Grace Dixon
The two of us lay sprawled in his bed, his white calf socks the only item of clothing between us. I was exhausted. My jaw ached. Laz explained, without meeting my eyes, that it happened sometimes and it wasn’t my fault. Was there anything he wanted? I asked.
He stared at the open bedroom window. He had cracked it open when we first got back to his room, muttering something about running hot. My skin was covered in goosebumps and I fought off a violent shiver. No, don’t worry about it. Let’s just lay here for a bit and could I use a cuddle? Laz answered.
My nose was shoved into his armpit, head crooked at an odd angle. Our legs were tangled in an approximation of intimacy. His nose was pressed into my hair. I counted down the number of days since the last time I’d washed my hair. I tried to stroke his back, though his arm atop mine limited my range of motion. I wondered if he could see the stubble on my legs from his vantage point.
I’ve got to piss, I said as I disentangled my limbs. I ignored an immediate and urgent desire to shield my tits from view. It felt obscene to be naked now, but bending over to rifle through the clothing on the floor felt even more obscene. Twisted sideways, I opened the bedroom door and half-ran, half-tiptoed to the bathroom down the hall.
His bathroom was immaculate. Two candles and a vase of dried flowers sat on a glass shelf over the toilet. My feet sunk into the rug, which matched the hand towels. The hand soap was not in a plastic Target container but an expensive, ceramic dispenser. His medicine cabinet housed items from a custom order skincare line. The whole thing smelled like eucalyptus and lemon.
I stared at myself in his spotless bathroom mirror as I scrubbed my hands. The haze of the mixed drinks we’d downed at a nearby bar was already fading away. Something was getting lost in translation between my body and the mirror. Inside of the mirror was a woman whose eyes were too wide. The remnants of her lipstick were smudged on her chin. Her chest was red, rubbed raw by stubble. Grace Dixon
I slathered some of the custom order skincare on my face, wiping away the smudged lipstick. Inside the medicine cabinet beside the skincare were a few pill bottles, another shelf of half-empty hair products and up in the top right an odd-looking bottle I couldn’t quite see. Balancing on my toes, I stretched to reach for the bottle. Underneath me, the rug slipped, then caught, then slipped further across the glossy bathroom tiles. I fell sideways, unable to catch the sink on the way down and hit my head on the toilet with a resounding crack.
When I came to a few seconds later, my surroundings were unfamiliar. Above me, a white porcelain bowl loomed. I blinked, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. I reached out a hand to feel the obstacle in front of me, with four webbed fingers. Grace Dixon
***
Being a frog wasn’t all that bad, I discovered. Of course at first, I was terrified, during those early uncertain minutes where I found myself on the bathroom floor, suddenly five feet shorter than I could ever remember being. I scanned the bathroom floor in a panic, expecting to see some empty husk of my old body but seeing none. Breathing, blinking, swallowing, all of that still came instinctually. Walking, not so much. My first few misguided attempts at using my own limbs saw me tumble ass over face, legs splayed in all directions.
I was still testing out my new limbs as I hopped down the hallway back to Laz’s bedroom. Was he coming to check on me? Surely my transformation hadn’t been silent. How was I going to explain this situation? I overshot a jump, nearly falling on my face. Actually, could I talk? Another misjudged leap sent me skidding down the hardwood hallway floor. Would he be able to put two and two together on his own? Grace Dixon
I began to get the hang of it with a final leap that took me through the doorway of his room. The bed loomed above me. The sound of my toe pads slapping on the bedroom floor must have been loud enough to pull him away from his phone, where I could see he was scrolling on Facebook marketplace.
He rolled off the bed and crouched down to my level. How did I get in here, surely this was not my home. I most definitely had a family that was missing me, he wondered. He eyed me with an unfamiliar curiosity and a softness.
It’s me! Except the words came out in a rasping croak. Ca-ha-ha-ac!
His calloused hands swooped down around me, offering me a seat on either side. I took a tentative step onto his left hand and found myself flying through the air towards his face. Up close, his features were still disarmingly attractive.
I’m going to put you back where you belong, his voice boomed. Yes yes, I belong right here, I thought. I nestled my body deeper into his warm palms. And yet all of a sudden, I took flight again; his warm grip ferried my body over the carpet, around his desk, through the open window into the dark outside.
