Insect Life of Florida Lynda Hull In those days I thought their endless thrum was the great wheel that turned the days, the nights. In the throats of hibiscus and oleander I’d see them clustered yellow, blue, their shells enameled hard as the sky before the rain. All that summer, my second, from city to city my young father drove the black coupe through humid mornings I’d wake to like fever parceled between luggage and sample goods. Afternoons, showers drummed the roof, my parents silent for hours. Even then I knew something of love was cruel, was distant. Mother leaned over the seat to me, the orchid Father’d pinned in her hair shriveled to a purple fist. A necklace of shells coiled her throat, moving a little as she murmured of alligators that float the rivers able to swallow a child whole, of mosquitoes whose bite would make you sleep a thousand years. And always the trance of blacktop shimmering through swamps with names like incantations— Okeefenokee, where Father held my hand and pointed to an egret’s flight unfolding white above swamp reeds that sang with insects until I was lost, until I was part of the singing, their thousand wings gauze on my body, tattooing my skin. Father rocked me later by the water, the motel balcony, singing calypso with the Jamaican radio. The lyrics a net over the sea, its lesson of desire and repetition. Lizards flashed over his shoes, over the rail where the citronella burned merging our shadows—Father’s face floating over mine in the black changing sound of night, the enormous Florida night, metallic with cicadas, musical and dangerous as the human heart.
Posted on: Wed, 16 Jul 2014 07:17:21 +0000
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