On Winged Words

Experimental Prose, Lilienne Shore Kilgore-Brown

A long, long time ago, the cicadas were real human people. They formed complex thoughts and danced and named each other Xanthippe. They gazed at the clouds and built the classification system necessary to differentiate dirt, soil, and mud. They spread their fingers through silt and admired their skin’s iridescence dancing upon their crisscrossing veins, mirroring the way the rivers came together and pulled apart in their verdant countryside.

The real human people, with their love for soft sand and dense wood and lazy movement, began to form the universe’s first philosophies. They loved so indiscriminately that blood-born ties were blissfully irrelevant. Older sisters did not love little brothers any more or any less than any other person. The real human people did not build separate houses, so none were bigger or smaller or cleaner or messier than any other. The philosophies they built were the philosophies of petals and air and joy, not of borders. 

More than anything, the real human people loved to bask. They loved the sun and they loved the breeze and they loved the whispering blades of grass. They spent most of the day lying down, murmuring only a little to one another. This was easier than philosophy, you see, so they began to do it more and more.

The long-ago people did not have mothers to warn them that if they put their tongues out, then their faces might get stuck like that. They did not have fables or bedtime stories or biology or crime or omens, so they were entirely content to get stuck like that. They slept underneath our very same sun before its orange marker swirl got washed away in blinding light. They hummed to each other, sleepy in that miraculous way after a day at the lake, a night under the stars. Lying there, bliss and closed eyes and tangled bodies and unworried hearts, pondering kindness and roots and the presence of flies, they began to sink into the ground.

All of that time lying down began to permeate the ways their cells arranged themselves. Their legs atrophied into spindly wires and their faces became long, their arms flattened and stretched into the sparkly shimmer of wings. It was so nice to relax and just let the change wash over them, to be aware of every part of their body and unbothered by any of it. They curled up and let the wind brush loose soil over them until they were all the way underground. They slept and slept, smiling for the residual heat granted by a far-above sun. 

Some of them began to get restless, pressed in tight by the weight of compressed dirt. Slowly, they began to dig upwards, something inside telling them to resist that comforting grasp of gravity. When the first group of long-ago people pulled themselves from the Earth, granules of dirt plastered to the wrinkles around their mouths and squinting against the light of the moon, they were cicadas. At first, they found this to be a wonderful transformation. They spent the evenings singing to each other and traveled in short, exuberant bursts. They let the wind dictate their plans and the temperature, their mood. It is a sign of a simple creature, to be happy when there’s sun and sad when there’s rain.

Like raisins in a loaf of baking bread, the cicadas found themselves spreading apart from one another, the wind’s effects growing exponentially. They had taken for granted that everyone who mattered, everyone who existed, would always be within shouting distance. As they continued to spread out, meters becoming directionless miles, they felt the growing pains of a new concept crystallizing in the hollows of their chest and tried to come up with a new word to describe it, a word that would come to mean not knowing where your loved ones were. They had never even had loved ones before. But because they couldn’t find each other among the ever-growing valleys of their world, they came up with hundreds of unique words, touching on hundreds of palpitations of this feeling: Aislado. Osamělý. Ensom. Yalniz. Lonely.

The longer they ached and steeped in experiencing something that they’d never felt before, the more words they created, trying to capture something uncapturable. Longing. Anguish. Sadness. Despair. They started to yell in hopes the wind might carry their pleas. They began to sing and thought it floated above the whims of the world quite nicely. They stretched and flexed their muscles and produced a sweet, clicking clatter. But they still couldn’t hear each other when it seemed to matter most.

The cicadas did not know what to do about their melancholy. They had no precedent for coping with such feelings. They could only cry, hoping against hope that maybe someone would hear. The weather beat down on them, rain softening their wings, so they crawled into trumpet flowers as reprieve from the storm and continued to lament. And just then, they noticed that their own songs grew louder—and that they could finally hear the faint cries of others. The weeping of cicadas reverberated throughout their world, emanating from the holes of tree trunks and within the undulations of echoing canyons. Vast distances meant so much less with the discovery of sound amplification. They traveled towards one another. They rediscovered one another. They came back to complex thoughts and played their music in the recesses of nature.

The cicadas never managed to lose the sense of desperation that had been instilled in them when they found themselves so irreparably alone, and so they strived to find and connect to each other whenever and however they could. They gathered to share the new words that they had created, coaching each other on pronunciation. They began to tell stories. The cicadas still crept underground, but when they arose, some mothers remembered their children. Their brains began to rumble in the train-track thinking of lovers. Discriminate love came into existence.

Once those cicadas realized they had brothers, they were not really cicadas anymore. They seemed to lose their iridescence and their many-mirrored eyes, so they created disco balls to remember the glimmering multitude the world once had. They made French horns and running shoes and plays and playgrounds and libraries and buttons and door hinges and great literature and voice cracks and calculus and ceiling fans and traditions and falsities and good wool socks. But they never forgot the feelings of bare feet on dark, damp soil and rubbing their legs against warm sheets and the sun nesting into their pores and the wonder of an irregular geometric pattern. 

Nor did the not-cicadas forget their appreciation of beauty. In everything. They assimilated it as a current between their skin cells. The real human people still feel that current as they walk, laughing, on city streets under cicada-filled trees. Their love of musicality pulses as they write good articles and bad poetry and think terrible things and love well and discriminately.

The real human people keep their contradictions lovingly wrapped in dandelion floss. They think: Nobody understands just how much I love them.  Still, they cannot imagine that the love they receive is similarly, unfathomably large. Each human person aches to take her and him in their arms, their lovers and their brothers, and hope that enough hugs and butterfly kisses and laughter-filled eye contact will be able to explain the depth of their emotion. It never will, so they just keep trying. 

Long ago, the cicadas were real human people and we were cicadas. Today, I lean into someone and I think that we must be the center of everything because no joy in the history of anyone could possibly amount to this. The world must have been created for us. I must have been made to give and experience so much love. I look to my right and her veins crisscross like water in the countryside; her eyes have the depth of river silt; when she laughs, it’s iridescent. 

Not far above our heads, tucked away on the bough of a tree, making music next to their dearest of dears, the cicadas think just the same things. 

We are all simple creatures. Happy when there’s sun and sad when there’s rain.

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Lilienne Shore Kilgore-Brown is a writer of fiction, experimental prose, and journalism who most enjoys writing about people, animals, science, and the world around us. She grew up in the dry parts of the Pacific Northwest, only sporadically finding left-behind cicada wings, but now she lives on city streets that thrum with the cicadas’ clickety-clackety song in the summer.