An ambulance shriek closes in. From which direction? Where? Where? I slam on the brakes midway through a left turn, and the ambulance screams past, dangerously close to my front bumper. After traffic nudges back to life, I’m frozen for a second, trying to remember how to drive.

I’ve just come from the art museum. I’d gone solo, so the visual images could sink into my cells, unobstructed by conversation. 30 Americans—an exhibit of American life, as interpreted by thirty contemporary black artists. It was a bad idea. Not the exhibit. My going to see the exhibit.

An engine revs; an SUV speeds by. Now I remember how to drive: Look both ways. Turn the steering wheel. Press the gas pedal. I cruise through the leafy neighborhood that surrounds the museum’s manicured gardens. Several blocks ahead, the ambulance is shrinking, its siren receding.

#

I felt out of place among the white onlookers touring 30 Americans, even though I was an onlooker, too, gawking at my own life. Four hundred years of color-infused emotions—mine, the artists’, our ancestors’—compressed into claustrophobic passageways and alcoves. I chuckled at a montage of our hair in its myriad configurations. Yup, I used to sport that stick-straight coif, thanks to a lye relaxer that—swear to god—I could still smell. And I fairly levitated with joy at a human-shaped sculpture made of flower blossoms. You couldn’t identify gender, race, or age. Yes, let me see cabbage roses when I look at my enemies. Let the fragrance of gardenias hang in the air between us. Apparently, I have a greater capacity for despondence than optimism. Despite the intermittent uplift, four hundred years beat me down.

#

I pull up for a red light at a crossroad where high-end white Kansas City smacks up against low-end black Kansas City. Fast food. Bus stop. Cell phone mart. An urban apparel store sits across the street from a health clinic. Anchoring the corner is Walgreens, the place I stock up on eye shadow in shades designed for women of color.

#

The exhibition flowed into a corner housing an installation called “Duck, Duck, Noose.” A circle of nine wooden stools. On each stool sat a KKK hood, empty eyeholes facing the center, where a rope dangled from the ceiling, the end pooled in tidy coils on the floor. I gasped. Run. Get the hell out of here. Stop looking. But “Duck, Duck, Noose” forced me to stare, like an assailant holding my head underwater. I stumbled past in a stupor.

#

The car in front of me sits a beat too long after the light turns green. Cell phone distraction? The driver creeps into the intersection. Stops again. What is he—?

In the fast food parking lot, the ambulance.

Two white policemen.

A black person flat on the ground. Face-up.

Bright flowered fabric across thighs. Skirt. A woman.

Still as a rock.

I clench the steering wheel. Hyperventilate. My vision blurs, and I realize I’m sobbing. Need to pull over, to park, to say oh my god, oh my god, but I can’t remember how to stop driving. Automatic pilot glides the car past the scene, but my heart stumbles past it in a stupor.

On the highway, as grief makes a slick mess of my face, a slide show plays the images my brain has photographed. She’s on her back, arms and legs spread. Her head is inches from the policemen’s polished shoes. Her legs span the sidewalk. The patrolmen stand beside their car, hands resting on their heavy-laden belts. They appear to watch traffic go by. If she were alive, they’d be kneeling at her side, wouldn’t they? They’d be making her comfortable, wouldn’t they? The EMTs would be rushing to her aid, wouldn’t they? There is an absence of urgency.

She’s alone. May she find peace. Her family’s going to get a bad phone call. May they find peace.

I grip the steering wheel hard, to squeeze life back into its proper shape. So I can buy makeup again at Walgreens.

Maybe she’s part of an art installation. I want her to be an art installation.

She’s lying in savasana—corpse pose. She’s anonymous. I name her Grace. Who lies at the intersection of life and art. Thirty-one Americans.

While I’m reading, a sentence will grab me and force me to stop. I pay tribute to other authors by sharing their Damn Fine Sentences with you. Then I recount a memory the words bring up for me. It’s about how books connect with your life.

*****

“… Horses had a nose for things that stray out from other worlds and stumble into ours.”

——Ta-Nehisi Coates
—--The Water Dancer
I stood at the top of the stairs, alone in the house, except for my two cats. On my way to the kitchen for a snack, I paused to relish the midnight silence, dark of my familiar surroundings. A railing overlooked the first floor entry, where my tabby lay, committed to licking every square millimeter of his body. He was sprawled on his side, front paw raised to meet his tongue. My black cat was winding an infinity loop around my ankles. My brain said, okay, take a step now, but before the signal reached my leg, both cats jerked their heads to point at the same invisible spot in the direction of the back door. They froze. I froze. The house was quiet as a graveyard, I lost my appetite and crawled back into bed, covers over my head.

