Brood

L.A. Harris

A Junetime cadence lifts from the distant stretch of flatwoods that bands our west-facing mountainside. There’s something about the rhythm of this place that tilts my insides all sorts of wrong with the emergent chorus of our seventeen-year cicada brood. Roils my stomach until I’m spit-up sick. Makes me trace the slick, whitened scar that slants across my forearm, marking me the last time the cicadas showed. At our spot. There always, Fawn finds me, in the first wide breath of summer.

Our cicadas, our Magicicada, only surface with the rumblings of their prime numbered life cycle, Fawn told me and my cousin Lottie seventeen years ago. I’m still fascinated by the math of it all. Lottie was my meanest uncle’s girl and I couldn’t shake her that summer. I hadn’t seen Fawn since high school and she appeared on my porch that June afternoon, sheepish and wanting my company to find the cicadas after years of cold silence. Her freckles had faded, but her hair was still the color of weak tea with honey-blond streaks framing her narrow face. She had just graduated from some girls’ college over in Virginia and as I scratched up my hair into a ponytail, I struggled to figure out how four years had blurred by so quick.

I tried ditching Lottie, but she wasn’t having it. I didn’t have a mind to challenge her, so the three of us set off and wandered past the clear-cut hillside with stumps scattered like uneven stubble. The lost old growth held unsettled ground for the mountain, the topsoil long gone and washed into the bottomlands. The shadow-bound giants were slashed by Fawn’s lawyer daddy and his dollar-grabbing pen strokes. Fawn chattered at me four years’ worth of catch-up about her biology studies and the new internship her daddy helped her land in Lexington. She didn’t ask once about my foot. Not once. I nodded along, kindly ashamed that I hadn’t done much to speak of since high school, or at least nothing I wanted Fawn to know. I was usually the slowest walker, but Lottie lagged behind, stone silent and sipping on her pint of whiskey. When Lottie caught up, we followed the ruined creek with its silted bottom as black as hardtop.

“Our Magicicada live underground as juveniles,” Fawn said, stomping around a deadfall of pines and leading us up a spur trail. “Thousands and thousands of Magicicada nymphs dig and twist through the soil, surfacing together to overwhelm predators with their numbers.”

Fawn always liked sounding smart. When we were little, that was my favorite thing about her. For many years, my mother cleaned for Fawn’s family and said to treat Fawn like a sister, so I tried. I really did. I thought Fawn would treat me the same. I read and re-read the stack of books Fawn delivered when I was bedridden with my hurt foot, the one that got mashed up when we wrecked her daddy’s new car. Even though Fawn was driving, I carried all the blame for reasons that sounded decent at the time. Fawn was reluctant to get in trouble, said she had too much to lose, like somehow I didn’t or my mother didn’t when she lost the cleaning work. My mother said they came from a long line of takers. Takers all, aside from Fawn’s mom, but the big daddy, her wayward man, gnawed her down, down to her nubbed fingernails, blue when we found her, so taken just the same. While Fawn was at college, my foot had curled inward, fixing itself into a permanent limp. Hard-bitten lessons, I suppose. Are there really any other kinds?

Shadows dropped between the felted folds of the surrounding mountains and Fawn squatted to sift through rust-colored pine needles that carpeted the ground. She planted her hand flat on the forest floor.

“Our Magicicada surface when the soil reaches sixty-four degrees,” Fawn said and shouldered out of her backpack to remove an old, dog-eared notebook. “It can happen in late May or June. I studied Mom’s old charts and they last showed themselves on June 2, 1978. You were there with us, Cissy. Remember?”

I nodded, not really sure I recalled, but there was the proof on the yellowed notebook page—Fawn and Cissy in looped letters over tiny handprints outlined in red crayon. My handprints looked dirty and smudged beside Fawn’s.

