Cricket Rhapsody — Anshi Purohit
Crickets. Tonight, all I hear is the fierce cacophony of crickets.
They will not halt their incessant chirping, broadcasting unspoken dilemmas for the world to bellow from rooftops in a raspy call-and-response sequence.
Tonight, I saw a car lit aflame as the traffic crawled, succumbing to the eternal static eating away at our dulled minds. We will not succumb, we whispered to ourselves as the car slogged along to radio music.
Tonight, I sat next to a girl I was not supposed to love in a car ride home from orchestra.
Crickets; they haunt me, staining my thoughts with the hollowness accompanied by their throaty rasps beneath a rising ochre moon.
Tomorrow, cicadas will swarm the roads and send cars sprawling over ravines—the natural world order from the Earth’s first jettison–-but in the wake of a full moon and after the crescendos of evensong tide over, we are left with chirping. Cicadas will follow me into school, waving a spidery limb as I flash an idee while staring at the boy in front of me. How does human chemistry input its seemingly flawless equations to produce an unfamiliar whole gathered in trembling hands that did not wish to cradle a born failure?
Are we more like crickets or lost birds?
On nights like these with her beside me—strapped to our own isles of unbecoming and becoming—an endless cycle overwhelms me. I descend into the hollowness we are birthed from, an abyss where the crickets feast on starved souls.
I would rather sell my soul than have it broken and discarded as it withers in a landfill of broken human things. Even there, I would not escape the crickets’ ephemeral callings and rough-sewn tethers. I am not supposed to do many things; even existing is a complex dilemma nobody is willing to help me navigate. The world is hard enough on sentient beings as it is; we do not need any more rules presiding over self-governing bodies.
I am an unspoken mess with no destination or journey except the concentric circles defining her personality, the overlapping contradictions paralleling my own. She is too religious, too rule-abiding and narrow-minded for me. Yet, when she surprises me I am stunned and she continues without stopping, shocking me with each treasure I unearth.
She knows more than I can fathom. And yet, she rests her head on my shoulder or pokes my dimple in a rapid, almost frantic, gesture. We watch the sun’s orange tears spill from behind dust-smote windows and glazed, sagging eyelids oozing with pus. I have picked up on things during my tenure living a life as a doppelganger, as an inhibitor of crickets, this invasive parasite of my dreams and ambitions threatening to send me to remote isolation.
One of these things withstands the tests of time and trust: the crickets never lie, and I am irrevocably in love with her again.
Anshi Purohit (she/her) is a writer living in Maryland. She has been published in twelve literary magazines such as the Eunoia Review and Mobius Lit. She has also been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. Aside from writing and reading, she loves listening to music and eating dark chocolate. You can follow her on Instagram @an.sheep_
