We feed. We sing. We jostle and join and flutter and crackle. We, some of us, watch. And some of us listen. We knock on the doors of houses that should be empty. We find the crack in the wall. We move from next to next. Some of us stay behind. We shift. We change. We molt. We die. The brood is healthy. We feed. We feed. We feed.
“I just don’t get how you can live out there,” Bobby says.
“Can you pass the milk?” August replies.
Bobby slides the carton over to August, eyebrow raised and waiting.
“How can you live out there?”
“It’s my life.”
“It’s so loud.”
Looking at August as she pours the milk by drips and drops into her weak tea—the tea he keeps in the cabinet for days like these, when August knocks on the door unannounced and invites herself into his dim kitchen—Bobby wonders about her morning. He imagines her plodding walk through the undergrowth, the way that, over years and miles, her boots have ground a fine trail from there to here. He wonders how quickly she shuts her own door, if the kids wave from the window as she departs. Bobby had met the babies once, when August had strapped their tightly wrapped grub bodies onto her chest and back and trekked to his house, the house that familial noise had once filled and was now home only to the metronome of his footsteps and the crackle of the earth.
In the almost-stillness of the almost-silence that follows Bobby’s condemnation, August raises an eyebrow, smiles with half of her face, showing her teeth. Bobby thinks, believes, that he sees the glint of a broken wing caught against her canine. But it could be a trick of the light.
“Can you get some tomatoes?” She asks.
“No.”
August looks at her brother, frowning.
“What do you mean, ‘No’?”
“There’s aphids again. I saved a tomato, chopped up in the freezer.”
August sighs and keeps cracking eggs.
“Okay, I’ll help you fix it after we eat,” she says.
The frozen tomatoes hiss when they hit the hot pan. Oil sputters. August stirs lightly, watching the egg form into curds.
“You need to flip it.”
“I’m the one cooking.”
August folds the omelet in two, watches as the outside layer stays stuck to the pan, the fluffy innards naked and pale as she presses the spatula down. Juices bubble out, raw egg splitting through the cooked.
We feed. We crawl. We slither. We rustle and tear. Sticky wings unfold and dry. We, some of us, glow in the unseen dark. We burrow. We feed. We fly. We rush toward the open door. We flow with the river. We crave the flickering light. We dance. We sing. We flow in masses of hundreds and thousands. We ask no questions. There are no questions to ask.
In the cellar, it’s worse than August had guessed. Bobby had said ‘aphids’ and no more. Standing in the doorway, hands blue under the glow of the grow lights, August makes no move to step forward. She looks back to Bobby, sitting at the bottom of the stairs. In the glow of the lightbulb hanging above him, his face is thrown into hills and valleys: shadows hide half of him from her. Bobby leans forward with his elbows on his knees, as though he can gain the wisdom of their father by imitating his postures. He looks up at August.
“I know it’s bad,” he says.
“Aphids always are,” she says.
August looks back toward the grow room. All across the floor, yellowed leaves curl into themselves. The tomato plants hang limply, still tied to supports, the weight of their rotting fruit pulling the limbs lower and lower. The aphids are almost imperceptible, a haze of whitish brown across the room. There are, August knows, eggs clustered all around, each plant surely host to thousands, invisible but waiting, cells cycling and splitting, something new eager to emerge.
“Come on,” she says.
August steps forward, right foot and then left. As she moves deeper into the room, she’s conscious of the soles of her boots sticking to the floor, each dead and dying leaf coated in sappy honeydew, the sugary fluid pissed out by thousands of aphids. August pictures it: the minuscule aphid with its mouth pierced into the stem, the gush of liquid that should run through the plant suddenly redirected into the body of the parasite. Under pressure, its body becomes little more than a desperate funnel. It would almost be enough to pity them, except for the sudden memory of her own body that bubbles up in August’s mind, too similar to cast aside. Bobby steps after her and threads of soft sweetness stretch from the floor to his sneakers with each stilted step. He wonders idly what would happen if they did nothing, if they locked it, if they surrendered one room—just one. He wonders at the power of an offering, at the difference between what is taken and what is given. But then August speaks and Bobby must leave thoughts of sacrifice behind.
