This week’s flash fiction is great. The bee’s knees, in fact. Or at least the wasp’s work. Enjoy!
Eve collected wasps in an old five-liter water bottle. It hung on the tree next to the fence in their front garden, and she wouldn’t take it down though her parents begged her to. They had to go next door to pick up their post, as the postman, unnerved rather than scared by the trapped wasps, refused delivery.
If you held your hand against the warm plastic on your way past, it felt like the bottle shivered. The hollow buzz was the excited gossip of a distant crowd, punctuated by the *tock* of a wasp bouncing off the surface.
Don’t let Eve catch you touching it, though. She swears better than anyone else in town.
The only time she ever took the bottle down, was to remove the corpse when a wasp died. She’d take the bottle into the house, then hang it straight back up again, afterwards.
She met Alan by catching him touching the bottle, but he didn’t mind her swearing at him.
She told him he’d never get his post delivered again, and he said he hated getting bills anyway.
They moved into a flat with nowhere outside for her to hang the wasp bottle, but we could still hear it thrumming all through town.
Sometimes, you could hear a *tock* like a wasp hitting the side of a plastic bottle.
The curtains in the windows were white with cartoon daisies, though the flowers had alternating black and yellow petals.
One day, the wasp bottle hung in the kitchen window in front of the curtains. That’s when we knew Alan had grown tired of not getting his post delivered.
If it was me, I’d have been scared of Eve getting pregnant, then presenting me with hundreds of tiny, stinging wasp babies.
She never got any bigger, though, so that couldn’t have been it.
You can’t touch the bottle any more, but Eve doesn’t mind people watching when she fishes the dead wasps out. The swarm clambers like crazy over her skin when she sticks her arm in, but they don’t ever sting.
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