The cicadas started scaling dense soil while I was in another state, hundreds of miles away from home, a hundred times farther than they’d ever travel. I returned to hollow husks, split along the back seam like a boy grown too fast for his new shirt. These exuvia are all the same brown color, light and shiny like parchment paper. They’re all fearsome, claws at the top of their three pairs of limbs, large round orbs for the eyes. A creature you’d never want to meet in a size larger than a human thumb. Even in their diminutive form, it’s easy to reach for terror in lieu of wonder. All those hollow, unhallowed shells crusting tree trunks and grass blades and park benches. Isn’t this how horror films start?
I made it home in time to watch one finish tugging itself free of its fifth instar, the final form of its subterranean nymph body. Fresh wings partially inflated with lymph, red eyes, pale body with two black spots behind its eyes. Within a day the whole body will be black, the wings outlined in umber, their translucence solidifying from the texture of tissue paper to the crisp firmness of film. The claws are gone, the red eyes endearing. The mature Magicicada does not make me think of monsters.
For the next three weeks I will be rescuing stragglers from the neighborhood sidewalks, even when the numbers of their brethren that have taken to the trees are so great they induce earaches with their shrill song. I feel sorry for the ones flipped on their backs, legs scrambling wildly. Or the ones on a slow meander down the concrete, surrounded by the squashed bodies of their kin. I place a twig or my finger within grasp of their legs, wait for the passenger to latch on. I like the tickle of their tiny feet, am unconcerned at the negligible risk of some prick from their piercing mouth part that allowed them to drink xylem from plant roots while underground. The main trouble is transporting them from hand to tree; the operation is easier when they climb aboard a stick or piece of mulch. If they’re on my hand, they seem reluctant to leave. Sometimes I speak aloud my encouragement. “You’ve waited seventeen years for this! Make the most of it!” Or “Go be with your friends and make babies.” Or simply “Don’t get squished.” I’ve learned to distinguish the call of Magicada septendecim (“phaaah-raoh, phaaa-raoh”) from Magicicada septendecula (“bzz-bzz-bzz-bzz”) and I want all these grounded insects to join their chorus centers. I don’t want them to be alone.
By the first week I’ve probably moved a dozen periodical cicadas to safer perches. I wonder if this act of movement by a creature they surely cannot comprehend will result in successful offspring. Seventeen years from now, will their hatchlings be coming up into another new world? Will I even be here? I mean here in this neighborhood on the edge of Chicago, but I also mean here on Earth. Some years feel like they’ll be the death of me, like they’re luring me toward a rupture between spirit and flesh. But would my spirit really leave Earth’s atmosphere and venture into another galaxy? Not while the planet exists, I think. Not while all my atoms reside here in some form or another.
Human psychology might need to insist on the existence of an afterlife, but I can’t see the sense in one that excludes all creatures but humans. When my mind grasps for an existence beyond death, I want it to be one where I can meet the Neanderthals and learn what they called themselves, see the shades of brontosaurus and pterodactyls. If the underworld has layers, I want to imagine them not as circles for pain and punishment as Dante did, but as the rings of geologic time, homes for all that has ever lived here. The strange pancake creatures of the Ediacran, the earliest synapsids, all the wonders that have wandered this land. I want to visit them, to explore their version of Earth.
Maybe the reason death feels so omnipresent is because every piece of news from our climate is apocalyptic. The hottest summer in a string of hottest summers. Some 1,000 birds dying in window collisions on a single night in Chicago alone. A dramatic, if little understood, decrease in insect populations. And all of this is due to my species, to humans, because we demand more and more comfort, more ways to escape death.
In the face of so much destruction, the sheer multitude and vibrancy of periodical cicadas gives me a strange sort of relief. More than anything else, what I want to encounter in the afterlife is the sound of cicadas in whatever passes for summer. I would like to be serenaded, if I still have something to hear with. I’d like to meet the ones I rescued and see if they remember me. I want to know that something I touched still lives.
Lorraine Boissoneault is a Chicago-based writer whose work covers a bit of everything: the history of moss in WWI, the work of Indigenous people to preserve their languages, and her own experience with heart problems and disastrous storms. She loves the Great Lakes, reading sci-fi and fantasy, hanging with her cat and her partner, and learning more about all the “little guys” of the natural world. Lorraine is currently at work on a book about climate change and chronic illness for Beacon Press. The book, Body Weather, was the winner of the 2024 Lukas Work-in-Progress Award. You can learn more about her work on her personal website.
Painting by the author
Wonderful!