Africanized: A Story

By Omar Ricks on October 9, 2012

She swung at me with her open left hand. I had been deeply ensconced in my work—as workers must be—and I didn’t execute quickly enough. She grazed me with her pinky, and I felt the crushing pain of a broken wing as I spun a corkscrew across the back corner of the kitchen and ricocheted off of a rare, intact portion of the torn screen through which I had grown accustomed to entering.

When I touched a pulsating, translucent strand of hair that had emerged prematurely (and unattractively) from her 27-year-old chin, she hissed through her nostrils and twitched in her smug chauvinism at the merest hint of cross-species contact, causing me to slip and land with a thump near the wrist of her resting forearm.

It all took me by surprise. I had harassed many humans. None but those temporary squatters had dared take a swing at me in all my days—and certainly no one with such good hand-eye coordination had lived in this old bungalow since the days of the Originals. And so I had not been accustomed to landing so hard.

In the course of my twenty-three-day life as a worker, I had always been able to land with careful grace, where and when would best please the Queen. And I had avoided these kinds of fights with the same grace.

But this human was different.

She appeared to feel a deep sense of entitlement to this space, our space. And since our concerns could not be reconciled with hers, we couldn’t coexist here, and I surmised that she must be possessed of a passionately felt will to annihilate all my kind. Against this I would be absolutely powerless. And I faced the terrifying reality that I could not reason with her. It was all going to end here at the terminus of her slender, auburn-freckled arm.

I felt all my days collapse into this moment and decided for the only Last Act of Glory afforded me. I plunged my barbed stinger into an open pore.

The last thing I heard was a roar, probably an obscenity in some human language.

To me, it was Gospel Music.

I had wanted to die pretty much like this. Not old and full of weeks, and abandoned beneath some creeping vine where I had been competing with those fucking hummingbirds for all eternity. And not from the disoriented starvation of that dreadful electromagnetic field near the cell phone tower. This was the way to go. Locked in struggle with an organism that had directly threatened the hive. For the Queen.

And so I shifted what remained of my weight forward and felt the sublime jouissance of self-evisceration just milliseconds before the Screaming One squished the only body I had ever known.