Frogs of Throat
Fairytale or Foe; an orchid, a duck, a lizard and love
‘Frog’ said he as he spluttered across the pavement, they assumed he was referring to the phlegm in his throat.
‘The frogs cause such awful shudder and ruckus’
He clears his throat again.
And then louder than before ‘FROG, pardon my frogs’. A crowd forms and they stare down at the man who resembles a lizard, they know his story is ending here.
A new one starts and so it begins, ‘HAHA’ said the duck with the constant frogspawn in his throat.
He hopes for a brain like still water, he’s armed with the promise of a life or the promise of his own life, like the one he had before, before the apple sized squeals from the eels which led him down the shallow water where the petulant siren with the orchid-like body had kissed his bleeding male skull. She spoke to him of the unreal rather than real and she told him of everything ugly in the world, him, her and everyone in it, in that order. She stomped her tiny feet which belonged to her swan neck ankles and he begged to differ but her temper ran through him like a loud turquoise dagger. He stayed quiet occasionally hysterical with sobs which appeared as laughter as her rhymes embedded his wiry frame. Her petal breasts loomed as she spoke:
‘Its so futile to say, but every sister lives and dies for her father and every mother will always love another, a gestation is a common cold and a baby is better off in an ant colony than by our side, you and I are not the same at all you’re both stupid and strange, we sit side by side and I just can’t believe we are alive at the same time. You’re a pot bellied pig with a dream the size of Jupiter but you are lacking arms and legs, you long to climb a thousand mountains but you have no limbs to begin with. You’re a jockey with no saddle and a badger who has no clue.’
She’d feed him her words and in return fungus grew in his veins. Creatures inhabited his pale body, frogspawn and more. He began to resemble a duck and stopped leaving the shallow water all together, the water bid him no shadow or past but multiplied them both by one. In the water they were four, the ones touchable and the ones reflected in the shallow wetness. Four was better than one but he’d rather two than four, but he knew she’d never leave. The bad tempered delicate girlish thing spoke more and more each word causing an eruption inside the growing city behind his skin. The creatures shrieked for more as the duckish man shuddered beside the girlish thing with the temper and the breasts.
‘Your beak has thickened again it looks so awful the way you’re both a man and a duck, you’ll never understand the importance of speaking of things that don’t exist, only the creatures inside you understand it, the frogs that live down your throat and the pixies that tumble around the flesh of your heart, I know there’s otters in your liver and I live to quench their hunger. But you, you’ll never really hear it but you’ll sit here in the shallow water your body turning to a duck because you envy everything about me, your feathers are turning green with every syllable and soon you’ll be plucked and raw. You hate me here on my lily pad and I hate you crouched beside me in the shallow water, surrounded by the eels with the apple sized squeals. The eels that followed me and in consequence you followed them, the eels were the creatures from my body which fell out an orifice and landed here when my water broke and filled the moulding land with this shallow trail. You’re sitting here in my shallowness unaware of all the enzymes tarnished by eels and screams. I can hear your otters shout for me and I see in your eye your own screams grinning back at me, teasing for the end. The lizard man ended when you begun, he died on the high street surrounded by people who felt deeply for one another but nothing for him. The lonely lizard and the strange stupid duck.’
After she spoke they both swallowed the hot string of silence which was born after the words, her face contorted and her smile paused, he looked down her orchid throat during the pause and saw the eyes of a beast staring back at him, a laughing wolf with teeth like elephant tusks, black snakes fell from the beasts eyes and fell through the mouth of the girlish floral thing, he ran from the shallow water, he lay down in a field, he cried for his mother and sobbed for his sisters.