I couldn’t bear the violence of the world, the world’s cruelty, the evil permeating the globe. I turned off the radio news. Click. Radio reporters’ voices lingered in the air for a few seconds; then they faded like dark wet paint changing to a lighter shade of dry paint. William was coming for dinner in less than an hour: I didn’t have time to sit at my kitchen table and mope over the murders I’d just learned about on the news. Didn’t I have enough to worry about, sensing William might propose to me tonight and I might not know whether to say “yes” or “no”?

As I baked tofu cutlets, boiled kale and stirred simmering macaroni, cricket sounds began to drift into my kitchen. The soft chant of early evening. The benign atmosphere of summer stroking the window screens. I had lived in this section of rural Westchester for three years and still felt the awe of a person not used to the natural world. Having grown up close to the center of a sizable city, I doubted I’d ever get accustomed to finches and roaming gaggles of chickens and deer five feet from my bedroom window.

William arrived. I watched him as he stood on my porch in his combat boots and jeans. Staring at him through the sliding screen door, I wondered if life would give me clear signs that I should marry him. Or that I shouldn’t.              

“Naomi, Naomi” he said, as he entered my place and delicately stroked my jawline with his large fingers. I realized just how chunky his fingers were when his hand massaged my neck. My plastic necklace shuttered in response.

We sat down to eat. I felt nervous and blinked a bit more than I normally did. William appeared calm, as he usually was. The sunset light glowed–a fire about to go out.

We chatted while we ate. An annoying local politician provided plenty of subject matter. Likewise, William’s truck–which my mother disliked because its wheels were often caked with mud. William treated the truck like a person, a buddy, even referring to it by a nickname (Bruce), and planning to take it to have a careful “physical” next week. 

The cricket sounds became louder–bloated. Pot-bellied ruckus. One cricket in particular was croak, croak, croaking very noisily, as if crying out. I told William to ignore its sound, but William’s face crease with aggravation. Finally, he went to the porch and I followed him. We both observed a cricket stuck between wood porch planks, its body half below the surface and partially above it.

“Here is the little bug-bastard making all the racket,” William said. Then he stomped on it.

“Don’t. Please,” I said.

William smashed it again, first with the toe section of his boot and then with his heel.

I went inside. Sat on a bench in the foyer area that overlooked the porch. Upset, I leaned forward; my breasts pulled me forward and a little downward.

William came back inside, sat next to me. “Let’s finish dinner, baby,” he said. “Just the two of us, sitting in your cozy kitchen. We have a lot to talk about; I have some things I’m wondering about.”

I knew where his conversation would go. I knew how I would respond.