My Story.

Well since I spend my days writing for class instead of for this blog, I have to double my efforts by sharing my writing with you. (I'm not really sure if that sentence even makes sense really...)
Writing my first fiction work for class proved to be a small trauma. After brainstorming for days I woke up the day it was due with no concrete story in my mind, and little half-moon indents on the palms of my hands. (I was making stress-fists as I slept apparently.)
However, it came together and I wrote this story and photocopied it for 20 classmates. Now the critique. Its just a first draft, so go easy on me.
Enjoy.
Also it's fairly dark. Don't judge me. ;)
P.S. Sarah wanted to make a cameo appearance in my production, so I named my narrator after her. However, I ended up writing it in the first person, but you'll notice her name is mentioned once. :)

Cicada Summer
Maria Vermeer

The summer millions of cicadas crawled from their earthy tombs was the summer we buried my father. And like the incessant whine those insects made, he was still with us, his reeking breath on our necks, the fear in my mother’s eyes. Though dead, he still caused her to curse the spoiling milk she pulled from the fridge and cry at night. When my hands were slimy with dirty dish water and I accidentally broke the plate that slipped away from me, she flinched, and I wondered if she saw his ghost.

We lived in a dead mining town. I heard people call it a ghost town and thought it must be because all those who were dead and buried still walked with us. Sickly-curious I watched for these ghosts in the windows of the abandoned homes and in the wrecked cars outside the old high school building, and most of all in the junkyard outside town, where people dumped old things to exorcise their decaying lives of unwanted memories. I was sure they would walk there.

And I’m sure he still walked with my mother. I knew she loved my three brothers and I, but she was crushed, like the man who used to be our neighbor who got his legs caught beneath his tractor, she was crippled, unable to support our pain with her own. So we supported ourselves during those long summer days. My brother’s created anarchy and I tagged behind wondering whether their acts weren’t very much like the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, who the pastor eluded to that one Sunday. I was sure fire and brimstone would be rained down on us the day they fed our gerbils vinegar until the little animals puked up their insides. It made me sick, but they all seemed to think it better entertainment then the static on our old television set.

Our teacher at school had told us that cicadas spent seventeen years in the ground as nymphs, then emerged for a couple weeks to mate and die. I was convinced they must have been nymphs when I first saw the winged-demons with their armored bodies and unblinking red stares. I hated them, and I hated the pungent smell of their decay, bodies rotted on the sidewalk and window sills. Mother said they sounded like the neighbors weed-whacker, and our teacher told us that their abdomens vibrated and that they were singing a love song. That could have been, but that’s not what it reminded me of. I imagined what they must have felt, the feeling of a thousand flies caught in your chest, pounding against the walls, humming, screaming, like the flies that gathered over the smeared remains of that rabbit that tried to cross the highway

Their song was as oppressive as the humidity that made my hopeful cotton dress cling to my sweaty legs and made it hard to keep up with my brothers as we walked down the road towards the junkyard.

“Hurry up Sarah!”, they yelled over their shoulders as a car sped by covering my sweat in dust and making me squint at them in the distance. I was always left behind, alone, except for our dog. His black and tan skin hanged limply over his bones. Hundreds of cicada carcasses crunched under my feet and the dog bent down to scoop them up into his mouth as we walked. I wondered why he did that, but they didn’t seem to make him sick.

I didn’t mind being left behind. The boys went to the junkyard to hunt, to break the antennas off of the wrecked cars and make sharp spears that they’d shish kabob mice with, waving them above their heads in victory. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t stomach the slaughter and so I came to see Joseph instead.

I’d met him less than a week ago. He was older than me, much taller and awkwardly lanky, with wild black hair and dark eyes that I was convinced held a hundred secrets. He had become my religion. Joseph knew everything and although I doubt he ever left our small town for more than an afternoon I remember thinking that surely he’d seen Indian temples and African plains. Joseph spent most of his days in the public library, except for Thursday afternoons where I could find him in the junkyard collecting old bottles that he’d take home and line up against the window.

I found him almost immediately, sitting near a pile of tires by a wrecked car, with his cardboard box filled with a few treasures, a cobalt blue bottle and a small red one that was as deep as blood until the sun’s light caught it. I came up and sat beside him. It was enough to sit. Joseph rarely spoke and he never looked you in the eyes when he did. That made people afraid. When he talked it was like he was speaking to a ghost beside him, and you were merely eavesdropping.

After awhile he said, “This is a pharmacy bottle,” he held up the blue one. “It was used to hold medicine—can you imagine.”

I answered, although it was not a question. “Imagine what?”

He continued, “Something that looks so beautiful was just used and thrown away.”

I did not understand, but I nodded. “This one,” he said, cupping the red on in his hand, “has the Star of David embossed on it.”

I said I liked the red one best. Joseph got up and started to walk through the field bending over and running his hands slowly over objects, pushing things aside, and I followed, although we did not find anymore bottles that day.

In the late afternoon we walked back to town and sat on Joseph’s porch on the steps, loose with dry rot. Joseph put on a record. The music played to the fading dusk and its soulful beat made me sad, although I didn’t know why.

Later Joseph gave me a book to look at full of paintings by Van Gogh and he explained to the darkness why Van Gogh painted, and why he died. I stared at a picture of a city at night and a sky full of life and movement, a celebration sky. I looked up at our sky. Before I thought perhaps the stars were holy fire poised to destroy us, or eyes, like the animals in the woods, eerie, glowing and watching. Now I thought, maybe they were tunnels of light to other worlds, or a hundred candles burning like on Christmas Eve. And then I thought maybe we’d both, like cicadas, emerge from this dark tomb and shed these shells of lives, and be able to sing a brief sad song before we too die.