THE kids went straight to the TV while Donna pulled the esky from the luggage and uncorked a Riesling. ‘Cold enough,’ she announced. Ken stood at the glass doors overlooking a deck and vast gully of bushland. Opening them, he was assailed by a chorus of cicadas. Jesus, the racket! It took him back—to a boyhood spent plucking cicadas off trees, feeling their humming bellies between his fingers, the clinging of their claws on his T-shirt. Then an unexpected memory: drowning an ice-cream container full of them in his neighbour’s pool. With shame surging through him, he shut the doors.