by Joseph Charles Mollica
Politely as though being watched, Oliver shoved in the same poor excuse for lunch he’d been shoving in for a month, a mostly salad-filled pouch, plus or minus some condiments. He licked the familiar trickle of neon-green dressing clean off his thumb, still unsure that none of his colleagues were watching. But onward he chewed, quickly but firmly – efficient mastication, he’d read, was its own kind of healthy diet – from the soggy, saccharine pineapple edges to the disappointing bits of chicken, always elusive, at the center. He was doing this as usual as usual gets until something went crunch. After a lifetime of shoving things into his mouth, he was certain this was neither chicken nor pineapple. He might not have realized he’d said a prayer for a piece of cartilage, but the taste was alien. After several long years in New York, he could not help but freeze his chewing apparatus in open, tabloid horror. Hypodermic needle? Human finger? Rat parts?
Whatever it was, it needed to come out. He purged the stuff from his mouth, gagging a little in the process. A hazardous blob settled onto his desk and he probed the pulverized bits of lettuce and onion with a pen until he plucked out what appeared to be a tiny bone, splintered like a toothpick and tapered into a webbed foot. He draped a napkin on his desk and set down the uneaten portion of his lunch. Slowly, he drew back an edge of spelt wrap. He didn’t want to look, but he did want to look: and there, smothered in low-fat Caesar dressing and shrouded by pineapple, was a frog about half the length of his thumb, green as Kermit, and sure enough missing a leg.
“Prasheet,” Oliver called.
Prasheet’s head appeared over the side of their cubicle partition. Oliver pointed at his desk accusingly.
“What’s that shit, man? Vomit?”
“Does it look like a frog to you?”
“Let me get a closer look.” Prasheet came around and leaned in close to the wrap, inspecting it thoughtfully. “This is definitely some kind of a frog, man. Where did it come from?”
Oliver pointed at his lunch.
“It was in your girly wrap? Inside? That’s freaky, man. Did you eat it? Oh, man, I hope you didn’t eat that shit.”
Oliver rotated the napkin to get a better view of the frog’s head, which was coated in a gelatinous substance that made Oliver think of green men from Mars. The frog’s mouth, set in thin-lipped angst, offered no suggestion that it was alive, but he understood amphibians to be coy by nature. It could have been playing dead in self-defense. Oliver peered into its tiny black eyes.
“I think I bit its leg off,” Oliver said.
“Is it dead?”
“Is it?”
“Shit, you’re lucky you didn’t eat the head side, man.”
True enough, Oliver thought. Yet there was still a very good chance he had digested microscopic particles of frog essence and slime, some of which he was sure contained poison. He suppressed a bit of undigested wrap that came up his gullet. It was not the day for a frog to get into his lunch.
Oliver poked at it some more with the ballpoint. “That looks like it’s breathing,” Prasheet said. “Freaky and more freaky, man. Let me go get someone.”
But before Oliver could get the words out of his mouth – “no, please, you’re going to cause a scene” – Prasheet was off, the town crier finally with a purpose.
Oliver went to the men’s room to soap his hands and gargle. When he returned, a group of colleagues had amassed outside his cubicle like well-drilled tourists. “This shit you have to see,” Prasheet was saying to them. Inquiries into the frog were lodged, some directed toward Baxter, others toward Prasheet, their knowing guide. It was Baxter, though, who was forced to repeat the story four times, doing so with the stunted clarity of someone who had walked away unscathed from a violent car wreck. One of the lawyers in Legal told him he should find representation immediately. Prasheet, sensing Baxter’s discomfort, asked firmly for the pilgrims to back away from the desk and give him space. An employee he’d never seen before warned him to “save” the specimen for lab testing. “It’s not like I was going to throw it into the trash,” Oliver said. “It might still be alive.”
“Is it suffering?” asked a woman from HR taking video of the scene with her phone. Oliver watched her pan from the leg jutting out from the pile of mouth sludge over to the bed of partially foraged, possibly tainted pineapple where the either dead or catatonic frog was now on display. “What if it’s suffering?” she narrated.
