The Frog Kisser.2
This is a short story I wrote a while back and posted in this rant book and I decided to re-write it now that I'm better at writing in English and my creative writing is getting bettah.
So yeah.
Once upon a time, there was a lonely girl who lived in a small town near the Colorado River. She had always been the weird kid, the outcast, the lonely girl to stand and watch all the other kids play and envy their laughter and smiles. To be honest, even her mother would talk to people, desperately trying to get an answer or help for how, special, how strange her own kid was. As a child, she didn't even try to make friends, she just watched as everyone made friends and enjoyed recess. At first teachers would bring up the fact that the young girl didn't talk much and didn't seem to work well in groups but then after she changed from middle school to high school; Teachers at her school were overwhelmed with the fact that there were at least three troublemakers in every class, so the fact that she was silent, did the work alone (and she did it well), didn't bother the them at all.
Everyone in their small town got used to it, they got used to her being her. They got used to her silence, to her small nods when the teacher was giving a lecture. They were used to her, but that didn't mean everyone accepted her. Kids can be cruel, everyone knows that and that little lonely girl who just wanted to be a public to the movie going on before her eyes was a victim of cruel, heartbroken children seeking revenge or satisfaction with acts of pure cruelty.
Ruby Frank, that was her name. There was also 'freak', 'fugly', 'fucking accident', 'thing' and many other names but her real name, the one everyone in the small town knows (even 15 years after her death) is Ruby Frank the frog kisser.
Her mother was a single mother who worked full time at the local Hospital. She worked her ass off to pay for the small apartment in which the two lonely girls lived. Her mother wasn't lonely of nature but the curve her live had taken pushed her to become lonely; she either worked or slept or tried to reach out to her daughter to try to get a word out of her, with no result.
Don't get it wrong, Ruby wasn't retarded, she was very smart and she could talk and she would if she needed to but she wouldn't talk about her feelings, about her own thoughts, about herself. She would not talk about herself to anymore. Sometimes, her mother would come home at 8pm and as she walked in the apartment, she could feel the heavy air charged with molecules of water; Ruby was taking a shower. She always took her showers so hot that the whole apartment would become humid for a few hours. The exhausted mother would stand quietly in the entry with the doorknob still in her hand and she would wait to hear her daughter sing quietly. Even if her feet were killing and even if as years went by the singing just got worse and it almost made the mother cringe, her she would stand there until Ruby finished with her shower and turn the water off and at that moment, the single mother would move the door with her arm to make sound and then she would scream 'I'm here' and turn the lights in the small hallway on an off a few times for her daughter to know she was home. Ruby knew the exact moment her mom came home every day, the front door made an awful sound and the fixations were so weak that it made the next wall vibrate. It made the shower's wall vibrate. She knew her mother was home and she would keep singing. It was her way to show her mother she was alright. But pushed her mother to think things were alright when they weren't.
Ruby was the result of a bottle of vodka and the backseat of a car on prom night. The father moved four states away two weeks after he learned he had a child in the making and he never came back. Ruby's mother told her daughter her father died as a hero, fighting mean little men in Vietnam. (Ruby was born in 1994, do your own research about the Vietnam war and do the math. It's impossible. Ruby knew it wasn't true but she figures out that if her mother lied to her about it, it was better that way. Most of the time, the young mother was straight forward but some things are better left untold. Like the story of her father, she figures and she figured right.) Ruby and her mother lived in a small apartment too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter but they always had food and blankets to cuddle and watch the same three Disney movies. It was all they needed, they said.
If you had asked Ruby how she felt about being alone most of the time (Actually, she was always alone.), she would have told you that she was never really alone and then would have turned her attention back to the (sometimes big) books about frogs and plants she always kept with her. They looked old and used, the corners were all messed up and the old cardboard that was the cover was separating in two thin pieces of paper and some of the pages had traces of weird substances and sometimes perfectly circulate lines of red (wine glass) on them, but she would look at them with big eyes and her lips would lightly move as she read in her head. She used leaves and flowers as bookmarks and they would dry ant she would cripples little piece of them to leave whenever she would leave a place she had been, in class, outside, in the bus, everywhere. As if these little dry pieces of leaves and flowers were tiny pieces of herself she was leaving behind, as if she could leave a mark saying, 'Ruby was here'. And she did that, but she didn't expect it and didn't even mean it. Maybe no one saw or sees a petal of a flower on the ground and think of the shy girl in the front of the class with her Biology and herpetology book, but everyone in the last 15 years have heard of her.
