Hemingway in the Weeds

Hemingway’s job was to scare off the hornets. He stood a mere three feet high, and he was designed to resemble a pelican. Studies had found that hornets are, for some reason, terrified of pelicans. Hemingway’s creator was a woman from the southern part of Delaware. She was twice-divorced with one child from her first marriage. She named the robot pelican Hemingway, because during the summer, she would reread a Hemingway novel from her stash in the spare room of her house. Whenever a problem with one of her inventions arose, she’d take a break and read five pages of The Old Man and the Sea or twelve pages of A Farewell to Arms. By the time she was done, she’d have an answer to her conundrum. Hemingway was her most acclaimed creation. He won Design of the Year from Backyard magazine. Hundreds of thousands of him were made. Each was the same, and each was placed in a garden or yard, or on a deck or patio. Each Hemingway was made out of a cost-effective plastic that was hard to break or shatter, because children loved to pick up Hemingway and throw him. If you were a Hemingway at a house without children, you were considered very lucky.

This Hemingway house did have a child.

At 414 Tuckerman Avenue, there was a Hemingway placed on the front lawn among other assorted ornaments. The neighbors complained to each other, because this was an elite community that masqueraded as casual, because it was by the ocean. Life was all salmon shorts and white sweaters with anchors on them, but the money was often old, and several retired Presidential Cabinet members had summer houses on the street. The house Hemingway was placed in front of was owned by a young man who inherited the house from his deceased uncle. His uncle died in his sleep while having a nightmare about food poisoning. The young man received notice about the house and instructions for how to go about selling it. Instead, he packed up his small apartment in Cedar Key and began the drive up north. When he arrived, he noticed a hornet’s nest under the eave of the roof of his new house. He looked up where the closest hardware store ‘n coffee shop was in town, and once located, he went to pick up a cold brew and a Hemingway. By the next morning, the hornet’s nest was empty. The young man took it down, brought it inside, placed it in one of the cardboard boxes he had just used to move a cactus, and placed it in the closet where his uncle had once kept a juggling kit.

Now, when I say the man was young, I’m sure you imagine that he’s in his twenties. Maybe his late twenties, but it’s unlikely that you saw him in his thirties even though, to many people, including myself, thirty is still quite young. A reader can’t help but imagine what they imagine, but I’m sure you imagined wrong, and it’s not your fault, although you were given a clue. I told you that there was a child in this house, and, indeed, there is. Perhaps you assumed that the young man was the father of a son or daughter. In fact, the young man who had once lived in Cedar Key, Florida, was only seven-years-old. He was living in Cedar Key with his mother and father, who were not actually his mother and father, but androids who had been given to him when his mother and father were killed in a car accident. His uncle had the option to adopt the young man, but he, himself, was not in the best health, and it turned out not adopting the child had been the right decision, because then he would have lost three parental figures in his life, and, unlike his mother and father, his uncle had not opted to have an android version made of himself by his life insurance company.

It was relatively recent that seven-year-olds were given full legal autonomy, and we certainly don’t need to get into all the controversy surrounding that decision. Technically, this young man didn’t need a mother and/or father android to look after him since he was considered an adult by age five. He asked for the androids anyway, because emotionally, he was still very much a child, even if not in the eyes of the law. As for the driving, that was done in an automated car. The money he used to purchase the Hemingway was from the money his parents had left him. The woman working at the hardware ‘n coffee shop told him that he was too young to be drinking cold brew, but she sold it to him anyway. This would be his first time living alone without any human or non-human parental figures in his life. He had chosen to leave the androids back in Cedar Key, because they had begun malfunctioning. The mother android wasn’t like his mother at all, and she insisted on telling him scary stories at bedtime. The father android was sort of like his father, but only wanted to watch ping pong matches on ESPN27. The young man’s father knew nothing about ping pong. It was clear the insurance company had made these androids on the cheap despite the very high monthly price his parents paid to have androids available to their son should they die in a car accident. Their accident was especially sad since the automated car they were in had been infected with a suicide virus. It drove them directly into the ocean. The manufacturer of the car insisted that suicide viruses were very rare even though this was the thirty-seventh car in a year to murder itself and its passengers.

The young man had an understandable aversion to automation after that. While his surrogate parents could be looked at as automated, he felt a greater displeasure towards products meant to handle a task without interference from human beings: Self-driving cars, automatic mailbox cleaners, and pelican-looking hornet deterrents. The only reason the young man purchased the Hemingway was because he hated hornets even more than he hated automated robots, because he was, well, seven-years-old. He had to use a stepladder to take down the empty nest, and he stored it in a bedroom closet, because where else was a seven-year-old supposed to put the former home of a bunch of vespas?

Hemingway’s usefulness as it pertained to hornets was also its reprieve. It would be allowed to stay on the front lawn despite how the neighbors felt about it. Over the next few years, the young man would remove all the other ornaments aside from the pelican. That would have satisfied the neighbors had the young man also taken advantage of the automated lawnmower, but that sat in the garage. And so weeds sprung up around Hemingway until they were nearly up to his drooping beak.

One by one, the neighbors began to move away. The water levels were rising, and even though Tuckerman Avenue was on a hill, the water proved to be an efficient climber. The young man became a real young man. First an eight-year-old, then an eighteen-year-old, and then a forty-eight year-old. Within the weeds, native plants emerged to masticate on any imported sod or flower that had the misfortune to remain past its welcome. The young man looked out his window each morning and saw strange creatures working their way through the undergrowth, but Hemingway was always at least slightly visible, as long as he was, there were never any hornets.

Nobody came to visit the young man who was soon an old man, and he ventured outside the house less and less now that the neighborhood was mostly marshland. Large reptiles that looked like crocodiles were not crocodiles would swim by the front porch. One such monster tried to eat Hemingway, but quickly spit him back out when they tasted his expired batteries. The weeds became reeds, which isn’t how it works. Nature had begun to change its rules for evolution and transformation. Inside the house, the formerly young man got into bed and had a dream about his mother. She was singing a song about a bumblebee. A tiny bumblebee that couldn’t make any honey. The man couldn’t remember why the bee was bad at doing what it was meant to do.

The dream ended before the song did.