The wellbeing of the frog, however, was the first thing he considered after establishing that it was not a hypodermic needle. It was the Wisconsin in him, always putting others before himself. He’d learned from his mother to accommodate others even when they didn’t deserve it. In New York, however, this was tantamount to getting your ass kicked, over and over again, and learning to love it. But all things being equal, the poor frog didn’t deserve to have its jumper shorn off; it was likely only disoriented, hiding in fear. And it had most certainly been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Then came Dave Andersen, the last person Oliver wanted to see, and he knew right then that the frog in his wrap was going to throw his plans into chaos. He was scheduled to leave work early to make his flight to Milwaukee. “Jesus, what a shit show,” Dave said. “This is some unlikely business. HR says you need to get to the ER asap and get yourself checked. I just Googled ‘tiny green frogs’ and those things” – he pointed at the frog – “can be more poisonous than a cobra.” He turned back to the assembled crowd. “Not too distracted, people,” he announced.
“Not too distracted, people,” Prasheet said. Sometimes Oliver thanked God for Prasheet. He was the only person in the office who openly mocked Dave Andersen for wearing a toupee, albeit only when Dave was out of earshot, but it was the spirit of defiance that counted. They formed the kind of bond that adheres naturally through mutual resentment of an authority figure, and it was one of the few aspects of work Oliver looked forward to. He tended to agree with Prasheet on the lesser lights of Dave’s attitude and management style, such as Dave being an unflinching tight-ass who earnestly swore to holy names and was under the impression people liked him because he had a limp and rode a motorcycle on the weekend and was a self-declared straight-shooter who liked to let every department know where they ranked on his color-coded efficiency charts. What really irked Baxter, however, was that Dave could have easily delegated payroll for the week to Prasheet, who’d never had a promotion and would have appreciated the responsibility. Instead, he’d forced Oliver to work harder and faster in return for his taking a few days off, like some kind of punishment. Oliver thought it was Dave who’d probably floated the rumor he was going on “vacation,” when what he was doing was attending his parents’ thirtieth anniversary party. He was schlepping to Milwaukee to sleep in his creepy old room and wake to the sound of his father hocking up phlegm.
Oliver remained seated as faraway colleagues received word of the event in Accounting. People he had never seen before filed in to view the pigmy frog on its death-lettuce, and then to ask – he thought rather pruriently – if Oliver was feeling at all sick or light-headed, or in the case of one of the entry-level guys in Billing, “Did it taste like ass?” To which Prasheet responded, “That shit is like a delicacy in France, man.”
The woman from HR was now interviewing on camera someone just outside the wall of Baxter’s cubicle, surveying the most disgusting thing she had ever eaten. It was clear no one could help him, not Prasheet and especially not Dave Andersen. And why should they? There were no frogs in their lunch. To organize himself he downed a cup of spring from the cooler and bought some time to figure the next sensible thing to do. What came to him was to dump the earplugs and stamps and misshapen paperclips out of a pencil container and line it with a napkin, like a see-through coffin for an action figure. Maxine from Research and Development brought over a pair of sanitary gloves and helped Oliver into them.
Maxine was the pretty one, but also sort of the chubby one, a label he knew to be unfair on so many levels, but New York had indeed smeared itself all over him. He had made up his mind that he could live with the chubby side; there were, after all, many different sides to people. And fitness-wise, he was not exactly his best possible self, either. So there was that. But also the chance she would shed the chubby. They could do it together, even. And then: voila! Suddenly he’d be dating a normal-sized pretty girl, and they’d be a normal-sized couple and their union would be fortified by camaraderie borne of facing the uphill challenge of looking like their best selves together. That was something to be proud of. “You should poke holes in the container,” Maxine said, “like before you put the frog in?”
