It was a really boring day, so boring it stuck out like a sore thumb. That’s all I remember. I was wandering around the internet on a dead Sunday and being bored at everything in a spare hour that felt days long, refreshing pages and comments and inboxes and hey look, my sister sent me a video.
‘LOOK’
Okay, sure. I looked.
It was footage of frogs from nature programs overlapped with a short, stupid song.
Okay, sure.
That was three minutes wasted. The other twenty-nine passed slow as molasses until noon rolled around and I found the motivation I needed to drag myself downstairs and go get coffee from someone who pretended to be friends with me.
“Hey,” he said. “Hey there.”
“Hey,” I said. I couldn’t remember his name but that was okay. “Give me the thing.”
“Sure. Hey. You seen that video?”
“The what?”
“The thing with the frogs.”
“Uh,” I decided. “Huh. Maybe?”
“Shit is HILARIOUS. Hey, remember when the one big red one is puffing out its neck, and the music goes all doo-DOO-doo?”
“I guess?”
“Yeah!” He did a little dance to show me the moment he was talking about but I had my coffee and didn’t care anymore, so I nodded and showed my teeth a lot and left.
I ran into my landlord on the steps.
“Hello!”
“Hey.”
“Have you seen that video?”
“What video?”
“With the frogs!”
“Oh. Yes.”
“Isn’t it just wonderful?”
“Yeah,” I said. “The red one with the neck is great.”
“Isn’t it JUST? Oh, do you mean the one at 0:43 or the second one at 1:12? Or the purple-red one at 2:28? “
“Yeah, that,” I said, and then I mumbled a lot and escaped upstairs. I had more shit to not do.
The next day I woke up with the phone ringing.
“Hey!”
“It’s two AM.”
“Yeah! Hey, it’s Theresa – you seen that video I sent you?”
I indicated to Theresa that I had seen a video with frogs in it.
“That’s great!”
“Yeah. Right. G’ni-“
“You DID watch it, right?”
“Yeah, su-“
“Did you forward it?”
“N-“
“Do that! Do it before you go to bed – mom HAS to see this. Oh, and Jeff, ooh, and maybe Ann, and Tim, and –“
I hung up and slept a frogless sleep ‘till noon, when I woke up to the sounds of voices. I raised the window and saw people on the street singing the frog song in choral harmony, hands linked.
Sugar helped. I came into work five hours late and found the building empty except for the janitor.
“Where’s everyone?” I asked.
“Gone singing,” he told me. “Tone-deaf myself. Can’t help or I’d be with them. Hey, you seen the video?”
“Yeah.”
He grinned and started humming. I fidgeted with my phone, said something, and left.
The buildings were empty and the sidewalks were full and everyone was probably going to get frostbite. I asked a paramedic about this and he told me it was fine, just keep singing and it’ll be fine. The guy on the stretcher asked me if I’d seen the video so I told him yes and left while he was busy coughing.
Home was better. I closed all my mailboxes and changed my email addresses to avoid the unending flow of links to the video and tried to get some news, but nobody’d put up anything on any site besides 5/5 reviews of the frog song. Somebody had tentatively attempted to put pictures of new frogs over the song, but he’d been evicted and shunned in the cold so I guessed that wasn’t happening.
The next day I woke up to a knocking on the door before the sun came up, and when I opened it there were cops there.
“There a problem?” I asked.
“You seen the video?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“How’d you like it?”
“Fine.”
“What length was it?”
“Three minutes?”
“What happens in the last four seconds?”
I tried to remember some of the advice I’d read on a website run by aging anti-fascist activists who exchanged recipes for charcuterie. “Am I being detained or am I free to go?”
“What happened in the last four seconds?”
I tried to close the door but someone stuck their foot in it. “Answer the question.”
“One of the frogs croaks?”
They smiled at me. “The video is two minutes fifty-seven seconds fourteen milliseconds long, and in the last four seconds the camera zooms in on the backside of the big green frog. Give us your phone.”
They took the phone and brought up the video, and I watched it.
“There, you see?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Good.” And they left.
I phoned 911 to let them know that I’d just been assaulted by police officers.
“Did you see the video?” the operator asked.
“Yeah. They showed me.”
“Well, that’s nice of them. Hey, which frog was your favorite?”
“Uh. The red one.”
“Which red one?”
“The second one.”
“Oh, that’s nice! Goodbye.”
By the end of the week it was just me and five other people holed up in the basement of a condemned building, eating beans out of cans that were old enough to not have frogs stamped on them. The oldest woman with us was a sociologist and she kept telling us this is what happens when communication becomes too easy in a society, but the biology grad student kept telling her she was full of it and this never would have happened if we’d killed all the frogs with global warming like he kept saying we were going to do. I couldn’t make them calm down because I’d never gotten my bachelor’s and whenever I tried to say anything they’d start talking in Latin until I got tired.
“They’re always like this,” said the bank clerk.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know that. I was the first person in this basement. You just got here five minutes ago. Why are you telling me this?”
“No reason at all, I’m just one of you guys, I fit in here just fine, yes sir indeed, no doubt, no how,” he said. “By the way, have you seen the video? Oops, slipped.”
We tried to pin him but they broke down the door before we could find his radio, and I was the only one that got away. I lost the pursuit in the ruins of downtown, where office buildings had been carved into giant monuments to frogs and every frost-coated window had been doodled with the sheet music for the frog song. Someone had rearranged all the abandoned vehicles into the shape of a frog, or that’s what I guessed they’d look like if you weren’t stuck at ground level because all the elevators had stopped working and the stairways had been scrapped for frog-sculpture materials.
“Howdy friend!” shouted a sculptor from his front yard as I slipped down a suburban drive. “Whaddaya think?”
It was a frog. “Real nice,” I said, strolling up to him.
“Ain’t it just? What’s your favorite?”
“The red one.”
“Which red one?”
I pulled the brass knuckles out of my pocket and socked him one at the base of the skull. Before he’d even hit the ground I was checking his pockets – empty, but his boots fit. I put them on and luxuriated in feet that were merely damp. It was a good feeling, made better by being so close to home. They’d never look for me there, not after all this time.
I opened the door. My landlord was sitting on the couch.
“Hello,” he said. “Hey, you seen this video?”
“You’ll never take me alive,” I told him.
“Jeez, cool your jets. I was just asking.”
“Who sent you here?”
“Who sent me the video? My daughter. Look, it’s cute.”
“Stand back.”
“What? It’s just a dog.”
I blinked. “Dog?”
“Dog.”
“Not frog.”
“No? That’s old news.”
I moved very carefully towards him, then rushed him and put him in a sleeper hold as I watched the clip. It was sixteen seconds long and showed a Labrador puppy chasing its tail until it tripped over its mother’s leg and fell over.
“Like it?”
“Sure, I guess.”
“Nice. Well, see you.”
I sat around for a while, then put my bulletproof vest on the coathook and went to bed. When I woke up I shopped around the net a bit. The frog stuff was still there on some of the archives. ‘Last week’s trends.’ God I’d seen enough of that.
That dog video was pretty cool though. I forwarded that to six people.