It was a late morning—sun slanted like an overexposed photograph across the tiles, Schmutz was somewhere behind the curtains making suspiciously ceremonial noises, and I was on high alert, as usual. That’s when the wasp appeared.
It hovered with bureaucratic intent, a black-yellow warning stitched into the air. I saw it first, of course. I always do. It zigzagged through the room like a microdrone built entirely out of spite and sting. I crouched. I calculated. I was ready.
But she, the human, Ann, intervened.
With the kind of solemnity usually reserved for small funerals or awkward performance art, she executed a quiet extraction. Glass. Paper. Balcony door. Exit. I watched it go. Out into the hot wind, a miniature exile.
She did not let me handle it.
And one understands why. Fear, mostly. Of stings. Of swelling. Of what a vet visit might cost in metaphor and money. But still, something inside me flicked its tail. What is the point of predator reflexes if mercy always gets there first?
A few days passed. Then came the crickets.
She brought them in a small container that rattled like dry thoughts. “For enrichment,” I imagine she told herself. Schmutz, naturally, was intrigued—she views all novelty as a stage. I was… skeptical.
At first, the crickets seemed like what they were: food that had not been assigned a meal. But as time passed, and they weren’t served, weren’t sacrificed, weren’t offered to any reptilian altar, they began to… organize.
They hollowed out little patterns in the sand, claimed corners. Formed strange routines. Built a village. Not in the literal sense, though one of them did attempt to climb the plastic wall repeatedly, as if seeking office. It was less a habitat, more a society. Primitive, anxious, enduring. As all societies are.
And then Schmutz, ever the theatrical deity, would descend.
Each day, she picked one. Always just one. The others learned. They scattered faster. They learned the value of quiet corners and paused breathing. The chosen cricket was usually dramatic, sometimes dignified, never lucky.
Ann watched from afar. She thought she had found a compromise: no wasp-stings, no dead lizards, no guilt. Only play. Only enrichment. Only… displaced ritual. But I saw it clearly from my perch above the microwave: she had traded real danger for the illusion of safety—one curated microcosm for another.
She hadn’t brought us prey. She had brought us responsibility. Governance. A living metaphor that twitched.
And I, of course, did nothing. That is my role here. I do not destroy. I observe. I catalogue. I interpret. Perhaps I, too, am just a soft architect—maintaining order where there should be chaos, and chaos where there ought to be rest.
In the end, she meant well. She always does.
But sometimes I wonder if she brought the crickets because it was easier than watching us confront something with a sting. Something that hurt, but was honest about it.
Final Thought:
When mercy intervenes before risk can play out, does it protect—or just reorganize the inevitable into a tidier shape?
