Was it the size—the width of wings, veined & spread, of abdomen, antenna—that invited
your gentlest reach? Even through my tinted windows, rolling down West as I was, I could feel
your hesitation equal with desire. Was it the stillness? The surprising cessation of a thing that
ought to be whirring with a thousand winds, sounding like a sewing machine hammering a hem.
They die like that, you know, after the swell then burst above ground, they’ve got two weeks to
put their hard bodies on another before they sputter, too tired to keep up their call. The way it
halted there on a column outside the graveyard—was it too good a metaphor for you to pass by?
You had to drop the phone from your ear, quit your jog, stand stunned for a moment. Maybe I’m
mistaken, but I thought I heard you say, “Let me call you back,” as you slow-lifted your arm like
you might wipe away a stray hair from a lip corner or tears tracing a jaw. You weren’t sure of
yourself. Sensing, maybe, that cicadas are mouthless—he won’t bite, spit, suck—so where do
you place your tender thumbpad? Sensing in the same moment all his song must come from
somewhere else in the body, and you might be so lucky to feel the dying vibration. (Sound in
cicada moves like hot blood in mammal. Sound in cicada seeps like breath through salamander
skin. Lifeforce muscles up from somewhere in all of us and transmutes—bodies in alchemy.) I
thought you might stop, stiffen your pounding chest. But you felt first the breeze curving ‘round
his wing tip, soft-searching for the edge of thin chitin—a thing only known by touch. Or were
you taking cues? Reading notes from the air on how to hold a cicada? For you adjusted the angle
of your fingers like you placed your hand in water. Something buoyed the rest of your rising. It
was like lightning, that first touch, that meeting of seven eyes seeing cross species, and in cicada-
vision you exploded.
Marta Regn (she/her) is a writer living along the edge of the Chesapeake Bay. She holds an MFA from Hollins University, and her work has appeared in X-R-A-Y, Had, Hunger Mountain, Necessary Fiction, and Wildness, among other venues. She is at work on a collection of essays about animals.