I was in the bath when the first one showed up. I’d been in the tub for an hour without knowing it was there. It wasn’t until I dragged myself out with puckered fingers pulsing toes that I saw it. 

A bullfrog sitting in my in my sink. I clutched the towel to my chest and let my body drip. It was the size of a dinner roll and the color of pond scum. It had slimy skin with thick thighs and warts scattered across its back and a big mouth that stretched past its bulging eyes. We observed one another, still and quiet like a showdown. I moved first, darting out and slamming the bathroom door shut. I went to change and figure out how to evict it. I was more annoyed at the bullfrog’s presence than anything, like when the trash is full and I don’t want to take it out. 

I should’ve figured it out right away. My sister was coming over, and I needed still to do the dishes and fold the laundry on top of sorting out the bullfrog, but I suppose because my deep desire to do nothing, I ended up in bed still wrapped in the towel and somehow the bullfrog was forgotten. At some point, I must have gotten up and dressed because when my sister came to my door, I wasn’t naked. 

 She sat at the kitchen table. She brought shepherd’s pie. Every time she visited, she brought a dish with her. I told her I didn’t need her to cook for me, though I never really cooked; grocery shopping was one of those things I kept meaning to do. I liked to lie to her. She always knew when I was lying and cooking for someone was one of the things she seemed to need after our mother died, so I guess it worked out alright.

I washed two mugs, trying to hide the pile of dishes in the sink. Unfortunately, the simple act of washing the mugs instead of grabbing clean ones from the cabinet was enough for her to question how often I did the dishes. I ignored her and put the dented kettle on to boil. She told me she was starting her new job at an investment firm on Monday. I was so happy for her—and me. During her year of unemployment, she was always complaining how no one would hire her even though she was well-qualified with years of experience. I sent her every restaurant, café, and store that needed workers. I even offered to talk to my boss about her working at the front desk for the mechanic shop, but every time, she sighed and said, “Maybe.” Even as a kid, she had an aversion to blue-collar life. When we played, I was always the cashier or the taxi driver while she was the politician demanding service. 

I was taking the opportunity of my sister using the bathroom to grab the week-old pile of laundry on the couch when I heard her scream.  

“Fuck, the frog,” I mumbled and dropped the laundry to grab a glass from the kitchen sink. She stood in the doorway with her hand on her hip. 

“You’re such a freak. Why do you have a frog in your sink? Mom would’ve lost it if she ever saw this.” She always used the ghost of our mother to discipline me. “It’s disgusting. How can you live like this?”

I pushed past her, flipping her off behind my back.

“I saw that, dickhead.”

“You were supposed to.”

The bullfrog hadn’t moved at all. It sat above the drain, chest bulging and collapsing. It groaned as I scooped it into the glass.

My sister moved back into the hallway. I shoved the glass in her face as I passed.

“Ugh! Asshole,” she said and swatted my hand away.

I laughed. “Pobrecita.”

“You can’t just dump it! You need to call an exterminator,” she yelled as I walked out the front door.

It was late September. The air was cold and crisp, and the evening light was that orangey color it gets as the seasons change. I dumped the bullfrog under my neighbor’s juniper bushes.  

When I came back, my sister peeled off a sock stuck to my sweater, called me a slob, and then continued talking about herself as if nothing happened. She’d apparently found a new boyfriend along with the new job. She wouldn’t say where or how they met, just that he had money. 

#

The second bullfrog showed up about two weeks later. It was a long day. Some guy’s girlfriend knifed his tires and scratched FUCKHEAD across the hood and PANTY LICKER across the left doors of his Ford Escort. Did a good job too, got all the way down through the paint and scratched the metal underneath. Then, a dude brought in his lime-green Alfa Romeo. Before last year, we hardly got any luxury cars, just old Fords needing a new catalytic converter and minivans needing an oil change. The city was going to shit with all those rich guys coming in to make movies and drill for oil down south. The Romeo was cool though, minus the dent on the front fender. The dude insisted some skaters did it, but we all saw the yellow guardrail paint and the half-drunk vodka bottle under the seat. We’d always gotten plenty of alcoholics with banged-up cars and unlikely stories.

