“Did you know there is always a dead wasp hidden inside a fig?” Vera asks, sinking her teeth into the pink and green flesh. I’m sure it’s a myth but won’t say so. This summer we’re exploring sex with the enthusiasm a dedicated entomologist affords a newly discovered species.

Sex is a red splash of pomegranate juice on the pavement below the branches hanging over a stone wall across the street. Split skin and scattered seeds. It is the salty liquid of an oyster. It is in her blackwork tattoos. It is in my fingers searching for that sweet spot. In the tangled blonde hair of a girl sitting next to us on a tourist boat.

We rent a room up five flights of stairs without a lift. Drink cheap wine from carton boxes. Vera plays her guitar for hours in a row. “Don’t you ever get tired?” I ask. No answer is forthcoming.

Sex is a thick trickle of white honey, down into the cup of hot tea. It is a line of poetry I read somewhere and immediately forgot. All lights flashing in a game arcade. A riddle. A rhyme. A bag of tricks. Dead wasps crawling inside a fig, biting at the green and pink walls.

I get restless before the weekend is over. 

We take two different taxis on the way back.

Never call each other again.

Sex is a number scrawled on a paper napkin. A folded map. A change of weather. An incoming storm. The slow undulation of a wave crawling up the shore. It never smells so much like summer anymore.

When Vera steps off the balcony in San Francisco, I’m in my bed, half-across the world, next to a woman I met much, much later. I won’t know, until I go online in the morning and open my inbox, where an email from a mutual friend lies in waiting. 

The night is velvet black, and the windows open into a hot, sticky darkness. The air trembles, thick and sweet as syrup. Wasps are crawling all over my skin.

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Laila Amado writes in her second language, has recently exchanged her fourth country of residence for the fifth, and can now be found staring at the North Sea, instead of the Mediterranean. The sea, occasionally, stares back. Her works have appeared in Best Small Fictions 2022, Best Microfiction 2024, Lost Balloon, Flash Frog, Cheap Pop, Milk Candy Review, and other publications.