Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Hannah says, “Sweetie, it’s only been three months—not long enough for you to be so alone.”

  She doesn’t mean the three months since that punk shot Jason during a convenience-store robbery. She means the three months since my “incident.” Since I discovered why all those ancient Biblical women used to tear out their own hair, and then their own lives. But alone is what I want to be.

  “I need to be here, Hannah.”

  “You don’t even have cell service or Internet!”

  This is true. I am on my Saturday trip to town, standing with my cell outside a drugstore ten miles from my cabin, where I’ve just bought snack food I will not eat and paraphernalia I will use tonight. The Georgia sun pours down like thick boiling oil. The tee clings to my sweat.

  I say, “I have neighbors, Hanny. There are other cabins at the edge of the swamp.” Not exactly true, since the swamp is smelly and hot and buggy beyond belief, but there is one other cabin. At night I can see its lights through the trees dripping Spanish moss.

  “So you visit neighbors?”

  “Not yet.” “Megs, are you eating?”

  “Yes,” I lie. In three months I’ve lost almost thirty pounds. I look like a bundle of dry sticks walking, which is how I feel. I’m always cold.

  “Promise me you’ll call on one neighbor today. Just one. So there’s somebody to check on you if . . . just if.”

  Promising is easier than arguing. “Okay.” Maybe this will mollify Hannah.

  It doesn’t. All at once she wails, “But what will you do with yourself out there?” And even though I want desperately to hang up and go back to swampy silence, I answer because Hannah is the one person who does really care about my loss and the breakdown that followed it. Who took me to the psychiatric facility after I tried to off myself, who visited every day, who drove me home when the insurance ran out. Who would really warp her life to help me if I were selfish enough to let her leave her own family and fly a thousand miles to be with me longer than she already was. Who misses Jason—no, not as much as I do, that isn’t possible—but sincerely and deeply.

  So I say, “I’m doing FrogWatch.”

  And then, lamely, “It’s important.”

  The frog and toad population of the world started to drop over thirty years ago, in the 1980s. Among the first casualties was the Golden Toad of Costa Rica, which abruptly and completely disappeared from an isolated and pristine habitat in 1989. Just gone, the entire species. The last living Rabb’s treefrog is caged in Atlanta. The current extinction rate for amphibians is 211 times the extinction rate of everything else, and if you count endangered species, it’s forty thousand times the background rate.

  Some of this is due to pollution. Some is due to real-estate development reducing or destroying amphibians’ habitats. But frogs are disappearing from habitats that aren’t touched by pollution or development, and frogs are developing weird diseases that scientists can’t account for. The ones that don’t die are turning up with many deformities or turning out too many female tadpoles—like, 80 percent female. Nobody knows why.

  People don’t think cops, especially Georgia cops, have any interests outside of crime, football, beer, and gun dogs. Jason hunted, sure—I have both his.410 shotgun and his.22 in my cabin with me now—but he also liked Wes Anderson movies, jazz, and frogs. He did FrogWatch for three years before he died, even though there weren’t many frogs near our suburban tract, and so I do it now, where there are huge numbers of frogs. Every night for three minutes, a half hour after sunset and again at 10:00 P.M., I sit on the back porch and record on a data sheet all the frog calls I hear from my assigned species, five of them. Bugs hurl themselves against the screen door, which is as worn and soft as cloth. Moths circle the porch light. I listen and record.

  The Southern Cricket Frog: a double or triple chit-chit-chit, like quick clicks of a remote. The American Bullfrog: a slow, deep ribbit. The Bird-voiced Tree Frog: really shrill, like an agitated small bird. The Pig Frog: a truly weird grunt. And my hardest to count: the Upland Chorus Frog, whose medium-high, sustained trills blend together in, well, a chorus. Every week I drive to town and mail my data sheet to FrogWatch USA.

  On Saturday night I record all five frogs. The sun has set, but it is still very hot, and my shorts and top cling to me as I put my clipboard inside, drag a brush through my neglected hair, and spray myself with bug repellant. Then I set out to my neighbor’s cabin. I owe Hannah this much. I owe Hannah my life, and I try not to think how little I wanted that gift after Jason died.

