Published in American Writers Review, 2026
Eve woke up as usual Friday morning at five, but what was unusual was the near silence. She knew for sure that when she went to sleep the night before there had been a pleasing and animated cricket jamboree right outside her bedroom window. The grass there — tall, weedy, undisturbed — invited fireflies in June, crickets in July. What happened to all the crickets? No birds or amphibians either.
As she opened her computer that morning a message raced across her screen: “All Finger Lakes crickets are now the property of C.H.i.R.P.s.”
“Fung-goo! Is this a joke?”
Eve visited the recommended website, a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley that offered a trial subscription: ten crickets for two weeks. Then Eve could rent – it was expensive – but if she bought, there was no guarantee that even one cricket would survive New York state’s winter temperatures. Maintenance was the owner’s responsibility. Insurance was suggested. The venture capitalists implied that only a nincompoop would buy. When she called the 800 number a Cricket Associate told her she could purchase one, two, or three dozen crickets; she recommended three because of high mortality rates with first-time entomophiles. You could have mixed gender or no gender; mixed was advised otherwise there would be no stridulation. No music.
Eve said she’d think about it.
At eight a.m., she texted her neighbor, Lisa.
“You’ve been living in the stone age,” Lisa said.
Eve had been working at home since COVID. Then Charlie, her gangly 13-year-old with a mop of red hair, had had back surgery. It had been four years at home, her last year an extended parental leave.
“When you go back,” Lisa said, “you’ll see how life has changed.”
∞
Eve biked to the university’s Office of Sustainability where she worked. It was only three miles. Nothing quite compared with the feel of the wind on her face, the sun warming her strong shoulders. She could nod or wave hello to her neighbors.
Once on campus, she ran up five flights of stairs to her floor because she didn’t have the app that activated the elevator. This was new. Why an app? To keep out homeless? Every busy street corner she passed on her way in was occupied by someone in rags with a sunburnt forehead and unwieldy hair. They held cardboard signs in one hand, and their hungry mutt’s leash in the other. There seemed to be more homeless people than ever. In fact, she thought she saw her neighbor, Harold, a skilled construction worker, begging on the corner near the greasy Chinese takeout and the Speedway gas station that sold lottery tickets.
Nothing less than a dollar, his sign said.
It wasn’t a big surprise to Eve that office space was now shared, but it was a surprise that the whole department was crammed into one room. Because none of the windows opened, she could no longer hear robins and goldfinches chattering as they swooped in and out from a line of spruce and ash trees. Her co-workers sat rigidly, shoulder-to-shoulder, typing away on used ASUS laptops, and drinking cafeteria coffee out of reusable mugs.
“The Sustainability Office isn’t very important anymore,” her supervisor, Lenore said, shaking her head, as if to ally Eve’s feelings of discomfort. “Sustainability and its backbone of science are the new bad boys. We’re keeping a low profile. Just trying to survive.”
When a bell rang at noon everyone rose, and Lenore grabbed Eve’s shoulder and said, “First day back so I’m treating you to lunch. Gates Cafeteria has these awesomely tasty veggie burgers.” As part of their personal mission and commitment to sustainability, both women did not eat meat.
∞
As they were ordering, the cashier, a college student with a hairnet and enough rings and baubles to permanently re-align her facial muscles, asked Eve if she wanted condiments.
“What’s a veggie burger without condiments?” Eve said in a caviler way. It suddenly felt good to be out again, among the students and other workers, with the opportunity to meet new people. Working at home, you missed chances for shared experiences.
The cashier indicated the electronic menu overhead. Listed were more than two dozen condiments – some of which Eve had never heard of – and their prices.
“Are you telling me I have to pay five cents for a squirt of ketchup?” Eve’s eyes narrowed.
“Two at eight cents is a real bargain,” Lenore said, trying to keep the mood light. “It just takes time, Eve. Relax. You’ll get used to it. Change is the way of the world.”
“Where have you been?” the cashier said to Eve. “Anyway, I don’t make the rules.” She adjusted a white wireless device stuck into one ear (apparently it was instructing her in some activity), and added, “You’re holding up the line.”
