“Let the freak get ‘em,” one of the girls said. Carla, I thought. She looked like the other girl. Patty. It was my first day. I knew these identical twins in high school. At first, they looked exactly alike, but after a while I could tell each right off. ‘I guess it’s the same when you meet a lot of new people all at once,’ I thought, ‘they are all identical twins.’

Ava was fixated on the boy in seat 28D before the engines went silent. Before the oxygen masks deployed above their heads and rebounded on their plastic tubes before settling. He had the height of the boys in her class, yet his puffy cheeks and darting eyes made her consider a younger age.

It was the cicadas on those hot August evenings that elicited childhood dreams in that rural America, Their droning songs in that humidity that never seemed to break. Seaweed green outer shells infused with black to match jet black eyes bugged out. Translucent wings, veiny lines enmeshed throughout at odd angles. Inch-long prehistoric reminders with thick width—perfectly designed for phobic reactions.

The trees had yet to bud, though the air felt as if they should any day now. The evening sun was descending. An aged minivan roared with rusted exhaust pipes, followed it west, slowed, and disappeared down a desolate side street. A church stood, paint peeling from its white steeple and wood façade. The brick faded at its base. ‘Last home-cooked meal before Fields,’ in black block letters were stuck upon a tipped over sign laying among the weeds and dirt near the street.