"When are you going to leave your wife?" my mistress asked.


    I was putting on my boots.


    "Soon," I said.


    On my way home, I swung by the office to pick up a new golf club I''d had delivered, then stopped by the daycare to pick up my son.


    That''s when I saw the first wasp.


    I assumed it had entered the car on my son''s clothes. It was particularly pesky, eluding my attempts to flush it out the windows until I had no choice but to pull over and hunt it down with a rolled-up business magazine—a hunt that ended with a very satisfying splat!


    The next one appeared a few days later while I was pretending to watch TV, followed by a second and third, and all three buzzed so loudly I couldn''t concentrate on my sexting. I had to take a break and kill them.


    Splat!


    Dozens more materialized the following week.


    By now, I was certain we had an infestation. But my wife insisted she hadn''t seen any, and my son was too young to talk.


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    I called an exterminator.


    "House is clean," he said after his inspection.


    But it wasn''t.


    The wasps continued to show up, day after day, in ever-greater numbers. Any time I was home, they buzzed relentlessly. I stopped being able to sleep. I stopped being able to concentrate. The only time I felt any peace from them was at work, where my boss increasingly micro-managed me, and in the hotel, where my mistress had stepped up her nagging. "It''s been almost a year! Are you gonna leave your wife or not?"


    One day, I could barely take it anymore, and had to use every ounce of my self-control not to slap her across the face. "When my son is a little older," I said through clenched teeth.


    On my wife''s birthday, my wife and I took turns hiding from our son in a game of hide-and-seek. I hid in our shed. It was dark inside, and when the buzzing started I suddenly felt the wasps all around me, crawling on my face and limbs, and as I lurched for the exit I felt as if I were passing through an entire atmosphere of them! I imagined them flying down my throat, devouring my eyes, numbing my tongue…


    I screamed and my wife had to calm me down. "It''s OK, there aren''t any more wasps," she repeated as she petted my hair like I was a dumb dog.


    I took a sabbatical from work.


    Because I was home all day, we cancelled daycare.


    I checked the house insistently for the wasp lair. I knew there was one because I had already killed thousands.


    That''s when I saw it:


    My son sleeping so peacefully, as a wasp exited his nostril. Another emerged from his ear.


    I knew what had to be done. What I had to do.


    Wasps buzzed. Phone buzzed.


    I grabbed my golf club.


    Splat!