Eve wondered what she accomplished by being at the office in person. The coworker to her right gave her dirty looks every time Eve’s eyes deviated from her laptop, while the coworker to the left kept coughing and blowing his nose and honking like a goose, causing her to lose focus. From her co-workers incidental comments, she understood there was a big push to get warm bodies back in the office. Those who worked at home bankrupted the food franchises and no longer filled the city’s parking lots with their vehicles. Most significantly, the profits of real estate tycoons and reality stars suffered; reality stars, because large arsenals of them clamored for attention. Only the most outrageous and controversial would succeed.
When quitting time came, Eve ran down the five flights of stairs. Never had she felt so free. Then she got to her bike and found a wheel boot on it. A notice sealed in plastic said: It is illegal to remove this boot by blow torch or other destructive means. You will face fines, penalties, and possibly long jail times. You will never be able to get a job again, and if you live in the state of Florida, you will never be able to vote again. Another notice said her bike was unsightly and she should get something more attractive, or the bike could be hauled off as trash even if she did pay the parking fee, which was one dollar-an-hour. Attached to the plastic notice was a yellow Post-it. In black sharpie were the words: What makes you think you’re so special?
Eve sat down on the university’s lawn, which didn’t cost her anything yet, and reviewed her options for getting home. She called the 800 number listed on the citation and spent fifteen minutes being looped from one menu to another until she was back at the same start menu. She could walk home – she had strong legs and stable ankles – but she worried about leaving her bike unattended. Next to her children, there was nothing more she loved than her bike.
Eve was watching all the cars go by, each one obediently coming to a full stop, when a masked, blue-bandanaed cyclist appeared out of nowhere. The skinny cyclist wore denim cutoffs, and a tee-shirt that said: Question. His dark sunglasses made it impossible to see his eyes. She thought he was going to lock up next to her, instead, he examined the boot, then he scanned the surrounding buildings and sky.
“You have a wheel boot,” he said, like a doctor making a diagnosis.
“I didn’t know I had to pay to park. It’s a bike. Who ever heard of paying to park a bike?”
The masked cyclist pulled a battery-operated wheel grinder out from his backpack. In minutes the boot was unbooted.
“How much do I owe you?”
He gave Eve a leaflet and pedaled off. The leaflet said things like, Are you concerned about losing Nature? Losing jobs? What will be next? Bike detentions? Attacking the most vulnerable of us is just the beginning. Protest Next Saturday. Be there and beware. No links or barcodes, just a small map that showed the location of a popular downtown park.
On her way home, Eve verified that the man begging on the corner was indeed her neighbor, Harold. He looked like he had aged twenty years since last year when he’d been a fully employed construction worker. She handed him a dollar.
∞
The next morning, which Eve and Lisa powered through their morning walk, Eve said, “The police contacted me.”
“What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything! They wanted to know who removed the boot from my bike. They were contemplating putting me – an ordinary working person with no criminal record – in jail! A mom with three kids. You look at them cross-eyed and they want to incarcerate you.”
Lisa shrugged. “The rich and powerful do whatever they want, I guess. It’s a new world, Eve.”
And a world without crickets, Eve thought sadly.
“I’m just being realistic,” Lisa said when she saw the look on Eve’s face. “Feel lucky that you still have a job.”
They passed dozens of For Sale signs on front lawns advertising extra bedrooms for rent, sweatpants for sale, even typing paper used on one side. Lisa mentioned an oil-rich country that had bought the rights to the sounds from Vermont’s babbling creeks, and their intention to remove creeks from the backyards of those who refused to pay rent.
“Life is changing right before our very eyes,” Lisa said. “It’s not some weird conspiracy theory.”
∞
It was bad enough that there was a price on everything, but prices were going up: a small squirt of ketchup now ten cents. What put Eve over the top was Charlie coming home from middle school in tears. The school had confiscated his bike claiming it had been parked illegally.
Fung-goo!
Eve called the principal. She reminded him how bikes benefitted the earth by not overwhelming an already too-warm atmosphere with tons of carbon dioxide.
