Cricket Symphony
Dusk was falling as she stood out on the porch, waiting. It was warm for April, with the spring peepers singing away in the ponds and streams beyond the cabin, and the beginnings of a cricket chorus tuning up somewhere in the grass. The snowmelt was long past, and the crocus in the front yard, bulbs that she wouldn’t ever abandon because her grandmother had planted them, though she let the rest of the yard run wild in a riot of blazing star, butterfly weed, cornflowers, ox-eyed daisies, and an assortment of other interesting weeds that she only knew by the odd, analogy-laden names of her grandmother or the low, rumbling, almost sighing sounds of another language entirely. She’d managed to cut down most of the buckthorn, and cleared a path through the wild roses. Although she had been informed it was unnecessary, she was inclined to think that it was, given that she’d several times had a thorn go straight through her dense canvas jacket and two layers of sweatshirt under that, and if the briars could get through that, they could get through anything. There was being tough - and she had her gran and her mother to thank for that, and years of a lot of thinking and not a lot of empty talking - and there was being obstinately proud, and thinking yourself resistant to thorns was the second.
A goose honked once somewhere out in the gathering dark, and for a moment she let herself think of the flock that should be heading north around now, high above the blue world, where they could trace a path far away from the infective light of the cities and highways, the sluggish, clotted veins of people and the low-hanging clouds of society. They could fly north for the cool, crisp air, and look down over the world as the rulers of the wind, and perhaps they would even see a small pack moving south, out of the cold white tundra and into the verdant green of the northern forests, after months of fasting and solitude, baring white teeth to the wind at the prospect of fresh hunting.
But no - look for me at sunset - not tonight. It might still be too early, as the calendar meant nothing to them and the days that turned, over and over again, were more closely calculated on the rhythm of the land and the broad sweep of the skies than any system of numbers and charted stars. Then, too, there were the delays - a spring flood, a new road, a hunt that could not be refused - and it would not do to get impatient. She would not pine for him - not for the green-gold eyes at sunset, not for the husky rumbles that were his first language, not for the gleam of teeth as suddenly he made that shift that took him far beyond her grasp. It was not only the physical change, but the sudden shift of his eyes, as he changed from the teller of tales and the explainer of all things, to the being filled with running, made of fur and claw, the one beyond the need of names. He would try to explain, later, what it was to live within two minds, to need not only the cornflower blue sky of summer but the razor powder of ice crystals cutting into his feet, the glistening gut of the caribou in the red, red snow, but how could she understand? She was only human.
I would go with you, if I could, she had once told him, and he had - not laughed, that action was foreign to everything he knew, indeed he had been surprised at how many teeth went into a smile, or that the action was meant to be friendly - told her with a few words and his eyes why such an idea was ridiculous. She had meant, of course, if she was able to leave it all behind - her sleepy job restoring antiques, her book club, her grandmother still growing pots of flowers in her nursing home, her visits to her mother and father where they had retired into the southern sun, her cabin that wasn’t her permanent address but was her home all the same, the photographs. But it was the sheer physical impossibility that daunted him - how would she keep up, running on ice? Would she be able to suffer the bite of a jackal, tell the poison berries from the sweet, feel the iron tang of a fox’s liver slide down her throat? He communicated in ideas, in pictures, but there was an eloquence there that nonetheless had left her desolate when the cries of the geese mourned in the marsh grasses. She could not be a part of his world. She was bound, bound with the unbreakable ties of being human, evolution and society having conspired so that not only was it unthinkable to throw convention to the wind and head out, step by step, across the wide green world, it was physically impossible. Oh, certainly she could survive for a while on very little: years of backpacking, a childhood as a scout, the lessons of her grandmother who had grown up in a time where waste was the cardinal sin had taught her that much. But the things she’d need for it - a knife, for example, a flint for sparking fires, probably fishhooks and line and snares, and then needles and twine and storage containers - they simply weren’t compatible with a nomadic life.
Very slowly, she turned back to the old cabin with its faded wallpaper and the broken clock on the mantel, slipped in through the door, pulled shut the latch.
Dinner was a simple meal - the cabin had no electricity and the kerosene stove was yellower than any ancient bulb, shedding a comfortable light on the brown eggshells as she made herself an omelet. Brown eggs had always tasted better to her, and she had no idea why. Afterwards she washed up the only set of dishes in the cabin, hung the cast-iron skillet up once more. Everything in the cabin was old and simple and never changed, just like the enormous pine trees and the mantel clock that was stuck forever at three sixteen. Whether it was three sixteen in the morning or three sixteen in the afternoon she couldn’t tell. She ought to get it fixed or simply throw it out, but she kept coming up here for the weekend away from all the thick, smoky sprawl of it all, and then returning without having done anything about the clock.
