Milton and Ermine
For Hannah and Jack

Deep in a tropical rainforest in the shade of the thick green canopy stood Ermine, a frog of the most distinguished color, a brilliant indigo so vivid, so bright, she looked like a jewel that had fallen out of a queen’s silk purse and landed next to the muddy river. No bumps or warts on her! Not a spot, a mottle, or a marking. Ermine’s skin was smooth and shiny as a marble, her body sleek and taut as a snake’s. Her human-like hands and feet were splayed in the mud. She wriggled them freely, delighting in the feel of the alluvium.

Out from under the awning of a nearby mushroom hopped her friend Willa, thinking, “There is Ermine, again, longing for her lover.” The frogs often thought this when they spotted Ermine standing alone by the river where she had wed three years before.

She and her groom had hopped across the moss-covered log bridge and taken their seats on two silken lily pads embroidered with gold, as the other frogs had watched from under the vaulted, cathedral-like, aerial roots of a mangrove tree, on top of which a bright Scarlet Macaw had decided to perch. The frogs were all too splendidly dressed and deliriously happy -- for Ermine and Milton had chosen rightly -- to shoo the troublesome bird away. SQUAWK! SQUAWK! They let it stay. A wise snake officiated the ceremony, flicking its tongue extravagantly between phrases. Afterwards, they all splashed into the river for mud games and feasted on the rare beetles and exquisite nectars that had been carefully harvested from the base of nepenthes.

“Good evening, Ermine. I don’t mean to disturb you,” said Willa, carrying one of her tadpoles piggyback. “I must get my little ones to water.” She hopped onto a pineapple plant and tilted her body until the tadpole slid off like jelly, into the clear, small pool concealed by leaves.

Ermine asked, “How did it feel?”

“Miraculous!” Willa exclaimed. The exhilaration gave way to sadness. That would be the last time she would ever feel her baby. Then she thought of Ermine, “Poor Ermine,” and put her gloves on.

“He will come home,” Willa said, touching Ermine’s sapphire head. “They will bring him back.”

Ermine listened to the vines twisting, the orchids breathing, the constellations shifting, and the spiders blinking, as she watched Willa hard at work, climbing up and down the trees, depositing her tadpoles in their arboreal nurseries. A beautiful dragonfly alighted on Ermine’s head, then fell dead as a leaf. It lay iridescent in the mud. Ermine sighed, put on her gloves and hopped back to the village to sleep.

*    *  *

To be poison is to remain untouched. That is the curse of being a poisonous frog, and no one knew this better than Milton, who had been plucked by gloved scientists in of the bloom of his youth only a short time after his wedding and transplanted to a strange and sterile world on the other side of four dark and inarticulate seas, where he now lived in a glass box on a bright shelf in the corner of a busy office. He walked on soft yarn-like fibers that had been spray-painted green. One synthetic plant protruded from the middle. In the glass case to his right, hissing cockroaches climbed all over each other or, when they weren’t hiding under their gray egg crates (they preferred rotting logs), wingless, they would try to climb up the glass to escape, but it had been smeared with petroleum jelly, and so they always failed, lost their footing, and slowly slid back down. In the glass case to Milton’s left lived a great big, green, ornate horned frog. He could fit ten of Milton in his mouth, if he wanted to, because Milton’s, though virulent, was a petite species. The horned frog’s eyes were clouded with glaucoma, and he never, ever moved. He had come here from the zoo thirty years ago; nobody at the zoo knew how long he had been there.  He was very old.

Milton had been encased alone since his arrival but for one brief time: during the war. The scientists had placed five or six other frogs of his kind (orange, purple, white, pink, two with black racecar stripes, one with red polka dot legs) into his glass box, hoping they would breed. After that, it gets foggy. Milton does not remember what happened or how it all came about. The scientists could be seen stopping by the cage, looking in approvingly, observing the frogs clutching each other, assuming they were copulating, but what they didn’t know was that the poison frogs were actually engaged in highly aggressive territorial wrestling matches that would result in nothing short of total carnage and death.

