by Alex Daudelin

Marks of Death

Crouched close to warm, sunbaked bricks, I watched a wasp tear apart a cicada. There was a sort of catharsis to it, in watching something so small die so brutally, in knowing that sort of thing could never happen to you because you were bigger. You thought you were bigger.

“Did you know that cicadas are actually poisonous?”

I couldn’t take my eyes away from the gory scene: the wasp had started to rip the cicada’s heart out, fragment by fragment. The thing is, cicada hearts are long, with seven segments that stretch through the entire body. Seeing one dragged out, half mangled, is disgustingly fascinating. “Really?”

“No, I don’t know.”

“Well, why’d you say it, then?”

Casper shrugged. “Don’t you do that? Say did you know and then something no one else knows?”

I considered it. “Did you know February has 28 days?” 

He laughed. “Not like that. That’s actually true. And it can’t be something that’s common sense to everyone.”

I scowled defensively. “Someone might not know that.” “But most people do.”

I didn’t tell him I hadn’t known until last month.

I drew myself up from that uncomfortable crouch, casting one last glance at the cicada and its legs, which were twitching as the wasp dragged a portion of the heart away. In that moment, I wondered if it was somehow surviving without its heart or if the twitching was just an involuntary after-death movement. A taunt at the heart that had failed it.

I knew humans have those sorts of twitches after they die, caused by electrochemical reactions. But bugs aren’t humans. They’re bugs, obviously. So they can’t have electrochemical reactions. I reassured myself then that the cicada was, in fact, surviving without its heart. There was no other explanation for such a similarity between the small and the big.

But as it turns out, pesticides can cause those violent twitches in bugs as they die. It’s not exactly the same way it happens in humans, but it’s all just chemicals, in the end.

Electrochemical reactions in the body’s nerves and poisons in the soil.

We read The Masque of the Red Death in English later that day. I didn’t like Edgar Allan Poe. Back then, his work reminded me too much of Romeo and Juliet—even though that was Shakespeare, and now I don’t know how I ever saw a similarity at all.

We read as a class: Prince Prospero and his wealthy friends, shutting themselves off from the poor people who were dying beyond iron gates. The seven colorful rooms, dreams waltzing, a giant clock ticking away. And then the orchestra stopping, the grand clock striking midnight, and a shift in the world.

I could almost see Death then, the hooded figure, weaving back and forth—between the dancers, stalled in their waltz; between desks in the classroom, my classmates ignorant of his presence. He slowly made his way toward me, directed by a path of rainbow-colored light beams as the sun bled through stained-glass windows that didn’t exist.

“It would have been easier to kill the people on the outside. Why did he care about this dumb prince at all? Why kill him?” Casper asked me in a low whisper.

“Maybe he wanted a challenge. And I don’t think he did. Care, I mean.” “Why bother, then?”

I shrugged. “He had nothing else to do.” It ended in death—the story did. Poe had a strange mind.

I looked him up that night: a lot of his family died—his parents, his wife who was also his cousin. I thought that was why he wrote about death a lot. And pendulums. Death and time and bloody murder, all at the tip of his pen.

Two months later, I experienced my own shift in the world. I’d like to say it was sudden, to excuse how unprepared I was for it—but it wasn’t. The signs were all there; I just chose to ignore them, hoping stubborn ignorance would be enough to shield me from reality when Death came calling. And it was a lonely emptiness that I found on the other side of that shift. Where Prince Prospero’s guests all saw Death and died, I had seen Death and lived on anyway.

It’s here that I would like to take a moment and compare my friend to that cicada. He, too, had a heart—albeit, not one with seven segments—and it, too, failed him. His wasn’t torn out by a wasp, but such a thing wasn’t necessary; he could not survive with the heart he had.

As I clung desperately to memories I feared were already slipping away, I found a time capsule in the floorboards of my house. The floor outside my room creaked when I stepped on it, but I’d never bothered to investigate it until I was home and needed something to distract myself from the heavy hollowness weighing on me. I pried up one of the planks—splintered in half from wear over the years—and found a treasure trove of small objects and worn papers that looked like they’d been unfolded and folded time and again.

There were cobwebs in the corners of the little hole, and a musty smell rose from within. It clearly hadn’t been opened in a long time; there was a yellowing, half-used cigarette pack from the 1990s, a worn newspaper from 2001 about the Twin Towers falling, a playbill from a 1998 production of The Scarlet Pimpernel. A letter beginning, “My dearest William.” A letter about the upcoming end-of-the-world-by-nuclear-apocalypse in 1986.

I stared into that time capsule, filled with a strange sense of awe and grief. Awe, because I’d lived in the same house for 15 years—my whole life—and I never once knew about the time capsule outside my room. But that amazement was tainted by something more bitter—how could memories so tangible be left in a hole and forgotten so easily? It was such a harsh betrayal; once, these objects symbolized an important event or feeling the owner experienced. Now they were in a cobwebbed hole.

I wondered why those things had been put in there to begin with. I wondered if the capsule was meant to be a way for people to forget the burdens some memories brought them, or if it was a way for the house to remember that it used to have different humans inside of it. I wondered if the people who'd written the notes, placed those objects inside . . . Did they ever think about what they left behind? Or were they dead, the stories of those objects dead with them?

