My brain had a hard time keeping up as I processed this information. I found myself allowing my eyes to scan his form, wondering what else I had failed to notice the day I met him as I’d scrambled after him through the orchard. His legs had a backward turned hock in the same way a bird or horse does, and sturdy looking thighs led up to well-defined abdominal muscles that gave my stomach a fluttery feeling as I stared at them. His chest and shoulders held bulky muscles used for powering the massive wings he currently had folded tightly behind him. His limbs and body were covered in a soft, velvety down that was darker in color than the puffy mane of fluff around his neck. Right now, with his shoulders hunched, he looked like he was trying to disappear into his fluff. It occurred to me that he was oddly… cute. I felt my lips curve up.
“I’m… I’m not lurking,” he stammered, his tiny fangs making an appearance as he spoke. “I just appreciate a nice lamp when I see one.”
“Okay.” I heard the confusion in my own voice and bit back my amusement, not wanting to offend him further. “Well… enjoy, I guess.” I flashed him a quick smile and reached behind me to open the door, mentally apologizing to my neighbors for the frog goo I left on the doorknob. I wasn’t coming back down tonight to wipe it off and risking another strange encounter of the mothman kind.
As I was turning off the sink in my kitchen, I heard the familiar tick, tick, tick of claws in front of my apartment and tiptoed to the door to peek through the peephole. Sure enough, Alistair passed in front of my unit and down the hall toward the rear set of stairs to the upper floor. Several minutes later, his tapping claws sounded through the ceiling above.
As I climbed into bed that night, something inside me relaxed for the first time since I’d come here. The scritch, scritch, scritch was suddenly familiar instead of foreign, now that I knew who it was, and I wondered what he was doing up there. I pictured him dusting a shelf or tidying his apartment. Maybe he had a plant. I had difficulty imagining him doing the same mundane household chores that the rest of us participated in—maybe he wore a blue gingham apron while he dusted his apartment with a fluffy, white feather duster that matched his antennae, or perhaps he had two sets of matching pink dish gloves to protect his perfectly sharp claws while he did the washing up—but the effort of doing so tugged a small smile to my lips and lifted a bit of the heaviness that had been collecting in my chest over the last several weeks.
I’d changed my shirt but had been too tired to take another shower, and the scent of his scales still blanketed me as I lay in bed. Soft, warm musk and crisp night air. I wonderedwhy I hadn’t seen him around the apartment before. I’d seen the middle-aged elvish man who lived next door as he came and went, and the younger goblin in her stylish, pressed suits who lived across the hall, along with several others as we were coming and going, but never the mothman.
I realized as I drifted off to sleep that he must be nocturnal. I wondered if he had any friends, or if he was lonely. Like me.
Chapter 3
Lilith
The frog was back.Or maybe it was a different frog. I don’t know how, or why, or when, but two days later, there was a frog in my planter.
I took it outside again, scolding it the entire way, and this time I made sure to deposit it a little more carefully, placing it under some bushes on the far side of the building property. Then I came back inside and searched the entire apartment, looking for any opening that it could have gotten in through. All the air vents were secure and the windows—though they all had paint peeling from the sills and creaky locks—were closed up tight as well. My doors were fitted tightly with no spaces something could enter through. The apartment was certainly old and in need of renovation, but there were no obvious gaps anywhere that I could find. There was nothing.
I had frogs magically appearing in my living room.
Maybe they were coming out of the planter? But I had planted that tree myself and had broken up the root ball and checked itfor anything “off” the same way I’ve always done for every plant I’ve re-potted. It made no sense.
The next day, there was another frog. “What is going on?” I practically yelled at the frog. He was half buried in the damp potting soil, his little backside dug into the substrate, placidly sitting there with his little froggy eyes giving a thousand-yard stare. This was out of control.
I scooped him up and examined him. Now, I’m no frog-ologist, but I was pretty sure this was the same frog. It had the same toady little body, the same coloring, the same warty little bumps on its head and shoulders. His eyes were buggy and giving major “no thoughts, just frog” vibes, and his throat pouch was going a mile a minute, but he didn’t struggle in my hands at all. “You can’t keep doing this,” I told him. “My house is not the place for you. I don’t have frog food. There are no ponds for you to sit in. I’m going to come in here one day and find your desiccated little frog body dried out in my pot. Nobody wants that,” I explained to him.
I carried him outside and deposited him farther away this time before continuing on to work, where I scrubbed my hands until I thought my skin might come off.
Later that day, I asked, “Artem, have you ever had a frog just show up inside your house?”
The old man paused with the watering can he held and looked at me like I was crazy. “Why would a frog show up inside my house?”
“I don’t know! I keep finding a frog in my house.”
“The same frog?” he asked incredulously.
“I think so,” I responded with uncertainty.
He continued to stare at me like I was crazy, so I let it drop. “Never mind.” I waved him off, and he shuffled away to return to his tasks, leaving me to finish balancing the books.
And then the frog was there, waiting for me, when I returned home that evening. And I had absolutely had enough. I had begged. I’d scolded. I’d pleaded. I’d threatened. I hadimploredit to stay out of my house. Did I know that talking to a frog, magical or not, was nonsense? Yes. Did I do it anyway? Also yes.
What else was I going to find in my house next? If a frog could get in, what else could? I also didn’t want it to die of starvation or dehydration, which seemed inevitable if it managed to stay inside without me noticing it.
But Frog didn’t listen.
Frog never left.
Frog was eternal.
Frog was determined to live in my plant pot.
But my plant pot already had plenty of unwelcome guests making it home—I’m looking at you, fungi friends—and so I scooped the toady menace up again and marched it right back outside.
How far away does one need to take a frog to keep it from returning to the same place?
