Cicada

It’s a prime number,
after all. A product only
of itself

and solitude,
natural and indivisible without
remainder,

and greater than
one—ironic,

then, given the amount of
multiplication
it took to get us here. Division,

too—purposely, cynically
sowed for individual
gain by those and

to those of the prime
conviction that there is
no number
greater than one.

Seventeen:

it’s a long time, tallied in
months. Longer still when you know
it didn’t need to be

so protracted—the most meager of
efforts, of
sacrifice,
compassion,
humility,
logic—of
care and diligence
all that was required to metamorphose

what is

into what could have
been. Should have been. Seventeen
months so easily narrowed to seventeen
weeks. Days, even. If only.

Only.

But there are so few in this particular
brood—such insufficient colony of
those with the patience and sense, the
willingness to do
what is right even at their most
minimal expense and
thus,

seventeen months:

mimeographed days
bleeding and smudging into each other with
indigo blur and hollowed
purpose, one maybe

a slightly altered facsimile of another, but not
enough to matter. Not enough
to give it a different scientific
name. Months spent

burrowed underground,
nymphal and removed
from life above as you knew it, bent on doing
your small part to save a species
mostly not worth saving and
bent on accelerating

its own inevitable extinction
while believing in nothing so faithfully

as its own immortality.
Seventeen months
before you would tentatively
emerge from
the chrysalis of principle
and caution

—reason, too, if that still exists—and stretch
your hyaline,
atrophied wings. A second dose of
innoculative sap
was far enough removed by then

to reach its full efficacy, rendering you
unlikely
to feed the viral predator, infect
others, shorten

life spans. Something instinctual and
mathematical
told you it was time—all
the waiting
underground
building to this climactic moment as
you crept into the

daylight, red eyes
slow to adjust, feeling
your skin soften and shedding
the membranous
shell of responsibility
and restraint. There were,

after all,
things you’d missed—the warm
embrace of a favorite bar, the
favored bar of a
warm embrace, a road trip

to see a band for the tenth time,
arriving in a new town with ears
still ringing from the
buckling tymbals of a
reverberant stereo sonorous

enough to be heard over the open
window highway din—arriving
with anticipation more
fevered than your own

sunburnt left arm. It took no time at all for
the mask that had
morphed into a part of
your own biology to be easily

sloughed and forgotten, those
seventeen months vanishing
instantly, a
dream that fades faster the
harder you try to remember
as you wake. The caution, also—

the care and distancing and self-control all
were soon molted and blew away, carried

on the wind, suspended as aerosols
too microscopic to perceive and too
intangible to fear, but
still there

whether you believed in them
or not. It felt good—

frighteningly so—to return
to places so a part of yourself that
seventeen months felt like
just yesterday—
to feel your soul adjust to the

long-deferred familiarity of
the world outside, letting
the sun warm your form, your
antennae processing the sensory
overload of the swarm’s call, finding
your vocal cords again,
relearning

how to have a conversation,
how to sing your genus’ ancient song. It
scared you to see

how easy
it was to not care—to understand

for a moment how most had been
living
these seventeen months while
you remained
dormant—to feel

how normal reckless could feel and how
quickly rationalization could
take hold. An invisible
enemy is too easily ignored, impalpable
dangers too quickly
forgotten, and the lure of

communing
with others of your
species too strong. Or at least

it was. Before.

They say solitary
confinement changes
a person, and
while that likely is true, it may

not always be for the most manifest of
reasons—the isolation providing
perspective
as much as madness—a forced break from
routine and habit, an
opportunity to observe the

behavior of others, your revulsion
and disappointment at
their choices as responsible for your
Kafkaesque transformation
as anything else. You were

no longer the same
person—and yet—perhaps
more you than
ever before, having
stuck to your principles, unbending

to pressure and persuasion, unyielding
to the ridicule from those who
call themselves friends—the

isolation of derision and
loneliness of perspicacity far

worse than that
of quarantine—but

not enough for you to become
someone you are
not, begging the dispiriting
question: did this scourge devolve
other broods into
something other than themselves, or

is this who they
were all along?

