itsy-bitsy-beings-abigail-bobst

In the corpse of my fallen oak tree, there lives a band of jazzy, pizzazz-y Cicadas;
Chowing down on chartreuse liquor. Six feet tapping along to bluesy tunes and glassy wings
shimmering under candlelit burrows. Silky ribbons fastened along their hindwings (because it
would be rude to extend them at the table, don’t you know). Friends attached thorax to thorax,
getting drunk off of tree sap. Two friends turned rivals sitting at a tree-trunk bar; Sloshing down
shots of poison ivy cocktails.

     And at the head of the bar sits the star herself: A gentle doe who was kind enough to
stretch her long neck down and entertain drunken, loving, crawling fools. She sings a bluesy
song each night; Delighted crowds of Cicada-people clapping their wings together in an encore.
One must wonder why the doe would strain her neck for creatures she should sooner stamp upon
than love. Perhaps because she, too, feels as though she was born to be hunted and hated.
Perhaps because her glassy eyes mistake the bug-folk for her own kin. Perhaps because her
glassy heart bleeds for bug-folk regardless.

     The two drunken cicadas at the bar are knocked out cold; Probably dreaming of
themselves as grasshoppers instead. At the sign of their dreaming, the buggy bartend passes
around giant hogweed elixir and angels’ trumpet wine. All bugs and doe take a sip in solidarity;
Dreaming too of honeydew and longer lifespans. They gulp down their cocktails and cut their
ribbons loose; Freeing their wings for one final encore (though the act is rather taboo). The doe
can hardly see well with her glassy eyes, but she can feel the prick of warmth on her muzzle as
cicadas pile themselves for bed on her nose. She has to be careful not to cry, you see, because
one of her tears alone could easily drown the poor bugs. And they deserve a kinder death than
that. She parts her teeth and bellows out one last bluesy lullaby. She must sing quietly, however,
for one octave too high could shatter their poor eardrums as well. She hums a familiar tune as
softly as her vocal cords will allow her. But it sounds like an angel’s choir for those with smaller
eardrums than you or I.

     One by one, cicadas rest their many eyes and wrap their bendy arms around each other.
By morning, a gardener will find a tree trunk of dead cicadas and an oddly sullen doe. But
woodland creatures such as these care not for what a god thinks of them. They’re too small to fly
up to Heaven anyways. The doe reaches forward and kisses each of their tiny heads to rest. The
bugs don’t realize that their tiny, poisonous cocktails aren’t enough to topple over a beast like
her. But she sings them to sleep with the sweet lie that she was just as small as them.