I flew, propelled by the magic carpet of Laz’s hands, enthralled and horrified and entirely out of control. He dropped me onto a bush just below his first-floor window. Good luck, go home friend, he called. I gripped on for dear life with my toes, praying that I could figure out how they worked in time to avoid hurtling to the ground. Grace Dixon
***
It didn’t take me as long to adjust as you might have imagined. The backyard bordered a vast wooded area filled with plenty of spiders and beetles and snails, which my new body found delicious. I loved the wet and the muck, loved hopping and dragging my body through the mud.
The woods were also filled with what I began to recognize as the call of my brothers. Ca-ha-ha-ac! Ca-ha-ha-ac! I bellowed alongside my siblings. I had one close call with a garter snake. But as the pond out back filled up with egg sacs, I grew bored.
I couldn’t stop myself from clinging to memories of our time together, brief and unsatisfying as it was. I sat and stewed. Caught flies and stewed. Swam among my peers desperately seeking mates in the breeding pond out back and stewed. I couldn’t let go of the last moment another pair of eyes, however uninterested and unforgiving, had seen me as human.
I found that if I climbed up the same bush Laz had dumped me in, I could see straight into the ground-floor bedroom. There I could watch Laz change and sleep and occasionally bring other women home. And I watched, obsession, curiosity, resentment and jealousy curdling within my animal body.
I learned his habits, committed them to memory until they were a part of me. There was not much else to fill the time. Every morning he brewed his French press coffee and dumped the grounds in a compost bin behind his back door. I wondered what it might feel like to roll around in his food scraps. Three times a week he went to the gym, usually Monday, Tuesday and Thursday after work. He called his parents on Sunday afternoons, I usually listened in from outside his bedroom window. Grace Dixon
Trash days were Monday nights. If he brought other women over at night, it was usually a Thursday or Friday. He grocery shopped in the mornings, before work. More and more often as the weather grew warmer, he would sit out back to read and smoke after work. Hiding under dead leaves and odd pots that littered the yard, I could watch him read.
The backyard was thick with new growth and dead remnants from the past fall. A raspberry bramble covered the Northeast corner of the yard. Beside it, a raised bed was covered in brown leaves and little else. A few worn lawn chairs circled a grill behind the house. Heavy rains had left the ground damp with decay. I spent hours that spring burrowed into the cool dirt, watching.
It must have been a Saturday because Laz had not left for work yet. I began to hear a few telltale signs of life from inside and soon he burst out the back door, garden shears, gloves and a bag in hand. He got to work on a thick tangle of vines in the corner, cutting away at dead growth. He carried the compost bin to the raised bed, covering it with a layer of rich dirt. Sweat tracked paths through the dirt on his arms.
After a few hours of this, he yanked off his gardening gloves and took stock of his work. I waited a few minutes after he’d returned inside before leaping towards the gloves he’d left lying near the raised bed. I stuck my head inside one glove. The musky smell hit me, both sweet and acrid. I crawled inside where it was damp and warm, much warmer than the still-thawing ground. The smell was strongest near the center of the palm, where I circled before settling down. Lulled by the warmth, I fell asleep.
***
I found that if I timed it right in the mornings and evenings, I could sit by the front sidewalk as Laz left for work and returned home later in the day. If he didn’t come home as the sun was setting, like usual, I could wait and wait and catch him coming home, sometimes with someone else. When he came home with another woman, my fixation on him lapsed, if only momentarily. I examined her hair, her gait, the timbre of her laugh, taking note.
That night, he hadn’t come home before the sun set. I sat at the base of an elderberry bush that leaned over the sidewalk out front. The block where Laz lived was residential and slow, mostly home to a population that commuted by car. I watched the few walkers that ambled up the steep hill towards the house, none of which were him.
And then there he was, his long and slow strides offbeat and off kilter. From halfway down the block I could hear him croaking indiscernible lyrics out loud. I felt my body flush with the anticipation of proximity. All day I had waited, had watched those who were not Laz walk by, and here he was.
He was clearly drunk. Uneven steps sent him swaying from one side of the sidewalk to the other, propelled like a sound wave. His careening spun him from the other side of the sidewalk closer and closer towards my elderberry bush, until he was nearly overhead.
I stared up, eyes wide and mouth parted in awe. In the weeks since he dumped me out of the window, I’d never come this close. Now, I could smell the beer and sweat wafting off his body. It took a few moments before I realized that he had fully come to a stop and was wrestling mightily with his pants. And it took another moment after he’d triumphed over his belt buckle that I realized that he was planning to piss here in the front garden, mere feet from the front door.
