Mano Fico

When she cut into the fig, a wasp fell out. She paused. The wasp wasn’t very large, nor was it moving. It simply sat in the bowl among the dozens of halves of waspless figs and remained in the curled position it had contorted itself into within the fruit. She was fairly certain it was dead. The thought passed that the children wouldn’t be thrilled if they knew their fig cake had been touched by a corpse. She decided not to tell them.

She heard her husband coming down the stairs for breakfast, and before he could see it, she reached into the bowl and plucked the wasp out. It was dropped into her apron pocket alongside a tissue and a stray sprig of rosemary from the previous evening’s dinner.

It stayed in her pocket for the rest of the morning. She was aware of her body moving differently throughout her usual routine. Her hips held themselves away from the counter as she finished mixing the cake, and her son and daughter were maneuvered into side hugs when they emerged with sleepy eyes and half-buttoned shirts. The delicate carcass of the wasp made every movement feel as if it had the destructive potential of a battering ram against an eggshell. She mentally constructed the crunching sound the wasp would make if she crushed it – how the bulbous body would cave in on itself and the spindly legs would crack into useless fragments and mix with the rosemary leaves. She knew it would be the kind of noise that made it impossible not to imagine desiccating the thing between your teeth.

She dreaded hearing it through every task – from placing the fig cake in the oven to serving up breakfast to kissing her husband goodbye and making sure that both children had remembered to pack their lunches. Finally, when the door closed behind them and the school bus pulled away from the curb, she found herself in silence. She stood in an empty kitchen in an empty house with any empty day stretching out before her.

She sat at the kitchen table and reached into her pocket. The wasp felt unnatural against her fingers. Something in her brain knew that this was not a creature she should touch. She had to resist the overwhelming urge to flick it away from her and instead placed it neatly atop her husband’s dirty plate.

It occurred to her that she had probably never seen a wasp up close before. It looked meaner than she expected. Was that just because of the stinger that protruded from its body, or the expectation that it would be used upon her? Any creature with pain built into its purpose could look mean, she decided. It wouldn’t be right to blame any creature’s nature on itself.

After a moment of regarding the wasp, she stood from the table and went to fetch the W volume of the encyclopedia from her husband’s study. The entry for ‘wasp’ held little more than Latin words and a description deemed moot by the physical evidence in front of her. She went to get the F volume and flipped to the certain page:

In the process of pollination, the female wasp enters an unripe male fig, breaking off her antennae and wings in order to fit inside, and lays her eggs in the flower. Her male offspring later tunnel out of the fig and provide an exit route. However, if the fig is also female, the wasp can pollinate the fig but cannot lay her eggs and instead finds herself trapped inside the fig with no offspring provide an escape. An enzyme in the fig then fully digests the wasp’s body.

 Placing her finger on the entry, she regarded the wasp in the light of their newly found sisterhood. She thought of the pile of figs she had sliced through that morning. How many female bodies had she laid out for consumption? Perhaps the wasp would see it as a justice – the sister that had doomed her to a dark and lonely death, now having all the sweetness cooked and caramelized out of her. From one woman to another.

The wasp stared up at her from amongst the crumbs of her husband’s breakfast. The urge to flick it away no longer loomed. Tenderly, she reached out to stroke her pinky along its back. Poor thing, she thought to herself. All you did was choose the wrong fig.

Her husband’s napkin was crumpled next to his plate, and she picked it up and folded it into a neat square on the tabletop. The wasp didn’t flinch as it was moved from porcelain to cloth. One leg fell off along the way. She picked it up and dropped it back into her apron pocket.

It sat on its cloth catafalque and surveyed her as she cleaned the kitchen. The timer on the oven beeped just as she placed the last dish on the drying rack. The fig cake came out perfectly golden around the edges and gooey with cooked fruit on top. She smiled down at it. Picking it up with oven-mitted hands, she carried it over to the kitchen table and held it up for the wasp to see. It didn’t respond. She took this as a good sign and placed the cake on the countertop to cool.

She could feel the wasp’s presence emanating from the kitchen as she continued her tidying around the house. It thrummed like a central organ, plucking at her with heartstrings whenever she was out of sight, a center point from which she radiated. She went back to check on it between tasks. Each time, it stayed exactly as it had been before, a dark smudge of exoskeleton in the creamy yellow of her kitchen. She rather liked the sight of something so foreign and out-of-place. It was a palate cleanser between bouts of putting away her children’s toys and dusting the tops of the bookshelves.

By lunchtime, everything was in its rightful place except for the encyclopedias stationed on either side of the wasp. She went to take them, then paused, noticing a stray fleck of dark against the napkin. She picked up the fallen leg and placed it in her pocket alongside its mate before carrying the encyclopedia into her husband’s study. The wasp watched as she put the volumes back: W next to E, and F next to X.

Her children came home from school to find their mother sitting at the kitchen table with an open cookbook and a folded napkin laid out in front of her. The fig cake had been moved out of reach to the windowsill over the sink. She distracted them with an afternoon snack, angling her waist away from the countertop in an awkward stance as she sliced into apples and smeared peanut butter. The children disappeared into the living room to take their toys out. She sat back down at the table with one hand on the recipe she had chosen for dinner and the other cupped protectively over her apron pocket.

