Those who have followed the saga of life at my current address know that it has been a tapestry woven from nightmares. The sickly, bloated summer moon has ushered through my window terrors uncatalogued by science, but recognized by children whose fears so often linger beyond the periphery of what is known. The season began innocently enough, with a random act of callous arachnicide on my part. After that, my life descended into a twisted mockery with the arrival of a spider which could respawn itself again and again, returning to its perch on my ceiling every night to carry out its malevolent plans to get on me. I successfully banished this eight-legged apparition, only to discover that my home was under siege by a terrifying horde of its older cousins: primordial beasts fully large enough to incapacitate and devour a small bird.
These horrors have subsided for the most part. My immortal antagonist has yet to resurface, perhaps having found new prey in the town where I set it free. And an uneasy truce has settled in with the demons outside the window: I leave them be, they feast on the smaller insects drawn into their hideous webs by the glowing nighttime warmth of my windows, and I can leave my screens open on a warm night without bugs getting in. It is an arrangement beneficial to both parties, and I feel like I’m part of that “circle of life” that has been sung about. However, I have hardly had time to relax and lay down my guard, for the rise of the sun has recently brought with it a new invader.
Autumn is nice. Mild temperatures, colorful foliage, Halloween…I love all of these things. However, since I so despise cold weather, part of me can only view the season as summer’s long, slow death march toward winter.
The new creatures prowling my apartment view it that way in a very literal sense. I’m talking about wasps. In general, wasps and I will not frequently cross paths, as they mostly terrorize those who venture outdoors: a luxury my desk-bound writing endeavors do not afford me. Now, with the evenings growing chilly and the daytime heat dwindling, wasps know their days are numbered. Like rats on the Titanic they are fleeing en masse to warm places that will allow them to extend by just a little bit longer their doomed lives. Unfortunately for both of us, one of those places is my apartment.
Worse, they are understandably pissed off. They know their time is coming to a close, so this makes them especially aggressive. Not only that, but some cruel trick of a snickering Mother Nature has given them all the least desirable traits of both ants and bees, but without any valuable career skills such as the honey-making that everybody is always fawning over those stuck-up bees for. Wouldn’t you be angry at the world?
The wasps are not as grotesque in appearance as the spiders, so their march indoors would not alarm me so much if it were not for that whole stinging me business. Disturb one of these large, dark and irritable creatures at your peril, for they will strike through your flesh and envenomate it in less time than it takes you to blink. It may be just a brief sting and some temporary puffiness and discomfort…but let’s just say that after what happened in Steve Irwin’s last encounter with a stinger, I refuse to take risks.
So, for the past few weeks, terrifying moments where I have turned my head or opened a door only to yelp in alarm at the appearance of one of these winged menaces have become gruesomely commonplace. Stealthily the wasps crawl along the walls into hiding spots behind furniture or hum erratically through the air, awaiting the perfect moment to deploy their stingers against me. One was lying in wait atop my trash can when I went to toss out my dinner refuse, and made a beeline (Hah!) for my face the very moment I spotted it, resulting in a cry of fear and a furious flurry of frantic arm-waving.
Naturally, each of these hellish predators meets with the Paper Towel Wad of Doom the moment it is discovered. I look upon each instance as a mercy killing, an early discharge from the service for a creature too stubborn to die and too dangerous to live. However, have I so soon forgotten the lessons of my spider nightmare? Will these deaths will once again visit upon me the focused wrath of another pack of vengeance-minded larger cousins? Will my fate come upon the wings of an armored Superwasp with a six-inch stinger? Or will my apartment be swarmed by a buzzing black cloud of the creatures like a Biblical locust plague?
For once, the colder weather can’t come quickly enough.