Nor did the scientists know what Milton had been taught by the elders from the youngest age: That every creature could only ever touch one other individual creature with impunity; to the rest you were poison. This is why the elders cautioned the young against experience. This is why, where Milton came from, marriages were consummated on the night before, not after, the wedding. You had to choose right. If you chose right, you would marry. If you didn’t, you would die. No one wants to die on the night of her wedding, and where he came from, no one ever did.

The war was terrible madness, and Milton does not remember exactly what came over him, or how he could accomplish such a terrible feat, but when he emerged from whatever stupor or frenzy he had disappeared into, all of the other frogs were dead. The only other time had he touched and been touched, and it had been like flying: He and Ermine had chosen rightly and, as a result, were launched together into a dark and regal sky. He had always thought of himself as a lover. What would she think of him now? He was a killer.

He tried to escape his encasement, the shame and the death which he had caused, to flee from those stiff and stinking corpses, but he kept hitting his head on the screen above him. He wanted to knock the screen off or bust through it somehow, but he couldn’t get enough boing. In the forest he could jump three feet! Here, not even one. He kept jumping, and jumping, and gave himself a concussion.

When he awoke, the carcasses had been cleared out, and the great big, green, ornate horned frog spoke: “Be still. You are not a murderer. You did not kill them with your hands nor with your teeth, but with your poison, which was only on your skin, and not in your heart. It could not be helped.”

“You can’t know that. You can’t even see!” Milton sunk again into despondent worry. “What if I did kill them with my hands? I wish I could remember!”

“I see in other ways,” said the horned frog. “When one sense dies, the others are enlivened.”

Milton wondered if he was telling the truth. “Why didn’t Idie in the war?” he asked.

“The most brightly colored frog is the most poisonous frog. You are as yellow as a tulip, or a pepper.”

“So, my color, it is my strength?”

The ornate horned frog never answered more than one question at a time. He found it tedious.

In the days after the war, Milton felt greatly changed and couldn’t help thinking that he would never again be touched, never again experience the feeling of a being a rocket, unless he could get back to Ermine.

“I am going back!” he shouted, jumping alongside the glass, formulating wild ideas and telling the horned frog all of his plans. “Did you know that the native men in my forest would dip their darts in my poison? One small scratch would kill an elephant in its tracks!” Milton, who could stand comfortably on a man’s half dollar, puffed out his tiny chest. “What the elders said was true. I am the most poisonous creature on Earth!” Then he thought to himself: What incredible power must true love have to overcome such poison. Oh, my love, Ermine!  He resumed: “Did you know that cheetahs have died simply from stepping on a leaf where one of us had been sitting? One drop of my poison is enough to kill 10,000 mice, or twenty men. I will kill the scientists next time they reach in to mist my cage! I will go free, back to my love, Ermine.”

“There is no going back,” said the horned frog, “and a kind of experience can be a kind of poison.”

“What do you mean?” asked Milton, halting.

The horned frog never answered more than one question at a time. He found it querulous.

The ornate horned frog continued to sit, and the days and weeks continued to pass, and the gloved scientists had their ways, of trapping and drugging and avoiding Milton, of keeping him far at bay, at arm’s length, in quarantined quarters where he belonged. The rage within him grew. Perhaps this would not drive a forest frog mad, this curse of remaining untouched, in a place where there were wet pebbles and leaves with sparkling dew, tree bark and moss, where one could swim in the rivers among the orange fish, but here…

“How long have I been here?”  Milton asked the horned frog one day, after he had given up on all of his plans, after he had stopped eating, when it felt like his life would never end.

“You have been here since before the stars were thrown like rice and scattered in the sky, since before the ice melted and the rivers flowed, since before the black monkeys learned to howl.”

“How long is that?”

The ornate horned frog never answered more than one question at a time. Especially stupid ones.

