fabled end of the world, as I didn’t know then how widespread it was. So this is how it’s all gonna end, thought I.
Not with a bang, but with a whimper.
With a croak.
Frogs.
Truly I can say to you that I did not thrill to the prospect of giving up the ghost at the hands (yes, they did, by this time, have hands) of numerous frogs. World War Three maybe (which in my considered opinion had already, albeit unofficially, begun on September 11, 2001), an Arab dirty bomb planted in Boston Common, an Iranian suitcase bomb left at JFK airport, a filthy mosquito injecting West Nile into my veins, even being run down by a bakery truck, but not frogs. No way. God and Jesus, frogs, of all things! Of all the ways there are for a person to croak (lol) it looked like it was going to be frogs. I had once read a magnificent novel about a certain strain of flu which claimed a good 99% of all life on earth (not with a bang but a whimper). That would be better than frogs.
My imagination rambled on. I could envision a vast assemblage of frogs ascending out of the East River and converging on United Nations headquarters, shouting and laughing as they toppled the enormous honey-box building onto its side, like a portable toilet after a Florida hurricane. I could see them scaring the dung out of all the pimps, heads and murderers on the streets of Bed-Stuy and Harlem. Rising up out of the Delaware and frightening to their death all the speed-freaks in Bristol and all the gang-bangers in Trenton. Dishing out heart attacks and strokes to every drunken gambling boss in Atlantic City as they rose up out of the ocean and developed to their full size on the streets of that fine city. I could visualize them knocking over the Brooklyn Bridge, swarming over the great white walls of Yankee Stadium, carting away the Statue of Liberty and plunging it upside down somewhere in the swamps of Jersey.
Maybe this was God’s purpose. Maybe the prophet John was just a little off in the details of the Revelation.
Armageddon.
Frogs.
No. I myself had serious doubts that His Omnipotentness would finish off mankind with something as unoriginal as mere frogs.
I decided to check the internet to see if this weirdness had made headlines in the cyberworld as yet. First, though, I flicked on the radio to a local station from Hyannis, and the newscaster was speaking of frogs. He claimed that huge and strange-looking frogs were dancing in the streets of Hyannis, fanning out all over the Cape. The local constabulary was trying, and failing miserably, to do battle with them. Everyone was to remain locked in their homes until the scourge was over. By this time there were more frogs than people, like cows in Vermont, and they were beginning to wreck things in their way. The Kennedy Compound was under siege, the National Guard had been activated and martial law was imminent. I tried another station, this one right down the road in Sandwich, WFMF. The same thing, frogs. Frogs were filling the land, overtaking the small city; they had arrived in Sandwich Center minutes before and were now causing havoc. The announcer spoke of thousands of frogs banging down the Laundromat and assaulting a Sandwich cop, then throwing him up in the air. All over town, they were grabbing people and throwing them up in the air. I switched over to a Boston rock station, expecting to hear something about frogs clogging Quincy Market and banging down the John Hancock Tower, but instead I got an old Aerosmith tune, Eat the Rich. I switched again to a Boston talk station and found Sean Hannity bitching to the high heavens about the debt ceiling and ObamaCare. Moving down the dial, I found sports – the second game of the ALCS, the host and call-in guests all crying in their Rheingold over the Red Sox loss the Tigers in yesterday’s game. I couldn’t understand this. How in the name of God’s holy hat could people be talking baseball and listening to Steven Tyler’s rowdy old band when the Earth was being invaded by mutant frogs? Maybe they hadn’t reached Boston yet? Then a thought struck me, and it was that maybe this was merely a local disaster. That could be a good thing. I knew from Mr. Morrison that I wasn’t crazy; maybe now I wasn’t even going to perish.
But, oh good God, just outside my window, the frogs marched on. They were still coming up out of the sea and growing. They were crossing the beach, coming up over the dunes and passing by our houses, crossing the road and spilling out in the mile-wide grassy marshland that separates North Shore Blvd from the rest of East Sandwich.