When I got home, I tossed my keys on the entryway table, ready to lie on the couch and watch some TV, but waiting for me in the middle of the cushions—I’m pretty sure it was a different one, it was bigger at least—was a bullfrog.

I grabbed a plastic bag from under the sink and turned it inside out like I was picking up dog shit. In case it was the same one, I walked to the end of the block and left it on the grassy median across the street. I probably should’ve taken it further, but I was tired and mad I wasn’t watching two delusional people yell at each other on TV. I got back ready to just relax, but it had secreted mucus or something on the couch. I rubbed it out as best I could with some soap and water, but it still left a stain. Something about that second bullfrog got me feeling like I had chalk under my nails. 

That weekend I cleaned the whole house. I did it properly, moving everything off the counter, pushing out the stove and the fridge to clean behind them. I vacuumed everything, did three loads of laundry, and scrubbed the grout in the bathroom like my mom did once a month growing up. I stuck a wire hanger down the bathtub drain to remove a clog, and I started thinking maybe they came up from the drains. The bullfrog in the sink made sense, maybe because there’s water in the bathroom. The living room was next to the kitchen, so it was possible that the second bullfrog had come up into the kitchen sink and hopped over to the living room. The house wasn’t very big, one of the small adobe places built before the highways. 

I got a flashlight and bent over the bathroom sink, peering down the drain. There was a lot of brown slimy stuff, but the pipes were small and had a metal cross that made four holes too tight for the size of these frogs, unless they were like mice and could squeeze themselves to fit. The tub drain was a possibility, but I hoped I’d have noticed if a bullfrog showed up in my bath with me. I checked the kitchen sink too. It seemed improbable, but I started putting plates and bowls over the drains just in case. 

#

It was shortly after that I met Danny. She was an artist in the South Valley who worked with scrap metal and glass. She had worked out a deal with my boss, and she’d come by once a month to pick up whatever we had to offer. We started chatting one day as I was covered in grease, cutting up some flawed windshield glass for her, and as it goes, we went on a date and then started seeing each other. She was short and strong and clever with dark hair she kept long in its natural ringlets. 

Danny learned to work with metal from her father who constructed wrought iron fences and gates. He was a real artist too, although not many people recognized him as such. 

I kept my house clean, in case she ever stopped by. I called the landlady about the shower and when she again didn’t answer, I called the plumber. As the days grew short and cold, Danny and I kept warm with the heat of our bodies under blankets. She was so much smarter than me, telling me all about the history of the working class and Cesar Chavez and Dolores something—proletariat movements, she called them—as I tangled my hands in her hair, kissing the soft slope of her neck. 

#

On a day Danny was out of town for a gallery opening I invited my sister over—mostly to show off the spotless house and brag about Danny. I was lying on my couch, butternut squash soup simmering on the stove, when I heard her car pull into the driveway. I went to the kitchen and began stirring the soup slowly with a ladle so she could hear the clang as she came to the door. She’d brought a Pyrex filled with baked salmon and potatoes. 

“I told you I was making dinner,” I said out of obligation.

“I thought I would just bring a little something.” 

“Yeah, a whole dinner.”

She pushed inside and placed the salmon in the oven. I poured us large glasses of wine and grabbed two plates out of the cupboard. 

She looked around. “Did you hire someone to clean?” she asked, but before I could answer, she began complaining about her new job. 

She hated how boring it was. I think she always believed she’d end up doing something that would benefit real people, make their lives better, not just make money for shareholders. She told me she broke up with her boyfriend because now that she was at this job, she realized she was only dating him because she had nothing else to do before. She no longer had time to waste with a man who worked freelance and brewed his own beer. It was time, she said, to find someone with a real job like her. Dinner went on like this, and despite my best efforts, my sister left little room in the conversation for me to gush about Danny. 

We were at the door saying goodbye when a bellow came from somewhere inside the house. I coughed as soon as I heard it.