The sharpest thing on hand was the fang of a staple-remover, so he stabbed and jagged at the cover of the container, putting small gashes on either end. Still suspecting rope-a-dope, he finger-tweezed the limp frog from the lettuce and delivered it into the waiting coffin. Nothing on the frog’s body twitched or flexed, but Prasheet and Maxine agreed it was still breathing. “It’s almost imperceptible,” Oliver said.
“It’s probably in shock,” Maxine said.
“What if you have the thing you use to walk eaten off your body?” said Prasheet. “You’d be in shock, too.”
An instant message from Dave plinked onto his computer screen: “ER asap get yourself checked.”
Maxine was now perched on the edge of his desk, holding a diet Coke. He wondered if she would offer to come with him to the hospital. It would tee up perfectly for the “how did you meet” question that New Yorkers always seemed actually interested in. “You don’t look any different or anything,” she said. “I mean, you don’t look poisoned.”
“I don’t feel any different,” Oliver said.
“Let’s go, man. You are going to need some support,” said Prasheet.
How could he turn his back on Prasheet, who seemed like his only friend? He watched Maxine pour a little spring along the sides of the container. “Frogs need moisture. You should show him to the doctor, too.”
“How do you know it’s a him?” asked Prasheet.
Maxine answered quickly: “Don’t you see the way it manifests pain?”
“Manifests pain?” Prasheet said as he drove them in Baxter’s car to the hospital.
“I don’t know,” Oliver said. “She feels things we don’t.”
“Hey, man, I feel just as much as she feels.”
At the admittance desk, the nurse read out loud from his admissions form. “A frog in your … Hawaiian chicken wrap?” she asked.
“Yes,” Oliver said, placing the container on the desk.
The nurse eyed the container suspiciously and made a private, seemingly improvisational note in her records. She instructed him to secure the frog and wait for his name to be called, and he and Prasheet settled in seats next to a vending machine. A few chairs away, a yellow-haired child sat on his father’s lap, driving an imaginary car and singing songs.
“I say to you, milk this, man,” Prasheet told him. “Listen to the lawyer. You should get sick as fuck and then sue the shit out of that deli, man. I never liked that deli. They can’t even toast toast in that place.”
Baxter, who had stopped listening, put the frog coffin down on an open seat. Almost immediately, the boy stopped singing. “Is that really a frog?” the boy asked.
“He heard you while you were talking to the nurse,” the boy’s father said, ridding them of suspicion the boy was clairvoyant.
“He has excellent hearing,” Prasheet said.
“Can I see?” the boy asked. Although it was unclear to Oliver who the boy was asking, he made a run to the edge of the frog’s chair and took a malevolent shine to the container. Oliver leaned forward and tried to signal the father with eye contact that now was a good time to have the boy stand down, but the father was flipping through a Sports Illustrated.
“Can I see?” the child repeated. “Can I see? Pleeeeze.”
With no immediate response, the boy said, “Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeze.”
“Just a quick peek,” Oliver said. He opened the container for the boy to take his peep. Oliver watched his face alight with secret information. The boy checked to see if his father was watching, but the Sports Illustrated was now covering his face, and he stuck a finger out to touch. Oliver pulled the container back. “This frog is hurt,” he said.
“But this hospital is for people,” the boy said. “Not for frogs.” Pleased with himself, the boy giggled and shook his fists wildly and clambered back into his father’s lap, where he resumed driving and singing.
“Fuck, man. We’ll save that frog,” Prasheet said. “Listen, are you going to sue that shitty deli, man, or what?”
He watched the nurse at the front desk. An old lady with a tenement-quality hunchback had entered, ramming her walker against the front of the admittance kiosk. Her body was wrapped in ancient shades of gray and brown, contrasting a fresh white bandage around her calf. He’d once been in line at Dunkin’ Donuts and overheard a police officer telling his partner that this was the hospital you used if you wanted to die of an ankle sprain. Now here he was.
“Hey, man. Listen, let’s forget about that shit deli. Let’s talk about this: why you eat all those wraps for lunch anyway?” Prasheet said. “That’s not good nutrition, man.”