SHADOWS of sleep solidified into recognizable objects: ceiling fan, nightstand, bookshelf. My husband’s arm lay heavy across my shoulder and chest. His breath brushed my neck. I pulled his arm tighter around me, while cicadas sang torch songs outside our bedroom window.

FOR a week in late April 2015, the Kansan brood of Magicicada septemdecim tunnel to the earth’s surface. In a choreographed invasion that stirs the twilight throughout Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, and Iowa, the periodical cicadas steal toward the nearest vertical surfaces, to which they cling overnight. They shed exoskeletons in the midday heat. After the adults fly into the treetops on brand new lacy wings, their discarded shells stick to tree trunks, light posts, mailboxes, headstones.

Winged adult cicadas dry in the sun for a day, and then sing to attract females. When flexed, tymbals––drum-like organs buried inside hollow abdomens––release a mating cacophony across the countryside and over suburban neighborhoods. Tymbals, a word reminiscent of crashing cymbals. Appropriate, because Magicicadas chorus at eighty-five decibels, as loud as a blender. Awakened to the single purpose of reproduction, males rarely even stop to eat. They collaborate as well as any orchestra; individual soloists alternate their serenades with short flights to search out receptive females. After cutting slits into tree twigs, each female deposits up to 400 eggs.

Their physical energy spent, their bodies starved, both males and females die. The corpses of Magicicada Brood IV carpet the ground.

THE ceiling fan blades rotated light and dark stripes above me. I nudged the pillow into a more comfortable position, coaxing the memory foam to remember a new shape for my head. Ben’s stomach pressed into my back. His midsection supported me. Lying next to him, I was relieved of the anxiety caused by navigating the world as an independent organism.

I wasn’t supposed to crave support.

I had been raised during the Ms. Magazine era. Run your own company. Change your own spark plugs. Show no hint of dependence. Ms. daughters would take care of ourselves, thank you very much. Ms. daughters were trained to fly solo.

TO achieve the penultimate goal of the species––reproduction––Magicicadas employ a two-pronged survival strategy.
First prong: predator satiation—a million and a half cicadas per acre of land sates the most voracious appetites. And appetites wait in abundance to be sated. Dogs and cats gorge until indigestible wings block their livers. Starlings feast, grow bloated, and cannot fly. Cicadas are high-protein food for hawks, deer, and squirrels; turtles and fish; raccoons and possums; lizards, snakes, and mice; spiders, ants, and wasps. Even humans consider cicadas a delicacy. But the sacrifice of many increases survival odds for the individual.

Second prong: out-of-sync life cycle. No bird or beast of prey can limit its diet to a food source available only once every seventeen years. Any predator with a one-year lifespan crosses paths with cicadas once every seventeen generations. Thus the cicada is not essential for the existence of any single species.

I TRACKED a single blade of the ceiling fan as it orbited the motor, ruffling air across my ankles. The bed frame creaked as I twisted halfway onto my back, head in the crook of Ben’s arm, my side pressed against his stomach. His heart thumped a lullaby that eased my spine into the mattress.

AFTER ten weeks, instinct pulls newly hatched nymphs to the edge of host branches and then drops them to the earth, where they tunnel underground, plowing through cool damp soil. As many as fifty share a hole a mere twelve inches in diameter, feeding on the sap stored in tree roots. Cicada nymphs specialize in a particular variety of sap that flows upward instead of downward. Because they work against gravity, their jaws are stronger than their size would suggest, heads forward of their bodies. They are bred for sucking.
During their seventeen-year growth cycle, they will venture only a few feet in any direction; they are completely nourished within the bulls-eye where instinct dropped them.

THE ceiling fan receded into shadow as late afternoon dimmed our east-facing bedroom to a half-light. Bunched under my knees, the sheets were scratchy, a brand I’d bought on sale. I lay on my back, pressing tight against Ben, and in his sleep, his arms encircled me. The heat that radiated from his skin warmed mine. A faint scent of shampoo enticed me to stroke his baby-fine hair. My stomach rumbled, but I felt no need to obey its demand. I was nourished lying next to my husband, in the bed where instinct had drawn me.