Chapter Text
On a late-summer evening, a cricket sings on the riverbank. If you were to listen closely, the sound would be full-throated and vibrant, would taste rich like chocolate. It would build, dimensional where other crickets warble and waver.
This cricket frolics, feet in the mud, antennae fluttering. It jumps across strewn pebbles. The Yangtze River has brought these pebbles thousands of kilometers from the far west to accumulate on this bank, accompanying dirt and insect eggs and human boats.
With the pressing humidity lying over the city, no one's out. Alone, the cricket sings with the vain hope of some thunderous response from the heavens. Instead, a dove swoops low, beak out, and the cricket hops away, chilled by the rush of the dove's passage. It tucks itself against a branch washed ashore, soothed by the damp rot, embraced by the rasping bark.
As the cricket rests, a horsehair worm, Paragordius varius, stirs under its exoskeleton. The cricket twitches. This worm has lurked inside the cricket, nested and miserably growing in its digestive tract, for months now. It senses the moisture outside and yearns with some vague instinct for the ecstasy of immersion.
The worm seizes the moment and sends a signal to the cricket's nervous system. Go, it says, through chemical messengers. Sound travels further underwater.
The cricket jumps like there's something fantastically beautiful waiting for it under the surface of the water. For a second, light shimmers on its glossy thorax. If you were to look closely, you would think at first it was a reflection, but then find nothing casting it. The cricket appears, for just a second, as if it's lit from within.
It hits the surface and sinks, air bubbles clinging to the rough texture of its legs.
The river water percolates through the cricket's body, caressing the horsehair worm with summer-warm tendrils. The worm feels a shining moment of total clarity, as if the river tuned the worm and the cricket to a singular frequency, reverberating along its infinite length. The cricket struggles, and, if the horsehair worm could think, it would think "I understand." After all, the cricket and the horsehair worm have shared one body and one life for months.
The worm pierces the cricket's exoskeleton, cracking it open from the inside. As it abandons the cricket, a sliver of its awareness travels with the sinking chitin, deeper and deeper into the river. Inexplicably, the worm expects to sing.
The cricket embraces the silt of the river, feeling not promised freedom but bitter loss. Each segment of its body shuts off, one by one, and the cricket suffers as much as a cricket can.
The worm begins its search for a mate. Before it brushes up against another worm, talons hit the water, grasping for a fish, and a golden eagle throws the worm into the air.
The worm lands limply on the bank once more, and it dies a slow death, drip-fed with the humidity as it dries out. The death of the cricket, then, the silencing of its song, for nothing.