Of the moment

A story about a timely matter.

4 April 2023

Emily Brisse —

Cicadas, or The Morning After Another School Shooting

In the live oak, one hundred yards away from where I sit, insects are buzzing so loudly the sound is like the crackle of electricity.

Yesterday morning I sat here too, heard it then, too. Thought of the crackle in ecstatic semantics—the sun had just risen gold over the opposite hills, birds were singing and swooping above the valley, cows were lowing. It was a fucking postcard.

This morning I hear the crackle of those bugs and think of death—of each sound a singe, a bug fried on a heat lamp, their indiscriminate bodies already fossilizing on the surface of a world not made to protect them.

More children—shot, killed.

In classrooms decorated with handmade bulletin boards.

Next to rows of single bean plants growing in soil packed into plastic cups.

Alongside terrariums lined with sticks and leaves upon which chrysalises hung, each one within easy view of the children waiting for metamorphosis.

It is so outrageously beautiful on this hill.

It’s outrageous—beyond rage, violent, lawless: my grief lawless, fire, the fury of the sun, born of exhaustion and fear and proximity (my students, my classroom—a possibility) and a slick familiarity that has no place here and yet ricochets through the air.

Those beautiful children.

My children. I am thinking of their wheat-colored hair.

The insects crackle around me, the birds cry out to one another, the donkey haws, the sun rises, the day more vibrant with every second. I sit here, ecstatic and bereft. I will learn these insects’ names, I tell myself, I will never forget them. Though this morning, on this hill far from home, I don’t know where to begin.

Emily Brisse's essays have appeared in publications including the Washington Post, The New York Times, Creative Nonfiction's True Story, Parents, Ninth Letter, The Sun, and River Teeth. A graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts, she is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, a Curt Johnson Prose Award finalist, and a recipient of a Minnesota Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant. She teaches high school English, and lives just outside Minneapolis with her family.

photo by Jake Weary