The cicada is out of his shell. After seventeen years submerged in the dank earth, he is bright-eyed, horny and ready for action. He is trilling on a leafy bough, calling for a mate, but he stops to drink some droplets of dew off a waxy philodendron—so loving the dew that he doesn’t hear the praying mantis lurking behind him. Intense in her focus, ready on her haunches, the praying mantis pounces, taking the cicada head first, crunching and relishing, so she can’t feel the swift-footed sparrow behind her. The sparrow twitter-twitters, light on the branch. She jabs her sharp beak and skewers the mantis, devouring her in three mouthfuls, so relishing this morsel that she doesn’t sense the small calico cat with a spotty black nose, ready to pounce on her. So fun-loving is this calico, Beetlejuice, that she plays with the limp carcass in her mouth for a few minutes. She rolls the sparrow around on the ground with her paws. So focused in her play, she is oblivious to the California red tail hawk, high on her perch, poising herself, collecting the gravity to swoop down to snatch the poor, declawed kitty to feed her famished chicks.
The next day Jack, my asshole neighbor, keeps tripping around in his yard and, calling “kitty, kitty, kitty,” finds only a bloody fur pelt on the ground. He points his rifle at the red tail hawk, shoots a few times and misses. He says, “I’ll get you, bastard.” I say, “Leave the poor bird alone, you loser-redneck, else I’ll call the police. She’s an endangered raptor.” “You shut up, wetback bitch,” he says. “Endangered raptor, my ass. The fucking bird ate my cat. You’re lucky that I don’t shoot the whole lot of you.”
The next month his company sends Jack to Iraq to fix some sabotaged oil field pipes. He stops one day under an olive tree for a moment’s rest and delights in a care package of Almond Joy candy bars that his mother sent him. So hungry is he that he can’t eat just one but proceeds to unwrap another and another. As he is relishing each morsel of the fourth candy bar, a sniper from atop a building shoots him in the back of the head. The marksman jumps up and down waving his rifle and shouts, “God is great, God is great.” So boastful and elated is he that he is not aware that the enemy is behind him. Scarcely has he cried out “God” a third time when he is strafed down by a UH-60A Blackhawk assault helicopter.
The pilot of the copter says, “Shazam! Got five in one!” Finally able to return home after sixteen months of combat for her reward, a brief R&R in Hemet, California, she finds that her loser-husband has run off with another woman, a lieutenant colonel, higher brass than hers. The house is emptied of furniture, save a moldy mattress. After throwing the mattress out the backdoor, she sits on that mold-stinking perch, wearing her comfy Hello Kitty flannels, and downs a quart of Bombay gin with Led Zeppelin blaring into her headphones. So deep into her despair that she tunes out the ten thousand cicadas performing an eerie birth and death song. They sing and sing. They shall finally meet their mates, make desperate love and perish satiated. Or they shall be eaten by other famished creatures, and the cycle of feeding and mating and suffering begins again.
The dead and the living shall bury themselves and be reborn over and over, with the same lust for life, the same fury. The egg-born, the womb-born, the moisture-born, those with form, those without form, those with consciousness, those without consciousness, those who are neither conscious nor unconscious: all singing together, in one loud hissing harmony.