Cicada
Have you stepped outside lately? Have you noticed a peculiar buzzing sound in the trees? The cicadas have returned! In honor of this momentous occasion, I am posting this short story I wrote many years ago, right here–for FREE! I hope you enjoy reading it.
Cicada
Corinne has broken a nail. It doesn’t matter in the great scheme of things, that’s what she’s telling herself. But in reality, that nail, if you figure in the weekly maintenance fees plus the original installation charge, cost precisely $15.74. She has already figured it on her adding machine, rolling her eyes because she positively can’t believe she’s trying to figure out how much this nail has cost her. She curses under her breath and types a few words on her computer, discouraged. Then she remembers what her pudgy soft, hands looked like, pre-acrylic. With a groan, she starts typing, already feeling better.
Corinne is bored. She is a receptionist for a plumbing parts store in Blue Mound, Kansas. She gets up every morning at 6:30 a.m. and brushes her teeth first thing because she can’t stand to eat her breakfast without doing so. She doesn’t wash her hair—she does that at night—but she rolls it on hot rollers and soaks it with some expensive hairspray in a white can that she can’t afford. Her breakfast is short and sweet, something like a banana, midway between green and completely too ripe. She’s lost five pounds over the last six months and is quite proud of herself because she’s been working out and eating right. Broccoli and oatmeal, mainly.
She’s sitting here between customers, in one small, microcosm of the universe, sitting at an outdated blue Formica counter. The counter has a coffee stain on it, which she has tried, on numerous occasions, to remove. Her boss, Jack Mast, is locked in his office, probably reading porno magazines, and Grace, the company accountant, who has to be at least ninety years old, is in the back storage room, poring over tax files from 1994. She sighs, taps her nails methodically on the counter, shuts down her computer and clocks out for lunch.
*
“Did you know that there’s a breed of cicadas that only comes out every seventeen years? I mean—wait a minute—can you even imagine this? What do they do under there? Don’t they get bored? And if it takes that long, why do they even bother to come out at all? I mean, what’s the point?” Gary speaks with a slight New York accent that Corrine knows for sure is fake. His parents live down the street from Corrine’s father-in-law, Bobby Rutgers. He was born and raised right here in Kansas, right here in Linn county. She looks at Gary with a tinge of regret in her eyes, she knows he can see it. She wonders, faintly, if potatoes are included in the price of her meal, then remembers that she doesn’t particularly like potatoes, so keeps quiet about it and instead, tries to think positively about the mole on the left side of Gary’s mouth.
“So how come you to know so much about cicadas anyway? Cicadas, I always wondered how you pronounced that. Am I saying it right? Ci-ca-das.” Corrine looks at Gary hopefully, her blonde hair wilting around her face in the mid-summer heat. She sits back, satisfied that she’s salvaged any sense of ill regard Gary might have had for her.
“Cicadas,” Gary repeats. “Cicadas, cicadas, cicadas. You know it sort of sounds weird after a while.” He laughs obnoxiously and slurps half of his root beer in a single breath. “I love root beer. Cicadas and root beer, root beer and cicadas. Sounds like some old drippy country song that no one remembers any more.” He laughs again. Corrine just smiles dumbly and flips her hair, wishing she were in Buenos Aires. She doesn’t have a clue as to why, but that was the place that popped into her head, so she latches on to it, makes a spectacle of it in her brain, like some cheap, flashy pair of dime store sunglasses. It sounds fairly damn exotic. “Aren’t they some kind of bee or something? Like do they bite?”
*
Cicadas are large, blunt-headed flying insects that live in trees and are quite noisy, emitting a strange humming chatter at all hours of the day. They are in the insect order of Homoptera and they spend long lives under the earth living off the juices of deciduous tree roots. Corinne is reading the encyclopedia, thinking she’ll blow Gary away with her new found Cicada knowledge tomorrow. She imagines him blinking his eyes in bafflement as if some khaki-clad man with a hat and a clipboard had bounded into the restaurant, hurling explanations, pointing out that the varying stages of cicada development make it possible to see a cicada in any given year, not just every seventeen. He would just blink, blink, blink. It would be an affair to remember.