  The two cabins, both on stilts and maybe a football field apart, stand on a hummock, a long dry ridge raised like a massive log above the swamp. To the south a raised bridge connects us to a county road. To the north lie the labyrinthine waterways, marshes, and hidden lakes. Or so I’m told; in my month here I have never gone into the swamp. I never will.

  The cabin’s side window shines brightly through the dusk, even though heavily curtained. The porch, facing the swamp like mine (maybe rented by the same agency?) is unlit. I stumble up the concrete-block steps and knock. “Yes?” A woman’s voice, sharp, with an accent.

  “Hi. I’m your neighbor, Meg Knowles. It seemed time to come over and say hello, since we live so close to each other.” I hate this.

  She comes to the door, a tall woman in a loose dress, and although she is backlit and in silhouette to me, I glean that she is young. Behind her I see a single large room, kitchen and living and bedroom all in one, like my cabin. In the middle of the floor, not quite blocked by her body, sits a large metal tub, the kind that Jason and his buddies filled with ice and beer for parties. Was she getting ready to take a bath? Is her shower broken?

  She says, “I am Sally.” No last name. “Hello. I no take visits.”

  This rudeness stuns me. Anger follows, and then relief. “Well, great. Have a nice night, Sally.” I grope my way back down the steps and give her the finger. But only in the dark, where I know she doesn’t see.

  Okay, Hannah, I did my part to rejoin the human race. And look what it got me.

  Jason’s and my first date was a hike. I am not a hiker, which I might not have made clear when we met at a party because I so much wanted him to like me that I would have showed an interest in anything he might have liked: grand opera, mountain climbing, yoga, old china. But no, it was hiking and frogs. By mile three my boots, bought brand new for the date, had given my heel a blister the size of Rhode Island. Then I tripped and twisted my ankle. Jason had to hike back and get a park ranger, who got me out on a dirt bike. By the time we’d reached the ER, me making brave little wisecracks and Jason all sweet solicitude, I was in love. We were married a year later.

  Death is like amputation. Your arms are suddenly missing, or your legs, or your heart, but you are expected to carry on more or less as before. Oh, really, walking around without my legs, doing my job without my arms, breathing without my heart? How might that work, exactly?

  I didn’t try. Thus the suicide attempt, and Hannah finding me, and the psychiatric facility, and blah blah blah. Hannah thinks my wrist-slitting was an act of shock, not a genuine desire to kill myself. The doctors agreed with her and let me out. Well, maybe they’re right, because I didn’t try again. Instead I left my old life behind, office job and tract house and suburban routines, the leaving possible only because Jason carried massive life insurance. Now I stand in a rural Post Office, which is blessedly cool with A/C, sending off my weekly FrogWatch report and picking up my mail.

  An I’m-glad-you’re-my-sister Hallmark card from Hannah, with enclosed drawings from my niece and nephew. Two belated condolence letters, which I discard; I can’t read them, I just can’t. A notice from the IRS, who can apparently find anybody anywhere, that Jason and I failed to file income tax for last year. Neither grief nor death exempts you from taxes. Finally, the latest bulletin from FrogWatch, this time enclosed in an envelope that also contains a personal letter.

  Dear Ms. Knowles,

  We at F
rogWatch want to thank you yet again for your valuable contribution to the data bank on amphibian endangerment. As you know, frog extinction is a critical threat to global biodiversity, and the data provided by volunteers like you both documents that threat and serves as the basis for political action.

  Now, because of your sustained and important contributions, I want to ask you to go yet further, and in two ways. First, your reports seem to be at variance with others from your part of the state; they show many more frogs of all five species, even given the undisturbed isolation of your call territory. I am therefore asking you to double-check your data before submitting it, since I know you are fully aware of how important accuracy is to our efforts.

  Second, we are asking selected, faithful FrogWatchers to go one step further. One day a week, whenever is most convenient for you, are you willing to spend one hour walking carefully through your call territory and recording any observed cases of frog deformities? Worldwide reports show alarming increases in frogs with extra or missing limbs, humps on their backs, malformed eyes, and other abnormalities. We desperately need to track this. Will you help us, please?

