The Grieving
The line drifts up through his head, vaporous and spectral, brainstem to skulltop. He sees the dead wasp in his path on the long walk from campus to car, stops and kneels to get a better look. Grit peppering the bottoms of his brown shoes as he perches apelike on his toes, knees crackling all the way down. Indistinct and incomplete the line comes to him, unsummoned.
My grief fills up whole rooms
He’s got it wrong and wishes he could emend it truthwise, but Spenser knows this is beyond him, knows that he is distilling an entire speech into a single line of his own creation, and this cannot be fixed, not in his own mind, not here, not now. He can’t remember if he was thinking of the line before he saw the wasp.
Desiccated wings, sun-dappled and fairy-thin. It seems fully intact and preserved, as if it was ruined by some secret catastrophe in its body and curled up there to die or was purled along by the breeze and placed, gently, in his way. The ominous curvature of its body, the alien hairs and the dark constellations of its eyes.
He tells himself he will look up the speech when he gets home. King John, he is almost certain. A queen mourning her dead child, grief filling up whole rooms. He is still a twenty-minute walk from his car. The drive will take over an hour. By the time he steps in his door he will have forgotten all about this promise to his past self.
The wasp makes a satisfying squelch underfoot. He can hear it bursting as he gives his heel a little twist. This surprises him, that the grinding of a wasp can stir the soft bones in his ear, that the delicate fibres of his senses, conjured without consent or consciousness, are attuned to the riving of insect wings, disjointing of mandibles, rending of antennae, thoracic explosions on scales unfathomable.
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