Go Back to the Moment You Broke Your Fate

Frogs were typical amusements. Reproducing wildly in the runoff from a dark artesian well, their mottled backs and thin ugly bones signaled a hapless nature. In some respects brilliantly evasive, but in most respects completely retarded. It was this that made them so frustrating to me and so I found myself spending increasing time over summer honing my frog-catching strike down to heron precision. I discovered that I was more likely to catch one if I looked away from it, as though it could feel my eyes or breath echoing out toward it, redolent with intent. I didn’t feel cruel or angry so much as this was a riddle that I needed to solve; I needed to catch one every time I meant to catch one and couldn’t stop until that perfection was attained despite the variables involved.

It came to pass that on one boringly pretty day the frogs got wise somehow, or maybe I was just off, off my game or what have you, and not a single catch was in the offering. Not even slow, fat, old frogs. Not even young naive frogs. For the first time I felt a sense of total distress whelm within me, slipping out slick as the scum tipping from that old well, and a blind helpless cruelty slid over every aspect of my otherwise nondescript personality. Before thinking, there was a branch in my little hand, and I was successfully bludgeoning as many frogs as I could lay eyes on. Stunned by this new development, at the wanton destruction of our fragile truce, the frogs began to form a kind of dazed pile beside the pond. Some of them had stripes of blood on their ears now. I remembered that the way to tell the difference between males and females was ear size: females have larger ear circles than males. I was taking aim at one remaining frog, a small female, when a lapping sound that had been going on in the background but was filtered out by the blood in my own ears rose to the forefront. Perhaps it was a snort or a gasp that betrayed the dog. Perhaps the adrenaline was ebbing away from me and that’s what made his sounds noticeable. Whatever the reason, I looked back and saw him rooting through the pile and tearing the frogs up excitedly. I had never seen living things taken apart that way before. It had never occurred to me that their bodies were so much softness and sinew and so little bone that they could tear like wet bread under the whistling snorts of a big puppy. I knew I was the cause of it and felt estranged from myself in the most palpable way. It was a marker between who I’d been moments before and who I was now: someone cruel to animals, a torturer; a dark-secreted devil.

I beat the dog until the branch broke, distantly aware of panting and envious sobs.