Death Throes of the Swarm

The cicadas are croaking, singing a swan song that marks their return to seventeen years of relative silence.  They will not go quietly, though.  Afternoons are beaten with the constant tattoo of the Swarm, buzzing incessantly in the trees as if to remind us that, yes, they were here.  They came, and they thoroughly annoyed the living hell out of us for a little over a month.

I have waged various entomological wars in my day.  I've had epic battles with giant subterranean spiders.  I swept a Dark Hand over a teeming earwig metropolis, and I led an all-out assault on the neighborhood hornets' nest as a child having equipped a veritable mob of snotty youngsters with pillow armor, cans of Raid, and various blunt objects for when the time came to obliterate their headquarters.  And naturally, I have an ongoing battle with the centipedes, which I am losing due to their uncanny ability to forge cohesive multinational networks as well as recruit impressionable younglings to take up the cause.

Indeed.  My personal military history is not marked by tremendous success in any way.  I have returned a defeated man my fair share of times while having vanquished a modest handful of my enemies in times of particular strife.

Cicadas, however, are a relatively easy foe to combat.  They are slow and clumsy and have poor eyesight.  What's more is that they are an insect of some substance.  Thick-bodied.  Lacking the intelligence of spiders or centipedes.  All it takes is one swing from a book or tennis racket to cause massive internal bleeding in one of those little buggers, and he will fall to the pavement convulsing like a bumble bee soaked in nerve toxins.  (I had to bash one with a UPS box today during a cigarette-run to Walgreens.  I would have left him alone, but he kept pestering me and spewing weird gibberish in that grating tongue common among Swarm members.)

Cleanup is relatively painless as well, since we need do nothing more than to wait a short while until the worker ants take the poor bastard piece by piece back home to their underground city.  Cicadas appear to be a particular favorite for ants.  I have noticed on a few occasions a band of worker ants passing up the chance to haul away much smaller, lighter insects in favor of systematically tearing asunder the body of an expired cicada, which makes sense.  The flesh of a larger insect takes longer to fester not to mention the fact that cicadas must be revered among ant populations as a particular delicacy.  I would imagine the Queen heaps fantastic rewards upon the band of workers responsible for bringing such a royal feast into her house, plying them full of honey alcohol and granting private audience to the band leader in her central chamber.

Well, it must go something like that, right?

But enough talk of insects.  My mind has been crawling with them for several days, and quite frankly, this whole thing is beginning to wear on me.