Jackie Vondross

Frogs to Come

As Jackie ran down the street, living room windows briefly framed her want unwantedly. She ran and ran forever before she arrived in this neighborhood, searching under stones for spots to rest where she found only sleepless pill bugs in spider webs. No one in the neighborhood turned their heads to see her running down the street, down that street there, that street which might have been the street she grew up on. She passed houses with smoky right angles like she remembered from the houses she grew up around, houses with ice cream spires and turkey in the straw in the air. She turned a corner to start down another street and felt she had often rounded that same corner, wearing roller skates or riding her bike or pulling a wagon of cans and bottles, but she ran past these houses too quickly to know what tricks her memory had tied to her finger with unfamiliar twine.

Whether she had been here before or not was unimportant. There are prodigal sons but no prodigal daughters, and this neighborhood would not welcome her now. She continued running, the victim and the criminal, in hot pursuit of herself. The county confiscated her belt, so her jeans were held up by surface tension, by the dynamics of fluids which long ago had dried to stains, by inertia. She was not in the habit of running like this. She lived by torpor and quick fights that drew blood out of her muscles and into her socks and left her with the white meat of fast-twitch prey. Streets flew past her faster than made sense. Each block of prefabs shit her out into the next before it could even finish swallowing her, desperate to make her the purview of another neighborhood’s watch. 

She ran with six legs, her two legs and the four hooves of the lamb that led her, a horned ewe that bucked out of her jeans, fighting to free a keyhole pupil out the fly to seek shelter, a place to rest in a town with no inn. Hers was not to birth a savior but to tend the livestock, to birth the beasts that kept company with magi. The shelter she sought in this town was nowhere to be seen. Yards and homes and streets tessellated perfectly. A visitor here was either out in the street and waving red capes or green handkerchiefs at passing cars or trespassing on private property and subject to the saltpeter buckshot of castle doctrine.

There was only one seam of the out-of-bounds, one strip of pubic brush that was public but private, a poppy seed stuck between the sharp teeth of city deeds. A drainage creek ran through the shrubbery that separated two properties, down below the lawns and the watch, to collect what could be collected. She rushed down the steep bank of the creek and crouched down there, submerged in the darkness, breathing in the cool air that settled in that space and only once poking her head up above the banks to make sure she had not been seen. Nobody saw her, nobody was there. She sat down beside the creek and unbuttoned her jeans. Flowers and seeds can’t stand in for the parts she pulled out. A time-lapse is not needed to catch the movements of pudenda. They run with hairy sinews and sweat with wild effort. They devour fingernails cut close and shod in gold and defecate fawn legs unfolding from the birth canal to kick the father in the chin.

Jackie freed that lamb from her jeans, her ewe with the crescent horns of a ram, and she masturbated. In this neighborhood, all the women work and care for their families, but none of them are allowed to play, is a lie that she thought to herself, knowing that they do play with themselves, that their pleasure exceeds her own. Well-dressed women rush from here to there, always coming and going, but none of them ever cum, not for real, knowing that they do cum, of course they cum, in orgasms that exceed anything she’s ever known. All these working women love and play and work. But she was only a working girl, not a real woman, not a real worker, unemployed even as she worked. She played at work and worked to play, and she was a greedy little piggy for playing on the pillars while the workers made the world. Masturbation was a function of the body like any other, but of what use were the functions of a body without function? The surplus bodies of the bag lady and the bag bitch are functionless but function still, forced to compensate for that lack of utility or they will decompose. These women fossilize and find their function at last. Burn coal and not witches, don’t be silly. Bag her from the bottom so nothing spills.

