The Cicada Choir

My grandmother, Elena, used to say that our family was a lightning rod for the unseen. But it wasn’t until I was eleven that I learned why. We had just moved to the arid high desert of New Mexico, into a crumbling adobe house that had been in my father’s family for a century. The house was known as ‘La Casa de la Cigarra’ — the House of the Cicada — named for the relentless drone of insects that filled the summer nights. I thought it was a poetic name. I was wrong.

My first experience came on a sweltering July evening. I was in my new room, the walls covered in a peeling, sun-bleached floral wallpaper, when I heard a sound that cut through the cicada’s chorus. It was a wet, rhythmic knock, like a fist against the adobe from the other side. I pressed my ear to the cool plaster. The knocking stopped. Then, from the corner of the room, a small, dark shape began to emerge from the shadow — not a creature, but a hole. The wallpaper had begun to recede like a wound, revealing a black void that breathed. A thin, reedy voice, like a child’s, whispered, ‘Count them.’

I didn’t count. I ran to my mother, who was unpacking boxes in the kitchen. She looked at me with that familiar, haunted expression I’d seen in old photographs of her as a girl. ‘It’s just the house settling,’ she said, but her hands trembled. That night, I couldn’t sleep. The cicadas were deafening, but beneath them, I heard a chorus of smaller, falsetto voices, all whispering in unison: ‘Count them, count them, count them.’

Over the next week, the presence became more aggressive. Objects would slide off shelves, leaving no fall. My father, a pragmatic man who had never believed in our family’s ‘gift,’ dismissed it as wind. But I saw him one night, standing at the window, staring at the empty desert, his reflection eerily still. Then, one afternoon, I found a pile of cicada husks on my pillow, arranged in a spiral. Each husk was perfectly intact, as if something had carefully peeled them from their bodies. And in the center was a single, dried-up human finger.

My grandmother arrived the next day, uninvited. She was a stern, leathery woman with eyes that seemed to see through time. She took one look at the finger and said, ‘It’s been waiting for you, Miguel.’ She explained that our family wasn’t just a lightning rod — we were the vessel. Every generation, a child was chosen to contain the ‘Cicada King,’ a spirit that fed on memory and silence. It had been in my mother’s head, and before that, my great-aunt’s. Now it wanted me. But the finger was a taste of what it would become: a body stitched together from all the forgotten things.

That night, I dreamed of the void in my wall. It had grown to the size of a door, and through it, I saw a vast, underground cathedral made of hollowed-out trees and insect wings. Thousands of cicadas sat in the pews, all facing an empty throne. The reedy voice boomed, ‘The count is due.’ I woke to find my grandmother dead in her chair, her skin as dry and brittle as a husk. My mother was weeping, but her tears were black. And I knew, with a certainty that chilled me, that I had only two options: I could let the Cicada King consume me, or I could feed it someone else’s memories to placate it.

The next evening, I invited my friend, a girl named Rosa, over to ‘watch a movie.’ She had a cousin with a memory palace — a boy who could recall every word he’d ever read. I didn’t know how to stop what I was doing. As we sat in my room, the wallpaper began to peel back, and the void opened like a hungry mouth. Rosa screamed, but the cicadas drowned her out. I watched, frozen, as the void seized her cousin’s image from her mind, pulling it out like a long, silver thread. The thread coiled around the throne, and for a moment, I saw a shape take form — a tall, shimmering figure with gossamer wings and eyes like polished obsidian. It smiled at me. ‘Thank you,’ it said, in her cousin’s voice.

I ran. I ran out of the house, into the desert night, the cicadas screaming in triumph. I didn’t stop until I reached the highway, where a truck driver found me, shaking, covered in dust and dried insect parts. When they took me back to the house, they found Rosa catatonic on the floor, her memories gone. My mother was in the kitchen, calmly sipping tea, her eyes hollow. ‘He’s inside you now,’ she said, without looking at me. ‘You’ll never be alone again.’

I moved away, changed my name, and tried to forget. But every summer, when the cicadas emerge from the ground, I hear that chorus. And I feel it — a presence scratching at the back of my skull, patient, eternal, whispering to me, ‘Count them. Count them. Count them.’ And I know, because I’m the last of the line, that when I finally give in, there will be no one left to feed him but me.