Cricket

In my dream I hear bird calls. That’s a starling, I say to myself, and I know that I am right. When I wake up, the bird is still singing outside my window. My certainty fades faster the more I grasp for it. Esme has already left for work. I type bird calls into the YouTube search bar——Morning bird call, Maine, two short notes, deedoo——but I’m not getting results.

Esme has left the lights on in the kitchen and no note. Before she moved in with me in March, and for the first several weeks, we used to leave messages for each other. Love notes, drawings of the bird on the sill, the lamp slightly askew. I don’t know when the habit faded. We hardly spoke last night. She turned out the lights while I was still reading. I could have gotten angry, but instead I went to sleep.

In the car, on the way to work, I play a Youtube video of birds singing and wailing. I’m listening partially as a joke, but I do love the sounds. I imagine birds filling the car: a pile of feathers, warbles, and chirps. I brush against my earlier certainty, but I can’t fit it back into my hands.

I do what I’ve done on every drive since March and peer into cars as I pass them on the highway. I make up stories for the drivers, fill in their lives with vast and mundane detail. Sometimes, I accidentally catch their eyes and have to refocus on the lines of the road. I imagine we are racing as they pass me on the left. Imagine we each laugh to ourselves. Then I worry I’ve left the stove on. I worry about disinfecting groceries sufficiently. I buy gas and fill the tank for less than fifteen dollars. I imagine Esme, at the bakery, placing pastries in waxed paper bags.

“Guess how many cups of coffee I’ve had today,” Mindy says. She’s sweeping the patio where we’re eating lunch. Behind her, I can see where the ocean meets the tidal river. It’s low tide, and only a narrow stream cuts through the mud flats, which are wide and brown and still. The smell of baking salt. Everything just trying to survive. Mindy comes back to the table to chug from her Redbull. She’s the only sixty-something year old I know who drinks Redbull.

“How many cups of coffee?” I ask.

“Six!” She throws the can on the ground and stomps it flat.

“Sometimes I worry for your health,” I say.

We’re the only ones working today. With the lack of visitors, they’ve cut all of our shifts. The gift store and information desk are closed to the public, so there’s a lot of time to talk. We clean up the visitor center, move fallen branches from trails, talk about Mindy’s kids, who are my age. Mindy is watching Grey’s Anatomy. I ask her if she knows any bird calls.

“Try me,” she says.

I whistle the call from this morning. She laughs. She’s not sure. Then she says:

"Wonder if we’ll be seeing Cricket Man today.”

Cricket Man started showing up four months ago, in mid-May, when things first began to feel less locked down. He’s a guy in his 40s. He parks his rusted-out truck on the shoulder right at the base of the dirt road to the preserve, so we have to pass him to arrive or head home. He leaves the car running and blasts the sound of cricket song at full volume over the car speakers. He usually shows up in the early evening, when we’re leaving. It feels like he’s waiting for us. Whenever he’s there, I blow through the stop sign to avoid any chance of interaction.

I leave before Mindy today. She attempts cricket noises at me——hard to do, she doesn’t have the right legs for it——and wiggles her eyebrows.

“Text me if you see our friend out there?”

“Sure thing.”

“Someday I’ll throw a bunch of spiders in his car. See how he likes those insects. Sick fuck.”

She hugs me, which we aren’t supposed to do. She always forgets and then apologizes. It’s my favorite ritual of the workday: feeling her arms around me. I laugh it off, but I always close my eyes when my face meets her shoulder.

In the car, I consider blasting bird noises to compete with Cricket Man but think better of initiating contact. My car rattles its way down the dirt road, which is dotted with potholes. I have to swerve around to avoid them. The car kicks up dirt. I have the windows rolled down, trying to listen for him, but it’s impossible to hear anything above the sound of the road. I’m filling the car with dust at this rate. I wonder, briefly, about how it would feel to live alone. The way my fear of men might grow. Carbon monoxide poisoning. Airborne threats. Then I’m at the end of the road and I see him and all at once I’m surrounded with the thrumming of crickets.

Cricket Man has blue eyes. He’s got the truck running. I can see the exhaust fumes choking the cooling air. It’s that time of evening where sound travels better, as though the air has thinned to make space for noise. The coming chill of the night is tastable. The ocean has come back since midday: a calm black mirror.

The cricket sound floods over me, into the car, where it mingles with the dust. I’m staring at him. We make eye contact. The space between us collapses. The moment stretches itself across the air between our cars. I pull away, past the stop sign, fast——laughing. I shut the windows.

Further down the road, I slam the brakes. The seatbelt tightens around my chest. Illuminated in the headlights is a young buck, his velvet antlers gleaming. We look at each other. He is unafraid. I roll down the window again. I want to say something: to make contact. The swell of real cricket song reaches in from the surrounding woods. He turns and runs.