Cricket's Leg

Broken punctuation, this elongated comma, stiff parentheses

with no partner to close the deal. Headless arrow, it points to a day I can’t recall, but I was outdoors or this tiny limb would not rest on a page I don’t recall turning. It was warmer than this day whose draperies of rain wants to slow into ice. Each summer a cricket gets in the house, camps under some piece of furniture too solid for my back, then grates forth a song whose notes are insomnia and the grave.

I forget the name of the pond where we were fishing when Billy Dale pinched a cricket behind the head and slid the book between carapace and soft body. “That’ll make your skin crawl.” He held the head to my finger so I could feel the little mandibles work against my flesh. I’ve never heard of anyone gnawed to death by crickets, but I developed an interest in artificial lures the next time we stopped to buy bait.

Like a road aiming beyond the map’s boundaries, that non-kicking leg always points backward, no matter that our focus is always forward. Ahead, there will always be disaster—potholes, cars overheating, a wallet’s absence. There will always be the grinding you hear when dark gauzes our vision and all we see turns strange.

In Sunday school, there were plagues, clouds of insects blocking the sun, fields devoured in a frenzy of minutes. There were always reasons; they always felt small: failing to recognize an angel in the doorway, an offering of fruit instead of meat, a son punished incorrectly. In a few months I’ll walk out into the humidity and the one endless note of cricket-song, all of them rubbing their legs, like small demented fiddlers ushering us through half a year of nights, then going still with weather or loss of a limb that lies silent as shadow between pages of a book I’m not done reading yet.

Al Maginnes