Muriel's Cicadas

 Mother still doesn’t know about the cans of saliva-soaked scabs despite their five-year presence beneath my bed. 

When I was fifteen, I climbed the oak tree in the backyard. The branches of the tree rested gently on the roof of the old shed where we stored the bikes my older brother, Wiley, and I had outgrown. 

My legs were nestled around dead acorns and bark. The exoskeletons of the cicadas felt so hollow and cheap. I snapped them from the trunk and kissed them softly through chapped lips, feeling the many layers of the useless things as they tried not to crumble from my touch. I picked at their withered legs clutching their stomachs like they were going to vomit. 

Mother pulled into the driveway with Wiley in the passenger seat. It had been a long time since I had seen his blue irises clearly: not deepened by redness, sulking, or shallow. It had been a long time since I had looked at his eyes at all. 

Wiley ran into the house before mother even stepped from the car. Father had rushed to catch the left-open front door and met mother’s stern face. She had thin lips, which pursed and disappeared. 

“He didn’t even go in and talk to the shrink!” Mother shouted as they moved into the kitchen, where the lighting was yellowed and warm.  

I heard my father's prophetic voice come out: “God won’t forsake him. Rehab is flawed.”

I thought about how lucky the rest of the church must be since they only have to hear these stereotypical lines on Sundays. That’s when they can say “the Lord is my Shepherd” and go on with their lives. I think the Lord is my Pillow, the white one with makeup stains which covered my head that night to muffle the noise from Wiley’s room next door. 

“Are you an idiot?!” Father asked. This time, his voice was mean instead of prophetic. I could hear Wiley’s body stumble backwards and smack against his nightstand, knocking the lamp over and shattering the lightbulb. 

I liked my door shut, I liked when my room felt like my own home. 

When the fighting was inevitably silenced by mother, I would sit up and pick at the bug bites on my ankles. I started to collect them in old tuna cans and place them beneath my bed. When I had enough, I spewed up saliva onto the scabs and soaked them, turning them into a fleshy clay. Twirling the wet scabs between my fingers, I made six legs, two antennas, a round body, and two flattened wings to wrap around it. I’d take them out to the tree and stick them beside the other cicadas. If I was lucky, I would catch a live cicada abandoning its shell, rebirthing itself into the dawn of a new life. They were my little fish smelling carcasses. I wrote on the cans: Muriel’s Cicadas. 

I possessed them as much as they did me. 

Sometimes, in the evening when I made art of these scabs, I would hear Wiley in the other room open the squeaky top drawer of his dresser. He would sniff a bunch. Later, I’d find unflushed pieces of toilet paper wrapped up and full of blood like they had been shoved up his nose. 

That summer, our parents went to drop Wiley off at a rehab camp. Their trip took two days, and I was alone with my cicadas and spit. Wiley’s room smelled curiously of salt. I found a small bag of cocaine in his top drawer. I opened and sniffed inside a few times, just wanting a taste of what all the yelling was about. The metallic odor reminded me of when we would fish for crawdads and cook them over the fire in old metal cans as kids. 

It wasn’t long before I had started to feel my pores open to the air of the salty room. I sat on his floor and let the carpet burn my knees. With my dried mouth, I pulled saliva from the back of my throat and used my sticky little fingers to peel off more scabs. I felt my blood gushing faster, as if this thinned blood didn’t belong to me. 

I crawled to my room, leaving small traces of blood in the carpet. I molded the new-found scabs with the old. The more I bled, the more I sucked on myself like a small kitten does to its mother. 

I watched the blueness of my veins slowly be replaced with the pearly white color of my spit. I held my stomach and it folded inside of itself. This incessant ache took over my mind, my limbs, and my gut. All I knew was to suck on these scabs. I sucked and sucked until I faded to sleep. 

Father’s voice woke me up: “Where did I go wrong as a father? Tell me! The idiot bled out all over my carpet!” This time his voice was mean and prophetic at the same time. 

I saw the outline of my mother in the sunlit doorway. She slowly closed the door while she answered him: “It’s not for us to decide. It’s his life, honey. He’ll come around.”

“Why can’t you decide if you’re on my side or not? You say he needs a shrink, that he needs this camp, but then again you say he needs to figure it out for himself. Why have I dedicated my life to the Lord just to abandon my son to the advice of the world?” Naturally, he was prophetic here. 

“You should have been a lawyer.” Mother bit him back. 

The day was silent, when the whistles of the wind blew through small cracks in the windows of my bedroom. 

“I have to fix them.” Father discussed the windows over the dinner table, a place that mostly loomed with awkward silence and cutlery scraping against plates. 

Wiley called mother every few days. I’d hear mother’s side of the conversation from the other room. She said things like ‘We’re praying for you,’ ‘He loves you in his own way,’ ‘You have to give him time.’ 

I never knew if she was talking about God or father. 

Two months later they went to pick Wiley up. Mother was in the passenger side of the car and the engine was rumbling low. Father walked around and checked the lights. 

“I’m here, nothing’s going to burn down. You’ve taught me well.” I said, trying to reassure him enough to hustle him out of the house. 

“Muriel, make sure to check the breaker if any of the lights aren’t working. Turn off the water when you’re not using it. I love you.” He closed my bedroom door before he left. 

I masturbated slowly that afternoon, letting myself feel numb like the center of a scab. I didn’t reach any high. In fact, I felt next to nothing at all. 

Mother and father came home the next day fighting. I saw Wiley's bright blue eyes as they pulled into the driveway. He sulked up to his room. 

“Hi.” He had noted towards me before shutting his door. 

“Hi.” I said into the white paint of the wall. 

From the hall by the stairs, I listened to our parents’ conversation. 

“Do you think it was easy?” Mother questioned.

“You could have told me he was calling you.” 

“I didn’t think you wanted to speak to him. You’re always so harsh.” Mother was trying to pull father outside, but he remained firm in the foyer. 

“Of course I want to speak to my son!” Father was mean.

“I don’t want you talking to him the way you do.” 

I fell asleep sometime in between these spurts of shouts muffled through the floor. 

Father was gone in the morning. 

There were months of distant visits and scattered legal papers on the table. Sometimes I caught glimpses of the writing and it looked like another language. They left a foreign wash over the table every time I sat around it.  

Wiley started to take walks to the crick with me, where we found ourselves laying side by side in the sun reading old paperbacks that smelled of dust. We spoke only in technicalities. 

“Can you pass me water?” 

“I’m going to wade on the shore for a little.”

There were months when I didn’t see him at all. Around town, I noticed him with his arm around a girl, a few inches shorter than him, who had rosy cheeks and a slight but consistent smile. I noticed he started to smoke cigarettes when our parents were gone.

I still sucked on my scabs. Sometimes I’d hear him yell, punch a wall–that angst that only comes when you’re eighteen.

My parents were divorced by the next summer. 

I see father on Christmas and occasionally in the spring, when he still insists on coming to mow the lawn for mother. Each year, I watch him intently from my bedroom window, waiting for him to find my cicada scabs. He never does. I told the cicadas to call for him, that low hum, that comforting thing. I told them to wish him a goodnight, to tell him I love him, but they don’t listen to me anymore. 

I picked up Wiley’s cigarette habit after he left for college. He only comes back once a year, when the crick is at a high and warm, when I can bathe in the murky again and wash the saliva scabs from me. Smoking makes the saliva turn black when it scabs against my skin. It makes me a real girl again. When I get hungry, I visit the scabs to suckle. I smell their metallic fishy scent, and I am hungry for the crawdads I can never eat again.