She went to the back door, and nearly opened it again. But the yard outside would be beautifully, placidly empty and she turned around once more. Something about these early country sunsets left her sleepy hours before she could manage a restful moment in the city. Perhaps that was why she kept coming here, despite the long drive, despite the fact that no one she was looking for was still here, because some part of her wanted to sleep. To dream as she never did in her tiny apartment, to look on the stars and swim between them in the night, to feel like she had a purpose again and control over her own fate. Perhaps it was as simple as letting all the windows open without hearing car alarms and sirens and barking dogs. The frogs and crickets were a symphony that she knew well.
The old quilt, probably one of the ones that her grandma had made, was threadbare, frayed in the corner where she pulled it up to her shoulders. Another thing she should fix, if only for something to do up here, a responsibility to Gran’s memories that would give her a reason to go back up to the cabin next time. It was only marginally less ridiculous than waiting for the return of the wolf-eyed nomad, than eradicating the buckthorn stem by stem, than listening to the crickets. The truth was that she simply couldn’t think in the city, couldn’t take the pressure of all the people, all the news, all the furious, furious sound that surrounded her without some part of her mind going dormant, stopping her from feeling, from really seeing, from finishing an old paper-backed novel, from opening up that old sketchbook from her college days once more. Every day there was simply something to be gotten through, to be finished, and yet - and yet she was bored, later, and restless, staring into the midnight streetlights and the neon signs and knowing that no one, no matter how drunk they got, found their purpose there.
At the same time, though, no matter how many of her memories were stored under the loose floorboard in this cabin, no matter how little changed from week to week, spring to spring, she could not stay here. It was a beautiful dream: a dream to perhaps meet the wider world halfway, let herself stay in the world where everything made sense, where violence and death were simply facts, simply survival, not a Gordian knot of pain and fear and hatred and a thousand broken things, thrown away things that she could only scratch the surface of, never fix entirely. But it was just that - a dream.
In the morning she would carry her things back down to the car, all the way down the driveway between the pines. It would be exactly the things that she had come with, never anything to take back to the city, because she couldn’t throw anything here away and she couldn’t keep it, no, not where she lived and where it would so quickly lose its meaning, the old quilt in its ugly colors nothing more than a sentimental keepsake of the childhood days, of when the world was open and everything made sense. Not even Dan would understand, because he didn’t come here anymore, he didn’t remember the long days of summer when everything fit into place and time stretched like a hot, sticky rubber band. He was married now, and Julia was having a baby in October, and maybe the neon vanity of the world no longer kept them up at night. Maybe it never had.
She would fuel up in town, buy a soda from the old man at the convenience store, the one who had known her grandfather, and it would be a four-hour drive down from the world where everything was defined by the past to the place where the last five minutes were constantly erased. First, the trees would disappear, then the fields, then finally the sky, and she would have enough time when she returned to check her phone, her e-mail, her television. Tomorrow she would go back to being a mere converter of information, a circuit in the machine, the person who didn’t exactly know why she kept going north, intermittently, to spend the night in a house she couldn’t even truly say she had grown up in, because it had been her grandparents’ summer home away from the Saturday morning cartoons and piano lessons and the sprawling ranch house without a fence that she had been raised in. She would go back to scoffing at the sentimentality of the woman who wanted to sit on the back porch with a child’s box of colored pencils and draw the flowers, scorning doing something she wasn’t good at simply because it made her happy. She could work with her hands all she wanted, but the simplicity of creation, or at least of fixing things, was so often covered over in all that noise. And she would return to all that, she would just drive away from nothing in particular.
Tomorrow she would wonder why she had spent so long up here, waiting for what was never going to happen, and resolve not to come back again for another few weeks, a month even, though it rarely lasted that long, not in the spring. It was easy to stay away in the winter - her body craved the heat, not the icicles that could form on her nose and her car wasn’t equipped for the slushy back roads anyway - but in the spring, it was as if all her longing for this place was pressing tightly against the lid that she kept on it. But tomorrow she would seal that lid good and tight and not let those feelings bubble up again, because it was distracting.
Tonight she would dream of caribou, of sharp ice crystals and red, red snow, and of the mourning of the geese in the marsh grass for those that could not fly above the wind. She would dream of the wolf-eyed nomad and the scent of the grass under her toes, of the heat lightning blue and green across the sky, startling although all it ever destroyed were the amorphous clouds. And she would dream these things to the overture of the frogs, in counterpoint to the symphony of the crickets.
AN: Yeah… no idea where this came from. Not one hundred percent certain if it’s fantasy or if the nomad is a metaphor, though for what I don't know. *Is stalked by a metaphor*