2024 Extra Fiction Best Short Story in English Finalist

The Wasp and the Roach

The Wasp and the Roach: 6 Methods to Escape Extermination

The Emerald Cockroach Wasp, Jewel Wasp, or Ampulex Compressa, are solitary insects. Endoparasitoids, entomophagous parasites, cannibals. The wasps sting cockroaches, the Paraplaneta Americana. The poison turns their hosts into zombies to be hollowed out by the wasp’s larva. The wasp’s first sting is aimed at the cockroach’s thoracic ganglion to induce a biochemically transient paralysis. The second sting is aimed at the head ganglia of the cockroach, disabling their escape reflex. Most pests are attacked by at least one type of specialized parasitoid. Parasitoids perform an important ecosystem service. In the process of generating their offspring, they suppress pest populations. 
 In May 1940, the Experiment Station of the Hawaiian Sugar Planter’s Association sent Dr. R.E. Turner to the French Pacific colonial archipelago of New Caledonia to retrieve A. Compressa. Cockroaches threatened colonial economic interests in the Hawaiian Islands, and so the invasive Jewel Wasp was introduced as a form of biocontrol from the far west of the Americas and east of Europe. 

Escape Vector 1: Into the Mind 
My brother, Maverick, called me again. I was on campus picking up a research poster I had presented earlier that day on the history of the Mexican folk song “La Cucaracha.”  His voice shook, and he asked if I could give him a ride. I immediately agreed to pick him up. He was an hour away in the middle of Dallas. He had been undergoing ECT treatments for bipolar disorder recently. On top of the electricity, over the past decade, his brain had been cooked well by antipsychotics that made him ridged in the body and slow in his head. He did not have his car because his license had been revoked. Earlier that week, he had been walking up and down the street with his shirt off, unable to explain his state. My parents had called the police.  

That morning, I sang to conferencegoers as they passed.  
“La Cucaracha, La Cucaracha…”  

I would let them finish the lyrics if they knew them. Most people sang the lyrics that they knew, the white lyrics.  
“La Cucaracha, La Cucaracha  
Nah, Nah, Nah, Nah, Nah, Nah, Nah…”  

We would laugh when I sang the rest, the Villista version popularized during the Mexican Revolution.  
“Ya no puede caminar   
Porque no tiene, porque le falta   
Marijuana que fumar.”
  
I wanted to be the one to pick him up. I did not want him to go back to the psych ward. I have done my time cocooned in those white walls. After I was released, I applied to grad school. I had to prove that I was not insane or that the word was arbitrary.  Around that time, Maverick took a one-way ticket to Hawaii. He called it a paradise and talked about “Kaddie,” a mixture of Ketamine and Adderall. Apparently, Maui Wowie was not strong enough for him. 

Some say that marijuana and other pre-Hispanic medicinal traditions elicit psychosis. Maybe they bring our attention to how little things make sense. Several Spanish-speaking women ruined my hook and sang the lyrics verbatim. I had the most rewarding conversations with them. I sang the lyrics probably 15 times, and by the end of the conference, the lyrics whistled through my calavera. My antennae were visible; maybe that was why people were drawn to my poster. One asked nervously if I was of indigenous or Spanish descent. My research topic and how I look are thrown off by my last name - Campbell. At least nobody asked me directly if I was a white Anglo-Saxon protestant, a W.A.S.P. But it was obvious that they did not care about this; they each scooped generous helpings of my flesh and spread it across their attention spans until I was hollowed and bleached stark white under the bright lights of the conference room.  

“La Cucaracha, La Cucaracha  
Ya no puede caminar  
Porque no tiene  
Porque le falta  
Flesh on their bones” 

I told the conferencegoers, “Cockroaches are a part of the Blattidae family; Linnaeus chose this name because of its Latin prefix, Blatta, which can be translated to “He who shuns the light.” I just wanted to go back to my darkened apartment and remember that I had flesh on my bones, but I thought of my brother running through the streets looking for a dark space to hide, and I knew that I needed to find him wherever he was and tell him where the darkness was. 


