The Frog and The Scorpion - N. Barry Carver (novel24 .TXT) 📗

This is a story of human nature thinly disguised as a fable of old... exactly the way fables of old were, well, exactly the same thing.

On the verge of a brown wood just starting to grow a misty hint of green, a rain had been falling steadily for the last two days. The afternoon’s gray ceiling slid into fragments and the sun burst onto the scene from a slightly odd angle (as it is seldom seen at all on days such as these). Canadian geese, mimicking an air force formation overhead, each made Mexico-City-style random honking with every other flap as they circled directionless above–while the decomposing forest floor sopped up what it could and dry land again began to appear.

A newly made river–tiny but swift–now ran between one nondescript bit of the gray-green-brown carpet and another. On one side, colonies of ants and beetles tried to ignore each other as they busied themselves reordering what would never be orderly in any way. Much the same as humans do.

They reshuffle their comforts and their knickknacks into a pattern that pleases them for a moment and, once each has gathered enough dust in that position, they’ll rearrange them once more. This pattern continues, less and less frequently as the humans age, until finally they are in just the right position... for an auctioneer to sell, at a dollar a pound, to help defray the expenses of their funeral. They can’t help it. It’s just their nature.

On the other side of this little creek, watching the bugs fretting over their useless enterprise was a rather small yet certainly venomous scorpion. His name was Tyler Aeschylus Cammerbottom. How he’d come by such a preposterous name was anyone’s guess... most of his friends (if you can call a swarm of sneaking backstabbers “friends” at all... which, somehow, lots of humans do) had names like Sikkiletto, Monsieur Stabalot and DarkShivver–all of which seem much more appropriate.

In the rain Tyler (still an odd name for anyone in mid-life to be stuck with, no matter how you slice it) had found it difficult to come across enough things to spear and eat, and so was looking a bit thin... if exoskeletons work like that–on which subject no one seems quite sure. But Mr. Cammerbottom had other problems as well.

A while back one of his friends (now an enemy–and that happens quite a bit too) had the good fortune to catch him unawares and nip off one of his large front claws with half of two legs on that side for good measure. Having quickly adjusted to his handicap, Tyler was making a reasonable go of his scorpion-ness but did have the appearance, as he walked along, of a matchbox-sized Cadillac driving along on a dead-flat front tire. Bobbing out a rhythm as he went about his day that, in confidence, many other insects could not keep from chuckling over.

With due deference to the late Ms. Houston’s lyrics on the subject, one’s dignity

can be snatched away with the slightest smirk of an onlooker, a badly timed photo or an unwary step into something that should not have been on the sidewalk at all. Or by a friend who’d taken advantage of inattentive pause to satisfy a momentarily hunger.

While Tyler sat, trying to pass for normal, a toad emerged from the margin of this river that would not last a week. Bulgosuress, which is a perfectly fine name for a toad if one needs to be told, had just “finished her business” in a bit of backwater which was calm enough for her tastes in such matters. Her business, in this case, was disgorging herself of a few hundred offspring that would soon be enjoying the thousands of offspring a mosquito au pair was presently depositing in the very same place.

How the au pair, unwed as she was, came to be filled with so many progeny is not part of this story but is sadly all too common a tale for that occupation.

Ms. Bulgosuress stepped up onto the bank and stood face to face with Mr. Cammerbottom and both were instantly possessed of the same thought – that the other was likely to attack. After an awkward moment of staring, Mr. Cammerbottom was the first to speak.

“Uhm, nice day, isn’t it froggy?”

“Does I look like a frog to you?” came the croaking reply.

Tyler, thinking a bit quicker than his usual, raised his one claw in defense (but not his barbed tail) and said, “No, no. No offense meant. As you can see, I am a cripple and have no ability or disposition for a fight of any kind with you.”

“That’s good,” replied Bulgosuress, “’Cause you’d lose and I’m nearly too exhausted to eat you.”

“Good to know,” the prickly insect observed, “but you might be interested in the hubbub on the opposite shore.”

Without turning her back on him, the toad cast an eye on the doings across the water. There she saw what looked to her like a cross between a chorus line and an all-you-can-eat buffet. A few of the potential entrees had just begun to tussle with each other over the disposition of a small ball of dung. To humans it would be like a chicken and a Cornish game-hen wrestling in basil leaves.

Turning her full attention back to Tyler, and before she could speak her emptied innards rumbled, she said, “Sounds good-a-licious, let’s eat. You can take them what’s suited to your situation and I’ll mop up the rest.”

“It’s a deal!” Tyler eagerly chimed, “but, good miss toad, I have a problem... I cannot cross the water–deformed as I am.”

Ms. Bulgosuress, being a mother (several thousand times over) could not ignore his plight. But, and for exactly that same reason, was not to be taken for a chump either.

“If’n I ferry you over, you’re gonna sting me and I won’t have no way to defend myself.”

“Good lady,” said the arachnid (a branch of which where every single one is poisonous), “I am not so foolish as that. If I stung you, out in the water where you are helpless... I would be helpless too and surely drown with you.”

“Fair enough,” said the toad, “and supper's waiting!” Then she slipped into the water and allowed the creepy three-quarters of a scorpion to scuttle up her shiny, smooth back.

One thing that should need to be told at this point is the Ms. Bulgosuress had, in a former life (which she had recalled just this last month) been a New Orleanian and quite a reader. She was well aware of the fable she was now enacting. Had this been that former life, she would have been packing a derringer in her garter to cut any funny business short. But, alas, derringers, garters, lovely cucumber and crayfish roulade – all that was now long behind her and she had to deal with what and where she was, an empty stomach, and the desire to be both a decent creature and not a complete boob.

The other thing that wants telling here is that Tyler also had a previous life of which he was marginally aware. He’d been a certified public accountant, for a casino chain in Monaco, who’d dearly loved Kafka’s Metamorphosis and, in a wicked twist of whatever is filling in for fate these days, had transmuted into a bug himself. He also understood he was in the middle of an ancient children’s allegory but, as must be well known, the permanently disabled have, sometimes very few choices about how they can proceed... and to procure a good meal.

So, as was destined long ago, at the midpoint between the former bank and the future feast, Tyler concentrated a devastating wallop of poison in his swollen tail and delivered it viciously into the base of Bulgosuress’s skull.

Anticipating the blow, his lumpy mistress, at that very moment, lashed her long, sticky tongue expertly around the exposed bit of his throat and was, just as viciously, struggling to snap off his head before hers dipped under the water never to return.

Thus intertwined they floated for a minute. Both dead and alive and calmly sliding along with the current toward the finale of their sortie – if not the moral of the story.

As their faculties failed, they neither heard the honking, clumping or splashing of the large, avian Canuck that chose this moment to give his flappers a rest. Without consideration of any kind the goose sippled-up some of the water and, on a whim, gobbled down the two small creatures commingled before it, before returning to his trek to “La toundra du nord.”

The snack didn’t agree with him an hour later. That however made little difference to the jet engine that sucked him in as it spiraled up from Dulles airport on it’s way to France.

France, as you know, is the world’s largest consumer of Pâté de foie gras. Which was, as fate would have it, at that very instant being served on over-sized goldfish crackers to the children seated in the plane’s first class section–but could also be found in the cowling of the number two engine on the right-hand side of the craft.

The moral of the story is: You can not

trust the French.

Text: © 2012 Barry Carver
Publication Date: 03-07-2012

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