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Fair Peril

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

"Once upon a time there was a middle-aged woman," Buffy Murphy declaimed to the trees, "whose slime-loving, shigella-kissing bung hole of a husband dumped her the month after their twentieth wedding anniversary." Striding faster through the nature park, her jeans brushing together between her ample thighs, she started to huff. "After she—had quit college to put him through law school, after she—had skipped having a life—to raise three kids with him, he gives her the old heave-ho and off he goes with his bimbo." Tramping recklessly down a hill slick with pine needles, Buffy contemplated the serendipitous rhyme of heave-ho, go, bimbo and brightened momentarily. She puffed her bosomy chest and raised her volume—there was nobody in the park on an April weekday, and even if there were, at this juncture of her life she didn't care. As if being heard venting aloud in the third person might be embarrassing to the normal person? Okay, then she wasn't normal. What else was new. Loudly Buffy declared, "So she, quixotic person that she is, naturally she tells him bloody fine, she can make it on her own, she doesn't want a fricking penny from him, she's going to build a career as a storyteller." Yeah. Right. So far she hadn't made enough to cover the cost of her business cards. Her scutty job was what was paying the bills, not her storytelling. "The son of a bitch thinks he can pay her off and forget about her. She isn't going to let it happen. He can just keep his goddamn money and feel the guilt, goddamn it. She is so mad she ..." Striding along a valley chilly with hemlock shade, reaching for a fiery simile, Buffy failed to come up with one sufficiently incandescent and faltered to a halt, both verbally and physically.

The mouth got going again first. "She's bloody heartbroken, okay?" Her voice hitched, and she shook her head angrily. No crying. No goddamn use. No use telling her story to the forest, either. "I talk to the trees," she muttered, "but they don't listen to me." Who had ever listened? But she told stories anyway.

"So on the first anniversary of the divorce," she proclaimed to a shagbark hickory, "she went for a long walk deep in the woods. Not a happy camper." She kicked at a jack-in-the-pulpit standing too uppity phallic near her foot, then got herself moving again, never one to follow the marked trails, squelching over damp ground topped with leaves as rotten and swampy as her mood.

"And what happened in the woods? Absolutely nothing. The end. End of story. This woman had no future. And do you want to know why? Because she was fat. Fat. FAT."

Not true. She was not obese, merely overweight. Thirty pounds. Well, maybe forty.

So, sure, just lose weight and she'd be lovable again? Like morphology was all that could possibly make her worthwhile? The thought made her want to eat somebody's head off.

A serene silver gleam showed ahead, at the bottom of the hollow. Buffy veered toward it. Why did she always do that, head toward outdoor water, even if it was just a glorified birdbath in somebody's back yard? No rational reason, but she always did. There was something about water. By all logic, a person ought to stay as far as possible from muck and mosquitoes, yet she had fallen into some sort of primordial love with the swamp hidden in the woods behind her house when she was a kid. The world had seemed more alive there—hawks, snakes, snails, cattails shooting out of the mud. The wet smells, like the whole place was God's bathroom. Ducks, carp, muskrats with their disgusting naked tails. She had gone there every chance she got.

But that was then, and this was now. Hard to feel the sense of wonder that kid did.

At the muddy edge of a small woodland pond, Buffy stood staring at the shivery reflections of tree branches, trying to sense a promise of salvation. Sure, it was a pretty little place, a tiny echo of Eden. Green horse-ears of skunk cabbage were pushing up along the edge. Buffy noticed bloodroot not yet in bloom, long-legged Jesus bugs walking on the water, duckweed.

Floating in a twiggy, reedy, rankly effulgent mess of trash near the edge was a dented Coors Extra Gold can some yahoo had thrown in.

So much for Eden.

On the Coors Extra Gold can squatted a greasy-green bullfrog, large compared to other frogs, but small for a bullfrog, young. It stared at Buffy with half-dome eyes the same sullied golden color as its throne.

"Can't you sit on a lily pad or a log or something?" Buffy complained.

The frog smirked. "Kiss me," it said.

Buffy felt everything stop. Her brain, her heart, her breathing, time, the world's slow turning, all hovered in abeyance. The frog—was speaking? The content of its message hung on the air, meaningless. The frog—was talking?

Then time jerked into motion again like a toy carousel. The frog—had spoken? Yes. Yes, it sure damn had. Retrieving the words from the air, Buffy heard what it had said. Kiss me. Kiss me, it had said, the cheeky little bastard.

Buffy was used to similar propositions from construction workers. Back when she was still riding her bike, some guy in a Day-Glo orange vest had once yelled at her to sit on his face and pedal his ears. "Kiss me" was mild by comparison, but coming from a frog, it startled her enough to jolt her free of her dismal focus on herself, which was a relief. She stood gawking.

The frog goggled back at her. "I am an ensorcelled prince," it said in a haughty baritone voice. "Kiss me, break the spell, and I will be yours to command."

