I looked sideways into the hollows of my canoe, and out into the trees and the galaxies high above them. Somewhere in the unwalkable world of minds, there is a place where children are thrown into ovens by witches. And the writers of those worlds live in my dimension, a place that sends mothers to jail and makes brothers walk through gun-wounded cities. And the creatures of that world are unfair, and turn kings into sporting goods salesmen, and slaughter the Blue Bull of Bayou Bonne Chance.
What luck does a person need to have? To outsmart a witch, or to be born into a kind family? To be a king who keeps his throne? To bear witness to a rare beauty and discover that it had actually been all around, all the time?
I stared into the beam of light coming from me, felt the heat on my own hands, and let a chuckle squeeze from my lips. All that reading and escaping and I hadn’t ever realized it. For most of my life, I had been in the oven all along.
I sat up in case Papa Roy and Eli rowed back around to look for me. The movement jostled the boat where it touched the grass, and I heard a small plop as something landed a delicate dive off the bank. I saw it breaststroke beside me, a little frog—plain, green like a billion blades of maidencane—swimming from the ledge. In a flash of instinct, I reached down and snatched it up. I’d gotten pretty good since my days with Papa Roy.
I set my flashlight upright in front of me with the beam toward the stars, cupping the frog in the palms of my hands. Eli hooted again. Another catch in the bag.
I leaned in closer, studied the translucent skin of the webbed hand pressed in the crook of my thumb. The seconds stalled, moments of a life extended. I wouldn’t put this one in my bag, but that didn’t mean it would be safe back in the wild. Maybe this frog would lose an arm or a leg later. Or be snatched up by a hawk. Or maybe it was already old and sick and dying, and I just couldn’t tell.
This frog was much smaller than the Bull, and not spectacular in any way. It had not been blessed with beautiful colors or patterns, and likely wasn’t much for brains, either. A little pulse the size of an apple seed beat against my palm. For whatever reason, this animal—so easy to catch, and so much like all the others—had so far made it through alive. I shifted it into one hand and wiped the other one with hard swipes against my shirt.
In hindsight, I should have considered germs and algae and microbes and bugs and everything that might have dissuaded me from what I did next. But I didn’t think about that. A Fairy Tale Companion lay on my bedspread in the little room I shared with Eli, open to a page in the story we hadn’t yet finished. The gingerbread witch having been defeated weeks ago, the problem now was the case of the princess and her debate with a frog by the woodland pond. One kiss, and he would become the prince he was before. What he was meant to be. Nobody had recognized him in a long, long time.
So I lifted the creature a little bit higher. I pressed the tips of my fingers to my lips, kissed a quick prayer against them, and touched them to the top of the frog’s head. The smallest of coronations.
I whispered goodbye, hid the animal inside a hollow log, and rowed back to Eli and Papa Roy, who smiled when they saw me.
Rain fell again on the day we left Bonne Chance a couple of weeks later. The atmosphere cellophaned us in warm winds and muddy splatter as we ferried our possessions up and down the porch steps and onto the driveway, the backs of our calves speckled and smeared. We hobbled through the weather to carry the last of our things into Papa Roy’s truck, everything wrapped in trash bags and huddled beneath a blue, bungeed tarp. The trees shook their limbs at us, shushed our protests, let droplets gather on their leaves until the weight poured them all at once upon our heads.
Such ill-equipped animals; we barely knew how to handle it, the little bit of damp in our hair and clothes. We’re supposed to be evolved for this, I thought. One cold splash to the face and a natural reflex forces our lungs to hold our breath, the same trick used by Gulf whales diving deep into the crush of leagues. But we were so eager to surface.
Papa’s last dash inside brought with it his violin case wrapped in a Wal-Mart bag stuffed under his shirt, his whole body hunched over it.
Even with the rain, we laughed all the while. Like when a dragonfly spooked Papa Roy by landing on his nose. Or when Mama’s sneakers skid on the grass and she hollered to high heaven the worst—and only—cusses I had ever heard from her mouth. Eli opened an umbrella and waved it over our bent backs, waddling to keep us dry, and I broke into such fits of giggles that I dropped everything in my arms. Another reflex, maybe, to accommodate a body’s sudden and unexpected joy.
The screen porch on the old house glistened. White diamonds in a black sand.