“I’m going to check on the rest, do you think they’ve got to the next room?”
“I looked a little before you showed up, most everything else is okay, might be some moving on the peppers, I’ll check the potatoes.”
“Okay, you go, I guess.”
August strips the room, cutting the dead plants down and dropping them into black plastic bags. Soft tomato flesh is everywhere, squelching under her feet. Red skins slip against the bloodied concrete. August finds more leaves, more aphids, in the soil of raised beds and floating in the hydroponic tanks. It’s just one room. She hopes it’s just one room.
Bobby comes back as August begins screwing the hose into the wall.
“Shit, you’re almost done.”
August looks up at Bobby. There’s nothing much to say, she is almost done. The plants are packed away, full bags ready to be heaved up the stairs. The soil is aerated and watered; her fingernails are clotted with dirt. She has drained the tanks, refreshed the growing medium. August and Bobby stand under the yellow hazard lights and consider the gutted grow room. From somewhere, a drop of water pings against a piece of metal. The smell of soil—sweet and rotten, yeasty and tingling—fills the room. In the back of his throat, Bobby tastes the sourness of bile, the memory of a childhood spent biting into tomatoes like apples, of pausing to rub them carelessly across his t-shirt before tearing into them with his teeth, the way they would burst and he would swallow the seeds whole.
Standing still next to her brother, August grasps the nozzle and pulls the release back, firing water around the dark room, aiming for the concrete floor, the metal sides of the raised beds, the cinder block walls. After a time, everything is dark and damp and a slow river of water runs toward the drain at the center of the room. August imagines the victorious aphids, riding leaf boats down an endless stream.
“Where do you think they came from?” August asks.
Bobby smiles with one side of his face.
“Where they always come from—everywhere.”
August, almost fondly, huffs a laugh.
“Yeah, or nowhere, whatever. How’s the rest?”
“Okay, gonna have to spray the potatoes a little, keep an eye out. But the brassicas are good and the herbs are fine.”
“What about the roses?”
“What about the roses?”
“Aphids like roses, I like roses.”
“Can’t eat roses.”
“Well that’s just not true.”
We smell. We taste. We run and hide. We listen to the sound of the rushing water. We await the rise and fall of the forever light. We war. We help. We hunt and gather. We shake. We know our place and keep to it. We believe our place to be all places. We find the crack like water. We crawl. We beg. We scream. We tapdance. We sing. We sing. We sing.
Later, they haul the bags out of the cellar, each distended with bent stalks and sticky fruit, nodes and branches pressed against the plastic. They look, August thinks, like overgrown chrysalises, wiggling with the dewy body of something unmade. Bobby goes first, bags clenched in either fist. He steps gingerly, trying to distribute the weight. Each step creaks nonetheless. The plastic scrapes against the cement walls as he trips toward the cellar door. August watches as he throws a shoulder against the wood and forces it open, warm light falling around him. Something about him has gentled or maybe she has grown more patient. Looking at him, as he lifts each bag without complaint, she sees him like an echo, the image of her brother bounced against the cavern of the world and returned to her changed.
Bobby looks down at her.
“Are you coming or what?”
August hefts her bags onto her shoulder and follows after him.
Standing in the kitchen once again, August sets a squelching bag on the tile floor. Bobby drags it over to the front door, the one with the three square windows, through which flashes of light shine in.
August waits by the door, glittering overcoat thrown on, boots laced tight around her ankles. She can hear Bobby shuffling through the house, senses his footsteps somewhere above her as he collects his many things. Growing up, they weren’t thing-people, not more than any other family in the neighborhood. August remembers hauling their bikes out of the garage, how Bobby could be careless, taking off headlong into the street. Sometimes, she would only know where he was by the whir of the playing card that he’d clipped to the back support, the edge catching every spoke as the wheel turned. They’d race in circles through the neighborhood, picking up friends here and there as they flooded the streets with noise. The neighborhood sloped down, each loop of houses more downhill than the last. In those days, it was only as they biked closer and closer to the river that they would notice a change in the air, a slight vibration, an energy, a noise.
