"Swallowing Wasps" by Marley Korzen

It hurts before you feel it.

Static in your throat. A swarm. Laughter bubbling. Wings needle through the mist with crisp optimism. 

The first hit’s a surprise. The next, a testament. You open your mouth wide, eyes, locked shut. A fuzzing cannon ricochets your molars. You like the way your teeth are pinballed. How their wings get caught between your canines.

A spiderweb. A Venus fly trap. You catch one and try for more. As many that would impress your little brother.

You open up your mouth for mother to discover a throbbing, red marble welt on your tongue. 

You could have died! Mother shrieks, almost loud enough to jolt the tight crew-cut lawn, the gleaming countertops of the kitchen. It always sounds like no one is listening whenever she screams.

Toothbrush is filled with the pepper anthers.

You start seeing their six-jointed ballerina legs in your cereal bowl. 

Your grandmother’s favorite rose was yellow. Yellow was the color her bones were when you learned who she was: a woman grasping for anything that might siphon the poison from her body. Gold shots and dandelion juice. Raspberry jam diet. Fasting. Juice cleanses. She would do anything…except bugs. She was terrified of them. 

Your mother tells you to stop.

Not yet.

You find pictures of what her illness looked like on the internet: black and yellow speckled scabs. Scaly scalloped purples and pinks that bloomed on her leg. Your mother says it happened because of the DDT they were spraying back then. Her mole looked exactly like displaced milkweeds and mealybugs. Corrosive, like an uncut diamond.

It was just a few years after she found it on her that she died.

Another summer, you make your way to the creek bed where thousands of them glide. You place one in your mouth, feel the lightning sit on your tongue. The poison drags through every nerve. Dislocates your wisdom teeth sutures, unravels your pinned gaze. Smooshed into glitter, redacted like the words you’d like to remove from her death certificate.

The past becomes a freckle, a dead star.

You should associate her with nice things. The orange groves that sweep your backyard. Your little brother hangs a picture of her in the living room, a youthful glow, a decade before she was diagnosed. You should do things like this to remember her. You should have grown out of it, like your cousin’s silly thumb-sucking, a waning view in the rear-view mirror.

You feel it mark your gums with their sticky bodies.

You hear dad calls you in for dinner. You arrive at your plateful of mashed potatoes and peas, wasps stuck to your fat, aching lips.

You show your dad your welts like a prize. “How did you?” He shakes his head. “You take after your mother.”

Before the group of friends could notice that you were gone, the boy you‘ve had a crush on for months has his hand crawling up your shirt and his tongue was tiptoeing over your mouth. He tastes of sweat and axe. Your ankles, heavy in the tadpoled creek bed. A wasp lands delicately on his shoulder.

You’re confused. When he asked you if you’d like to try something different, wasn’t that sear of the stinger electric enough? Didn’t he feel alive from the way it pierced his gums?

On a doctor visit, your mother asks you why you do it. 

“I don’t know.” You shrug haphazardly. 

“You’re becoming a liability.”

You don’t know why she’s disappointed in you. You think she should be proud to know she’s got such a tough daughter.

In the doctor’s office, you notice the sterilized seats and tools. You remember when you were four years old a cousin told you your grandmother had died because she was younger than your grandfather. Someone told you she’d slipped in the tub. The confusion spun like honey when you found photographs that looked exactly like your mother wearing a dress from the 1950’s. How did your mother go back in time? Your dad is trying to help you understand that the person in the photo was someone you’d never met.

“Promise me you’ll stop.” Your mother says in the car ride home.

“I promise.” You say. It’s a want.

A special Sunday, your mom is cooking for an important work BBQ. A three-layered lemon cake with castle-white frosting. Through the crisp chatter, you hear the familiar tingling.

Your dad’s boss stands by the cake where a wasp is hovering before it lands softly on the swirled icing. It’s been months since you’ve seen one. Its laced wings hinge like it’s tired. Like it’s been gliding around, waiting for this moment to rest its nervous legs.

You take just one more in your mouth. A secret. No one will know.

You feel their humming on your tongue first. The ribboning of insect legs. Slow dying. The only thing she was afraid of.

Marley Korzen is a writer based in Santa Barbara, CA, with work featured in MudRoom, Talk Vomit, Brown University’s The Round, Bodega and Gone Lawn.