Among the Pines

They drone steadily from the tall trees and possess the ventriloquist's gift of projecting their voices, so that predators have a difficult time locating them. Every seventeen years, one species of them makes an invasion of sorts, blanketing trees, buildings, and telephone poles from the eastern seaboard to Indiana and south through Tennessee. They are cicadas.

Every so often, you will find a cicada shell lying on the ground in parts of the southern half of the United States. This is because cicadas, not atypically, go through a development stage that requires the shedding of an exoskeleton.

What Beth found on the campus of Southern Mississippi last week was something slightly more unusual. A cicada corpse, if you will, lying on the ground and perfectly preserved. She naturally picked it up and took it home, but the question was what to do with it...Frame it and hang it on the wall? Paste it to a trivet and feature as a dining table centerpiece? She decided, instead, to box it and send it in the mail to an artist/filmmaker friend with an interest in insects.

And so, it is currently on a mail truck somewhere, or in the reliable hands of some anonymous postal worker who will let neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stay him from the swift completion of delivering a dead cicada to its appointed destination.