“What was that?”

I had to get her out before it croaked again. “Got something in my throat.”

She poked her head back through the doorway. “No, it was from the kitchen—”

“That’s weird, maybe you should get your hearing checked.” I showed her out and closed the door behind me. I walked her to her car and told her to text when she got home. 

She hesitated a moment before she got in the car. I waited until she turned the corner before running back inside. 

My sister was right—the croak came from the kitchen. I went to the sink and slowly lifted the bowl I’d placed over the drain. But there was nothing. I checked under the sink. Then the bullfrog croaked again. It startled me. I banged my head pretty good against the cabinet. The bump on the back of my head lasted for about a week. 

There were two croaks, a metallic harmony from atop the stove. I kept telling myself that we had finished the soup before. We would’ve seen them. I almost didn’t look. But I did. And there they were. Two of them at the bottom of my pot, feet covered in the creamsicle orange of the butternut squash. I gagged.

I carried the pot with the bullfrogs several blocks down to the arroyo and dumped them. I figured there were nicer, more inviting houses in that area for them to seek shelter if the mud and water weren’t cozy enough and they wouldn’t come back to bother me. 

#

After that, the bullfrogs didn’t come for a while. I’d almost entirely forgotten about them. Work picked up. We got more luxury cars needing special servicing and while the owners were obnoxious, it meant good money for the shop which meant a good bonus for us mechanics. Most were SUVs or sedans, but a few classic models came in and stirred some excitement. 

Danny and I were together most nights, going to her art openings or other events she said would culture me. I saw my sister very little. We were both busy with work and she started an affair with a coworker which occupied most of her thoughts and time. It was fine with me. I was happy to let someone else be the object of her nitpicking. Eventually, I knew her affair would sour, and I’d have to go through the whole break-up routine with her, but at that time I was preoccupied with my own love. I could spend more time with Danny without feeling the guilt of ignoring my sister. 

It was mid-November when the frogs returned. I think it was the night that Danny and I went to see a special film screening of Vertigo at an art house theater. I’d never seen it before, and she was into all that old artsy film. She came back to my place as usual and sometime early in the morning when it was still dark, I was woken by a belch. At first, I thought it was cute—as you do when it’s early on and you’re still infatuated—that Danny burped in her sleep. She curled her body into mine. But then it came again, clearer, not a belch, a bellow. And then again.

An apparition of my mother’s face came to me, the one she made when I came in from playing in the mud, or when I left clothes on the floor, or when I once let a sandwich mold in a plastic bag in my room just to see what would happen. And then it was Danny’s face, confronted by a bullfrog, with that same expression of disgust. 

I snuck out of bed. Not wanting to wake Danny, I used the dull light from my phone to look in the corners of the room, under the bed, between the dresser and the wall. Nothing. I went back to Danny and wrapped myself around her and pretended the bullfrog didn’t exist. I slept poorly, waking every time Danny shifted from one shoulder to the other. Around seven I gave up on sleep altogether. I put my kettle on to boil before slipping on shoes and going outside. 

It smelled clean like decomposition and fresh growth. It was a smell I associated with childhood summers with our dad, waking up on hard ground out in the mountains, face cold but body snug in a flannel sleeping bag. Those were the few good memories I had of him before he gambled away everything, before Mom left and took us with her, and he died broke in some motel room. He always believed he could win it all back until he didn’t. 

Frost covered the patches of grass in my front yard. I thought that frogs would be hibernating this late into the fall. I returned inside before the kettle whistled. I rummaged through what was left of my groceries and made a large breakfast. I was over the stove when Danny shuffled into the kitchen earlier than normal. Her hair was mussed, some curls flattened to her head. She hunched into her sweater as if being consumed by it. She was always the most beautiful in the moments right after she woke up. She sat with me, telling me about her dreams. I was too tired to retain any of it, but she could give a Latin mass, and I would be enthralled by her voice and passion. We ate, drank plenty of coffee, and returned to bed twice. 

We were still entangled when she laughed, “I just remembered, I heard a frog last night.” 

