A Million Demented Cicadas
by Sarp Sozdinler
e gathered them at dusk, brittle casings caught in the mesh of the fence, clinging to tomato vines, tucked beneath the lip of the porch railing. My sister lined the cicada shells up in rows, counted their legs and hollow backs, swore she could still hear the insects humming, even though their bodies had already risen into the trees. That summer was all exoskeleton—sunburns peeling from our shoulders, lemonade sweating through the glass, the ache of outgrowing. We pressed the shells to our arms, wondered if we could wear them, take on their armor, but everything felt too sharp, too easy to break. When the storms came and swept the shells away, my sister cried, not for the loss, but for how clean the fence looked without them. She said the summer was almost over, but the trees buzzed anyway, louder than ever, impossible to hush.
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Author's Note
The title was part of a line I came across in the closing pages of Elif Batuman’s 2017 novel, The Idiot. The phrase instantly lodged a special place in my mind but I didn’t know what to do with it at the time. It only came together after eight years of brewing, after I’d gotten to write this story about childhood and intimacy, and it clicked so well with the contradictions at its core as a title. I’m generally compelled to follow up on an image that almost semi-spontaneously strikes me and dissect that image and fill it with a lot of depth from one’s personal history until something honest emerges.
Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, Vestal Review, Fractured Lit, Flash Frog, Hobart, JMWW, Trampset, and Maudlin House, among other journals. His stories have been selected or nominated for such anthologies as the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Wigleaf Top 50. He is currently at work on his first novel in Philadelphia and Amsterdam.
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