Leap Frogging

Posted on May 19, 2003 in Book of Days Prose Arcana

Note: This is part of a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.

Today’s topic: One day….

One day, a leap frog leaped to his death. He’d followed the line every since he rose from tadpolehood and wherever the frog in front of him pointed, he went, taking his place at the front while the other three frogs who made up this group waited their turns. When a frog felt the frog immediately behind him flash as a shadow over his head, he braced himself because he knew that he was next. He listened for the plop of the rear-frog-now-fore-frog to hit his tympanous ears, then pressed his strength into his back legs and webbed feet; then flew.

And it was at the end of such a flight that the leap frog met his death. You see, like all the other leap frogs, he believed that having an unflinching direction was a good thing. His partnership with the other frogs gave them all a line to follow. A sense of comraderie developed as they shot through the cattails that crowded the edge of their birth pond; up the clay bank; through the bunch grasses that grew in the spots that dried up during the summer; across a pasture cropped low by cattle. Ultimately, after many days of jumping (once intersecting the path of a party of hop toads doing pretty much the same thing), they rocketed up a piney hill. Here the line of leap frogs reached a striated grey rock. The last of the line leaped when he heard the splat of the first’s arrival. Down he fell to a scree of the same rock as the one he’d passed over far above. A sharp point skewered his innards and broke his back.

The three survivors talked among themselves. Should they jump even though the way was clearly perilous? They all agreed that they should not do so. But they rejected the thought of abandoning the leap-frogging altogether: because, after all, no life was worth living if it did not have a direction.

At length, they arrived at this consensus: they would set off in a new direction. The first frog looked about him, surveyed the lines of the cliffs, and pointed them in what appeared to be a safe path through the piney woods. Together they leaped one after the other for a few days more. Then the first frog leaped onto a hot, freshly tarred road. He cried in his pain, but the second followed anyways. So did the third. The tar held them fast. The last frog could not advance and the first could not go back. A few minutes after the heat of the highway cooked them through, a steam roller passed over them. Of the frogs nothing was seen again. But leap frog sages who heard of the affair insist that it was a happy death because, after all, it is far more affirming to have a direction than to just live and catch flies without one.

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Tomorrow’ topic/prompt: Write about ebb tide.