Past the abandoned theater, there’s an awning for a stage door. There’s a half-wall that blocks view of the door from the alley. Great. Three walls and a crappy roof. Tristan pulls his sleeping bag and backpack down the stairs, lays out the sleeping bag. He rips open a half-melted granola bar for dinner as the sky opens up and rain pounds the awning overhead. There’s a leak near the door, but Tristan finds an old coffee can, a few long-dead cigarette butts in the bottom of it, and uses that to catch the water.
While he eats, some of the glitter frogs, slick with rain, seem to grow tired of the weather. They come down the stairs in butt-bumping hops, surrounding him. One climbs up onto his knee.
He pulls out his old cell phone, the SIM card deactivated long ago. He’s still got some juice, but there’s no WiFi near enough, so he saves the power. He thinks about offering the frog on his knee some of the granola bar, but he isn’t sure if the frogs eat.
He remembers a news article that went the social media rounds a few months ago:
Question: Alien “Glitter” Frogs: CO2-Eating Terraforming Technology?
Answer: Nobody knows, but they do seem to exhale oxygen, despite looking like animals. However, it’s not enough oxygen to reliably light them on fire.
Tristan is putting the phone away when another boy comes around the corner of the half-wall, drenched from the rainstorm, his hair plastered to his face and his T-shirt stuck to his torso.
The boy stops, staring, his hand on the half-wall. His fingers leave little damp marks on the painted concrete. He picks at the edges, dislodging crumbling bits of stone. There are glitter frogs all over him, of all sizes. Large ones sit on his shoulders, cling to the wet fabric of his clothing. His hair seems to move of its own accord, but it’s just small frogs climbing between the strands.
Tristan has never seen anyone with that many frogs on them before.
“It’s raining,” the boy says.
“Yeah,” Tristan answers. He wonders if the boy is high. If he is, that’s fine unless it’s meth or something and he’s going to flip out. Tristan wonders what the frogs would do if the boy flipped out. Probably leave.
Tristan shifts his sleeping bag, crumpling it up so that there’s bare concrete for the boy to stand or sit on. He doesn’t want his bed to get wet. “Come in,” he says. “What’s your name?”
The boy steps out of the rain, dripping on the dusty concrete. Tracks of rainwater run down his face and arms. “Aaron,” he says. He crouches, his back against the wall, watching Tristan. The frogs also follow him in, too many.
Tristan tries to keep them off the sleeping bag, but eventually gives up. Most of them don’t climb on him, but the entire space is quickly covered in a shifting mass of the glitter frogs, all colors and sizes hopping, shifting, trying to stay close to Aaron. This makes Tristan nervous.
“Do you have somewhere to stay?”
Aaron blinks rapidly, wipes the rainwater off his face. “No,” he says, and then he laughs. “I didn’t plan this very well, I guess.” He pulls off his T-shirt, scattering the frogs. He shakes it out gently to make sure there are no frogs inside, and then he leans over the wall to wring it out into the rain.
He must have run away recently, Tristan thinks. Or been kicked out in the past few days. But it’s strange for him to be so calm about it. Maybe this isn’t the first time. “I can help you find somewhere to go tomorrow,” he says. “If you need it.”
Aaron drapes the shirt over the wall, and even though he got a lot of the water out, it trickles down to pool on the floor. “I don’t,” he says. “I’m not planning on sticking around very long. I’ve decided to go away with the frogs.”
He looks slightly surprised when he says it. Like he’s just now put the thought into words. But he doesn’t take it back.
They are glitter frogs, and they are aliens, but nobody has ever gone away with them. There are so many frogs that Tristan has to be careful if he shifts his legs, otherwise he’ll squish them.
“Running away to join the alien circus,” Tristan says.
Aaron shrugs.
A YouTube video that persisted for six months before someone reported it for terms of service violations:
The camera is fixed on the ground, bouncing with every step. Glitter frogs dive out of the way. The person behind the camera knows better than to tilt the camera back and show their face.
There’s a clearing in the tall grass, glistening where it’s been wetted down with a hose. Just in case. There’s a flat piece of particle board on the ground, dented, scratched, splattered with paint of various colors. The camera gets especially haphazard as something is put on the wet piece of particle board. It’s one of the glitter frogs, but it doesn’t look quite right. Something is wrong with its legs.
And there are fire crackers next to it.
You can guess the rest. You don’t need to see it. Don’t go looking. The video was taken down. There are no torrents.
Nickie’s high school doesn’t do dissections any more. It hasn’t for years. Her parents once asked if she was going to be dissecting worms in biology class and then looked dismayed when she said, “Uh, no. Duh.”
Duh. You can’t cut up unassuming animals for fun. And there’s no way that the school would want to court more controversy after firing their biology teacher for being too aggressive in his teaching of evolutionary theory.
Nickie saw him in the grocery store afterward. He looked drunk, or like he’d been drunk, or maybe he wanted to be drunk. She waved at him, after shifting the box of Coke to her left arm. He stared through her like she wasn’t even there, picking up glitter frogs from where they sat among the kumquats. In retrospect, Nickie didn’t think that she’d want to be reminded she’d been fired, either.
Even though the equipment never gets used anymore, the school never throws anything out. After class, Nickie steals one dissecting tray, two scalpels (in case the first one isn’t sharp enough), ten pins, and a pair of rusty surgical scissors. She has her own scissors, but the idea of using them on dead animal guts and then putting them back in her desk drawer is gross.
At home, the frogs are everywhere, so they’re not hard to catch. Nickie holds the frog while others hop around her feet in the living room. Her parents have tried to keep the frogs out, but they always get back in.
Whenever Nickie types a question into a search engine that starts with “How,” the autofill gives her variations on “How do I keep frogs out of my house?” She clicked a link once, and the suggestions horrified her. But that was then. Now, she’s watched an old instructional video about Earth frog dissections, taken careful notes. All of the Google results for dissections of the glitter frogs come up broken. Her other searches weren’t much better.
What are the frogs?
What are they doing here?
What are they made of?
Nickie carries the frog into the kitchen and puts it down on the counter. There are so many others—almost as though they know what she’s about to do and are coming to watch. She hopes not. Psychic alien frogs are even worse than regular alien frogs.
She drops the frog into a canning jar. It puts its brilliant green hands up against the side of the glass, its purple-blue throat pulsing more rapidly than the frogs on the counter. Nickie drops in three cotton balls covered in acetone and tightens the lid.
She watches the glitter frog suffocate.