“I’m on a diet,” Oliver said.
“You are on a frog diet, man.” He chuckled again over his good humor and looked over at the boy, who was still on the road singing.
“I always diet before I go home to see my folks. It makes it a little easier.”
“That really sounds like a girl, man.”
“Well, can you see the difference? I’ve dropped close to five pounds.”
“You look the same to me, man.”
With Prasheet, you had to take it both ways. One second it was Dave Andersen, the next it was you. Oliver had spent most of his life safeguarding his thoughts from open air and had never gotten used to Prasheet’s indomitable urge to broadcast for public consumption whatever came into his head. Instead of getting passively annoyed at Prasheet, he re-considered the frog, and how much it might or might not have been suffering, and whether there was something obvious he should be doing on its behalf that he wasn’t. It was a living thing, no? Yet he’d inadvertently and/or purposefully snuffed out the lives of thousands of bugs and sundry vermin over his lifetime, and he was certain he’d not spent more than a few seconds total to mourn their non-existence. What was so different about a frog? He took another hopeful peek into the container, and it was like low tide on a nuclear river.
The nurse called Hurley to report to triage, and the yellow-haired boy and his father were let beyond the blue curtain, where Oliver suspected there had to be one single under-burdened medical professional available to treat him. It was cold in the waiting room, or he was feverish. He wanted to ask Prasheet to touch his forehead, but that would again make him sound like a girl, and anyway Prasheet had taken the frog container into his hands and was peering in through the homemade air-vents. “This thing needs help, man,” he said. “Crazy Maxine said we should keep the thing’s box moist.” Oliver took the frog to the cooler and filled a cone-cup and drizzled some in through the vents. “Shit, man,” Prasheet said. “It’s good to be out of that office, even if we’re in a hospital.”
“Not for me. Anderson knows I need to catch a flight.”
“Screw Anderson,” Prasheet said. “I hate even saying his name. Anderson, Anderson, Anderson – this is a much too American name. Anyway, what is wrong with your family? Why do you have to be not fat just for them?”
The hunchback was now using her walker as a battering ram, scattering two small toddlers whose mothers seemed determined not to care, and settled into the seat farthest away from the waiting hoard of sick and injured. Oliver watched her re-fasten the bandage around her leg and mutter to herself.
“It’s complicated,” Oliver said. “I was pretty overweight, and they were always pointing it out, like I didn’t already know it. What made it worse was that everyone in Milwaukee is kind of fat already, from all the beer and cheese.”
“My daddy was a bastard, too,” Prasheet said. “But everyone knew he was a bastard, so he had to be the bastard. See?”
Oliver nodded and indicated by standing and pacing that he was ready for a new line of conversation.
“Why does Maxine have those gloves, man?” Prasheet said.
For the last several months, Oliver had been paying closer attention to Maxine’s odd routines; she rubbed antibacterial lotion into her hands religiously and slyly used a napkin to open doors and push elevator buttons. A hundred times he’d seen her take pills out of her purse and wash them down with that diet Coke. He had already decided that he could live with it, all of it.
“She’s just very clean.”
“You should just ask her out, man.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was like she knew what to do about the frog, man. Did you see it? How did she know what to do?”
“Technically, I thought up the little container,” Oliver said. “But she had some solid advice.” Oliver again opened the lid to check on the frog. No revival. The briny odor was thickening.
“That thing is dying, man,” Prasheet said. “What about you? Feel sick or anything? How long we are waiting already?” Oliver was thinking this same thing, and he was beginning to suspect the nurse put a check in some kind of low-priority box on his entry form. Just then his eye caught the trail-mix and fruit snacks in vivid competition behind the plate glass of the vending machine. It dawned on him that he hadn’t finished his lunch. A pouch of mixed nuts wouldn’t compromise him, and hunger might have been contributing to his confused state. He dug around his pockets for some change. He hated unsalted nuts, but after the frog they would probably taste like cherry pie.
“Are you okay, man?” Prasheet asked.
