the Euphuistic Frog

by T. Leah Fehr, December 26, 2008

"wowowoweee!  Lest it be written crippled me in the best way!  I LOVE YOUR BRAIN!!!  You are awesomelymindblowinglyfucking brilliant!  Ribbit! xo"  ~  Bif Naked, 2010

The surge of ink upon paper is smooth and without consciousness; each thought flows seamlessly into a word into a line into a rhyme into a surreality that she, alone, can fathom and manipulate.  It’ll kill me sooner or later, she muses as she writes, this incessant and seemingly infinite catharsis. And while she knows that each line and each rhyme brings her closer to a world in which she’d rather be, she knows with equal conviction, that she will perish before she finds it, and it will be this writing that ultimately destroys her.  And if not the writing, then the drink and the smoke that inevitably accompany it.  Which came first, the words or the pain?  The pain or the dependence?   She pauses, lifts her pen from the paper and tries to massage away the ice pick embedded in the base of her skull, and the drunken fog that permeates her mind, and this break of the flow of ink upon paper causes her to descend back to the reality from which she has steadfastly tried to write herself away.  

“Damn it, where the hell was I?” she curses aloud to herself, and the sudden sound of her voice startles the black beast slumbering in the corner of the room.  His lifts his head slowly and gazes at her with an expression of annoyed adoration that could never be adequately described to any human who has never been owned by a cat.  Returning his lovingly contemptuous glare, she whispers, “So sorry to have disturbed you, darling – go back to sleep.”  She smiles as he murmurs his indignation and his sleepy amber eyes close once more; she lights another cigarette and sips her wine, and looks out into the darkness beyond her window.  

Yes, that was it, wasn’t it… I was writing about him, my keeper, my guardian, my guide.  The idea had come to her that morning as she trudged through knee-deep snow and toiled against the blustering gusts of winter at its apex; the daily trek to work, her real work in the real world.  She detested it – the commute, the schedule, the monotony, the corporate bullshit – but few poets can actually make a living through writing, at least while they’re still alive.  So she pours her usually hung-over self out of bed each morning at the ungodly hour of four thirty and steps out into the darkness and cold to face her demons and her boss.  But this morning had been different, had been better, despite the frigid conditions, for she had finally seen him again.  He only comes for her when the world is at its darkest, and he has always led her precisely where it is she needs to go, even if it’s not where she wants to go.  And he was finally there this morning, wasn’t he?  She had walked toward him, led by him, just as she has always been, since the moment she learned his name as a child.  She has never understood how he could know where she is headed, but he does, and he seems to be there always to guide her through the black cold.  The strength and integrity of the constellation has always struck her with such assurance and infallibility, that she has, on several occasions, whispered to him, on those cold walks, and thanked him for his direction and warmth.  

So she had decided it was time to write about him tonight; it’s quite odd, actually, that she has never written of him before now, but then, she hasn’t done much writing since that horrible day eighteen years before.  It’s a distant and fractured memory for her now, but she can still feel the agony of it dry her pen and crumble her paper.  She hadn’t written so much as a line, a solitary rhyme, for over fifteen years since that day; the day the boy vanished.  She no longer knows his name, but she knows the overwhelming love she once had for him.  She knows his face and his smell.  She knows his touch.  She knows he had loved her once – loved her more than she could bear.  She had written of their love that day; dedicated to word and time all that was within their mutual souls.  She wrote of their condemnation and their exile.  She wrote of their pain.  

“Love be faithful, and love be true.  So wrong, is it, that I love you?”

And when she awoke the next day, he was gone.  She searched for him in every face, every stranger she met, to no avail.  Those who had known and cursed them, denied that he had ever existed, and looked upon her as if she were mad.  Their shallowness and fear had blinded them to the passion she had shared with him, that when they could no longer see him, they could no longer recall him at all.  But she could.  He was gone, and she never saw him again.  She knew his name once, she’s quite sure of it, but the wordless years had finally erased it from her mind.  

I write again now for it takes me away from that which took him away from me.  And with that, she empties her glass and clutches her pen once more, to complete her dedication to those stars which have sheltered her from her own darkness and misery, since that fateful day.

