Summer of the Cicadas
As the road rises in elevation, the air grows cooler. I keep going until the river narrows with boulders. Sweat sticks to my skin as I slow and pull over on the side of the road. I stash the bike amongst some bushes and climb down the encampment to the water bed.
It’s pebbly down here with a surprisingly low tide considering the rain we’ve had. It smells like fresh water, the scent you get from tall mountain runoff. Clean and crisp. I love that smell, the chill of it.
I find a large boulder to sit on and take my shoes off, dabbling my feet in the water. I brought two vodka nips with me and take them out, look at them. They shimmer in the light. After a moment, I place them back inside my uniform pocket.
It’s still hot, even at a higher elevation.
The trees sway. The foliage is dense here at the S-curve of the river. The shoulders run tight. A few feet away, the current eddies in a shallow pool of slow moving water. I check around me, then start to strip.
Dad would never approve of this, but Mom and Meg would. The three of us used to swim everywhere. In lakes, rivers, the ocean. On one trip to Rodanthe, North Carolina, Mom forced my dad to stop on the side of the road so the three of us could get in the water. I was seven. Meg was fourteen.
“It’s perfect right in this spot,” my mom said. “If we drive any further, it might not be this good again.”
My dad complained for a moment before stopping for her. Meg helped me take off my clothes and the three of us went frolicking in the cool water in our underwear. I remember the waves were stronger than I thought. They crashed into my gangly, skinny body, battering my skin and stinging my eyes. I dove under the waves again and again. There was something soothing about being beneath them. The whole world went quiet and dark and smooth.
That’s how it feels now as I lean back into the shallow pool, letting my hair get caught in the current. I can hear the tinkle of water and fish and rock just beneath the surface. I stretch my arms out and lift my feet, floating. I look up at the trees and underbrush. For a moment, a flicker of movement catches my eye. I panic, sloshing forward in the water so I’m standing on my own two feet again.
Standing, water drips from my hair, like a million caterpillars cascading down my body. I squint into the underbrush, trying to spot the whisper of cicada wings, anything. I search and search, walking over to the side of the river but I never find anything. It’s only when a car passes by on the road that I realize I’m crying. There are no cicadas out. There are barely mosquitos.
I am alone.
I close my eyes. I wish everything would go back to the way it was. I wish I was still fifteen, sitting across the table from my sister and her best friend, this pretty girl I thought might look at me someday like I was more than what I was. I want that back so badly it hurts.
But it has been two years now and I am still stuck on this town and that house and those moments that ruined my life. If I’m going to keep going, I have to tuck them away somehow, to keep Meg with me without letting her absence be everything, to let her lingering bolster me.
After a few moments, I force myself to relax. I sink back down into the water, still crying, but less so now. I lean back and float again, so all I can do is hear the tinkle of the current.
I imagine Dad is complaining about the heat from the side of the road. Mom is further upstream, looking for small fish. It’s quiet and peaceful. There is nothing here that can harm me. I open my eyes. In the sliver of sunlight, I can almost see Meg next to me. Her tiny nose is spotted with freckles. She wrinkles it, placing one of her hands is under my neck and the other under my legs. “Stop flailing, Jessie,” she says. “I got you.”
She helps keep me afloat. She always has and she always will.
Chelsea Catherine is a PEN Short Story Prize Nominee, a winner of the Raymond Carver Fiction Contest in 2016, a Sterling Watson fellow, and an Ann McKee Grant recipient. Her novella Blindsided won the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize and was published in October of 2018. Her nonfiction recently won the Mary C. Mohr Award through the Southern Indiana Review. Summer of the Cicadas is a Red Hen Press Quill Prose Award winner, and is available for purchase here.
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