Once there was a leopard frog who lived in a pond next to a nuclear power plant. He spent most of his time jumping and croaking and eating bugs. He was pretty happy until one day there was a small leak from the reactor. The frog felt a strange tingling as his tiny chromosomes were bombarded and jazzed with many harmful radiations. He had become a mutant. All the other frogs began to avoid him, and the females no longer responded to his croaks.
This is not good, he thought. This is entirely unsatisfactory.
One night as he lay sobbing and glowing on a lily pad he was captured by a boy with a Wrist Rocket. The boy was going to shoot him in the head but changed his mind. He put the frog in a cardboard box instead and took him home to be his pet.
"I can talk and read books now," was the first thing the frog said when the boy took the cover off the box. "It was a million to one shot," the frog added. "You can never tell about plutonium."
The boy almost had a heart attack but didn't. He was young and his heart was in fantastic shape. "I will bring you some novels from the library," he promised the frog. "And get you some horseflies and raw hamburger to eat."
"Thanks," said the frog, feeling slightly better. "But no Faulkner. That guy is too damned depressing. Stick to Fitzgerald, Wolfe, Vonnegut, those kinda guys. Also I will need to be in water or my skin will dry out and I'll die."
"Gotcha," said the boy.
So the next day after school, the boy bought an aquarium and put some rocks and lily pads in it for the frog to sit on while he was munching horseflies and watching C-SPAN. When he felt nice and hydrated the mutant frog would jump out and sit on the boy's desk and read a few pages of a novel. The sticky pads on his hands were perfect for turning the pages. He learned a lot in a very short time. He was in love with all of life.
One night he could no longer contain the many fluttery eruptions of joy he was experiencing. "I think I'll go in for literary criticism," he announced.
"I'm trying to masturbate over here!" came the muffled voice of the boy. "It's not as easy as it looks."
"Sorry," said the frog.
Copyright © 2007 by Craig Snyder. This is a demo of the IE HOVER EFFECT which can be found here