A Symphony of Cicadas Read online

  In its final gesture, the sky broke, sending large drops of water from the black clouds above. It started out as gentle taps that landed with a sizzle on the fiery ground. And then it picked up with gradual speed until it was a torrential downpour. The water waged a war against the flames, coming in like white stallions that trampled the flames into a quivering death. Soon the forest was reduced to a blackened and soggy skeleton of smoldering stumps and ash. I lay in a protective ball in the middle of it all, curled up in a fetal position to protect myself from any further attack from the elements.

  I couldn’t understand what was going on. It was unclear how long I had been here, how long the forest had been raging against my presence. It seemed like time was more of a suggestion than a rule. It could have been hours, or even days.

  And what of this place I was in? Was I the only one? Did we all have separate worlds to occupy when our human lives had passed and we found ourselves in the afterlife? Is that why my son wasn’t anywhere to be seen in the place where we both died?

  And what made the lightning bolt start the fire? Or the rain that put it out? Was it me? Was it God? It felt strange to wonder that, given I wasn’t even sure there was a God. But with everything I had just been through, believing there might be a God seemed like the least complicated of all answers – an ironic revelation since the idea of God seemed so complicated while I was still alive.

  The wind slowed to a cool breeze, the rain subsiding to a light mist that brushed against my skin. I held my hands at the base of my neck, the way we had been taught as children during earthquake drills - as if our tiny hands could withstand the crushing blow from a falling ceiling. My hair was matted from the rain and charred pine needles, my clothes full of dirt and ash. I moved my arms underneath me and hoisted myself into a seated position, hugging my knees against me. The clothes I was wearing were the same ones I had worn to the bridal shop; a time that felt like a thousand years before. They were the remains of a nice blouse over a pair of what used to be white pants; not the kind of clothes meant to withstand a car crash and wild fire. At this point I was no longer wearing shoes. I didn’t know where I’d lost them, but it didn’t seem to matter. The jagged rocks and pointed pine needles I walked on weren’t noticed at all as if my feet were calloused from years of walking barefoot. Pain wasn’t an easy thing to come by in this world, and yet I welcomed the way it made me feel somewhat human in those brief twinges. Even the terrifying heat from the fire had felt somewhat energizing.

  But now I had nowhere to turn. I couldn’t understand the point of this, why I was here, where my son was...I was tired of being stuck in this world hidden within the only one I had ever known. I no longer wanted to be alone. I wanted answers to all of the questions I had burning inside of me with no one to ask. But most of all, I missed the sound of someone speaking to me, and hearing me when I spoke back to them.

  “Well, you’ve really created quite the spectacle,” a voice said next to me, almost making me jump out of my skin. “Are you done with your tantrum yet?”

  Five

  I scrambled to my feet and whipped around to meet the face behind the voice.

  “Aunt Rose?” I stammered.

  I had been ten when she had passed away. She was my mother’s aunt, and no longer young when she had succumbed to an illness that had made her weak and frail. But before that, she’d been a vibrant part of our family, encouraging my sister and me to take risks that our parents would never dream of. It was Rose who encouraged me to balance on top of the playground equipment blocks from her house, cheering me on as I shuffled with fear on the tiny beam that stood eight feet above the sand, and applauding when I was successful in making it to the other end. She let me roller skate across the wood floors of her house, ignoring the scuff marks I left behind with my clumsy feet. Her large smocks became the costume wardrobe for Sara and me when we performed plays and musicals in the front yard. We’d try on her large-brimmed Easter bonnets, giggle as we slipped on her large bras over our dresses, teeter along in her heels, and spin around in satin sleepwear that became the magnificent ball gown of a princess within our fantasy-fueled imaginations.