Oliver grumbled and squared up to the vending machine. He entered his coins, pressed the code, and in one motion tore and gobbled. His parents always had soda and snacks and various cheese products in the house, and he wondered how different his childhood would have been if they had taken an interest in him not being so fat instead of just pointing it out and then enabling him.
“Are you okay, man?” Prasheet repeated. “You look more whiter than usual.”
“Maybe I’m just going to cancel my flight. I just won’t show up. This is taking much too long. I’ll tell them I have food poisoning. It wouldn’t even be a lie, right?”
“Good for you, man. Don’t care that you are a little fat.”
But now Oliver could hear his mother’s tone of suspicion – she’d think something had gone wrong; his father would blanket-blame the scourge of New York City – “the element,” he called it – where everyone was just a vessel for a disease or a sick-minded idea, and likely both at the same time. Whatever. He didn’t need to apologize, and part of him wished he didn’t have to lie. They’d celebrate without him, their oldest – the unmarried one who lived alone in Libville and did accounting.
First things first, he had to worry about himself. He’d get treated and tested for communicable frog diseases. Then he’d figure out what to do about the frog itself, if maybe the animal hospital would take it in. Maybe it could be saved. He wouldn’t mind caring for a pet amputee. Whenever he encountered a three-legged pooch bravely hobbling, or strapped into one of those canine rickshaw contraptions, he felt a little steadier about his troubles, which were comparatively minor. Seeing to a three-legged frog would serve this purpose daily.
And perhaps Prasheet was right. Maybe this would also be a good time to ask Maxine out. This was a way into her world.
But then he was thinking of how it would feel to live with the fact that he’d bailed on his parents’ anniversary party on account of a tainted sandwich. His little brother was coming home, too. He hadn’t seen Billy since he got back from Falluajah. He and Emily had a new baby Oliver had only seen in pictures. What about the diet? All those Hawaiian chicken wraps, for what?
The temperature in the waiting room felt like it was dropping. He began to rehearse how to politely remind the admitting nurse that he was fed up with all this waiting. This was a hospital, an emergency room, and in his world unintentionally chewing a leg off a live amphibian hidden in your lunch amounted to an emergency. But then again, he could use the extra time to make up his mind.
When she finally called out his name they were permitted through the blue curtain. A pretty female doctor conversed with Prasheet in their native non-English, apparently mistaking him for the patient. Prasheet laughed and pointed at Oliver and appeared to say something not entirely appropriate, and then they laughed together. She smiled and asked to see the frog in what Oliver thought was a slightly condescending tone, as though she were addressing a functional paranoid.
It took less than five seconds for her to deduce that if the frog indeed carried a disease, Oliver would have been exposed to such small traces it would barely register in his bloodstream. She checked his pulse and took his temperature. “I can’t find anything wrong,” she said.
“Are you sure?” Oliver asked. “Because if I understand right they’re sometimes poisonous?”
“I’m fairly sure,” she said.
“And the frog?”
“I’m not a veterinarian, but I believe the frog has expired,” she said. “It doesn’t appear to be breathing any longer, and it smells badly of rot.”
After settling Oliver down, Prasheet located the car in the parking lot. Although Oliver was feeling okay and had been given a clean bill of health, he let Prasheet re-assume the driver’s seat, which he seemed to appreciate. Oliver held the frog coffin in his lap and strapped on his seatbelt while Prasheet rolled down the windows to release some of the boggy death smell. For such a small thing it really did reek.
They pulled out and rounded an enormous Dumpster taking up five spots in the parking grid. Prasheet slowed the car down. “What about the frog?” Prasheet asked. But Oliver would do no such thing. He instructed Prasheet to return him to the office. He had work to finish.
Joseph Charles Mollica is a writer originally from Queens, NY. His short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Southwest Review, Thin Air Magazine, Peauxdunque Review, The Blood Pudding, Flying Island Journal, and elsewhere. Read more about his work at Josephcharlesmollica.com.