The frogs are calling her again.  Her goddamn, fucking frogs.  She is obsessed with them, of course; surrounds herself with them.  They remind her that there is birth and rebirth, that there is such a thing as life, even here, where the world seems mostly dead.  But they’re calling and calling, and it must be time to wake up, time to breathe, time to do the same thing she did yesterday and the day before; time to do what she will do again tomorrow, and the next day, and will continue to do until the writing or the wine or the frogs finally kill her.  And so begins another day.

She steps out into the dark and breathes deeply the frigid air that shrouds her.  And as she makes her way through the shifting snow-drifts, she looks up to the sky for guidance, as she has done a thousand times before on morning such as this.  And she looks and looks and blinks away the tears that the cold has drawn from her eyes.  And she stops in the road and turns, knowing that he would never be behind her, for he has always been before her, been her guide.  He is not behind her, no, of course he’s not.  But he’s not in front of her, either.  There must be too much cloud cover… but she can see the stars and moon clearly against the sable backdrop of a pre-dawn winter morning.  Her heart sinks as she realizes that she is on her own this morning, and with her head down against the bitter wind, she walks on into the darkness alone.

“What do you mean you’ve never heard of it?”  The look of incredulous irritation is obvious on her face as she tries to discuss the abrupt disappearance of her constellation with a befuddled colleague, “It’s one of the most well-known groups of stars!  Kids learn about it in grade school!”  He looks at her imploringly and admits that he’s just not very well-versed in astronomy.  She had even asked him to read the poem she’d written about the constellation a week earlier, hoping that he’d recognize it from her description, but he remained hopelessly boggled.  What am I doing?  She thinks, This is ridiculous… it was just a bit hazy this morning, that’s all.  She shrugs, tosses her cigarette butt into the street and, almost defiantly, walks back into her office building.  I’ll see him tomorrow morning.  I must.

But she doesn’t see him, not the next morning, nor the morning after.  Another storm blows in, and for the days and weeks to come, her mornings are met by an impenetrable grayness that seems to have leeched all color and light from the world.  The night sky is a dingy reflection of the undying city glow and filthy snow, and even during the day, never once does the sun penetrate the ashen mantle .  

”I know that I will never cease to follow, for he is my keeper and it has been thus since long before I was used up and spent.”  

She soon stops looking for her keeper.  She remembers that she had once sought him out but she does not remember why.  And his name becomes as lost to her as it was to her colleague.

Spring had arrived pleasantly early, and she is savoring the longer days and sunlight that she had so dearly missed during the darkened winter months.  Apparently, so is the black beast in the corner.  He languishes obscenely in the warm rays filtering through the windows in her office, and his fuzzy exposed belly is a tempting target for nuzzles, which he doesn’t particularly like, but tolerates for the sake of human-feline equilibrium.  She lifts her head from his lazy, furry mass and slowly strokes the top of his head with one finger, just that way that makes his amber eyes close tightly and evokes the closest thing to a smile that any cat could ever manage.

Every time she sees him so content and at ease, she is reminded of the first moment they met.  It had been six years or more, and she and her husband were visiting a local pet store.  She had strolled into the adopt-a-pet area, much to her husband’s dismay.  And there he was:  enormous and filthy, matted fur and feral eyes.  He was pacing his cage, as a captive lion would in a zoo.  He was intimidating and wild, and he had very nearly outstayed his welcome; with no prospects of adoption, he was on kitty death-row.  She fell in love with him immediately.  And while her husband filled out the adoption papers, she opened his cage, and he fell into her lap, purring and gazing up at her with those eyes, those feral amber eyes, and she knew her heart was his.  And as she stokes his head now and he purrs that thunderous rumbling purr that completely melts her resolve, she knows that she must write about him.  

He is curled up in his corner, purring as the glow from the candles casts their flickering and shifting light throughout the room, and she opens her journal.  She’s not written in months, and she feels that familiar twinge of exhilaration and angst as she wields her pen once again.  She looks at him, in his lazy feline grace, and her pen touches the page.  

And the surge of ink upon paper is smooth and without consciousness; each thought flows seamlessly into a word into a line into a rhyme into a surreality that she, alone, can fathom and manipulate.  But the room is too quiet, too still.  The connection breaks abruptly as her pen leaves the page, and her mind swims in the silence.  Jesus, how much did I drink this time?  She looks down at the empty wine bottle on its side on the floor next to her chair, and she knows all too well.  There are two cigarettes burning in the ashtray by her hand, and the candles have all died but one, and by its meager light she glances at the short prose upon the page before her, trying to determine how she could have imbibed so much to produce so little.  It’s too damned quiet.  She closes her journal, and looks to the corner for her beast, but he’d obviously gone to bed hours before.  She snuffs the remaining candle and stumbles out of the room.