“Charlie just started back at school,” Eve pleaded to the principal. “How could you take his bike?” She felt her fists clenching up, and she had to sit down, and remind herself to take a deep breath. “He needs his bike back! How is he supposed to get to school?”
“Calm down, Eve,” the principal said. “It’s not up to me anymore. Bicycle Interference City Enforcement are in charge now. So you can forget the carbon dioxide. It doesn’t matter, Eve. Not even one molecule. Watch what you say. And pl-ee-eze: do not post anything anywhere.”
This new world order wasn’t being imposed just on Eve, her co-workers, or neighbors anymore: it had trickled down to her son, and his generation. People who had not had a chance to live. She glanced at the pamphlet the blue-bandanaed cyclist had given her.
∞
Saturday morning Eve found herself with a hundred or so people marching along the city’s main street with home-made signs, chanting, “Go home BICE!” They shouted other things too like, “No bike is illegal! Give us back our crickets! Free condiments for everyone!”
When Eve sat down to rest, a combat-clad BICE man, masked and in full armor, yanked her up by her armpits, zip-tied her hands, and dragged her along with her bike into the BICE processing center, a six-story concrete monstrosity that lacked windows; a stinky airless building (a former Sears warehouse) that echoed with the sound of wheels being wrenched off bikes, and brake lines being cut. Scattered about were bikes tagged with parking tickets, or No License stickers. The BICE head honcho insisted that locking up bikes kept everyone safe; true, some believed him, but those in the majority considered him a sociopath and bona fide lunatic hell bent on creating pandemonium.
As Eve sat on the concrete floor waiting to be processed, she watched the BICE men separate bikes by style: racers, road, mountain, commuters, hybrids. Then they wheeled them away, the bikes creaking as if they knew life as they knew it was over. Chains rattled and wobbly lights threatened to fall off. Some bikes were completely dismantled and shipped away. Who knows where? Eve kept watching for Charlie’s red bike with the white banana seat, but there were so many bikes all crowded together that even if his bike had passed by her, it was unlikely she would have seen it.
After 24 hours and an assessment of Eve’s bike – which BICE declared to be a piece of junk – Eve and her bike were released.
“Why was I even locked up?” she asked the BICE man who gave her an exit paper. It said, No Criminal Behavior. Yet.
“Because we can,” he said. “You clog up the roads, and you don’t belong here.”
She knew from conversations with the other cyclists that unless she stopped all activism, it was only a matter of time before she would end up back at BICE.
∞
That night Eve went to bed haunted by the images of the quiet, stilled bikes left behind, and those who owned them. She barely slept. She felt a deep longing for those nights when the music of crickets – a half dozen different species at least – surrounded her house, and serenaded her to sleep.
∞
Meanwhile the rich kept getting richer. Maybe it was all those crickets they were selling. For most people, however, life was becoming increasingly difficult. Hospitals closed. No one went to the dentist anymore. They were too expensive. Schools went to half day. Newspapers disappeared overnight. More jobless people roamed the streets. The resources of the National Parks were gutted, and names of revered institutions were changed to reflect those in power.
It was now or never, Eve thought. Taking a chance – because there were cameras everywhere, and she was on a watch list – she met late one night with the bandanaed bicyclist and his gang of roving bicyclists.
∞
Not even a month later, a massive swarm of bicyclists jam-packed the city’s streets. Every bicyclist seemed to be out. Several cyclists had zip-tied radios to their handlebars and blasted songs like Queen’s We Are the Champions, and Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land. Eve and the bandanaed bicyclist led the rally. Their T-shirts said Question on the front, and Resist on the back.
All kinds of bikes showed up: commuter bikes, road bikes, hybrids, gravel, flat-tire, reclining, recumbent, cargo. E-bikes. They were joined by the people movers, skateboarders, scooter riders, and the everyday, ordinary pedestrians. Everyone chanted, Rights for All. Some people actually started standing up for the right to open their windows at work. The right to bring your own catsup to lunch. The right to bike in the road. The right to know what happened to the incarcerated bikes, like Charlie’s.
The people knew there would be more coming down from above, and they didn’t always know when, where, or how, but they were starting to understand the grand plan, and the consequences, and they weren’t going to take it anymore, not without a fight.
