An Unkillable Frog

An Unkillable Frog

By N.J. Smith

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2022 N.J. Smith

ISBN: 9781476423524

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For Sam and Mausie.

Paradox is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality ought to be – Physicist Richard Feynman

They dug well that summer. An entire trench system took shape upon the hillside they had claimed. It was scaled down for ten-year-old boys, of course, yet every parapet and dugout proclaimed their intent, belying the fact only bracken-banks troubled the cool valley sides opposing their position. At places, their digging had far outpaced their speed in design. There, the trenches became tunnels-in-waiting, with a random few graduating to fully fledged bunker-hood. The earth here was red clay, easy to work and forgiving of mistakes. They could have asked for no better place in which to carve a playground for war.

Three competing plans for the trench complex were literally intertwined in the labyrinth of narrow passageways. Like worms in the corpse of a giant they bored and burrowed, the sinuous galleries tumbling into each other. An early attempt to map it had been abandoned. To do that would require a map in at least three dimensions, as Jeremy had put it.

As no single blueprint had been followed, the trench was a beast with many mouths. Each of these dusty throats seemed to whisper to the boys under any touch of wind, their hollows speaking a language thick with lost meaning.

This, they thought, was a compound to repel all enemies. The trenches extended perhaps a hundred metres from the pine plantation, down to where a natural gully began. Jeremy drew a line in the dirt here with his spade.

This is the final line of defence, he said. If we wanted, we could dig down across the gully and to the road. You all know we could.

It's a long way, Jeremy, said Nathan.

Jeremy either ignored him or was lost in the vision.

Nothing could stop us. We'd go under the road, down through the reserve until we got to the school. Right through the playground, circling the whole thing.

The boys looked down at the distant school roof. Ian smiled, saying:

Yeah. That would be good. And I'd put traps through the whole thing.

Nathan knelt and mashed a beetle absent-mindedly with a stone.

Are we putting in any traps up here? he asked.

We should vote on it. I don't think we need to, said Ian. He looked at Jeremy.

Maybe we reserve a single trench for traps. Like a test bay. It would be stupid to put traps everywhere.

Nathan's voice was rising in excitement. But if we trap everything, right, then we'll expect it.

The other two looked at him.

It would be like training. So if an attack came we could retreat -

Jeremy and Ian spoke in unison:

Fall back.

Nathan corrected himself with an embarrassed smile.

Fall back. If we had to fall back we'd slow them down.

The other two boys said nothing and contemplated the tactical possibilities of traps. Ian was in favour of a spiked log, suspended from between two trees, which would swing murderously free upon its release by an unwitting victim. His description of the destructive power of such a weapon was punctuated with screams and the mimed piling of guts back into his abdomen. After several minutes of this he looked up hopefully from the forest floor, his last death spasms subsiding. Nathan looked wistfully into the trees.

A lot of little kids come up here too, Ian, he said. If we slam a spiky log into one of them, there'll be trouble.

This image - a clutch of smaller children spitted upon the trap's barbs - took hold in all their imaginations simultaneously and they fell to the ground laughing. Nathan could not help but think of them being crushed by the dozen as might a rolling pin swatting flies.

Jeremy put his arm around Ian, pointed to the shadows under the pine trees where a shaft of afternoon sun caught the turned earth. His voice was a whisper.

Look over there. We've repelled their first attack. Nathan is stuck in the forward lines but he's not dead yet. He's got a sharpened entrenching tool and he's making them pay for every inch!

Nathan ran ahead, his stubby legs scrambling up the gully flanks. Ian bolted after him, shouting.

Ian sees that Nathan is in trouble. He sends a heavy barrage of grenades into the middle lines!

Jeremy bolted last but easily beat his friends to the edge of the trench rim.

Only Jeremy is brave enough to join Nathan in the brutal hand to hand fighting! he picked up a stick and swept it around like a bayoneted rifle as he ran.

A cloud of purest silver slid over the sun, sweeping the shadows up under the trees. The wind, which had not troubled the boys for the whole day, gusted for a moment. Pine branches whipped and sighed; red soil rose swirling into the air. The trenches took on the quality of a stage as the dimming light washed over the earthworks. It seemed that there was a crescendo of sound just behind the wind, a lion's roar that did not end. Running and diving amongst the ramparts, the boys could hear it better; when they stood still it faded to nothing. Ian picked up a pine cone and hurled it far.

Don't let them get to the reserve trench! he yelled.

A broad line of soldiers was advancing towards them across the valley. Nathan stood at the lip of his foxhole and aimed a Sten gun. The cloud above thickened. Ian saw their enemy grow in number where gloom lay in pools under the tussocks of grass. Jeremy leapt up beside Nathan, and the pair unloaded their weapons down into the ranks of their foe. It seemed that the soldiers were emboldened with the sun's departure; the khaki ether of which they were constructed solidified. Ian called to his friends but was not heard over the cacophony of battle.

Later, Jeremy suggested that the other boys should be killed and he would make a last stand with his bayonet in the Command Bunker. The other two protested loudly, until Jeremy pointed out that, of course, they could have their turn. Ian advised that he had secreted a line of satchel charges in a ring beneath the bunker, and that he would detonate these at the critical moment of enemy infiltration, with a resultant bloody devastation he described breathlessly. Nathan demanded to be slain by an onslaught of tanks. A few minutes’ searching turned up a hollow loglet he thought to be an accurate replica of a bazooka.

I have had both my legs blown off already, he said from the ground. But Ian left me a whole box of ammo before he was run over.

Jeremy piped up.

Strictly speaking, Nathan, you are not run over by a tank but crushed, because its tracks don't move when it's on top of you.

Nathan aimed his bazooka intently at Jeremy's face and squeezed the trigger.

