Cricket Song

CARISSA LENTZ

Heather found her first specimen when she was cleaning her bathroom on a Tuesday, and after squeaking yellow gloves on, she took her cleaning bottle to the floor like it was a flame-thrower. She bent on her knees to scrub the crevice between the toilet and linoleum. Behind the toilet, drawing its spindly legs up toward the ceiling, she found it.

Heather backed out of the bathroom on her hands and knees so quickly that she had to lean against the wall outside the bathroom to catch her breath. She wondered how long it had been there, dead. It still had a crunchy body that would eventually turn into dust that she might eventually breathe. Thinking about it made her chest constrict. She stood up and peered her head around the door. The bug hadn’t moved. She took a step inside with wadded-up toilet paper and threw it at the bug. It still didn’t move, but there could be more, waiting to ambush. Heather lifted up the rug, ready to run. Nothing. She checked the shower curtain, bathtub, medicine cabinet. Nothing. She thought she might pass out, and since she was turning thirty in a few months, took the incident as impending doom of life after twenty-nine. You are strong, she thought. Independent and in control.

She remembered words she’d heard before: thorax, exoskeleton, chrysa

lis, mandibles. The words didn’t mean anything to her. All she saw was a toxic-looking bug, with prickles on its legs and stripes on its back-end. She wanted to know its name. Heather bumped it with the toe of her house shoe, and then reeled backwards. It was repulsive.

She took an old jam jar and the toilet paper wad and slid the insect across the floor and over the lip of the glass. Its antennae broke off and she winced and screwed the lid on tight. You are strong, she thought, but she wished that she could call someone, anyone, to remove the insect from the bathroom. What she didn’t know about the bug forced fear to surface and stick. She remembered that Natural History Museum, only a few blocks up the hill from her house, had signs about a bug exhibit. She decided to stop in before work.

Heather held the jar by its lid two feet in front of her when she brought the insect to the car. She drove up the hill, rising above the city, and the jar slid across the floor in the passenger side. “What are you?” Heather asked the bug. “Who are you?” The bug was silent. Heather passed tall stalks of corn as she drove toward the museum and the rows made long corridors in the field that flashed dark and fast as she drove.

The museum was quiet as a stopped clock and Heather barely noticed a man in his thirties at the desk. He sat straight in his chair, his brown hair thin around his face, and his eyes focused on a book in front of him. There was a bowl of soda tabs right next to his business cards which read Benny Siddler, Exhibit Coordinator. The only sound was the quiet fizz of the open soda sitting in his reach. She set the jar on the counter in front of him.

“Do you know anything about bugs?” she asked. He looked up at her and then to the jar with cocked eyebrows.

“A little,” he spoke cautiously. She liked his teeth.

“Is it poisonous?” She was jittery, thinking about what she would do if the bug suddenly twitched its single antennae. Scream probably. “It looks poisonous. It looks like it would really do some harm.” While she talked, he turned the glass slowly to see a view of the entire bug. “I found it in my bathroom. Could there be more? Do they swarm?”

Benny pointed to the bug. “See these ridges, here, like a bee’s stripes? It’s only a Jerusalem cricket.”

“Do they sting?”

“Well, theoretically, they could bite.”

Benny rose from his chair, still examining the creature, and walked around his desk to hand the jar back. Heather stepped back and shooed the jar with her hands.

“It’s not going to hurt you,” he said.

“But it can bite.”

“It’s not poisonous, and besides, it’s already dead.” He opened his mouth with his short white teeth and laughed so that it echoed around the room with all the fossils and lighted signs and glass cases.

“It isn’t funny.”

“Nope, it’s a Jerusalem Cricket. The Navajo’s name for it means boneneck beetle. But it’s not funny.” He smiled.

Heather grabbed the jar from him and pointed at the trash can; it was full of bent red aluminum.

“All that Coke will pickle your heart, you know.” Then she left.

At work, she stood scanning grocery items in the third Kroger register, one after another after another. Lines of bananas and soup and airy bags of potato chips passed her hands until the red beeps from the register started sounding like crickets.

