Bug-phobic dread the looming swarm of Brood II cicadas [View all]

[xchrom]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/2013/05/18/6cea6be6-bd6e-11e2-9b09-1638acc3942e_story.html?hpid=z1

The night started with one tiny click near the bedroom window.

Then came another, and another, until a great oak beside Lori Milani’s South Arlington apartment was alive with an almost deafening roar of cicadas.

“It sounded like a human being murdered,” Milani said, recalling her anxious reaction to the emergence of cicadas in 2004, when she shut herself inside for five weeks to avoid them. “I was really afraid they would come into the apartment.”

For people like Milani, a graphic artist who struggles with her fear of bugs, the coming swarm of cicadas — which were spotted as nearby as Fredericksburg last week — elicits a single response: Dread.