She was deep in this suburban labyrinth and it was up to her fingers and the lamb on the leash, tethered neck to neck to knuckle, to pull her out of this neighborhood and into a fishbowl with the silence of colored gravel. She let some slack into the leash and pulled it taut, let the ewe run free and pulled it back. She buried her fingers, deep, deeper, two, spit, three, deeper and deeper, until they travelled through a gate and came out the other side in a place where they poked the head of a creature like an egg yolk. Her fingers were long and slender and varied in size, the index many times longer than the middle which was many times longer than the ring without a ring, so that they were like the toes of a frog’s forelimbs, and nothing at all like the toes of its hind limbs, the toes which push away what is past to move forward, but only like those frontmost fingering toes which stretch forward to grab that land which is always paradise to the frog before it is reached and sometimes remains paradise still. She thought of things that pleased her, of cream stirred into red tea, of playing scratch-offs with a birthyear penny, the foil falling into her lap and becoming a strong man, of a door that sometimes led somewhere and other times was part of the wall, and to her body she did what digestion does to the Christ in communion wafers. 

The grass dampened her back and stained her hands and elbows. Grass stained her knees and her face as she writhed about beside the creek which boiled with the trickle of gravity. She suddenly felt the weight of a coin purse drop down onto her leg, a donation gently tossed to her by a bashful unseen voyeur, she figured, a small man with a delicate elfin body and narrow legs like tentpoles as tall as the trees, who watched her through the canopy and filmed her for the dreams of the neighborhood children. The coin purse was a brown treefrog, which hopped off and continued hopping across the grass, where it crossed paths with a few other frogs, and then many frogs. 

A deluge of frogs then boiled out of the creek and coated its banks in bubbles of wet leaping flesh. They were plump little frogs and they were polliwogs, hopping and mature but with untransformed juvenile tails that flopped like fat trout. They were a thousand detached scrotums packed with uncooked testicles, the berries of the neighborhood elders cut by the neighborhood gelders, and they were coin purses stuffed with the thirty pieces of silver the eunuch pays to enter the kingdom of heaven. The frogs hopped and flopped over each other’s bodies like the beached whales of a stolen ocean. They swarmed over her body and found comfortable places to perch on Jackie’s belly, her legs, and her arms too, even as they flailed. The frogs were bursting with primitive scrotal magnetism that could sense the warm ardor that fell from her in heavy, ground-hugging waves. With long tongues they could see through her shell, past the wool and horns of the ewe and down to the jammy yolk inside studded with diamond eggteeth, which even now she still massaged with bitten fingertips. They amplected every patch of bare skin they could find, their forelimbs seizing her like properties. Each frog’s face was flat as though painted, smoothly painted on its front side, or its dorsal side, or, for a few of them, on their ventral side, so that they could bite while they leapt and bite while they landed. Those flat amphibian faces were of the land and of the water. They were the strange faces of those who protected the neighborhood, but they were also faces she knew well, faces which had hopped around in her dreams since childhood, always from a place of high ground. They closed their eyes and closed their forelimbs around her, locking bits of her body in amplexus, and sprayed her with fertility, assuming her self-love fruitful enough to share. 

They croaked out the love song of the treefrog, and their song of success shook the neighborhood like cement drums. These frogs, the frogmen who were polliwogmen, sang the ribbit ribbit ribbit which was theirs and theirs alone, a chorus of fast-swimming potency which boasted of their domination over the feminine while also attracting the feminine to come and be dominated. It is said that the first ribbit invokes that rib which became the first woman, she who doomed the frogs to be the prey of serpent devils. The second ribbit goes on to make craters out of inhospitable towns which fill up with standing water during the rainy season and bring the larvae of bloodsucking things. The third ribbit poisons the waters, and in them spawn epicene frogs who can leap across the anogenital chasms and make two lands into one land and two bodies into one body. This was the song of the frogs as they mounted Jackie, her legs and arms, her back and belly and chest, and showered her with final generations of every animal. 

