Jessica Whitehead
Stories (1/0)
The Cicada Year
They have a polarizing effect, cicadas. I know the first time I saw one, seventeen years ago during the last emergence of Brood X, I wasn’t too keen. Something about their wild, ungainly flight, sending their big black bodies careening this way and that, was unsettling. I find it funny now—even charming—but I remember dodging them on the way to school back then, fending them off with an open umbrella and crying. In fact, most people I know are extremely unsettled by their presence, especially as concerns these periodical cicadas that crawl from the ground in hoards, coating tall trees with a vibrating, screaming layer of the clumsy, sex-crazed insects. No one who has experienced a periodical cicada year forgets it, that’s for sure.
By Jessica Whitehead 3 years ago in Earth