Once, on a dare, which was how August did most things back then, she and Bobby had snuck down to the river’s edge, switchbacking through the undergrowth, sliding on rotting leaves and pine needles. They grabbed onto the bodies of small trees, tangled their hands in exposed roots as they lowered themselves to the sandy bank. When they looked up, the neighborhood boys were all gathered at the top of the ravine, watching. None of them had ever gotten so close before. The river ran swiftly, its murky waters skipping over boulders and tree limbs. It wasn’t the kind of place you went swimming; the water ran too swiftly even to step in and turn over algae-covered stones. Their river flowed without beginning or end and, when heard at a distance, through thickets of trees, blanketed their homes in a calming din.
Up close, August and Bobby could see a squirming cloud over the river. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of black pinpricks danced a stuttering two-step, the motion of their bodies jagged and frenetic. In their stillness, August and Bobby didn’t notice as the swarm engulfed them. In the space of a glance between them, they looked up to see that the black dots had gotten closer. Bobby had looked at August, glanced sharply at her boots before shuddering and returning his gaze to the river. When August had looked down, she’d seen a clamor of lady beetles, a few hundred, crawling their way up her foot, burrowing between the laces. A few were clinging tightly to the fibers of her sock. August still believed in luck then, so she’d let them be, and looked back toward her big little brother as he brought his right hand down sharply across his left forearm, where he’d pushed his sleeves up to his elbows in a flight of childhood fancy. In the almost-quiet buzz of the woods at the rushing river’s edge, the slapandcrunch reverberated and August closed her eyes, nervous to see what Bobby had killed.
“Shit,” Bobby said.
And August glanced at the slimy mess across his skin. She counted four long wings, iridescent and almost see-through, now clinging wetly to Bobby’s freckled arm, disconnected from the long body that they had previously been attached to. And there, bent and crushed wide, was the body itself, long and leaking blood, almost blue, almost green. The worst was the head, with its big eyes, still looking like it might know something. August had pulled her shirt sleeve down over her fist and, with one firm swipe, cleaned the dragonfly off of Bobby’s arm, scraping down past his hand and into the crowded air. Eyes scrunched tight, August had thought of their mother, ferrying spiders and centipedes outside with sheets of paper and overturned cups. August had whispered sorry and with a nauseous flick of her ankle, deposited the lady beetles back to their home, which was the same earth that teemed around them. And so August had stopped believing in luck and Bobby had started believing in omens.
We lie in wait. We sing. We flow. We fly. We move as many. We move as one. We crave something sickly sweet. We listen to the hum at the center of all things. We move toward the source in trickles and droves. We bite. We chew. We tear. We shift. We change. We die. We know the hand that comes down. We sacrifice one for the whole. We bite the hand that feeds.
“Okay, sorry, I’m ready.”
August looks up at Bobby, the little brother with the afterimage of a dragonfly on his arm.
“You sure you don’t need more layers?” August asks.
She can feel Bobby looking at her overcoat, the swinging hem, her exposed hands, head, neck. In the early years, pretty much everyone had worn thick coverings, balaclavas, bee-keeping nets, goggles and gloves. But now, it was simply her looking at him: Bobby who ventured out with covered skin and August who did not. She had given it up years ago, exhausted by the dark. Standing in front of her, August thinks Bobby looks ready for underwater exploration, netted hat draped to his shoulders, iridescent ski goggles hiding his eyes and a medical mask over his mouth. She thinks he might be wearing two jackets and he’s fashioned a kind of kilt over his trousers, which tuck into gaiters that then clip to his boots. He wears snow gloves, the kind that extend up to the elbow. August can barely see any skin, just the sides of his face, his ears—plugged of course.
“Can you even hear me?” August half shouts.
“The plugs aren’t for sound,” Bobby shouts back.
