Dog Day Cicadas by Danielle Lapidoth
That summer, the cicadas roared louder than Sirius shone. Popping their tymbals for love, they drowned out Wonder Woman and our kickball score; every few weeks they competed successfully with the lawnmower. They'd ramped up the volume since the fighting had stopped; maybe they knew Mother had sent him packing.
The dog days of summer, she said almost every morning after Rice Krispies, and packed us into the station wagon, the cracked cooler full of jelly sandwiches, popsicles and Tab jammed beneath our flip-flopped feet. It didn't occur to anyone to wear a seat belt. We rolled down all the windows and scrambled over each other to stick our heads into the breeze.
At the lake we hauled out sweaty thighs, pattern-pocked and sunburnt, and dropped our short shorts on boulders. We ran for the water, except for Mother, who passed out on a bath towel in the shade with a paperback over her face (Judith Krantz, Harold Robbins) too tired, she said, to even read about sex.
We splashed and screamed and dunked until someone came up choking.
Then Mother picked her way over hot sharp pebbles, cursing God, and grabbed the offender's arm. She cuffed an ear, hard, took away a season's worth of popsicles, and, if she was really pissed, threatened to hand us over to the state. We swam away.
All that month and the next, the cicadas begged noisily, at home, at the lake, in the lot beside the Dairy Queen. Mother turned a deaf ear. The heat punished her, and she punished us. And in another perfectly square county a few hours east, Father was no doubt busy, Mother told us as she tricked the stick shift into first, punishing himself.
Danielle Lapidoth lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland, with her husband, two toddlers, and a newborn. She is a teacher, editor (www.webscribe.ch), poet and essayist whose work has been published by Midstream, The Lyric, Lightning Bell, Zuzu's Petals, Literary Mama, and Mamaphonic.