Her husband was greeted at the door by the scent of rosemary chicken and roasted potatoes. He kissed her on the cheek. She held the salad bowl between them. He sat down at the head of the table, took his napkin from where it was folded beside his plate, and called the children in to eat. She hung her apron in the pantry to keep it away from any hands or eyes but her own.

They had the fig cake for dessert, and the children scarfed it down at a pace she knew would cause stomachaches later. Her husband ate his between lines in a one-sided conversation with himself. She turned her hearing inward on each bite, waiting to hear a familiar crunch. It never came.

Her family gathered to watch TV together while she cleared the table and washed the dishes. She donned her apron and stood so far back from the sink that water dripped onto the floor. Her husband commented on it when he came in to pour himself a finger of whiskey. She drove a rag over the floor with her foot and put the whiskey decanter back in the liquor cabinet.

When the movie ended, the children were sent to bed. She fended off their goodnight hugs with mugs of warm milk that they had to take with both hands as they toddled up the stairs to their rooms. A peek inside her apron pocket proved that the wasp was still intact, its stare unwavering. She could feel it through the fabric as she let the pocket fall closed and started making the children’s lunches for the next day.

Her husband came in for another glass of whiskey and kissed her on the cheek before going into his study. The door clicked shut to seal him in with the disordered encyclopedias. She put the whiskey decanter back in the liquor cabinet.

She moved to the sink to wash mayonnaise off the sandwich knife, then stopped, caught by the sight of her own reflection in the window. Did she look mean? She didn’t have any harsh angles or a sharp stinger like the wasp, but they were sisters, weren’t they? She was suddenly overwhelmed with the need to prove she, too, had pain built into her purpose. She bared her fangs at her reflection and raised her claws in threat. Straightened teeth and polished nails flashed back at her.

Her vision shifted, and she was looking out the window, beyond her reflection. The backyard was shrouded in darkness. Weak moonlight illuminated the uniform rows of her herb garden and a basketball her son had left out. Directly in front of her, butting against the back fence, the fig tree’s silhouette loomed.

It had been much smaller and more diminutive when they moved into the house. Only a few figs had come forth in the first year. That morning, she had walked over a cobbled path of them, left to rot in the afternoon sun and soften with the morning dew. The branches of the tree expanded every year like a distant aunt’s embrace. She could feel it staring at her. Its gaze melded with the wasp’s to become searing, stifling, unbearable.

The kitchen door was creaking shut behind her before she realized she had gone outside. Somewhere, a lone grasshopper was singing. She toed off her shoes and walked onto the grass with bare feet. The blades pricked between her toes. Silence fell when she took another step.

She crossed the yard to the fig tree and stopped when she felt the fallen figs squishing beneath her feet. Their skins would bruise hers with their color, but she wouldn’t be able to see it in the night, so she didn’t bother checking. Her eyes travelled from the base of the tree to the top. Its glare had not wavered from the moment she made eye contact through the kitchen window. The wasp watched from her pocket as she lifted her foot and climbed up.

She settled herself into the crotch of the tree, where the trunk began to split into branches, and leaned back in a leisurely position. From the pocket of her apron, she took the wasp out and set it atop her knee. It was only against the pale fabric of her skirt that she could make out the dark fragment of another broken leg. Their gazes met. She tucked the leg into her pocket with one hand and nudged the wasp with the other to face the house. They surveyed the scene before them together.

Her home glowed with warmth. Honey colored light poured from her kitchen window and mixed with the burgundy that oozed from her husband’s study. Upstairs, her children’s rooms were twin blue eyes winking down at her. She could trace the interior as if the wall wasn’t even there. The steps from the kitchen to the den, up the stairs to the bedrooms, down the hall to the bathroom, pausing for the laundry chute and the linen closet and the vase of flowers that sat on a table beneath the window. She knew every path by heart. In her mind, they tunneled, flattening and cornering at the edges until dozens of hexagonal pathways wound before her.

A branch was bowed by the wind, into her field of vision. She blinked. At the end of the bough hung a fat fig. Its purple color soaked up the night around it until it was nearly black. She reached out and plucked it from the branch. Its skin and weight felt just the same as the ones she had cut into that morning. She looked down at the wasp to find that it had turned back to her. They stared at each other as she bit into the fig.

It was mealy, and sweet, and took over her body in an instant. She reached for another and shoved it into her mouth before the first was down her throat. The seeds caught in her teeth. Another found its way from the branch to her lips. Juice dribbled down her chin and stained the front of her dress. Another. Her cheeks bulged. She could feel her throat flexing open and closed in a frantic motion as it tried to keep up. She ate two at once. Her breath quickened. Tears streamed down her cheeks. Another, and one right after that. Mucus dripped from her nose. Her stomach felt stretched to bursting beneath her skin. She finished the fruit on the branches within her reach and climbed higher to reach more. She ate the figs so quickly that their taste was lost against her tongue. They stopped going down her throat and sat just beyond her uvula. It tried to make her gag. She ate more. The wasp clung to the fabric of her apron and watched on.

As a new day began to rise, her daughter looked out the window and noticed something strange in the fig tree. She went downstairs to investigate. The bare soles of her mother’s feet were stained purple to match her hands and face and the whites of her eyes. Her apron draped neatly over the bulging of her gut. A dead wasp was perched on her knee, and beyond one outstretched hand, just out of reach, a plump fig dangled from the end of the branch.