August resists the urge to make a joke about shedding skins, about dried exoskeletons and the bug-eyed look of the goggles. Standing together, she’s sure they resemble each other, if not for the familial resemblance then for the way they carry themselves under the swinging weight of the unsettled air.
“Okay, grab your bags and stand right behind me. I’m going to open the door wide so we can shuffle out, and you’ll slam it behind you, okay?” August asks. It’s a bad reflex, the-older-sister-always-in-charge reflex. But she does it anyway, and Bobby doesn’t seem to mind.
“Yeah, okay. Try to be quick, I don’t want so many in the house, not like last time,” Bobby says.
August faces the door, hauls the black plastic bags in her right hand, grasps the knob with her left. She looks back at Bobby, just for a moment, a flick of her neck. And she throws the door wide open.
The sun is blinding, but then, the sun always is. It’s enough to make Bobby question everything in the split second between awe and horror when he sees insect after insect approach the door. They fly, scuttle, claw, and crawl. He steps through the door, bags dragging in one hand. He pulls the door tightly shut, a sickening crunch over the bodies of the first wave. And all at once, he is outside. And everything is so bright. And everything is so loud. And the insects are everywhere, upon him in an instant. He stands still, just a step away from his home, their family home, and Bobby finds that he is nowhere and everywhere. He had known it would be like this, had lost himself before, was accustomed to finding himself a few feet over, a little to the left. He watches himself take halting steps away from the front door, hand somehow still gripped tightly around the trash bags. He sees the wet juices of the rotting tomatoes starting to seep across the ground, the sticky honeydew attracting ants and other obedient things. Ahead of him, August stands at the edge of the drive, at the edge of the forest where they had once delighted in getting lost.
Standing there, looking at her in the light of day, Bobby can see the real August, the August that trudges through miles and marshes to visit. The August that touches them with her bare skin, who collects their dead, fallen parts, who eats them when the situation demands. She turns to look at him now, smiling. As she twists, her glittering coat catches the sunlight and Bobby sees the carapaces, exoskeletons, wings that she’s stitched to the coat, the green half-beetles and butterfly wings. Somehow, the light show keeps the swarm from landing on her, the greens, blues, oranges, and yellows announce her as a beautiful, poisonous thing.
“Okay? Come on,” she says.
“I am,” he says.
And they drag their spoiled crop to the shed with the caved in walls, where the compost pile teems. Bobby watches worms wriggle through the rotting flesh of apples, mats of old leaves, stalks and skins. It’s been years since anyone tended to the pile regularly and he sees potato greens sprouting through much of the rot. He wonders what he might find were he to reach into the center. Millipedes scuttle over and under, over and under, and the odd cockroach emerges from the dark. Bobby considers the world before him and wishes he could love it. August slashes the bags open, all but pours the desiccated plants onto the pile, juices and seeds sprinkle the ground around her feet.
“When’s the last time you were out?” August asks.
“What?” Bobby asks.
“When’s the last time you were out here? I know you leave. You promised me.”
“Oh, last week sometime, probably during the rain.”
“Might want some sun sometime.”
“The coat looks good, kind of scary.”
August hums something under her breath.
“It’s mostly supposed to be pretty. Thanks.”
Bobby nods and looks away, starts gathering shreds of plastic that have hit the ground, bends slowly to the earth. August watches as he brushes his gloved hands through the tall grasses, like a mother delousing with a fine-toothed comb. Looking at Bobby now, August suddenly wishes she could grab him by the wrist and pull the glove off in one swift motion, giving him the gift of sun on bare skin, of a breeze brushing against his fingers. They used to run barefoot out here in the summers, dodging mosquitos and black flies. She remembers plucking the grasses by the root, holding the thin leaves between her thumbs and whistling across the gap. They had played away the dim evening hours until the only light around was the glow of the kitchen window calling them back inside. And they would run in, clutching bruised buttercups and dandelions in their hands. August missed the brother that had known how to be in the world. But the world wasn’t like that anymore.