When she got home, she set the jar on the kitchen counter. The bug and Heather. Heather and the bug. Like they were having a dinner conversation, only the bug was making some obscure joke that Heather couldn’t really place. She decided she couldn’t look at it while eating, so she went outside without her appetite. She was surprised it was still summer. The bachelor buttons that had been planted last year had come back this spring; it was up to her knees and the bunches of quarter-sized blooms stood out like the fourth of July sky against her black work pants. Crouched in the dirt, she pulled up a weed—its tendril roots held pockets of dirt. She placed it on the concrete step.

Joey had planted the majority of the flowers in the backyard. She remembered him bending over the hoe, softening the earth for his red astilbe and petunias, bleeding hearts and cockscomb. She liked how he would play with the petals of the snap dragon. Gruffing up his voice while moving the mouth-like petals open and closed, he’d talk about fighting

knights and breathing fire. Those flowers were gone now though, along with the petunias and cockscomb; along with Joey. His calls had slowed until they stopped completely. He never promised his commitment, but the long evenings drinking beer on the porch, or lying in bed the next morning hung-over had warmed a secret space next to her heart. She had started to make a home, plant a garden. She took pleasure in washing the socks he left in a rumpled pile beside her bed. But then he just disappeared, like the annual plants.

The bleeding hearts ran their tear-like flowers in lines near the edge of the fence. Next to them was a spread of dirt where plants had been last year and hadn’t returned. Scurrying around the dirt were lots of ants. Heather didn’t like how they scurried in and out of the hole with dead flies or seeds. They spanned the dirt and then formed single-file lines to descend into their nest. She watched them for a while as the sun moved towards the west, spreading a thin pink strip at the top of the fence and spilling lines of gold light through the vertical cracks between the wooden slats. She watched the stream of ants slow with the sunlight, and imagined them crawling up her arms, little pinpricks that turned into numbness. She thought about burying the Jerusalem cricket in the empty dirt, to be rid of it, but she thought the ants might uncover it and take it down their nest for food. Instead she stashed it under the kitchen sink, behind the cleaning supplies and garbage can, so she wouldn’t have to see it. The dust gathered slowly there and it was quiet. The only sound was the rush of water through the pipes, and Heather imagined it might sound like the lulling of the ocean or the voices of loved ones talking quietly in the next room.

H

A week later, Heather had forgotten about the bug in its tomb beneath her sink. At work the customers were steady through her line, the rotating belt spilling barcodes as it hummed. Heather had wet hands from the hand sanitizer she had used, and was trying to hold the items coming across her line carefully, as to not smudge dull silver lines across any plastic packaging. Bulk oatmeal. Oreos. Cans of pineapple rounds. The machine outputted three hollow beeps.

“Find everything okay?” Mayonnaise, 12 pack of Coke. Beep. Beep.

“I get headaches.”

Heather looked up from scanning.

“What?”

“Headaches.” It was Benny. He pointed at the soda. “The caffeine helps. That’s why I drink soda a lot.”

It took a moment for Heather to register Benny. His eye contact made her uncomfortable after their last encounter. She scanned his toilet paper and bread, a little ashamed about how rude she had been.

“Why do you like bugs so much?” she asked.

“I like to eat them.”

He shrugged and handed her a twenty dollar bill. “Oh,” she said, averting her eyes. She took his bill and opened the till. She tried to unstick his change, but the dollars were sticking fast.

“Hey, it’s a joke. There’s an exhibit down at the museum with bugs. I have to know about it in case someone asks.”

She handed him back his change, pressing the pennies and dime in the line of his palm. She didn’t know how to take his informality. It was slightly abrasive and almost nice.

“You should come check the exhibit out. You might learn to like bugs after all.”

Heather looked at his face, trying to decide if his invitation was also a joke. His lips were tensing at the corners in a smile. The pink in his cheeks was about the same color as his lips. The way Benny stood with more weight on his left leg reminded her of Joey. Benny’s face was more round, and his eyes kinder, but the stance he took was a bit distracting. She thought he was sincere, but she wasn’t sure.