I tensed. “You couldn’t have. It’s too late in the year for frogs.” 

She propped herself up on her elbows and looked me over, “I could see you having a frog. You’ve got the same reserved temperament, strong thighs, like burrowing into the mud, getting wet, being dirty…”

And as if summoned by her words, the damned thing croaked. 

Danny turned to me with a surprised smile and said, “I told you.” She jumped out of bed and ran around the house hunting for the bullfrog like a child hunting for eggs on Easter. Her excitement was embarrassing. I found her enthusiasm and quirkiness cute, an artistic charm, but watching her ass up, groping for a bullfrog was too much. I started thinking about if she kept the thing. Her apartment was tidy but too small for a tank with a frog that her orange tabby, Jason, would no doubt knock over and eat. She would tell everyone about how she found it squatting in my home. If she met my sister—I couldn’t let her tell my sister she’d kept a bullfrog she found in my house. My sister would think Danny was stupid and she’d think I was more of an idiot for letting any of it happen. To make it worse, Danny was prone to exaggeration. When she told me how her father had lost his finger in an accident with a reciprocating saw, she said the cat pounced on the finger and ate it off the garage floor. At one of her gallery shows, her father told me the story too, and when I asked about the cat, he said maybe it had gone up and sniffed it, but no, the cat did not eat his finger. 

I told her I had to get to work, hoping to get her out of the house. It took five minutes of me asking her to get dressed and her saying one more minute before she finally shoved passed, saying, “You’re such a buzzkill.” She made me promise to call her if I had any leads on the bullfrog like it was some missing kid case. I agreed, never intending to speak of the bullfrog ever again.

 When we went out to a bar with her friends a few days later, she told them the bullfrog was croaking all night and that I tried to convince her she was crazy because it was too cold out for frogs, and that she’d actually seen the bullfrog—which I know for a fact she didn’t—but that I purposely scared it off and then dragged her out of the house because I didn’t want her to have any fun. I don’t know why she made me seem like such an ass in her stories.

I didn’t see Danny for a week after that. I told her I was sick and canceled our plans. I bought a spray bottle, a gallon of vinegar, and a twelve pack of beer. I tried to exorcise the bullfrog by pouring vinegar down the drains, spraying my windowsills and doorways, but mostly I spent the week sitting on the couch drinking beer and listening for the bullfrog. The bastard seemed to know I was hunting him, remaining quiet in the day, teasing me in the evening. He’d let out a bellow, and I’d hop out of my seat ready to dart towards the next sound, but then he’d be silent, and I’d sit down again right in time for him to croak again.

Danny called a few times. I only answered if I was out of the house. I wasn’t taking any chances on her hearing anything remotely amphibian. She asked how I was feeling and if I wanted to go out, but I knew she only wanted to know about the bullfrog. She always steered our conversation towards it, sending images of cute cartoon frogs or large tanks on Craigslist. I didn’t understand how she was unashamedly enchanted with something so repulsive. By the weekend I was ignoring her texts, and she was understandably upset, but if I could get the frog out of the picture everything could go back to being fine. 

#

He haunted me at night, beginning his dirges with an uncanny ability to know the moment sleep began to leach into my body. His song oozed through walls with a strange and muted harmony as though reverberating through the air ducts.  

On the Monday following my week of avoidance, Danny called and said she wanted to talk about our relationship. She said I’d been acting off. I think she suspected I was cheating on her. I tried to explain why I was acting strange, but it came out wrong. I told her it was weird she was so obsessed with the bullfrog.

“So, you’ve been dodging me because I thought it was funny you had a frog?” she asked as I held the phone between my ear and shoulder, pacing with a beer in one hand and vinegar in the other. 

“I haven’t been dodging you. I told you I’ve just been working a lot.” 

“Yeah, sure. You can’t even watch a movie with me because you’re exhausted from holding a wrench.” I could hear she was going to cry. I never knew what to do when people cried. 

