This is my first post here on Barbelith, so I thought I'd make that known right off the bat. I've been very pleased over the past few months of the quality of discussion here on the boards and decided that maybe some of you could help me out. I've been writing for a short while with some positive feedback here and there, but seeing as how I have yet to let anyone other than my friends read anything I've written, I have decided to post something here in hopes that I'll receive some constructive criticism. Oh, and I'm only 18 so if its horrible don't tell me to stick to my day job, I dont have one  .
Anyway, here's a peice called Crickets, and yes it has the horrible "dear journal" first sentance.
Dear Journal,
It’s now two thirty, AM time; I’ve been up since seven yesterday morning. I can’t sleep again.
Night after night for the past few months, since the beginning of summer I guess, I’ve had to deal with the crickets. Their scrap and screech and chirp and chime mating songs – I can feel the veins in my neck bulge and fill at the very thought of it. I don’t know where they come from. Always found in the same spots, in front of the couch, in the bathroom under the toilet, in the shower, behind the armchair next to the TV. A small three dimensional speck of vivid hops and antenna waves trapped in a sea of pinkish-orange knuckle deep carpet.
What do crickets eat, anyway? I would have figured they’d all die by now with nothing to eat. Crickets don’t have big mouths, do they? I’ve never looked. My guess is that they eat flies or dust mites or maybe bits of carpet or tile floor grout.
There has never, ever, been a cricket in the kitchen.
Each night I lay in bed, finally relaxed enough to ease the muscles in my legs, feel the tension in my shoulders fade. My eyelids collapse under their weight. I start to forget that I’m concentrating on falling asleep. Like clockwork then, the symphony starts to play. At first there’s only one. There is ever only one in the beginning. A single, rhythmic chirp. Then, an accompaniment, an octave higher. Chaotic and random are their shouts now, with no coherent beat, no time. Mating calls. But there are no females in my house. I know, because the chirps never stop.
The one single cricket, lonesome, desperate, searching for that perfect, thick legged violinist to hop into his life takes a stab into the silent, perking his antenna against the dark living room night, waiting for a chirp in return. Secondary and tertiary crickets follow suit, hoping that the long lost female cricket will instead seek their jagged and sharp song, will answer none of the calls, or at the very least dismiss the first suitor. It’s the fast food theory, by placing one chain restaurant next to another you, at the very least, take business away from the first restaurant, which is all that matters.
If there were female crickets, surely enough the males would stop their optimistic chirping.
I’ve thought, with my eyes wide and my arms crossed across my chest, staring into the knots and grains of wooden ceiling above me, about crickets “spooning.” I doubt many crickets would want to spoon with such sharp back legs, razors – literally razor sharp back legs scraping black, smooth, blackboard smooth exoskeleton legs. Every night. For a few months.
I’ve never seen a baby cricket. Do crickets make nests? I guess they probably do. All the crickets I find are large, large enough to require multiple blows with my newspaper or magazine truncheon. They make crunching sounds when I pick them up with a tissue, sometimes I flush them down the toilet to make sure that they don’t crawl out of the waste bin. It’s November now, I wonder how many crickets I’ll kill by spring. Will we have a cricket infestation this summer? I hope not. I won’t be able to sleep at night.
Who left the door open to let that first cricket in? Well, the first two crickets in, I guess, unless the first cricket had already been found by a suitable suitor cricket, when she hopped in. Or it could have been that the cricket was predestined to manifest itself as a thousand other crickets for the eternity of my life so long as I live in my current house. Maybe. Maybe it was like the immaculate conception, the virgin cricket borne a son without knowing the touch of a fellow cricket.
What was that person doing when they let the cricket in? I could have done it, I left the door open a lot during the summer months. That’d be ironic, if the reason I can’t sleep at night was due to leaving the front door open a few months ago, during the beginning of summer. I can’t blame myself, I was probably in a hurry or something and for whatever earth shattering reason closing the door was a chore and didn’t need to be completed right away. In fact I’m sure I was in a hurry. The cricket could have only taken advantage of me if I was in a hurried state of mind.
Their small greenish, blackish, freakish bodies with spots and stripes and, legs bent far above their behinds as if they’re constantly crouching, like models and movie stars, always restless thinking that they are being watched, followed, stalked, preyed upon.
Like anybody actually cares that much about crickets.
If you could talk to a cricket, I think you’d find that crickets are pretty high strung, what with their huge reflective dreamy eyes that can see the world for what it really is. Crickets, as I’m sure anyone knows, can’t fly. How can anyone, anything, possibly know what the world is really like if they can’t even fly. They should take notes from their cousins, the grasshoppers, as I’m sure they have much more to say on the issue.
Two days ago, finding myself staggering home from the basketball court after a long three hours of failed jump shots, distraught, I fumbled into the shower with hopes that it would bring comfort to my battered bones. I wanted nothing more than to slide into a warm stream of invigorating fresh water. I opened the shower door and of all things that one could possibly find staring back at them in a shower I saw, with utter disbelief and hopelessness, a cricket sitting, staring at me, from the soap rack atop the brand new bar of Dove that I had placed there not two days earlier. This dirty, disgusting, disease-ridden insect of hell perched on, tainting, the cleanliness that is the soapiest of soaps.
Had I had the energy and resources I might have taken that cricket and pinned it to a placard, scientific style, rear legs pulled apart revealing the soft cricket underbelly, front legs akimbo, for all the crickets to see. I would have made an example, a mockery, out of him. But instead I sent him into the world of swirling water and septic tanks through my toilet.
And it never stops, their songs. “Give it up, you will never find the soul mate you wish to live with,” I say to myself, sometimes aloud and under my breath. “And if you did, she would probably eat you, and your cricket children, your life is meaningless and fruitless, you serve little purpose in this world.” I start to, with more passion and fervor, rant at this point. “And yet you will never, ever, for as long as your legs have energy, your exoskeleton strength, stop rubbing your legs together until I am sure that one day every single one of you will burst into a thousand little flaming violinists. Stop for once and reveal to yourself the madness of your daily routine, listen to yourself go on and on and on – “
Well, the crickets have subsided for the night. Must have just happened, although to be honest I wasn’t really paying attention to them just now. I hope to find sleep, before they return from their intermission. Goodnight. |