Most were not
like you, that much is certain—
most had emerged from their
underground chambers as
soon as the restrictions
were lifted, oblivious

to the reality that these official
decrees were made not with
health and safety
in mind—driven instead
by political,
economical,

irrational justifications which
needlessly prolonged the
curse. Others had never
heeded the mandates in the
first place, never

bothered to stop living
life as normal or do the
bare minimum
for others, chirping
endlessly about their
freedoms

while infringing on
everyone else’s.

You watched in horror and anger, and in
despondency for your world as
the others couldn’t or
wouldn’t wait—flooding
out of their mud turrets, they
took to the trees,
gathering

in large groups and making
      so
      much
      noise—
blinded by a sudden
awareness
of their own short
lifespans—blinded

by misinformation, disinformation,
pseudo-science and conspiracy,
regurgitating the lobotomizing tissue
they’d sucked from
whatever xylem would feed them

what they wanted to hear:

justification for the behavior
they’d already decided
was permissible and justified,
talking endlessly about it to make
themselves feel at peace
with their choices. The sound

of their bullshit was
deafening at times—a cacophony
of willful ignorance and self-deception—
the consensus that
the threat was over

because they wanted it to be,

a herd immunity to empathy, responsibility,
and reality—not
noticing or caring about the
hundreds of thousands of
carcasses
accumulating on the ground
below them—two hundred times

those lost in the tragedy we were
constantly scolded to “Never
Forget,”

yet piled here in mass
graves, stacked like cord wood
in refrigerated trucks, littering the
base of the tree of our indifference,
the forgotten loam from which to sow
more suffering. Jokes were

made about biblical signs—checking
the tic boxes of
first disease,
then locusts, speculation of
amphibious meteorology next—but,

the sacred text revered and misinterpreted
by so many
failed to teach that there is
no greater plague
than the virulent combination of
stupidity and
selfishness.

Seventeen months:

a long time to go without cutting
your hair, let alone letting
it down and freeing
yourself from worry and
accountability. Yet, somehow

also a fleeting span, since time means
nothing now and humanity
means less. It’s possible—likely,
in fact—that seventeen more
will pass before

we see this blight truly
lifted, if it ever is at all, leaving
unfathomable but largely unnoticed
extermination in its wake. And when

this chapter ends, it will instantly be
torn from the tomes of our
collective history and
discarded as though it
never happened—remembered only as

one more lie “they” want you to
believe—no lessons to be
learned, no improvements made
to what we’d labeled
“normal”—no shakeup of

the status quo for
the good of the species or the
acceptance and assistance of
other broods in dire need—we will
go on, as most did already—with
a life the way it was—
the way it has always been—
a life where

numbers greater than one
don’t exist.

Seventeen months

was far too long but
not long enough
to overcome predation unacknowledged
by most,
to persuade those so fixated on the
economy that there can be
no economy while the plague remains,
to debunk the constant firehose of
lies and bad-faith appeals to
freedom,
to summon the better angels
from their lofted branches—

it was only long enough to
accumulate death tolls so
staggering as to be
incomprehensible,
unrelatable,
surreal, and therefore
unreal—
resulting in a dearth of common register and fading
into the wallpaper—forgotten
as quickly as the threat was and
will be.

Still, you will not forget. You could not even
if you tried and even as the world
around you tries to
make you. This
terrific truth remains
forever seared onto your recall, a

memento mori superfluum, inoculating you
against hope
and mutating your psyche into
a supervariant resistant to trust. You will

Never Forget

the way other broods responded when
tested, or how even those close
to you, respected and highly regarded,
gave you reason to think so achingly
less of them. Any illusions

you might’ve had about who
people are
at their core
have now disappeared as swiftly

as the millions of their brethren
they helped wipe from the earth.

You can be thankful, at least, for
your forethought and caution. For as you
emerged from isolation, you took care
to leave your shell
intact and delicately attached to a
low-hanging limb near the
burrow you’d occupied in those
long, pupal days—a complete

exoskeleton ready to again
accept your thoraxial form and
offer safe harbor. You will be glad for its
protection—not from pandemics or
disease—not from new strains of
deleterious infection, but from
the viral spread of our species’ own
futility and self-
destruction—

as you retreat
once more

underground.