“That’s fucked up. I told you I have shit going on. I’d tell you if I found the stupid frog. I haven’t heard or seen it. It’s probably gone now anyway.” Turns out lying to her was just as easy as with my sister. “But I think it’s strange that you’re so invested. Like what are you going to do? Keep it? It’s like keeping a rat you found in your walls. Honestly, it’s just gross and childish.” I knew I’d fucked up as I spoke, but I couldn’t stop.

She was quiet for a minute, then said, “I think we need a break,” and hung up. I don’t know why I couldn’t shut up. 

I spent the rest of the night drinking, trying to convince myself that this was better. I told myself nothing had really changed other than I could focus on the bullfrog without feeling guilty that I was ignoring her. Once I got rid of the bullfrog, I’d apologize, buy her flowers or plan a vacation I couldn’t afford, and she’d take me back and it would all be fine. 

After that call with Danny the house reverted to its natural state. Dishes tossed in the sink, couch covered in crumbs, clothes scattered across the bedroom floor. My trash got so full of microwave dinner trays that the lid wouldn’t close. It was finally taking the trash out that reminded me of the attic. I often forgot it existed. It was almost impossible to know the house even had an attic other than a small window visible from the side of the house where I kept the trash bins. 

The entrance to the attic was through a hole in the hallway closet where I kept the trash bags and batteries. The attic was unfinished with no flooring apart from particle board that ran down the center for maintenance. The rest was vent shafts and pipes and pink insulation poking out between floor beams. I pulled myself up through the hole and crawled into the attic, getting covered in dust. I heard a ribbit—not muffled, clear and clean. I’d finally found where the fucker was hiding. 

The attic was disgusting; everything had a small mound of dust like a powdery snowfall. The only light came from the single window. I brushed myself off and turned on my phone’s flashlight. Between the dust and the exposed insulation, I probably should’ve been wearing a mask. I took a few cautious steps further in. I saw the thing hiding behind an air duct. Then there was another, and another, and another. Four ranging from mini to monstrous. I took a picture of them to send to Danny. Typed out some sorry message but then deleted it. I’d figure out what to say to her later, something smarter.

There were more bullfrogs than I bargained for. I went down to grab a cardboard box and then went back for the hunt. They scattered. I closed in on the largest. I grasped for it and slipped. My elbow brushed against fiberglass which later became a bad rash. But I had it. It was slimy and squelched beneath the pressure of my fingers. I dropped it in the box and snatched another only to find that the largest had hopped out. They retreated under pipes, behind vent shafts, in crevasses I couldn’t reach. Right when I thought I was victorious, the fuckers had me outnumbered. 

I left the foursome in the attic, and after a moment of frustrated panic—wanting to call my sister to figure out what to do, setting against calling my sister—I realized I should call pest control. They couldn’t come until Thursday, but Thursday was fine. It gave me time to clean and get things in order. 

I called Danny to invite her for dinner on Friday after the exterminators came. I wouldn’t be distracted, and we could hash things out and get back together. When she didn’t answer my second call, I sent her a text asking to talk. She didn’t respond. 

The bullfrogs began their songs earlier the following nights, each making sure to have its voice heard, as though my discovery had liberated them from their inhibitions. 

The next few days of work were tedious and the customers unbearable. It wasn’t hard to change your own oil or replace your wiper fluid. They were idiots for coming to the garage for such things. Just buy the shit and watch a video on it, or better yet, read the fucking manual. I flinched every time the hydraulic risers groaned as they lifted a car into the air. Patching tires was the worst of it, the textured rubber like leathery, warted skin, bulging and bloating as I filled them with air. 

I made a frozen dinner and turned in early Wednesday. I burrowed deep beneath the blankets and waited for the heat of my solitary body to warm the bed. Danny still hadn’t texted back. I was so stupid. I clenched my clammy hands and wrapped my cold toes in sheets. 

#

I woke sweating and tangled in the blankets. I dreamt the frogs performed a ritual, chanting in vibrato as they multiplied like rabbits. My phone buzzed over and over. It wasn’t Danny. It was my sister was calling for the fifth time. I answered. It was six am.