“He can’t have gotten out – there’s simply no way.”  She takes the stairs to the basement two at a time, knowing that he must have gotten locked in the laundry room again.  It hasn’t been warm enough yet to have the windows open, and besides, she would have noticed a hole torn in one of the screens.  They’re both so careful to not let him out when they’re coming and going, so he couldn’t have gotten out either of the doors.  So then where the hell is he?  She blames herself, blames her inattentiveness.  Cats are just so damned independent, and she has taken it, taken him, for granted.  When did I see him last??  Dammit!  He’s not in the laundry room, and she hasn’t seen him in his corner of her study for at least three nights, she’s sure.  Didn’t she trip over him in the dark the night before last?  And didn’t he lull her to sleep with his rumbling hymn just last night?  She can’t remember.  She returns to the kitchen, and checks his dish to see if any food is missing since she filled it that morning, still trying to understand why it hadn’t been on the floor and why she had finally found it in the back of the pantry, covered in dust.  

Her husband is sitting at the kitchen table, with a cup of tea trembling in his hand.  He tried to explain to her that they hadn’t owned any animals since her childhood pet cat had passed on several years earlier.  The dish she had pulled out of the pantry had belonged to it, and hadn’t been used since.  She had screamed at him that he was lying and she knew that he had killed the cat to hurt her.  And now she is frantically running around the house, trying to find a cat that he has never known, a cat whose name she can’t even tell him.  And he knows that it’s happening again, and he knows that she’ll need to go back.

Exhausted, she finally crumbles to the floor in her study, and reaches for the corner that he sleeps in.  The carpet is clean; there’s no trace of fur clinging to it.  That corner should be matted with silky black fur; she curses every time she tries to vacuum it up.  She opens the closed closet door, the door that is always left slightly ajar so he can reach his litter… but the litter box isn’t there.  She lifts herself up from the floor, sits at her desk and lights the only candle left to light.  And she opens her journal to the last written page.  

“Obsidian silk cradling sublime caress.  Souls rapture entwine, bestow soft hymn, resplendent.  Resounding voice beholden.”

She closes the book, blows out the candle and sits in the moonlit darkness for several minutes.  She looks out the window before her, and knows she should be looking for something or someone, but it’s not the right time for him now, and she doesn’t know why.  She knows she was looking for something; something she loved that loved her, but she doesn’t know what.  She knows the light in the blackness and the cold and she knows the softness and the thunder.  But she doesn’t know their name.

The heat awakens her even before the frogs.  Too fucking early.  But no, that’s not right… there are no frogs today… it’s Saturday.  The thought washes over her as a rare cool breeze wafts through the bedroom window, breaching the early summer heat wave that has choked the freshness out of the air and the life out of the living.  She languishes in the breeze, as a black cat might in the sun, and reaches out for her husband.  It’s their anniversary, and she is preparing a special gift for him.  He was so desperately worried about her when she had the breakdown last spring, and she had treated him so badly.  She has put him through so very much during their fourteen years together, and still she does not understand how he has stayed by her when she is at her most ridiculous.  Between the drinking and the delusions, I should have lost him years ago.  

She thinks back to when they met, and how tumultuous and passionate they both were; such very different people, who found a love so strong, despite their differences, that even the occasional insanity, hers or his, simply could not disrupt it.  They had met when she was only eighteen and morose and new to the world beyond her parents walls.  He was older, and miserable, and they spent their first years indulging in their mutual selfish and self-indulgent behaviors, sometimes together, sometimes apart.  There were countless lovers, parties, bruises, drinks, drugs and fights.  They almost didn’t make it a few times, as her writing and drinking and desires and mind would begin to slip and she would try to summon a new world to belong to, and she would try find a reason to leave him behind.  But she never did, and she knows now that she never could.  They have too much together.  Too much of what, she’s never been able to identify, but too much nonetheless.  And that is all that matters.  

She loosens her embrace on her sleeping husband and rolls onto her left side, facing the window and the rising sun.  She takes a deep breath, and thinks of his home; the home he doesn’t believe he’ll ever return to; the ocean and the temperance.  She’s been there only once, and she adores it, but it’s so very far removed from her home, the decayed and depressed country, the frightening and intrusive city; the only home she’s ever known.  She detests her home, and she tells him again and again how she longs to run away to the water, but he will never believe her until she actually does it.  And she fears that she may never be able to leave her dry and decrepit home, despite her loathing, and that he will finally leave her for no reason, other than she is too afraid to follow him to the water.

