'tis the season

Last night, I had a dream.  I was walking down a street that ran alongside a forest, with powerlines overhead.  Between the forest and the road was a little brook, and I decided to wander off of the road to traipse around in the water for a bit before heading off to explore the forest.

I stepped off of the road and was about to make my way down into the creek when something solid bounced off my shoulder.  Surprised, I looked around and found that tiny pieces of what appeared to be plastic were raining down around me, bouncing off my shoulders and the ground in a growing cascade.

I looked up to find the source, and suddenly noticed hundreds (or maybe thousands) of bats, hanging from the powerlines above, chittering to each other as they dropped little things all around me.  Then I remembered hearing that this year would be a cicada year, and I understood all at once that the objects the bats were dropping were, in fact, the dismembered bodies of cicadas.  Looking down, I could see thousands of cicada heads staring at me, and I felt their body parts building up on my clothes, and I ran.  The bats, startled by my sudden movement, took flight as one body, soaring up and away, ending the grisly torrent as quickly as they had started it.  It was horrifying, but it was still one of the less upsetting dreams I had last night.

There are cicadas in Japan, but they come every year, and they have their own special way of inflicting terror.  When they moult, they leave their discarded shells everywhere, and the ground receives a thick carpet of cicada-shaped chitin that you have no choice but to walk over if you want to get anywhere.  The crunching noise and texture certainly bothered me, but what really stuck with me was what I spotted once when I was getting off the subway.

On one of the landings in the stairs heading up to the street, there was a live cicada buzzing about in frustration. It had mostly finished its moult, but somehow it became caught in its shell; unable to escape, and weighed down by the shell, it buzzed around on the floor in crooked circles, sweeping aside other shells and occasionally bumping into walls.  Even though I know cicadas can't hurt me, I have an innate fear of all buzzing insects, so I stopped in my tracks and watched it warily.  Other passengers passed me and headed up the stairs, but I was stuck watching this insect, trapped with no way to extricate itself, nor (I assume) any understanding of its situation.

I contemplated stepping on it, saving it the trouble of fruitlessly fighting against its own skin for the few hours it was likely to survive.  My fear held me back, but something else did, too:  I had no way of knowing for sure that the cicada would be unable to escape.  What right did I have to snuff out its life, if it turned out my supposed mercy may have been misplaced?  Who was I to say that the cicada was too weak?

I left the cicada there, spinning in circles.  When I got to the subway station the next morning, the landing had been cleaned up.  I never saw another cicada trapped in its shell; eventually, the cicada season passed, but the memory of that little battle, and my untaken opportunity to end it, stuck with me.