  Rose would let us jump on her bed, a sharp contrast from our father’s reaction, which would be a swift spanking across a bare bottom. At night, she’d let us sleep in the large bed cozy with quilts, giving us the best room of the house while she slept on the couch. Breakfasts were always feasts of waffles or pancakes, bacon and eggs, or the sugary cereals our parents denied us. She always listened to us with great interest, feeding off the stories we pulled from thin air over a slice of apple pie with blackened crust. We were never treated like little kids, even in our constant barrage of questions and tireless demands for entertainment. At her house, we were treated as honored guests.

  One of her rooms held a vast array of paints and canvases. She’d often have a fresh canvas waiting for us, having painted over it with white to give us a clean start on a new creation. While Sara and I would mash the paintbrush against the canvas with hurried and messy strokes, Rose would apply color with delicate precision on her own board beside us. She would soon transform her blank canvas into a mountain against an endless sky, a mysterious cave with wonders unseen, or even a green and blue wave ready to curl out of the canvas and lick the floor at our feet. The colors melted into each other with unfailing detail, and we could almost hear the ocean’s call if we looked deep enough into where the green faded into the reflection of an unseen setting sun. She’d paint clouds that rolled over waving fields of wheat, the movement from the wind coming to life with glints of gold and brown in the valley that expanded beyond the painting. Sometimes she’d even paint pictures of us, capturing our likeness on the board while we slapped paint on our own canvases. Those she never painted over, but kept in a room she called her office despite her retirement many years earlier.

  Standing before me now, Aunt Rose was just as I remembered her. That is, before the sickness had taken hold and stolen the soft roundness of her features, and ultimately her life. Her long white hair was piled into a loose bun on top of her head. The creaminess of her fair skin was interrupted only by the rosiness of her cheeks and twinkling blueberry eyes. Her laugh lines and crow’s feet still lit up the roadmap of her kind expression, yet her face appeared more vibrant and youthful under its mature appearance. Her short and plump body was clothed in her usual painting smock over a pair of flowing pants, and she held a paintbrush in her right hand. I was so relieved to see someone familiar that I rushed over to embrace her, almost knocking her off her feet. It surprised both of us when I burst into tears, and I buried my face into her neck to try and stop the watery flow of emotion.

  “Oh, my dear,” Rose crooned. “There, there. It’s all going to be okay.” She pet my hair as I shook, her compassion opening the floodgates. Free to let my guard down, I stopped fighting against my fear and sadness, and allowed myself a good, ugly cry on her shoulder. She didn’t try to stop me, only murmured comforting words while I let out all that had been bottled up since the moment I found myself in this new existence.

  When I was able to come up for halting breaths of air, I pulled away and swiped at the tears in my eyes. She offered me the hem of her smock as if I were a little child. I was grateful and wiped my face on it, rubbing at my nose with an embarrassed chuckle.

  “Now then, feel better, darling? You’ve had a rough time of it, haven’t you?” she asked. I nodded, my momentary good cheer replaced by sullenness as I fed off her maternal sympathy. “Well, let me get a look at you.” She stepped back and nodded in approval. “Oh darling, you are a vision!” she exclaimed. “You’ve become quite the young lady, haven’t you?” I looked down at my body, taking in the damage from the crash and the fire, touching my matted hair with my hand to try and smooth out the tangles.

  “Oh, Aunt Rose, I’m a mess,” I said. “And I’m not so young anymore, I’m thirty-five.”

  “Posh,” she countered, taking my hand in hers to stop me from sm
oothing my hair. “You’re only a baby. Thirty-five? Darling, you’ve hardly lived!”

  She took her paintbrush and smoothed it at my hair, brushing it with gentle strokes before moving to my clothes. I touched my hair once again, surprised at its sudden softness, looking at the ends of the golden brown fullness it now possessed. I watched as she transformed my torn clothing into a light blue sundress that fit me snug just above my waist before falling around my hips. On my feet she painted a pair of gold-colored sandals that wrapped around my ankles and calves like those of a Roman goddess.

