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OAWTF

Or Are We the Frogs?

By Judy Tynon

She felt childish. It had seemed spontaneous and playful at first but now, not so much. She pulled her sweater tighter around herself though she wasn’t actually chilly, and in fact she was beginning to sweat. Glad I did this in the backyard instead of the park so nobody could catch me looking like an idiot, or like some creep, she surmised. “Where the hell are the fireflies anyway?”, she said to break up the silence. The full moon sat high in the night sky with an LED level of brightness, shadows stretched out across the manicured lawn from the trees she’d planted herself just two years ago as the sound of the sprinklers ts-ts-ts sounded in the background. She’d agreed to a “digital detox”, a recommendation from her doctor when she’d gone in for incessant eye twitching but at this rate, she might prefer the brain rot. Straining to hear, she could faintly make out the sound of crickets chirping somewhere in the distance and started walking aimlessly through the yard while dew began to gather on the blades of grass. It was a peaceful night, but it was not the same nostalgic peace she remembered from this time of year during her childhood, back when she could reach out and cup her hands around the glow of the small blinking insects and coax them into a mason jar. Back then they practically infested the entire area before the sun went down over the hill and well into the night. That’s global warming for you, she thought only half sarcastically.

Those were simpler days; the biggest problems she’d faced back then were assignment deadlines. She recalled a page in the science textbook with a sequence of images revealing a slimy green frog being boiled alive, just the process though, it never showed the frog when it was actually dead, or maybe cooked was a better word. Apparently, if you placed a frog in a pot of shallow water and increased the temperature slowly enough then the frog would not notice the change and subsequently be boiled alive. The teacher had continued on with the lesson, but she couldn’t remember what it was over, instead she was fixated on the frog. Why hadn’t the frog tried to jump out of the pot? What would it be like to die so slowly? “The earth is dying too” she breathed and imagined the huff of air that would be visible if it had been cold enough. Anyway, the frog must have already been diseased for it to just sit there like that. She looked up, hoping to spot the big dipper unable to make out but a handful of stars flickering in and out faintly.

Who even thinks to boil a frog? She quickly tried to push that question away but the crickets were quieter while the silence was almost deafening and so she pulled at the thread. Who in the hell does think up to boil a damn frog?! She wasn’t sure when she’d stopped walking, she began again and relaxed her features as they’d become contorted with the question. “It was probably some psychopath using ‘science’ as an excuse to get away with murder”, she muttered into the warm breeze. The sprinkler grew more hushed. None of this has anything to do with the lightning bugs though. However, when she took time to think about it, the world was very different back then. Even the land around her home had seen its own fair share of growth, condos went up and general stores had crowded in. A polluted atmosphere and a destroyed habitat, do lightning bugs migrate? “No, that doesn’t sound right”, she muttered in response to her own question. Could bugs be considered endangered? Frogs eat bugs.

She giggled at her line of questioning, grateful for the large backyard, several of the nearby lots could easily be fit into the space. She sighed into the balmy night air and strained her ears for sounds of a raccoon or cats fighting, maybe even an owl hooting into the night. From where she stood the crickets had ceased chirping entirely and she still had not caught sight of a single lightning bug, or anything else for that matter. There’s nothing left. Not liking the depressing direction her thoughts were taking, she decided to start making her way back to the light of the back porch. The textbook may not have shown the final stage of the boiled frog, but she’d known the final stage existed nonetheless. What was it like? Did it just melt into the pot, or maybe it bubbled under the skin until it exploded? Did it remain in the same place or did it eventually try to crawl its way out in self-preservation, perhaps did it sit in resigned silence? As silent as it now was in her backyard? She tripped on an exposed tree root and just managed to right herself, suddenly feeling nauseous at her own morbid curiosity of what surely was animal torture. “We’re no better than the psychopath, are we?” Who even thought that was ethical enough to put into a children’s science textbook?

Then again, ethics had no place in the scientific world, she remembered when she’d been younger and conducting her own scientific experiments. Wanting to capture the glow of lightning bugs for her own use she had pulled off the abdomens of the insects and set them to the side. Then she’d trying to utilize the glow by making it into a paste, mashing together however many abdomens she’d felt were necessary to give her the desired result, but the paste never kept its glow. She’d imagined herself a scientist then with a lab full of subjects and the test tubes you saw on tv. She didn’t have a white coat though so it was not to be. Afterwards she’d let the bugs keep their abdomens but would pinch them between her fingers and treat the abdomen as a pen, writing directly on a surface. She found this to be the best transfer option for a lasting glow.

Burning fossil fuels and cutting down trees, overconsumption and the growing demand to build on every square inch that could generate revenue, it was no wonder then that earth was fighting back. That’s what the frog should have done. “Is that what the lightning bugs have done?” She’d made her way to the brightly lit back porch while lost in thought and took a moment to observe the Christmas lights twinkling along the edges of the roof, the freshly decorated tree in the window, window clings with snowmen and reindeer. Her parents used to say that lightning bugs only came around in the summer, but she used to be able to spend her Christmas breaks out here catching the little buggers. “Welp, brain rot it is then.”

DMU Timestamp: September 05, 2025 20:59





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