Pischick the Conqueror

Prompted Fiction: Consecutive Substack Story 1167

Photo by USGS on Unsplash

This story was written during the Keyboard Catharsis: Writing without Fear Program that I moderate at Passenger Recovery Community Center in Hamtramck, Michigan.

Edgar Lawkins strutted around like he was some kinda royalty based on the simple and strange fact that his great grandfather, a Dallas cop, had gotten a commendation for his actions during the Kennedy Assassination.

Edgar told the story often, in one of those thick, leaning brags that he expected to impress someone with.

Pischick hung around his house, tidying, generally feeling sorry for himself and dreaming of being something better, flashier, more vital than being a hornet living in a neglected back porch overhang in a two bedroom Cape Cod. At least the homeowner didn’t call an exterminator, seemingly content to sit on his couch, slamming malt liquor and watching the Cowboys get their ass kicked.

All the other porch hornets had tired of chewing on the old maple of the Cape Cod porch and had moved on to a porch down the street, but Pischick had gotten some sort of insect agoraphobia and decided to stay, cozily, right where he was.

The other hornets snidely referred to him as the Lone Hornet of the Apocalypse, but Pishick, though lonely and feeling unaccomplished, was content with his decision.

He scanned the street, the surroundings, looking for something, anything to jazz up his life.

Pischick was a lawful good hornet, so he took no joy in stinging children at ice cream trucks, or chewing through lattice work for the hell of annoying a homeowner.

Weeks into his tenure as the solo occupant of the porch overhang, he saw a ladder being placed on the house over the fence as dusk took over the night skies.

A ladder to the average hornet is like a SWAT truck to the average dope dealer.

Trouble.

Hives and nest destruction are always precipitated by the arrival of a ladder.

Pischick didn’t know any other flying pals in the house behind his porch, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any.

The man who climbed the ladder didn’t have bug spray. He had a bouquet of flowers.

Pischick’s giant aorta (all hornets have comparatively giant aortas) swelled.

Romance! Pollen! Romance and pollen!

Pischick heard the grating and swooshing slide of a window opening. His chaotic evil hornet friends loved that sound. Pischick had never been an interior interloping stinger.

He was jonesing for some pollen, but the flowers were too high up the ladder for his liking.

Just because you have wings doesn’t mean you love heights.

Just because you have a pollen addiction doesn’t mean you’ll chase it everywhere, at least not Pischick.

Edgar Lawkins trudged up the ladder he saw in the backyard of Ginnie Rugnum’s house the first time he followed her home from Electrocution Arcade.

He sang a song he had written, or kind of ripped off from Kendrick Lamar, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and a mayonnaise jingle.

Ginnie Rugnum thrust open the window.

“What the hell are you doing at my house…Teddy? Right? What the fuck?”

“ Edgar. I brought you some daisies, Ginnie, I want you to be…”

Those are marigolds, Eddie.”

“Edgar. My great grandad–”

“Yeah, I remember you told me at Electrocution. Kennedy didn’t live, by the way, now get off that ladder and away from-”

“Just smell the flowers I brought you.”

“No, I…what the hell are you…”

“Smell them!” Edgar bellowed, thrusting the bouquet in Ginnie’s face.

Pischick was no human expert, though he thought he knew a bit about his oft inebriated homeowner, but he knew that there was no romance on the top of the ladder.

He saw the human woman fall unconscious.

Pischick had seen his rowdier cousins gang sting a few tourists outside Delta Tau Psider Mill, and they didn’t pass out.

Pischick sensed the woman human needed help.

He flew, higher than he had ever flown.

Edgar Lawkins threw the bouquet of flowers through the bedroom window and let the bag of chloroform fall to the ground.

He pushed Ginnie’s unconscious body back into her bedroom, smiled, drooled slightly, and then experienced the worst pain he had ever felt in his genital region since trying unsuccessfully to jump his BMX bike over Guillermo’s Fish Taco cart on Staubach Boulevard.

The pain was so piercing and intense he was still feeling it when it repeated itself on his other testicle, and he fell, frightened but almost wishing to die so that the stinging would stop.

It did not, until he hit the ground.

Down the street, the other hornets sat around slurping pollen.

“Wonder what Pischick is up to right now,” one of them said, not knowing that at that very moment, Pischick was underneath the paralyzed girth of Edgar Lawkins, and that Pischick had died a hero.

***

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