weeks, and then they'd vanished almost overnight.
There must have been larvae in the mud Emma had exhumed to form the bear. She must have packed them right in there. And after two years they had wriggled out of the dried earth as nymphs and molted for the final stage of their life cycles. As adults.
A few minutes on the internet had taught her that these individuals were part of one of thirty distinct North American broods, Brood XIX specifically, colloquially termed The Great Southern Brood. They emerged from deep in the soil every thirteen years for a mating frenzy that lasted less than a month. The females would carve shallow grooves in tree branches in which to lay their eggs. When they hatched, the larvae fell to the ground and burrowed more than a foot down, where they survived on the roots of plants for exactly thirteen years before all of them erupted in a synchronized uprising, climbed into the canopy, and molted into the terminal stage of their development.
It was as though Emma had somehow breathed life into her creation. She had left a parting gift that proved that a miracle could be birthed from decomposition and apparent death. There was no way the nymphs should have survived. And yet they had.
Vanessa believed it was a message of hope, a portent.
What was two years when a cicada waited thirteen to spread its wings and live for but a single month?
She was going to find her daughter.
And she was going to bring her home.
It felt like a great weight had been lifted from her soul, as though a ray of sunshine had cut through the fog through which she'd been blindly stumbling since Emma's disappearance.
The hint of a smile curled the corners of her lips.
She heard a knock at the front door and rose from the table. Even her step felt lighter as she strode across the living room. For the first time, she thought that everything just might work out all right. Or at least as well as it could.
Vanessa opened the door.
The feeling fled as quickly as it had arrived.
'Hi, sis,' Trey said.
He had paced on her porch for more than ten minutes before he finally found the courage to knock. Part of him had hoped that Vanessa would still be asleep, that he would have to return later. It was selfish, he knew. He should have called her the moment they found the remains, but he had needed to be certain. And now that he was, he wasn't sure he was going to be able to vocalize the words. He couldn't even bring himself to look her in the eyes.
Vanessa stood silently in the doorway as he shifted nervously from side to side, the porch planks creaking under his weight. He forced himself to look up from his toes. Her pale cheeks were already wet with tears.
She must have read the news from his expression, his posture.
'When?' she whispered.
He finally summoned the nerve to look her in the eyes and saw only fathomless pits of pain.
'Yesterday,' he said. 'We found her body in the bayou. Half a mile from Caddo Lake.'
'How long?'
'Two years.'
'How did she...?'
'Vanessa...'
'I need to know.'
Trey reached out and took her hand.
'I need to know!' she screamed and jerked her arm away.
Trey eased closer and opened his arms. She balled her fists and hit him on the chest over and over until he was able to draw her into his embrace. She continued to pound on his back until she eventually ran out of adrenaline and collapsed into him, sobbing.
They slumped to the floor right there in the foyer. He held her tightly and willed whatever strength he had into her. Tears streamed from his eyes as well. He leaned his cheek against hers and whispered directly into her ear. He told her everything. From the discovery of the corpse through the identification process. He described the condition of the body. The broken bones. The lack of flesh from decomposition and insect consumption. The teeth. The hair. He spared no detail. Vanessa needed to know and it would only hurt worse if she had to hear it from someone else in bits and pieces doled out over the coming days and weeks. He needed to crush her now to know if she would be able to survive it.
She cried until there were no more tears, her head on his shoulder, her fingers clenching his shirt. He held her in the silence for what felt like hours, unable to offer any words of comfort. She had heard them all before and they sounded hollow coming from him. He thought she had drifted off to sleep or fallen into a state of catatonia when she finally spoke.
'Will you...?' She paused to dampen her dry mouth. 'Will you take me to see my husband?'
Vanessa sat at the foot of Warren's grave. Her brother waited patiently in his car fifty yards away on the sizzling ribbon of blacktop that meandered through the low hills crowned with lush grasses and carefully tended copses of trees. Right now, she needed her husband more than ever before. She had never felt so alone. Even after Warren's death, there had always been the promise that her daughter was out there somewhere and it was only a matter of time before they were reunited. And now that promise had been found broken and abused, cast aside like refuse in the swamp.
'There's nothing left for me here,' she whispered.
The cruel sun beat down on her. She would have felt the skin on the back of her neck burning were she able to feel anything at all.
She heard the deafening chorus of cicadas from the cypress trees looming over the row of headstones, the same trees from which the crunching sounds had previously originated. There had to be thousands of them in that one stand alone. Predator satiation, they called it. Produce more offspring than its enemies can consume and the species will survive. The individual is nothing. Expendable. The same rules applied to humanity.
Vanessa crawled over the faint lump until she was close enough to touch the headstone. She ran her palm over the smooth marble surface. The polish was beginning to pit. She traced the letters with her fingertips. It was as close as she was going to get to the physical consolation she so desperately needed from the man she loved.
'Would you forgive me? If I just went to sleep and woke up there with you? Wherever you are. Would you be able to forgive me?'
The cicadas sang even louder, their amassed voices making the leaves shiver.
'I can't do it anymore. I don't
A gentle breeze from the east rustled the trees and the cicada song abruptly ceased. It was replaced by the buzzing sound of thousands of wings as a cloud of insects rose from the cluster of cypresses. They swarmed above her, whirling like a cyclone, casting strange dotted shadows. The air stirred around her at the behest of so many wings, like fingertips just grazing the fine hairs on her body. A lover's touch.
And then the cloud descended.
Chitinous bodies assaulted her from all sides. She threw her arms up over her head and shrieked in surprise. Cicadas tangled in her hair. Wings tapped her skin. Tiny feet poked like so many needles. They scurried up her sleeves, down the back of her shirt. Across her lips and her tongue. She spat and forced her mouth closed as tightly as she could. They clicked in her ears as they tried to squeeze into the canals. Then, one by one, they took to flight again.
The buzz of wings metamorphosed into the high-pitched squealing and clicking sound.
Cautiously, she lowered her arms and eased herself up to her knees. She couldn't even hear herself think over the cicadas. It sounded like they were screaming from inside her head.
She plucked several stragglers out of her hair, where they had become hopelessly entangled, and brushed herself off. It still felt as though they were crawling all over her. She looked up at her husband's headstone and
