Nine Bar Blues. Sheree Renée Thomas
wooden tongues.
Scavengers came to take what the families had not deemed worthy to carry on. Whole families had disappeared, it seemed, overnight, leaving all that they once owned behind to decay in the town’s deadly dust. And now Doc stood, staring down into what he thought had to be the dark face of God’s judgment. The Good Lord took man and put him in the garden to work and keep it, but from what Doc could tell, man had done a piss poor job.
And what had that hard, scrabble-back preacher said, before he, too, showed his backside to Viscerol and the town, with its labyrinth prison-like plant that spewed poisons, and the giant water tower emblazoned with its red V? They had transgressed the laws, violated the statutes. They had broken the everlasting covenants, turned an ancient blessing into a new curse. Old Rev. Bowen had preached a word that day, as he took the church Bible and its baptismal altar with him. That they never should have let Viscerol build on their fertile land. That they should have turned those jobs down, and the money, too. Now newborns of townsfolk, who had been there for generations, were being born so sick, they had to carry the future away from there.
Doc didn’t know what that was, rumbling deep inside the open door of earth, but he knew he didn’t want to be standing around when whatever it was came busting through. He bolted up the steps as fast as his legs would carry him and knew exactly what he must do. He planned to be long gone, before the skies rolled up like a scroll and the heavens vanished like smoke.
“Doc! Oh, Doc! What is all this you got piled up in the truck?” Rachel stomped up the steps, the screen door banging shut behind her. Her bike lay on the ground, the rusted kickstand jutted out like a swollen tongue. The house was dark and the whole sky, too, but she could still see that Doc had emptied half the house and had it sitting up in the back of Big Daddy.
A groan met her before she walked in his room.
“What did you say, Doc?”
She put her helmet down and found him lying on his side in his bed, staring out the window. Rachel missed the times when he was a handful, when she used to get off work and find him, stumbling, mumbling in the dark, cranky as ever. Then he would cuss like a thief with an empty wallet, tell her story after story about some slight from the past, a friend who stole away from the broken, poisoned town without even saying goodbye, the neighbor who still had his good clippers and never bothered to acknowledge the debt. The other one, whose grass he cut as if it was his own, when the poison had made the man’s skin peel off under the tainted bloodstained tap water. Thirteen years, he and his friends had suffered, undergoing varying stages of collapse and decay, until only Doc remained, steadfast and stubborn on his family’s land. But it wasn’t the land that worried her. It was his mind. Now it didn’t even look like he was going to be able to hold on to that.
“Where have all the fireflies gone?”
Doc pointed a finger at the darkness outside. “There used to be clouds of them, all up through here. When y’all was little, you used to run out and try to catch them …”
“In jelly jars, yes,” she said, “I remember, Daddy. Why are you worried about fireflies? We ain’t seen them in years, now. And why have you tired yourself out, packing up this old house by yourself? I told you, when you were ready to move, I’d be ready to move with you.”
“‘Cuz they gone like everything else.”
“I ain’t gone. I’m still here.”
He turned to look at her. “Yes, you are. You and that old maple in the yard, the only things softening the heat. What you gon’ do when my eyes close?”
“Oh, Daddy,” Rachel said and brushed some lint out of her eye. “Why you always got to say that?”
Doc didn’t answer for a while. He raised up on his elbow and craned his head, as if listening to a sound far off in the darkness. The wind whistled and the little strip of curtain fluttered like a moth’s wing. Finally, he turned to her, his beard jutted out like a question mark. “Because I don’t want you to be the last one left here.”
Rachel rubbed her palms together, the sound like sandpaper. “What I tell you? When you leave, I leave.” The moon rose from behind a cloud, the light spilling over the windowsill into the room of darkness, a sign and a symbol. “We got to leave soon. The ground ain’t good.”
Doc lay his head down and drifted off to sleep.
The next night, Rachel could hear the sound before she pulled up. When she dropped her bike and first walked up the gravel driveway, little husks crunching under her feet, she thought the sound was coming from the tree. She stumbled on an upturned root that hadn’t been there before.
“Where did you come from?” she asked, and unsnapped the chin strap of her helmet, but the tree was silent. As she walked, the driveway sounded extra gravelly, almost crunchy. She thought she was moving carefully, but she tripped again. Not a root this time, but something hard, shell-like. Rachel turned on the flashlight on her phone and peered at the biggest husk she’d ever seen, liked to jumped right out of her skin.
“Lawd,” she cried before she could catch herself, started laughing at her own fool self. Then she looked around and saw that the yard and the porch steps, all the way up to the front door, were filled with empty shells.
The warm spring night chilled her, the fine hairs on her arm prickled in alarm. She was fine until the air filled with a high-pitched, shrill-sounding song. The sound was deafening. Suddenly, everything about Doc’s yard seemed strange and frightening. The driveway littered with hills of hollow husks, and the maple tree’s branches that hung low in the darkness, as if weighed down by a burden only the wind could see. Hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, resting and waiting in the limbs, singing that song that made all of her flesh ripple and itch. A deep, pulsing sound like a great alarm, ringing through the dark scroll of sky.
And then she saw it. A wave of movement rushing up from what looked like the biggest hole she had ever seen. A mini-Grand Canyon ripped right open in her daddy’s front yard. A few more steps to the right, and she would have been good and gone.
Rachel hunched her back, held her helmet like a weapon, and when a low humming buzzed her left ear, she flew up the front steps, practically barreling through the door.
“Doc!”
Inside the house, they covered the floor like a glittering, blue-green blanket. Rachel shuffled through them, trying not to cry out as they crunched beneath her feet. She found Doc lying there, wrapped up in his bedsheets, mud all over the bed, mud all over the floor. She called to him above the din, but he only turned his eyes away and would not answer. The more he refused to speak, lips sewed up, the more she found herself ripping at invisible seams. In her time, the town had seen its share of plagues, but this was a new marvel. And Doc didn’t want to speak. He didn’t even seem to want to be anymore. He seemed to be waiting, wrapped in his muddy cocoon, surrounded by the insects that cuddled him as if he was their own true kin. He held the sheets so fast that she’d grown weary and stopped wrestling with him. She patted his shoulder and left him to the mud, and the wind, and the rising moon.
Desperate for answers, she found herself breaking and entering. Shamed, Rachel asked for forgiveness as she crossed herself and climbed and picked her way through overturned piles of books, laid out like waterlogged corpses, all that remained of the town’s old library.
After some time, Rachel discovered a thin volume, Cicadas: The Puzzle and the Problem. She forced herself to slow her breathing, to focus her eyes on the handwritten text. An entomologist’s entry read, Magicicada tredicula, but by the time Rachel got to Doc’s house, all she could remember was “magic