My fears had diminished tremendously, though, for I knew that whatever these odd beings were up to, they were not out to kill us. They could have already done that, with ease. No, they were just passing by our houses and heading for town. They looked like a miniature army, those frogs did, all they needed were weapons, and they were just the right color. I could imagine how Nick, who runs the Colonial Market at the end of Ploughed Neck, would react when he saw them converging on his store. I chuckled at the thought of old Nick Nickerson rushing out and chasing them around, long black hair blowing back in the breeze, meat cleaver held high, looking to catch a few so he could butcher, pickle and sell some of those great legs.
Yes, they were an army, an unearthly army, and I wondered what this would lead to and what caused it to happen. But what I didn’t know was that what was happening on my beach was only happening as far out as Barnstable, about eight miles to the east. And that on the other side of the Cape the same thing was happening; frogs, millions of them, were ascending up out of Nantucket Sound and evolving; shouting, pointing and laughing as they overtook the beaches and streets and instilled fear in the residents of the opposite shore. They crammed the streets of Hyannis and caused total chaos, mayhem of the first division. And those frogs had begun their ascent at about the same time as my frogs did.
My frogs.
Oh good God, I must be going dizzy, fully whacko, referring to these bizarre, teratoid beings as my frogs. But there you have it. The damn frogs boiled out of the Sound at the same time they boiled out of the Bay. And while I was worrying that these colossal amphibians were going to take over my beach, my house, my town, maybe even my country, all they were really doing was marching across the cape, rising forth from one body of water, crossing the land, and descending down into the next body of water. They weren’t really taking over; they were just having maneuvers of some unintelligible kind and scaring the holy biem out of everyone who saw them. They marched across Cape Cod in a matter of hours. All the frogs from Nantucket Sound met up with all the frogs from Cape Cod Bay in the sparsely populated pine forests of the mid-Cape. They passed by one another and possibly they communicated. They continued on to the end of the land.
Several hours later, still locked tightly in the sanctity of my house, I decided to look outside again to see what was going on. The local stations were still speaking of frogs, but they were now telling us that it would soon be over, that it was an accident of nature, and other such bulldung. The distant stations still had not even mentioned frogs. Not a thing on television about frogs, either, except a weird and ominous movie, circa 1972, featuring Ray Milland and a very young and gorgeous Joan Van Ark. It was about frogs (today the pond - tomorrow the world!) overtaking a rich man’s estate down in the Mississippi delta. I looked out the window. They were still all over the place, still out in force, but something was different about them now. I couldn’t place it at first, but then it hit me. I knew exactly what was happening. I went back out to the deck, not fearful at all now.
I watched in amazement as the millions of frogs were now walking back across the beach and into the water, growing ever smaller, their legs disappearing as they vanished back into the sea.
I sat back and thought about this for a long time and I must admit, I was totally dumbfounded. I couldn’t even begin to comprehend why frogs would rise out of the water, evolve into large green erect humanoids, then saunter across about ten miles of populated land, and then shrink back to normal size and leap back into the drink. It was baffling and it was completely unscientific. And they didn’t even kill anyone. I think that maybe, just maybe, it could have been an accident of nature, but I have my doubts. In the extreme. I think that possibly those frogs
had been contaminated by some strange, man-made and mishandled chemical, and that caused the evolution process to greatly accelerate. When the chemical passed through their systems, they regressed back to their normal state of being. Toxic waste perhaps, maybe some radioactive residue from some secret project gone amok, possibly another Cydronium-240 spill. Some kind of screw-up that would cause some kind of chemical imbalance. No way was this blight some well-intentioned act of God to scare us into getting our proverbial shit together, of that I’m certain.
This was plain and simple – pure human fuckery.
Then again, maybe they weren’t frogs at all. Maybe they were super-beings from the far-off planet of Reggin or Alcoloyd or some other distant world and they just resembled frogs. Maybe they came here to check us out; maybe they came here to serve man. Or maybe they were frogs who were possessed of a great power for a short time. Maybe they were little Al-Qieda robots with bombs in their bellies designed to blow us all to hell. They didn’t look metallic, but who in their right mind would want to go and feel one up to see what it was made of? Not me, buddy, and that’s for sure!! Well, perhaps