The Listener

In the eleventh summer since her father disappeared into the dust storm that took half the town's goats and all the radio towers, Marisol awoke to the sound of something living in her left ear. It was not the kind of sound one hears and forgets, like a mosquito or the tick of a clock wrapped in cotton. This was a sound with intention. It scratched with patience, like a writer sharpening a pencil before beginning a letter no one would read.

At first, she blamed the wind, which had a way of speaking through the adobe cracks, but the wind never hummed lullabies in dead languages or mimicked the cadence of her grandmother's rosary prayers. She told the doctor, who pressed a light to her ear and declared it "perfectly normal," as if normalcy could explain why the birds on her windowsill had started copying the scratching with their beaks. Her cousin Alma insisted it was a ghost. Her ex-lover called it attention-seeking. Only the old woman who sold prayer candles behind the church kiosk squinted at her with recognition and muttered, "La Oyente te ha elegido." The Listener has chosen you.

By the time the sun began to hang lower and the mesquite trees whispered more than they swayed, Marisol stopped trying to silence it. The more she listened, the more the world bent to meet her--not dramatically, but softly, like a curtain parting to let her through. The townspeople, who had once gossiped about her wearing mismatched shoes or speaking to her plants in the market, now turned their heads politely when she passed, as if to protect themselves from catching whatever it was that had taken root inside her. Marisol noticed that children stopped crying when she came near, and that dogs, even the half-wild ones with ribs like washboards, followed her silently, eyes wide and reverent.

The beetle--because by now she understood it was a beetle, though no one had shown it to her--began to speak in pulses, not words. It had no need for syllables. Its language lived in marrow, in gut-sense, in the sudden clarity that arrived just before waking. When she listened closely, her hands itched to paint symbols she'd never learned, and sometimes she woke with dirt under her fingernails, though her garden lay untouched.

The first time she saw another beetle, it was not in a waking moment, but one of those slow-moving dreams that felt older than her house was. She stood barefoot in the arroyo behind her grandmother's house, the one that only ran wet every ten years, and there in the cracked clay was a beetle identical to the one she felt inside her. Its back shimmered like wet obsidian. Its legs moved in loops, tracing a spiral in the dust, and when it looked at her, she understood it had been watching her longer than she'd been alive.

She knelt to touch it, but it burrowed into the earth before her fingers could reach. When she woke, her ear hummed with the sound of running water, though the drought hadn't broken in three years. She walked to the arroyo that morning. It was dry, as always, but the ground was warm beneath her feet, as if something underneath had recently stirred. That night, she placed her palm against the earth before bed, and for the first time, the beetle whispered a word she understood. It was not spoken, but carved into her blood.

She began to sense that the beetle was not only in her but around her, part of the desert's buried language. The sound of it lived in the clicking of cactus thorns in wind, in the hum beneath the silence when the town's generators failed. The beetle was of the land, not separate from it. A fragment of something older than roads and saints, older even than names. And now it had chosen her as its keeper--not as a possession, but as a biome. She was a walking ecosystem, a small desert carrying a smaller one inside her. She found a sense of satisfaction about this.

She thought of her father, how he had walked into the storm without fear, how the land had taken him not cruelly but deliberately. She wondered if he, too, had once heard the beetle. If he, too, had become part of something no one dared name.

From then on, Marisol stopped pretending to belong to the routines of other people. She let the dust settle on her calendar. The houseplants grew wild, tendriling up the walls as if they, too, had begun to listen. She no longer visited the market on Sundays or returned borrowed dishes. She ate when the beetle told her she was hungry, slept when it quieted, and rose when it stirred.

The line between her thoughts and its signals blurred like ink in water, until she could no longer say where she ended and it began. At first, the loss of boundary frightened her, like stepping into a pool deeper than expected. But then it felt like returning to a language she had once spoken fluently and forgotten.

The dreams came more often, longer now, stitched through with heat and the slow rhythm of roots pushing into rock. She wandered canyons that did not exist on any map, where enormous beetles--some translucent, some gold-veined--roamed in silence. In one dream, she stood at the mouth of a cave with carvings that pulsed like a heartbeat. Inside, she found a woman who looked like her but older, cracked like fired clay, with the same spiral pattern on her shoulder that Marisol had begun to notice on her own skin.

The woman did not speak, but offered her a bowl filled with soil and whispered breath. Marisol drank it. When she woke, her mouth tasted of iron and sage, and the silence in her ear was heavier than before--not empty, but waiting.

It happened gradually, as all permanent things do. Her hearing changed. She could no longer understand the news from the transistor radio, but she could hear the groaning of trees, the sigh of moths turning in the attic. She no longer cried when she felt overwhelmed--instead, she would lie in the garden, ear pressed to the earth, and let the beetle hum lullabies into her bones.

She understood now that it did not live in her… it nested through her. She was no more the host than the beetle was a parasite. They were co-authors of the same breath, rooted together in a pact older than the town, older than speech.

By the time the rains finally returned--thick and fragrant, pounding the roof like hooves--Marisol did not need to leave the house to feel them. The beetle opened her chest like a door and the storm walked in. She stood at the window, face wet with more than rain, and knew with a certainty she had never known before that her life was no longer hers alone. She was an ecosystem. A vessel. A song translated from desert into blood. The sound in her ear, once feared and fought, now pulsed in harmony with her breath.

So when the door-to-door surveyor arrived, clipboard in hand and sweat pooling at his collar, asking how satisfied she was with her current internet service, Marisol simply tilted her head slightly to the left, listened for a moment to the beetle's tiny percussion, and smiled. "I don't use Wi-Fi anymore," she said. "I receive all transmissions through the soil." She handed him a glass of sun tea infused with something aromatic and silvery, and asked if his dreams had been strange lately. “Mine certainly have been.”, she mused mirthlessly.

The man blinked. Looked inside his tea cup. Looked at her garden, wild with color in a dry, dry land. Then, very slowly, he reached up and scratched his ear.

Just once.

Marisol noticed, and so did the beetle.