promotion

I'd been living there three months, when Marie's shouts woke me in the middle of the night.

"Sarah, babe!" she called into my room. "Help!"

I stumbled into the hallway, yawning, to find a Chinese man unloading wooden crates of frogs from his cart into the entryway. Marie rushed over and took both of my hands. "Oh, my God," she said. "Look what I did!"

She'd been walking home through Chinatown when she spotted a sign advertising frogs for one dollar apiece. A few of them paddled around in a plastic bucket on the sidewalk. "So I told the guy I'd take all of his frogs," she said, and when he told her there were a ton more in the back, she said she'd take those, too.

I supposed buying hundreds of frogs came with free delivery. She waved goodbye to the man, who looked anxious to get out of the house. (And who could blame him?)

Marie hauled one of the cases through the kitchen, around the corner and into our bathroom.

"Oh, my God," she said. "Look what I did!"

"Now we take them out!" With the handle of a plastic hairbrush, she pried open the lid and dumped two dozen frogs into the shower.

As one of them hopped out of the tub and behind the toilet, Marie looked up, suddenly afraid. "We've got to get these frogs out of here," she said. She flipped open her cell phone and dialed. I heard her tell a friend what she had done. A tinny voice on the other end yelled out, "Not again!"

I asked if she had done this before.

"Not with frogs," she said, brushing past me to close the bathroom door so none of them could escape. "There were, like, two small things involving freeing animals from Chinatown. One was ducks."

"How does this end?" I asked.

She said her friend would be here soon with a truck and they'd drive out to a wildlife sanctuary in Brooklyn to let them go. But these frogs hardly struck me as wild. They were like the amphibian version of that killer whale released from Sea World into the open sea. He'd floated there in the ocean — a listless lump too disoriented to hunt. I had serious doubts about the likelihood of these little guys making a go of it outside the box.

We rounded them all up before Marie's creature retriever arrived, a shaggy guy who must have realized by now that sleeping with Marie wasn't going to be as awesome as he imagined. One by one, we hefted the splintery cases to his Jeep, and the two of them got in. "Hey," Marie said to me, "you're invited."

I shook my head, and they took off towards the Manhattan Bridge. Back in the bathroom washing my hands, I spotted a frog crouching behind the shower curtain. He had missed the exit to Brooklyn and now was stuck in this apartment. For about two seconds, I considered abandoning him in that puddle of patchouli body wash, but then what?

I thought about my old apartment, empty all these months. I'd had the broker agreement sitting on my desk since before Christmas, willing the whole mess to disappear.

I caught the frog in a paper sack, stuffed the signed contract into an envelope and ran downstairs and outside. I'd forgotten my jacket, and the wind blew straight through my worn out t-shirt to the skin, but I was grateful for the cold air, the way I imagine someone waking up from a coma might be excited about eating a turkey sandwich. When I reached Hudson River Park, I set the bag close to the water's edge, opened it, and walked away.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
	Sarah Norris is a freelance writer in New York.

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