We moved on and I was barely keeping up. Fawn said I needed a sturdy walking stick, so we rifled around the understory until she freed a fallen sapling from its tethers of ropey wild muscadine. Lottie pointed to a deep scar on the dead sapling and explained to Fawn that it was a buck rub. Lottie was trying to impress her, but Fawn just politely nodded and raised her eyebrows to me as if to say of course it’s a buck rub. Lottie looked down, her face blooming red with embarrassment, and she slurped a too-loud drink from her pint. Fawn disappointed me when she acted holier-than-thou the way her daddy always operated, but she slid that way with us after her mother passed.

We picked up our pace and Fawn couldn’t pass up a chance to say Magicicada. The bones in her face would ripple with a sad smile when she said it. The same way her mother’s mouth wilted in the months before she receded into her final, vacant descent. Something about that look ran all over me and resurrected my own sorrowful fatigue before I stuffed it down with a pill I tried to secret-swallow. Lottie noticed and elbowed me hard, demanding two pills of her own. I knew better, but complied, and Fawn prattled on about our cicada brood. 

“After emergence, our Magicicada nymphs climb the trees and molt into adulthood, waiting for their exoskeletons to harden,” she said and skirted a stand of moss-furred hardwoods.

Fawn’s long dead mother had taught her these things, the rotations and surges of nature’s signs that Fawn spouted off to us, like me and Lottie didn’t know any better. The pill jetted me forward too fast, and my slow foot caught on wickered briars I fought to navigate. Lottie waited and eyed Fawn who snickered then stiffened when Lottie widened her stance. I avoided Fawn’s pity eyes and balanced on the walking stick to free myself. 

When Lottie finally spoke again, Fawn corrected her pronunciation of Magicicada—twice. Fawn’s tone didn’t land right for me, and it didn’t help that my pill was kicking in hard. I knew how Lottie took that kind of talking down to, especially back in these woods she’d tramped around all her life. Lottie’s eyes barely flared before she smiled, but I saw a hard flicker when she offered Fawn a taste of her whiskey that was waved off.

“Listen up,” Fawn said, shushing us with her bony forefinger. “We’ll find the cicadas gathered in their chorus tree with the Magicicada males singing to attract their mates.”

At the time, I thought it was bullshit. The late afternoon sun strobed through the overstory, and I tripped again, falling backwards into a tangle of ferns. I was resting with the ferns fanning around my head when I heard the cicadas drone deep in the woods. 

Pharaoooooooooooohhhhh, Pharaooooooooooooooooooooooooooh.

The cicadas sounded like some olden dirge, unlocking in my brain a grainy familiarity of our destination, and rattling loose memories of my raspy aunts singing at so many of our family’s funerals. Hearing those cicadas spurred my heart and quickened the pill’s thrust in my bloodstream. Soft sunlight circled Lottie’s head when she offered a hand to boost me to my feet. I declined her gesture and Fawn shamed me for being so feeble willed with the pills, the ones that found me after my run-in with her sort and that car wreck. Fawn’s condescension made my mood turn all sorts of wrong and I angled my walking stick to lever myself upright. Lottie said I should’ve had spine enough to turn my back on Fawn and her kind. Fawn got all worked up again about the cicadas and ignored Lottie, the same way she always used to do in high school. The cicadas drowned out the birdsong and vibrated in my head, taunting me like a challenge.

Pharaoooooooooooohhhhh, Pharaooooooooooooooooooooooooooh.

“They’re crying out the word Pharaoh—Pharaoooh—Pharaooooooh,” Fawn said, mirroring the cicadas’ cryptic intonations. I couldn’t locate their direction, but Fawn knew. She rounded a bend on the trail and I tried my best to keep up. I followed Lottie and watched a band of sweat sop down her backbone, blackening her gray t-shirt and ringing her armpits. The amber whiskey sloshed in her pint bottle that was stuffed in the ass pocket of her jeans. When Lottie’s hands weren’t balled into fists, she fidgeted with a belted leather sheath concealing her pocketknife.