OK, Ian had been crushed. Jeremy, you went to check on Ian but were shot.

His friends assumed their roles. Nathan yelled out a banzai mantra of Take that you bastards! and a favourite line he had read on the lyric sheet of a Heavy Metal album that belonged to his brother:

Bathe in the lead-corrupted stream of your life's blood!

The boys played for hours, their yelled commands and shrill death screams echoing up into the pines where the sun' glow slowly broadened into an orange splay of dusk. Nathan loved the twilight. A remnant of day still glowed on one horizon, yet night was already claiming the sky's opposing corner. Stretching one hand towards the west and the other eastward, Nathan looked directly above him. The sky above was beyond his powers of description. Each second he watched, its texture thinned as light leached from the atmosphere and the world's true nature was revealed through incremental shades of darkness. When night had finally settled upon the hill, Jeremy bade them to crouch on their haunches at the perimeter of the earthworks.

We have sniper rifles now, he whispered. Silenced German ones with rubber guts that are quieter than a mouse. Full night vision too. We can see them but they can't see us.

Taken with this concept, his voice rose in tone:

They are sending in troops to probe us, but we're seeing them way off. We are waiting for the sure kill, though, until we can see how scared they are. But we don't care. We have to defend the position.

His voice softer now.

We have to defend the position.

A night bird began a song of crisp lamentation. The moon seemed on an invisible string tied to the ruined oak atop their Command Bunker, its attendant stars dull, their cold intensity muted in deference to the boys' own. Nathan knee-rose and assumed a firing stance forged in long study of war movies on gray Saturday afternoons. Ian whispered:

I am going back to my normal rifle, Jeremy.

Don't, his friend hissed. If you give away our location we're all dead.

Ian nodded and raised his weapon again.

Jeremy was wise in these things.

He was on the Web until late most nights, lost in the arcana of battles fought long ago. Ian knew the starting point for his obsession coincided with his first real taste of bullying. Until then the anti-Jeremy operations had been covert, as he smilingly described it. Then war was declared. The trio had friends among the fringes of their class within the chess players and proto-geeks. Jeremy disdained these social connections.

Why bother? If the rest hate us, let them hate us. Let's give them their target.

Needless to say, this philosophy invited only further scorn.

His every attempt to deny the bullies their prize failed. Being the lightest out of the three, it was Jeremy's fate to be regularly tossed in the school dumpster amid the apple cores and waxed lunch paper. Yet even his tormentors grew to have a respect for him. Jeremy did not name them, even after he landed hard in a garbage-free area of the waste container and the destruction of his glasses tore a gash in his cheek that took three stitches to close. He explained to the doctor that it was merely play gone awry.

After that the beatings lessened in duration and severity, but never intent. In the caste system of ten-year-olds, even those who were spat on by girls for amusement were grateful for Jeremy. He was neither the shortest nor the fattest. And there were other kids whose glasses appeared cut from the same stuff used to contain killer whales at aquariums. But Jeremy simply greeted his attackers with a smile every morning, and this they could not abide. Nathan and Ian were tolerated by the bullies, but offered no real sport. Nathan was merely another Fat Kid in a smorgasbord of targets of opportunity.

Ian’s dysfunction was, in the opinion of his classmates, indeterminate. Their feeling that he was afflicted by some inherent wrongness was itself enough.

The next day, Jeremy put Nathan in charge of Deep Tunnelling and Countermine Procedures. Jeremy had examined this to him thus:

"In World War One they could only entrench -"

A slow smile crawled upon his face.

"I love that word. Entrench to a certain point, and past that the artillery would smash them like bugs in a matchbox. They then decided to go deep, to undertunnel the enemy's trenches and get them that way."

Nathan thought on this a moment. They had brought up with them a spray can of deruster, and he misted the blade of his shovel with it.

What is they were down there now? he said.

Jeremy nodded.

They could be extending galleries left and right to cover our flanks. Then, at a per-arranged time, their forces break through the earth to the surface.

Nathan's small brow furrowed with worry.

Talk of impending attack seemed suddenly ludicrous to Nathan. The very fabric of night was warm and aromatic; only the slow designs of dreams could be woven there. From the sports ground near their school rose the shouts of soccer players. He closed his eyes and imagined them as the battle cry of an invading army, but failed. That sound was too infused with joy.

We would be over-run before we knew it! he said at last.

But that will never happen, Nathan. Not while we control this hill.

No, Nathan said, and scuffed the spade into the dirt.

His frame was what his relatives would earnestly call Chubby. But they would never know the power to lacerate encompassed in that single word. Its mere derivatives were no less scourging. Nathan had borne these and many others all his short life. Here, up on the hill with a pine-scented breeze filling his lungs and fresh-turned earth beneath his sneakers, they had never happened. Or at least, the location of these affronts was obscured by a screen of trees he wished could fill the entire valley below.

And in the undergrowth would run many-fanged things dripping claws for of all the things in the world to occupy his time, nothing pleased Nathan more than the imagining of beasts.

Those of history and even legend were not sufficient to satiate him. The dinosaurs were the merest shadows of the animals that crowded his mind by night. On long hot school afternoons Nathan uncoiled great monsters down the classroom length; think stands of envenomed stingers nestling next to gullets lined with eyes. His stare focused at an infinitesimal point many miles distant. When like this, the other children would nudge and snigger, for it was not unknown for a silvery strand of drool to alight his lips and hang there.

But the boy was not daydreaming. Nathan knew that a blossom of jaws rent the world's heart.

Even now he imagined he stood astride the back of some vast-bulked sea creature. His job was to harvest hunks of lardy meat from it. A whole team of fleshcutters laboured alongside him, singing work songs praising the swiftness of their