Art Pact 83


Having made it the practise of her daily life to check the shed for wasps, Mathilda was the first to notice the little nest of eggs, the tiny white pearls wrapped in a loose silk container. She was not overly fond of insects as whole, but her particular fear of wasps left her with a more laissez-faire attitude towards their relatives, so she noted the nest with an apathetic disinterest and went about her day, safe in the knowledge that whatever else might be lurking in the family home, there were no wasps there.

Young, however, and therefore unaccustomed to the growth of most insects, she was not the first to comment on the less than usual manner in which the eggs began to develop. It was Mathilda's mother, on her evening sweep of the garage, who spotted that the eggs had hatched but had become individual cocoons almost immediately, rather than yielding some more mobile grubs or larvae. It was as if the cocoons had been directly inside the eggs, and had become visible the instant they hatched.

Mathilda's mother had begun her evening investigation of the gardens in response to the Mathilda's recurring night terrors. Realising that Mathilda's own patrols were designed to reassure her that everything was well, she also reasoned that if she were to find wasps in the garage - or anywhere else in the grounds - it would simply remind her daughter of her terror, and so she had decided that - it being unlikely that a wasp's nest would pop up overnight - she would secretly search the area each evening and take care of any wasps's nests that might have been constructed during the day, thereby ensuring that when Mathilda made her own search she would find nothing.

One evening, four days after Mathilda had first seen the eggs, her mother pulled open the sticky door from the back garden into the garage, brushed a small web away from the top right of the opening, and stepped in, wrinkling her nose at the musty smell. She made her way first around her husband's kit car (still in the same half-constructed state it had been in for the last year and a half), past the workbench on which stood a number of Mathilda's little figurines, drying from the weekend, and to the open area where the tools were kept, the place (since there were several holes between the corrugated steel ceiling and the wall) which she thought it most likely that wasps would be able to infiltrate.

The little collection of cocoons that she'd seen the day before was nestled in a broken paint sampler pot which had become stuck to the shelf it was on by its contents - a little slick of hardened lavender colour which made the tiny white silk shells against it look like early seeds sitting in the faded glory of the petals that had birthed them. They were larger than they had been the day before - and, Mathilda's mother noticed - fewer. One was missing, and she took a step back without knowing why, unnerved by the thought that some caterpillar might even now be crawling towards her.

"Get a grip, Janice," she whispered to herself. She stepped closer, lifting her feet to avoid a bag of of concrete that had split at the seams, emitting a small landslide of the fien grey dust that swirled and grasped at her wellies even as they flew above it. From her new position nearer to the nest she could see that there was no indication that there had ever been another cocoon - not strands of silk discarded when the occupant burst forth, nor an obvious open place in the strictly regimented arrangement of the others. If she had not been so diligent as to count them when she spotted them before (and to have made a note, there being seven and it being Mathilda's seventh birthday the coming month), she would have assumed that there had always been that many.

She reached out a glove-clad finger to touch the rightmost of the little packets, but withdrew it in a flash when the thing - just a centimetre away from the end of her index finger at this point - suddenly writhed, bending in the middle as if its two ends were reaching out to her. The let out a little gasp and stepped back, kicking up a great cloud of concrete dust around her legs.

As she watched, dumbfounded, the cocoon began to move sideways, pressing itself against its neighbour, which in turn pressed against the next in line, and so on. The cocoon that had moved began to shrink, as though it were a deflating balloon - so quickly that within a couple of seconds it had just vanished. The remaining cocoons were larger.

Mathilda's mother stood and stared.

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