rude with loudness. its overarching chorus of song and sex. fat flying insects, once buried in the pockets of this town. loosened, and. flamboyantly doing their business in the trees, then. all around. dying. as I sat within their buzz. reckoning with the death of my car. its engine. which, by summer, kept trying, but. had grown sluggish. and began, one evening, to knock against the rhythm of a slow crank. I told the symptoms to a mechanic who told me it was the work of a busted catalytic converter. said soon, my ’05 Altima would conclude, as the falling cicadas. that it, too, had accomplished what it was put on earth to do. “well, I be damned,” my grandma, two hours east, responded to the knowledge of the cataclysmic report. “you ain’t but had that car for a few months,” her voice sang against the reign of bugs. their little humps and thumps of fire sang against the rain of her telephone’s background noise. the Wheel of Fortune reminder splicing our evening chatter. it was a season in which NPR published an article about Missourians. Sparky’s on S. Ninth St. using the bug meat to make ice cream batter. and I learned quickly. that when classes weren’t in session. when spring semester ended, and majority of the college students were gone. Columbia Transit didn’t fully operate. what is it they say? if life gives you a cicada invasion, make me scream! but what was I to do about an inadequate public transit system? “you better get on the good foot,” my sister advised. the two of us feeling played. she having invested 1,000 of the 5,000 dollars spent to buy the hand-me-down vehicle. in Ferguson, there was a used car salesman named Majid. who bragged about the Altima being a bit of a Frankenstein. an ’05 body with an ’06 grill and heart, both parts coming from the same model with fewer miles. totaled. portions being sold like black market organs. “sounds like magic,” I said when he gave us his name. and by the time I drove off the lot my auntie was telling everybody we passed, “this my nephew—he in college—and this his car.” that was April. perhaps, we were fooled. but that June, the cicadas molted their nymph skins. and, oh the males. how they flexed. vibrating their tymbals. the whole lot of them. in their drone of mating and death. encroached. upon me. eventually, I began to walk the 6.4 miles to work shifts at the downtown Papa John’s. no. seriously. what was I to do about an inadequate public transit system? on weeknights, I drafted emails to the city’s Department of Transportation. “you’re welcome to voice your concern at our next City Council meeting,” a representative once responded. “how the hell am I supposed to get there?” I retorted. and by July, lone cicadas rained in the Missouri heat. pools of them were at the base of trees and lined the sidewalks. I walked and they sang. I called Majid and he told me I most certainly had the wrong number.