His flaccid dick loomed, once again. And with a steady hiss, he took perfect aim at my head. It washed over me where I stood in a warm shower. My body, chilled from hours of waiting for him in the dark, instinctively stretched towards the source of heat. My mouth dropped open, tongue outstretched like a child trying to catch a snowflake. I could taste that nutty, musky smell of him, notes beneath the acid and salt.
The faucet on high slowed to a stream, then a final few drips that dropped to the ground direct ahead of me. And with a quick buckle of his pants, he turned to the front door. His right foot narrowly missed clipping my head. A few millimeters of liquid pooled on the dirt floor around me. I splayed out my limbs, seething and shamefully desperate to soak in the final few drops as they sunk into the ground below.
***
That night was Monday night, trash night. He’d wheeled the bins to the front curb an hour ago. As I sat nestled into the base of my elderberry bush a car came careening over the top of the hill. The front bumper clipped the side of one can, sending it flying which took down its neighboring can too. Bags tumbled out of the bins as they flew from the impact, landing sprawled across the lawn. One split on impact and out tumbled a carton of orange juice, tooth floss, a wet clump of something that might be salad greens or moldy bacon.
I hopped from my hiding spot to examine the treasures now scattered across the front lawn. I took a few cautious leaps from my spot. I nudged a crumpled paper towel with my nose. What had he used this for? Cleaning up spilled coffee? Wiping down his toilet lid? I hopped forward once more, eyeing the wrapping from a bag of Trolli Peach Rings. To my left I spotted two Q-Tips, heads browned. I made my way past an empty tube of toothpaste, a worn pair of Calvin Klein underwear, a crumpled tissue stained yellow and red. Above me loomed his trash bag, split several inches and leaking its contents across Laz’s lawn.
Without pausing, I launched myself up towards the hole. My weight pulled me through the upper layers of tissue and towel to the center of the bag. Here it was warm and wet, the smells were cacophonous. I sighed and wiggled my body even deeper into the muck, settling down for a quick nap.
***
I woke to the sudden sensation that the ground had shifted below me. With no window to the outside world, all I could sense was that I was being lifted into the air. A deep voice near me muttered; Goddamn bags split. Idiots.
All at once I was weightless. In my groggy state I wondered if I had entered another dimension with entirely different gravity rules, until my home slammed into a surface. The impact crushed me up against a paper coffee cup. I heard another thud against a hard surface next to me. Then a screeching noise, the sound of metal rubbing against metal. The sound vibrated through my entire body. I realized the safe home I’d found in Laz’s warm, wet trash was not safe. I scrambled in the trash; legs dug for purchase and slid down a banana peel, ripping paper. But nothing stayed put and I found myself sliding further and further back into the trash. The shrill noise of metal screaming got closer.
Muted by the shrieking of the compactor, I heard a familiar voice. Sorry man, not sure what happened to my trash last night, Laz said. Every nerve in my body crackled. With renewed intensity, I fought to escape. My hands finally caught hold of metal through the tear in the bag, holding me in place as trash slid further into the maw of the garbage truck behind me. In a final miraculous push of self-preservation, I shook free from the trash bag and launched myself skyward.
I cleared the lip of the garbage truck by an inch, sailing to freedom. The two men were eyeing the trash scattered across Laz’s front lawn and missed my escape. Adrenaline and panic still surging through my veins, I beelined to Laz’s feet. I had made it, I was safe, all I could think about was getting close to him. After just narrowly escaping a brush with death, all survival instincts were out the window.
He wore his work shoes. He must have been on his way out when he discovered the trash strewn about the front lawn. Without thinking, I nuzzled my head against the brown leather and inhaled that safe and familiar scent. Still oblivious to the amphibian by his feet, Laz crouched to the ground, collecting a few items scattered around his feet. He leaned forward to grab a toilet paper roll, shifting onto his toes.
His heels loomed high, soles worn on the outsides from his rolling gait. Laz pivoted to the right to reach for an empty bag of chips, bringing them right above my head. And I stared up, unthinking. With an exhale, Laz up pushed to his feet again, trash in hand. And the shoes above me came down. I felt a brief moment of blinding pressure and then nothing.
