Work Text:
I.
It is March, and it will be March, and I sit in a living room in a fairy tale building in Manhattan. Crystals in suggestive shapes hang from the ceiling, falling from a chandelier, cascading light across the rest of the room. The couch is extremely comfortable.
Outside, the news is getting worse. Here in this room, Madame Sosostris sits next to me, eight-pointed star on her breast. Now, she says, laying down the card, lightning striking over a ferris wheel on a shuttered boardwalk. Then, swords impaling a television screen. Here, she says, and the card shows this room, this chandelier, that table, those columns, another time. Here.
Later, we will step out into the emptying streets. The concrete will ring with the sound of applause, with weeping, with fear and grief and hope. Later, I will sit in the back of a cab, racing through the streets, weaving into traffic at breakneck pace as the driver mutters whaddaya think yer doin’? under his breath. Later, I will sit in the empty terminal of a busy airport, on an empty airplane for a fully-booked flight, under the black expanse of the sky, over an unreal city.
I lace my fingers through hers. Here, I echo. Now.
II.
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
You’re sitting in a flat in Wivenhoe, telling me about the matzo you made from scratch, eighteen minutes from start to finish. No other way to get any for the holiday where you are, you tell me. Barely any flour in the shops anyway. You tell me you made cheese with your roommate, or tried to. The milk went bad, and waste not. The cheese wasn’t great, not bad for a first attempt, but not great, and now you have all this whey, and do I know anything to do with whey?
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
You thought about coming home but thought better of it, and now there’s no going anywhere. It’s just as well, you tell me, did I see the crowds in London on the television? You wouldn’t have wanted to be caught up in that. At least there’s a balcony in your flat. You show it to me over the video, the sky gray over the train tracks.
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
It’s three months before you come home at last, taking a cab from the airport because you don’t want me to risk picking you up. I missed you, you tell me, standing in your upstairs window as I sit on your lawn, shredding grass. The flight was fine, busy on the leg coming in from Chicago. I got you too much tea, and thank you for the pie I left you, and I’m much too good for you. Only days until we’re together again for real now. HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
HURRY UP PLEASE-
It’s dark before I leave. Goonight, you say. Goonight.
III.
Tiresias is a young man, already going bald, scars where his tits used to be. He sits on the ground and sings, holds hands with the people next to him, High Street to his back. No justice, someone calls out, from across the street, and he raises his fist and calls back NO PEACE, his voice joining with the crowd, echoing against the concrete, bouncing along the walls of the statehouse and up into the sky. NO RACIST POLICE, they chant, the prayer clattering into the streets.
The streets heave, and shake, and the police appear. They’re enforcing curfew, they say, even though the mayor’s curfew is hours off. Ordered to disperse- and the crowd churns, hums, shouts, links arms, breaks-
Someone is kneeling in the street, hands raised and empty. Tiresias points his camera, waits, watches, records, transmits. The streets breathe in, and out, and-
There is a crack, and then screaming. They will come later and find wooden bullets scattered among the empty tear gas canisters. But here and now, there is only sound and rage and pain and terror.
Tiresias runs. The camera shakes as he moves, the stream going blurry. They’re kettling us - he says, panic in his voice. The commenters flood the chat with stay safe, get out of there! Worry flows from one screen to the next, the waters of one river converging on the other, inexorable through the city.
IV.
The whirlpool pulls me under.
I watch a steady diet of reality television, of competent British people doing their best and being kind to each other. I make rules about how often I am allowed to take my temperature. I sit on the floor of my kitchen and cry until I can no longer remember why I started. I dream about the grocery store, about museums, about concerts, until I remember that I have forgotten my mask, and I wake up sweating. I read the news too much. I make to-do lists at work, but I never seem to get through them anymore. I sleep more than I should, get distracted more than I would like. I set alarms to remind myself to eat.
I am not what I used to be.
V.
We drive into the woods, and we find the cicadas.
It rained in the morning, and everything is wet, leaves dripping into vernal pools, mulch sinking into the mud. We feel them before we see them, hear them before that. Their skins crunch under our feet, are pressed into the mud. The ground is pockmarked with their escape tunnels. And all around us, they scream, voices singing out of overflowing cisterns and wells, the trees, the damp and living earth.
They climbed up from the roots of the trees, burrowed through the earth. They were born in the air, but they have lived all their lives underground. Now they emerge, they climb, they shed their old skins. They are hungry, horny, dying. They are starving to death, even now, but in the meantime, they scream their desire for each other in an echoing cacophony, a deafening hum. My daughter walks the path beside me, cloaked and hooded, trying to damp the sound. We stand in a cathedral of tree branches, leaves gone brown at the tips, and the choir calls jīvās, l’chaim, bywyd. Life, in defiance of death, in the face of death, inevitable.
London Bridge is falling down. There are refrigerator trucks outside the hospitals in New York. In Skopje, there is an outbreak, another surge, not enough vaccine, not enough masks. In Ohio, in seventeen years, the cicadas will emerge again.
We walk across the sand, dive into the water. There is a cicada struggling on the surface of the lake, too far from shore to survive. It clings to us as we carry it back to the trees. Mārḍīkam. Shantivam. Jīvam.