One day, when Milton was feeling sad and weak, a girl of such beauty entered the office that he sat upright and stared at her and could not look away. She wore a bright blue tutu and tennis shoes and a white tank top t-shirt with a large, pink heart. She spun around and spotted the frogs and exclaimed, “Daddy, what are these!” She looked at Milton not as a specimen but as a creature.

Her father, a white-coated scientist, bent down with her to peer into the glass case, and Milton hopped forward in the case to stare into the girl’s large, brown, mesmerizing eyes. They reminded him of the slow muddy rivers in the forest, and he wished he could swim in them. The girl, whom he knew immediately, as if from another time, he knew, could hear his thoughts.

“Help me, Hannah!” he said. “Get me out!”

“Hannah,” the father said, “these are frogs.” Then the scientist went back to his papers.

“Not just any frog!” Milton yelped, but the humans couldn’t hear him.

But Hannah, she continued to smile and stare at Milton, and from that day forward she began to appear in the office with regularity, always bounding over to the shelves with the frogs, and though Milton suspected that she liked the great big, green, ornate horned frog the best, he knew she would one day set them all free. Sometimes Hannah would run into the office and smile into the glass. Other times she would saunter over thoughtfully, put her beautiful face close, and look at Milton with near annihilating pity.

“Oh, Hannah!” Milton would think. “When will you free us?”

One day when her father was busy leaving, he came back for her and switched on the lights and said, “Hannah, what on Earth are you doing?”

Hannah had her cheek pressed against the glass of the horned frog’s cage, and her eyes were closed.

She said, “Daddy, the glass, it feels so cool.”

“Come on, Hannah,” her father said, “we have to go.” He switched off the lights and Hannah sighed. She blew the horned frog a kiss and waved at Milton, flashing her sweet, inscrutable smile, and Milton thought his heart would break with love. He no longer wanted to kill anybody. He would never kill anybody ever again. He only wanted to go home.

The day finally came. Hannah burst into the office behind her father, and she was pulling a boy in a little red wagon. He was making race car noises. She brought the wagon to a sudden halt and he fell out on purpose, as if he had crashed. Hannah laughed. The boy sprung up and they both lifted Milton’s glass cage together, shakily, and Milton felt the ground underneath him move.

“Be careful with that,” the scientist said absentmindedly, looking at a clipboard and shuffling around his computer, while the children put his glass box in the wagon.

“Is this the only one we’re taking?” Hannah asked her father to be sure. The small boy got down on hands and knees and examined Milton. Then he started making froggy faces, puffing out his cheeks grotesquely and shoving his head forward, blinking slowly and flicking his tongue. Then he crouched and jumped, landing in a sitting position, and jumped and jumped again and again, going higher each time, and Hannah joined him, and they laughed and hopped about the office, saying, “Ribbit! Ribbit!” until they fell over laughing and Milton realized what was happening.

“They are taking me back!” Milton cried to the ornate horned frog still on the shelf, and the indifferent cockroaches, who were at that moment hiding from the whole world in their egg crates. “Aren’t you coming too, horned frog? I will get Hannah to put you in the wagon. I see how much she loves you. She will set you free too!”

“There can be no going to where I already am,” the horned frog said. “That is the end of all experience.”

“Well, whatever great big, green, ornate horned frog! I am going home to see Ermine now! I will miss you!”

The ornate horned frog never answered more than one question at a time. He was tired.

Milton set forth on his journey, happily riding in the red wagon pulled by Hannah and her brother Jack, a bumpy ride which took him out of the office and into the bright hot sun for the first time in lifetimes. The sunbeams stroked his skin like a warm fire, as Hannah and Jack curved their way over a paved path that meandered through what appeared to be a luscious garden full of fruit trees and rose bushes and big red hyacinth. They passed by a fountain where the swallows were flitting and drinking, and Milton felt the cool spray prickle his skin. He hopped excitedly around in his cage, taking in the view from every angle and noticing the scent of tea olive, until Hannah and Jack pulled him around a corner and onto a great big lawn where the sun shone overhead and the clear blue sky sprawled out like a blanket.

