Nickie takes the frog and supplies into the garage and sets up on the concrete floor. There are more frogs in the garage than she expected, hundreds of them sitting on every surface. Nickie has to nudge them out of the way with her sneakers.
The frog doesn’t move when she takes it out of the jar. She hopes it’s completely dead. To make sure, she waits a few minutes, the frog resting motionless in the center of the dissecting tray. She cautiously pokes it in the back with her set of tweezers. Then she flips it over onto its back like she saw in the video. She uses the pins to stick it to the pad underneath, trying not to gag at how hard it is to push pins through the stringy flesh of its legs.
She makes the cuts with the stolen scalpel, wishing it was sharper, trying not to break anything that could be interesting. The skin of the glitter frog parts easily, though it rips in places and she has trouble cutting through the sections that appear to be circuits.
The dissection video hasn’t prepared her for the blood. It wells out of every cut; it oozes from the pinholes. This is nothing like the nice, neat dissection she had planned. It’s worse. Messier. There is so much blood. She pulls back the layer of skin from the torso, pins it to the side, and looks down at the smooth, peeled wall of the glitter frog’s abdominal cavity. There’s a thin circuit embedded in the muscle. Nickie takes her tweezers and carefully, gently, extracts it from the bloody mess. The thin metal wire keeps coming until she pulls it free. There’s a square bit at the end that looks more like an RF chip than anything else. She holds it up to the light, frowning because it doesn’t look all that alien.
Next, Nickie cuts through the muscle itself even though her scalpel slides around on the wet tissue. She can see the glitter frog’s organs, and she realizes that they look nothing like the ones she saw on the video. These organs are shaped differently and of course, they’re not dyed.
The other glitter frogs around her are staring; their eyes are huge in the dim light of the garage. The frogs crowd so close that she can feel them pressing up against her legs, against her arms. There’s an army of them, a nation of them, and she thinks she can feel them climbing up her back.
The cold, wet sensation of a frog on the back of her neck jars her into motion. Nickie stands suddenly, accidentally kicking the dissection tray so that it clatters across the concrete floor. The frogs fall from her, and she hears soft thuds as they hit the ground.
She bags the dead glitter frog in a Ziploc sandwich bag to carry it out to the woods behind her house—a stand of tragic cedars and vine maples between her house and the neighbors. She hides the body under a rotting log and hopes something out here will eat it.
She hoses off the dissection tray in the backyard, her golden retriever snuffling around the sullen red puddle at her feet, the bloody water flecked with tufts of shed hair and tiny bits of frog guts. When the dog laps up the bloodied water, she turns the hose on him, and he dances away. He stares at her from a few feet away, head cocked to the side, pink tongue dripping.
Nickie washes the RF chip in the sink, dries it on a paper towel, and brings it with her to school the next morning.
She finds her chem lab partner before class. Christian has been doing the same thing every morning since his boyfriend—ex-boyfriend—ran away from home. He’s sitting out on the picnic table that nobody ever uses, picking at flecks of lichen and peeling paint, moping. Nickie had a crush on him, once, in like elementary school. She’d held out hope he was bi until sophomore year, when they had the most awkward conversation ever.
Nickie brushes some frogs off the table and sits next to him. “Hey,” she says.
He frowns at her through that missing-someone-plus-senioritis haze. “We don’t have anything due today, do we?”
“No. Remember how I was telling you that I couldn’t find anything online about what the glitter frogs are made of?” She pulls off her backpack and swings it around onto her lap. It’s warm for being so early. There are other students out, though most of them are walking to the lunchroom or heading toward class.
“Yeah?”
She pulls out the plastic baggie, hands it to him. “This was under its skin.”
Christian frowns at the piece of metal, frowns at her, holds it up to the light. He slides the plastic baggie around with his fingers, as though the clear plastic is obstructing his view. Nickie’s about to tell him that he can take it out of the bag if he wants when he asks, “Are you sure?”
“What do you mean, ‘am I sure?’” Nickie takes the RF chip back, stuffs it in her backpack. “I took it out of the frog myself.”
Christian looks at the glitter frogs surrounding them on the grass. They are watching. He pitches his voice low, almost a whisper. “You cut one of them up?”
Nickie zips her bag with more force than she intended. “Yes. I did. I thought that it was weird that they’re apparently such a big fucking secret. But look at that. It doesn’t look very alien, does it?”
Christian closes his eyes and exhales, but before she can ask him what he thinks about it, he says, “I didn’t see anything. You didn’t show me anything, I don’t know anything.”
“What?”
When he opens his eyes, all she can see is fear. “I don’t want to know,” he says, as a glitter frog lands between them.
Of course, if someone were systematically scrubbing the internet of all references to the glitter frogs, then how do you explain the Tumblr gif sets? The audio recordings? The videos that don’t involve illegal firecrackers and animal cruelty?
Surely someone would have taken down the space frog conspiracy theory site designed by a person with only a very cursory understanding of HTML?
The site has a star field background with red, white, and blue text. The only thing less systematic than the wildly varying font size is the capitalization, which seems to occur at random.
tHe FRogS ArE NOT alIeNS, ThEY are GOveRnmENT sPiES!
DO NoT leT TheM FOOL yOU!
i HaVE THE uLTiMatE PrOoF thAt THE sHIp iN oRbIT iS FAkE
tHeRE ARE NO aLiENs
tHAt iS whAt THEY WanT YOu tO BeLiEVE
cIA and FbI haVE bEEN tRYinG tO ShUT Me uP FoR YEARS
NsA iS UsInG FROGs tO ImPLAnt TheIR InSTRUctiOnS In YoUR ChilDRenS MInDS
We MuST RISE UP BeFoRE iT iS TOo LaTE!!!
And so on…
This site has been up for at least a year now. If these sites were under surveillance, don’t you think it’d be down already?
She is really surprised how easy it is to get drinks at this show. She’s got three years to go before she can drink legally, but the show is 21+ and the bartender is assuming the door guys did their job. The door guys checked out her boobs with about ten times more attention than they did her fake ID.
Her friends, Trisha and Moira, are drinking whatever they want, ordering drinks that sound funny and then snickering behind their hands when the bartender, harried and over-busy with the number of drink orders during the shitty opener’s set, just nods. It seems that he’s completely lost the ability to find “sex on the beach” funny. Karen doesn’t blame him.
She orders her fourth rum and coke and wonders if she should be feeling drunk yet.
Trisha has ordered a drink that is a horrifying shade of blue, and she’s trying to get Moira to bet on whether or not it’s going to make her tongue change colors. Karen is still watching them when one of the glitter frogs on the counter walks over with its halting, I-should-be-jumping frog walk. She thinks that it might be planning to climb up the side of her glass—yuck. The last thing she wants is a frog in her drink.
The frog stops a few inches short, staring at her with its incomprehensible gaze. Then it crawls to the other side of the bar, where it stares at a fallen slice of lime in a puddle of tepid water.