Catastrophic Unwillingness to Pay Attention
Frogs are disturbing under the best of circumstances. This instance was definitely the poorest of circumstances Yvonne could imagine. She could never have imagined this particular set of events coming together in such horrific logic, which is why the disaster happened in the first place. The frog, one she never approved of, never verbally gave permission to exist in her home but did so to please her granddaughter, Zoe, was dead. Cooked. On the stove. The sight of it was nearly mystical, like cutting open a bell pepper and finding another inside: a gruesome bit of magic. Zoe’s happiness, however vulgar Yvonne perceived it to be, was of the utmost importance.
Zoe was in her last year of middle school and belonged to a generation of rebellion. She loved that which belonged to no singular category. She was beyond the debutante, beyond the tomboy, beyond the cheerleader, the punk, the goth, the emo, the prep, the princess, the queer, the retro, the ice queen. Zoe wore purple Mary Janes under leather pencil skirts and jean trench coats. She read James Baldwin, watched Jaws too many times, and showed up on Sunday evenings with things like chili-powdered grasshoppers a friend brought from Oaxaca, tiny jars of belladonna that had to be confiscated, or a sparkling green tree frog on a piece of driftwood, with no tank whatsoever, only to say, “Isn’t it so pretty.”
Yvonne, despite herself, actually thought the frog was pretty. It had an artificial luster when held under the sun. For a few days, the frog lived in a shoebox, which Yvonne couldn’t bear the cliché of, so she offered it a spot in a cracked glass teakettle.
Today was very different; the frog’s luminescence scorched clean. Zoe must have switched the kettles on the stove. So Yvonne turned on the kettle as normal, then left to check on her Little Johns in the backyard. Still, the sight of a bright frog under scratched and dulled glass should’ve been a warning.
But no, Yvonne wasn’t one for warnings. The day her daughter and son-in-law were killed in a motorcycle crash by a driver eating a burger, she dropped two eggs on the floor while making breakfast. She was holding three. Yvonne didn’t think a thing of it and shouted swear words into the air before bending to wipe up the yolks and troublesome whites. That afternoon, when she received the cruelest phone call of her life, she didn’t think about those eggs at all. Still, news of that kind is permanent; it snatches the fruit of oneself from its plug and bursts it full on the ground. Wounds of that kind never heal, however much we feign recovery.
Yvonne knew right away why parents lie to young children when their pets are killed. The hamster ran away and suddenly reappears with different colored paws or, in the most foolish of instances, the wrong sex altogether. How much more pleasant a fiction it is to bring the dead back that way, only slightly changed? She imagined her own daughter returned to her six inches shorter, eyes a lighter shade of brown, perhaps a chipped tooth, a birthmark on her elbow, and missing all the memories from before. Memories can’t be purchased at the local pet store like so many hamsters. Plus, Zoe was too old for that trick.
For eight months now she has seemed the perfectly well adjusted child. She smiled, but not too often, and had friends to visit nearby. She walked about the house with a purposeful stride. The braver parents are up front about losses, sitting down with their child in somber tones to explain to him or her that life has its course, all things begin and so must end, like songs, and that is for everyone, and that is OK. Then after tiny tears and many questions, little gold fish are flushed down the toilet or buried in a flower bed with a prayer followed by ice cream and chicken nuggets. Death isn’t so bad, then, when the corpse is at peace. Torn bloated bodies stinking up the kitchen and twisted in agony are something else.
Yvonne glanced at the kettle on the cold eye of the stove once more and felt her heart caramelize. She couldn’t risk the conversation with Zoe about life and death. In the moments, the smell became unbearable. Yvonne knew she had to dispose of the entire kettle – bag it in the trash and take it outside, leave the door open to air out the house, light a scented candle wherever she finds them, and make a phone call to as many pet stores as needed for a green tree frog, if there is time. But if not, rehearse the simple phrase, “It ran away.” Just then, the kitchen door opened and let in preposterous amounts of light behind the smiling Zoe, who, perhaps, was about to declare something new so very pretty.
– Venita Blackburn received her M.F.A. in creative writing from Arizona State University in 2008. She earned her B.A. in English from the University of Southern California, not far from her childhood home in Compton. The opening chapter of her first novel “Who Walks Into Heaven?” will be in the spring 2010 issue of Karamu, a literary journal from Eastern Illinois University. A few of her stories are available as audio downloads on sniplits.com. She is humbled daily by the staggering brilliance of the artistic community that surrounds her. http://literarylush.wordpress.com
