangliders and birds. When she walked, the bag smacked against her hard little body. I met her when she was seventeen and rallying at a protest governed solely by women. Her dark curls were hacked short and pointed like scythes at the bottom, whirling around her contorted face as she snarled and waved her sign still slick and wet with paint. Furious perspiration flew off her forehead onto the crowd. I leaned in the comfort of the shady stucco wall, smoking and observing with slight curiosity. Here, I could think and pass judgment without apprehension. However, when she approached me, I became nervous and hated that she was so invasive. Her nearness infiltrated the sphere that surrounded me, my crutch, my cigarette. I shook and tried not to pant. I turned to leave but she tugged my shirt with all the impertinence of a teenaged girl and said, "for all the watching you were doing, you could at least offer me one of those."
What could I say? I fumbled with my pack of smokes and she took them from me. "Let's go." Not once did she regard my crutch; the part of me that was half paralyzed. The brief glance I get or even the stare that usually accompanies a greeting from a stranger, a new person, did not occur to her. I followed. This is how Wesley and I met.
Three years later and I still didn't do much of the talking. I figured what she had to say must feel more pressing and important, so I kept my mouth shut most of the time. We were both okay with it.
I blink and the wasp is illuminated from the inside. Light takes the form of smoke and clouds around her, lifting her wings, detaching her legs from the sill. She hovers. I blink again and there are three of her, again and there are more. This parade of luminous insect bodies floats in a haze. They hover to her lifeless form, propped in the corner. She is clean and no longer frowning, pale and fragile. Her arms are white and somewhat akimbo; her fingers are turned inward toward her palms. The main wasp circles and looks across the room at me. Many others turn and glare, tiny netted eyes blinding in the slowly ascending night. "Stop it, you," I bark. "Guilt is not present here. They'll find her eventually and I'm not bothered by it. She's there for safekeeping, I refuse to be a product of your scrutiny." I look back to the windowsill and the solitary wasp is still, plain, so tired. I realize I haven't slept in days. My hand is over my mouth, now.
The Diamma bicolor, also known as the blue ant, is a large soliditary parasitic wasp native to south and southeast Australia. It closely resembles an ant aside from its metallic turquoise coloration. While the male is busy subsisting on flower nectar, the female is paralyzing mole cricket larvae and laying eggs on their immobile bodies so that her young are born with a full supply of sustenance directly underneath them. She is defensive and will sting if provoked or threatened in any way; the poison released is merely painful to most, an in some can result in anaphylactic shock.
Sphecidae, or mud-dauber wasps, create cells with separate compartments made of (surprise) mud. When these homes are no longer in use and broken apart, there may be spider or caterpillar remains inside, as the mud-dauber also paralyzes its prey to drag home and consume alive with its larvae. Insects have no receptors to feel pain, but I wonder what they think about when they're eating someone else, being eaten, or if they think at all.
We are in the basement. This futon is flowered (if you could call it that), sandy and unstable. My body is flopped against the arm, equally as flimsy. Who makes these, anyway? She looks at my eyes and men everywhere deteriorate. Lying opposite my lacklustre form, she sends words skidding across the polyester. Her skirt fabric is the same as the couch. There is no other option than to cup her jaw; balance my fingertips on her neck. She says, "If anyone who's seen us, who knows us, tried to rescue our existence, I'd be disgusted." I don't really know what she means but I call her corny and arrogant and she punches me and then we kiss and I forget where we are in the room. She and I, we silently dare each other to blink first. There is no part of my love for Wesley that is not frivolous. Physically, no one has sat this close to me.
(...)
I am disappointed that she had to die just then, I thought, as I slide a large kitchen knife through an old dishtowel to wipe clear the blood. There were no theatrics- no spurting head wounds, no flailing jugular vein- the fanfare that usually accompanies this kind of murder. Humans do this to each other on purpose as a mockery of their demise: annihilate each other brutally and almost comically. The more gore and leakage, the better. None of that for me. I stumble slightly on clock parts as I go to completely wash the length of the blade. I didn't love her, really, but I felt I'd been exposed.
On September 12th Lloyd Mason, 63, of Baldur, Manitoba was chopping wood outside his house in the early morning. His wife, Shirley Mason, was frying eggs in bacon grease behind the semi-security of the screen porch door. Her faded toy train apron was double-knotted in the back. Simple lambskin slippers scuffed the blue wooden floor planks. In the yard, Mason put down his axe, turned around, and was abruptly swarmed by a horde of German yellow jackets. After they repeatedly stung his face and body, he managed to scramble into his modest cottage and collapse on the hardwood. He was barely able to explain the situation to Shirley and despite her valiant efforts to deliver antihistamine to his body, Lloyd Mason was dead long before the ambulance arrived. Earlier that day, Lloyd's eldest son Thomas had risen from his bed and marvelled how his gut had grown large enough to cast a small shadow across the terrain underneath. Before the rest of the family was awake, he and the german shepard went outside to throw axes at a target on the south side of the shed. The night before, Shirley sat awake and thought of other people existing.
Wasps are known for aggression when they run low on food during foraging season. A 46-year-old woman in Colchester disturbed a nest while gardening and was stung in multiple places on her face, arms and neck. Showing early signs of shock, she was airlifted to the local hospital, her condition further unknown. That afternoon, she left her husband of eight years at their fourth floor suite and went to stay with her cousin. Her husband, Paul, made a pile of all her belongings and jerked off onto them in the middle of the oak floor. Then, he compulsively scrubbed and polished until the surface gleamed.
In the UK, a farm worker named Frederick Parker and his employer, Arther Pocock, were stung hundreds of times by a cloud of hornets when they went to the stable to rescue an injured calf. The night before, Frederick and Arther touched hands and blushed. Frederick's family waited at home around the dinner table but eventually went to bed because he didn't get home until late.
I feel as though I tried. This few-year ordeal has slowly caused my body to yellow at the edges. Stomps start to echo in the hall and I plug my ears and look at Wesley's body, nails painted gold, slouching against the wall. This room is too loud and I'm overheated. The wasp crawls up the window.