Frog F**kery: A Stacy and Jazz Story
October 28, 2011
Stacy hated raking leaves, but somehow she was the one who always got stuck with it. Les preferred to mow them, but Stacy had been lectured time and again by her father that running over the leaves with a mulching mower led to crab grass. She had no idea why this would be true, and why crab grass was such a bad thing anyway, but she dutifully took his word for it and spent all of November raking and bagging.
A frosty north wind blew the leaves around the yard, making things impossible. She wished they’d bought a house with a smaller yard, or maybe fewer trees. She was trying to get an armful of leaves into a bag when she noticed the stone well next to the shed.
They didn’t have a well.
She sighed and finished cramming leaves into the bag. Once she’d finished removing leaf bits from her hair, she reluctantly edged up to the well to see what was going on.
It seemed ordinary. Then again, lots of things in Stacy’s life started out as normal only to turn into crazy later. She looked around the well’s base, kicking the stonework experimentally. It was round with a little peaked wooden roof perched on two posts above the opening. It looked like it had come out of a coffee table book of quaint wells.
She took out her phone and snapped a picture. Yup. It showed up. She peered down into the opening, trying to use the flash on her phone to illuminate the darkness, when a gust of wind plucked the phone out of her hands, sending it clacking down into the deep. It landed with a distant splash.
“Shit!” Stacy said. That phone had a camera and email, and all her contacts were in there! How was she going to get it out? The well didn’t seem to have a bucket.
She paced furiously around the well, trying to think. “Stupid well!” she seethed.
“It’s not the well’s fault,” a rather damp voice said from the stone lip of the well. “It’s just here. It didn’t drop it down itself, right?”
A frog sat on the well’s rim, looking insufferable.
Stacy glared at it. “A frog. Well, isn’t that great. Let me guess:”
“Right,” said the frog. “You know the drill. I can get that back for you. But you’ve got to pay the price.”
“Like hell,” Stacy snorted. “You could be anything. If I kiss you, you could turn into a demon.”
“Sure,” said the frog. “Or I could be a prince, but the kind of prince who spends all your cash and hangs out in casinos all day. You never know.”
“And are you?”
“Heh,” said the frog. “Can’t say. That’s the game.”
Stacy folded her arms over her chest. “I don’t need the phone that badly.”
“Suit yourself,” said the frog. “But if you change your mind, I’ll be here.”
“You do that,” said Stacy. She picked the rake back up and started raking again.
“Hey,” said the frog. “It goes faster if you rake them onto a tarp or something first. Then you can move ‘em.”
“Shut up,” suggested Stacy.
She raked faster. The wind blew the leaves around again, knocking the bag over. Leaves spilled everywhere. Stacy swore in frustration and stormed back into the house.
Fortunately, Jazz’s number was right next to the wall phone. Stacy had figured she’d need it for something else like this some day.
* * *
“That’s a well,” said Jazz, scratching the nearly-shaved left side of her head absently. She had a new haircut which looked kind of like a bleach blond part-Mohawk to Stacy, and she was wearing a jean jacket covered in buttons, a ratty gray top and pink sweatpants. She looked cold.
“I know,” said Stacy. “It wasn’t here yesterday.”
“So you said,” Jazz said. “This kind of thing keeps happening to you, huh?”
“Ever since I was little,” said Stacy with a long-suffering sigh. Her mother had once caught her trying to sneak out of her window as a little girl, and wouldn’t believe her when she said she was following the fairies. They’d come back every night for a week, though, and it was only Stacy’s fear of her mother that had kept her in bed and safe.
She didn’t tell Jazz that.
“So your phone’s down a magic well,” Jazz said. “And hey! A frog! What’s up, dude?”
“Not much,” said the frog easily. “Just hanging out.”
“Doing your thing, am I right?” Jazz said with a grin.
“You know it. Love the hair.”
“Don’t start, I don’t go for amphibians.” She turned to Stacy. “You didn’t promise this little green scumbag anything, did you?”
“Hey!” protested the frog.
“No,” Stacy said. “I wouldn’t.”
“Good girl. These frog-demons are assholes. Just players, mostly, trying to get into your pants. Ain’t that right, frog?”
“I can’t say anything about it,” said the frog primly.
“Bull. You guys just make that up to seem mysterious.”
The frog stuck its lengthy tongue out at her, reeling it back in with a thwip.
“So what happens if I kiss him?”Stacy asked, genuinely curious.
“He gets your phone and turns into whatever he actually is. Probably nothing good. They enchant these guys for a reason.”
“But I’d have my phone,” said Stacy.
“Trust me,” said Jazz. “You don’t want this.”
“I bet you’d be cool with things if I turned into a lady frog,” said the frog. “Am I right?”
“Suck it,” said Jazz.
