Frog in the Basement

“I was looking at the weather forecast for the upcoming week, and there seems to be a lot of rain as well as warnings for flash floods,” my grandfather said at dinner Tuesday evening, “so we should probably go to the basement either tonight or tomorrow before it gets to be too late.”

My grandfather is always worrying about the weather and our safety. This is probably due to his having grown up in southern Mississippi, a place commonly ravaged by hurricanes or cyclones. However, we live in a 19th century suburb with just enough lawn between the houses to fit two bikes and a labrador retriever. All of the houses in my neighborhood look so similar that when Mom and Dad first moved here they painted our mailbox bright orange so they could identify which house was there own. In all of my time living here, our house had stood strong against anything nature throws at us.

“Dad, why don’t you and Lily take care of the basement and I will clean up dinner, “ Mom suggested, “I have a few more pages to type before work tomorrow anyway and don’t have that much spare time.”

Mom works as the local historian for our town, and she is currently typing up the journals of our towns founders, the Friendly Neighbor Builders. I think her job sounds completely boring, but grandad is retired and my dad suddenly died in the shower two years ago, so she works extra hard so we can continue living in our town. The autopsy said that Dad had been taking a hot showers that contained traces of toxic elements from the soil around our pipes as well as the deteriorating metal of the pipes and had slowly poisoned him. The weird thing was that neither my mom nor I had any poisoning, though we both shower as frequently as he did.

I helped Grandad down the steps and we went to the far left corner of the room. I had recently vacuumed down here so I could get my weekly allowance, but now you could barely tell it was clean. Since our house was built in a rush along with the 40 other houses in my neighborhood, our basement isn’t an actual room. It has a cement floor and all of the pipes to the boiler or sewage are exposed. We replaced all of our pipes after Dad’s death, but I still avoid touching them when I’m down here. When Grandad and I got the the corner of the room I set down two pillows for us to sit on and I carefully started picking up parts of our cement floor.

Staring up at me from the dust of our basement is a perfectly preserved mummified frog. Its legs and arms form concentric upside down U’s arching away from the middle. We can’t see its eyes as it is laying on its back with its chin up and belly exposed to us. It is far thinner than any frog I have seen, its skin having shrunk around its body under the pressure of the solidifying concrete years ago. Our frog was discovered when I was four, two years after my parents bought the house. My mom was glad it was there as it gave our house a uniqueness to all the identical copies around it, but my dad was upset that the frog’s body had caused the cement floor to shatter around it. He went to the hardware store and layered cement over the broken area after being unable to remove the frog’s body, but the cement just cracked in the same place three months later.

Once the frog had been fully uncovered Grandad began talking to it.

“As you may already know, there’s a storm headed right toward us,” he told the frog. “Last storm we had nearly took the shingles off our roof. I don’t want to think about what this one could do.”

He sat silent for a while. His eyes weren’t focused, as if remembering something.

“I don’t know if I can make it through the same storms we used to have down in Mississippi: windows shattering, walls collapsing, roofs falling. I’m just too old for this now.”

There was silence for a while, so I figured Grandad must be waiting for me to tell the frog something.

I told the frog about the life cycle of frogs, and how we were learning about it in school right now. I also told it about the book my teacher is reading us, my painting I’m making in art class, and the 100% I got on my spelling quiz last week. Grandad says that telling the frog about positive things will help keep our lives positive. He thinks, because the frog’s life was taken for the construction of our house, the frog’s spirit is now in charge of the well being of the house.

While Grandad and I were talking to the frog, Mom came down holding a copy of one of the journals. I moved over because I thought she would want to tell the frog about something in her journal, but instead she seemed to be inspecting the bricks making up our walls. I finished up my story to the frog, said goodnight to the frog and my family, and went to bed.

Four days later the storm hit. School was cancelled due to unsafe road conditions, and the buses weren’t running so Mom couldn’t get to work. The three of us sat huddled in the kitchen, trying to organize our food into piles of what would expire and what would keep. It was only April, so the house was still a bit cold. We all wore jackets and hats to keep away the slight chill that was taking over our house. Our power had gone out one-and-a-half hours earlier. I was excited, as I have never experienced a power outage before. Our neighbors tend to lose power every time there is a slightly strong storm, but I had never had it happen to our house. We would be stuck with no power for three days.

Mom, with nothing better to do it seemed, continued reading her journals even though she couldn’t type them without power. Grandad spent the first day making sure we had everything we needed (e.g. food, water, and a radio) and then relocated to the basement where he was immovably sat in front of the frog. He planned to talk to it until the storm ended and everyone was safe. I sat around until either Mom or Grandad said anything for something.

