Close your eyes for a moment. Clear your mind of distractions, and imagine it: a quarter-mile away, someone is using a buzz saw to saw a car in half, a car that is alarmed, and whose alarm is now blaring.
That's what the cicadas sound like.
Solo, or in small manageable groups, they're quite fetching, really, with their black-and-red industrial color scheme, their weird car-grill faces, their very harmlessness. En masse, it's a writhing, rustling, squirming, living Hieronymus Bosch scene, with crawling nymphs blindly making their way across lawns, choking the sidewalks with their husks as well as their dead; newly emerged adults, ghostly white and sometimes frozen in eerie attitudes of torment, having died half-out of their exoskeletons; and of course, the kajillion unsuccessful adults who ooze patches of blackish goo all over the pavement.
I find this all so fucking cool, even when the trees at night are full of that crickling sound of billions of cicadas walking (and probably having sex). During the day, the trees are alive with them, blundering from branch to branch with that clackafwhappa sound they make when they fly.
(Naturally, I am thinking this would be an awesome time to get pregnant, you know, for the story and all.)
They ARE indsutrial looking. I think it makes for a great story too.
Posted by: Mamarama | Monday, May 24, 2004 at 11:20 AM
Remembering a less benign infestation of my youth (gypsy moths): is it possible that, among the sounds of walking, is also the sound of thousands of cicacas pooping?
As she again manages to elevate the tone of the blog ...
Posted by: jilbur | Monday, May 24, 2004 at 12:59 PM