At the end of the lawn was a building marked “Conservatory” and in front of that a pond with lily pads and reeds, where some rice was growing.  Milton could hear the croaking, chirping, whistling, peeping, clucking, barking and grunting of frogs! (Something told him they were green.) The lawn was surrounded by trees and gardens. Above the treetops Milton could see the tips of skyscrapers sparkling in the sun. On the other side of the lawn, there was a loud droning, and a big red structure that looked like a castle was being inflated to the height of the trees.

Hannah and Jack pulled Milton to a corner of the lawn where some tables had been set up. Men were putting up signs and unloading from carts glass cases that held bats, tarantulas, scorpions and snakes.

“Can we play with him for a while, Dad?” Hannah asked.

The scientist said, “Kids, go out into the middle of the lawn, where he can’t hide under anything. Never squeeze him too hard, and as you know, remain sitting so you don’t step on him. He is very small. Call to me immediately if he starts to get away.”

The children exchanged excited glances and pulled him to the center of the lawn and lifted up his cage and placed it in the grass. Suddenly, Milton’s screened roof was removed. He looked up into the great blue glacier of sky: He had only ever seen swaths of it before, through the tree canopy, and now it seemed to pull his heart into its wide expanse. If he would ever have the chance to escape, this was it.

If he was going to go, he had to go now.  But which direction was home? Where would he go? How would he find Ermine? There was no time for thoughts now, only action. He had to jump!

But Hannah and Jack were sitting down together on one side of his cage! What if he could not get away in time, and they touched him, or he touched them? Never again did he want to bring harm to any creature, especially ones as delightful as these, but he wanted so badly to get back to Ermine. He knew the rainforest is where he belonged. He closed his two beady, inky black eyes and pictured himself with Ermine and remembered when they were a rocket, and imagined himself again a rocket, and became a rocket. He opened his eyes and turned away from the children and:

BOING!

Jack caught Milton in his soft little boy hands, with a squeal of delight, and Milton, realizing he had been caught, felt as if his heart had turned to the heaviest lead and fallen out of his body and right through the crust of the earth. He did not care that he did not succeed; he only grieved -- in one great pang -- for the little boy. For the first time he knew regret, and he regretted jumping. He knew he could not undo this touch but, irrationally, as if he could, he began to squirm fretfully, moving his little legs, trying to get Jack to let him go, to get away from the boy and his susceptible human skin, but the more Milton squirmed the more assuredly Jack held him, and then Milton was laughing because of the silly tickle of Jack’s touch. Jack didn’t know he was tickling Milton but his fingers were digging into Milton’s little ribs and as Milton moved, Jack was tickling him and then Milton was not wiggling to get away but wiggling the way giggles make you wiggle.  And the more Milton wiggled, the more Jack and Hannah giggled!

Then Jack lifted Milton up to his face and made his funny frog faces, and this made Milton laugh even more. How ridiculous he looked! Jack put Milton down on the lawn, and for a second Milton was plunged into the fragrant, moist world of dewy grass, which rose above his head, and for a second when he felt the dirt beneath his feet and saw some black ants parading dutifully through the individual blades, he forgot that he was poison. Then he looked back up at Jack, crouching in the grass, and Jack looked fine. Hannah was looking quite fine too. He hopped away from them, secretly thinking, “Catch me! Catch me!” Then Hannah scooped him up with a giggle, “Gotcha”! Once again Milton started to giggle and wiggle, and for a good long time, they played a game of Catch Me in the grass.

Milton liked the skin on the children’s hands, their soft, plush fingers and sweaty palms. He wished he could sleep at night between two human hands.

Milton spent the rest of the day back in his glass cage with the screen on top, confused. Wide-eyed children came up to his table on tiptoe, splayed their hands on the glass, leaving greasy fingerprints and looking at him fearfully, tapping at the glass and trying to provoke him, while Jack and Hannah ran around the lawn playing with hoola hoops and bouncy balls and climbing into the big, red castle with the other children, which bent and moved like some massive underwater jellyfish.

