I once accidentally dug up a cicada in the springtime, killing it right before it was meant to fly. The house I lived in, my parents’ house, had a ring of plants around it—the man who lived there before, by most accounts a generally grumpy and not well-liked neighbor, had been an expert gardener, and he tended to all sorts of flowers and bushes that made our yard lush and attractive in ways we could not.
No one in my family ever knew much of anything about gardening. But every now and then one of us would get the notion to try to plant some tulips, and that might have been why I was digging the day I unearthed the cicada. Most of that week is only memory in passing, threads I am barely able to hold on to, but I remember his body under the butterfly bush, which stood large with lilac flowers.
It must have been only a few months, maybe even just a few weeks, before he was supposed to wake up. The cicada, that is. The swarm had last been seen in the Nineties, and every year the farmers that congregated by the Church of the Nazarene suspected that this was finally the year the plague would turn upon our houses. Most years they were wrong, but this time they were finally right. All spring, there was a sense of Old Testament doom hanging in the air, making it hard to breathe.
The periodical cicadas (Magicicada) will burrow into the hollow of the ground, create a home inside the dirt, and live there for thirteen or seventeen years, depending on the brood. They do not see the sun, instead spending most of their lives resting, growing, preparing. After over a decade of gestating inside the earth, they will emerge, spend a week shedding the hard outer layer of skin, and then scream their way across the countryside. I’ve always found it kind of admirable, to be able to express yourself so freely like that.
While there are annual cicadas, those that come up every year, the periodical cicadas, like him, are perfectly developmentally synchronized—they emerge as adults together, either on the thirteenth or seventeenth year. It is a prime number, always, which makes it harder for other animals to biologically sync up their own schedules to the cicada appearances. As a nymph, he would live just around two feet under the surface, drinking the juice of deciduous trees.
They eventually emerge on a spring evening. The perfect synchronization coded into their DNA means they all work under very exact conditions, coming out only when the soil temperature at eight inches deep is greater than sixty-four degrees Fahrenheit. He would have been born from the earth in late May and molted one more time, spending six days hiding in the trees, waiting for his exoskeleton to harden. After that, he would have started singing.
Mythology tells us that Eos, the goddess of dawn, was cursed by Aphrodite to be perpetually in love and in lust, which led her to take on a string of mortal lovers. This included a Trojan prince named Tithonus. A vase shows Eos chasing after him, and Tithonus holds a lyre, reluctant to be caught. Sappho recorded their story, which almost doubles as a warning. Eos, so obsessed with her mortal companion, asked Zeus to turn him immortal so they could spend the rest of eternity welcoming mornings together. There is no information on whether Tithonus was consulted.
Zeus granted Eos’s wish, but the goddess forgot to ask for eternal youth. While Tithonus did not die, he did age, until his skin became loose and heavy, and his spine curled into a circle. He outlived his eyes and tongue, no longer able to see, no longer able to talk. He lived for a hundred lifetimes, growing so small, so shriveled, that he became the world’s first cicada.
The week I killed the cicada, I was on spring break. I was in college and had no interest in staying with my parents for the entire week off. For the first couple of days, I went to stay with a friend in the city nearby. I was young enough and came from a town small enough that going out to bars was still an event. We’d sleep all day and emerge at night to meet up with strangers, tall men with biblical-sounding names and deep voices. One time, one of them bought me shots of Crown Royal and drove us home. While my friend was throwing up in the bathroom, he pushed me over the kitchen table, making my body curve like a tree that can’t stand on its own. I don’t remember his name. I don’t remember the color of his hair. I remember the taste of whisky as I bit my tongue and tried not to throw up too. I stared at the tiles, the black-and-white checkered pattern, trying to imagine the floor below us, and then the earth below that, the dirt below dirt, imagining I was there, nestled in the dark soft ground, anywhere that wasn’t under the too-bright fluorescent lights of the kitchen.
A fact: there is a reason cicadas stay buried for so long. It makes them harder to kill. Due to the extra-long time they spend belowground, they are unreliable prey for any predator that wants to eat regularly. Though they’re vulnerable in their first week above earth, as they molt and adjust to their new bodies, their new lives, the sheer number of them emerging all at once helps insure that most of the individuals make it through that first week. The reason behind everything the cicada does comes down to the core strand woven into their DNA: an unshakable desire to survive.