We listen. We scramble. We escape. We ascend far above. We burrow far below. We sleep for generations in the crowded dark. We awake breathing through our skins. We dream all the while. We have no intentions. There are no intentions to have. We do not imagine leaving. We do not imagine. We feed. We rush. We tend the brood. We dance through the air.
“I want to check on the roses,” August says.
And Bobby sighs, looks at her from his place across the compost pile. He heaves another shovelful of dark rotting matter. August rakes through as he turns, catches sight of the wriggling tides in the layers, the strata below. As kids, they had learned that you could cut a worm in half, that the two ends would wriggle away from each other, still alive. And August can’t remember how true that is anymore, but she watches as Bobby’s shovel slices cleanly into the dirt, imagining segmentation upon segmentation, worms regenerating like cells, like Hydra.
Behind the house, the roses look okay, overgrown but still blooming. August strokes through the petals with her fingertips. She finds overfed bees inside pink blossoms and red petals fall to the ground with each gust of wind. Clustered here and there are clutches of aphids, digging into the stems with their piercing-sucking mouthparts. Spiders hang from the eaves of the house, hide in the grass, even descend from the rosebuds themselves. August imagines that they will make quick work of the aphids and thin spider silks catch the light before disappearing again.
“Why did we ever even plant these?” Bobby asks.
“It got warm enough,” August says.
August plucks a rose petal, rolls it neatly before popping it in her mouth. Bobby imagines the fibrous chew as her teeth cut into the powder-soft surface, crisp with water. Beside them, with them in place although not, perhaps, in time, the rose bush trembles and remembers loss.
Distantly, the rush of water, of roots plunged into the dark—the vibration of Bobby’s footsteps, or the indistinct suggestion of sound: voices, laughter, sobs. But that wasn’t today, or, it wasn’t now. Distantly, two sets of child feet run across the damp grass and a bumblebee lands graciously on a limb now long dead. The soil had been cold, almost too cold, and life had been new. Now, or, in a time somehow warmer and more empty, children no more, two sets of feet compress the soil and the vibration of a thought brews in one sibling, but not the other. Loneliness, the rose bush knows, hums at a particular frequency, a breath lower than melancholy but higher still than despair. Bobby resonates, even in the absence of his footsteps. When he is somewhere else, dampened by a structure tall and old, the rose bush senses him by their shared wanting, which for Bobby seems to emanate on the wind and for the rose bush by the twitch of its roots in the ground. Distantly, a woman leans in and breathes deep. Closer, a hand muffled by cloth prunes old branches as rain falls softly to the earth. Now, the vibration that had been a thought was becoming a sound in the throat of a man who had made, finally, a choice.
“Have you heard the rumors about Essex County?” Bobby asks.
“What?”
August looks at him, surprised to see the ski goggles hanging around his neck, brown eyes uncovered. Through the mesh haze, he looks real for the first time in years, determination belying something beyond survival.
“Have you heard the rumors about Essex County?” he repeats in a whisper, looking around like someone or something might here.
“Bobby, what are you talking about? Who are you even talking to?”
Bobby waves this away, raises his hand askew as if to gesture all around.
“And what are these—what’s being said about Essex County?” And there’s the silent, unasked question, Why don’t I know? How do you know before me?
“August, they’re saying that it’s quiet there.”
Silently, the rose bush leans north and water runs more quickly up, more quickly down: xylem and phloem expand and contract to the beat of Bobby’s hope.
August sighs, and concern resonates deep in her chest.
“Oh, Bobby, you know those rumors are never true.”
Bobby nods and is inexplicably smiling again, like he might at a child or a sister who will learn some things in time.
“It’s real Auggie, they’re saying that the seismographs are almost totally still. Lake Willoughby is as clear as tap water and you can see the sky—only the sky. They say that at night, it’s dark enough to see the milky way. They even sleep under it.”