These are no thoughts to begin our anniversary celebration.  She clears her mind, stretches, gets out of bed, and makes her way to the kitchen to put on a pot of coffee, all the time pondering sweet rhymes to include in the poem she plans to write for him as a token of her love, her gratitude, and her promise that they will run away to the ocean someday, together.  And the surge of ink upon paper is smooth and without consciousness; each thought flows seamlessly into a word into a line into a rhyme into a surreality that she, alone, can fathom and manipulate.  

“Now his hand in mine, a fate he’d not known; bitterness fractured, a warmth seldom dared.  The call of the ocean summons him home.”

She can see through the bars affixed to the small window in her room that the leaves are starting to change color and fall.  But it is so very muted and washed out here, isn’t it?  He had described to her many times, in glorious detail, the vibrancy of the fall by the ocean, and she had dreamed of seeing it with him, hadn’t she?  But how did she end up here?  And why hasn’t he visited?  He always visits.  He’s always been there for her.  

Why won’t they give me my journals?  She pounds the floor and her legs with bony fists and screams at the locked door in front of her, “I want to see my fucking husband!”  A small window in the door opens and a disembodied eye glares in at her.  The eye decides that she’s not yet posing another serious threat, and the window closes again.  And she’s tired, so tired.  Too tired to keep fighting, too tired to keep screaming.  She wants to write; write about their love, their devotion, their celebration, and how wonderful it would have been… if she hadn’t been taken away.  

“Tell me his name.”  The condescending woman asks her again.  And she is so weary of this game they insist on playing with her.  

“You know his fucking name.  I’ve told you a thousand times.  He’s my husband.  We’ve been married for fourteen years.  I know he’s come to see me and you assholes won’t let him in.”  She sulks and turns away from the doctor.

“Now, you know that’s not true.  You’ve had plenty of visitors since you came to us, and you’ve been allowed to see them all.  Your husband hasn’t visited you because he doesn’t exist.  Your friends and family have all told us that you’ve never been married.  You wrote about being married once.  You wrote about a man who loved the ocean.  But Chamille, you must know by now that these things you write about simply aren’t real.  We’ve been through this.  You can’t put a name to anyone or anything that you’ve ever written about, because none of them have ever existed.  You have an exceptional imagination, but your mind has never been able to decipher between what is real and what is imagined.  So I ask you again… if you were really married for fourteen years, then tell me your husband’s name.”

She takes a deep breath, turns back to her doctor and looks her directly in the eye for the first time in months.  “I can’t tell you his name, because I don’t remember it.  I can never remember their names.  Sometimes I don’t remember them at all.  And other times I can remember everything but.  But I never remember their names; the names of those who I write away.  You think I don’t know why you won’t give me back my journals?  Why you won’t even give me a fucking crayon?  It has nothing to do with my imagination or with what you or I perceive as reality.  You’re afraid of me.  You’re afraid that I’ll write about you.”

She’s bleeding, and they’re not paying attention.  It’s New Years Eve, as far as she can guess, and the nursing staff are enjoying their subdued and illicit festivities in the common room.  She puts her fingers between her legs and they are slick and sticky with menstrual fluid, and she looks at the blank white walls around her. 

The surge of blood is smooth and without consciousness; each thought flows seamlessly into a word into a line into a rhyme into a surreality that she, alone, can fathom and manipulate.

It’s the first day of a new year, and a condescending doctor is escorting a new patient to a secured room in the hospital.  The room has remained blessedly empty for months, but this patient is a special case: delusional, violent, complete psychotic break from reality.  The doctor signals the nurse to unlock the door, and frowns as she fumbles with the keys.  She knows there was a New Year’s Eve party in the common room the night before, and that the nurse isn’t nursing anything this morning, but her own hangover.  The door is finally unlocked and the doctor and patient step in...  

… and the patient screams and he turns and he claws out the eyes of the dazed nurse and runs down the corridor, blood dripping from his fingers, shrieking “I am real!  I am real!”…

… and the doctor stands, motionless and without expression, in the empty room, and stares at the coagulated bloody verse scrawled across the padded wall before her…