  The enclosed guidelines detail what to look for and how to report it.

  Thanking you in advance,

  Harley Foster

  President, Briarwood Zoo Branch of FrogWatch USA

  A rebuke, a compliment, a plea, and gratitude, all in four paragraphs. Well done, Harley Foster. But I am not going into the swamp.

  I drive back home with my groceries and a fresh load of books from the library. Half an hour after sunset, I record three minutes of frog calls, then three more, then three more, straining to listen carefully, to distinguish individual frog species from the torrent of swamp sound. After years of doing this with Jason, I know I’m good at it—better, in fact, than he was. When I compare my count with the county, state, and national data, I see that I have six times as many frogs as the averages, across all five species. “Pristine” environments like this swamp, away from water-borne chemical pollutants and most human contamination, should only have only twice the averages.

  I don’t like screwing up. Carefully I repeat the three listening intervals. The results are the same.

  Lights burn day and night, all night, in the cabin of my surly neighbor. I know this because, when I can’t sleep and get up to make myself some herbal tea (I hate herbal tea), her lighted windows always gleam dully through the trees. I remember the heavy curtains over her side window; those must be powerful bulbs. Maybe she suffers from Seasonal Affect Disorder—but then, why live beside a gloomy swamp?

  Well, I do.

  “A good thing I at least brought the file with me,” I say to Jason, who of course doesn’t answer. “Everything else is in storage, but I must have just shoved this shit in here without thinking.” Spread out on the cabin table are my W-2, Jason’s, interest and insurance papers, and the 1040 form I picked up at the P.O.

  “Now if I can just remember the figures for—”

  “Hello? Hello?”

  Someone is climbing the steps to the porch, a deep male voice. I put my hand on Jason’s.22, always ready and loaded. “Who’s there?”

  “I am Silas.” A shadow at the screen, and then he walks right in. I raise the rifle and then lower it again, blinking.

  Short and thin, he looks about twelve, which doesn’t match the voice. There is a tuft of red hair on the top of his head, the rest shaved or bald. He wears jeans, a plain white tee, and enormous rubber waders that come nearly as high as his crotch. The jeans look off somehow, as if made of some other cloth than denim, and made badly. The waders drip with water, mud, and swamp vegetation, making a mess of the cabin floor.

  He grins goofily. “Hello.” There is an accent, but not the same one as Surly Sally.

  “Who do you think you are, just walking in like that?”

  “I am Silas. Hello.”

  I finally realize that this kid is mentally challenged. But what the hell is he doing out here?

  “What the hell are you doing out here?”

  “I am lost.”

  “How did you get lost?”

  “I am lost. I am Silas. Hello.” And then, “I sleep.”

  “Not on the bed!” He’s headed for my cot in the corner. He stops, looks at me, says,

  “Yes,” and falls to the floor. In seconds he is fast asleep.

  I chew my lip, weighing my options. The dusk is deepening into night. I don’t want to drive the dark county road, with its twists and turns, in the dark, and even if I did, any precinct building or Child Protective Services in such a small town would probably be closed. Finally I get the waders off the kid and onto the porch, mop the floor around him, and drop an extra blanket over his thin body. Then I go back to my taxes, my FrogWatch, my conversation with Jason.

  When I wake in the morning, the kid is gone.

  I don’t have any waders, so I pull tripled-up garbage bags over my sneakers and jeans and tie them around my knees. I won’t actually go into the swamp but will stay in sight of the cabin, counting deformed frogs along the shallow creek that runs below the hummock. At least it would be a creek if it had proper banks, but it doesn’t: just shifting sort-of-borders of cattails, small hummocks, and mud. A non-creek. The morning is sunny, for a change; there won’t be many mosquitoes. I slather myself with insect-repellant anyway, put on a baseball cap and yellow plastic dish-washing gloves, and set off with my clipboard.

  The swamp is, if anything, uglier closer up. Oh, there are clumps of pink flowers, but mostly it’s mud covered with a few inches of water that smells of rotting vegetation, dotted with occasional trees or clumps of tall reeds that sway in the slight breeze. Spanish moss drips, ghostly, from the trees. My feet make splurgling sounds every time I lift them from the mud. A snake swims past and I stand still until it’s gone. I don’t like snakes. At least it wasn’t an alligator. The drone of insects sounds like a low-energy dentist’s drill.

