Crickets don't sound like that.

“What do they sound like?” I asked.

“They chirp. They don’t click.”

My friend’s voice came tinny over the phone box. I held them up to the mesh guarding the open window, next to the cat sitting on the sill. She hadn’t moved since the clicking started.

“But some animals do click.”

“Sure.”

“And pens.”

“Yeah,” my friend agreed. “Pens click.”

“But not crickets.”

“Not exactly.”

“What does that mean?”

“’Not exactly?’”

“Yes.”

“It means kind of-sort of.”

I rolled the thought around. Ace could hear the question I was thinking.

“Does Kitty roar?” They asked.

I looked down at Kitty. I think Kitty thought she roared. She walked around the house with the same authority, but she meowed, and squeaked. And chirped, even.

“Kitty isn’t a cricket,” I said aloud. Not to my friend; not exactly.

Ace laughed. “I’ll be home tomorrow. Remember to lock the door.”

---

Seventeen sunrises before this conversation with the phone box, I was born.

I’d woken in the dark. The thick roots and swampy ground were me, at one point in time. But under the night sky and leaves they ferried dew and peat, and something that started to think things about itself. It started to call itself ‘me.’ The thing called ‘me’ was indistinguishable from the marsh, except that it could refer to myself. It could move as well, so I did.

The fibers in my limbs groaned with the effort. Mud sloughed off of me in thick rivulets and I stood for a long time, because I never had before. And I had never seen the stars. How could I go back, when I had seen the stars? How could I look anywhere else, when I was looking at the stars?

---

The sun chased the stars away. It reminded me that the water in my veins had grown stagnant, and when I moved, the dried dirt left cracks along my surfaces. The bog never looked like this, except in the heat of the summers when the air was parched. Perhaps this was a mistake.

I returned, sunk below the bog water. It was cooler here. I sighed, digging myself deeper into the earth. I did not need to move. I had tried it once and that was enough.

Before the sun reached zenith, I left the bog.

There were many things to see in the trees; little things and flying things and furry things that made themselves known to me. Some things of the bog only moved with the wind, but ferned and branched overhead. They waved as I passed and I waved back.

I stopped every so often to pick up my pieces. Bits of mud and earth flaked off when I moved, and I did not want to lose the things that just became mine. So I cupped myself in my hands as I went. Perhaps a rain could help me put myself together again, but the sky was radiant blue through the trees. The day passed like this until the blue softened and darkened to a deep indigo.

I found a new light. Not the moon — a delicate fingernail curved amongst the stars — though I found that as well. This came through the wood like a small sunrise. I followed the moths to its source. It was attached to something that wasn’t the wood, but made of trees. Water still moved through its veins, sluggish and quiet in death.

It was a house and a friend, I would come to learn. Ace wasn’t a friend first. First, Ace was a thing that moved differently than the other things in the woods. Ace was a thing that wore odd fibers in odd colors. They were a thing that let out high pitched noises when I crossed the grass between the wood and the light.

(These were screams. Because I looked very scary. Ace told me this after the fourth sunrise, when they realized I did not want to leave.)

I held up two hands full of dirt. “Can I find water here?”

---

As promised, Ace came home after the next sunrise. After the next sunset, the clicking started again.

We sat at the window with Kitty. The sound was rhythmic until it wasn’t. It lulled you with predictability until it didn’t. The lantern at the front of the house illuminated the porch and the grass, but didn’t reach the trees beyond.

“Cicadas don’t sound like that either,” Ace said, in that quiet way when they were thinking with their voice. “What is that?”

“Maybe it’s still learning how to be a cricket,” I said. I was learning a lot of things.

“Maybe,” Ace agreed.

“Or,” I said. “Something woke up with me.”