The treetops crowded above me with the cicadas echoing the word Pharaoh, and I shivered, even in the thick heat. The cicadas’ song revved my thoughts into paranoia—reeled my pill-spilled mind back to the story of the Pharaoh and orders to drown male children and the plagues of blood and frogs and lice and flies and boils and dying livestock and hail and locusts and darkness and dead sons and all that Old Testament Exodus wrath my granny used to preach, back when I still listened. Back before she said something turned rotten in me. Same way it did for my daddy, my uncles, and all us kids.

Pharaoooooooooooohhhhh, Pharaooooooooooooooooooooooooooh. My forearms crawled with the cicadas’ noise, and I dug at something skittering under my skin until I opened a wound that wept blood.

“Sounds like locusts,” I said. I hardly recognized my own voice as blood trailed off my fingertips. Lottie bobbed her head in agreement and her brow dripped sweat into her glassy eyes.

“Cissy, they’re not locusts,” Fawn said, so sure and right with only the assurance of a twenty-two year old who hadn’t yet realized place, context, and the long legs of our crooked history. I thought she knew better. I thought she understood how the circumference of death wrapped its weary limbs to hold the graved world in its tight grasp. Why didn’t she know?

“After they mate, the female cicadas scratch slits in the branches and lay their eggs,” Fawn said and ignored my bleeding arm. “Then the adults die off—just disappear all of a sudden. A few weeks later, new nymphs will hatch, drop from the trees and burrow into the earth where they mature underground for the next seventeen-year cycle.”

Fawn spotted her target and bolted forward, snapping her fingers at us to hurry. The cicadas’ chorus tree stood ahead, an ancient oak spreading its knotty branches half toward the reddening sky and half toward the shaded ground. As me and Lottie approached, molted cicada shells fell from the treelimbs like pale ghosts that crunched under our feet. The Pharaoooooooooooohhhhh sound chirred in waves, and I downed a swig of Lottie’s whiskey. The ground circling the old oak was punctured with holes from the Magicicada emergence and I kicked at several of the openings to bury them in the oldest of dirt.

“We were five years old when my mom showed us our Magicicada at this chorus tree,” Fawn said and stretched out her wiry arms. “Can you believe it, Cissy? They’ve been right here for seventeen years.”

The Magicicada males teemed on the chorus tree’s bark and branches like the oak was scaled with a fluttering palsy disease. Something about their chanting reverberations made me and Lottie drink harder.

The Magicicada females lacked the males’ sound-making tymbals that flexed their bodies into song. The females could only flap their wings to make a snapping sound. Or so we were told.

After that last tidbit, Lottie locked her meaty arms with Fawn’s and started spinning her around, slow at first, and then so fast Fawn’s kicking feet lifted in the air. Made me dizzy sick to watch them and it took me some time to realize Fawn was crying. Lottie dropped Fawn in a heap. Fawn tried to stand but couldn’t.

"You used to be sweet," Fawn said and searched my hardened eyes.

Sweet was a word I hadn’t heard in many years. Gone with what I knew, what I recognized when my own reflection was absorbed into Lottie’s steely gaze. Lottie hinged open her pocketknife. I tried to stop Lottie. I really did until she handed me the blade. Fawn crawled to the chorus tree and rested her back against it with the cicadas weaving into her soft hair.

“Cissy, settle down,” Fawn said and sat half-stunned. But I didn’t. Seventeen years ago, we left Fawn there, silenced and entombed with her Magicicada. She never stood a chance.

L.A. Harris grew up in the Appalachian mountains of Southwest Virginia and currently lives in Denver, Colorado. Her fiction has been selected as a finalist for the Lamar York Prize for Fiction, awarded by The Chattahoochee Review, a finalist for the American Fiction Short Story Award, appearing in the American Fiction Volume 17 anthology (New Rivers Press), and an honorable mention for the 2025 Barthelme Prize, awarded by the Gulf Coast Journal. Her work has also appeared in the Chautauqua Journal. You can find her at LAHarrisauthor.com.