• Cicada


    - any large homopterous insect of the family Cicadidae, the male of which produces a shrill sound by means of vibrating membranes on the underside of the abdomen.

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    She loved the night more than anything.

    The way the lake looked as fireflies danced under the moonlight that was reflected on the lake’s smooth surface.

    The infinite night sky filled with far more stars than she could ever hope to count.

    The soft hoot of the owls perched in various trees across the meadow.

    But what ensorcelled her the most about this time of the night, was the cicada’s song.

    To her, it was more hypnotizing than anything else she had ever heard. She would spend hours in the summer lying on the grass field outside her house simply listening to their bewitching melody. Perhaps many people would find ‘melody’ and ‘song’ to be the wrong words to describe the sound the cicada made at night, but to her, it was more than just simple sound.

    It brought her peace, harmony and content.

    As her hands reached up towards the stars, so impossibly far away, she thought back to her life.

    She had lived in this small town all her life. People, both familiar and strange, had come and gone. Friends, family, strangers, lovers… all her life, with all the hello’s and goodbyes she’d have to make in her life, the song of the cicada had always followed her.

    They had followed her from when they sang outside her nursery’s window, til she grew old and white and wrinkly.

    It was the first sound she remembered hearing, and she hoped, that the final thing she would hear when her time came, would be the cicada’s song.