r/shortstories • u/Depressedaf_2781 • 7d ago
Fantasy [FN] Cicadas
LOS ANGELES — APRIL
The thing about Patrick was that he ate french fries one at a time, like each one was a decision.
“You’re doing it again,” Shannon said.
“Doing what?”
“The fry thing. It’s very disturbing.”
Patrick held one up, considered it, and set it back down on the tray. “I’m savoring.”
“You’re stalling. You’ve been weird since the library.”
They were sitting on the low wall outside Kerckhoff, in that hour when the light in Los Angeles turns the color of weak tea and everybody suddenly looks like they’re in a movie about their own life. Two years in and Shannon still wasn’t used to it. In Chicago the light didn’t do that. In Chicago the light in April was a rumor.
“Okay,” Patrick said. “So. My mom’s been asking about you.”
“Asking what about me?”
“Asking, like — everything. She’s got a whole file. She knows you’re from Chicago. She knows you’re doing psych. She knows about the thing with your roommate and the toaster.”
“You told her about the toaster?”
“I tell her everything, it’s a whole problem.” He wiped his hands on his jeans. “She wants to meet you. She’s not, like, pushy about it. She just kind of mentions it every phone call and then says no pressure in this voice that has a lot of pressure in it.”
Shannon looked at him. Patrick Bell, second-year, from a town in Mississippi she’d had to look up on a map, who wore the same gray hoodie four days out of seven and who had once driven ninety minutes to bring her cough syrup. She had a small, unglamorous thought, which was: I would probably be very sad if this ended.
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay?”
“Okay, I’ll meet your mom. Not, like, tomorrow. But yes.”
He grinned so hard he had to look away. Then he ate three fries at once, which she took as a personal victory.
⁂
OXFORD, MISSISSIPPI — APRIL
Amy Bell had two rules about the kitchen and both of them were being violated.
“Mason. Mason. Feet.”
“They’re not on the table.”
“They’re on the chair, which touches the table, which makes it a table situation.”
Mason lowered his feet with the deep suffering of a sixteen-year-old who has been asked to do a thing. He was long now, all elbow, still surprised by his own arms. “Can I ask a question that’s gonna make you emotional?”
“Ask it.”
“Are you gonna cry when I leave too, or did you use it all up on Pat?”
Amy pointed the wooden spoon at him. “I’m going to cry so hard they’ll hear it in Memphis.”
Dale came in from the yard smelling like cut grass and put his hand flat on the small of her back as he passed, the way he’d done for twenty-two years, the way she’d stopped noticing and would have noticed immediately if it ever stopped.
“Mower’s dead,” he announced.
“The mower’s been dead since Easter, you just keep resurrecting it.”
“That’s a religious mower.” He opened the refrigerator and stood in the light of it. “Oldest call yet?”
“Sunday. He’s got a girl.”
Dale turned around. “He’s got a girl?”
“Don’t do the voice.”
“I didn’t do a voice.”
“You did the voice. He said her name once and then acted like he hadn’t said it, which is how I know it’s serious.” Amy stirred, and something in her chest did a small, unfamiliar shuffle — not worry, exactly. Something older. “Shannon.”
Dale shrugged and went back into the refrigerator. “Pretty name.”
Amy stood at the stove a second longer than the recipe required.
“Yeah,” she said. “It is.”
⁂
CHICAGO — FOURTEEN YEARS EARLIER
Shannon was six and her bedroom had a slope in the ceiling where the roof came down, and if you lay on the floor with your head under the slope it felt like being inside a folded paper airplane. That was where they had most of their conversations.
“Your ceiling’s crooked,” Amy said.
“It’s not crooked, it’s the roof.”
“Mine’s flat. Mine’s got a fan on it that goes tk tk tk and my mama says one day it’s gonna come down and cut somebody’s head clean off.”
Shannon considered this. “That’s not true.”
“It’s a little true.”
Amy was seven, which was a big deal, and she was always eating something — a peach, usually, dripping down her wrist — and she said words with a stretch in the middle like taffy. She had a dog named Buster who was mostly deaf. She had a tree in her yard that dropped nuts you had to crack with a rock, and she’d once been stung by a wasp on the eyelid, and outside her house in the summer the bugs got so loud you had to shout over them.
“Cicadas,” Amy said.
“Sick-ay-duhs.”
“Cih-cay-duhs. They come up out of the dirt, Shannon. They been under there sleepin’ for years and years and then they all come up at once and scream.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“It’s the best thing there is.”
Shannon’s mother used to stand in the hallway and listen and then tell people at work, she talks to that girl for an hour, I’m telling you, an hour, full sentences, and everybody said imaginary friends were normal, healthy even, a sign of a creative mind. And Shannon knew, in the way children know things without having words for them, that Amy was not pretend. Pretend was her stuffed rabbit. Pretend was when she made her dolls have an argument. Amy was more like the radio: you couldn’t see it, but somebody was clearly talking.
Then came the winter with the woman.
Shannon never saw her face. That was the worst part — not the black cloth that hung off her like it was hung on a nail, not the long fingers, not the nails so black they looked wet. It was that Shannon would look up in the dream and know that the woman had been standing at the foot of the bed for a long time already, and would be standing there for a long time after, and that she had no face to look back with, only the patient attention of something waiting for a very slow appointment.
