frog

frog
Consuelo and Delia sit on the floor in Delia's drafty bedroom in the big green country house near the river that looked like a dollhouse. Consuelo is Indian-style and Delia is crouches. They have been creating a universe on the wood floor, using the hundreds of miniature animals and people and trees and fences and buildings that Delia keeps in a big, rusty three-flavor popcorn tin. It's a game that no one really invented, they just started playing it one day. It’s called Animal Town. Consuelo stays interested for about five minutes, while Delia becomes more deeply absorbed with each of her precise decisions about where each piece belongs. Consuelo is holding Polly Pocket by the head, deciding whether or not to stand her near the magical well (a round mirror from the basement), and not really caring about it; Delia is patiently lining up a family of tiny plastic geese in front of a disproportionately large, and inconsistently urban replica of Oscar the Grouch's stoop when the girls hear something small and wet plopping in the hall towards the doorway of the room.
A frog visitor -- Delia watches intently as it enters her space. Consuelo, not as comfortable with animals of this size and sliminess, inches away as the frog inches towards her. Her blonde curls tremble, and Delia thinks of Goldilocks which pulls a giggle out from inside of her. Her friend is too terrified to notice.
Delia notices first that the frog is injured. The smooth skin on his back is punctured and bleeding and there is another wound on his leg. His flopping movement is lop-sided and weak. When Consuelo sees the blood she whimpers a little. Delia, brave as any magician, stares into the frog's helpless eyes. She wants so badly to cure him, to relieve the pain he must be feeling. Animal Town slips out of importance, and the living creature's pain becomes all she can think of. She starts to feel a gathering of prickly something welling up behind her eyes, it makes her feel a little dizzy, a little bit like she has to sneeze, as if her head were filled with thick, sticky spider-webs. The frog stops flopping inches from where Delia is sitting on her haunches. She stares down at the animal and begins to let the imaginary spider-webs stream out of her eyes and into the frog's. His swollen eyes begin to grow milky, hypnotized.
"Is he dead?" Consuelo peeps, hopefully. Then, noticing Delia's curious behavior, "What are you doing?"
Her friend's voice disrupts Delia, who had been concentrating on guiding the spider-webs to the frog's torn flesh. The webs hang loose for a moment, then dissolve; the ones in her head sink away, thinning and disappearing. She keeps looking at the frog, trying to maintain some sort of connection, and answers Consuelo.
"No. He's hurt." She finds herself insisting, convincing. She is intent on curing the frog visitor, and frustrated at her friend’s squeamishness.
The girls hear Delia's mom coming up the old wooden stairs and wait for her to appear in the doorway. Neither knows what she'll do when she sees the frog, but Delia suspects she won't want it in the house. She thinks for a moment about how to protect the creature from her mom, Considers throwing herself onto the floor between her mother and the amphibian, protecting the creature from the large human's wrath by heroically receiving it herself, but this seems too cartoonish a solution for this real situation.
The grown-up sighs, looking down at the scene in her daughter's room. The frog, the girls, Animal Town.
"Woodstock must have brought this little guy in." The dash of irritation in her mom's voice alerts her to the pending threat she poses to this little frog’s life.
Woodstock is the pink-blonde cat that Delia and Celeste found in the street in Woodstock while on a day-trip to a monastery near there. Skin and bones, he clearly didn't have a home, and so, when Delia saw the gleaming plea in the large dark eyes of the cat, her mother saw the gleaming plea in the large dark eyes of her daughter. There was no leaving him behind. He feeds himself during the week, hunting mice, moles, voles, bats, snakes, and frogs. He has been known to bring half-dead animals like this one into the house, showing off his prey like a trophy the whole family should be proud of.
Delia's mom kneels down to get a closer look.
"Oooo, he's a little bloody, huh?" She goes to the bathroom and comes out with a big wad of toilet paper. Delia makes a sound of protest, feeling glued to the floor, and her mom, already crouching with the frog again, looks up at her and lies because this is what grown-ups commonly do to five-year-olds: "I'll just put him outside and he'll find his way home to his mom and she'll make him better. She’ll kiss his boo boos with her frog lips."
Delia only half-believes her mother and her stomach tightens with vague fear for the frog's fate. Consuelo exhales, flying her relief like a victory flag, wanting all of Delia’s attention for herself now that the frog no longer monopolized it. Gently, because Delia is watching intently, Celeste picks up the frog into the white blob of toilet paper.