*
“Affair. What do you mean—affair?”
“I mean gettin’ some behind my back, that’s what I mean,” Joe screams, his wide face bulging around his red, nonexistent neck.
Corrine and her husband Joe are sitting on a postage stamp deck attached to their white, three bedroom manufactured home, exactly thirty miles from Blue Mound, Kansas, on the Sugar River. They’re sipping iced tea, instant.
“Well?” Joe throws his cigarette butt harshly at the side of the house. Sparks fly. He picks up a spare chair—the one with the seat rotting out of it—and tosses it across the deck.
Corrine looks around thoughtfully, amazingly unaffected by Joe’s brash, ballistic behavior. She sighs, settles more comfortably into her chair.
“Listen Joe. It’s the cicadas. Can’t you hear that noise? Listen to it.” She leans back.
Joe looks at her bewildered, confused, a cartoon cat who’s just swallowed a ten pound beach ball. “What?” He blares.
“Did you know they only come out every seventeen years?”
“Well, what the hell for?” Joe asks, wide-eyed and flustered, suddenly defeated. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m just talking, Joe. It’s called talking. Having a conversation about something interesting. Get it?”
Joe stares. “I don’t know where the hell you get this stuff. I really don’t.”
*
Cicadas emerge in droves together, after spending up to seventeen years underground, to complete their metamorphosis into adulthood. This metamorphosis might aptly be referred to as one long winter. Their primary objective is, not surprisingly, sex, which serves to explain the droning noise. The males are said to be cat-calling the females, a sound which is also heard when they are picked up or bothered in any way—which suggests, interestingly, that the same call used for propagation is also used to frighten predators.
Corinne cocks an eyebrow and turns the page. “Hmmmm….”
*
For weeks, Corinne types away at her keyboard, her red nails clicking with each stroke. She feels some degree of comfort in this sound—tap, tap, t-t-tap, t-tap-t, t-t-ap—on and on, sometimes for hours at a time. It makes her drowsy and reflective, often unable to keep her eyes open (she’s been doing this so long, she can type with her eyes closed anyway). T-t-tap, t-t-t-ap, t-t-, t-tap. She is one of the few people in the world who actually enjoys typing. She beams, examining her slick nails massaging the keys. She’s just had her weekly maintenance.
In June, the rain pelts and dribbles for three days straight, soaking the ground and silencing the cicadas. Joe spends his time fixing the lawn mower in the garage and Corinne, taking her much needed, five days paid, busies herself on the couch reading romance novels and encyclopedias, feet propped up and hair in a crudely arranged ponytail. She’s taken up smoking again, too, which she loathes. She takes note of this fact as she rolls an index finger quickly over her lighter, an already loose nail flipping into her iced tea as the thing ignites. “Damn,” she sticks her finger in her mouth and resolves to take a hot bath with jasmine oil. That always seems to work. She fiddles with the lighter, striking it over and over, as she reads. She likes the sound it makes.
The ice chips shift in her glass.
In the yard, a chain saw breaks and chokes, then rumbles. She hears the whine rise and fall as it eats into next winter’s fire wood. She just smiles and turns another page.
It dries up in July and Corinne gets to feeling better about herself. She colors her hair red and wears garish sunglasses to work. She writes vague, simple-minded letters to Gary and tucks them under the mattress. She leaves the window open at night, thinking about tropical sunsets and Mai Tais, listening to the endless chatter in the trees, as the cicada song becomes oppressively loud, like a descending spaceship.
*
It’s almost hunting season and Gary announces he is about to enter some turkey calling contest. He wants to know what Corinne thinks about that. She doesn’t think much of anything about it, but she smiles and asks him how much money a man might make, calling turkeys.
They’re sitting on a curb, just down the street from where Corinne works, eating the bologna sandwiches that Corinne brought from home.
“Oh, I s’pose a man could eventually make a fortune, if he’s good enough.”
That seems to satisfy her, so she doesn’t ask any more questions. She sits, watching cars as they whiz by. No one seems to know her here, she thinks, her mind momentarily fogged with the sound of something, something deep and real and confident. Something that she’s heard so long, she doesn’t even know it exists any more.
