Full of Sound and Fury by Yelena Crane
2000 words, 10 minutes reading time
Issue 3 (Fall/Winter 2023)
When Reed and Cymbel first met, they were human. Now they weren’t.
He projected his whale song into the watery abyss. Others replied, but they weren’t Cymbel. Reed moved on; tail whipping into the cold, blubber warming his body but not his soul, listening, waiting until they were together again.
In their past lives, they’d found each other as nightingales, loons, and cicadas. Reed believed the water would carry his tune through its waves. Believed Cymbel had survived long enough to hear it.
When the missing became too much he let the past lives wash over him. With Cymbel, he’d heard music for the first time. He’d listened to it before, swung hips in poor-rhythm, but with her he’d heard, and song became theirs, through time.
As humpback, Reed made more music than ever. “I am here,” he said through lobtails on the water’s surface, through a blown column of air. He couldn’t move without making ocean music and all his music was in search of her, his love. She would delight in this, how his every movement became melody. Reed shuddered with the thought of hearing her again.
He traveled to the Tonga coast, where others told Reed they’d heard her call in a previous migration. Hope as fresh as ever beat in his lonely heart even though mating season ended, and the chances were slim she’d stayed. He hoped she had a pod by now, little Cymbel whales for him to meet.
Air flowed between his lungs and laryngeal sac. “I’m here, are you?”
Silence answered. And then a distress call. Faint, so he dove deeper. It was nothing like their song, and yet he recognized her voice in his heart, in how it made him feel to hear her. He found her, stuck between the ocean depth and the human's hunting, Cymbel caught in fishing gear and not for the first time. Scars of past entanglements mar her flesh. Unevenly healed greys and whites from the shrapnel of exploding harpoons, claw and bite marks. Waters can be cruel as land. Can be crueler.
“Love,” he said. Too dazed at having found her at last. His head butted against the nets to no avail. She was trapped and he, with no teeth or hands, could not free her. Curse this whale form.
“How long has it been?” he asked.
Her head rested against the netting in defeat. “Long.”
An hour? Were there only minutes left before she’d need to surface or die? He couldn’t look into her sad, wet eyes and couldn’t look away. Here at last they’d found each other, surrounded in blue and gentle waves. Both of them together, only to say goodbye.
She flashed her baleen plates. “Find me,” she said as if it was over. Not now, so soon.
“I only just have,” Reed said.
His tail whipped and twisted in the net, not giving up. Humpbacks were solitary creatures, too big for friends. He was no ordinary humpback.
“Help,” he cried to the ocean friends he’d made through years of searching. They didn’t need to understand his form of speech to catch the meaning but they were far away, catching the next season. Reed followed the trail of the net to its source. The hull that showed itself made the illusion of being smaller than it was. The tip of an iceberg barely gave a clue to its width and breadth and so was true of men’s boats. Of these false fish.
He slammed at it. Metal and plastic against flesh and bone. Against four decades of fluttering hope. The boat, much bigger than he, barely moved.
“Come to me,” she said, “please.”
There was eternity in their song, in their shared grief.
“Sing it to me, it’s been so long,” she said.
“Why did you stay?” He knew why, in search and hope of him, and asked anyway.
Reed’s flipper flapped to her through the net. So little separated their flesh. So much. He sang because he couldn't deny Cymbel’s last wish. Because he still believed love wouldn’t fail. The song had changed through the years and the species they’ve been, but he whaled as it was that first time.
She moaned. Her last breaths heavy, hard to witness. Hard to sing of easy love as she drowned and suffocated before his eyes. It was not his first time seeing her die. Cymbel always died first. How foolish and shallow his words were here. While she still listened, he stopped. Pressed his face to hers. Their song has been the death of her, has made her linger in the fields, the hills, the seas for want of it.
“Don’t wait for me in the next life. No more songs. Just live,” he pleaded.
Cymbel was gone.
The waters swallowed his scream until the ocean’s and his were one.
An insectoid nose replaced the sense of Reed’s ears, scent heightening until the world of music transposed with one of perfume. So many reincarnations and it always took time for Reed to adjust to a new body. He’d not really been human or Reed for ages. Few animals require words to recognize each other but Reed and Cymbel stuck. These, their names on first meeting. Through the thick mist of city fumes and sewer, of bagged rot and humans with flower juice on their necks, Reed caught a smell he couldn’t possibly recognize but did: Cymbel’s phloem-digested sap. She had been sending him messages in scents, love letters in the form of delicious black walnut sugars. Their world was smaller than it'd ever been, metres of separation, and for the first time, he didn’t reply.
Live, love another, no more curses.
He refused to have her die in his arms or fins again.
“Find me before we’re found,” she said, thick in the spice of Ailanthus trees.
Jasmine bloomed and bore another message, spoored under the lip of white petals. “Before the black earth takes us, and others take our place among the bark and vines. Let’s pay the price again. My love, survive long enough and return to me so we may live.”
