Late Wasp
Written by William Conway on Thursday the 21st of April 2011
I'm lying on my bed with my chin hanging over
the side, wondering whether I'll get up now or wait a little bit and be
late. Something like a heavy fly falls from the curtain into a box full
of books under the window. Well that's what it sounds like. Now I can
hear it's definitely some kind of flying insect as it's starting to make
feeble attempts to get going like a shaver with low battery. Sounding
like an old mobile phone underneath some papers, he doesn't seem to be
doing so well.
What an idiot. After a while I forget about him but then I
see him jump and hover for a second before falling. I figure that the
weather's getting nicer so perhaps he was hibernating somewhere in the
curtain of the window frame and now it's become warm enough to wake him
up. I moved in here in spring so he'll have lived here longer than me in
that case.
It is a wasp by the way, a fairly large one. I scoff as I
watch him drunkenly try to take off for some time, projecting his sound
into the future when I'm hung over on Sunday and he's buzzing round my
head as I try to sleep or die or something. He's floating up out of the
box just over the tops of the books for moments at a time like an
indecisive warship over a city.
Look at you wasp, what are your plans?
What exactly are you going to with your day? I don't hate you yet but I
will come to do so. Are you just going to reacquaint yourself with all
the hiding places in your bedroom, taking care to find the place with
the best acoustics where you can remain an invisible annoyance? Will you
still be here to bug me when I return from work?
I look at the time
on my phone which provokes me to stop writing. Thanks wasp, I'm late
now. I write the rest of this on the bus which has less people because
I'm late. Usually every other person this side of town has to get to
the exact same place as me at the exact same time. Maybe this bus will
catch up with my normal bus because there's less traffic outside of that
crucial twenty minute window.
I think back to the wasp and debate
feeling guilty for blaming him for my tardiness. I look at the mark on
my notebook where his pasty guts were wiped off.