Every night at 10.19 a hornet arrives and
makes a great effort to get into the house.
It hunts for crevices but none seem to be
wide enough or deep enough and it withdraws,
and buzzes across another stretch till it finds
another potential hole to disappear into.
Sometimes it’s joined by one, two or even
three others and the air is full of their
deep droning. If I’ve left the door open
it will fly straight in and start hunting in the
kitchen. We shut the shutters at 10 o’clock
and that sorts it, though one time, our
daughter came into our bedroom at about
five in the morning and said that there was
a hornet in her room. She said that it had
flown above her head as she lay in bed,
flying from the skylight to the window. It must
have been there all night. The man next door
said that he was once stung by a hornet while
he was picking courgettes and his arm swelled
up like a balloon. The man who cuts grass and
hedges says he’s been stung by hornets and
it’s no big deal. I ask him what he puts on it
and he says nothing because it happens when
he’s out cutting grass and hedges. I told him
that he has to be careful not to annoy a hornet.
Hornets that are annoyed release a scent that
tells the other hornets to come straightaway
and sting whatever it is that is annoying the one
who’s released the scent. We scream when we see
them arrive at 10.19 and we hide. Or we ram
the doors and windows shut and peer at them
through the glass. The hornets see us and
come over to the glass and crawl in front of us
just a few millimetres from our noses. Once I
was sitting in the kitchen with the door open
behind me and the hornet flew in at 10.19 and
landed in my hair. It decided of its own accord
that there wasn’t a deep enough crevice there.
Another time I said that I would shut the shutters
to keep the hornets out but then just as I shut
the shutters I found that I had trapped myself
between the shutters and the outside doors
with the hornet. There wasn’t any room for me
to run away from it and it tried my hair. Once
again, my hair turned out to be not good
enough for it and it flew off into the night when
I got the shutters open. I imagined myself
opening my mouth and the hornet flying in
and deciding that at last it had found the crevice
it’s been looking for all summer, only for me
to close my mouth around it, finishing it off
with one crunch.
them arrive at 10.19 and we hide. Or we ram
the doors and windows shut and peer at them
through the glass. The hornets see us and
come over to the glass and crawl in front of us
just a few millimetres from our noses. Once I
was sitting in the kitchen with the door open
behind me and the hornet flew in at 10.19 and
landed in my hair. It decided of its own accord
that there wasn’t a deep enough crevice there.
Another time I said that I would shut the shutters
to keep the hornets out but then just as I shut
the shutters I found that I had trapped myself
between the shutters and the outside doors
with the hornet. There wasn’t any room for me
to run away from it and it tried my hair. Once
again, my hair turned out to be not good
enough for it and it flew off into the night when
I got the shutters open. I imagined myself
opening my mouth and the hornet flying in
and deciding that at last it had found the crevice
it’s been looking for all summer, only for me
to close my mouth around it, finishing it off
with one crunch.