Bobby has missed the quiet almost as long as the insects. In middle school—but it could have been high school, maybe college—some kid or teacher or professor had lent down at his desk and whispered Do you know that the bugs are getting louder? And Bobby had rolled his eyes Yeah? Why’s that? And Bobby had returned to the notebook on his desk, already tuning the kidteacherprofessor out as they said To compete with us—they can’t hear each other anymore, not with all the noise we’ve been making. And we’re only getting louder. Bobby had supposed then, supposed now, that that was fair. He could sympathize with wanting to be heard, hell, to be seen. He felt wounded on behalf of the fireflies, the ones blinded by the city lights, flying toward their beloved only to find a blinking marquee.
But then there was the buzz, the incessant din, the chorus of competing voices that followed him everywhere. Even with his hands over his ears, he felt the persistent vibration of the air around his house, the minute shift of the soil. In dreams, he was covered in insects—beetles of all sizes crowded his mouth, his nose. He saw centipedes walk across his forehead, their feathery legs twitching across his eyelashes. He felt that he had been underwater for years, unable to see right, unable to breathe. Looking at August now, Bobby could see the doubt fighting its way across her face, the furrow of her brow, the twist of her mouth. How strange, he thinks, to have this little older sister, the last person connecting him to this place, a person he would never choose to be friends with, a person he misses even when she’s standing next to him.
“Why do you believe it?” she asks.
“Even if it’s not true, even if I go and it’s all a lie—I can’t remember the last time I wanted something like I want this.”
Distantly, the rose bush remembers pain and its thorns glint sharper in the light.
“Why not walk home with me? To my house, my family—your family?”
“I need something new, a place I can’t remember.”
August rakes her fingers through more blossoms, knocking petals to the ground.
“And what, you’re gonna walk all the way up there?” She asks.
Bobby nods and August wonders how long he’s been planning this, how long this rumor has been spreading, and by what, and by who.
“I’ve got it all set out, only three days, maybe four.”
“You have no business dragging yourself north like that.”
“What business do I have staying? I’ve heard all there is to hear.”
August leans back into the breeze, listening to the river carve its way through the wood. Distantly, she hears the buzz of a playing card catching spokes.
“And how will you reach me?”
“How do you ever reach me?”
We nest. We burrow. We build and scale and weave. Generations fall and generations rise. The sleepers hum under the crust of the earth. The waking din crowds out the light. We do not want for more than we have. We have all that we need. We sing to the growing brood. We turn ourselves out and in. We leave some behind. We watch as we are left.
The siblings go back inside. They scrape the interloping insects off the walls. They close their eyes against the buzz. And August walks home along that well-trodden path between her place and Bobby’s, which are the same in the way that a childhood shared is a node on a tomato plant, one side of which bears fruit and one side of which can’t help but seek out the sun.
Bobby leaves, watched by no one and everyone. He throws open the doors, the windows. He leaves the lights on. He pulls the mesh hat low, buckles the pack across his chest. He says nothing. There’s nothing to say. There’s no one to say it to. He detects the smallest of shifts in the din, the rhythmic buzz relaxing into an atonal drone. From above, he imagines the sea parting with his every step, those frenetic bodies, those not clinging to his clothes, making way for him in the dark.
Beetles burrow into the floorboards. Moths envelop themselves in draperies and pillows. Dripping honeycomb fills the drawers. Hornets make nests under the eaves. August stands in the hall in her glittering beetle coat, runs her fingertips through the swarm, listens to the new voices filling the empty house. Outside, the rose bush grows heavy with the weight of its beauty and flowers brush gently against the ground. Distantly, so distantly that its farthest roots barely tremble with the knowledge, a familiar vibration arrives at the edge of the known world. Now, a cricket sings to August across grasses and fields and she catches it in the nostalgia between wakefulness and sleep. The stars blink in time to a song that even the rose bush has not yet learned. Leaning against a banister spongy with termites, August sucks honey from the comb, rubs the drips from her chin with the back of her hand. She closes her eyes against the sensation of being watched and knows that they will watch anyway.
We sing. We dance. We watch and wait and descend. We are liquid filling the emptiness. We chase the lights of false gods. We know our place. We feed. We clean. We harmonize with the chorus of all things. We move from next to next. We make way. We move in neat lines. We move in mobs and armies. We carry the dead. We do not look back.
