Yuck, yuck, yuck.
The teenager comes out of her room wrinkling her nose, disgust written all over her face. She sniffs her fingers, twists her mouth. She runs to the dish soap, presses the pump, but nothing comes out. She shakes it: empty. Huffing, she sniffs her fingers again and feels a gag rise up from her throat. Eyes watering, she pulls the big green refill bag of dish soap out from under the sink and pours an entire pool of it onto her hand. She stands there rinsing her hands under scalding water until she can’t feel them anymore.
From the kitchen stool, her mother watches her, head tilted to one side. She sees the steam rising toward the ceiling, the foam filling the sink, tiny bubbles popping in the air. When her daughter finally shuts off the tap, her mother watches her dry her hands and sniff her fingers one more time. Satisfied, the teenager grabs a strawberry candy from the bowl in the middle of the kitchen island.
“What’s going on?” her mother asks, unwrapping an orange one for herself.
“A stink bug,” the girl says, her voice trembling just slightly. “There was a stink bug in the laundry.”
Her mother bursts out laughing.
“Did you get it?” she asks her daughter.
“I tried, but the thing stunk,” the teenager answers, still disgusted.
With a resigned sigh, the mother goes to check the laundry, which has been sitting outside all afternoon under the cherry tree that’s nearly bare of leaves now. She finds the stink bug between a pair of jeans and a Green Day t-shirt, watches it crawl across the fabric and buttons. It’s a green one, that bright, glossy shade of green that would almost be pretty, if it weren’t a stink bug. While she’d been hanging the laundry earlier, she thought she’d heard the sound of stink bugs bumping against glass, drawn in by the warmth and light of the garage windows. Tick, tick, tick. As she’d clipped on the clothespins, she’d caught that sharp little sound without really paying it any mind.
Here’s the season’s first stink bug — that in-between season, still warm as summer in the sun, but with a hint of autumn wind the moment you step into the shade. That moment when the soybeans get harvested from fields scorched by the sun, some seeds gone yellow, others scattered on the ground after a hare’s passed through. It’s the season on the fence, the kind where you need a light jacket in the evening but could still wander around in a swimsuit in the afternoon. The first stink bug always marks the start of autumn — the persimmon trees growing heavier and sweeter by the day, the pumpkins swelling crooked and huge in the gardens, the woodpile for the fireplace growing fast.
The mother watches the stink bug try to hide in the jeans pocket. She catches it with a little square of toilet paper, flushes it down the toilet, and sniffs her fingers: nothing. She managed not to crush it. Her own grandmother — the frightened teenager’s great-great-grandmother — used to catch stink bugs with her bare fingers, holding them gently between thumb and index finger, then toss them out into the garden. There, she’d crush them under her lilac slippers, the smell making everyone’s nose twitch, the cat curious whether that thing was something you could eat. She herself has never once managed to catch one with her bare hands.
Her grandmother used to point at the stink bugs on the living room windows, drawn in by the warmth of the fireplace, and tell her to just grab them, no fuss. She, still just a little girl back then, would inch closer but bolt the second the bugs so much as twitched, terrified of finding one tangled in her hair. She’d let out a little shriek and hide under the table, where she could hear her grandmother’s heavy footsteps, see the pockets of the apron she never took off, and hear her climb onto the bench to catch the insects bare-handed. Huffing, she’d toss the bugs straight into the fire, as if they were chestnuts.
She’d managed to catch one with her bare hands only once, with no crumpled tissue to help her. It had happened when there was no one home, just the cat watching her from the green velvet armchair. She’d crept slowly toward a stink bug making its way across the kitchen windowsill — a gray one, with a strange green stripe. Closing her eyes and holding her breath, she’d picked the thing up between her fingers, careful not to squeeze, and opened the door still with her eyes shut, arm stretched out as far as possible from her beloved blond curls. She’d flung the bug to the ground, ready to stomp it with her grandmother’s lilac slippers, but it had taken off flying instead, fast and unpredictable. Screaming, she’d run back inside, the smell still on her fingers, the cat still fast asleep.
Now an adult, the mother shakes out the clothes before folding them, watching for one more sneaky stink bug — those insects are sly, hiding in the folds, and you only notice them once they start banging against the light bulbs. Tick, tick, tick. She catches one crawling across her daughter’s white socks, and another trying to escape from the laundry basket. She’s already had enough, might as well skip straight to autumn, the mother thinks, as a mosquito bites her on the forearm.
This is the limbo season, when it’s still too warm for the mosquitoes to disappear, when the tractors and combines in the fields stir up stink bugs and swarms of gnats, rising into the sky in humming, dark columns. This is the season when hazelnuts drop from the trees with the first raindrops, when it’s time to dust off grandma’s mulled wine recipe, to start thinking about the first roasted chestnuts, eaten from a paper cone while wandering through the village streets.
It’s the end of summer. Can you feel it?
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