The Year of Locusts
By Aria Braswell
They came when I was just about to fly.
Little dark darks, buzzing little things, blotting out the sun before I’d even had the chance to Icarus into the ocean. What’s the point of growing wings if you can’t use them? If you find the sky too crowded to try? I got dirt on my knees and screamed into the earth, the ground, made it mud, and dug down down deep into you to feel like I was flying.
*
I’ll call him Andrew, and Andrew tried to kiss me on a park bench and I laughed in his face.
He didn’t like me after that. I’m not sure he liked me in the first place.
It was cold and I was hungry. He was only going to feed me, I presumed, if we were driving over the bridge to have sex, and I didn’t get in his car, so he let me go home unfed. I’d known him forty minutes and he wouldn’t tell me what he did for his job.
I cried on the train home and
I thought about you.
I’ll call him Jared, and Jared kissed me after a drink in the cold and I didn’t like his small small head but he kissed me anyway, even when I laughed in his face and pulled away. And I walked as quickly as I could back to the train, as he kissed me and grabbed me again and again even though I was running away from his small small head.
And I cried on the train home and
I thought about you.
I thought about you kissing other girls on other park benches. I thought about you kissing other girls after a drink, and I thought they might want to kiss you back, because you’re you and not Jared and not Andrew. And they’re them and not me. And they probably kiss boys on first dates all the time. And you too have a small small head but it’s full of things I like and hate. Regardless, it’s full of the you I know. And I wondered if you think it’s normal to force someone to kiss you on a first date after only one drink and only forty minutes.
And I cried on the train and I cried in the shower and I cried in my bed and I cried at work the next day with you sitting behind me because I was swarming. Because I’d been kissed by a person with a small small head full of things I don’t know or care about when I’d wanted to be kissing you and yours. Your small head.
But now you’ve a hole in it. Your small small head. A hole right out the back. And I’m the one who put it there, to clear out all the locusts.
And I worry, that out, so easily now, could slip all your thoughts about me.
*
I’m a big big bug and I look like them. They crawled out of that hole in the desert and I stopped making art out of wings because I could no longer bear to look at flying things. So I stopped looking in the mirror. I quickly found after fleeing that there was no room to fly, with them swarming up there so I had to retire and I chose you to do it with, because after all the tossing around up there in the clouds, my wings grew sore and stopped working well enough and need a good massage to get back in shape really, but who can go out to get one now, what with all the traffic? Too many legs and wings to sort through. Too dense to even get a good breath without choking on a little green-brown body.
And each time I try to fight my way through, wingless, I walk back to you.
*
So you hold me now again. This different version of us, pre and post hole. Hole in the desert, hole in your head. Empty gaping things, left in the past, and I just try my best not to ever let myself peek at the back of your skull, lest I be reminded of how you ended up with it and all the things I knew before about what goes on inside your head. Blowing out the back of it, I’d hoped would work. I’d thought might give you a new way of thinking. You are different now.
But I still get swarms of locusts all up in my head, because my skull’s too thick for holes. And I worry you’re more afraid of bugs than you let on. I try my best not to bug you. Not to ask too much of things. Because I want to keep you different this way. With me, I think, different this way, and I’m scared of the feeling I get when the bugs creep in through my ears and remind me of how I felt when they were out and about those two long years and swarming, and making it too too hard to reach you through the fog of them.
*
I dream up a plague of toads to eat up the plague of locusts so they don’t hang around on our skin anymore and cloud out our sky anymore and stop me from seeing a few weeks ahead. I want my air to be clear. Enough for you to see how long I’ve been standing right in front of you, and the long long line of blood and crushed green-brown bodies we’ve left trailed behind.
THE END
Author Bio: Aria Braswell is a 24 year old neurodivergent artist and emerging writer currently working as a performer in New York City.