Was somebody playing a practical joke, trying to make her look silly? Her ex seeking revenge by getting her on America's Funniest Home Videos? Buffy flashed a look all around, but the woods were typical Appalachian second growth, trees standing like fashion models, thin and boring; there was no interesting undergrowth to conceal anyone. Moreover, the frog's mouth had moved as it spoke. She had seen its salmon-colored gullet, its sticky yellowish tongue thrashing wildly to shape the words.

Because her knees felt a trifle weak, Buffy allowed herself to fold groundward and plant her large butt in the mud.

"Kiss me," the frog said with imperiled patience. Read my lips. Let me spell it out. "You kiss me. I turn into a prince."

Buffy managed to get herself functioning enough to vocalize. "This is the nineties," she whispered. "This is Pennsylvania."

"Your point being?"

"We don't have princes here. We don't even have Kennedys."

"I was stranded here by Gypsies." The frog's tone was becoming more and more imperious. "I am an ensorcelled prince. I am Prince Adamus d'Aurca. Do as I say and you will see."

Despite cold mud seeping through her pants, Buffy went hot with annoyance. This frog sounded a lot like her ex in his less endearing moments.

Her annoyance superseded her astonishment and allowed her to resume intelligent thought. And her thinking did not take long. She smiled.

"I can't kiss you when you're over there and I'm over here," she said in a wispy voice calculated to convey meekness and stupidity.

"Well, get over here and do it!"

"But I can't swim." The water was maybe a foot deep between Buffy and the frog, but why should she soak her sneakers? Let him come to her.

His Highness Prince Adamus d'Aurca complained, "God's codpiece!" then gave a kick with his powerful hind legs and plunged into the pond. One more kick thrust him to the mudbank upon which she sat, his princess enthroned in muck. Wet, gleaming a mottled, juicy off-green after his dip, he hopped past her feet and paused expectantly within her reach.

Silently she placed the thumb and fingers of her right hand around his squishy-soft middle and picked him up like an overripe banana. As a kid, she had earned a few dollars catching frogs for her biology teacher, so this was not a new experience, but were she to handle it every day of her life, she would still never get used to the tacky, humid feel of frog skin, indecently crotchy in her hand. "Ugh," she said.

Prince Adamus stretched his blunt face toward her, his wet mouth slightly agape. His hind legs kicked and dangled, twice as long as the rest of him. "Get on with it," he ordered.

Holding him in midair and well away from her, Buffy lumbered to her feet, then groped in her jacket pocket with her other hand.

"Kiss me."

"I don't think so." Buffy pulled her knit hat out of her pocket, bent over (short of breath as her belly got in the way), and sopped it in the water at the pond's edge, raising interesting clouds of silt.

The frog's voice rose to a shriek. "You said you were going to kiss me!" More in panic than in malice, he let go a stream of unidentifiable excrement which just missed Buffy's foot.

"You promised!"

"I merely implied that I was going to kiss you."

"You misled me!"

"Too bad."

"But I am a prince!"

"What the hell do I need a prince for?" Men. They all seemed to assume they were God's gift. "I just got rid of one dickheaded male. I don't need another one." Especially as she'd reached a point in her life where celibacy was far preferable to the terror of getting pregnant. "Anyway, what on earth do you think you're prince of? England? Monaco? Those slots are taken."

"I'm not that kind of prince!"

"I'll say." Buffy retrieved her soaked and dripping hat, carefully inserted the frog into it, then held it closed and slogged out of there, hurrying muddily back the way she had come.

"You're taking me captive!" The hat wriggled. Prince Adamus's voice issued from it muffled and hysterical.

"Think of it as role reversal," Buffy told him. "You're being swept away. Don't you read romance novels?"

"Let me go!"

Buffy did not answer. Puffing her way up the first hill, she had no breath to spare. But her thoughts were far happier, in a gloating way, than they had been an hour before. She was thinking about all the times in the past few months that she had been passed over for storytelling jobs, and who got them? Better storytellers than she was? Noooooo, people with gimmicks. A mime. A clown. A guy who did magic tricks.

"Set me free! I, Prince Adamus d'Aurca, command it!"

"That and a dime will get you a cup of coffee," Buffy panted. No, not a dime. Fifty cents. A dollar. Damn, her age was showing.

The frog's soggy voice turned pleading. "You don't believe I am a prince?"

She had not given it much thought, and she did not care to, especially not in her embittered mood. "I keep telling you, I don't need a prince or anything resembling a male of the human species," she grumbled to her hat. "What is much more interesting, and what I can really use right now, is a talking frog."

