Happy Friday!
If you like what you read, think about becoming a paid subscriber for $5/month—cheaper than your oat milk latte. If you don’t know how, you can go to your account page here and click upgrade subscription.
One bright afternoon last year, one of those false spring days in Boston before warmth becomes reliable, I walked into a tattoo parlor. The front door swung into pitch black. My pupils opened like mouths as the scene sharpened, shapes taking the forms of bodies, chairs, a front desk, a projector playing Baby Driver.
I’d called the parlor on a whim. Did I want an appointment for this Saturday? the receptionist asked, There’d been a last-minute cancellation. I did. And I found myself climbing into a black chair in a tattoo parlor, the artist pouring black and gray ink into thimble-sized cups, then pulling a bright light toward my skin, swabbing, cleaning, shaving my bicep, as if he might perform surgery. Instead, he grabbed his buzzing machine and in my flesh began to draw the outline of a cicada.
Seventeen years before that—2004—in the sticky, green summer of the east coast, my parents loaded my sister and me into our tan one-door minivan that sparkled like sand. We drove from the Pioneer Valley of Amherst, Massachusetts to the Hoosierland of Bloomington, Indiana. At eight years old, I didn’t have a choice in the move. I was resentful that I was being torn away from my home, and I remained sullen for the fourteen hours across the eastern United States, staring out the window at the green plains, determined to be unpleasant.
When we arrived at our would-be home, I looked down to see the ground covered in cicadas. They blanketed the earth. They crawled across the sidewalk and swarmed trees. They moved slowly, almost clumsily, a quality magnified by their size; each bug was grotesquely large, fatter than a thumb, with beady red eyes set wide, on either side of their head. Many had already shed their exoskeletons leaving cicada casings clinging to tree bark and limestone steps. Everywhere, they made their presence known with a loud, pulsing buzz.
My four-year-old sister Anna was so horrified that she authored a book—“The Truth about Sharks and Cicadas,” her two most hated animals—which she dictated to my dad who then transcribed the story onto the page. Anna’s story went like this:
Some people think sharks are just misunderstood.
The truth is that they are mean.
Why are sharks mean?
Because they’re UGLY!
Why do cicadas wait 17 years to come above ground?
Because it takes them that long to grow their STINGERS!
I was also not a friend to the bugs—cicadas were an easy enemy and stood in for everything I hated about Indiana. But I was simultaneously fascinated. They were harmless, after all, and they had no stingers, despite Anna’s slanderous polemic. The bugs were large, but their size was disproportionate to their threat. They were curious creatures with alien, prehistoric bodies. And I was a curious creature, perceptive and intense, long and lanky, out of place.
Our new home in Indiana was part of a cookie-cutter subdivision in agrosuburbia. There was a rumor circulating among the neighborhood kids that blue-eyed cicadas could go for a thousand dollars per bug. Scientists wanted them, badly, and we could be the ones to pluck them from the grass and get rich. In the purple dusk of those summer nights, we’d meet up with friends on our block and hunt for the blue-eyed bugs among endless beady crimson eyes.
Cicadas were the fabric of that summer. They were everywhere, on our doorsteps, in our daydreams. It was an abundance we wouldn’t see again for nearly two decades.
This group of cicadas, Brood X, emerges only once every 17 years. Periodical cicadas like these evolved atypical life cycles to survive. Predators can’t sync up with divisors of the odd, prime numbers (13 or 17), and when the cicadas do arrive, they come in droves and all at once. The birds and praying mantises that feast on them are overwhelmed and sated quickly, so the bugs that escape predators have a fighting chance at survival and lay their eggs in the bark of trees. In a few months, before the season turns cold, the eggs hatch, and the nymphs crawl down into the earth where they’ll live for 17 years.
Below ground, they’re not asleep. From birth through their teen years, the cicadas dig tunnels and feed on root sap. A molecular clock keeps the time, and when the soil grows warm in their 17th summer, they crawl from the earth and molt again, assuming their adult bodies, abdomens thick and hard as obsidian, new wings translucent as glass.
It is an awesome cycle. The bugs I saw as an eight-year-old were nearly a decade my senior. We humans interact with them so infrequently, once every 17 years, but so suddenly and intimately that they seem like invaders. But they’ve been below our feet the whole time. The land is theirs.
I didn’t want it anyway. When I moved to Indiana, I didn’t believe it could ever be home. The Hoosier earth felt lonely. Long expanses of land plowed for soybean fields. Hulking limestone quarries mined for their worth and left to fill with rainwater. Highway stretches uncrossable by anything but cars, proven again and again to any deer desperate enough to try, left bloodied, pumping, and wide-eyed on the road’s shoulder.
Still, Indiana was our home now, and my parents gently impressed that we weren’t going anywhere. My dad stared out of our kitchen one afternoon and projected forward: “In 17 years, let’s see…the cicadas will come again in 2021. You’ll be 25. You won’t be scared of them by then.”
