How to prepare figs and honey:
by Molly Thatcher
The summer I turned 15 there was a wasp nest in the attic above my bed. Every night I lay there listening to the wasps’ luxurious cannibalism, hovering just above my head. The sound of scratching larvae turned my brain to dumb pulp; my ingrown prayers punctuated by chewing “wasp-fig,” “wasp-fig.”
I always prayed at night. I’d do it while gripping and pulling at my nylon nightdress so it wouldn’t touch my clammy body. I knew already god was meant to hate me, but calling my thoughts prayers put them in italics. As prayers, my secret desires and loathings weren’t trapped inside my mind with the chewing wasps but stage direction: italicised and already leaning out from my body in anticipation.
One September morning the men came and gassed the wasps. The tiny bodies I’d heard growing sprinkled down through impossible ceiling seams onto my pillow, their embryonic legs adorably curled-up in mute defeat.
Looking down at them, I was indecently outgrown. I blushed as I cleared away the corpses.
Molly Thatcher is an emerging writing. This is the first time her fiction has been published, but her non-fiction art and literary criticism has appeared in The Oxonian Review and The Virginia Woolf Miscellany. She studied an MSt in modern and contemporary literature at Oxford University and currently lives in London. She finds joy in writing about the queer stuff of life, the materials of history, and all things morbid.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “How to prepare figs and honey:”? This piece is part of a longer work about the experience of living back in your childhood bedroom. The wasp situation didn’t happen exactly this way. I was unfortunate enough to have a wasp nest above my bed and was driven slightly mad by the noise. However, it happened when I was older, and I never felt the need to pray. I’ve always felt though that my self-loathing teenage mind resembled a fig: this ingrown flower around a hateful but helpless wasp. So, the imagery has always been associated with that age to me.
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