#6: W for Wasp Vendetta
By: Midnight Drifters
Tags: Chronicle, Urban Tales, Vengeance, Youth

#6: W for Wasp Vendetta

The wasp passed unnoticed at first. Half prosciutto crudo, half margherita, half eaten, half unbaked and totally cold by that time, the pizza was still the main priority for this group of munchie teenagers.

The last pizza. A holy grail over 2 empty pizza boxes in a round center table that also included a joint rolling station, small remote controls, two wallets, a moonstone ring, an half used roll of paper towels, greasy orange wrinkled pieces of paper towel and an overcrowd of glasses of varied content, from tap water to black bubbly soda and different alcohol mixes.

And empty beer bottles, of course.

The music loud, a Youtube fail compilation mirrored to the TV and all phones in hands. In this multiverse of basic interests, the wasp had to get audacious to be noticed. Maybe she got too comfortable with teenagers lying down, melted backs and swollen bellies, a sofa with two mounds and a third one occupying a blue-striped beach chair. Just three thumbs and three mouths moving, discussing about how they might be ready, maybe, to eat again in 15 minutes for sure.

Teenagers time and needs can be reliably measured in joints. Sometimes.

The bold wasp hovers lower and lower to the unbaked pizza crusts, while another wasp frantically hits against the windowpane, too anxious to realise there is a fat layer of dirty glass in the way of her pacing.

Yellow and black and amber wings, the wasp makes a landing on a pizza crust. She lands right on the valley where the crust falls to meet a dented patch of remaining pizza land, still outlined by a shore of cheese. The wasp scratches her head, then walks towards the cheese - a double insult in the world of munchie teenagers.

The second wasp remains unnoticed. None of the teenagers, but only a spider at the window corner witnesses the madness of that wasp. The spider asks herself if that wasp was actually trying to break the window glass. Because it felt. like. she could.

It felt like the spider wasn’t that keen to test her web on this raging beast.

The movement was fast but she computed every frame of it. A human hand lifts a glass, flips it skillfully — like it has been done before- and drops over her trespassing sister.

She knows what is coming. In the wasps world, they tell bed stories about this to scare the larva.

The second wasp had to wait away with all her fury and pain. She mirrored the desperate moves of her trapped sister. She waited for the teenagers attention span to decay, but — how it always happens between teenagers and cruel things — the attention fully endured, in consecutive blows of smoke, until there was no more sign of movement in the glass chamber over the center table.

Only then the human youth lost interest and turned away to finish the joint. Coins were offered to the friend at the beach chair — the one who bet the wasp was going to die. The teenager who lost the money gets up to get another beer. And the gluttony hiatus is soon supplanted by a fresh urge to eat cold unbaked pizza.

Through the swarms of deadly smoke engulfing her sister’s hopeless pleas and until there was no pizza crust left by the hungry human savages, the second wasp watched from screaming distance, and waited and ravaged her soul with the bulldozer of impotence. When everything is crushed, you find fulfillment in simple resolutions.

And the little insect's resolution was to approach and say her goodbye. Fuck these humans, her sting is pulsating in a murderous fever, ready for retaliation. Let them come and try to bother her grief.

Which of course, the teenagers did.

‘Hey man, look… Look! There’s another wasp! It’s looking to the one we killed. Maybe they are. Related?… Shit man, serious, what have we done?’

‘Shut up dude, you’re high. It’s a wasp’.

‘Let’s trap this one too?’, suggested the third friend. Maybe he wanted more easy money. Tacitly he positions himself front the rolling station to prepare another murder weapon.

In an instinctive moment of guilt, the teenager who noticed the grieving wasp raises his back in the sofa. No one knows yet, but he is decided to protect this little one. Because… whatever, he is tripping, his friends can make fun of him later.

Motionless against the table wood surface, the wasp stared her sister, her family, half opened wings in rigor mortis, matte black eyes. The gruesome cage, a circular transparent chamber until now licked by tongues of deadly smoke. Not even evil could escape.

‘Sadistic animals…’. the wasp is nothing but stripes of vengeance and wrath. She notices the huge mass stretching up above her sentiment.

The guilty teenager raises an arm and with care tries to air broom the wasp to the open window, like a bouncer escorting you from the club, only more gentle and pointless, after all wasps don’t have backs for your arm to lever on.

In the wasps world, human hands are murderous pentapods that guard the entrance to hell.

In the wasps world, if you are going on a one way ticket to damage, the human face is the target area of choice.

The assaulting wasp hums her war cry while dashing for the cheek of the guilty teenager. The one human trying to “help”. Well, too late for that. The wasp lands by a red pimple below the left eye. She has a split second to deliver her vengeance.

In the wasps world, the human face it’s a one way ticket because as soon as you nail the sting in the tender oily facial skin of a human teenager, his reflex will send the pentapod — claws opened — exactly to the area you are drilling.

A suicidal self made face slap. It always proves to be more suicidal for the wasp, but if you are going for damage, nothing like double damage.

As the death eclipse approaches, a huge black hole with five tentacles stretched, tips blurred from speed, the wasp opens her wings, but makes no mention of flying or trying to evade the battlefield in any form.

Instead, she pushes the sting further down one last time. And then pulls it up in an angle — and twitches.

Wasps know male human cubs usually don’t carry tweezers.

As for the open wings, the wasp was just getting ready to meet her sisters in the Eternal Hive. In the wasps world, there’s a special place filled with sugars for those who die in honor.

In the bigger world, small acts of formidable heroism pass completely unnoticed every day.