When 2021 did roll around and the summer of the cicadas was approaching, it was the second year of a global pandemic. I was living in Boston; I’d moved east for college, out of cicada territory when I was 18 and never looked back. I felt proud of myself for “getting out.” A Boston friend who’d grown up in Ohio drunkenly told me once that, “If you make it out of the Midwest, you’re the main character.” I believed her with my whole body. The entire time I’d lived in Indiana I’d thought to myself, “This is temporary. This is not my forever home.” As if my life would only start once I’d left.
But in the long weeks of quarantining in Boston, of waiting for the weather to turn hot, then cold, then shiver off its blanket of ice and turn warm again, I missed my family. I missed Indiana. And then May came and I was missing the cicadas.
I called my mom, and we talked about the bugs on the phone. “Can you hear them?” she’d say, holding the phone up to the air—pulsing with their electric, synchronized thrum. They were deafening, crackling through the phone line.
In lieu of seeing the bugs in person, I got a tattoo of a big black cicada on my right bicep. It took three hours. First the exoskeleton appeared: the bug forming from the outside in. Then the artist created the wings, diaphanous on my skin so that the cicada’s ridged body showed through. And then he shaded, adding texture and depth to the curious creature materializing on my body.
I sat stoic in the chair, focusing and then unfocusing on the pain in my right arm that was coaxing a cicada into the world. It was the closest I’d been to one of the bugs in 17 years. And it felt poetic, as if I had let a cicada tunnel and nest inside me for all that time, active and busy, scurrying around within my organs. And now, feeling the impending warmth of its 17th summer, the bug crawled to the surface of my skin, emerging on the trunk of my arm.
The sound of the tattoo gun was strikingly similar to how I remembered the cicada buzz: a constant pitch, continuous, incessant. But the sound of the cicadas is more dynamic. It swells and then quiets, a purring cycle of loud and soft.
Male cicadas are the noisemakers; their songs are mating calls. They produce the buzz not in the way crickets do, by rubbing together their body parts, but by vibrating air within their corrugated exoskeleton, the tymbal. The exoskeleton isn’t rigid, and the cicada’s complex musculature allows the tymbal structure to rapidly buckle and unbuckle, creating sound through vibrations which are, in turn, amplified within the resonance chamber of their empty abdomens. Their bodies are instruments.
After several hours, once Baby Driver had ended and we were now halfway into Dracula, the buzzing stopped and the artist said he was done. “Take a look,” he said, “What do you think?” I loved it. He pressed a bandage to my arm, shielding the cicada from the world. I got up, paid, and walked into the sun, taking my bug with me.
Later in the summer, after the tattoo was healed, the lines still crisp and dark and defined, I went to a friend’s wedding in South Bend, Indiana, a city near the Michigan border at the southernmost bend of the St. Joseph River. The Great Eastern Brood of cicadas doesn’t make it up that far north: they’re concentrated in the southern part of the state, so the wedding ceremony was quiet, no strident buzz in the background, just the echo of the priest’s voice in the gaping mouth of the cathedral, instructing this new couple to breed Catholic offspring.
After the ceremony, my mom and sister drove from Bloomington to South Bend to pick me up from the wedding. It was late June and several torrential storms had swept through Southern Indiana, washing out the summer of cicadas. By the time I made it to Bloomington, I’d missed them, and I arrived at a mass grave. Stepping out of the car onto our concrete driveway, I saw the carcasses everywhere: littering the sidewalks, scattered at the bases of trees. Some stuck to the bark as if they’d been clinging to life, climbing toward higher ground.
I walked into our house and dumped my duffel bag on the floor of my room. On my melamine bookshelf sat a Panera cream cheese container scrawled with sharpie: Cicadas. Inside, my mom had saved nine cicada bodies for me. Dried out, they’d shrunk to a smaller size than when they were alive. My mom had collected the bugs, then tucked them into a makeshift coffin, this tissue-lined plastic vessel that once held cream cheese.
I took them home with me to Boston and kept them on my desk for the next two months until they started to smell like a thing that had died. Then I threw them away.
My tattoo remained the last vestige of the cicada summer. When my arms are bare, everyone asks about it. “What a lovely fly!” “I like your scarab.” “That’s a big bug.” I nod, “It’s a cicada.” Often, they want to know what it means and why I got it, feeling suddenly entitled to a part of my body and life because it’s visible. I rarely know how to answer these questions, and most of the time I don’t want to. “There are cicadas where I’m from in Indiana,” I’ll say. Usually that’s enough for whoever is asking. Usually, it’s enough for me.
Fortnightly Faves
This essay from Emily Gould on public shame which came out in 2020. I read it for the first time this week and found it fascinating, terrifying, and a little too relatable.
In Love, Amy Bloom’s memoir about watching her husband develop Alzheimers and then traveling to Zurich with him to die by accompanied suicide.
This short story in The Drift (I know I know) a little bit about breastmilk but also about friendship.
This poem by Kim Addonizio, one of my favorites, also featuring tattoos.
Winners of Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2022. Number 8 was one of my faves but they’re all breathtaking.
I learned so much from this! Though in the summer of 2021 I definitely spent more time inside. 🙃
I have a tattoo of the moon. I'm often asked what the "meaning" of it is, as if every piece of body art must be deep and philosophical. I just tell people I like the moon!