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.
First the wobble of a considerable snout, then the protrusions of spindly black legs. It was still shit, but it had now roused itself suddenly into being and struck a pose one might even be moved to dub "jaunty." There the shit stood before me, odious and unafraid. The great fear unlatched itself within me and I fell to my knees like a penitent frog. I hid my eyes so that I might hide from the shit, which had revealed itself to be a weevil. I hated the shit-disguised weevil so much that I found myself feeling almost tender toward it, as I did not want to sit alone with my disgust. My hatred intoxicated me, clear as the mortal nectar of a pitcher plant, that other Juice of Death.
That was when I saw the weevil's face, which was as old as time itself. Its exoskeleton was pebbled like a rock, a fossil, a coprolite. The weevil was both animal and mineral, a body that had conquered time by turning itself to stone. I looked at its black eyes, gleaming like lumps of cooled lava. And what I saw was life looking back at me. I saw in the weevil the cosmic soil that seeded the universe, the gas and dust of the big bang, the stardust that poets say courses through our veins. It was matter at its most primeval, the clay flesh of a golem, how I imagined primordial ooze might congeal if left uncovered in a fridge for a couple of weeks. As I looked at the weevil I felt myself rewinding my own personal evolution. I was a frog and then, suddenly, I wasn't. I was froglet, tadpole, jellied egg with an olive-black pit, then sperm and egg holding fast to each other in the water under the auspices of amplexus. I was a single cell. I was a protein, a molecule, an atom. It was as if the weevil and I had abandoned the cube for some unearthly arena outside time and space, the very place of Creation. And then I understood.
Despite our differences—how one of us looks like frog and the other looks like shit—the weevil and I were made of the same matter. We had the same insides, not guts or blood, but electrons whizzing around the grape cluster of our nuclei. This realization nauseated me, how my flesh was essentially indistinguishable from that of this rotted, fecal weevil, who still stared blankly at me, betraying nothing. I saw in this weevil the most disgusting parts of myself, the secrets I dare not spill to any other frog. "Ribbit," I wished to scream. "Ribbit. Ribbit. Ribbit!" But I knew if I were to ribbit I would never stop ribbiting. I would ribbit and rage in my disgust until the gloved hand of God removed me from my plastic chamber and took me to the dark chamber from which frogs do not return. I looked around desperately for an exit. But I remained irrevocably in my Cube, the same as always, not eternity in the kingdom of life but damnation in the fiery pits of hell. I could see the headlines now: "Adrift In The Purgatory Of A Laboratory, A. Frog Struggles Desperately For Life."
But I have not told you everything. I have not told you how, staring at that weevil, I understood what I must do. I wish I could spare you from this knowledge but I cannot. To escape this purgatory, this damnation, I would have to eat the shit weevil, smear its horrid body against my moist lips and taste its putrid insides. I would eat my disgust and my fear and my hatred, swallow it deep inside me until I became once again a pure and goodly frog. In order to reach the divine, I must submit myself to the rank unknown. I felt once more my sheen of sticky mucus grow into great gobs, which slid down my face like rocks in a mudslide. I trembled. I stepped forward. I opened my mouth. Protect me Saint Catherine, great guzzler of pus! I prayed. O weevil, I whispered, my mouth dry as the Libyan desert, baptize me!
O, O!
I crunched and keeled over from the nastiness in my mouth. I asked myself in anguish, what had I done? I wanted to spit it out, to regurgitate the dreaded weevil, to spit and spit until my guts, my heart, even my soul came up with it. Yet as I spat and spat, the weevil remained in my mouth. I understood then that it clung to my tongue with its shitty little legs, preventing swallowing and ensuring its survival. Vile trickster, I cursed, get thee hence from my mouth!
I stopped myself upon realizing that to spit out the shit weevil would undo all of my work, would snip the tenuous thread I was weaving between me and the divine, would cast me adrift as a lost soul in the bubbling green vat of amphibial hell. Tears tumbled down my face. I bit down and down and down again. And yet the weevil resisted. And so we found ourselves in a strange truce, the weevil and I.
Perhaps this was my destiny: never to swallow, only to taste. This realization lanced me as sweetly and miserably as a boil, my soft parts suddenly spilling out of me in a rush of tenderness and joy. I was a frog, and I was more than a frog. I was a blade of grass trembling in the wind, a lily pad wobbling in a stream, a delicious fly flitting out of reach. I was a frog, no—I am a frog who will remain hungry and desirous of the world. As long as I live in this Cube, I will search for the divine. This is the life I choose. I will climb high enough that I will fall. I search so that I surrender myself to the unknown. I can only pray to my gloved God because I do not know what body the hand belongs to. I felt subsumed in trust, in what, exactly, I do not know. In myself? The laboratory? My God? The weevil? I found myself smiling despite the tenacious grasp of the passenger in my mouth. At last I had been baptized by the world. I was no hero, no saint, but I had put the weevil in my mouth and now my life had taken on a greater purpose. I am not just a frog; I am A. Frog. And this is the gauntlet thrown down to those of us favored by froghood. We must take the leap, even if we are doomed to eat shit.
