Murder Hornets
Claire Lawrence
Word Count 754
By the eighteenth month of the pandemic our living room had become sacred space. The world outside raged and moaned, but my husband and I had two couches (one for each of us) reading lights, stacks of books, two dogs, and honest work to keep us afloat. Our house was in a little forest, so we were surrounded by trees and forest animals who sang to us at night. Here was safety, we thought.
One night, we heard a thick buzzing. A zeppelin of a bug flew out of the living room light and began to circle.
“What the fuck is that?” I squealed and ducked my head under the couch blanket.
“Murder hornet,” my husband said without looking up from his book.
“What?”
“I’m not kidding. I killed one of them this afternoon. It’s basically a huge wasp.” He proceeded to swat at it with his LL Bean moccasin.
“Get it off me.” I screamed for real as it fell with a plop in my blanket and proceeded to buzz around ominously. When I threw the blanket and ran upstairs, the confused wasp bit my husband. He said it hurt more than the bite he had just gotten picking up a rat snake and moving it out of the yard for a neighbor who was frightened. That’s how my husband is: unafraid to hold a snake with his bare hands if it meant helping someone. The kind of person I am is afraid of my own shadow. Years ago, he nicknamed me Bunny because I startle and run like a rabbit.
The next day I Googled murder hornets. Turns out they have only showed up in the Northwest and Canada. We live in the Northeast. Phew, I thought. Having something named “murder” in my house was not part of the safety plan. Four more had shown up after I had gone to bed, driving my husband away from his nightly reading to hunt them down and kill them with his shoe. One of their corpses lay on the floor, so I picked it up by a wing. That thing was huge, two inches long and heavy in my fingers. I brought it up to my nose and sniffed. It smelled like dust and the sweet decay of a dead forest animal. When I compared it to the pictures on my computer, I learned that what I was holding was a European hornet – a non-native species that had crossed the Atlantic around 1840 and rooted itself on the east coast. I watched a video of murder hornets attacking a man in a bee suit anyway.
That night, and many nights after that, the siege continued. Around nine every evening one or two hornets bumbled through the loose molding under the patio door. As many as four or five visited each night, one at a time, their thick buzz echoing as they made a circuit of the house seeking light. The internet said if you didn’t want pesticide in your living room to spray a mixture of dishwashing liquid and water at them; this would eventually make their wings too sticky to fly. The problem was this only made them louder and slower and it still took them hours to die. My husband got bit another three times in the process. Then came the exterminator who over three visits found the first nest but not the second, which had to have been buried deep in the gaps between the walls of our house.
One night in the twentieth month of the pandemic my husband called across the room to me. We had taken to just sitting in our living room with all the lights out once it got dark, not reading, some nights staring at our screens, some nights just waiting for the hornets to arrive.
“Bun,” he said. “I’m afraid.”
“Of what?” I asked him.
“That this will never end.” He was having trouble sleeping after his nightly fight to keep us safe.
“The internet says we just need to wait it out. Another month tops, and the nest will freeze. Hornets don’t come back the next year. They make their nests elsewhere.”
He sighed. “I’m sick of it,” he said.
Just then another hornet rose up from the floor, making its slow dizzy way upwards. We looked at each other and at the spray bottle but neither one of us wanted to kill it, perhaps because we were tired or worn down, or perhaps because there had already been so much death.
Claire a Professor of Creative Writing at Bloomsburg University. She has a PhD in Creative Writing: Fiction from the University of Houston and an MFA in Fiction from the University of Utah. She has published fiction, poetry, and memoir in numerous magazines including Crab Orchard Review, TriQuarterly, Event Magazine, Terra Nova, Western Humanities Review, Lunch Ticket and Juked.