How do you mend a broken three-chambered heart? This question tailed me as I wandered lost and lonely from the burrow of the frog I once loved most ardently. It is true she endeavored to devour me, rend me limb from spotted limb, and yet, in my eyes, she had been perfect. Mayhap, I mused, I was not destined for love in this life, at least not the romantic kind, that full-body luminescence conjured when two hearts meet, mingle, and meld. O, the ecstasy of amplexus, are we fated never to touch?
Enough! I can spare no more space in my heart for a vile temptress. Having escaped with everything but my dignity intact, I literally hopped with my proverbial tail betwixt my legs. I hankered for the comfort of home, that old familiar plastic cube in the laboratory, and knew thither I must go. These clinical strictures, which once felt suffocating, now offered me a sense of comfort, how wrapping yourself in a blanket is sometimes the closest you can come to being held.
And so my days became humdrum once more. I splayed my webbed toes against the plastic and watched the others do what we frogs are known to do: sit, stare, and haphazardly hop. I felt no love for the beings whose enormous hands dropped mealworms into my cube, but at least the terms of our arrangement were clear and transactional. We each knew what we were getting from each other. I would not awake with horror to find my legs disappeared in their toothy and cavernous jaws.
I became contented with this banal purgatory, the days multiplying like minced planaria. So when a detestable invertebrate was once again dropped without warning into my plastic box, when I heard its loathsome little wings battering the acrylic walls, I turned around without hesitation and opened my mouth to swallow the minibeast. After weeks of mealworms, I was ready for flavor and prepared for significant bodily harm. O wretched ambrosial bug, come into my mouth!
When I opened my eyes to see my meal, horror coursed through the cold blood of my veins. I am no stranger to pain. I had survived the barbed penes of the mason wasp and the pestilential nectar of the bombardier beetle. But now I faced a nemesis I feared I could not vanquish. Time wavered as I realized that I now looked upon the northern giant hornet, Vespa mandarinia. Had I not been so hungry, I would have bowed my head in reverence to such a creature. This is the beast some call the murder hornet.
Verily, good reader, I had heard the horror stories. How its stinger slices through the dense barrier of a beekeeping suit as if it were nothing more than silk. How it slays four score bees a minute, decapitating each worker head by puny head. How a single prick of its venom can kill a mouse. How might the life of a mouse measure up to that of of a frog? The odds, I reasoned, were not in my favor. I thought I had stared Death in his wizened face before, felt his stale breath waft over my mortal soul, but I know now I had never been in any real danger. The mason wasp and bombardier beetle were mere hurdles, a way to test my thirst for the spice of life. But this, it dawned on me, would be my final test. Was this lonely frog ready to die?
Of course I contemplated spitting out the hornet, wrenching it from my lips with the suctioned pads of my forelimbs. Yet my mouth rudely ignored my mind; my jaws clamped together as the creature thrashed in my throat. I thought of many things in these precious seconds that preceded the pain. I thought of my almost-love, my almost-killer. I thought of my youth in Honshu, whose green fields I remember only in dreams. Was it still my homeland, or had my home become this plastic cube? Had the fluorescent overhead lighting become my new sun, and these large-fingered scientists my pantheon of gods? 'Twould not be so bad to die like this, I reasoned, among the closest thing a frog has got to family. No need to mend a broken heart if it stops beating entirely. And so I waited, hornet in my jaws, thinking of my father—had I ever met him, and did he look like me?—and felt the Dreaded Puncture of my supper's stinger slicing through my flesh. Farewell, brutish world!
I waited, and waited, and waited, and as I waited this dastardly hornet stung me once more on my lip, and then my throat and face, and finally, my eyeball. This is when I began pleading with Death to come more expeditiously. Come Charon, here is my coin! Let me hop with the shades! Through my stung eye, I looked beyond the walls of my box to see if any of my fellow frogs bore witness to my expiration. But none spared me a second glance. My comrades were each in their boxes, munching on hornets of their own, and looking invariably unperturbed. What was the meaning of this? Were we not all put on Earth to die, put specifically in this laboratory to be murdered by way of hornet?
And then I swallowed the hornet and felt fine. A cold sheen seeped from my mucus membrane as I realized that I was, against every expectation, going to live. (This also surprised the scientists.)
In that moment I understood the devil with which I had danced. I had almost given up the most precious gift a frog can have, because of what, exactly? Some failed romance? I was a fool to search for happiness in others before I could first find happiness in myself.
I may be a frog alone in the world, but this is not such a tragedy. I have my two strong hindlimbs for hopping, my two dexterous forelimbs for pushing giant, wriggling hornets down my gullet. I have eyes that can see despite being repeatedly stung. I have a mind and a soul, one no more or less significant than any of the other beings around me in this lab. I have a story, which I am not ready to end. I am not ready to croak. Bring it on, life, give me more! Give me more taste, more experiences. Give me the moon and the stars! Give me more joy, more love, even more heartache, I am ready for it all! Whatever the webbed fingers of the heavens may throw at me next, I will open my mouth wide to guzzle the rapture and the pain, to be changed by what will change me. You know what I'm getting at. Another hornet, good sir!
