Amphibious

Alyssa Greene

Once, on a camping trip, Diana’s hands turned into a dozen small frogs. They fell to the wet earth, stunned as she was.

She had been standing at the edge of a pond, clearing away the fog of sleep when it happened.

The frogs, green and speckled black, began to hop away.

She was watching them scatter when a friend came to find her.

“Breakfast is ready,” Lucy said.

In response, Diana held up her arms. Perfectly rounded, skinned-over stumps poked out of her windbreaker.

Lucy screamed. Diana thought she was being a little dramatic.

Her friends argued over a solution. Raymond trudged around the pond with a net, looking for green-and-black frogs. He insisted that a doctor could somehow reverse the process and change the frogs back. Marques thought that looking for them was a waste of time, and that they should get Diana to a hospital as quickly as possible. Privately, Diana agreed, but Lucy and Raymond had driven, so no one else’s opinion really mattered. They all knew that Marques had only been invited to downplay Lucy’s efforts to fix Diana up with Raymond’s friend Chuck, the ill-fitting fifth wheel on what was supposed to be a reunion trip for old friends.

Besides, she didn’t want to cause more of a fuss than she already had.

*

Diana sat by the campfire, a tin plate balanced on her knees. Lucy disassembled the tents, offering reassurances as she worked. Chuck stood around uselessly, unsure if he should help Lucy or comfort Diana, but positive he didn’t want to be anywhere near that pond.

Diana steadied the plate between her stumps, leaned forward, and bit off a mouthful of scrambled eggs. It wasn’t so bad. Every now and again she wiggled her toes, making sure they were still attached. She wished everyone would stop making such a fuss.

“Everything’s going to be fine,” Lucy kept saying, but really, Diana thought, everything was fine. She could eat and enjoy the fire, and soon they’d be back in town, and Diana wouldn’t have to nod politely as Chuck talked on and on about his promotion, or feel resentful of Lucy and Raymond for acting like she needed to be part of a couple just because they were.

Marques and Raymond returned to camp empty-handed.

“You’re sure they were green and black? And small?” Raymond asked, like it was her fault they hadn’t found anything.

“Dude,” Marques said. “You don’t forget a thing like that.”

On the hike back, Diana savored the feel of morning in the woods, before the full force of daylight bore down. She worked her wrists into the pockets of her jeans.

They were almost at the car when Chuck sidled up beside her.

“You know, it’s been really great meeting you. Maybe I’ll give you a call once things have calmed down.” He thought it best to let her down gently.

“Work’s pretty busy right now,” she said. “Not a lot of free time, you know?”

Chuck fell back and walked behind her the rest of the way, miffed that a girl with no hands thought she was in a position to reject him.

The friends dropped her at emergency services, relieved when she insisted that they didn’t need to accompany her.

*

Just as she’d suspected, there was nothing the doctors could do. After several fruitless hours, the attending nurse asked if there was anyone she might call. Diana thought about it and directed her to the number of a pretty coworker in her phone. For weeks they’d shared a timid flirtation, neither daring to inch forward into more. Diana was no longer sure why she’d been so afraid.

The coworker picked her up at the hospital. Diana deflected the conversation away from what happened, instead joking about the horrible fix-up and other foibles from the disastrous trip, and the two women laughed together.

The coworker unlocked Diana’s apartment, helped her unpack, drew her a bath. Shyly, she offered to spend the night.

“You know,” she said. “Just to help out.”

As they fell asleep, the coworker put an arm around Diana. Diana looked at the other woman’s hand and wondered if the frogs remembered their sudden birth, or if they just went on with their lives, as she supposed all frogs do.

Far away from the spooning women, a scattering of green-and-black frogs looked up at the moon for the first time in wonder.

© 2019 Alyssa Greene

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Alyssa Greene‘s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Southeast Review, Passages North, Gone Lawn, North American Review, Monkeybicycle, Hotel Amerika, and elsewhere. She is a fiction editor for Quarterly West and an editorial assistant for the Lambda Literary Review; she also created and runs Lambda‘s “Spotlight on New Queer Literature” interview series. She received her MFA from the University of Utah and currently lives in Boston.