after words

One rainy afternoon in Lisbon there were male cicadas in the weeds.  Within seven minutes it got loud and the thunderclouds went in, and the long humans with wide feet in protective shells on the bottom opened single wings over their heads and abandoned the street.  Two stayed near and made mud-women like snowmen with their top feet unprotected and pink.  She and Buz could see them above on the ditch lip.  Buz sat on a rock.  He was stiff and green in the cold ditch.

Buz sang with dual tymbals in his abdomen for one reason.  She was happy to let him.  When he performed for her he elevated her with the cicada rhythm; and they had songs, amazing-fine songs.  She succumbed, quivering lightly upon a cattail so she would not click-clicky about things during the noisy, mating moment.  Before she learned to cling to cattails she used to make a racket and Buz would have to get back on the rock.  There were many other cicadas, and they all knew about it.  Not one envied Buz. 

Before she left for the ponds they hid under a Ford and played.  It was slick and oily, and there were other cicadas click-clicking.  They wanted to stay monogamous, but their genes might not allow - both had other instincts.  They saw through monogamy, for they witnessed human failures, and because of this they tried it.

Buz drummed her many songs that she never got until after her season.  Ninety came on the wind to the ponds and she picked through the clicks and sat quiet straight through.  They were all about the ditch, and how little he missed her and how it was lovely to sing along without her and how beautifully all the males click-clicked in the night.

Before her season they fought about her move to the River to lay eggs.  Buz would not join her until she had laid several thousand down the cattail stems and could come to the aqueduct to meet him.  It was understood she would not eat the eggs, and she would not give them to any frogs or fish in the River.  Only to lay the future larvae and be monogamous.  In the air between Lisbon and Mill Pond they agreed about him not becoming monogamous at once.  Not until when they rubbed hello, in the wild iris at Mill Pond, would he sing only her song.  This they swore in agreement.  She felt pink with envy about his singing to others like that.

She came to the River upon a leaf via the Aqueduct.  Buz went back to sit in a ditch on the outskirts of Lisbon.  It was raucous and noisy there, and a swarm of homopteran insects whirred near the water.  Loitering on the dry bank in the sun, the females of the swarm asked Buz not to sing, and he had never known mute mating before, and finally sent a relayed song to the River that theirs had been only an incomplete metamorphosing relationship.  He was glad, and he knew she would be too, and would soon thank him, and be envious of him, and he believed, without question, he would never want to sing again or be monogamous in his life.  He would mate her as before, but he knew now theirs was only a fragmentary union.  He wished her success with the thousands of eggs, but had doubts about her leaving them to drop and burrow.  He sang his one last note.

These females did not have seasons, and mated him in the winter, and all other times.  Buz heard a song, relayed from the River about her.  A short song about the long line of larvae she ate before they could burrow while celebrating his silence, which bloated her thorax until she exploded while clinging to milkweed beside the sewer.

[word count 653] [from the old files, May 1998, imitating Ernest H. style]

The girls knew that on the moon mohair sweaters were everywhere, sometimes folded and sometimes not, but in either case settled lightly on the powder and weighted with tear-shaped fishing sinkers so as not to rise, float out of sight.  Although moon sweaters ranged in color from bubblegum pink to peacock, the majority fell into the cheese color family-edam to jack, cheddar to gouda, and all the lovely yellows and oranges in between.  Weavers were, had always been, partial and wool providers made no bones about their bias toward all things mellow and ivory where the moon’s woolens were concerned.  But, generally, the sweaters the girls were most desirous of were out of sight, round the curve there, away from the light.  The coffee-colored cardigans with coffee-colored pearl buttons.  The midnight plum pullovers with low V-neck plunge!  The ebony shrugs saturated with onyx seed beads to replicate meteor showers on a black night. 

The girls coveted the sweaters in the keenest of ways, and they argued among themselves as to how they might successfully fold them into their private closets, wear them on their private backs and shoulders and breasts.  They possessed sweaters they could not live long enough to wear, even if they obeyed every rule, ate every right thing, moved every right muscle in just the right way, forsook games with the opposite sex (including the approaches to same, start ups, blast offs, entries and re-entries, hard and soft landings, all)-even if they gave up transportation all together, avoiding accidents by car, train, plane and bus, and lived in germ-free bubbles-these girls could not live long enough to wear them all.  It was scientifically impossible.  So, they wore what they could, often times two and three different changes between rising and noon lunch: a sweater to match the marmalade on a muffin at breakfast, another one, white, to post the letters at ten, and something pale blue for eleven.  Girls, all of varying heights and shades, some paler and frailer and others more robust and red.  Or brown and leggy.  Or twiggy and black.  They were, these girls, all of that and, additionally, every shade in between-both in skin colorations and eyes and mood.  Yet, in spite of all they had both in common and out of common-they, every one, coveted the moon mohairs on the dark side.

 In town on a June night, the mothers, talking with other mothers, would mention the past as if current gossip had lost all its juice.

The Ferris girl: You recall how it was when she come home . . . they would say and nod.

That second girl of Harriet Striker’s:  Turned Harriet’s hair plum’ white.

                             Did not.

                             Did so.

                             It was already there.

                             That was gray; now it’s white.

                             You are right about that, Berniece.  I’d forgot.

And the girl nobody could remember except that she had been Ellen’s only child:  There’ll be no grandbabies there . . .

                            What ever happened to Ellen?

                            Can’t say.

                            Don’t know.

                           Haven’t heard.

The strong possibility that they would come to no good if they ever set into motion any one of their plans for reaching the far side stared the girls in the face at every turn.  Blacked eyes and missing teeth with their coupon books in Safeway lines.  There was a big price to pay for a “pretty” you might not live long enough to wear.

And the mothers nodding agreements between themselves and eyeing their own, making connections that could come to pass:  You could wind up like Jenna Ferris.  That could be you . . .

The girls all knew it could.  They knew it the same way they knew there was magic in that ebony shrug showered with onyx , knew it like the moon’s pull on the tides, even when out of sight, when fully eclipsed by the earth and all things in earth and on earth and of earth, yet the tides move in and back out, rise and fall, riseandfall-they cannot do otherwise.  Same with the pull of those mohair sweaters upon the girls who don’t recall a mother named Ellen or her only child, a girl, floating just off the powdery surface on the back side of the moon.