Fair Peril (2 page)

Because her knees felt a trifle weak, Buffy allowed herself to fold groundward and plant her large butt in the mud.

“Kiss me,” the frog said with imperiled patience. Read my lips. Let me spell it out. “You kiss me. I turn into a prince.”

Buffy managed to get herself functioning enough to vocalize. “This is the nineties,” she whispered. “This is Pennsylvania.”

“Your point being?”

“We don't have princes here. We don't even have Kennedys.”

“I was stranded here by Gypsies.” The frog's tone was becoming more and more imperious. “I am an ensorcelled prince. I am Prince Adamus d'Aurca. Do as I say and you will see.”

Despite cold mud seeping through her pants, Buffy went hot with annoyance. This frog sounded a lot like her ex in his less endearing moments.

Her annoyance superseded her astonishment and allowed her to resume intelligent thought. And her thinking did not take long. She smiled.

“I can't kiss you when you're over there and I'm over here,” she said in a wispy voice calculated to convey meekness and stupidity.

“Well, get over here and do it!”

“But I can't swim.” The water was maybe a foot deep between Buffy and the frog, but why should she soak her sneakers? Let him come to her.

His Highness Prince Adamus d'Aurca complained, “God's codpiece!” then gave a kick with his powerful hind legs and plunged into the pond. One more kick thrust him to the mudbank upon which she sat, his princess enthroned in muck. Wet, gleaming a mottled, juicy off-green after his dip, he hopped past her feet and paused expectantly within her reach.

Silently she placed the thumb and fingers of her right hand around his squishy-soft middle and picked him up like an overripe banana. As a kid, she had earned a few dollars catching frogs for her biology teacher, so this was not a new experience, but were she to handle it every day of her life, she would still never get used to the tacky, humid feel of frog skin, indecently crotchy in her hand. “Ugh,” she said.

Prince Adamus stretched his blunt face toward her, his wet mouth slightly agape. His hind legs kicked and dangled, twice as long as the rest of him. “Get on with it,” he ordered.

Holding him in midair and well away from her, Buffy lumbered to her feet, then groped in her jacket pocket with her other hand.

“Kiss me.”

“I don't think so.” Buffy pulled her knit hat out of her pocket, bent over (short of breath as her belly got in the way), and sopped it in the water at the pond's edge, raising interesting clouds of silt.

The frog's voice rose to a shriek. “You said you were going to kiss me!” More in panic than in malice, he let go a stream of unidentifiable excrement which just missed Buffy's foot. “You promised!”

“I merely
implied
that I was going to kiss you.”

“You misled me!”

“Too bad.”

“But I am a prince!”

“What the hell do I need a prince for?” Men. They all seemed to assume they were God's gift. “I just got rid of one dickheaded male. I don't need another one.” Especially as she'd reached a point in her life where celibacy was far preferable to the terror of getting pregnant. “Anyway, what on earth do you think you're prince of? England? Monaco? Those slots are taken.”

“I'm not that kind of prince!”

“I'll say.” Buffy retrieved her soaked and dripping hat, carefully inserted the frog into it, then held it closed and slogged out of there, hurrying muddily back the way she had come.

“You're taking me captive!” The hat wriggled. Prince Adamus's voice issued from it muffled and hysterical.

“Think of it as role reversal,” Buffy told him. “You're being swept away. Don't you read romance novels?”

“Let me go!”

Buffy did not answer. Puffing her way up the first hill, she had no breath to spare. But her thoughts were far happier, in a gloating way, than they had been an hour before. She was thinking about all the times in the past few months that she had been passed over for storytelling jobs, and who got them? Better storytellers than she was? Noooooo, people with gimmicks. A mime. A clown. A guy who did magic tricks.

“Set me free! I, Prince Adamus d'Aurca, command it!”

“That and a dime will get you a cup of coffee,” Buffy panted. No, not a dime. Fifty cents. A dollar. Damn, her age was showing.

The frog's soggy voice turned pleading. “You don't believe I am a prince?”

She had not given it much thought, and she did not care to, especially not in her embittered mood. “I keep telling you, I don't need a prince or anything resembling a male of the human species,” she grumbled to her hat. “What is much more interesting, and what I can really use right now, is a talking frog.”