“I might,” she said. He took his receipt.

H

Heather wasn’t sure that she would ever learn to like bugs because she knew how much she hated them. Besides the possibility of being poisonous, she hated the way bugs moved and how they often had legs sticking everywhere. But, there was only one of her, and so many millions of bugs.

She probably missed dozens of them around her everyday. She could have stepped on ants or crushed spiders when closing doors. They could die so easily. She knew she might never like them, but if she learned about them, she might not duck every time she heard the soft buzz of an insect past her ear. She started researching. After work she would sit in the public library parking lot, reading books about creepy crawlies. She learned about their habitats, their digestion, even their mating rituals. Heather took notes: The Malaysian stick insect lays the largest egg. Point zero five inches. Tarantulas can live up to twenty-eight years. Maggots are used in hospitals to eat dead tissue. The facts made her disgruntled, but she was forced to realize she wasn’t alone, because there were other creatures around her all the time. She was bigger than them, though, like a demi-god.

Heather followed bug links online to a video of Botfly larvae being removed from human flesh. The fat white worm was pulled from a man’s back, wiggling in the tweezers. Heather watched with her hand over her mouth, caught between wanting to vomit and wanting to poke the larvae with a very long stick to see if it was hard or spongy like a marshmallow. She watched the video two more times, and then googled marshmallows.

Heather sometimes thought about Joey when she hadn’t for a long time. She wanted to share her insect research with someone who wouldn’t think it was just a masochistic response to entomophobia. She bought an illuminated ant-farm and wanted someone to watch them with her. They built their tunnels slowly, but diligently. First she set them by her bed-side table. Their glass case functioned as a green-glowing night-light. She liked their company until she realized that their presence made her loneliness more apparent. She moved the farm to the coffee table in the living room, but when she watched TV and saw them scurrying in their glass case, sitting next to an empty milk carton, the remote, and a stale bowl empty but for butter smears and a few popcorn kernels, she had to move it again. The ants ended up in the bathroom, on the back of the toilet. It was okay to feel alone in the bathroom. She’d hold the farm in her hands as she sat, watching them scurry in their Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit-holes. They always had something to do. She would flush and set them back on the porcelain. One Wednesday after work Heather went into the bathroom for

some aspirin. She shook the bottle before putting it back behind the mirror and spoke aloud to the ants about her headache. It was after this that Heather realized the bugs had become an obsession.

On a Saturday morning in mid-September, Heather decided to go the Natural History Museum. She thought about it a long time when lying in her bed. Rain was hitting her window in quiet tones and the gray light from the clouds was merging with the white of her bedroom walls when she got up and put on boots and a sweatshirt. She wanted to see if the bug exhibit had any information on tarantulas. She wanted to see how they moved their hairy legs when they walked. Heather wanted to see the tarantula in action. She wondered if their eyes were as shiny and reflective as they seemed to be in photographs. She respected the tarantula as a solitary creature that could take care of itself and instill fear into its enemies.

After Heather parked her 4Runner, she made her way to the museum’s door. The air was still hot from the moisture even though the rain had drizzled off to a light sprinkle. She held out her hand, palm-up. Two fat drops landed on it by the time she got to the entrance. Heather took a deep, humid breath and pulled the door open.

Before her eyes adjusted to the darker interior, she looked for a shape at the front desk. Benny sat there, typing. Heather pressed her hands from the crown of her head down her hair, trying to decrease the static that buzzed around her head like a halo. She cleared her throat.

“You haven’t been to the store in a while,” she said. Benny stopped typing.

“So you finally decided to show up!”

Heather shrugged. They stood in an aura of awkward silence. “Well I don’t really like bugs.”

Benny nodded. “I remember.” He watched her for a second then walked around his desk and motioned for her to follow as he backed into a hallway. “The exhibit is this way. I won’t even charge you today.” He grinned at her before turning.

