Mort n' Lucifer

I spent the first three hours of yesterday assisting Bob in the shoveling of approximately two and a half tons of flood-induced landslide off of a hill behind his house. The offending mess looked and smelled like what might have happened if, after consuming a steady diet of huevos rancheros for the last millennium, the hill had decided to relieve itself, mightily and without reservation.

As I was about to thrust in for my 219th shovelful of funky earth, a small and oily patch of something on its surface caught my eye. The something began twitching, then wriggling, slowly working its way out of the mud and into full view. It was a frog. Once freed of its earthy prison, the amphibian froze and regarded me with one bulbous eye.

"Allright!" I cheered like a mother at a soccer game. "You made it!"

With a pithy look worthy of George Costanza, the frog hopped away.

For a moment, I reveled in this small victory. In the face of the destruction and despair that has swept through the Middle Tennessee over the past week, any sign of life amongst ruin was cause for some celebration. Then I reconsidered: That frog might have really been enjoying himself down there. Maybe he was already happy. As I got back to shoveling, I imagined a conversation that may or may not have occurred a few weeks earlier:


"Gotcha!"

Mort had been in mid-flight, stretched out to Olympian lengths above the surface of the pond, milliseconds from contact with the water, when something odd happened. Instead of the cool familiar slap of the water on his belly, he felt rough, hot ridges, callousy and crinkled. His entire body was squeezed by hot fingers, tight enough to constrict any movement while allowing just enough room to breathe.

Mort opened his eyes to find two very large orbs staring at him from a close distance.

"Hello, Mort," the voice assaulted him on warm, garlicky breath. "Going for a swim?"

"What. The. Fuck." Mort glared into the big eyes and urinated with all his might.

"Well, then." The man set Mort down on the bank of the pond and shook the liquid off of his hand. "I see you're staying hydrated."

"Actually, no." Mort collected himself. "It's been getting hotter and hotter. Short Spring this year."

"Ah, you don't know hot, my little friend," smiled the man, his face creasing into a hundred tiny wrinkles. The eyes glowed crimson under the brim of a ratty porkpie hat. Black hairs curled out from his wide nostrils. A black wool suit with ragged sleeves wrapped around him like a sarcophagus, revealing a shiny black shirt unbuttoned at the neck. His skin was chalky and, in spite of the sweltering heat, bore no hint of perspiration.

"Excuse me," said Mort, turning to leap back into the pond.

"Don't move." The man's voice took on the rumble of thunder, the shades of hell. "I need to speak with you."

Mort slowly turned himself to face the man again. "OK, I'm listening."

"I have a proposition," drawled the man. He extracted half a joint from the breast pocket of his jacket and breathed on the black end of it. It immediately ignited in a tiny burst of flame.

"You shouldn't smoke that stuff," said Mort. "It will make you emotionally unavailable."

"Huh," the man snorted before taking a long, searing hit off the joint. "Imagine that. Listen. I've got a little something planned for Nashville in a few weeks, and I'm going to need your help."

Mort noticed that the man never exhaled any smoke.

"I'm going to take care of your little hydration problem, lickity-split. This is going to be big. Water everywhere. You'll love it." He held the remnants of the smoking joint down towards Mort. "Want a hit?"

"Uh, no thanks," said Mort, closing his eyes against the cloud of smoke suddenly surrounding him. It was a pointless exercise; the amphibian's highly-porous skin absorbed the THC in the air like a wet sponge and, within seconds, Mort was high as a kite.

"I'm talking flood, little fellow. Apocalyptic shit, as much as I hate to use the expression. Now," the man paused to flick the joint into the woods, "you may not think that a tiny little frog is going to matter much in the middle of all this mayhem. But if a butterfly can set events into motion, you certainly can. Mort? Mort. Are you listening?"

Mort did not say anything.

"Mort!"

"That's correct," said Mort.

"Sour Jesus," said the man. "OK, so. Here's the deal. On May 1st you're going to see a lot of rain. On May 2nd, it's going to get really crazy. You'll need to be positioned at the top of that hill," he pointed to the hill behind the house. "About three in the afternoon, a good portion of that thing is going to go running down the slope like chocolate pudding. I need you to be smack in the middle of it."

"Pudding," said Mort. "Puuuuhddd-eeeeng. What is it?"

The man snapped his fingers on either side of the frog's head, eliciting slow, mucousy blinks from both. "Come on, Mort! Pull it together."

"OK," said Mort, sleepily. "Why am I doing this?"

"Mud, baby." The man grinned. "The sweet, healing properties of earth. You'll be under for a couple of days, max. You'll be nourished by the abundant minerals, the comfortable flow of moisture. Think of it like a weekend in Sonoma."

"Been there," yawned Mort.

"My ass."

"I just mean, like." Mort rolled over onto his back and let the sun warm his yellow belly. "What's the purpose of my participation at all? Like, what does it mean?"

"No one knows what any of it means, little guy," said the man. "I don't really do meaning. I've always been into chaos, misdirection, smoke, mirrors, that kind of thing." He rotated his chin and cracked his neck. "Meaning is for humans. I gave it up a long time ago. Look," he poked Mort's shiny belly softly, "just be there on Sunday."

"Cool," said Mort, turning, with a little difficulty, back onto his belly. "I'll let you know how it goes."

"Don't worry about it," said the man, repositioning his hat and dusting off his trouser legs. "Word gets around."

And, with a loud sizzle, he dove into the shallows of the pond and vanished.