Sound Bites, Yellowjackets, and Velvet Ants

The artist was stung by a wasp today and I had this vague memory of the father I never knew sucking venom out of a sting like a snake-bite once, but that was impossible to verify so I verbally soothed and sat the artist down on the bright red sofa, checking for no bad reactions, low blood pressure, or welling to such a degree it blocked the air from getting into the lungs. I should probably have removed any remaining ‘stingers’ in the skin with soap and water. Stingers? A long way from the 10kg ‘Stingers’ with a distance range of 8km provided unwittingly to certain members of what became the Taliban*, but risky enough I suppose. (Some medical opinion even recommends scraping out the stingers with a credit card so there may be some connection, though I'm told this kind of stinger - the so-called velvet ant or yellowjacket variety - is only present in females and derives from a sex organ.) Anyway, I tried ice cubes in a plastic bag wrapped in a red and white cotton tea towel, but that wasn't enough, though I think the artist admired the inventiveness. (Even with a spear in her heart she’d find a way to be polite about the carving.) I used cream in the end and gave the artist some space to read a novel about an early-twentieth-century painting and the women whose lives it touches. And to think her sister only a few days ago asked if we knew what was good for wasp stings. (‘Vinegar,’ she beamed.) I even meant to get some today. A WASP. I had to cross an ocean and read about people like James Ellroy to discover it meant a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant as well. Anyway, throughout the afternoon I kept checking – no rash, no breathing problems, nothing to worry about there. Then I remembered I was stung by a wasp on the eye-lid once and even shared a different kind of sting with the artist one hot summer when a large and gelatinous jellyfish wrapped its long tentacles round us in the water. I actually felt good afterwards. (It was some hit.) The artist felt bad. We weren’t married at the time and I think I saw it as some kind of pagan symbol of our unity. I'm stung if I know what the wasp means. *now unusable due to the deterioration of the battery and electronics and systems