The Second Life
by Bridgette Shade
It was August, early evening. Teams of little girls chased a soccer ball across the football field, and football players churned out laps. I was standing adjacent to the track activity, minding my own business next to a tree in an otherwise open field, waiting for my daughter—who was in training for cross country season—when something felt wrong at the top of my ankle. The wrongness intensified, and looking down, I discovered the problem was a bee.
I hadn’t been stung since I was nine, and, in retrospect, I can’t be sure it was a bee. Lazily, I label all stinging bugs bees, except for wasps, which I can easily identify by their long, creepy arms. This might have been a yellow jacket, a species I am familiar with in terms of language but whose function I don’t understand. It appeared to be garbed in yellow, but was it of the bee family? The hornet? Is a hornet a wasp or something else? I am not a writer who typically finds inspiration in the outdoors. I love to read about the inner workings of a fig, but summer is not my season, and its mysteries are not my go-to material.
Too late, I realized I must have been standing on a hive because no sooner had I shaken the first marauder, a second one nailed me in the back. When I recounted the details to my mother, she sounded incredulous. “Your back? But you were wearing clothes?” Her tone suggested I might have invited this hanky-panky with the yellow jacket perverts by arriving to their party half-dressed.
“Yes,” I said. “I was fully clothed. They stung me anyway.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she said.
I agreed.
As the second one stung me in the back, I panicked. My daughter barreled around the bend, and seeing my shirt hovering around my shoulders, seized the opportunity to cut her laps short. “My back,” she said. “Mommy!” My daughter was thirteen at the time and hadn’t addressed me that way since she was a toddler. But there she was, doubled over in a cramp with tears in her eyes. “My back really hurts,” she said, ignoring my condition or maybe trying to create a diversion from the strip show.
So, I began to rub her back while hopping on one foot and holding a bag of dog shit and the leash, on the other end of which was Sadie, our dog, who was snapping at yellow jackets with her teeth. I suppose I forgot to mention there was also a dog in this scenario.
The three of us ambled across the open field toward the car. Every step I took felt as if I were being knifed by invisible assailants: one who stood ankle high and the other, someone not quite as tall as me, like a third grader. Burning and stinging, I hobbled, shaking out my leg. Twisting and bending and slapping at the unreachable spot on my back where the nasty third grader persisted.
Finally, mercifully, the car came into sight, red and shimmering. But the closer we got to the finish line, the more the suffering mocked us. To our left, the dog leapt at joggers, and I admired their oblivion. I vowed to take up running as soon I could rid myself of the pain. I would run and run, celebrating my unstung self. Still ten paces away, I unlocked the door with the remote, jamming the button so many times that the taillights continued to flash long after I’d popped the trunk, fed it the bag of Sadie’s droppings, and climbed behind the wheel. On the drive home, Sadie sniffed out the window as my daughter and I issued lamentations into the setting sun.
”Oh, Lord, how it hurts.”
“Crime and punishment, the pain.”
The next morning, pen in hand, I filled four pages of lined notebook paper, reliving the events of the previous day. The second time around, I recognized them as an adventure. How fun to be stung! How invigorating life seemed on the page, how fleeting and treasured. How lucky was I to be in possession of such powerful salve as words?
Finished with a first draft of a story, fueled by this unexpected momentum, I laced my shoes and headed out to make good on that running vow. I opened the car door and was confronted with a terrible odor. Finding nothing to explain its origin, I wondered, briefly, if this was the smell of pain. Then I remembered. The dog. The plastic bag in the trunk. But how exquisite to be gifted with such ripe material!
This story took place almost ten years ago, but it came back to me because, in the midst of a pandemic, the internet tells me we now have to worry about killer bees. How can we even think about writing when life keeps stinging us? Here are my answers:
Because I was never any good at math.
Because I go queasy at the sight of blood.
But the best answer is this: I write because it affords me an opportunity to live a second life. The first life might be dogged with confusion and disappointment and sorrow, but the second life—the writer’s life—is chosen and full of possibility.