King of Diamonds

Frog Excerpt

Music, maestro, please! There's Rana catesbeina on bass fiddle, Thump!-a thump-Thump! Acris crepitans crepitans double-timing on sticks, Rick!-a-tick-Tick! Rick!-a-tick-Tick! The songsters join in: Pseudacris triseriata on tenor trills, Hyla chrysoscelis the coloratura soprano; the whole ensemble sending cadenzas rising and falling across Mosquito Marsh like a looped-tape Om with the hiccups.

It is a warm, moonlit night in the Oligocene Epoch. Had its shores soote been invented yet, the month would be April. Since the beginning of time, or so it seemed to Ngaio the Rana onca, that mysterious maiden the moon had been playing hide-and-seek with the batrachian residents of Mosquito Marsh: showing up now in the morning as a hangnail in the sky, next in mid-afternoon as a ball of cheese with a chunk bitten out of it, a week or so later (although frogs, having no offices to go to, no doctor's appointments to keep, no Sunday sermons to drowse through, indeed no deities to name the days after, entertain no concept of a "week") at sunset disguised as a newly-minted quarter and still later as a slot in the piggybank sky with the quarter almost fully deposited in it. And then, just as Ngaio and his fellow choristers have grown to expect this beguiling quick-change artist in the heavens, the following night she is mysteriously absent.

Also since the beginning of time, or so it seemed to Ngaio, he and his songster buddies had squatted on their logs and lilypads and serenaded this peek-a-boo moon.

In fact, as the moon could have told him, Mosquito Marsh had existed for less than 10,000 years, or since her partner the sun sent the most recent Ice Age off packing to Siberia and melted the glacier that had crept and crawled its way through the surrounding hillsides, dissolving in the valley into the pools of water that millennium upon millennium later, in a characteristic burst of pique, the nonfeathering biped - a newcomer on the scene - would dub Mosquito Marsh.

Ranid legend has it that before the moon took on the task for them, the frogs controlled the tides with the vibrations in their throats, and all that the tides themselves control: the shapes of shorelines, the distribution of rocks and sand and wildlife along them, the best places for frogs to make love and deposit eggs...

But tonight, thought Ngaio, is not to speculate. Tonight is to sing! To tune up sotto voce, then to join in the chorus until, everyone aboard, you soared together into glorious, bubbling crescendos that rolled across the marsh like tom-toms (how far back goes the human instinct to drum?), now rising here, now dying there: All together now, We All Live in a Green Dream Machine.

All across Mosquito Marsh lay the fruits of those nocturnal emissions: pollywogs, as googoloid in number as their look-alike descendants, sperm, their top-heavy bodies forming vast black carpets over the bottom, providing fast-food delights for all their fellow denizens of the marsh.

Ngaio puffed out the skin on his throat until he'd blown a bubble bigger than he was and let 'er rip: SKRIEK-EK-EK!

Fifty million years in the future, all the violin teachers in the world turned over in their graves. Beethoven Ngaio was not, but then neither was Beethoven Ngaio. He struck a resonant chord in Gurgle Gertie, a juicy fellow Rana onca in the horsetails with skin as soft and moist as thighs parting in a velvet night. As she kicked off, legs akimbo, Ngaio belched out a fusillade of appreciative notes whose euphonious tones made Gertie's head light, caused the blood to quiver through her cloaca and lubricated her oviduct. She kicked on over to Ngaio's pad, her glabrous gams forming stylish diamonds in her wake. Together they found a tranquil, secluded pond brimming with yummy mosquito larvae and there, while the moon deposited a quarter to watch the PEEP! show, they fucked and fucked and fucked. That summer Ngaio, basso profundo extraordinaire, was eaten by a pterodactyl.¹

He was survived by those of his 36,224 children who hadn't been eaten by each other.²

¹ Arguing that pterodactyls had been extinct for at least 10 million years before the Oligocene epoch, Veribushi and Pearl hypothesize that Ngaio was actually stepped on by a mastodon. It is generally held that mastodons lived in coniferous forests; however, Veribushi and Pearl posit that conifers grew near Mosquito Marsh at the time and the mastodons journeyed to the marsh during dry spells to drink. The pterodactyl's response is compelling: "Were you there?"

² Veribushi and Pearl argue that leopard frogs do not eat their young. Gurgle Gertie's response is compelling: "Were you there?"