Frances Orrok (@francesorrok.bsky.social)

'How to Overcome a Childhood Fear of Earwigs' by Jan Kaneen * Be dead to the moment as you go outside, noticing nothing, not the pulsating rainbow of garden greens, malachite apples, pistachio shadows, moist mossy crevices. * Breathe through your mouth so the sickening whiff of sweet-rotten windfalls doesn’t catch in your throat. * Find an optimum spot where the fruit is low hanging, and don’t focus on the foul sappy mounds beneath your wellies or the monsters that lurk in their rotten insides. * Never imagine mouthparts, or mandibular sharpness, or side-to-side shearing or abdominal pincers. * Think in facts because facts dispel fear. Earwig, name derived from old English wicga, which means beetle, and ēare, which means, well… ear which entomologists suggest refers to the appearance of hindwings which when unfolded resemble a human ear. Absolutely nothing to do with crawling into human ears then, to feast on the sweet-rotten pap of windfallen brains. * Pick three hard-green fruits and if a breath of wind rustles the leaves above your head, do not imagine bristly bodies landing in your leaf-litter hair. * Tear back inside to the clean not-green kitchen and stare at the TV which you left on for its bluescreen light. Stare into that light, at the bright orange face on the rolling news. * Watch the tangerine man spit poison from his tight little mouth and feel a deeper fear immerge. Find yourself instinctively filling your head with an army of facts, but the power of information only makes matters worse, this isn’t irrational fear of something that can do you no harm, but reasonable fear based on adult understanding. * See the tiny hairs on your naked forearms itch themselves upright in logical loathing, in sentient terror. * Feel the earwig fear recede into the background for the first time in over forty years. --- Jan Kaneen writes flash and short stories and her new collection of both, Hostile Environments is available to pre-order here, from at Northodox Press. http://dlvr.it/TLLm2p