Gryllus Texenis
The autumn of my sophomore year was the autumn of the crickets. Their numbers were something of a biblical magnitude, writhing black masses that congregated on walls and around walkways; jumping down on unsuspecting passersby from the alcoves surrounding the university library. These masses were measured not by the number of bodies, which would have been impossible to calculate, but by the number of square feet they occupied.
His house was along my daily route, unavoidable, looking the same as it had when we were together. Worn white siding and a bowed porch, a small remnant of the neighborhood that had existed before the international student housing was constructed. The window to his bedroom - the window facing the porch, the one I would knock on so as not to wake his roommates - was framed by a shivering horde of the insects. Always moving and never quiet. I wondered if they kept him up at night.
Under my feet, a loose piece of concrete shifted and broke free. Crickets surged forth from the crack, twitching and jumping onto my pant legs. I shook them away.
At the front of the main Art Building (a very uninspired name), there were automatic doors, but I found them to be disabled upon arrival. I circled to the back entrance, and carefully wiped smeared insect remains from the bottoms of my chucks before going inside. At the far end of the hall, a girl frantically scooped crickets into a bucket. Hundreds of crickets were setting off the automatic door sensors and rushing through en masse, thus causing the doors to be disabled.
Ivanka stood at the entrance of her classroom, waiting for art history students to arrive. We are under attack! she cried in her thick Hungarian accent.
The Intro to Sculpture class required each student to create a work using no less than 100 of the same item. Rolando made a plaster cast of his arm, painted it black, and covered it with cricket carcasses. He was forced to throw the sculpture away immediately after critique, as no one could stomach the smell.
Someone else decided to remove the artwork from the display case downstairs and replace it with a makeshift installation. Multi-colored strings suspended dead crickets at varying heights. Behind them, a sign read Your Tuition Dollars at Work.
The school gallery was closed down entirely to prevent any potential damage to the artwork.
With each passing week, the situation grew more dire. The issue was not just the sheer quantity of crickets, nor their noise, but the stench of death and decay. Foolishly the university had made plans for extermination, but not for removal, and now the campus was littered with carcasses. A mass grave. Even still, the live crickets outnumbered the dead.
Late fall brought on the first frosts of the season, and the weather finally accomplished what humans could not. The noise slowly ceased; the fetor faded. The crickets were gone. By the spring semester, the entire episode was almost entirely forgotten.
Every day I passed his house on the way to class and wondered if there was another girl there to enjoy his sleepy morning eyes and terrible jokes. Almost a year had passed - did I still care? Perhaps I was different, stronger in some way.
After all, I had survived a plague.
6:38 p.m. - 2023-07-27