Boys Life

falling voice. What he was saying I didn’t know; I looked at the wasp between my fingers again, then back to the hole in the ceiling.
    More were coming out, spiraling down into the steamy, closed-up, rain-damp church. I counted them. Eight… nine… ten… eleven. Some of them clung to the fan’s slow blades and rode them like a merry-go-round. Fourteen… fifteen… sixteen… seventeen. A dark, twitching fist of wasps pushed through the hole. Twenty… twenty-one… twenty-two. I stopped counting at twenty-five.
    There must be a nest of them up there in the attic, I thought. Must be a nest the size of a football, pulsing in the damp dark. As I watched, transfixed at the sight as Mary must have been when a stranger on the road showed her his wounded side, a dozen more wasps boiled out of the hole. No one else seemed to notice; were they invisible, as the Demon had been when she picked a nose grape? The wasps spun slowly around and around the ceiling, in emulation of the fans. There were enough now to form a dark cloud, as if the outside storm had found a way in.
    The wasp between my fingers was moving. I looked at it, and winced as another pea stung the back of my neck where the hair was stubbled. The wasp crawled along my index finger and stopped on the knuckle. Its stinger lay against my flesh, and I felt the tiny little jagged edge of it like a grain of broken glass.
    Reverend Lovoy was in his element now, his arms gesturing and his hair starting to slide forward. Thunder crashed outside and rain beat on the roof. It sounded like Judgment Day out there, time to hew some wood and call the animals together two by two. All but the wasps, I thought; this time around we could fix Noah’s mistake. I kept watching that hole in the ceiling with a mixture of fascination and dread. It occurred to me that Satan had found a way to slip into the Easter service, and there he was circling above our heads, looking for flesh.
    Two things happened at once.
    Reverend Lovoy lifted his hands and said, in his loud preacher’s cadence, “And on that glorious mornin’ after the darkest day the angels came down and gakkkk!” He had raised his hands to the angels, and suddenly he found them crawling with little wings.
    My mom put her hand on mine, where my own wasp was, and squeezed in a loving grip.
    It got her at the same instant the wasps decided Reverend Lovoy’s sermon had gone on long enough.
    She screamed. He screamed. It was the signal the wasps had been waiting for.
    The blue-black cloud of them, over a hundred stingers strong, dropped down like a net on the heads of trapped beasts.
    I heard Granddaddy Jaybird bellow, “Shitfire!” as he was pierced. Nana Alice let out an operatic, quavering high note. The Demon’s mother wailed, wasps attacking the back of her neck. The Demon’s father flailed at the air with his skinny arms. The Demon started laughing. Behind me, the Branlins croaked with pain, the peashooter forgotten. All across the church there were screams and hollers and people in Easter suits and dresses were jumping up and fighting the air as if grappling the devils of the invisible dimension. Reverend Lovoy was dancing in a paroxysm of agony, shaking his multiple-stung hands as if to disconnect them from the wrists. The whole choir was up and singing, not hymns this time but cries of pain as the wasps stung cheeks, chins, and noses. The air was full of dark, swirling currents that flew into people’s faces and wound around their heads like thorny crowns. “Get out! Get out!” somebody was shouting. “Run for it!” somebody else hollered, behind me. The Glasses broke, running for the exit with wasps in their hair. All at once everybody was up, and what had been a peaceful congregation barely ten seconds before was now a stampede of terror-struck cattle.
    Wasps will do that to you.
    “My damn leg’s stuck!” Grand Austin shouted.
    “Jay! Help him!” Grandmomma Sarah yelled, but Grand-daddy Jaybird was already fighting his way out into the clogged, thrashing mass of people in the aisle.
    Dad pulled me up. I heard an evil hum in my left ear, and the next instant I took a sting at the edge of my ear that caused the tears to jump from my eyes. “Ow!” I heard myself shout, though with all the screaming and hollering one little ow was of no consequence. Two more wasps, however, heard me. One of them got me in my right shoulder, stinging through my suit coat and shirt; the other darted at my face like