“Gary, I think maybe Joe knows.”
Gary’s cheek bulges with an enormous mound of bread and slop. “Huh?”
“Knows. He knows, Gary. About us I think.”
Gary chokes down the food in his mouth and pushes his hat up further on his forehead. “Well, what do you think we ought to do about that?”
*
“Big mistake, Gary. Never ask a woman what she thinks you ought to do about something. You’re just asking to be handed some flowery smelling letter and a picture, on the way out the door. Corinne is messed up, man.” Gary is sitting at the Beer Joint, listening with drunken attentiveness while his best friend Bob dissects his predicament.
“Whaddya mean, messed up?”
“For some unfathomable reason, she likes you. Likes you enough to sit on a public street corner with you in a town with a population under 10,000, eating bologna sandwiches. She’s not exactly smart you know. She’s worried what Joe might do, you know what I’m sayin’? She’s gonna run, man.”
“Whaddya mean run?”
“It’s easy, that’s all I’m sayin’. You’re just another Gary to her and remember, this is her first affair. She’s like in training or somethin’.”
*
“Training?” Joe says smugly. “What the hell for? You work in a chintzy pipe store, for Christ’s sake.”
“Well, Joe, they want to put us on some new computer system. And you know how dumb I am when it comes to those things.” Corinne fiddles with her wedding ring and smiles. “It’s just one night a week anyway. You won’t even know I’m gone.”
“What am I supposed to do about dinner?”
“Don’t worry about it honey,” Corinne nudges closer to her husband. “We’ll work it out. Let’s go outside and enjoy the evening. Just listen.”
*
Some people are afraid of them, harboring fears of savage locusts, ready to swarm and attack. In reality, cicadas are harmless to humans, completely absorbed in their own impassioned beat. When the male is cater walling the female, he is oblivious. The French etymologist Fabre fired guns next to them and no signs of reaction could be detected. They are both common and otherworldly, insignificant and enchanting. They appear all over the world, even Borneo. In some countries, they are used for food. In Shangai, for example, skewered cicadas are a delicacy. They are represented in the mythologies of numerous civilizations, including China, where they are seen as symbolic of rebirth and immortality. Cicada-shaped funeral jades were placed the tongues of the deceased to ensure resurrection.
*
“Ever think about dying?” Corinne asks offhandedly. “I mean, what would be the absolute worst way to go?”
Corinne and Gary are lying in a near collapsed bed in the Munger Moss Motel, room 55B. A green and blue sign blinks gratuitously outside the window, and cigarette smoke hovers in the air like moss.
“Getting’ burned alive, that’d be pretty bad.”
Corinne gasps in agreement. “What about getting eaten by a bear or something? Ooh.”
Gary wiggles his feet.
“Oooh, they’re cold. Stop it!” Corinne kicks in playful defensiveness and then buries her nose in the soft, white skin just below Gary’s armpit.
“Ooh—how ‘bout getting run over by a steam roller, man.”
“Oh Gary, gross! That’s the worst for sure!”
Gary kisses her neck and laughs. “Man you’re easy to talk to.”
Corinne is quiet for a few moments, then says, “What are we gonna do about us anyway?”
“How ‘bout we do this all over again?” Gary looks at her quite seriously, in the seedy neon light, and Corinne just laughs.
*
Somewhere in the forest, which is just to the east of the Munger Moss Motel property line, a clumsy, toe-headed insect sits on the sparse remains of an unprofessionally-cared-for poplar tree, churning his poetry into the forlorn sky, oblivious and still. The sky is the same to him today as it was yesterday, an airy calm that sits on the night like it was part of things, part of the chill and racing blood of summertime dusks. He will sit here perhaps forever, inspiring people to the stuff of hot, mundane summer days, of muggy, nostalgic nights. He’ll stay, perhaps long enough to weather another long, lonely day; perhaps long enough to weather another Blue Mound winter, times seventeen. He hums in the night, consuming the insignificance of life, the stars that glow with some kind of promise, beaming some luminous passing of ordinary time. And then, slowly or suddenly, he dies of boredom, or perhaps, something like love, and leaves but a shell behind.