Heather followed Benny past a Lewis and Clark exhibit with a mannequin of Sacagawea. They walked past a niche in the wall that held skeletons of rodents behind glass and past a full-sized Oregon Trail wagon. Next to the wagon were old appliances and chests. They were rusted out and the

sign said: The pioneers often abandoned heavy objects off the side of the trail in order to gain better speed. While Benny walked, Heather noticed he kept pulling his shirt down, like it was itchy near his armpits or as if he was afraid his shirt might somehow lift a bit to expose some belly skin. It made her nervous about her own clothes, as if she was showing too much flesh, even though she was still wearing her sweatshirt.

He stopped in front of a glass case and peered down into it, his elbows resting close to his sides on top of the glass. “Here you go.”

Heather stood beside him. She gazed openly at the rows of pinned butterflies and moths. There was a photograph of a field that was covered with a swarm of grasshoppers where the crop was bent and eaten. Benny pointed to the scorpion specimens.

“These are my favorite.” He pressed a red button that was on the side of the case and a purple-shining light hit the scorpion bodies.

“They glow in black light,” he said. “It’s not a very well-known fact.”

“I’m not sure I like it.” Heather crossed her arms and took a half-step back. The scorpions glowed. “They look like the product of a bad nuclear experiment.”

“So you’re saying we could make a really bad B-rated horror flick.”

Heather shook her head. She didn’t like horror films. “I’ve hated insects since I was seven.”

Benny leaned his back against the case.

“When I was seven a wasp hid in the lip of my soda at a picnic.” She remembered that it had been Betsy Lincoln’s birthday picnic. Betsy Lincoln’s mother had bought whole cans of soda for all the girls and a pin the tail on a donkey game, too.

“Are you allergic?”

“No, at least I don’t think so. My lip puffed up though. While the other girls played games and opened party favors, I had ice held to my face by one of the mothers who stayed to help chaperone.”

“I guess that means no birthday cake then.”

“It’s silly, I know.” It made Heather’s lip itch thinking about it. She saw that Benny was looking at her without pity, but he wasn’t thinking she was silly either. His eyes were soft and he seemed to be searching her face to know the right words to say. She broke the silence. “Do you have

any tarantulas?”

Benny moved his eyes back to the exhibit. He stared at the wasp species held down by the silver needles. “No.”

Heather picked at a sticker of a smiley face that someone had stuck to the glass.

“I know they sell them at pet stores though. Live ones, I mean.”

Heather drew the musty air of the museum in slowly. She scratched her neck and forced herself to look at Benny. “Do you want to come see one with me?”

“Yeah,” he said. He licked his lips, “But, I’m working right now.”

“Oh, right.” Heather shook her head. “Nevermind then.”

Benny touched her arm, “I’m glad you stopped by.”

H

Heather decided to go to PetSmart anyway. She was interested in tarantulas, and that was okay. She didn’t need an escort to try and find one in a pet store. Heather wandered the glass cases. There were lizards lying in piles staring boringly, and they didn’t move when Heather tapped the glass. She passed snakes and guinea pigs and turtles. She got to the row of fish, the wall of blue hit her eyes like the blur of television screens in peripheral vision. She turned around in the aisle, not sure which way to go.

“Can I help you?”

Heather hadn’t noticed the girl in the PetSmart apron who was feeding the individual beta fish in round containers at the end of the aisle.

“I want to see your tarantulas in action,” Heather said.

“Action?”

Heather stared at the row of tropical fish; the clownfish blew bubbles at her.

“Like, do you want to see them eat?”

Heather followed the girl around the corner and watched the girl’s braid swing right and left. Heather didn’t know if she wanted to see the spider eat.

“We mostly feed them crickets.” The girl stopped at a glass case and grabbed a red plastic cup from behind it. She lowered it into the feeder

cricket cage and flicked a few black bugs into the cup. Heather was surprised the other crickets in the cage didn’t jump around. They just slightly flicked their long antennae and stayed still on their faux branches.

