In the past, the sound of the monastery’s bedtime chimes had always made them drift right off, but the once-soothing metal hum now felt dull and clattering-not sweet and high, like crickets were. I bet it’s nice to fall asleep listening to crickets, they thought.
The absence persisted at night, while Dex lay curled beneath their soft covers in the dormitory. They were city bugs and therefore, by Dex’s estimation, inadequate. Oh, there were plenty of bugs-butterflies and spiders and beetles galore, all happy little synanthropes whose ancestors had decided the City was preferable to the chaotic fields beyond its border walls. It’d be nicer here if there were some crickets, they thought as they raked and weeded. They noted it while they tended the Meadow Den Monastery’s rooftop garden, as was their vocation.
They’d never lived anywhere with cricket song, yet once they registered its absence in the City’s soundscape, it couldn’t be ignored. Some multimedia art show that sprinkled in nature sounds, perhaps. Maybe it’d been a movie they watched, or a museum exhibit. Dex couldn’t pinpoint where the affinity had come from. The urge to leave began with the idea of cricket song. A never-ending harmony of making, doing, growing, trying, laughing, running, living. The City was a healthy place, a thriving place. A towering architectural celebration of curves and polish and colored light, laced with the connective threads of elevated rail lines and smooth footpaths, flocked with leaves that spilled lushly from every balcony and center divider, each inhaled breath perfumed with cooking spice, fresh nectar, laundry drying in the pristine air. It doesn’t matter that your friends are there, as well as every building you love, every park whose best hidden corners you know, every street your feet instinctively follow without needing to check for directions.
It doesn’t matter if the city is a good city, as Panga’s only City was. It doesn’t matter if you’ve spent your entire adult life in a city, as was the case for Sibling Dex. Sometimes, a person reaches a point in their life when it becomes absolutely essential to get the fuck out of the city.
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