I’m used to lying in bed at night thinking up a million reasons not to go to sleep. I’m used to it, I’m pretty good at it, I’m seemingly always up for it. Tonight it’s the sirens. City living has its drawbacks. My son asked me if I remember falling asleep to those bugs in North Carolina. Those bugs were cicadas, and how could I forget? Only it wasn’t North Carolina that he’s remembering, it was Southern Missouri. It was 2011 and 2015. A mass emergence, both times. Different broods. The year his baby sister died, and the year we vanished. He’s misremembered, but he hasn’t forgotten. I suppose he never will. He’ll lie awake at some point undetermined, a slow year in his late thirties, and remember those bugs.

Maybe he’ll stop saying he misses Missouri. That he feels called back to it. That it’s his home. He doesn’t remember the Missouri I do. He was five when we left. He doesn’t know about the meth trails and the tweakers, the crisp, fall Ozark mornings with the bang of the hunter’s gun so close you look over your shoulder, paralyzed, but with an urge to run.

The cicadas come every 13 and 17 years. Maybe they were in North Carolina too. Maybe I don’t remember. Maybe they came above ground, wreaked havoc, went back down. A different brood. A different mass emergence. I don’t know enough about cicadas to say. I don’t know what to say about the cicadas. I just hold him when he runs into my room. The sirens startling his dreams.

Tonight I’m taken with that paralyzing urge. The gun, not from a hunter. The news. The shootings. The sirens. I’m stuck. Stuck between the urban landscape I’ve come to know, and the inability to get a good fucking night’s sleep. With or without the cicadas.

M.