Thirteen miles away was a plastic-lined goldfish pond dominated by a large poison-green plastic frog mindlessly spouting a stream of water like pee from its mouth. Mom hated the plastic pond, the mindless plastic frog, the old lumps in wheelchairs who stared mindlessly at the frog, the nurses who propelled them to do so, herself for being as mindless as they. Strong, able to jump around, but the old gray marbles gone. Shingles flown off the roof, trump cards missing from her deck, still plugged in but didn't light up no more, out to lunch for the duration. She was Mom and not Mom. Had some other names, she knew she did, but she couldn't remember. Everything was itself and something else, including her. This place, what did you call it, she couldn't remember coming here, all these mindless ancient people sitting in rows, boring. Pee, pee, pee went the big frog, and a pretty girl in white walked toward her with a plastic smile as a rickety gray man clung to her arm. Mom knew him. He sat and twiddled his whizzer when he didn't think anybody was looking.

Mom called out like a rain crow, "Too old! He's too old for you!"

Tooooo old, old, old.

The pretty girl in white smiled back at her without changing expression or speaking, a daughter, a nurse, a bride in ugly shoes. Yes, it was a wedding, a wedding, a wedding, silent as a funeral. Mom remembered now. She remembered her wedding, all those solemn old people. But the bride was just a child. The bride was just a child.

Mom stood intently still, feeling her own heart break. Lucid moments always did that to her.

She whispered, "I am losing my mind."

Because they cracked her heart so, she let lucid moments go by quickly. Losing her mind. Mind all gone. That was what marrying that stony-gray old man had done to her. Old man, all he thought about was his wiggle worm. Mom screamed and laughed and hopped like a cricket around the goldfish pond. Mom began to pull her clothes off.

"Shut up," Buffy told her brand-new talking frog as she placed the soggy hat that encased him on the passenger seat of her Escort.

"Ogress. I spit upon your nose hair."

Buffy started the car to drive her prize home, shifting into gear rather hard. "Shut up or I'll pull your nice wet prison off you and let you dehydrate."

"You want a talking frog, you got a talking frog. I am going to talk till you wish you'd turn into a deaf fish. Dingdong bell, pussy's in the well, which is where the hell I should be, in the deep dark well with a golden ball—"

"You do understand, don't you," Buffy said sweetly, "that a frog out of water can lose half its body weight in just a few minutes of exposure to full sunlight?"

"You do not frighten me, beldam. I have survived herons and owls and the foul clutches of raccoons and I will survive you, harpy. I am a prince. I am Prince Adamus d'Aurca de la Pompe de la Trompe de l'Eau. The sun is not more glorious than I am. Maidens swoon at the mention of my comely name."

Being no maiden, Buffy did not swoon. She rolled her eyes and turned on the car radio in an attempt to drown out Prince Adamus, etc. Classic rock shook the speakers.

"Aaaaaa!" the frog shrieked. "Savages on the march! Barbarians! Man the ramparts!"

It was John Cougar with his little ditty about Jack and Diane. Good one. Buffy sang along.

She sang, the radio blared, and the frog bellowed imprecations, until she pulled to a stop in front of her house.

Her hovel, really; it barely deserved to be called a house. Her dumpy little hut, built out of lumber salvaged from a burned-down bra factory by an eccentric do-it-yourselfer who had eschewed the use of plumb bob and T square. A one-story cockeyed bungalow, with windows and door canted, siding slanted a different way, roofline out of agreement with any of the above, and the attached garage sliding downhill at the rate of several inches per year. Too bad; Buffy could not afford the rent on a place with right angles.

"... piece of work is a prince," the frog was babbling. "How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty ..."

Hoping the neighbors were not at home to notice anything strange, Buffy hurried him into the house and unceremoniously plopped him from her hat into her aquarium.

"... of the world. The paragon of—blub!" Blessed silence for a moment. "Hey!" Adamus complained, resurfacing. "Land! I'm an amphibian, I need land!"

"We're gonna see how long you can tread water." Buffy laid a hefty Reader's Digest Wide World Atlas over the top of the aquarium to block escape.

"Air! I'm an amphibian, I need air!"

"We're gonna see how long you can breathe through your skin."

"Filthy hedgehog! Three-tongued slattern! Harridan!"

"Very good," Buffy approved, exiting. The frog's insults cheered her—they were so much more interesting than the ones she was accustomed to. Americans really needed to learn to swear with more flair. Perhaps she and the frog ought to give lessons. Buffy smiled as she surveyed the unkempt rectangle of real estate her landlord called a back yard. In her recycling bin she found a glass jar with a lid, and then she walked to the nearest miscelleny heap, spraddled her legs with more sturdiness than grace, bent, and started rooting. Clawing like a bear, turning over cinder blocks, she collected small red worms, sow bugs, and other creepy-crawlies. She harvested more of the same from a brick and a short length of mossy, rotting plank, then hefted those two items and headed back into the house.

The frog was floating at his ease in the dechlorinated water of the aquarium, but began to kick and thrash pitifully when he saw her. "Monster! Grendel!"

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Excerpted from Fair Peril by Nancy Springer. Copyright © 1996 Nancy Springer. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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