Frog

The frog did not consider the ramifications of his metamorphosis. He’d met this great girl, see, with hair and fingernails and opposable thumbs, who wanted to marry him and whisk him away to Homo Sapiens City. She held his tiny green hand at the water’s edge, told him they could sleep together in a pond of pillows if he would only follow her into the great metal ecosystem of civilization. Who was he, a frog raised on horse flies and cattail mud, to reject her advances? Who was he to turn down the miracle of a human sort of life? He let her kiss his lipless mouth, and became and became and became.

The first obstacle of the frog’s transformation was the loss of his prehensile tongue, its phantom weight still spiraled in his mouth. On the train with his lover, leaving the countryside for the spot of smog on the horizon, a fly buzzed about their cabin. The no-longer-frog tried frantically to unfurl his tongue from behind his brand new teeth and pluck the insect from the air, but his efforts made him look like a fool. His lover laughed and kissed his cheek. He smiled back at her—how he liked to smile, that bright new stretch of the body!—and tried to ignore the flash of melancholy that overcame him when he realized she would never know the power and grace his mouth used to contain, only this clumsy substitute.

In the city, the no-longer-frog climbed one thousand stairs to his lover’s apartment. When she ran him a bath, he let the tap run until the whole tile floor was flooded. He wanted to fix the despairing drought of the indoors, to convert its glass and metal and wood back into memory of beaches and quarries and forests. His lover was aggravated. We’ll get mold, she said. The no-longer-frog did not speak because he was perfectly friendly with mold, would in fact prefer its quiet creeping company to the blank shine of this unnatural cube of space. Still, he kept the water in the bathtub from then on.

The no-longer-frog and his lover were married in a simple ceremony in the park, next to a man-made duck pond, which was the best of nature the city had to offer. The no-longer-frog was distracted by the waterbirds, who had been his mortal enemies for the whole of his amphibious existence. His lover, dressed in flowing white, beautiful as a frozen waterfall, told him he had to learn to relax. Lesson one of being a human, she told him, is that no one is trying to eat you. This sounded unlikely to the no-longer-frog—humans are not, after all, very fast, and have more than enough meat to tempt an appropriately monstrous predator. But he loved his lover, so he listened to her, and he listened to the priest, and repeated back his words as he had once echoed the oldest bullfrogs in their evening chorus, and he kissed his lover on her soft human mouth when he was told it was time to do so.

In this way, he learned it wasn’t so hard to be a human, at least in theory: it consisted merely of doing the right human things at the right times, over and over again. When he came home to his wife, he was a human if he inquired about her day and cooked pasta for dinner and took her to bed, and he was something less than human if he prepared a platter of cockroaches and asked if she wanted to spawn with him in the bathtub. Being human was all about rules, about the regulation of animal instinct in favor of the appearance of normalcy.

So the no-longer-frog learned the rules of the game.

Because it turned out you could not be human without laboring for paper of dubious importance, the no-longer-frog got a job at a pet store. There, he learned to sell small units of life, and to keep his fear of cats to himself. He advised customers on terrarium substrate selection, recommended his own preferred brand of crickets to people who had never even tried to think like a frog. The no-longer-frog’s favorite time at the pet store was after hours, when his boss would turn the lights down low to save electricity, and he could swim in the blue wash of the aquariums and pretend he was sunk once again in the mud of his distant beloved pond.

The no-longer-frog’s wife saw his sadness, and decided to show him all the inconceivable magics of humanity so that he might appreciate his newfound personhood. She took him to an amusement park and bought them tickets for the rollercoaster. The no-longer-frog was horrified by the soaring machine. Like being caught in the talons of a heron, he said to his wife, and she said, yes, but without the danger. Isn’t there something about that to love?

His wife brought the no-longer-frog to the symphony, where he watched one hundred wooden chambers resonate in a harmony that brought tears to his eyes. His wife laced her fingers through his, whispered, isn’t that a sort of beauty you’ve never heard, and he turned to her, face wet and starstruck, and whispered back, as beautiful as the crickets singing lullabies with the red-wing blackbirds.

The no-longer frog felt weighed upon by his new condition in a way he couldn’t explain. In the pet store, he found himself looking at the parade of animal companions with a vicious jealousy. One night, with no people around to witness his flouting of human norms, he planted a quick kiss on the mouth of a rubber boa, waited in the dark for the magic to happen. When it didn’t, he felt horribly guilty, and ran home to tell his wife, who laughed herself hoarse at the image. Imagine kissing a snake!

You kissed a frog, remember? says the no-longer-frog, and she says, but that was different—we were in love, and she pushed her body against his until it did what bodies are supposed to do when touched, and he lay down with her and forgot everything but his animality for a few delirious moments.

But no-longer-frog’s longing was getting worse. When his wife found him languishing in the bathtub, the showerhead plinking drops onto the surface like rain, she lost her temper. You’re being dramatic now, she told him. Every human has to come to terms with having no choice but to be a human. You’ll get used to it, just like the rest of us, and get on with your life. 

Far from reassuring him, her words sent the no-longer-frog into a frenzy. I love you, he told his wife. I’m sorry. I can’t be what you want me to be. 

He kissed her startled lips one last time, and then he ran down the thousand stairs into the street, and hopped on the bus which he took every morning to the pet store. He looked out the window at his place of employment, its ugly gray awning proclaiming REPTILES AMPHIBIANS TROPICAL FISH, and then the bus sailed on by. 

The no-longer-frog rode the bus all the way to the end of the line, in the countryside. He found a pond—there are lots of ponds in the countryside. He took off his shoes and his socks and his stupid belt and he put his feet right into the water, wishing for his old webbed toes. 

But this was good. He could live with this. He stood and walked forward, sinking into mud up to his ankles. If he had learned anything by being human, it is that the body matters far less than what you do with it. The water rose up to his shoulders, his eyes level with the surface as though perched on a lily pad. How he had missed seeing the world like this. What did it matter if his matter was human now? His mind was still the mind of a frog. How he had missed letting himself be what he was. 

In the distance, the frog could hear other frogs singing, a symphony, welcoming him home. He parted his lips, and sang with them.