Overwhelmed by their song and their fluids she tore the frogs off her body and threw them down to the grass. They splattered against the ground, stunned, but regained themselves and jumped back over to rejoin their brothers in mounting her. The frogs covered every inch of her body in a shroud of wet life and dry love that glistened in the moonlight. The night sky above them was as bright as noon’s blue sky and revealed more than any sun’s rays ever could, lit up by the full moon and its moon dogs, by shooting stars looming in and out of an asymmetric haze that bent toward the north star, by the counterglow which leaked out of the antisolar anus of the unseen sun; a night sky with no darkness in which to hide a door to the throne of God. Under this night’s light without darkness the frogs sparkled like fist-sized diadems all over her body, a chasuble of happy apples sewn together by mouths that croaked toward the bright nocturnal sky like cocks crowing for an honest sun.

There was no darkness at all in the sky until suddenly there was, until, from the north, the heavenly north, there came a dark cloud of flying insects which spilled dark ink over the guiding light of Polaris and threw blackening soot over the white fur of the little bear in the northern sky. It grew to darken the moon and its moon dogs and all the upturned candles of that bright night sky as it descended on the neighborhood, and this dark swarm put all light to darkness with their bodies, and they disturbed all the men and women and children sleeping in the neighborhood with violating flights, and they attacked Jackie and sought to fly into her mouth and fill her lungs to see all of her. They flew around her, a thousand flies with a thousand eyes each, bathing her pores in a surveillance which came to every angle. They looked between the frogs for patches of her skin where they might land and defecate and with six legs dance their filth into her skin. They looked to her wrinkles, for the years had been hard on her and she had many, to burrow between their folds like warm quilts and stay forever and ever in her skin. They planned these attacks and more, and they descended on her, diving down at her person like lammergeiers divebombing carrion skulls. 

One by one the flies attacked her, and one by one the flies were plucked out of heaven by the tongues of frogs. Hundreds of flies dove at her all at once, and, all at once, hundreds of flies were devoured by hundreds of frogs, by frogs which were knitted into a single bottomless stomach knitted into a suit of armor. Jackie watched the torrents of flies dive down into the frogs and be swallowed up until the bright night sky again lit up the neighborhood, and she rejoiced.

She let her body collapse back down to the wet earth, still boiling with frogs, and fell to her hands and knees. She let her head fall to the ground like a fifth limb, its fall cushioned by soft frogs. She lifted up her right hand and took it between her breasts, slid it down her belly, grazing the backs of excited frogs, and then finally slipped it between her legs, and found selves inside her that lapped at her fingers with annular tongues to draw her hand deeper and deeper into spots that made the horned ewe bleat, and made Jackie croak in harmony with the frogs. The untucked ecstasy of private love touched every muscle in her body and forced her face down into the ground where long grass filled her mouth. She couldn’t breathe; she tore a mouthful of grass with her teeth and spat it out. She chewed out another wad of grass and worked it around her mouth, finding gizzards in her throat that ground it into pulp and swallowed, choking, swallowed. The grass made her gag but she couldn’t stop. There was too much grass to spit out and too much grass to swallow and her eyes watered, her eyes watered the grass so that it grew down her throat until it met the tips of her fingers, girdled around them and pulled them in further, and her back arched and snapped like a mountain goat just falling and falling. Her fingertips at last pulled a rope out of her sex, a holy rope like a long tadpole woven with the yarns of final generations, and she fell flat into the wet grass. Frogs wriggled out from beneath her and returned to the creek. Jackie lay prone in the grass, covered in the loveless love of countless frogs. Natural colors smeared across her face and grass honey dripped from her tongue. She lay comfortably atop an absence of frogs in the grass, atop her arm in a most uncomfortable way and the holy rope she had pulled out of herself, which was no longer holy and no longer a rope, but the formless fluid of pre- and not pro- creation. She did not masturbate just now or ever in her life. She only obliged bestial orgies where she was not even a participant, orgies of the Other fucking the Others that permitted her to watch with frog eggs that looked like eyes. Even if there was no self in this self-love, she wondered: how many of the frogs of this neighborhood, come spring of the next calendar year, will have faces that look like her own face? She hoped the stars that still brightened the night sky would delay their descent to earth for just a little while, a few months, so that she might see her own face in another. She hoped to see her thousandfold face hop out of the boiling water and croak ribbit ribbit ribbit to all the last girls.