Dead wasp

There is a wasp caught in the headlight of my car.  It is dead I hasten to add, desiccated and shrivelled up but with its compound eyes pressed against the outside glass of the lamp facing the front as if it has been watching where I have been going.  What if it has?  Can you imagine the things it has seen, the places it has been, all of the things that have passed me by as a driver, all of the things that I have never noticed while I have been cocooned within my car?  You can imagine how well travelled it now is and the new experiences it has witnessed, its horizons will have been broadened far further than they would ever have been as a live wasp. 

It will have seen my daily commute to work from its vantage point barely half a metre above the tarmac surface which will have raced by at mesmeric speeds, too fast to pick out the individual stones set in the graphite coloured pitch of the motorway but slow enough to be hypnotised by the flash, flash, flash of the passing white lines that mark out the carriageways. 

It will have seen all of the verges and hedgerows of the byways that I have passed along, no doubt with a tinge of sadness as its head strikes the vitreous prison wall.  It will have seen all the wild flowers, primroses and wild garlic, all the tiny bugs and insects, slugs and snails, field mice and voles, all of the live that lives ignored along the roadside.

It will have witnessed the myriad of trips to the shops, to buy groceries, to buy clothes or trips to garden centres, shopping centres, leisure centres, sitting in car parks, sitting in traffic jams, sitting in queues.  It will have seen the filth and smog that was thrown up from the road surface or exhaled from the exhaust pipes of the vehicles in front, smothering and suffocating the tiny creatures that get caught up in the maelstrom and vortices as the traffic speeds past.  Indeed that could be how it ended up being in my headlamp in the first place, how it came to be incarcerated.  It’s been there for some time I am sure.

But the strangest experience must have been when the headlight was switched on, when night turned to instant day with an intense arc of light reflecting off the silvered inside of the lamp behind and its own image projected in shadow on any surface that got caught in the beam. How it would have cowered in the glory of its own inflated image, a sight unseen by any other wasp captured a hundred times in it compound eyes, a fantastic silhouette of mythical proportions and a god-like wasp made in its own image.  A sight worth dying for?