The other day I awoke to a strange tickling sensation on my forehead. 

It was a mediocre Saturday morning and the sun was streaming through the leaves of the half-dead plant imprisoned on my windowsill. Tucked comfortably in bed with no less than five different blankets, I was suddenly and rudely made aware of a barbaric tap dance on my forehead. I reached a hand up to encounter the source of this weaponized gyration when the perpetrator took flight and landed on the little pink chair beside the head of my bed.

I made eye contact. 

To be honest, I could not tell whether its inky alien eyes were looking at me or not, but I felt in my soul that it was planning some deceitfully visceral and terrible joy.

I responded sensibly by flattening it with a shoe.

Okay. That was a lie. 

I didn’t have it in me to take out this fearsome foe. 

I paced around the room a bit, panicked, ate a cookie in the kitchen, forgot the wasp was in my room, went back for my water bottle, absolutely lost it when I saw the wasp on the wall, cried a little, and called my neighbor and asked her to take care of it. 

She was valiant and strong. I locked myself in the bathroom. 

In Spanish a classmate observed wasps in a state of protest within the light above our heads.

In Olin I watched a wasp scale a window with its creepy grippy legs. 

Beside Farwell, from the safety of my vehicle, I watched a pedestrian perform feats of acrobatic wonder in order to evade a swarm of wasps. She narrowly escaped with her life.

They’re everywhere. 

Who charged these little yellow knives to take flight and endanger me? Who let them enter my home while I slept, to catch me unawares? Who let them listen in on lectures, peer into windows, and terrorize the peaceful masses? 

I know not who and I hope to never meet them.

Wolves in pollinators’ clothing, these ruiners of picnics and harbingers of unease have ruled the spring, summer, and early fall for far too long. I charge you, brave Luther students, to take up your Birkenstocks, your textbooks, your songbooks, and your napkins, and rid our campus of these devils.

I, for my part, will cheer you on from the sidelines. 

Wasps suck.