The frog had been pierced with a long, curved talon and left at my back door. It was an omen, clearly, but of what I had no inkling. All the neighborhood cats vanished months ago. I never bothered to carve any time from my schedule to investigate. A little mystery is good for the complexion, or so I’ve been told. Inside the frog’s rigor-mortised mouth I found a ring—white gold with a blue pearl gleaming from its bezel. That it fit my finger was anything but surprising.
Sometime later in the day, between the incessant pings of workplace morass, I heard the croak of a hairball gently scraping its way up a throat. I tried to find the sound’s origin but like so many things, I was forced to abandon it to ambiguity and placelessness.
There was a particular queasiness with which I liked to live my life, one I often struggled to maintain. That day, however, I felt as though I’d finally hit my stride.
Returning home, I was accosted by my boyfriend. We lived together, yes, and had for years or at the very least what felt closer to a decade than a harvest cycle. It wasn’t his sudden appearance after vanishing for weeks that irked me—I’d learned in my youth what being in a committed relationship entailed—it was his fingers. They fidgeted through the air like a beetle eluded by flight. When he dropped to one knee, holding out the little velvet box, and began stammering through his declaration, my attention was still on the spot where my imagined beetle had been, its sclerites too large for what lay beneath, hence the strange movements. I smiled, mirroring this ill-aligned phalanx.
Finally, he grabbed my hand to wedge the little bondage loop up to my knuckle. When he saw the blue pearl, he began smashing everything in our living room—couches, ornamental plates, clocks, the television. He knocked holes in the walls with candlesticks, ripped up the carpet with shattered glass, pulled the light fixtures right out of the ceiling.
This I learned later, once he had left, probably not for good, just for the time being. While he was occupied wringing out his rage, I sequestered myself to the backyard. We lived on a large property with a tree line that succumbed to dense undergrowth. Hand to bark and neck stretched over serrated leaves slick with poisonous oil, I offered a soft ribbit. Then another, louder, more confident. I meant it as an acceptance of sorts.
When I heard that sibilant purr from out of the darkness, I placed the talon to the cracked pink of my tongue, vows at the ready.
Aaron Hillel lives in Oregon. His writing has appeared in Back Patio and RiverLit.
