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          Insomnia tended to hit Hebe with the force of a freight train. She lay uncomfortably on the inflatable mattress, staring at the moon and stars that rested beyond the mesh roof of the tent. Her cousin snored loudly next to her. She could perceive a dog barking in the distance. She heard bat's call  from the branch above their backyard camp. And an obnoxious cricket was performing a horrible piece right next to their tent, if not in it.
          Hebe surveyed the tent with their dying flashlight, and thanked God that the cricket was not inside. She hit the wall, and miraculously the pest fell silent. Light fell across her face as someone turned on the bathroom light in the house. This will be a long night.

          The sun rose, but Hebe had already been awake for hours before her cousin arose at the crack of dawn. "Morning," Stephanie yawned.
          "There was a cricket in here last night." Hebe looked around in annoyance.
          "That's impossible," her cousin laughed. "I didn't hear anything."
          "It was either in the tent or right outside, because every time I hit the door it got quiet."
          "Prolly your imagination. Come on, we have to put up the tent today." Stephanie stretched and unzipped the door, Hebe following.
          They rested under a tree when they finished loading their possessions onto the truck. Only the tent deconstruction was left now.
          "Listen, Hebe, I'm going in to the bathroom. Wanna take out and fold the poles?"
          "Uh... yeah, sure."
          Hebe began sliding out the fiberglass poles when her bare foot happened upon a slimy mass. "Oh my God, a slug, ew!" she shrieked. Repulsed, she lifted the tent to see how many more slugs had made their home between the humid tent and the brick patio.
          A cricket jumped out as she nudged the tent. Hebe jumped back, but then came another cricket, this one smaller. And another. And another. A colony of screaming crickets clawed its way out from under the plastic, jumping towards her, multiplying by the second until Hebe was surrounded by a swarm larger than anything she had ever seen, And I was sleeping on top of these things? The crickets began to jump up onto her bare shins, their legs scraping her skin with every hop of ascent, their antennae tapping her knees, their feet holding on try as she might to shake them off and run. She could feel the unreal swarm devouring her flesh, defying her previous definition of what she had thought to be an herbivorous insect. As the fiends screeched into her ears like miniature banshees and closed in over her face she had one last thought: This explains the noise last night.