Wasps and Shadows

Do you know what shadows are? I thought I did too. Light travels millions of miles from the sun, and when it strikes an object, that object casts a shadow, right? Wrong. Shadows are alive. I know this because one of them took my little brother.

Starting around age seven, I would only play outside if it was raining. I actually hated getting wet, but it was the only time I knew the wasps wouldn’t come out.

The summer when I turned seven, that’s when they first showed up. At first there  were only a few, like you’d see in any yard. They grew in number slowly from there.

Imagine my surprise on that blistering hot day in July when I went outside to grab my toy sword and shield and found myself surrounded by them. I was stung six times that day. Damn, it hurt. It was the first real pain of my life so far. By the end of that first summer there were nests all over our property. Dad would eliminate one or two when he could find the courage, but they were always back by the next day. This went on for two years, with only a mild reprieve in winter. Dad said wasps are supposed to be totally dormant in winter. I guess our wasps disagreed.

It was that third summer when my parents finally decided to take action. We didn’t have any spare money to speak of for an exterminator, but we had had enough. We wanted our yard back. Mom and dad cashed in our entire savings to hire a professional. This would be no routine spray… there were hundreds of nests by then. We would need to leave the house for the ordeal, we were told.

What a relief it was when we returned to find our yard back to normal. I prayed they would not return… It was a misguided prayer. God, how I wish that we would have never gotten rid of them.

Once the wasps were gone, it took less than 24 hours for the first horror to walk out of the shadows. That’s when it took my little brother. He was only five.

I guess they were afraid of the wasps, but that deterrent had been removed. Now, when I say that it walked out of the shadows, I don’t mean it was hiding in the shadows. I mean it was part of the shadows. I still don’t know what those things actually are, but they’re the stuff that makes up what we call shadows, so that’s what I’ll call them here.

I should add that I’m not sure what darkness is. Like complete darkness when the sun goes down, or when you’re in a room with the door and curtains closed. That kind of darkness is more or less safe in my experience. It’s the shadows that spread across the ground in daylight. Those are the ones you have to worry about.

The first time I saw one move was that day when we got home after the exterminators left. I thought my eyes were just playing tricks on me, and dismissed it as nothing. 

Later that same afternoon, though, I am certain that I saw one drift slowly from behind a tree to the spot behind our shed. Let me be clear, because I know this sounds crazy... It’s not like it was the shadow of a large bird or something that just looked like it was part of the tree’s shadow that moved to the shed’s shadow. I mean a significant size piece of the tree’s shadow left its spot and lazily drifted across the yard to join its friends behind the shed.

I told my parents, but come on… I was seven and I told them that the shadows in our back yard were alive. How would you react if you were them?

I went to bed that night questioning my own senses. Had I really seen what I thought I saw? Were my parents right, and I just read too many comic books? If only they had listened to me.

The next day, it happened. We had this small stand of pine trees at the back edge of our property. When I used to play out there (before the wasps came and after, when I’d play out there in the rain), I didn’t like going near those trees. They gave me the creeps, though I never knew why.

The last time I saw my brother, he was chasing a ball over towards the pine trees. As he approached them, a shadow reached out like a tentacle and grabbed him around the leg. I’ll never forget the look on his face or the scream he let out as I looked on in horror from my bedroom window. That look, that sound, they define agony for me now. I ran to help, but I was too late. By the time I got outside, he was nowhere to be seen.

I wanted to cry. I wanted to scream, to fight back. Instead I just ran. I knew they would come for me too, so I ran inside. My parents were beside themselves with worry, but still they would not consider my explanation for what had happened to Sean. They scolded me when I insisted he had been taken by the shadows.

The wasps came back the next day. We couldn’t afford to exterminate them again, so instead we just stayed out of the backyard during the day. In the days that followed, my parents’ grief and fear turned into anger and sadness. Then to denial.

Here’s the part I still can’t explain, though. Denial is common in dealing with grief, but my parents don’t deny that Sean was abducted. They deny that he ever existed.

That’s impossible, though. I had a brother. His name was Sean. He was five years old. He was real, and the shadows took him.

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