Bugs and Other Things that Sting
Each Tuesday, this blog features the work of guest writers. During the month of May, our contributors investigate things that bug them, things that sting.
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A Different Normal
by Beth Casteel
I’m standing in my parents’ kitchen. A stink bug is creeping up their wall. “Oh, I’ll get that,” I say, taking a tissue and swiping the bug off the wall without killing it. I flush it down the toilet, holding the handle until I see it disappear.
“We have had a couple lately,” my mother says. A couple? I wish.
We suck them up by the thousands at our house, just five-minutes away. They fall from our vaulted wood ceiling while we watch television. They creep into every box of Christmas decorations in the attic. They line the window sills in the basement. They buzz around the kitchen, sometimes landing on a plate of food or in somebody’s water glass. They cover the side of our wood and cedar home in spring and fall—especially when the sun is shining. They migrate from one room of our house to another by season—one year in the family room, one year the basement, one year our master bathroom.
That year I tried everything to eradicate them. If I was reading in our adjoining bedroom, they would swarm to my bedside lamp. I would duck under the covers as soon as I heard the characteristic hum and a slight crunch when the triangular-shaped body landed. I rigged traps in the bathroom—jars filled with balsamic vinegar and dish soap set next to a little light to attract them. I was lucky if I caught one or two while dozens of others swarmed the oval window above our jacuzzi tub (which no one uses because of the stink bugs).
We’ve lived with these prehistoric bugs now for over 10 years. I’ve lost my need to catch every one. My husband still sweeps them up if there are dozens (I can’t stand the thwumping sound). More often, I’m swiping and flushing—being careful not to crush them and live with the stink on my fingers all day. When I tell my parents, my friends, how many stink bugs we have, they are mortified. I just say we are used to it. We like our house. We live in the woods. We aren’t moving, so, we accept the stinkbugs. It is a minor affliction. There are worse things to have to tolerate.
The stink in my life is not the offensive odor that permeates someone else’s life. We live with the stink bugs, just like we live with more painful things. Everyone lives with a different normal.
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Beth Casteel is a writer, organist, community volunteer, mom and grandma who lives in southwestern Pennsylvania with her husband.
Get Back
by Edie Everette
David wants to get back with Tina. After all she is his age, twenty-one to my seventeen. I guess my relationship with David is statutory rape. Sex with a minor. Sex with a minor on a waterbed with a glossy, lacquered headboard that's been ball peen hammered. Sex next to the piranha fish ripping live goldfish to death. Goldfish, the Doris Days of fish -- wholesome, perky, wide-eyed.
Tina Voylan has straight blonde hair and blue eyes. I don't know where she comes from, where they met. She is tough whereas I am constantly afraid. Everyone in David's house is older than me. I don't feel at home so I watch Kim, David's roommate's girlfriend, cook and clean. The more I watch the more frozen I become.
"I want to get back with Tina," he says one day as we ride in the vintage Volvo 544 that he often maneuvers with his right knee while rolling a joint. His black hair is short and his dark blue eyes gleam above a beautiful smile. Whether working in his grandmother's pawn shop on First Avenue, opening a package of hash that is disguised as a record album or bashing in the windshield of a car owned by someone who owes him money, he is always full of life.
I automatically begin to cry, tears that start as a few and become a flood. Mascara runs down my face like ink. We are on our way to his parent’s house. He moved there after a man came over to David’s house and they went into his bedroom. The rest of us sat around the living room drinking White Russians and it felt weird – something was being hidden. Ten minutes later the tall man and David emerged and a few weeks after that a bump the size of an avocado half appeared overnight on the inside of David’s arm—the same arm where he shot coke that first time?
I didn’t care that he was dying. He should have wanted to stay with me. At any rate, I vowed to buy a tube of waterproof mascara.
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Edie Everette is an illustrator, teacher, and writer who drinks a lot of coffee in the Pacific Northwest.