They never died, at least not that day, because what Milton didn’t know was that he had been living in the office for ten years and, deprived of his natural diet, had lost all toxicity. The scientists’ plan was to hold him there until one of the poison frogs in the Conservatory died, at which point he would be moved into a bigger, much more elaborate glass box, with a family of other, equally harmless poison frogs, to live with them peaceably and be on display, in a place where the environment – with its humid air, it microcosm of real, living breathing plants, and its cicadas that chirped and quail that cooed – would be much more to his liking.

Poison frogs can live up to 25 years in captivity, but only live between one and three years in the wild, like a leaf that falls in a rainforest will decompose in six weeks compared to one or seven years in other, less abundant forests. In a rainforest, fecundity and fragility go hand in hand.

At the end of the day, when Hannah and Jack were returning  Milton to his place on the shelf, Milton turned to the ornate horned  frog and asked the question that had been bothering him all day: “Why didn’t the children die from my touch?”

But the great big, green, ornate horned frog was dead.

“Oh, Hannah!” Milton cried. He wanted to shield her from this knowledge, but she was already standing in front of his cage, peering in. Jack had scampered out to the car.

“Can we feed him today, Daddy?” Hannah asked the scientist, as he switched off lights. The great big, green, ornate horned frog appeared to be staring back at her from his usual place through his permanently clouded eyes.

“Not today, honey,” he replied. She sighed and said, “See you next time!” and blew the dead frog a kiss. Then she leaned down and took one more look at Milton, and paused. She thought for a second that there was something different about him. The small bubble under his chin moved in and out like it always did, but this time it was as if his heart had been permanently moved, as if it had leapt up into his throat and was now lodged there, exposed and beating for all the world to see.

Milton now knew it was experience that yielded truth, and that he was never any poison at all.


Ellen Finnigan, Atlanta, GA

Boing, mixed media collage 6"x11"
Gabe Travis, 10 miles outside of Healy, Alaska  

At the end of the rainbow (lies the pet frog)
Kerstin Klein, Munich, Germany

Kristie Kachler, Berlin, Germany

Bedouin
C. Jason DePasquale, Ann Arbor, MI

My Headphones

I wear big headphones. This is because I’m a DJ. Everybody better recognize. That’s the identity I snagged, when we were picking costumes out of the Dr. Seuss hat on Halloween.

The party was at his house. He handed the headphones to me. Our fingers touched. Our eyes touched. Then he took them back, teasing. With a smirk, he lifted his hands over my head and put the headphones on for me. I have not taken them off since. And that was a whole week ago.

Today, I wear my headphones to the fiddle fest. It’s a pretty big deal. The whole town comes out. Once I get through the gate, I pass by the kettle corn, soup sellers, Mennonites and their preserves and pickled things. When I reach the back of the park, it’s a full-on assault. It’s coming at me from everywhere – that twang. Everything is twang, twang, twang, twang. Inside my headphones is bomp-bomp-bomp hardcore Industrial bass. But it’s not enough to bomp out the twang. The twang is winning.

I squint my eyes through the pain and look around for him. I see only green grass, strategically plotted trees, and crappy banjo jam circles everywhere.

Sometimes I can’t believe I fucking live here.

There’s one main contest on the main stage. Fiddlers and mandoliners battle it out to be the best. All around, on the park grounds, are little jam circles. Rickety old farmers, motorcycle men, hippies, schoolmarms and their one-roomed schoolhoused students gather in tiny clusters and play old standards – you know, the crap you learn in music class in the second grade. Fest-goers wander around the park, from circle to circle, stopping at different jams, and applauding at their close.

Wearing headphones at such an event, well, you can imagine. It’s kinda rude and besides the point. Most people come to hear fiddle music. But I’m not here for the music. I hate the music.

I am at the fest for him.