“Lily, would you say the color of the brick around the chimney is more reddish or brown?” Mom asked.

“I don’t know, probably brown?”

“Okay…”

None of her questions made sense, I thought she was just trying to keep me from getting bored. About halfway through day two I started getting restless and annoyed.

“Lily, bring me a glass of water would you? I’m quite thirsty down here and all this talking has started to hurt my throat,” called Grandad.

“Fine,” I acquiesced.

“Lily, would you count how many pieces of wood make up the floor in the living room?” Mom interrupted.

“Fine… 27”

“Lily, name every difference between our house and the houses next to it.”

“Fine. I guess our house has an orange mailbox, the frog, new pipes, stepping stones instead of gravel in the backyard, rose bushes instead of plain bushes, and I don’t know what else.”

“Lily, do you think Grandad is right in that the frog really controls the fate of our house?”

“I don’t know, I guess?”

“Because I have been reading these journals, and one of the houses they built was for one of the builder’s sister. This house was made with stronger materials and had a few key differences to set it apart from the other houses. I’m really starting to consider it may be our house that is the different one, especially seeing how much more durable it is than the neighboring houses.”

“Fine.”

Now I wasn’t sure what to do. If I stayed with Mom, she would continue to make me inspect the house for miniscule differences, while if I went downstairs with Grandad I would have to talk to the frog the whole time. I decided downstairs as I wouldn’t have to walk around as much, and my back had started to hurt from leaning over to count the wooden panels in the living room.

“I’m glad you came down,” Grandad welcomes as soon as I reach the last step down. He had lit three candles to make up for the lack of electricity, and had them encircling the frog, almost shrine-like.

“Well, there isn’t much to do in a storm.”

“I’m worried about your mother, if she continues searching the house and doesn’t visit the frog I’m afraid something will happen to her.”

“Fine Grandad, I will tell her to come down later.”

“Don’t sit too close to the candles, I don’t want your socks to catch fire.

I didn’t tell her. Why should I tell her. I didn’t care if our house was protected by a frog that happened to get mixed up with some cement or by higher quality building materials, I just wanted the storm to be over. I ended up falling asleep down there with Grandad, who woke me up the following morning with breakfast.

“Grandad, do you hear rumbling?” I quietly asked, not wanting to make him panic.

“Rumbling? No, not with my old ears anyway.”

“Then don’t you feel the floor sort of shaking, as if something big is moving toward us?”

“I’m sure you’re just restless from having been stuck inside for so long. Why don’t you run upstairs and see if you can get your mother to join us down here.”

I borrowed one of his candles and slowly made my way up to Mom. She was at the kitchen table with a flashlight propped up next to her so she could continue reading the journals. Now she was taking notes on the journals and going through her notes to see which aspects of the different house matched ours.

“Nearly everything matches besides things I knew wouldn’t match, like the interior of the garage, because your dad and I remodeled it two summers ago,” she told me, her eyes never leaving her journal.

“Mom, I think you should come downstairs. Grandad thinks you have been ignoring the frog for too long.” I was beginning to get worried. Maybe Grandad was right and Mom could be in danger? How could we know whether the frog actually had power over our house?

“Actually, according to these journals, the basement would be the most secure place to be in a storm. If our house is the better built one, then our basement should be reinforced within the walls to withstand nearly all hazardous weather. Would you help me carry the rest of these books down?”

I set down my candle and filled my arms with books and the flashlight and went down the stairs ahead of Mom. I could feel the rumbling getting stronger now, but no one else had noticed it, so I didn’t say anything. The water came suddenly, carrying with it bits of detritus from its former destructions. Our house stood against the water, creaking and groaning against the overwhelming sound of the flood rushing around the house’s exterior. Grandad grabbed me and blew out the candles. Together we sat still, only hearing the battle of our house against the water. We heard glass shattering, could feel water begin to collect around our feet and legs. Grandad held me close, refusing to be moved from the left corner of the room. I think we stayed like this for ten minutes, or maybe an hour, I honestly don’t remember.

We went upstairs once the sounds quieted to the constant rainfall again. Mom was standing four feet from the basement staircase, dripping in water. Behind her, one of the windows facing the flood had shattered. The ink on the papers I hadn’t brought down with me had practically disappeared, all washed away with the flood water. There was a layer of mud and murky water all over the kitchen. It looked like one of Mom’s hands had been cut from the glass of the window, but she wouldn’t tell me what happened. Instead, she stood petrified holding a now nearly blank page of notes, looking wide-eyed at the floor near Grandad’s feet. I looked down there as well, and saw the bloated carcass of a drowned frog, it’s eyes permanently stuck open in a glare at Mom.