The story teenagers (Adults too, we all get caught up in the slippery roads of rumors, but some of us talk about it a little more than other.) kept repeating the day she was found dead was that she was crazy (Teenagers at her school went nuts with the news, the next day they gathered in groups as usual but instead of talking about whatever they would normally talk about, they talked fast and moved their hands and made signs and face expression. Teachers could see and hear them talking, they had received the instruction to stay in the corridors and look out for students who might look like they might need help in this time of need from the principal, but the students didn't look like they needed anything. "She was crazy, liiiike, craazyyy" and then pointed to their heads. Then, they would go on with embarrassing or weird things she did. As if they were talking about someone who did wrong and finally got what they deserved, not as if a poor girl was found dead and the label 'suicide' had been put on the top of her perfect record. Some teacher felt rage rise in their bodies, they wanted to step up to the students and shake them, yell at them "This is not funny! She killed herself!" but they had been warned by a psychiatrist who stood beside the principal in the meeting that morning and he had talked about symptoms of someone in need of help and how students might react and not talking about the subject directly and making 'joke-like' comments was a way of coping. But that didn't make what they were saying any truer, that didn't give them the right to harass this girl even after she stopped breathing.) and she was convinced she was the princess who would find her prince by kissing a frog, so she did, she kissed frog.
Everything is false except the part where she kissed a frog, that, is true.
Here is the actual death story of the legendary Frog kisser, Ruby Frank.
Ruby had always been in love with frogs (Not literally. No matter what people say, Ruby did not have romantic or sexual interest in Frogs. Or in humans in general either.). She loved to know things, facts, stories, memories and she loved it even more when it was about her favorite kind of amphibians; How they lived, how they survive, what they could do, what they ate, everything. Sometimes she would go out and search for frogs, but never she took one home. She knew frogs belonged in their habitat and she saw them as tiny piece of very complicated art.
And she kissed one.
A very rare one.
A Colorado River Toad to be exact.
It was found in her blood when they ran a toxicology screen after her body was brought to a morgue, there was a high level of many chemical, many substances and all put together, some of them formed 5-MeO-DMT when put together. Which is the toxin the Colorado River Toad produces when it feels threatened. She kissed a threatened frog and got high with this same kiss.
She was stone because of a kiss.
In other circumstances, (with a human being and not a frog) it would be pretty poetic to say that a young woman was high because of a kiss.
But, kissing a frog is not poetic.
Not when that person is found dead, their frailer body on the ground, their skin cold and turning blue, two little pokes in the inner part of their lift elbow.
But it wasn't poetic and anyone who knows what happens and why it happened would be horrified to hear kids making fun of it.
She wasn't crazy, she wanted something way too many people take for granted; sounds.
The only sound she heard in her daily life was silence and that was not because she had no friends. It was because she was deaf. She had been deaf for the past 6 years of her life, doctors couldn't tell exactly why, all they told the scared mother and the silent little girl was that it was genetic and would most likely gets worse, that one day she would become completely deaf. She did. She could talk and you wouldn't really know she couldn't heard your response and had to read your lips to do so, you would just think she has a stutter and a light lisp. She had spent two years losing her hearing and then it was complete silence. She had learned to read lips and had started to teach her mother sign language even if Ruby could totally understand her mother and answer.
But she missed the sound of her mother drinking her coffee too loudly in the morning. She missed the music her Neighbor blasted on Friday nights. The sound of people screaming in the hallway of her school. The theme song of the daily news on the Tv. The voice of the little mermaid singing. The sound a piece of paper makes when you cripple it into a ball. The sound of cars honking in rage with their owner screaming insults. She missed hearing things; the pleasant things, the sad things, she just missed everything.
The only way she heard things, was when she used hallucinogenic drugs, a lot of them, such as LSD, PCP and, take a wild guess? Yes, 5-MeO-DMT is in fact a part of this list of things that could make her hear, that could make her feel normal.
Key words: could make. Could.
She was not convinced that she was the princess who would find her prince by kissing a frog.
She was actually a very intelligent, brilliant person who knew the frog she would kiss would not turn into a prince, she knew exactly what it would do to her.
It was just a bit too much for her body, she had already taken too many different drugs, so that little kiss killed her.
The part the kids got wrong is not only that she was not crazy but also that she didn't die for a kiss.
She did not kiss the frog to find her prince charming.
She kissed the frog to be relived.
But she did kiss a frog, at least they got this part right.
Ruby Frank kissed a frog and died.
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