In Nicaragua, we were stationed in a small village in Padre
Ramos where chickens muttered behind hunchback chain link fences and ocean
waves hit dark, dirty sand all night and where there was stucco it was brightly
painted. There were two two-story wood ranchos on the little camp property our
missionary—who asked me to call him Papa T—had built, segregated by gender.
Their roofs were an elaborate, dense interlacing of palm fronds, elegant and
beautiful. We ate underneath the boys’ rancho in the open salt wind, plastic
tables on sandy cement. In the humid night of the dive bombing cicadas, my
youth pastor, Ross “Coop” Cooper, a big bald man who crossed his eyes and
smiled in every picture and rolled an electric blue bowling ball with a plastic
skull inside, dared us to put a cicada in our mouths. I of the worm and the
baby bird, of our fear factor nights in the thin carpeted industrial church
space back home, always ready to take a dare. My fist close around the chirp, I
carefully hid the bug inside my mouth. Closing my lips, it went silent, and
when I opened my mouth, it began its frantic chirping again. When I came back
from that trip, I lied on Coop’s couch and bawled the entire day.
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