Leaving My Mother’s Vespiary
When I was seven or eight, I tried to catch the spider in my mother’s kitchen under a cup and set it free outside.
My mother saw me reaching for the front door and slapped the drinking glass out of my hand, rocketing it to the parquet floor and shattering it. She ground the spider inside into a paste with the ball of her bare foot, and for years when I thought back on that memory I assumed that spiders bled like people did, not realizing that the red on the floor probably belonged to my mom.
“When you see a bug,” she gripped my shoulders so hard it hurt, “any bug, you kill it, you hear me? Kill it right away. Don’t hesitate.”
I was sobbing in shock and fear, and I begged her to tell me why.
She took my face in her hands and said, with a gentleness that shocked me to silence, “It isn’t worth the risk, sweet girl.”
Her words set my stomach in knots. It happened whenever she called me anything like that: sweet girl, baby girl, my darling daughter. I thought it was only the infantilization that was twisting me up until I left our gated community and learned what it was to be trans.
My mother never changed her vernacular even as she pretended to try and learn my new name.
“I know you’ve changed and grown,” she told me on my first visit after coming out. I’d nearly forgotten the deep bags under her eyes. “But you’ll always be my little girl.”
I wasn’t her little girl. I was her grown son, a queer man unfortunately blessed with a carbon copy of my mother’s round, pretty face.
I hated myself for not correcting her, so I punished her from a distance. Aside from the drinking I did, and the random people I kissed at parties, I swore never to kill another bug.
I stepped around them outside. I gently removed them from my house. The only exception I made to this rule was the summer I got bedbugs, and that felt like a betrayal committed against myself as well as bugkind. Far from the gospel her words had seemed when I was a child, following my mother’s bug-killing creed became a cardinal sin. There were more of them when I stopped, but I never expected anything different.
If you let something live, that’s exactly what it’s going to do.
My mother taught me that killing bugs should always appear to be as natural as breathing. She’d divert her step with a dancer’s grace to crush any crawling thing in her path. She said we could never be sure who might be watching.
I still watched the pavement. I stepped around the bugs, saving tiny lives with every tiptoed step. My boyfriend called me his unicorn because, like the mythic beast, I studiously avoided causing harm.
The only rule my mother still asked me about, on those rare occasions we spoke on the phone, was the one about bushes. Her voice sounded fearful when she asked me if I was still steering clear of them. She asked if I remembered not to touch them. She reminded me to listen closely and be ready to run.
“I’m not a kid anymore, mom,” I told her, instead of a more accurate truth. I did follow that rule, and I hated that about myself too.
“I know, sweet girl.” My knuckles whitened against the metal and glass of my cell phone. “I just worry about you.”
I could have told her how much it hurt when she called me that, and that her fractional hesitations as she avoided my deadname and my real name with equal aplomb felt like they lasted a thousand years.
Instead, I shoved my phone into my pocket and pulled my hat down over my ears.
When my therapist suggested that this avoidance was feeding my anxiety and making it worse, I pushed back. I justified. They gently advised me to try defying that rule as well, not in spite of the fear but because of it. It was the way a lot of these things were treated, they said. When something that couldn’t harm you gave you anxiety, it was best to go toward it.
The path from the bodega to my apartment passed three hedge walls, and I was going to touch each one.
I clutched the black, plastic bag tightly. There wasn’t much in it—a bag of chips and a can of iced tea. They had been an excuse to get me down the block past the shrubs I’d have to pass again to get home.
I had been humiliated when I’d first realized how well my mother had me trained to cross the street when passing shrubbery.
This time, I kept the bushes next to me. For the first hedge, that was all I could manage.
The second hedge on the journey found me braver. When the leaves reached out to touch my shoulder, I let them. I felt them brush my shirt, exactly like any leaves might. I knew that there was nothing to be afraid of, but my stomach was stone.
The third hedge was the longest one. Its leaves were tightly packed, and I could see nothing through it. The dim evening didn’t help. I knew there had to be a yard on the other side, but all I could see was leaves behind leaves.
I closed my eyes and listened. The night was near silent around me, like the world was holding its breath as it waited for me to defy my mother’s wishes in the only way I hadn’t yet done.
I’d let the leaves touch my shoulder and survived. I took a deep breath and slipped my hand into the foliage.
Nothing happened, until it did.
From around my hand, a coalescing of tickling sensations that I couldn’t have mistaken for plant. When I pulled my hand free of the shrub, every inch was covered in a cluster of wasps.
I stepped back, breath snagged in my teeth. The swarm hitched to my fingers grew with the distance between me and the bush. There were so many wasps, as if every wasp in the world had gathered here to meet me. I could feel the small bodies scrambling over the flesh of my palm. None of them stung me, not yet, but they could sting as many times as they wanted and live. I knew that even never having been stung. How many wasp stings would it take to kill me? Was I going to die to spite my mother?
By the time I understood the tiny scrabbling legs were smoothing into a single unit, I was already holding a hand in mine. By the time I looked up, the man had almost fully formed. The last of the wasps crawled into his mouth and he stood in front of me, stark naked and staring.
“Adeline?” His voice was wondering. “I’ve looked everywhere for you.”
I ripped my hand from his and ran. I sprinted up the street toward my apartment, digging for my keys as I did. All I could think, even as I heard the wasp man calling after me, was that I had to get home, lock my door, call an exterminator. I had to call my mom.
Because whatever that wasp thing was, the name that it had spoken was hers.
Ria Hill is a nonbinary writer and librarian who lives in Toronto. They can be found online at riahill.weebly.com and on some social media @riawritten.