Vector 2: Self Destruction or the Resilient Multitude
After the conference, a Chicana playwright with a Wikipedia page visited our graduate class and asked us what we wanted to talk about. Everyone wanted to know more about her work. Still, I asked her how to survive without having our identities flattened by academia. She gave a brittle laugh, and I guessed that the question came off as naive. She said she was an artist and did not know how to help me. But she said that theater and research could be worldbuilding; her work in schools, prisons, and writer’s workshops created something that could not be commodified, moving us “Towards A Politic of Collective Self-Defense Instead of Individualized Self-Care.” She told me that funding for ethnic studies was rising, to tell other cockroaches where the money was, or to give away my excess stipends when I could. I thought grimly about how pest control companies like Orkin primarily fund the study of cockroaches. How could I save my spirit for my family? In a protean scramble, am I to be impervious to the passage of time? Am I to feed on the decay that comes with it? Universities extract more than can be repaid in currency and career. I wanted to tell her that it felt odd that a bug was under such bright lights and intellectual scrutiny. It was about the hours I spent being dissected and dried for preservation and further examination while my family and friends aged into creatures living in places that I found hard to recognize. I did not know how to say that, and I do not think she knew how to do it either.

I thought about Audre Lorde. 
“For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”

Could someone with six hands and antennae find a way?  Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, 
“If time is a turning circle, there is a place where history and prophecy converge—the footprints of First Man lie on the path behind us and on the path ahead.”

Flying down the highway, away from the university, I felt that there was nothing but linearity and that I was too late. I found Maverick outside of a closed-down Sherman Williams. The faded logo painted the world pink. He reeked of alcohol, and his eyes were glazed from some supplementary downer. Like me, he does not trust medicine from people who do not need it. But I have learned to talk and write, rationalize my individuality, and always prove that I can do things without prescriptions. He could not answer my questions; I knew that he would be going to the psych ward the next day for going AWOL, for running amok. He knew that, too.  

Driving to my apartment, he asked if I would stop for water. I agreed and gave him my credit card. He spent fifteen minutes in the gas station. I called my girlfriend and asked her to pick up fried chicken. My family used to eat fried chicken every Sunday after church when I was young. I wanted to be sure that the alcohol he was stealing would not be taken on an empty stomach. Maverick returned with his pants full of boxed wine, somehow proud that he had not used the money I had made grading and writing papers for fifteen dollars an hour with no insurance. I was somehow proud of him for refusing a lousy gift, even if he relapsed. I knew where he was going the following day. Orange unit, he returned like clockwork. An orange had been inked on his ankle to match a Christian woman he had met while on suicide watch together. She had paid for the tattoo. She wanted to be married soon, with an expensive dress. My brother does not work. I do not think he can work.  


Vector 3: Paradise
He chugged the stolen wine while sitting in my rolling desk chair, which I spend so much time making money in. He spun around, laughing loudly, listlessly. I gave him the nicotine vaporizer to try to calm him down. He could not stop laughing. He asked me to punch him in the face as hard as I could, and I told him I would after he hit the vape. He told me not to be offended but that I couldn’t knock him out. I told him I did not think I could, that I may be too chicken to try and hit him. He was crying. I wanted to distract him and asked if he wanted to hear my presentation that morning. He agreed and asked if we had anything to eat. I gave him the chicken as I began my presentation with my poster on the ground before us.  

“So, do you know the song La Cucaracha?” 

I tried my hook. 
“La Cucaracha, La Cucaracha…”

He ate the chicken while staring behind me at something or nothing.  
“This fucking chicken is undercooked. Mom and Dad still buy it every Sunday, and it’s fucking getting worse every time we get it.”  

“I remember when we would eat this chicken and sit around after church, and Dad would talk about the sermon.” 
 