She was crying. 

She told me her coworker had broken off their affair. She began saying a bunch of stuff way too fast for me to understand. I told her to call in sick and come over, I needed to take a sick day anyway to wait for pest control.

She arrived around nine with bloodshot and puffy eyes. I told her to lie down on the couch and grabbed a pillow and blanket from my bed. She was conked out by the time I returned. I draped the blanket over her and checked to make sure the hole to the attic was sealed. Then I moved the trash over the vent in the kitchen. 

She was in and out of sleep for the next five hours. The frogs didn’t make a sound, so I relaxed a little. At some point, I found a package of leftover brownie mix in my cabinet from the last time she was broken up with. I wanted to text Danny, to tell her about my sister showing up, about the dream I had last night, tell her I missed waking up next to her. But I didn’t want to seem desperate. If she wanted space, I’d give it to her. 

By the time my sister stirred, the brownies were out of the oven cooling. I brought her coffee and told her that the exterminators were coming for a routine spray to keep the bugs and such out. I guess the exterminator made her think about that first bullfrog. She asked if there’d been others.  

“No, only that one.”  I think I sounded convincing.

 “Well, you should tell them about it when they get here. See if they can figure out how it got in.”

 “You’re not here to micromanage my pest control,” I reprimanded. “I’ll get the brownies, and you can tell me everything.” 

She curled under the blanket and told me all the expected details from that kind of affair. The flirtation at a company party, a cheap hotel room, secret calls, and dates in far and dark places. He said he loved her, bought her gifts, but he wasn’t going to leave his wife. I was unsurprised to find that he was her subordinate, something she’d kept from me before. She always liked being the more important one in a relationship. I pushed my mother’s words from my head: what did you expect? She only yelled at me twice; once when I pointed out that she would’ve dumped him if he had left his wife and when I suggested she only eat one brownie at a time. It wasn’t that I was happy she was hurt, but there was something about her covered in snot, needing me, that felt so satisfying. 

Pest control rang the bell as my sister was sobbing and listing all the sweet things her coworker had done for her. I was grateful for the interruption, mostly because the most impressive thing she said he did was remember she liked Korean food.

I showed the man to the attic, waiting until we were out of earshot to ask why I was getting frogs in my house, but he was as confused as I was. He said they should be hibernating, but it was possible they got stuck in the attic a while ago and were living off spiders and bugs. I asked him if he could figure out how they kept getting in. He said his usual advice outside of sealing cracks was irrelevant since it was winter. He said he’d remove them. I was relieved, believing this to be the last of it. He went back to his car to grab a container for the frogs.

The man came back in with a plastic tub. I watched as my sister’s eyes followed him out before asking me if I could find out if he was single. I rolled my eyes. It took him about half an hour, but he came down with the box. I ushered him to the door hoping my sister was distracted enough not to question what was in the box or realize that he hadn’t sprayed at all, and she didn’t until he started talking about how tricky they were hopping this way and that, but he was certain he’d got them all. 

My smiled at him as he left. The door closed and the smile went away. 

“I knew it! And you’ve only called pest control now?” she yelled.

I tried to shift the blame off me. I said these were the only other ones since the first one and this the earliest pest control could come out. I tried to pander to her by saying I’d followed her advice and called pest control. We repeated the same things, having exhausted everything to say. She did what she always did if we fought long enough and brought up our mother’s death and how she was the one to take care of her in the end, and I asked her who took care of mom and faced all her abuse when my sister had fled to some fancy college and stayed away for another decade. Ultimately, the argument ended like all our arguments, neither of us relenting. 

She left irritated but with much more spirit. She’d be over the breakup in a week. It started to sleet as I watched her drive off. I left the dishes in the sink and the trash can over the vent and plopped down on the couch. I surfed through the channels thinking about my sister’s pathetic coworker. Danny wasn’t pathetic. She created intricate and formidable sculptures from crude materials I only saw as scrap. She once made me feel formidable. I opened our messages, my two previous texts just dangling there. I sent another. I told her I found the bullfrogs and that pest control got them. I sent her the picture I took of them in the attic. I checked my phone over and over but nothing. I tossed it to the far end of the couch.