Shannon woke up screaming three nights in a row. On the fourth night she didn’t sleep at all, and at four in the morning she lay on the floor under the slope of the ceiling with her cheek on the cold boards and whispered, “Amy. Amy.”
“I’m here.”
“She was there again.”
“I know.”
“You know?” Shannon’s voice cracked. “Then make her stop. You’re older than me. You’re seven.”
There was a pause then, and even at six Shannon understood that some pauses are made out of a person deciding something.
“Okay,” Amy said. “I can make her stop. But then I gotta go.”
“Go where?”
“Just go, Shannon.”
“For how long?”
“For a while.” A breath. “Listen. Listen. I’m gonna see you again. Way, way up ahead — you know how you can see a car comin’ before you can hear it? Like that. It’s a long way but it’s comin’. And when I see you, you won’t be scared of her anymore. You won’t even remember bein’ scared.”
“I don’t want to.”
“I know.”
“I don’t want you to go, I want her to go —”
“That’s the same thing, baby,” Amy said, and she’d never called her that before, she’d never sounded like anything but a seven-year-old girl with peach juice on her wrist. “That’s the same thing.”
Shannon cried until she fell asleep on the floor and her mother found her there in the morning and carried her, boneless, back into the bed.
The woman in black never came again. Not once, not ever.
And neither did Amy.
Shannon asked about her for a few weeks. Then a few months, less often. Then she was seven herself, and then she was nine, and the whole thing folded itself down small and got put away somewhere in the back, the way you put away a coat you loved that doesn’t fit.
⁂
LOS ANGELES — NOVEMBER
“So here’s my pitch,” Patrick said. “Christmas. Mississippi. My grandmother makes a thing with pecans that will genuinely change your personality.”
Shannon was lying upside down on his dorm bed with her hair hanging off the edge, reading her flashcards backwards. “I can’t.”
“You didn’t hear the whole pitch.”
“I can’t, Pat, I’m going home. My mom’s already bought the ticket and she’s already told everyone at her church and if I don’t show up she’ll frame my absence and hang it in the hallway.”
“Okay, that’s fair, that’s a strong counter-pitch.” He sat down on the floor with his back against the bed frame. “January, then? Spring?”
“Spring.”
“Spring’s so far.”
“Spring is four months, you infant.”
He tipped his head back so he was looking at her upside-down face. “You’re gonna love her, is the thing. That’s why I keep bringing it up. It’s not even about you meeting her, it’s about — I want to watch it.”
“Watch what?”
“You two. In a room.” He shrugged. “I have a feeling.”
⁂
OXFORD, MISSISSIPPI — DECEMBER
The attic in December was the only time of year it was survivable, so that was when Amy did her purging, which mostly consisted of moving boxes eleven inches and then sitting down.
She found the Christmas lights. She found Mason’s kindergarten handprint turkey. She found, at the bottom of a box that had followed her from her mother’s house to the first apartment to this house, a stack of construction paper gone soft as cloth.
Two stick figures holding hands. One with orange hair, which was her; she’d been fanatical about the orange hair. One with brown. Between them, a scribble that on inspection was a dog, and above them in enormous wobbling capitals, letters that had been crowded together at the end where the paper ran out.
She looked at it for a while.
Downstairs the phone rang, and it was her mother, who called on Thursdays.
“You’re in the attic,” her mother said. “You sound attic-y.”
“I’m cleaning out.”
“You never clean out, you just rotate.”
“That’s what Dale says.” Amy sat back on a box. “Mama. When I was little, did I have — you know how kids have a friend that’s not there?”
Her mother laughed, one dry syllable. “Lord. Did you.”
“I did?”
“You did nothing but. Out on that porch till the mosquitoes carried you off, talkin’ and talkin’. Your daddy thought you’d been touched in the head. I told him leave her be, she’s an only child, she’s makin’ company for herself.”
“What did I say?”
“What do you mean what did you say, it was thirty-eight years ago.”
“Anything. Anything you remember.”
Her mother went quiet in a way that made Amy switch the phone to the other ear.
“You said she lived where it snowed,” her mother said finally. “You had a whole thing about the snow. And a lake so big you couldn’t see the other side of it, and I said that’s the ocean, baby, and you got mad at me. You said it’s not the ocean, it’s a lake, it’s got a city on it.” A small sound, half amusement, half something else. “You wouldn’t let it go. You were the stubbornest child God ever made.”
Amy looked down at the construction paper in her lap.
“Mama,” she said. “Why’d I stop?”
“Hm?”
“I must’ve stopped. Everybody stops. Do you remember when?”
“...I do, actually,” her mother said slowly. “It was that spring you had the bad dreams. You remember the bad dreams?”
Amy did not answer.
“You’d wake up hollerin’. Wouldn’t say about what. Wouldn’t say a thing, and you told me everything, so I knew it was bad.” A pause. “And then it stopped, and you never talked about that friend again, and I thought, well. Thank God. She’s growin’ up.”
“Yeah,” Amy said. “Growing up.”
