» Fiction
Dying is Not a Crime
Katie Jean Shinkle
Red hornet bodies up-shaft. In the house, poisoned by smoke pump and gulped by a backpack vacuum, the exterminator says I got stung real bad the other day, hazmat suited all the way up, his voice gargling through his helmet. I kicked a log, and out shot a hundred, three hundred, maybe five hundred angry-ass hornets. They latched onto my hands, got into my face screen. I ran for my life. I can tell he is sweating by the way the paper-thin plastic sleeves stick to him in small puddles. Is he still scared? I grab your hand for reassurance, pretend it’s his. He turns from us, ready to face the potential of another round of swollen bull’s-eye stings.
The hornets crawl post-smoke, post-poison down our chimney and into the living room. I smash them with a thin, large book, crushing the bones of their little bodies. I say aloud, I’m sorry! And I really am sorry. I do not want to hurt another living thing exclusively because it causes pain. If it were true I could kill anything causing me pain, I could have killed so many things in my life already, been saved and redeemed over and over.
After the exterminator returns and blows, sprinkles, and sprays more poison, I am ordered to leave the house. At the coffee shop, a notification on my phone: your cousin has added me on Instagram. She will go on to abruptly add me for exactly twenty-four hours and then unfollow me, yet allow me to continue to follow her, a real gamey move. Blonde as ever. Spending your dead uncle’s money as ever. Her bio says she has a “clinical pathology degree” in hand after twenty long years and many failed attempts (What does that degree entail? you ask me, as if I am the keeper of all higher education degrees. I think Jack Kevorkian had one, I answer.) She always hated me, your cousin. There is not enough poison or thin/large books in the world.
Later, when I return home, two dying red hornets on the doorstep bewildered by potential death. I contemplate what to do. They will die organically, but they are suffering. I can tell. I’m some kind of hornet whisperer by now. They are cursing us under their breaths. Should I stomp them and put them out of their misery? The suffering really gets at me, as they snap their wings and flop, desperately shoving their fat butt stingers into the welcome mat. I raise my shoe. I will assist in their ending. I feel like Jack Kevorkian.
My friend Rick. Well, he’s not really my friend, more of a grown man who hung out with your cousin and me when we were teenagers. He went to jail for undisclosed reasons. He claimed he was in lockup with Jack Kevorkian. When he got out, and started hanging out with teenagers again, he tried to impress us with stories about how he ate at least a hundred meals with the guy. I think about this as I scoop the wasp carcasses and toss them into the garden. Rick insisted Jack Kevorkian was a kind person, a smart guy.
I don’t feel smart or kind. I feel terrible. These wasps! I go inside, and the house is bright with sunset and shadow, as though no poison was ever sprayed, or smoked, or sprinkled around, as though there wasn’t ever need for such things. My body looks terribly long against the bookshelves. I raise my hands to make myself bigger, give myself wings in the shadowed sun. Your cousin doesn’t respond to my DM when I say: Hey! What a whirlwind! See you in ten more years! Enjoy your Jack Kevorkian degree! She is forty years old and still calls your little brother Cousin Grant in photo captions, which I find both endlessly entertaining and sort of sad, since it’s clear she wants to differentiate the skinny, ugly man she hangs out with all the time from other potential suitors who she will not end up marrying. Because, let’s face it, she acts damaged for no reason. Everyone’s dad dies eventually, an event continuing to happen until the end of time. I hear a slight buzz, a slight cough, and a wasp, gently and without fanfare, keels over on my shoe.