A while later my phone buzzed. I tried to give it time, make it seem like I was doing something, but I couldn’t. The phone was in my hand in under a minute. My sister had sent me an article on how to prevent frogs from coming up pipes. I shoved the phone between the cushions and went to get a beer. 

It was on top of the eggs, the size of my palm, and it was sitting very still, barely breathing. I didn’t think, just grabbed it. Gripped it in my right hand. The bullfrog was smooth and slimy, and I wanted to pop it. Just squeeze it ‘til it burst. But then it peed. Right down my arm, got all over me. An awful smell like ammonia. I squeezed it harder, maybe I would kill it. I softened my grip. I couldn’t. I took it outside. The sleet seeped through my t-shirt and the mud caked my sneakers. I dumped it in my neighbor’s yard. I grabbed a beer, stripped, washed my arm, grabbed another beer. I spent the rest of the night on the couch wet and drinking, leaving the mud and bullfrog piss on the kitchen floor. 

It took a long time to fall asleep that night. I was drunk and sweating and freezing and I couldn’t stop thinking about the goddamned frogs and about Danny and how she must have thought I was a stupid asshole. 

My head was pounding from a hangover and fever the next morning. It was a slow trip to the bathroom as I had to stop every few steps and brace myself against a wall. I was almost to the toilet when something darted out from the hall. That was it. It was done for. I tracked it into the kitchen where I may have vomited. Someone was there silhouetted against the early morning light. Danny. I don’t know how, but I prayed she was really there. 

My eyes couldn’t focus, but it was her shape sitting at the table. I tried to apologize for all the shit I’d done and for the vomit, but I only croaked out nonsense. My tongue swelled. I watched her concern fade into disgust. I sank to my knees and darted my hand—slick with sticky sweat—towards her, touching her soft skin before she pulled away, the sweat, now viscous, formed delicate bridges of slime between her and me that sagged and snapped. 

I bellowed, the vibrations reverberating from the pit of my throat down into my gut. Her body recoiled from mine. My grasping hand formed warts. Like searing blisters they spread up my arm, across my chest, sprouted from the pores on my face. My tears flooded the floor, and in their reflection, my eyes bulged, my skin grew green, my nose flattened, my lips thinned, and my body plumped. Of course she left me.

Then, in a flash, firm hands that lifted me onto a chair, my thighs spilling off the edge. My heart jumped. I’d done it. I’d won it all back. But the light flickered, and it was my sister at the table, and she cooed at me, stroking the ridges on my back: “It’s okay, you’ll be okay”—she wiped the mucus and tears from my face— “You never did take care of yourself; You soiled everything faster than even mother could clean. Always betting more than you could afford, just like Daddy, but I’m here now.” She heaved me on her lap, pulling a spoon of maggots out from the shadow. She brought them to my mouth pressing the spoon against my tight thin lips, then from her pursed, beak-like mouth she hissed, “Eat, you’ll feel better.” 

I kicked at her, my toe hitting hard against the chair. I leapt, making a break for it. My body was so stiff and slow. My sister gave chase, the maggots wriggling in her spoon. My hand slipped on the door handle. I could feel my sister close behind me, but then, the door opened, and there was Mom, standing in a white dress with greying hair, her nude heels still pristine in the mud that consumed the yard, and I could have sworn she glowed. 

And now I could hear the choir of frogs urging me to join them in the warm mud, and I realized how much I wanted to, needed to join them. I grew impatient and angry. My sister was behind me, ready to peck, and the frogs kept crying because if I didn’t join them, they’d freeze and so would I, but my mother, as always, was impassable. So, I did what I was forced to. My tongue darted from my mouth—the frogs in crescendo—and laced my mother up in its pink elastic, my mouth agape, and I pulled her in and swallowed. The mud engulfed my body, coating me in its warmth; the frogs’ crooning welcomed me home.