Cicadas, in the heat of the day and of their mating fervor, can produce a call with the decibel equivalent of a rock concert. The inside of Lisa's head, in the heat of the day, the cool of the night, the air conditioning of her corner apartment or the middle of a meeting, can produce a comparable sound. Difference is, her noise doesn’t protect her from bird predators or procure her a life partner, nor can anyone hear it but Lisa.
She wakes every morning, gets up, smokes a cigarette, sits down, gets up again, bends into down dog, lies down to try and sleep, fails, gets up again, smokes another cigarette and finally surrenders to a cup of coffee. She sips while she tries to figure out whether or not her dreams were her actual life, and vice versa, and although coffee is something she claims to be unable to do without, it ends up winding her tighter around herself, which is what she doesn’t need.
Lisa is average—or, depending on the emotional attachment and embellishment of the onlooker, slightly above or below—in just about every way. She isn’t too thin, isn’t too large, isn’t too fit. Her hair and eyes aren’t too deeply brown, too light brown, no red highlights, no particularly alluring twist or smoothness. She isn’t notably tall or short, and her clothing is neither fashionable nor offensive. She attended a decent state college and earned a degree in business because that's what one does when one has no noteworthy fortes or talents.
Her job begins at nine in the morning, and until five she earns a salary that just about supports her unextravagant lifestyle. Like anyone else, she passively contemplates the benefits of earning just a bit more, though hasn’t anything in mind she’d want to do with the slight surplus.
Sometimes she meets a few of her friends for happy hour, all from her division at work, but sometimes she can't. Occasionally her boss will join them but he has new twin boys and a wife at home who are allergic to the smell (and the act) of beer. She has one or two pints of whatever’s on tap, nothing special. She doesn’t even particularly like beer, or any alcohol, but she doesn’t care to field the sort of interrogation that tends to emerge when one drinks a soda during happy hour. She takes just one pre-drink aspirin to preemptively avoid the slight headache beer gives her.
After an hour or so of decidedly happy (read: uneventful) shop talk and good-natured fun-poking at select higher-ups and “I sort of hoped the company Christmas party would be catered this year instead of the usual Olive Garden thing, but GOD those endless breadsticks are so good,” Lisa walks two blocks to the bus which brings her back to her apartment in twenty minutes.
Her apartment is tasteful with good light. The walls were painted an easy beige when she signed the mortgage instead of that empty white color so she didn’t have to do much of anything to them. They're hung with a few spare nature prints and fruits (in the kitchen, of course) she found for a pretty good deal at a framing joint around the corner from work. Draped neatly over her tan L couch is an afghan her mother thought would be “a nice way to bring some color in.”
Lisa hangs her keys on the key-hanger by the door, changes out of her work clothes into her comfy Levi’s Perfect Fit jeans, warms up a piece of pre-prepared chicken breast and a vegetable dish Sandra Lee thought would be a great way to “shake things up a bit” last week on cable and eats it at her chestnut, leafless kitchen table (the two extra leaves sit in the closet waiting for company). She doesn’t like to eat in front of the television because in order to avoid becoming just another victim of the ever-growing American obesity epidemic, one should concentrate on and savor one’s food without distractions.
If it were Tuesday through Friday, she’d have gone to her step class before eating, but it’s Monday, so she hasn’t. She finishes her meal, places her dishes in the dishwasher (leaving them in the kitchen sink marks the beginnings of a decaying sense of feng shui), and sits next to the afghan. It’s itchy, so she doesn’t sit against it. She flips through the pre-recorded offerings of her DVR and settles on the new episode of Entourage she missed while attending her co-worker’s weekday wedding the night it aired.
And then the noise starts. But small at first, like maybe only two or three cicadas. Her hand clenches around the remote.
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