Thirteen miles away was a plastic-lined goldfish pond dominated by a large poison-green plastic frog mindlessly spouting a stream of water like pee from its mouth. Mom hated the plastic pond, the mindless plastic frog, the old lumps in wheelchairs who stared mindlessly at the frog, the nurses who propelled them to do so, herself for being as mindless as they. Strong, able to jump around, but the old gray marbles gone. Shingles flown off the roof, trump cards missing from her deck, still plugged in but didn't light up no more, out to lunch for the duration. She was Mom and not Mom. Had some other names, she knew she did, but she couldn't remember. Everything was itself and something else, including her. This place, what did you call it, she couldn't remember coming here, all these mindless ancient people sitting in rows, boring. Pee, pee, pee went the big frog, and a pretty girl in white walked toward her with a plastic smile as a rickety gray man clung to her arm. Mom knew him. He sat and twiddled his whizzer when he didn't think anybody was looking.

Mom called out like a rain crow, “Too old! He's too old for you!”

Tooooo old, old, old.

The pretty girl in white smiled back at her without changing expression or speaking, a daughter, a nurse, a bride in ugly shoes. Yes, it was a wedding, a wedding, a wedding, silent as a funeral. Mom remembered now. She remembered her wedding, all those solemn old people. But the bride was just a child. The bride was just a child.

Mom stood intently still, feeling her own heart break. Lucid moments always did that to her.

She whispered, “I am losing my mind.”

Because they cracked her heart so, she let lucid moments go by quickly. Losing her mind. Mind all gone. That was what marrying that stony-gray old man had done to her. Old man, all he thought about was his wiggle worm. Mom screamed and laughed and hopped like a cricket around the goldfish pond. Mom began to pull her clothes off.

“Shut up,” Buffy told her brand-new talking frog as she placed the soggy hat that encased him on the passenger seat of her Escort.

“Ogress. I spit upon your nose hair.”

Buffy started the car to drive her prize home, shifting into gear rather hard. “Shut up or I'll pull your nice wet prison off you and let you dehydrate.”

“You want a talking frog, you got a talking frog. I am going to talk till you wish you'd turn into a deaf fish. Dingdong bell, pussy's in the well, which is where the hell I should be, in the deep dark well with a golden ball—”

“You do understand, don't you,” Buffy said sweetly, “that a frog out of water can lose half its body weight in just a few minutes of exposure to full sunlight?”

“You do not frighten me, beldam. I have survived herons and owls and the foul clutches of raccoons and I will survive you, harpy. I am a prince. I am Prince Adamus d'Aurca de la Pompe de la Trompe de l'Eau. The sun is not more glorious than I am. Maidens swoon at the mention of my comely name.”

Being no maiden, Buffy did not swoon. She rolled her eyes and turned on the car radio in an attempt to drown out Prince Adamus, etc. Classic rock shook the speakers.

“Aaaaaa!” the frog shrieked. “Savages on the march! Barbarians! Man the ramparts!”

It was John Cougar with his little ditty about Jack and Diane. Good one. Buffy sang along. She sang, the radio blared, and the frog bellowed imprecations, until she pulled to a stop in front of her house.

Her hovel, really; it barely deserved to be called a house. Her dumpy little hut, built out of lumber salvaged from a burned-down bra factory by an eccentric do-it-yourselfer who had eschewed the use of plumb bob and T square. A one-story cockeyed bungalow, with windows and door canted, siding slanted a different way, roofline out of agreement with any of the above, and the attached garage sliding downhill at the rate of several inches per year. Too bad; Buffy could not afford the rent on a place with right angles.

“… piece of work is a prince,” the frog was babbling. “How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty …”

Hoping the neighbors were not at home to notice anything strange, Buffy hurried him into the house and unceremoniously plopped him from her hat into her aquarium.

“… of the world. The paragon of—blub!” Blessed silence for a moment. “Hey!” Adamus complained, resurfacing. “Land! I'm an amphibian, I need land!”

“We're gonna see how long you can tread water.” Buffy laid a hefty
Reader's Digest Wide World Atlas
over the top of the aquarium to block escape.

“Air! I'm an amphibian, I need air!”

“We're gonna see how long you can breathe through your skin.”

“Filthy hedgehog! Three-tongued slattern! Harridan!”

