It emerged from nowhere. I think I was the first on the whole patio to see it shaking its fishhook back legs on the faux marble tabletop, antennae swiping back and forth like a drunk feeling for the hotel room light switch.
“Is that a fucking cricket?” someone said.
Lunchtime near the metro station and the outdoor patio was an embarrassingly on-the-nose cross-section of daytime eating society. College student in winter boots sweating onto her phone. A couple, maybe, on a date, maybe; there was light ankle touching and shallow conversation. A sparrow whose left leg turned at a grotesque angle hopping from chairback to chairback, stabbing at crumbs under empty tables. Guy in a Hawaiian shirt talking very loudly through a prosciutto and cheese and arugula sandwich to a woman with a Moleskine notebook. A work-from-homer pursing his lips at a spreadsheet and sighing so loud I wondered if he wanted someone to ask him if he was okay. A middle-aged woman reading a book, a gray corgi with blue eyes tied up under her feet.
I was there to nurse a four-dollar coffee and dick around on my laptop for a few hours. I was running a blog and social media accounts for a bookstore owned by an old man named Alan. His knees and eyesight had failed him, but he could price a book by the grit between its pages and the smell of its spine. He kept me around because he considered anything he didn’t understand to be basically magic – What excellent formatting you’ve done on this rectangular yellow poster, boy! What beautiful emails you’ve sent to our subscribers, good lord! I never will understand it! – and it was getting tough to climb the stairs to the literary nonfiction and memoir sections of the store. He gave me afternoons off if I showed up on time, which I often did. I was also considering starting an affair with a U.S. Postal Service warehouse worker, Julia, who I met in the dry pasta section at the grocery store a few weeks before. She told me she never had anything to do at work, anyway. She’d just get there and do forty minutes of work and then nap in the back. An affair would give her something to do. With all the time I spent climbing the stairs and looking at the latest from the modern masters of nonfiction and their ghostwriters, it was impossible to suffocate the little voice in my head saying: You should write a memoir! But I was sort of happy and content, the kind of rhythm that needed a real, actual, drastic shakeup. Walter Mitty bullshit of the highest order. We can only retell that story so many times. I rolled the sentence over my tongue constantly: I’m sorry, Maggie, my wife, but I’ve been having an affair with a U.S. Postal Service employee named Julia.
Would that sustain a compelling story? The uncertainty held me back.
I’d been watching the thing move around for a few seconds when someone called out: “Is that a fucking cricket?” I had already determined that it was a cricket, then questioned the conclusion. It could be a cockroach, though I’d never seen a cockroach with such pretty legs. They were big as bridge arches, flying buttresses of exoskeleton stamped with visible spikes. A rosebush came to mind. Barbed wire came to mind. They looked like legs that could jump a building, Superman-style. They looked like legs that, divorced from the rest of the body, might be placed over an awning or fastened to a flowerbed ledge to prevent birds from shitting on people’s heads or the homeless from finding a place to rest, respectively. The whole patio fell silent and watched the thing walk in a lazy circle around the empty table. It was a busy lunchtime – men pushing dollies and disappearing into the ramped maws of refrigerated trucks in front of the grocery store across the street, hot fresh asphalt spilling into empty trenches cut into the road, small dogs antagonizing big dogs, cops idling and blocking crosswalks, nonprofit volunteers in ugly orange vests drifting with the shade cast by median trees – and competition for tables was fierce. Everyone stared at our newest patio resident. You didn’t want to take your eyes off it. It had appeared so quickly, so out of nowhere, like it had simply sprung fully formed from the ripped gray outdoor carpet under our feet, that it seemed in danger of being anywhere next. Look away, and you might find it crawling up your leg. Look away, and it could materialize in your caprese!
I thought of Julia. She was probably doing nothing right now, somewhere else. I rose in my seat to get a better look and the guy in the Hawaiian shirt said: “I dare you!” Dare me to what? I wondered silently. I was overcome with the urge to touch its yellow underbelly. To hold it by an antenna, to let it crawl up my arm. What would stop me? These patio people? I imagined feeding it to the designer dog, which could not share in our fascination from his perch on the ground. The dog could tell something was going on and had unwrapped himself from his owner’s legs. His belly brushed the floor as he looked from table to table and back to his owner, asking someone to fill him in. The creature on the tabletop made a sudden move towards the northern edge of its domain and everyone drew a hard breath, all together. A collective sucking of teeth. In several deft motions, I tossed the ice from my cup into a bush, left my seat, and clapped the plastic tower upside down over the thing. It was no longer a threat. I didn’t get up for heroism. I just wanted to look at the thing a while longer. It was the color of good bread. It moved like it had no rules. But I’d be lying if it didn’t feel good to have been the person to solve our problem of uncertainty. No longer would you have to fix your gaze on the maybe-cricket at all times, in case it moved suddenly to get lodged in your hair or bite you on the upper calf.
The whole afternoon stretched out ahead of me. I would stay here and watch it move around in its new world. I wondered whether it was happy. I wondered whether it felt closer to safe or trapped. Surely, it constantly fretted about being eaten by grackles or squished by flip flops or poisoned or flushed or any other ways creatures such as itself could die. None of those things would happen now, not as long as it was contained in the plastic cup. I readied myself for an afternoon of observation. We simply wouldn’t use that table; the tabletop belonged to the creature now, and it could push the cup around to the delight of however many hearts it had.
Then, a man with a cup of water and a parfait emerged onto the patio, placed his parfait on the creature’s table, and flicked the creature away with what used to be my cup. I never saw where it went. Everyone lifted their feet and scanned the floor around them. It wasn’t on another table. It wasn’t on top of anyone’s shoes. It was simply gone.
“Gross,” the man said, and began to mix his parfait.
I left almost immediately. I wished for the man with the parfait to have an awful day. I hoped he’d break a toe. I couldn’t imagine living so bereft of wonder, unable to appreciate the beauty of a bug in a cup.
I deleted Julia’s number. I picked a new grocery store to frequent. I listened closer to Alan as he told me about how books smelled to him. This one’s seen too much sun, he’d tell me. This one belonged to someone who cooked with peanut oil. They all had stories. I never saw a creature so beautiful and brave again.
🦗
