Pulau
an excerpt

10121word count

It’s the beginning of monsoon season. The cricket season. They crawl on the wire screen mesh. The symphony of sounds. There are several different kinds of crickets. One type is the brownish color. We call these fire crickets. The other is a black with a bright yellow marking on the back of the cricket’s neck. We carry them in match box and put them in shirt pockets. Later on, the crickets sleep in one large shoe box with other crickets. In the morning, I open up the box to see which one survived the night. They die in battle. The cruel things we did to them. We break the heads off of a dead cricket and put it on the end of the burnt incense stick. With this device, we use the whiskers of the cricket head on the stick to tease the live crickets into flaring their wings and enrage them to ruffle the transparent wings to make that lovely sound and music. It amazed me. The sound coming out of that peculiar vibration and the transparent wings. Especially the brown fire crickets which were a little wrinkle.