What the Cicadas Sang

Cicadas.

If you've ever been somewhere they’re thick, you know what I mean. Sometimes they sing so loudly that you think you might actually lose your mind. And I have a rather unfortunate personal relationship with that particular sound. After a bad reaction to a medication, I was left with tinnitus. And the sound of my tinnitus?

Cicadas.

All

the

time.

Which means that I have spent an entirely unreasonable amount of time thinking about what it would be like if that sound really did drive somebody crazy. And, naturally, because I am who I am, I didn't stop there. I wondered what would happen if the sound became attached to something.

A memory. A fear. A secret. Guilt.

Because that is the particularly nasty thing about a sound you can't escape. Eventually your brain starts trying to make sense of it. It looks for patterns. It assigns meaning. It turns noise into language if you give it enough time and enough reason to listen. So I took one of the most unmistakable sounds of late summer in Michigan and gave it to a man who desperately needed silence.

Arthur Vance has done something terrible. He’s buried a man beneath his barn and convinced himself that burying the body was the same thing as burying what he’d done. Then August arrives. The cicadas arrive with it. And suddenly the thing he can’t escape isn't the heat or the noise. It's himself.

I loved the idea that the cicadas never actually have to become supernatural. They don't need to know Arthur's secret. They don't need to know Thomas. They don't need to know anything about guilt or murder or buried bodies. They're just doing what cicadas do. They emerge from the earth. They climb the trees. They sing. And Arthur supplies the rest.

That's the part of this story that still makes me smile a little. Because if you've ever sat outside on one of those August afternoons when the cicadas are screaming from every tree, you know how completely they can take over the world. There’s no negotiating with them. You can't ask them to lower the volume. You can't reason with them. You just have to listen. And if you're carrying something you don't want to hear about yourself, maybe the sound gets a little louder.

Maybe it starts sounding like words. Maybe it starts sounding like an accusation. Or maybe—and this is the part I like best—it's never saying anything at all. Maybe the world is simply making its ordinary summer noise. And the terrible thing you're hearing in it is entirely your own. Which, considering I hear cicadas in my head every day anyway, seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do with them.