“Very
good,
” Buffy approved, exiting. The frog's insults cheered her—they were so much more interesting than the ones she was accustomed to. Americans really needed to learn to swear with more flair. Perhaps she and the frog ought to give lessons. Buffy smiled as she surveyed the unkempt rectangle of real estate her landlord called a back yard. In her recycling bin she found a glass jar with a lid, and then she walked to the nearest miscelleny heap, spraddled her legs with more sturdiness than grace, bent, and started rooting. Clawing like a bear, turning over cinder blocks, she collected small red worms, sow bugs, and other creepy-crawlies. She harvested more of the same from a brick and a short length of mossy, rotting plank, then hefted those two items and headed back into the house.

The frog was floating at his ease in the dechlorinated water of the aquarium, but began to kick and thrash pitifully when he saw her. “Monster! Grendel!”

“Right.” She set down her finds on a sheet of newspaper, pulled a plastic margarine container out of the dish drainer, found her scrub bucket, and started dipping water from the aquarium.

“What are you doing? Water! I'm an amphibian, I need water!”

“Would you shut up and have some respect? These goldfish are being sacrificed for your sake.”

The frog did not shut up. “Aristophanes was right. We will have yet more terrible things to endure, we frogs, we will have yet more terrible things to endure.”

He went on from there, lamenting the fates of frogs, Thomas the Rhymer, Odysseus, and other noble captives. Buffy ignored his monologue, emptying the aquarium until about four inches of water remained, in which three goldfish, leftovers from her younger daughter's elementary-school days, swam disconsolately. She pulled out plastic ferns, shoved some gravel to one end, and topped it with her brick and piece of planking, making a dampish platform where her frog could rest out of the water, all the while keeping an eye on him. If he tried to leap out of the aquarium, she was ready to intercept him. But he seemed dispirited. He made only a token attempt to climb the wall, then stood with his long, webbed hind feet braced against the gravel, his four-fingered hands winsomely pressed against the glass.

“Here,” Buffy told him, “supper,” and she transferred three beetles and a red worm from her salsa jar to her frog's glass palace.

Adamus hunkered down in the farthest corner. “Aaaaaaugh! Grubs! Maggots!”

“I imagine you prefer flying insects, but—”

“Insects? You flea-pated crone, I have been living on insects for a thousand years! Bring me roast suckling pork, quickly!”

“But if it doesn't wiggle, you're not supposed to be able to handle it.”

“So wiggle it!”

As Buffy tried to think of a suitable retort, somebody knocked. Buffy rolled her eyes, slammed the world atlas down on top of the aquarium, strode to the door, and yanked it open. There stood her youngest, just sixteen, as blond and exquisite and sullen and unsmiling as a Calvin Klein perfume ad.

“Emily!” Buffy could not restrain the quick delight that always made her daughter scowl.

Emily scowled. “I was on my way to the
mall,
” she stated, making sure her mother wouldn't think she was visiting on purpose, “and my stupid
car
quit, so I was walking to get to a phone and I saw you're home. Why aren't you at work?”

Buffy ducked that. “Why did your car quit?”

“Like I know?” Emily's bored, perfect eyes scanned her mother. “
Mom,
you're a mess.” Emily wore a taupe silk ribbed top, a taupe-and-mauve long flowing skirt, Birkenstocks. Buffy wore mostly mud.

“Oh. Yeah, I've got to get cleaned up.” Buffy stood back, gesturing to invite her daughter in. Progressing past Buffy's furniture, most of which had come from garage sales, Emily showed remarkable maturity and restraint, barely curling her lip at all. Unfortunately, she headed straight to the aquarium.

“How are my fishies? Ewwww!” She jumped back. “Ewwww, ick, what is that?”

“It's called a frog,” Buffy said mildly, washing her hands at the kitchen sink. She tried not to be judgmental, but she often wondered whence this daughter had come. She had been right there when Emily popped out, but still—was this her child? Could mother and daughter be so different? Buffy habitually yanked her straight graying hair into a horse tail and fastened it with the rubber band off the newspaper; Emily spent twenty minutes every morning primping her permed bangs. Buffy shaved her legs only when she had to go to the gynecologist; for Emily, running out of disposable razors was an emergency. Buffy ate bacon by the pound; Emily was a vegetarian. Buffy liked to stick a worm on a hook and catch a sunny; Emily marched for animal rights. Buffy killed spiders that came into the house; Emily emitted soprano screams at them.