When I emerged, I did so in spring like so many other plants and cliches. I sent cicadas in my place to the grocery store, to bated-breath schools, to the bravest weddings. I had cicadas on the conference call line, behind the black square screen. Cicadas lined up for the jab.

Cicadas got on airplanes, went to music festivals, attended silent retreats, hugged their grandmothers one last time. 

Other cicadas quit jobs, closed businesses, cracked open Karl Marx texts. Cicadas started a streaming channel devoted to vintage video games. Young cicadas organized protests, handed out masks to cops who swatted them away. 

Those cicadas—they swarmed. They scream-sang rumors into existence. They sold merchandise by the chain link fence. If I looked at them a different way, I might say this was all white noise, or perhaps a lullaby, or better, hypnosis. Humming me into honeyed oblivion.

But then those flying motherfuckers fucked their way through summer. Cicadas fucking their way into a feeling even if that feeling was death. The variation of the variation didn’t stop cicadas from belting the national anthem on repeat while gathering to watch the fireworks colorfully sweating their way down the sky. There were clickbait essays about how there wouldn’t be a baby cicada boom: cicadas were just hoping for something smaller than ourselves. It was a summer for kneeling, when the cicadas and I had knees to fall upon.

Cicadas borrowed each other’s clothes, mended each other’s wings. Some cicadas had bucket lists: sailing on a cruel, crisp cruise down Antarctica; investing in polyamorous cicada circles; sipping sunshine as they apply to graduate school; orbiting the pole in pole dancing classes where their cicada wings shone iridescent. Cicada strip club business proposal drafted, then deleted.

What the cicadas wanted was beyond dirt. Their desires were channeled into a crescendoing chorus that they shrieked tirelessly into the abyss. They knew the pull of retreat, of muffled life happening outside and above, beyond reach. The cicadas were seventeen years old, or maybe no years old, or maybe ancient, but no matter, the cicadas rumspringa-d their way out of my yard.

I let cicadas peep through my condensated windows where I vibrated myself into an artifact. Why fight when I can let them feast their eyes, one last time. They had their havoc. I held their tune.

Sarah Rosenthal is a writer whose work has previously appeared in Bitch Magazine, Creative Nonfiction Magazine, The Sun, LitHub, Electric Lit, and beyond. She publishes a Substack on pop culture and anxiety called Nervous Wreckage. You can find more on her website, www.sarahrosenthalwrites.com, or follow her on Twitter and Instagram @sarahmrosenthal. She lives in Brooklyn.

Lauren Quin lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She holds an MFA from the Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. Her work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions, including Pulse Train Howl (2022), Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, CA, and group exhibitions such as Fire Figure Fantasy: Selections from ICA Miami’s Collection (2022), Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; and On Boxing (2021), Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, CA. Her work is held in numerous public collections including the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; ICA Miami, Miami, FL; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN.