Jacob Aiello

I was once stung me in the ear by a bee, right inside the little concavity next to the eardrum. I was at a friend’s house, maybe ten or eleven, playing in the woods behind their back porch. His mother had me put a bag of ice against my ear and after a while I couldn’t tell between the pain from the sting and the pain from the cold. My friend and his little sister all crowded around it and he said I better make sure to get the stinger out, and his sister said she’d heard that a bee dies after it stings you, if that made me feel any better. “Make sure you remove the stinger,” he said. The bee was dead, his sister assured me. I might have been stung but the bee was dead.