I wanted to pick out each of the abandoned items and learn their stories, let them see that they still existed in a world that wanted to remember them. But then I imagined the little hole cleared of all its cherished treasures and imagined that would be sadder. Maybe that was why each one of those people endeavored to fill it. Forgotten, mismatching memories stuffed together in a cramped space was better than that space being empty.

So, instead, I continued the legacy: I grabbed a random pen from my desk and dropped it in, watching it roll on the slight hill of paper before I covered the capsule up again. I smiled at the thought of a kid prying up the floorboard in the future, picking up my pen, and wondering about the significance of it.

It must have been a very special pen, said the Casper in my head. No, just a pen.

And I would remember it.

That spring, school was shut down. It was 2020, and suddenly the world was filled with a new sort of fear—a paranoia that pervaded every step, every breath. Though, I suppose, it wasn’t entirely new; people in England uncovered plague pits beneath the city for a reason. But it felt new, and that was what mattered, because you never knew which disaster might be the last one a species faced.

Pinching a face mask up to cover my nose and staring at taped arrows on the floor of the grocery store, I thought about shifts in the world and cicada legs and the forgotten things of life itself. I thought about how you could either live in fear that the next chime of the clock signaled your death or live believing you’d always have one hour more.

The world is ending, Casper said.

“No,” I said simply, calmly. “It just feels like it is.”

Four years later and I’m still careful where I step.

I keep my eyes open, only look ahead, and scan the ground to avoid stepping on wasps or cicadas or wasps tearing cicadas apart. Walking to class is a bit of a dance when it rains, with the worms everywhere.

You look so stupid, Casper laughs at me as I hop into a puddle to avoid a worm pulling itself towards grass.

Everything reminds me of death. When I see those worms, I think of how they’ll look when the rain is gone and the sun is out, mangled and crusted to the ground. When I see bugs skittering frantically across the ground, I think of the twitching legs of a dead cicada.

Because it was dead. It had to be. You can’t survive without a working heart, even if you’re a bug.

If you’re a human, even you can’t survive without a working heart. It might not be torn out by a wasp, but a failing heart is still a failing heart. It might be 2019, when all kinds of lifesaving technology exists, but inoperable is still inoperable. And a dead friend is still a dead friend, even if you hear him in every ridiculous thought you think.

Reading Poe feels like sitting down in the past; like driving past a cemetery and knowing names mean dead people even though some of their descendants are probably still alive with those same names. Like hearing a waltz and knowing that you must dance, that the revolutions you make are only a shadow of those someone else made in the past, but you must complete them anyway.

I don’t have to read Poe for class anymore; I read him when I’m in a mood. When it feels like maybe I’ve got death, time, and bloody murder at the tip of my pen, and I want to remember what it was like to not.

Traveling home for winter break, I stare out the car window as rolling fields drag past, stone markers plotting a path from one end to another, and think about how one day that will be what’s left of me. About how one day that will be all that’s left of everyone in the world alive now (everyone I love, everyone I hate, everyone I don’t know).

I don’t visit cemeteries—they’re dreary. I will someday. Maybe tomorrow, maybe later today. It doesn’t really matter, because graveyards always exist even when no one goes to them; they’ll always be here tomorrow, even if you avoid them.

So maybe it’s best not to avoid them.

Life is akin to Prince Prospero’s waltz; it moves steadily on until the moment it doesn’t. You have no partner: there’s only you, waltzing to Death’s song, taking cautious steps through the graveyard of the world. And once you realize you’re in a graveyard, it’s harder to trip on the stones. It’s a small mercy of the world that not only mourners are privy to acceptance; the fearful, too, can learn it.

My college must be in a hotspot of accidents and crime; emergency vehicles seem to pass by every hour, some days. When I hear a siren go past my room, my body freezes up. The mere suggestion of an emergency vehicle upsets my nerves, but I can’t remember: is it a primal fear, was it like this before, or did something recent create it? Is it the loudness of the sirens, or is it the possibility that something awful is happening? Does it even matter?

I stand at the side of a busy street waiting for the crosswalk light to flicker on. I stare ahead, trying not to see the car wheels and think of a body crushed beneath them. As cars roar past me, leaves rattle like teacups jumping in a train car.

But, eventually, the stoplights turn red, and the street is empty. The crosswalk light comes alive and beckons me onward with an insistent beep. So I go.

Death’s Waltz is a dance for one, unobservable until the very end. I’m halfway across when the crossing signal beep turns into the chime of a grand clock before it’s completely overtaken by the roar and rattle of a speeding car and a siren nearing rapidly.

We didn’t always have ambulances or sirens, but, over the decades, humans were conditioned to get out of the way whenever a siren sounded. Instincts are born, but somehow they are also learned—and sometimes we learn them wrong. Most people hurry out of the way when they hear a siren; they know something awful is happening. The primal fear of death has merged with the sound of this vehicle—of any vehicle—and they leap to avoid it.

But I freeze.

“Did you know that nothing’s really dead?” Casper said. “It’s called the first law of thermodynamics. Energy can be converted, but it can never be created or destroyed.”