When I moved to the quaint town it was cicada hatching season. The noisy insects wouldn’t shut up with their high-pitched squeal that buzzed on some hellish frequency day and night. I started going insane and spent my days pacing around with my hands over my ears.
I wrote to the council and asked if they could do something about it. My country vibe was being ruined. I sent a long letter about the price of my house and my vision board about country life being quiet. I explained to them that I couldn’t find my bliss amongst the scratching of a million wings in the air as the bugs tried to find their mates. I explained that I was in fact in the prime of my life and needed space to spread my own wings about town, uninhibited by a plague of insects.
Besides, I had a very attractive neighbour that I was hoping to impress. With all the noise it was hard to hatch a plan.
The council responded with a brochure from the cicada society about their life cycle. It explained how they are born in the ground, stay there for seven years, then pop up and breed in a chaotic sex frenzy for several months before dying.
The noise continued, the beauty of nature was killing me. When I walked outside the dead cicadas fell on me like an abject rain storm. I accidentally crunched one beneath my boot and in that moment my attitude changed. I felt empathy emerging and I felt deep in my soul for the pathos of the cicada.
I went home and sat in my thinking chair and tried to work out what was going on. The cicadas were my spirit animal. We shared a certain boldness and intense way of being in the world. I was just jealous that they were out enjoying their love life, just as I had been seven years ago before my ex-girlfriend left me for apparently being annoying and noisy.
So I opened my window and called out to them that I respected their decisions, that they should be free and do all the things that they wanted, and then I sat at my window like some green-change pervert watching them soaring through the air full of passion and lust.
As I watched them through the window I also noticed my neighbour on the other side of the road. She often got dressed in the lamp light and had a glorious and sensual body. I would often watch her weeding the garden for hours as I gazed out through the haze of cicadas. She awakened something in me, a part of me awakened after so many years, and I found myself spending more and more time at the window thinking about cicadas and my neighbour.
They inspired me, I loved their style, their boldness and their brazen declaration of desire that screeched through the night air. Country life had changed me, and I started opening myself to the eternal teachings of nature. My neighbour came out to do the weeding and I waved. She waved back and smiled.
I felt I already knew her and had a sense of what would impress her. So I got a shovel and during the night I dug a hole for myself outside her house. I curled up naked and thought about the seven years I had lost in celibate misery, all the wasted opportunities and loneliness. When I poked a hole in the dirt above and saw the early morning light appearing.
I knew she would be out soon to start gardening.
So I channelled the spirit of the cicada and braced myself to emerge.
Fiona Murray is a writer and social worker living in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney.
Patreon makes Every Day Fiction possible.
