Frogs on Sundays

Frogs are born in my attic. Every Sunday, I reach rung after rung and eat the babies.

Every Sunday, I am humiliated.

I have learned to fry the legs and char the toe pads but have also accepted they taste best raw. They squirm in my mouth before I crunch bone and feel the small creature fall limp on my tongue. I hunt in my own home, reminding the windows and ceiling I am a strong girl.

Frogs are frogs, my mother told me. They don’t feel, she told me. So why do they jump away from us when the attic door creaks open? Just instinct, she told me. Why do they croak louder when our boots hit the floor? They’re scared of every noise in the world, she told me. Nothing personal.

Our acrid attic attack, my mother whisper-sang. She climbed rung after rung on Sundays in denial, the croaks upstairs harmonizing with the rotting wood. I held the stairs and closed my eyes. I used to imagine a green mist, moss-covered floors. But when I learned to climb, I found our attic disintegrating. Black splotches sprinkled the wallpaper and the floor was soft, yielding to my foot. I know our attic will fall apart one day, but I still pretend the tree in our backyard will extend toward our house, burst through the walls and roost just below the attic floor to keep us afloat.

I used to make necklaces out of the frogs’ bones until Wanda told me that was a very strange thing to do. Wanda also taught me how to speak normally at school and let me borrow her clothes. Teenager girls should dress like hookers a little bit. But only just a little bit, and I watched Wanda step into a plaid skirt. Her mother made most of her clothes but Wanda also stole trendier clothing from the mall. She’d rip the tags off and screw up some of the stitching with a pair of scissors and convince her mom we had a sewing club at school. Something in her mom’s face told me she didn’t believe Wanda or me. But she was tired too and so she just smiled and said Wanda’s sewing skills were getting better every day.

One time, she said I needed to stop staring at her when I zone out. I’m just trying to remember something. That doesn’t matter, she told me. You open your eyes wide and get this weird look, she told me. Other people notice and they think you’re either in love with me or plotting how to murder me.

Wanda understands the world is unfair but she’s never asking why that is or how to change it. She says you can’t change it. Nobody can because everyone is angry and if they’re not, they will be soon. It’s hard to change when you’re angry. My mother used to say I’m too angry that everybody else isn’t angry enough. Wanda used to say she’s too angry to be properly angry like me. I’ve never decided if that makes us better or worse friends for each other.

I used to ask her hypotheticals (what would you do if you were in charge? What if we were allowed to leave? What if we could go to the ocean? Would you swim?) but she’d just sigh and look at me like a lost dog, her ear on a string connected to her shoulder. I loved Wanda but I’m not sure I like her.

I still hang frog bones from my ceiling. I use strings and at night I pretend they are wind chimes on my porch. In this dream, Wanda and I sleep in bunk beds, rotating top bunk each night, and I let her borrow my clothes.

Like a bible, a frog recipe book sits in the drawer of my nightstand. I’ve never opened it, afraid the inside was cursed and an alarm would sound, telling everyone everything. A pretty woman is holding a pink plastic bowl filled with different colored vegetables of varying size. There’s a yellow-brown meat I assume is the frog. There’s a kitchen in front of her, cluttered with tools and a tan powder. The background is green, the words are white, it almost looks like a normal cook book.

I imagine myself opening and annotating my bible. I imagine myself using multi-colored tabs, marking recipes I imagine myself cooking, I’m sitting at this organized wooden writing desk wearing a plaid skirt and I’m so normal that people stop and say “wow, she’s just so normal.” And I say “oh, you.” I imagine myself in the pretty woman’s kitchen, using her whisk to mix her ingredients in her pink bowl and we sing, eyes locked like lovers in a musical.

Wanda bought that cookbook, snuck it into my backpack and never mentioned it but I knew it was from her. A consolation prize for being normal-adjacent and a reward for heeding her advice on how to get better at it. Wanda never asked me about the recipes and she never prodded me about my dietary habits but she also never bothered to hide her disgust. She stopped sleeping over on Saturday nights and closed her eyes when we walked under the attic hatch, I imagine pretending she the chugarum orchestra above her were only the quaint and mercurial sounds of an old house.

I’ve never decided if the pretty woman actually eats frogs. I try to hear her voice but she sounds like a robot in my head. I love to eat frogs, the robot shouts. When I close my eyes, her voice turns melodic but her eyes turn red, her skin turns green and warts grow under her chin. She is beautiful and monotone or she is ugly and musical.

Had my mother chosen Sundays or my father? When she died, I scaled and ate frogs every day of the week, each time feeling more disgusting than the last. Until it was just Sunday again.

Just eat them raw, my mother told me. So I eat them raw.