He is the type of guy who listens to this shit. He told me at the party, when we were hiding behind the couch, our limbs all pretzeled and our faces smushed together. It was one of those conversations when you realize you can tell the other person anything. Why else would he admit to liking such crap? In exchange, I told him about Jessie Sipe and the basketball team. He told me about how his mom ran over the dog. He whispered: I wish the dog was driving and she got hit. His little hazel irises got all puddly. I breathed. I said: I know exactly what you mean.

The headphones are to save me from a headache. They are also like my antennae. Man, I feel like I have antennae; every hair on my neck is standing up and out and feeling the air for his senses. Until they find him, though – I have to pretend to be interested in fiddle music.

So I walk straight up to a circle. In the middle are two dudes – one on a guitar and one on a banjo. They sing, leaning all up into one another like Metallica, singing in each other’s faces, but singing cheesy lyrics about girls with pretty bonnets and ribbons or some shit. On each side of them are two Sunday school teachers playing fiddles. All around stand a ring of baby boomers, tappin’ their feet and gettin’ down.

I could just stand on the outskirts like the other soccer moms, diner waitresses and gas station cashiers. Instead, I step through them all. I stand right next to that banjo player who thinks he’s badass. I feel the boing of the strings go up from the dirt and into my skirt. I watch the muscles in his arm go plucking along with his fingers. He might as well be playing his own damn self. With the headphones like Princess Leia buns on my ears, I bomp my head along. If I’m going to do this, I might as well do this right.

The whole time, I’m picturing him coming up behind me, stupid smirk on his face. Oh, I’d say, you like this music too? Because girls – you can never let a boy know you remember what he tells you. That’s when he starts using you for your milk.

Once inside the circle, I see two old hippies leaning against a fence. Both are playing acoustic guitar. But the song’s fast. They can’t keep up for shit.

One of the hippies notices me notice him and smiles. He looks like a Muppet, with a never-die smile that’s all teeth and hair like Brillo pad.

He asks me: “Can you play?”

I nod.

It is true. I can play. But it’s been years. Lately, I’ve really been trying to make this move to electronic music.

The Muppet lifts the guitar over his head and holds it out to me. It’s cherry red, the color of hair I’ve always wanted. My headphones are on, but I can hear everything. I take his axe in my hands.

This is what I’m thinking: Maybe he’s coming up behind me. Maybe he’s watching. Maybe he’s like, Holy crap, I know her! Holy crap, I had no idea she could play like that. Holy crap, I want to love her to death.

Across the circle, old straggly’s rockin’ the chords. His fingers are like spider legs jumping from one fret to the next. It’s a challenge. So I start following: C, G, C, D.

I can’t barely follow but I do: C, G, C, D. Inside those chords are songs my daddy taught me. Inside those songs are songs I made up when I was ten. They were cheesy songs about freedom and love and you-can’t-tell-me-what-to-do, especially now that you’re dead, but whatever. Now my fingers are making the twang, making hits and misses. After I miss one note, I don’t want to miss another. So I keep trying. Heat burns in my nose.

What about him? Is he coming behind me? I can’t think about that now. The less I focus on the chords, the more notes I miss. And I really need to rock the fuck out right now.

The song ends. I turn around and look behind me. He’s not there. He’s not anywhere. But when I turn back to the circle, everybody’s clapping and smiling. The farmers, motorcycle men, and schoolmarms are all beaming at me. Like a tissue into the wind, I forget why I came in the first place. I rip my headphones off my head and throw them into the air like its graduation day.

Anney E. J. Ryan, Kutztown, PA

Ok Clark, She's All Yours
Greg Glassman, Brooklyn, NY

Where We Walked, Washington, DC 2011
Billy Friebele, Washington, DC

Where I Slept, New Jersey, 2008
Mollie Edgar, Chicago, IL

from the window in my room i see a cloud breaking
it breaks like a memory into a million silent pieces
Katie Parry, Philadelphia, PA