  In my allotted hour I count an astonishing forty-one frogs: bullfrogs, pickerel frogs, peepers, green frogs, tree and grass and river frogs, two pig frogs catching crayfish. The frogs are sunning themselves or snatching insects with their tongues or splashing into the water when they detect me coming. I go farther than I planned and discover that the non-creek empties into a large pond or small lake, its edges thick with reeds and rushes, its surface scummy with floating algae and lily pads. The sun broils everything. I head back, sweating like a waterfall and cursing when the sucking mud pulls one of my garbage bags down to my ankles and swamp water sloshes over my sneaker.

  “Jason,” I say aloud, “forty-one frogs, and not one deformed.”

  On my porch, I strip off the garbage bags, sneakers, socks, and jeans. Surly Sally walks toward me from the trees. “Hello. I am Sally.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “You take a visit, yes?”

  “This isn’t a good time.” Duh. I’m standing in my panties, glaring at her. “And I thought you didn’t take visits.”

  She smiles, a distorted grimace like she’s never done it before. “No Sally. You take a visit, a different person?”

  “Oh! Do you mean Silas? That lost kid? Did he go over to your place?”

  “Kid,” she says experimentally.

  “Boy. Child.”

  “Childs—not like parents, yes?”

  Despite myself, I flash on Hannah’s and my parents, the most conventional people I know except for Jason’s mom, who is even more so. But what does this have to do with Silas? Before I can ask, Sally walks straight into my cabin and looks around.

  “Hey!” I would grab her, but I’m at a disadvantage, standing several inches shorter than she and in my underwear. My heart stops when she approaches Jason’s guns, but she ignores them, turns around, and walks out.

  I say, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  No answer. She keeps walking, down the steps and along the hummock toward her own cabin, until she disappears into the trees.

&
nbsp; The federal government owes Jason and me a refund of $286.42. The sunny day is succeeded by five days of on-and-off drizzle. Surly Sally’s lights shine night and day. I drive to town, buy a pair of waders, and do two one-hour swamp walks every day. Walking is good for me; everything I’m reading in my library books says so. I do FrogWatch every night, sitting on my porch and counting.

  There are always more frogs in the swamp than there should be. There are never any deformed frogs.

  On Friday the drizzle stops and the sun comes out, at least intermittently. I am out of tea, and also I am sick of tea. I want strong coffee, a stiff belt of Scotch, a joint. I will have none of these things, but by late afternoon I decide to go to town anyway, a day early. I can mail my baffling frog reports.

  As I walk out onto my porch, Silas comes running out of the swamp. He is incredibly fast. His feet are bare and the mud sucks at him with each step, but still he runs straight along the non-creek toward Surly Sally’s cabin. One startled, demented look at me, but he doesn’t slow. There is something in his hand, but I can’t tell what.

  Sally comes out on her porch and shrieks, a sound so high and shattering that without thinking I clap my hands over my ears. It’s a train whistle at two feet away, that shriek. Silas keeps running, and he raises his hand. A blue beam shoots from the thing he holds to Sally, and she crumples.

  Silas turns to me. I am rigid with terror.

  “Hello, hello, I am Silas,” he says, his red topknot bobbing like Woody the Woodpecker. His face twists. He searches for words. “No destroy. You. No destroy you. Sassasssass—” an incoherent hiss is sibilants, pointing to Sally “—destroy you. Childs!”

  I nod, as if all or any of this makes sense.

  Silas locates one more word. “Sorry,” he says, just as something shoots a blue beam from the roof of Sally’s house. The beam bores a hole through Silas’s forehead. He has time only to look startled before he too falls to the ground.

  I squeeze my eyes shut and wait to die. But there are no more blue beams, and I open my eyes just in time to see Silas’s body dissolve. It takes a full minute, while a strong smell of acid, not of frying meat, rises on the air to mingle with the odor of rotting vegetation from the swamp.