The Cicadas Kept Screaming

The kitchen smelled like Kent Golden Lights and citrus, thick and stale, clinging to the yellowed curtains like it had lived there longer than we had. The air was heavy with the bite of vodka, not yet burned off by the heat creeping in through the back door. My mother sat at the table, one leg tucked under the other, cigarette balanced between her fingers, laughing into the phone. She was talking to her best friend from when they used to wait tables. I stood by the sink, barefoot, stomach growling, lifting a cup to my lips before the smell hit me—not water. The vodka burned before I could spit it out, a sharp slap to the tongue, and I could hear my mother laugh like it wasn’t anything at all. Like I should’ve known better. 

Outside, the cicadas screamed into the late afternoon sun, the pavement shimmering, the heat pressing down like a hand on the back of my neck. The walls of the house soaked it in, holding onto it long after the sun went down, and the nights never quite cooled. Everything stayed warm, humming with the kind of tension you could feel in your teeth. And then—the sound of it. The sharp crack of metal against drywall, the hollow echo of an empty can bouncing once before it settled on the linoleum. I turned my head just in time to see the red streak, thick and slow, sliding down the wall. For a moment, my breath caught in my throat. Was it blood? It wasn’t. It was tomato soup. A dented can from the pantry, now split at the seam, a dull metallic wound spilling onto the floor. A punctuation mark in the middle of an afternoon.

The cicadas didn’t care. They kept screaming. The house was full of these moments. Not just earthquakes, or explosions—but tremors. The kind you learned to keep your balance through. The kind you stopped flinching at after a while. The kind that taught you how to move without making a sound, how to gauge a mood from the way a door closed, how to tell from the weight of a silence whether it was safe to breathe. 

My father was a sculptor, and I was clay. Malleable. Meant to be shaped, meant to be pressed and smoothed into something he could hold. His voice was always gentle. His touch was always warm. That’s how you trick a child into thinking something isn’t wrong. My brother touched me like it was a secret, like it was something we could share, like it was something that belonged to us and not to the darkness curling around it. But I was not made to be clay. I was not made to be shaped by hands that did not know gentleness, by voices that spoke in commands and apologies that meant nothing. I was not made to carry the weight of other people’s sins, to swallow the things no one wanted to say, to hold my breath until the air felt safe again.

I was a boy who climbed trees and grew into a man who dedicated my life to understanding them.

When the heat got too thick, when the house became too small, I would slip out the back door and scale the broadleaf trees, bare feet gripping rough bark, hands reaching for branches that bent but never broke. Up there, the world was quiet. The cicadas sang for themselves, not for me. The wind moved without asking permission. The sun touched my skin without taking anything in return.