The twins next door have to go to evening school now that they’ve turned into crickets. On warm evenings, they leap from blade to branch, their frenzied shrieks replacing silence — quiet kids transformed into chatterboxes. No one knows how it happened; just that one day their mother told them “speak when I’m talking to you, dammit,” and the next day they were snacking on her lululemons. She’s not a bad mother, she insists, as she shows us the fetid pile of rotten vegetables, decayed leaves, and dead insects she’s assembled for dinner. She screws up her nose when she shows us, like this is all new to her, but we can tell she finds the twins only marginally more disgusting than before. “Would their daddy have walked out if they were a pair of angels?” Mom once asked when she thought we were away. “You know some kids are trouble from the moment you set eyes on them.” Away from prying eyes, we keep a diary of the twins’ daily doings: doze the morning away; early supper before heading to school; homework before play; and then prompt to bed at dawn. Rinse, repeat, for a few weeks… we’ve only recently discovered crickets don’t get to live very long, but it seems like fun while it lasts. It is late when we get home, dinner time except there is none to be had because Mom and Dad are quarrelling again. We shove stale Oreos into our mouth while we wait for the twins to beat their wings on our bedroom window and ask us out for a game of tag. When they arrive, we press our noses against the glass. If only we could fly out!
We could if our parents wish us into moths. Or butterflies. Something pretty. Something happy.
Varsha Venkatesh writes from Bangalore, India. She’s been previously featured in Exposition Review, Moss Puppy Magazine, Five Minute Lit, among others. She can be found on BlueSky at @VarshaWrites86.bsky.social.
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