Cicadas

The year is 1888 and you have not been in this much pain since being grazed by a Confederate bullet in 1865. That time, you battled through, knowing what was wrong. This time, the ache is a long-standing mystery. You tell the doctor, when he finally arrives, that your shoulder is immobile. You are unable to lift your arm. Your wife has to do all the heavy lifting around the house at the moment. No amount of “bend it this way” instructions from the doctor cure the fact that you cannot move your damn arm. The doctor is at a loss. Except for the one strange bump near your clavicle, he doesn’t see anything wrong.

My doctors don’t know what to make of me either. They both listen and don’t listen.

“When did the symptoms start?”

“Four months ago,” I say for the three hundredth time in four months.

“Says here there’s been some bleeding. Any abnormal bleeding?”

“You mean aside from the bleeding I’ve had for the last four months?”

By the time your doctor walks in the door to your home, you’ve been in pain for seventeen years. At first, you felt a sting when you were tilling your fields a few years after the war. The year was 1871. The land was finally reviving, so you and your two sons, seven and twelve, were trying to encourage that life. You were guiding your plow horse, your naked narrow chest burning in the afternoon sun, when a bee stings you—or, at least, you assume it’s a bee. A spot near your clavicle swells up but you push through. You’ve been through worse.

My pain started four months ago. Lower abdomen.

“Cramping?”

“Cramping,” I confirm. If you call back-hunching, take-you-to-your-knees, laying-in-a-fetal-position pain cramping. My eyes are practically crossing as I talk to this doctor. But I need her to believe my pain level—so she will remove the damn cysts causing the problem—so I have to present myself as a reasonable human being who is not in pain.

No one would believe you either. The doctor who comes into your parlor looks at the lump on your clavicle, sees the bruising around your joint, and says to keep the shoulder cool. Do you have ice? He doesn’t believe that you could have been in pain for seventeen years. If you’ve been in pain for seventeen years, why are you complaining about it now?

“Just lance it,” you tell your doctor.

“Just schedule the surgery,” I tell mine.

“It probably won’t do any good,” your doctor tells you.

“It’s not medically necessary. The insurance probably won’t cover it,” my doctor tells me.

“Just do it,” we say.

When they go into my abdomen laproscopically, they find all kinds of treasures. Instead of taking one cyst, they decide it is medically necessary to take a uterus and a whole ovary. The growths are all benign. They tell me I should be grateful for that, and I am. But I wonder at their definition of benign. Apparently benign means “won’t kill you on purpose but will definitely make you wish you were dead.”

When the doctor lances the lump on your clavicle, he makes a small incision with a scalpel that could be sharper. Not even a small trickle of blood leaks out. Now even the doctor is curious. You take another swig of whiskey and he makes another cut, creating an X. Something moves under your skin. The sensation is so odd, so alien, that it stirs curiosity more than pain—though there’s that too. You crane your neck to see.

The lump is moving. Your doctor actually leans back, away from your shoulder. You wish you could do the same. The incisions part and the gossamer structure of a wingtip pokes out of the cut. Your instinct is to slap it, the way you would slap any bug, but you let it emerge. First, a wing, then a leg. Your skin rips at this point, only a small bit, and you’re not sure whether it hurts. The thing that’s been causing you pain is trying to escape you now. Antennae, more legs, another wing, eyes like tiny black seed pearls. You recognize it. “It’s a locust.” Your very own insect to plague you.

Cicadas, commonly known as seventeen-year locusts, are swarming the land this year. The same way they did in 1871. Over the years this one was planted and grown in your arm. The doctor cannot explain it. It is unexplainable. We have both been treated like liars, but we knew, we knew. Something was growing where it shouldn’t be.