“Yep. And it’s gone up over five bucks in our lifetime. People tell me that I’m still young.”  

“You are.”  

“My demons aren’t. They’re old and can’t be killed.” I rolled my eyes.  
 
“Oh, like Beelzebub or Mephistopheles or something.”  

“No, like greed, guilt, and violence.”  

“Oh, you mean Moloch. The same demon likely spurred on the Spanish Colonists…”  

As I continued forward, he was left behind. He began to whimper, but I kept my presentation going. An intense focus on research has conditioned me to remain steady in my delivery and to disregard my feelings and those of the people around me. Lovely linearity. He was eating while he cried, spinning in my chair, a self-fulfilled prophecy. He spoke through mouthfuls of chicken.  

“I am in hell. I think my show has reached its finale. It's your time in the spotlight, isn’t it?”  

I glanced around my apartment.
I smirked. “Hell isn’t so bad.” 

He huffed. “It isn’t Hawaii.”

I sighed. “What is with you and that place?”

“It was paradise.”
    
“For whom exactly? You lost your mind out there. Hawaii, to you, is an idealized paradise used by imperialist neoliberalism to maintain sovereignty over the indigenous people through tourism and agricultural exploitation. You wore Hawaiian shirts and learned the creole, but they knew you were a tourist haole mestizo addict from the States.” 

I immediately felt like biting off my tongue. Who am I to throw the first stone? I shook my head. He did not speak. I stuttered. 
“Remember all the chickens on Kawaii? I bet they are better to eat than this GMO garbage.”

He began to pull at his clothes, sweating and moaning. He undid the watch on his wrist and tossed it onto my poster, ripping a hole in the paper from the weight and the metal. I recognized it as my watch, which I had saved up for years ago. I had left it at home when I went to college. It was made of polished metal that warped the reflection of the wearer.  The impact of the watch and the torn surface of the poster board stopped me for a moment. The poster had not rippled; it had ripped. I slipped the watch on, but he had refitted it to his thicker wrists, and it slid down my arm.

“Why don’t we go see our family in San Antonio? I am sure Nana will want to see us. That’s what makes it hell, a world without bonds. We almost lost you in Hawaii.”

 I slipped off the watch and looked up to hand it back to him, but he did not meet my eyes. His were closed. He had bits of the paper chicken box stuffed in his mouth, and he had been shoving the plastic fork into his gums. Blood pooled on one side of his bottom lip. I carefully took the shredded paper box and the bloody fork away from him. I put on his shoes for him and helped him to his feet.  

​
Vector 4: Cast Out and Away
He scuttled around as I flew above him, buzzing in the otherwise silent streets outside my apartment for about an hour. I still held the watch. He followed a few feet behind me as we walked. He hissed, clicked, and growled, unwilling or unable to talk, except when a jogger or biker passed. Then he would yell in their face until they sped off. I kept checking to see if he was still behind me. I noticed that he had lost both shoes and was wearing dirty socks. I could not let him be found like this.  

“La Cucaracha, La Cucaracha  
Ya no puede caminar  
Porque no tiene, porque le falta  
Las dos patitas de atras”  

I told him that I needed to call a ride and wait. I told him I did not want him to be seen like this. He did not stop and walked past me. I followed behind him, and I called after him. He did not respond. I followed him for another hour on foot. He walked slowly, and all I could think about was going to sleep. I had office hours the next morning and fifteen pages to write by the day after. I thought about getting fired for not doing my work. I thought about my research and how I was behind. I convinced myself that the “dead” in “deadline” was literal. I thought about everything, missing everyone and everything other than me. It is what I have learned to do. Just as Maverick has learned to run, I have run to the learned. Both methods offer the same result: separation and extermination. The duration and the speed of death are what differ. Survival is a brittle laugh in a fugitive space. As I followed him through the night, I became convinced that he was not trying as hard as me to survive and that he did not deserve his life. I flew behind him, iridescent, and watched his glossy red-brown back twitch in the streetlights.  I called after him.  