  “I’ll have to teach you how to do a better job of healing yourself,” she said with sympathy as she stroked my skin with the brush, all the cuts and bruises disappearing under her touch. Then she stepped back to admire her work, letting out a low whistle. “Oh darling, you’re what they’d call a knockout!” she exclaimed.

  I giggled with both pride and shyness, checking out her handiwork. Holding my hands out and noticing all the details she’d created with a mere flick of her brush, I couldn’t help but agree with her assessment. My skin glowed under the morning sun, glistening as if still damp from the rains. I could feel my hair brushing across my back, and I shook my head to feel the new fullness. My nails were shaped in pink and white half-moon crescents, a far cry from the blackened stubs they had been just moments earlier. My feet were no longer covered in mud, caressed now by the new sandals that protected them from the elements. I felt beautiful, appreciating my new form with vanity, admiring the perfection it had become.

  “Oh, thank you, Aunt Rose,” I said, throwing my arms around her once again. “You’ve made me beautiful.” She laughed and shook her head.

  “Darling, you did that on your own. I just revealed it for you,” she told me, tapping her brush against my forehead.

  “But the brush,” I said. “You did something magic with it!”

  “No darling, this brush has no magic in it at all.” She handed it to me for proof, and I swiped at the air only to have nothing happen. “Rachel, the magic is nothing more than our spirit released from our earthly bodies. We’ve had this power all along, even when we were alive. But being human has its limitations. However, when our spirit is unleashed from our bodies, the power we possess becomes unharnessed. You are capable of so much, you don’t even realize it.” She looked around at the tree stumps and blackened ground. “Well, maybe you have a hint,” she laughed. She took back her paintbrush and began painting small strokes against the ground. Tiny blades of grass and fern emerged from her paintbrush, multiplying across the darkened area in a gradual wave of green. “There now, that’s a start,” she said. She looked at me with eyebrows raised, smiling a small, meaningful smile. “The end of life is really just a new beginning.”

  “I don’t understand,” I admitted, leaning down to touch the new growth peeking out of the ashes. “You say your brush isn’t magic, and yet you use it as a wand.”

  “Oh sweetie, I forget how human your thoughts still are. First off, there’s no such thing as magic. Nothing I’m doing is magical at all, but only a part of the spirit. My spirit, your spirit, the spirit in the trees, the ground, the sky, and even these blades of grass...we are all pieces of the same source of energy. The lightning was a result of the energy being pulled from your spirit. The rain, that was you, too. Cleaning you up was a result of my spirit talking with your spirit. And this new life,” she said, gesturing to the greenery scattered around us, “it was there the whole time. I just helped it along by combining my energy with the energy of the forest.”

  “But the wand, er, paintbrush?” I asked again. “You keep using it, even though you claim it’s not magic. Surely it’s helping you with all this,” I argued, waving my hand to indicate the greenery that peeked out from the ashes. Rose laughed, sticking the end of the brush through the bun on the top of her head to free her hands.

  “The brush only makes me feel like all this is my canvas and I am but a painter,” she said. To emphasize, she placed her hand in front of her and moved it across the scene of the forest in one slow motion. The ash was soon covered by a thick blanket of green. Small buds pushed through the ground, unfurling to reveal leafy, vibrant ferns that reached out in all directions. The charred wood of the fallen trees was soon hidden under a spongy moss, as if the trees had fallen years before. The smell of smoke disappeared under the damp smell of rain; a carpet of baby’s tears covering a fresh layer of dirt. Soon there was no sign that there had ever been a fire, the garden of green around me so plush I felt I could just lay in it forever.

  “I still don’t understand,” I told her, running my hands over the ferns that surrounded us.

  “Oh darling, I know. I don’t expect you to yet. But it will all make sense soon,” she promised.

  I wanted to be satisfied with this answer. I tried to let it be at that, afraid that all of my questions would eat at her hospitality and cause her to lose her patience. Yet, I was burning inside with so much that still didn’t add up.

