At first it pissed
Franz off – those little scattered cuts, those twinkles pocking up the night
sky. It was hard to think about. It totally
ruined the nice black vista.
Toby didn’t agree. He
fantasized that the twinkles were collections of, of...something. He couldn’t think of a word for it. He started
putting them into groups, and calling the groups constellations, and pointing
them out to anyone who wasn’t croaking too loudly to hear. “There,
that one – just to the right over Centre Stump - I call that the Lily Pad
Constellation, and, ooh, ooh, omygod, look at that one over there! It looks just like a dragonfly, a nice beefy
dragonfly.” He stuck his tongue out but it came up empty.
Franz didn’t know
whether to be sickened or impressed. He
was a little of both. He dove deep, scraped
himself through the mud, and emerged with a respectable burp.
What were those damn, maddening, eye-tweaking
dots up there?
Toby was now pointing
out another constellation he called “Fish Face” and how there was a hook
trailing behind it. Croaks of “fish” and
“face” and “hook” were reverently bounced off the rubber lips of the
onlookers. Tongues flicked upward
enthusiastically, and Morgo poked himself in the eye for the fourth time since
supper. They went on naming, and pointing, and flicking, until Franz wished
they’d just shut the croak up.
Toby sure had a grip
on their attention, but Franz figured there was probably a way to steal back
the fickle admiration of the boys. He
hopped a little farther away from the Stump so he could get a better bead on
the twinkles. He sorted methodically
through his repertoire. He could swim. Nah.
He could croak. Overrated. And over used. He could eat.
Hard to see how that would help.
Hard to see how it would hurt, either, but he had to stay focused. He could jump. Jump! What
if...what if he could just jump right up there to those twinkles and show
everybody that they were just stupid holes in the overhead black?
He moved back farther,
farther away from The Stump than he’d ever been. The Stump was dwarfed by the endless black
that was totally twinked out, like flies on a fox poop. But the farther back he went the more
twinkles he could see. He paused and worked
his eyelids to redistribute the mucous in his eyes. He needed to make sure it was all real.
It was.
Franz hunkered down
and spring loaded his thighs. Then he
went into a super lower-than-low crouch and let go with a perfect jump. It was
even more gargantuan than he had
planned! He sailed past his blathering
comrades, two of which now had their waggling tongues tangled in a pink
knot. He sailed past Centre Stump, past
the shoreline’s Eastern Mass O’ Moss, and kept on going until he smacked head
first into the side of a tree. More of the twinkles poured right into his
eyes as made contact with the trunk.
Cries of “Holy thit!”
came from below as the twinkle-struck frogs strained to get their tongue unhitched. “Did you sthee that!?” “Franz is right up there with the sthars!”
Stars? Franz tried to sort out the ones in his head
from the ones above. They
were...stars? Hadn’t he read about them
only last week in the newspaper? Stars
were just were suns that looked falsely itty-bitty. He tried to remember the reason for that but
it eluded him.
Franz jumped again,
the stars in his eyes competing with the stars in the sky. His trajectory went up and up and then it started
to thin out a little at the apex. The
arc continued but now it went down in a blistering plunge. Franz accelerated faster and faster as the
lake rose up to meet the sky in a grand gesture of cooperation. There were as
many stars in the lake as there were in the sky, and Franz knew he was quite
likely the only star-gazing-flying frog in the neighbourhood, maybe even in the
world. He flew on and on until he heard
the giant “kerrrrspllatttt”. The pain
came later.
He stayed underwater
for a very long time. When he broke the
surface the boys were arguing over who had eaten the most fire flies and whether
or not fire flies yielded visible farts. Toby was categorizing fly clusters and naming
them. Morgo was licking his swollen eye.
The twinkles were gone
and a light rain was falling. Piper
looked over and said, “Hey Franz! Where
ya been? Did ya reach the stars?” He coughed up a half lit fly.
Franz turned around
and cuffed Morgo in the other eye with his tongue. It felt good to be part of the crowd once
again. And he was pretty sure of one
thing. Frogs reaching for the stars had
better be prepared for a hunk of pain. A
really big hunk of pain.
