Member-only story
Life Cycle: A Memoir of Death and Rebirth
I. Egg
My grandfather once sent me a cicada shell in the mail. I was seven. I remember the plain brown paper bag that wrapped the smallish box, our address scrawled on the outside in his handwriting: Kenai, Alaska, Star Route 3, Box 27.
My mother stood by as I opened the packaging. A weird smell wafted up from the contents: sweet-sour, like rotting grass but heavier, deader. He’d put the shell inside a clear plastic vial, a little bigger than my fist, then packed it in Styrofoam peanuts. I lifted the vial out. The smell grew stronger, hit my brainstem and bam, sent me back to San Antonio.
(My bare feet in the black soil of his garden. The high, chirring song of cicadas, impossibly loud, sounding from the live oak branches bending in the hot sun. And a wave of nausea rising in my throat as my grandfather’s hand worked its way down the back of my panties.)
“Why on earth did he send you that?” My mother’s voice brought me back to our small kitchen in Alaska. We did not have bugs, not as such. Just mosquitoes and daddy longlegs and wasps, and then only in our short summers. Nothing like the giant husk that rested in my palm. I said its name in my head. Cicada. Sick Ada. Its translucent wings glowed amber when I held it up to the light.
