by Richard Barr

On hearing this news he wastes no time in letting himself get entirely downhearted. His health deteriorates at a rapid speed and he feels life is no longer worth living. He neglects his wife, refusing to suck the shit from her arsehole and beating her when she tries to reason with him, saying his illness shouldn’t affect their reproduction. He starts hanging
out at all the wrong places again, smoking fibre optic cut-off buds and getting stoned like the old days when he was just out of his sac and wet behind the ears.

And the fatalist daring didn’t stop there either. Undaunted by anything anymore he gatecrashes the balls and pageants of the insect oligarchy that are held twice yearly under the dressing table in my sister’s room. The refined preying mantis and the spider assassins look at him like he was last weeks dinner, but he pays them no heed and gorges on the finest servings of thoroughbred dog shit, which are placed on inch long lollypop sticks coloured a deep rich yellow after being left out in the sun over the months of the summer.

He sees his days pass quickly and he is left in a state of slow witted despair, knowing the telltale signs of those inevitable death throes would start soon after as an odd twitch under his eye or an involuntary spasm in his wings, sending him bobbing all over the vicinity. And it was at this time that he decided he wouldn’t let his retail melanoma consume him completely.

Wrapping a bit of cotton fibre from my mother’s scarf around his hairy neck he left his eggbox house on a blustery cold night and headed for the kitchen. His journey there was a hard fought one, descending the stairs carefully, and making his last gasping steps onto that fabled grey linoleum where the cooker and the table and chairs all, to him, stood as tall as skyscrapers would in any metropolitan city. It was here that he found a bendy silver paper clip which he deftly converted into a noose and slung over one of the cutlery hooks that were fastened to the wall. Of course most insects with wings have the opportunity to save themselves on the short fall to death by hanging, but not this insect, whose wings had long been eaten away by a fledgling cancer which had left them looking like the wispy curtains that are put up in an old folks’ home. Death was certain in this insect hanging.

In their eggbox house the insect’s family had gathered around their little 2p piece dinner table. At the head of the table sat the family brief, a pretty young wasp with glasses who was a big turn on to the insect’s now adolescent son. He awkwardly tried to hide his hard on and reassure himself that she was only pretty in all the most typical ways. And of course, were he to mate with her what kind of strange cross breed would their union produce anyway? And so setting these musings aside for the time being, he considered, reluctantly, that there were more important things at stake. Like compensation. He asked the brief for her advice and she told them they had a good case in initiating a
plauge upon the Retail Giant, which must go unnamed at this point.

Back in the kitchen the insect was long dead, gently swaying back and forth his head deep purple and held tightly in that cute paperclip noose. His millions of hexagons that made up both eyes were dark and in light again as against the sun coming up their dull dead lustre shone like a living snow on that cold Saturday morning. I came down and turned on the radio with a glass of orange in one hand and an ashtray in the other. Albert King was on. ‘Blues At Sunrise’, he
sang.

Very good, I thought.

Six hours later the family were frantic to know where ‘daddy’ had got himself to. Word was that Jameson, that same fluffy yellow and black homosexual bee, was going around telling others that a body matching the description of the insect was hanging from a hook in my mother's kitchen.