“Fine,” sighed Stacy. “Let’s do the magic thing.”
“Hundred-fifty bucks,” said Jazz.
Stacy winced internally. But in the end, she agreed, and Jazz got to work.
* * *
Stacy leafed through Jazz’s copy of Webster’s New Guide to Enchanted Things while Jazz rummaged around, trying to set up her spells. “Fish, Flan, Fogeys, Fortresses (haunted), Freezers, ah. Frogs. There’s a section on Well Frogs: Removal.”
“Read the ingredients part,” said Jazz.
Stacy did. It was full of hard-to-pronounce words, but Jazz seemed to understand what they all were.
“Cool. Got it. Let me see the guide.” Stacy handed it over, and Jazz scanned it. “Right. Okay. This will take a couple of minutes.” She started making a circle in thick white chalk around the well.
“That’s not going to work,” said the frog. “I know the one you’re doing. That guide’s ten years out of date. You should get with the times, baby!”
“I’m gonna make you into frog’s legs,” said Jazz, continuing to work. “Hey. Stace. You said this always happened to you as a kid, right? What did you do about it?”
“What do you mean?” Stacy asked.
“Like, did you call someone? Like me. Who could deal with all the crazy.”
“Oh,” said Stacy. “Um. No. I just lived with it until they went away.”
Jazz actually stopped. “For real?”
Stacy shrugged, looking away. So many unpleasant memories.
“Wow. I mean, wow. I was that kind of little girl, too, but my dad taught me magic so I could get rid of it. You didn’t?”
Stacy shook her head. Her father hadn’t believed her, either. He hadn’t liked her “lying” to him, and she’d taken to just not saying anything to avoid getting punished again. “I can’t do magic,” she said.
“You ever try?”
Stacy didn’t say anything.
“There you go,” said Jazz, finishing the circle and sitting on the ground. “I bet I could teach you.”
“I don’t want to learn,” Stacy said shortly.
“Good for you, babe,” said the frog. “Magic’s rough stuff.”
“Shut up,” Stacy and Jazz said together.
Jazz mixed a powder together, shook it well, and murmured a spell over it. The powder turned blue, and she chucked it into the well. A minute later Stacy’s phone floated out.
“Nice,” Stacy said, grabbing it. It was full of water and wouldn’t turn on, but she’d leave it out to dry. Maybe it would still work.
“So. Want to get rid of the well?”
Stacy considered. “I don’t know,” she said. “I kind of like it.”
“That’s the spirit,” said the frog.
“Bad idea,” said Jazz. “With your luck, it would be crawling with magic frogs. I’d be getting rid of them every week. You’d probably lose half your house down there.”
Stacy sighed. She could always put a fake well in later if they had the money. “Okay,” she said. “Get rid of it.”
“Hey,” said the frog. “What about me?”
“What about you? You get to disappear with the well.”
“Like hell!” said the frog, leaping into the air.
Before Stacy could react, he was on her shirt. Then he leaped one more time up to her face as she tried to brush him off.
Their lips touched. He was cold and clammy.
She batted him out of the air, and he landed, rolling and bouncing, on the lawn.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then the air around the frog shimmered, and he expanded and stretched to the disturbing sound of rubber bands and froggy screams.
When the spell was done, a fat, balding man wearing a hockey t-shirt and shorts sat there.
“Hey!” he said. “Now that’s good. Thanks a ton.”
“You aren’t a demon,” said Stacy, surprised.
“Aw, sure I am,” said the ex-frog. “But I look like this. Pretty evil, huh?” He smiled. He had a creepy little mustache.
“Whatever you say,” said Jazz.
“Man, I’m cold,” said the ex-frog. “Got any pants?”
“No!” shouted Jazz and Stacy.
* * *
Half an hour later, they sat in Stacy’s kitchen drinking hot cider. A light snow had started falling outside.
“Thanks for helping with the leaves,” Stacy said. Jazz had managed to clean up the yard in just under five minutes. The leaves were now two counties over.
“Sure,” said Jazz. “Magic’s good for all kinds of things. Sure you don’t want to learn?”
Stacy shook her head. “No, thanks.”
“Well, whatever you want. If you change your mind, you let me know.”
“What do I owe you for the leaves?” Stacy asked.
Jazz waved a hand dismissively. “Aw, no charge,” she said. “You’re a good customer. Right?”
Stacy chuckled. “Right.”
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Susan Bigelow is a librarian and writer who lives in Connecticut with her wife and cats. She is obsessed with Twitter, politics and books, and thinks that only just now is life starting to get interesting.
Very nice. I like the tone that makes magic commonplace. It reminds me a little of Lev Grossman's The Magicians. Makes you wonder why more frogs in the fairy tales didn't take matters into their own hands, too.
Thanks! And I always wondered why the frogs weren't a little more proactive, myself.
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