“We only have one tarantula right now.” The girl held her hand over the lip of the cup and led Heather to the tarantula case. The tarantula sat with its hairy forelegs long, its small eyes looked like tiny drops of oil.

“Chilean Rose,” Heather said.

“They are pretty common,” the girl said. She took the lid off.

“Be careful.” Heather stood taut, watched the girl point the cup downward, waiting for the crickets to slide down the plastic and into the cage. She shook the cup lightly; one cricket fell out. The tarantula turned its face quickly to the landing of the cricket, rearing its front legs. The girl shook the cup harder, but the second cricket held fast.

“Wait!” Heather said, louder than she expected. She let out the air she had been holding.

The girl stopped, the cup dangling from her bent wrist over the cage.

“I’ll buy that cricket.”

The girl shrugged. Heather watched the tarantula jump at the unlucky cricket and turn all its legs inward with the fatal bite. She let herself watch until her eyes became blurry and she saw her own reflection in the glass, her eyes sorry and alive.

“The employees call the tarantula the Blood-Wench,” the girl said.

“I’ll take all the feeding crickets I can,” Heather said.

H

When Heather pulled into her driveway, she sat and stared at the bag of bugs, blown fat and round with air, in her passenger seat. She didn’t have a place for a cricket farm in her bathroom. The ants were already strange enough. She poked the bag. During the drive, they had stopped jumping like maniacs and settled at the bottom of the bag like good little pets. The bag rolled on its side and they starting jumping again. Seventeen crickets popped around inside it like burnt kettle corn.

“Stupid insects,” she said.

She grabbed her purse and her bugs and went inside the house. She

threw her keys on the coffee table; they skidded and fell off, landing on the carpet. She left them there and put the crickets on the dining room table. They settled at the bottom as their bag rolled to the side. Heather went outside.

The afternoon air was still warm, but much cooler than the past summer heat. The breeze brought rows of goosebumps like gravestones along Heather’s arms. She brought her arms together and held them tight across her chest. Her plants were at their end-cycles for the season. The last blossoms had started shrinking on the plants, turning brown and curling at the edges. Heather watched an ant struggle with a drying petal – it was getting caught on a stick the ant was trying to cross. The ant would pull itself up the twig and then back down again when the petal wouldn’t budge. Heather felt the ant’s sad persistence as it worked. It must have felt the cooling of the air at the end of the summer and yet it still harvested, not trusting the weather as it should.

“Go around, you stupid bug.”

She picked up the stick and the ant started crawling toward her hand.

Heather screamed and dropped the stick and the ant. She shook her hands down at her sides like she was fanning fire and leaned her weight from one tip-toe to the next. She looked like she was doing the chicken dance, her elbows flapping. Then she bent over, one hand over her heart, to make sure the ant was okay. It had already gone back to the petal, no blockade in its way anymore. It was the only ant she could see; the rest of the nest was quiet, its entrance still. She went back inside and dialed the number to the Natural History Museum.

“Do ants hibernate?” Heather paced her kitchen floor when there was an answer – she was tracking dirt from outside in a line in front of the refrigerator.

“I’m sorry?”

“Do ants survive the winter?”

“Well…”

“And what about crickets?”

“…Is this the girl with the Jerusalem cricket? Heather?”

Heather stopped pacing. She looked at the cabinet under the kitchen sink where she knew the Jerusalem cricket still sat in its jar, dead as dirt.

“Hello?”

She hung up.

A cricket offered up a hollow chirp.

Heather noticed the clumps of dirt all over her floor. She got the broom from the closet and swept up the dirt. She saw a corner of a crust of bread under the table and got that too. Then she moved all the chairs and swept the whole kitchen. The contents of the dustpan went in the garbage. Heather opened the cabinet under the sink for the bottle of multipurpose cleaner she used for mopping. The jar of Jerusalem cricket remains was what she ended up pulling out.