“If you keep stomping around drunk out here, you're going to get dizzy. Just come back to my apartment. I don’t want to have to drag you.” 

“What?”

“I don’t want to have to drag you back.”  

As if sensing a change in air pressure, he pivoted, charged toward me, and bowed up, creating the illusion that he was larger. He put his ear to my mouth, listening for me to renege. He did not look at me and whispered quickly, as if pouring out a secret he had kept with him his entire life.  

“It’s not the wine that’s made me dizzy. It’s you.”   

I was silent. 

“Your words are poison. Your writing is poison, too. Every idea you have is poison. I know what you are doing. You can’t fool me. You made me sick. You did this to me.”  

I did not ask what he meant; I already knew. I did not move because I knew that he was going to be violent. The Chicana playwright with a Wikipedia page warned us with Sun Tzu, “Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” Unfortunately, the usage of this wisdom is not limited to revolutionaries but also sell-outs that are pacifists until they are scared. Maverick leaned back and kicked me swiftly in the stomach. I stumbled backward and coiled. He looked at me without recognition.  
​
As a child we had a family dog. He was huge, and my father would sic him on me. My dad called me “chew toy,” and the dog would chew on me until I bled. He told the dog to attack me one day, but I was fed up. I stuck my fist down his throat and let him chew on it as I punched him in the side until he whimpered. I cried, and I turned to my father. He looked horrified as if I had poisoned myself. He asked, “Do you think you went too far?”

I lunged at my brother and felt my fist collapse his flesh, and it felt like punching the family dog all those years before. I felt something in my stinger break.  

“Ya no puede caminar.”


Vector 5: Pessimism, Bad Faith in Weltanschauung 
My brother went to the ER that night and Orange Unit the following day. He was treated for a suborbital fracture and a laceration above his eye where I had stung him. The next day, I walked out to the scene of the fight. Our watch sat in a pool of dried blood. He had left it for me to find. The face was broken, and the hands no longer moved, but it ticked away the seconds even still. I held it to my ear as I drove to the university.  

I broke my pinky - my stinger. I did not land the punch right. It took me a week to go to a doctor. I was walking on campus, my face pulsing from the pain that I felt I deserved. Typing for so long had left my hand aching, and I felt flush. I could not type anymore. Looking around at the students and the well-placed trees, I felt strange. My eyes welled up with tears. I had never noticed how beautiful the campus was, my umwelt, how everything was so bright and clean.    

Why would I think this? A more rational question might have been, “Why would I not think this?” Was I becoming a W.A.S.P.? Was I already a wasp? Was this paradise? I remember how my brother spoke about Hawaii. It was about time I had my pinky checked out.  

I went to the University Health Center. I waited in line wearing my brother’s hand-me-down, wrinkled Hawaiian shirt, and broken watch on my wrist. A nurse came to the counter and told me they had no appointments that day. They asked me to wait to see if an appointment would open before the end of the day or to come back tomorrow. I got up to leave, telling her I needed help that day.  

“But sir, you have already waited a week, why can’t you wait another day?”

I could not explain to her why I had waited a week to get treatment without sounding insane. I did not know how to say I could wait for the rest of my life to fix my pinky. But I could not wait there. 


Vector 6: Metamorphosis
I shed the Hawaiian shirt and dropped the broken watch. I flew, with buzzing translucent wings, to the nearest superstore. I bought myself a new watch.


​

Colton Monroe Campbell’s fiction focuses on racial identity, mental illness, academia, and insects. His identity as a mixed-race Chicano studying for a PhD in the Chicana/o Studies Department at UNM offers a unique perspective. America’s obsession with separation and extermination is, for la raza, not limited to Mexico’s border with America. Campbell works to draw attention to forms of biopolitical control that affect the mental wellbeing of Latinx people within the U.S, in a search for methods of collective resilience and resistance.

---