  “All this is lovely,” I told her. “But what if a person had been close by while you were creating this? I know I never saw anything supernatural like this happen while I was alive. But it doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility for someone to have come upon us while you, or rather your spirit, was drawing all of this out. How do you keep anyone from seeing this happen?”

  “I don’t,” she said. “Our vision and the vision of humans are completely different things. Basically, they’re seeing things occur much slower than what we’re seeing.” Her eyes twinkled at my obvious bewilderment. “Time is a much different thing when you’re alive than it is in the afterlife,” she explained. “As a human, you exist on a string of time.”

  She took the paintbrush out of her hair and drew a thin line in the dirt. Using her brush as a pointer, she went on.

  “There’s a beginning, a middle, and an end. Everyone’s string is a different length; some shorter, some longer. You can’t move backwards or up and down. The only way to move is forward.” She then drew a circle in the dirt around the line before filling it in so the line no longer existed. “When your spirit is free of your body, you are able to experience time much closer to how our source of energy experiences time. It still exists, but it’s not on a string. Instead, we’re able to go as fast or as slow as we want, jumping from moment to moment in the blink of an eye. You can move forward, backward, side to side. The possibilities are endless.”

  Rose reached over and picked a berry from a nearby bush and held it up.

  “The reason is because all of this is happening at once, with no point of beginning or end, not even a middle. There is no yesterday or tomorrow. The past is now. The future is now.”

  She smiled and took my hand.

  “But that’s a pretty heavy concept that even we can’t fully grasp until we are reunited with our source of energy. So for now, we can just hop from one moment to the next.”

  “So, can we control where we land?” I asked her. “I mean, would it be possible to say ‘take me to 1953,’ and then just end up there?”

  “We’re not time machines,” she chuckled. “But yes and no. If you can feel it, you can be there.”

  “What if I envision a person? Can I be close to them?” I asked, not even trying to hide the hopefulness in the question. I was still troubled over where Joey might be, even more so after seeing the vision the cicadas had given me of his broken body and the hovering light that disappeared with as much mystery as it appeared. But a different urgency was building inside me as I grew more comfortable in my new existence. I could feel my heart torn at the thought that I’d never see John again, feel his embrace, or even just see myself through his eyes when he looked my way.

  I could see Rose’s eyes cloud over, a concerned look appearing on her face.

  “Darling, I wouldn’t get too attached to those who are still alive,” she cautioned, as if she could read my mind. “It would be best if you just let them be and moved on. I know there are people you lov
e and miss terribly. But staying for them will only keep you from the greatest happiness you could ever experience, and leave you stuck in an internal prison of unnatural pain, never letting up until you learn to let go.”

  She held my hands and squeezed them so tight it caught me off guard. Her hold loosened only when I tried to pull away. She looked away for a second, and then gave me an embarrassed smile. “Rachel, please just trust me on this.”

  “Why are you telling me this, Aunt Rose?” I asked her, irritated about this limitation she was placing on me. “I mean, you’re here, aren’t you? And you’re fine, right?”

  “Rachel, I would give anything to be free from this divide.”

  “But who are you waiting for?” I implored her. “What’s causing you to be stuck here?”

  “Don’t you know, darling? I’ve stayed for you and Sara.”

  I was flooded with sudden emotion, the reality of how much Aunt Rose had loved us becoming apparent with her sacrifice of happiness for us. I thought of the past twenty-five years, when her memory had come to me out of nowhere, providing me with a sense of comfort in times when I felt the most alone. I wondered if it was in those times she had been near me, watching me from another reality while trapping herself in a world she couldn’t escape. She’d had no children in her lifetime, showering Sara and me with a love she would probably have reserved for her own children had she become a mother. And just as she had in her life, Aunt Rose had spent the last two and a half decades loving my sister and me while watching over us. I realized that even though she had died, she’d never left at all. The comfort that she gave me only intensified my desire to be close to John, to make sure he was okay before I left him alone forever.