She stared at it and became angry. She was angry at the Jerusalem cricket for her current obsession with bugs. Bugs couldn’t talk back. They didn’t care if you cooked them a gourmet meal or if you sang them a lullaby before going to sleep. They didn’t care if you were afraid of the upcoming winter and the deep-set cemented soul that the cold and clouds permitted. They didn’t care if you saved them from being eaten alive. They didn’t care.

She sat the jar down, hard, and it shattered like a chorus of bells. The Jerusalem cricket’s abdomen was still segmented with stripes, its legs and thorax had dulled into a hardened yellow. It lay amidst the glass shards, very dull and dusty. She picked it up and looked at it in her palm. Tearing up, the water in her eyes made the bug seem like the color of a dusty gold coin. She set it next to the live jumping crickets in their plastic bubble on the kitchen table. It was bigger than the other bugs, special. It wasn’t sold for feeding other creatures, but it still lived and died alone.

Heather swept up the glass and pressed the redial on her phone.

“Can I bring some crickets?” she asked.

H

The sun was getting low when Heather pulled up to the museum. Benny was outside, sitting along the side of the square two-story building. She stopped quickly, letting her car skid a little in the empty gravel parking lot. After opening the door she sat and let the car beep, the keys still in the ignition. A cricket responded to the sound. Heather got out.

She walked towards Benny holding the globe of crickets with both hands. She thought she must look ridiculous, holding an air-filled bag of crickets like a fortune-teller’s glass ball. Benny patted the side of a rock where he was sitting.

“Hey, you brought dinner!”

Heather stood, unsure; the orange of the sun reflected off the bag she was holding. The crickets jumped like a nuclear reaction.

“I saved them from being dinner.”

“I know,” he said.

They sat on the rock, both of them staring at the bag.

“I don’t know what to do with them.” Heather looked out across the scattered rocky hillside. The rain had cleaned the air. She saw the city stretched before her in the valley below, rows of fields separating the museum from the main jostle of town. The fields had been harvested already; some had been planted with winter wheat.

“It’s a nice view, isn’t it,” Benny said. Heather gently shook the bag, the crickets jumped.

“Soon it will be winter,” Heather said, studying the insects.

“So let them enjoy their final romp of the season,” Benny said.

“I don’t want them to die.”

“Everything dies,” he said.

Heather picked at the lichen on the rock, the bag of crickets leaning against her left arm. They were quiet, almost inanimate. Heather picked at the twist-tie that kept the bag closed. The bag lost some pressure, became a sagging oval. A cricket chirped and Heather jumped. Benny laughed.

“It’s not funny,” she said. She undid the twist tie and held it sharp in her closed palm. The crickets were still. She held the bag so its hole was toward the ground – the plastic opening shook gently in the wind. The crickets bounced. A few sprung across to the grass, some hid under rocks, one jumped and landed on Heather’s shirt.

Heather gasped and stood. She quietly held her shirt away from her stomach, keeping her index finger and thumb that held the fabric as far away from the rest of her hands as she could. The bag dropped to the ground and fluttered a few feet before catching on a rock. Benny lunged at

it with his back leaning, stretched from his feet. He caught the empty bag with his foot. The cricket clung to Heather’s shirt until she tried flicking it with her finger, and then it sprung off, landing on a rock a few feet away.

When Benny got off the ground, Heather was wiping her shirt where the cricket had been. He had a glimmer in his eyes, a twitch at the corner of his mouth.

“It’s not funny. I hate bugs.”

She sat down and looked at him. The bag flapped in his hand. The wind caught it and tore it away. Benny lunged at it again. He tripped on a patch of brush and landed on his stomach. The bag spun down the hill, twisting in the wind. Dust sat in thick patches on his thighs and stomach and chest.

Heather giggled and slapped her hand over her mouth. He looked at her and grinned a two-mile smile. Heather felt her stomach muscles contract, and she laughed out loud, bending over herself, holding her stomach. She couldn’t control the spasms in her belly. They ached and rolled. She laughed and laughed and he joined her, sitting with his butt in the dust, hands on his knees. When the crickets started chirping they were both just starting to breathe again.