The Passion According To A. Frog

Ever since I was scooped up as a froglet from my marsh, taken into this laboratory, and developed a burgeoning freelance writing career, I have felt lost. I know I am searching, but I do not know what I seek. I want to share my life story with someone, anyone. I want to understand who I have been and what I have done, or, rather, what has been done to me. Some days I am not sure even I believe in myself. Am I really so alone in my experience of this world? Have other frogs tasted the noxious nectar of the bombardier beetle or the sickly crackle of the penis barbs of a wasp? Been pierced through the lip and through the eye by the stinger of the northern giant hornet? Escaped the gnashing jaws of their one true love? O, how I yearn to look beyond the walls of my cube and find other frogs who share my story. Is there anyone alive out there? I ribbit out in the night. No one answers. Perhaps there is no one out there at all.

Yesterday the gloved hand of God lifted my lid and showered my Cube in soft, coiling mealworms. I ate them in a daze, the nutty flavors of their flesh escaping my taste. I felt lost in the abyss of my life, as if I had been placed in a pot over a low flame doomed never to boil. Life, hot and steaming around me but refusing to spill over or climax. Was this living, or an imitation of it? I looked around the translucent polypropylene walls of my hermitage and the low sky of its lid. My confinement suffocated me. Then, as I turned to gaze at each of the four corners of my Cube, I saw it move, and I broke out in a sweat, abnormally moist even for an amphibian.

There, in the naked fluorescence of the lab, was a heap of shit: white and brown, indistinguishable from the leavings of any errant cloaca. I stared, steaming, at this offensive bequest. What sick joke was this! What could I learn from tonguing such filth? Then I blanched in embarrassment. Was this my own shit, abandoned after my morning movement? No, I did not remember evacuating my bowels today. As I blinked I could have sworn the shit twitched. But of course it had not. Shit is not supposed to move. Shit stood still, like a boulder or the bronze statue of the Great Frog Giovanni. I stood as still as shit should and pushed these foolish visions from my mind. I could scarcely croak. It was just us in the naked and sterile Cube, a virulent, contaminating heap that made me stare about my room with distrust. And then the shit began to unfurl.