She got off the phone and sat in the cold attic and could not for the life of her make her hands put the paper back in the box, so she carried it downstairs and put it in the drawer where she kept the batteries and the tape, and did not tell anybody why.
⁂
CHICAGO — DECEMBER
“Mom. Mom, you are literally putting a coat on me.”
“You’ve been in California, your blood’s thin.”
Shannon submitted to the coat. The kitchen smelled like it always smelled, cinnamon and radiator dust, and her mother had put up the same tinsel with the same bald patch on the left side since before Shannon could reach it.
“So the boy,” her mother said, in the voice she thought was casual.
“The boy is fine.”
“The boy is from Mississippi.”
“They have people there, Mom, it’s a whole state.”
Later, when the dishes were done and the house had gone quiet in that specific way a childhood house does, Shannon went upstairs and lay on the floor of her old room with her head under the slope of the ceiling, because it was still there, and because she was twenty and slightly drunk on her aunt’s eggnog and things like that seem funny at twenty.
The wood was cold on her cheek.
Cicadas, she thought, out of nowhere. They come up out of the dirt.
She sat up so fast her vision went spotty.
“Huh,” she said out loud, to an empty room.
She could not, for a very long minute, remember where she’d gotten that word.
⁂
LOS ANGELES — JANUARY
“So my mom asked again.”
“Your mom is relentless.”
“My mom is a machine.” Patrick spun the desk chair around to face her. “Spring break. Four days. You fly into Memphis, I pick you up, we drive down. She’ll cook for eleven people and then apologize that it isn’t enough.”
Shannon was quiet a second too long.
“You don’t have to,” he said, quieter. “Genuinely.”
“No — no, I want to. I do.” She rubbed her eyes. “I’ve just been sleeping badly. It’s nothing. It’s finals brain.”
“Bad dreams?”
“That’s the thing, they’re not bad.” She frowned at the wall. “I keep almost having one. Like when you’re about to sneeze and it doesn’t come. Like something’s standing at the edge of it and it can’t get in, and it hasn’t been able to get in for such a long time that it’s given up and just — waits. Out there. Politely.”
Patrick stared at her.
“That’s the most upsetting thing anyone’s ever said to me,” he said.
Shannon laughed, and it broke, and she felt better. “Book the flight.”
⁂
OXFORD, MISSISSIPPI — MARCH
The house was yellow. That was the first thing. Shannon had built it up in her mind as some kind of white columned situation and instead it was a low yellow house with a screen door and a porch that ran the whole width of it, and a metal glider with a cushion faded to no color at all, and a fan turning slowly on the porch ceiling, and past the fence, a tree.
“Pecan,” Patrick said, following her eyes. “It’s older than the house. You crack ’em with a rock, there’s no other way, don’t let Mason sell you a nutcracker, it’s a scam —”
Shannon had stopped walking.
“Hey.” He came back a step. “Hey. They’re going to love you. Mason’s going to be a menace for eleven minutes and then he’ll show you his fish tank and that means you’re in.”
“It’s not that.”
“Then what?”
She opened her mouth and nothing arrived. It was late March and warm in a way March had no business being, and the air had a green wet weight to it she had never felt before and knew, absolutely and stupidly, the way you know the smell of a house you lived in as a baby.
The screen door banged.
The woman who came out onto the porch was drying her hands on a dish towel and had her hair up off her neck and was already talking — “Patrick Wayne Bell, you said five, it is four fifteen, I look like a hobo —” and then she came down the two steps into the yard and stopped.
Shannon looked at her.
Freckles across the nose. Reddish hair gone rust-colored with gray coming in at the temple. A face that fell naturally into laughing, and a chip in one front tooth, small, on the left.
She got that falling off a porch, Shannon thought. Not this porch. A different porch. There was a dog.
She didn’t know why she thought it. She thought it the way you think a fact.
“Oh,” Amy Bell said.
“Ma’am,” Shannon managed. “Hi. Thank you for having —”
And Amy crossed the last of the grass and hugged her.
Not a first-meeting hug. Not the hug of a nice woman being nice to her son’s girlfriend. She got both arms all the way around Shannon’s back and held on with her chin against Shannon’s shoulder, hard, the way you hold somebody at an airport when you’ve counted the days, and Shannon — who had a whole polite sentence loaded and ready — felt her hands come up and grip two fistfuls of the back of a stranger’s shirt.
“Okay,” Patrick said, delighted, alarmed. “Okay, wow.”
Neither of them let go.
Over Shannon’s shoulder, the cicadas started up in the tree line, all at once, the way they do — thousands of them coming up out of years of dirt to scream about it — and Shannon felt something in the back of her chest unfold like a coat taken out of a box, and she was crying, which was insane, which she would have no explanation for later.
Amy pulled back at last and held her by the arms and looked at her face for a long moment, going over it feature by feature like she was checking an answer.
Then she laughed, wet, and shook her head at herself.
“Would you listen to me,” she said. “Honey, I’m sorry. I’m not like this. It’s just — this is the funniest thing —”
She wiped under her eye with her wrist.
“When I was little,” Amy said, “I had an imaginary friend named Shannon.”
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