Another fact: the cicada has no defenses. It cannot sting, it doesn’t normally bite, and it is not venomous. The cicada, on its own, is as fragile as the single petal of a flower. This seems to be at odds with their survival instinct.
I did end up throwing up in that kitchen. After he ejaculated and left, I emptied my stomach until my throat felt exposed, as if it had been skinned. I fell asleep on the couch. My friend and I laughed about it the next morning because I didn’t want it to be a big deal, I didn’t want to be the one who made it a big deal, it couldn’t be a big deal if we were laughing.
God, we were so drunk. We laughed because it was just so funny. I can’t believe I threw up in the sink.
I went home that day and slept long and hard. The next afternoon (or was it morning?) I was digging into the soft dirt and found the cicada. He was im-possibly small, a curled comma, the skin dark and hard, his arms splayed outwards as if he was in the middle of digging. Holding it in my palms, my chest felt open and hollow. It had never been able to breathe open air, but it was so close. The guilt settled in my stomach, turning vile and rotten.
Who was I to rip it from the earth?
Who was I to turn his home into a grave?
Why me?
What had I done wrong?
What was wrong with me?
When I left for school again I began wearing oversized sweatshirts, creating an exoskeleton of my own, and started dreaming of being buried alive, forced to swallow dirt. I often woke up coughing deeply, from the chest.
Cicadas are littered through folklore and mythology, featured in songs, literature, art, and food. For as long as they’ve existed, they have been eaten, consumed and digested for their healing properties. Their rarity offers them power, and the cicada molt is sweet and cold and, in Chinese folklore, is thought to help with fevers, issues of the eyes, and sore throats that feel as if they had been scratched raw.
When I came home that summer, I stopped leaving my room when I didn’t have to. I slept often, curled up under layers of thick, dark blankets. I worked at a children’s camp where I had to sing five days a week, for five weeks straight, the entire month of June and first week of July. I often dreamt of men who would pull my bones out my body, leaving me loose and alone. Everything always seemed heavy. The butterfly bush stopped flowering.
What is happening to you? my mother asked me once. I shrugged. I didn’t talk much when I didn’t have to.
The singing of male cicadas is produced not from the throat, but rather from the chest. They use a pair of tybals, sound-producing organs attached to their abdominal regions, which rapidly relax and then tense, over and over and over again, making their mating call. Depending on their position, they can modulate the song, or amplify it. In some species, a single male cicada can call as loud as thunder. It is enough to cause permanent hearing loss in most people, if they’re close enough.
Periodical cicadas will sing for twenty-four hours straight on the hottest days of the summer, in a chorus together. The pitch feels continuous to the human ear, and it is nearly impossible for the average person to find where in the trees the cicada may be hiding in plain sight. It almost becomes like static.
How did Tithonus feel, when he realized what his life was to become? What was it like to curl into his own body, lie in the dirt so long that it became a blanket, and become new again? He was not given the ability to speak to his former lover, but was offered the power to scream instead. Is that what he wanted to do anyway?
In most mythology, the cicada represents rebirth and immortality. The Aztecs carved the insect from jade and used it in funeral rituals, placing it on the tongues of the dead. Even its genus name, Magicicada, comes from the Greek word magi, or magic.
As the summer wore on, I still had the dreams. I began going outside at night, driving into the forest, hiding among tall deciduous trees that were green and alive. Always, the cicadas spoke. I tried to make myself familiar with their language, as if they could offer me a secret I needed. I whispered promises into the trees. I apologized over and over and over again. Once I screamed back. I was so loud that the dogs nearby began howling, too. Then we were all just making noise, a symphony of animals trying to be heard, trying to bait the universe into giving answers to a question I didn’t know how to ask.
Unlike the butterfly or moth, the cicada has no pupal state. Rather, it is one single moment of change that sets them up for the unbearable weight of being alive.
The cicadas more or less die out by mid-July. Once they emerge, they only live for a few weeks— they mate, plant eggs, and as they die, the next generation begins to grow underground. They survive.
Kirsten Reneau lives in New Orleans, where she is working on her MFA and serving as nonfiction editor for Bayou Magazine. Her writing has appeared in Hobart Pulp, Hippocampus Magazine, French Quarter Journal, and elsewhere.