Her lovely scented words, tainted through the chorus of her deaths kept Reed from answering her plea. Better she not lose herself again to song and scent. Each death more gruesome than the last. Jealous, humans always hunted them or had their home destroyed only to write odes to it after. Insects should not be allowed to dream or remember the words of an old song they can no longer sing.
The black and white polka dots of their kind hid in a bush of blooming honeysuckle. Sugar-spun she said, “I will follow you to the crown of the highest sequoias, redwoods, hemlocks, and down to the rickety roots. We can’t let humans or their Feet stop us. I'll leave my scent everywhere, sticky sap screaming I’m here, and don’t care who smells it so long as it reaches you. Don’t give up on us, we only have this season.”
Reed stayed a long time smelling her words, risking himself to humans on the lookout for other invasive spotted lanternflies. Blamed for eating leaves and early blooms, too many of them hungry spoil the human's harvest. Their murder was economy, business, never personal.
It seemed worse, to die for nothing.
Cymbel’s messages came wind-spread, a mix of freesia and lavender. In her quiet fragrance she said, “love, are you hiding, scared? There are places we can go where Feet and Hands are scarce, where trees are large, where sap is honey-dewed. The burly Baobab, where we’d welcome a family of babies, bats, bugs; or the Jaboticaba where the trunk runs so rich with sap fruit grows off it like egg sacs. Our children would never go hungry, never be stomped. The season is longer there. Your polka dots with mine, fear nothing but our distance. You taught me that, I remember.”
He remembered: her last breaths, in their last life. Caught in a net he couldn’t break.
Reed passed from first instar, to second, to third, to forth; where a back of black and white polka dots gave way to red, and in his final form to wings. Spotted lanternflies cannot fly. It is only their leaps that seem like flying. They’d never make it to the baobabs.
Some died so others could live, it was how every living thing survived. Reed hid in the crowd and lived, filling on stems flowing with juice.
Cymbel’s last message came sour, with hints of citrus. “I'd prefer six feet with you than two with any other. Find me, before the next life. If we don’t find each other in one life, we may never have another together.”
Fed on bulrush, Reed smelt of swamp and musk. An appropriate apology of smells. “I didn’t know.”
No more fear for what he couldn’t control, for what high-thing stomped life and hard-sucked sap out of them.
Reed’s smell became bolder, mold on bark, “if I’m but a smashed-tannin-dead-leaved bug when you find me, forgive my cowardice. Live on, have children. Our life has become small, a wisped-flap wing, one instar to the next in blinks.”
He dreamt bug-dreams. Sleep was the only time a bug can think itself a giant, can think itself lord over a kingdom of easy sweets without predators.
When Reed woke, it was to a silent massacre except for the clap of human flesh or boot on gravel. His spotted lanternfly cousins were flattened and smeared. The next Foot, or Hand, he could not tell but for its huge size compared to his own, made for him. He leapt, too much faith in wind and wings to save him.
The world hated those born spotted lanternflies, as if Reed and Cymbel asked to be hatched from a mother's smear of mud-sac. As if anything asked to be born invasive. The world always had an excuse to hate on love. And Reed hated it back. Hated the net and the hand that cast it.
Reed traveled on the wind, spreading worked-sap out with messages. To make up for lost time he left love on bark and bust and brick. “Here I was. Here I go.”
His scent scattered vine to vine in an ocean of green and tar. Feet be damned, they wouldn’t stamp love as they did chitin. He yearned for Cymbel, she who was the most nutritious of saps, the most distant of fliers. They were each other’s, until the season’s end and they became the earth’s.
The other spotted lanternflies helped, searched out for love songs left behind in rose and hyssop and myrrh, though they only ever knew an insect’s life.
“She is there,” they said with a flap of their wings.
There Reed went. Black-spotted and blushing-bride reds were thicker than the ivy. Only Cymbel could make him hear music even when none was to be found, none that could be made. This time there was no net to separate them. Only wings and a season close to ending.
“You’ve found me too late again,” she said. Callery pear tree nectar lifted from her like song.
Reed couldn’t speak, shaking with the vision of her. When they first met she had worn a polka-dotted dress.
“Are you disappointed?” Her wings were damaged, Feet-missed. Reed cared only that she’d known hurt.
“Bless that they missed your heart, your lymph, my heart hidden within yours. Come, tuck under my thorax.”
“Will you sing to me?” she asked.
“I will. Is it true, this is our last life together?” An insect’s life is too short. Even if the reasons were pure, Reed regretted all their time apart wasted on his fear.
Cymbel answered in the wrap of his legs around her abdomen, her pulse quickening to match his.
“Sing.”
In their other forms, they were too small, too weak, too few; divided by too much ocean and sky to let fury alone fuel them. To love in this world, in any form, was revenge enough for all the Cymbels captured for her skin, for her blubber, for her beak.
And though a spotted lanternfly’s song was silent, Reed knew Cymbel could hear it.