Pre-Colombian Pottery Frog-Vessel (Replica) by S.A. Greene

“It’s a pitcher in the shape of a frog,” says my husband, who works near the museum shop.

“Didn’t have time to wrap it. Happy birthday anyway. You like frogs, right?” 

I’ve nothing against frogs, but if pressed I’d have to say I’ve always found toads more interesting.

“I adore frogs. He’s lovely! Thank you.”

I put the thing on the windowsill in the guestroom, between an unframed photograph of my sister’s children and a snake plant.

One year later, on my first unremembered birthday, it seems natural to turn to the last present my husband bothered to give me. I take the frog off the windowsill, blow the dust from its head and pour a year’s emptiness into the opening in its back. When tears leak through its soft unglazed eyes, I lick them. They’re not salty. There’s a purity to them, as if they’ve been cleansed by the clay. I cup my hands around the frog’s body and absorb the heartbeat of a distant continent.

“I’m gonna call you Brian,” I murmur, remembering a kindly uncle with a froggy face. (I can’t think of a South American name that pre-dates the Conquistadores, and I don’t want to spoil the moment by Googling.)

“Brian’s an excellent name, but I’m not sure it’s me. Let’s see if we can come up with something even better.”

I’m surprised to hear a pottery frog speak, but his voice is deep and educated, and I find this reassuring. We agree on the name Atoc, which he tells me is a Quechua word for fox.

We sit on the edge of the sofa-bed and talk through the night and long beyond sunrise. As Atoc describes his native landscapes, the guestroom walls open out to rainforests, deserts, river basins, thin-aired Andean peaks. The rainclouds burst and soon the room is echoing with the wails of a hundred oilbirds. When my own voice joins the swell the frog soothes me by guiding my forefinger around his body in the shape of the Nazca geoglyphs. As I trace the Nazca spider’s legs with light flicking motions, Atoc gives a tiny shudder of pleasure.

His voice thickens and he asks what my favourite poem is, and why, and when I tell him he recites it, performs it as if John Donne wrote it – wrote the actual The Ecstasy – just for me!

And afterwards, when the frog politely asks where and how I like to be touched, even though I’m tired, and even though I have to smother an uneasy sense of having been down this kind of road before, I want it never to stop. You see, Atoc has this way of making a woman feel almost beautiful, and by the time I taste his silver tongue it doesn’t matter that he’ll never be a prince, or even only a husband.

S.A. Greene’s short fiction has featured tables (kitchen, dining-room and picnic), a blue sponge, wombats, the last man on earth, a musical vagina, a right-wing foetus, homesick capybaras, love, loss, regret, nostalgia, family – that kind of thing. The sponge story made the Wigleaf Top 50 longlist and one with a fish that looks exactly like a banana was shortlisted for the 2022 Bridport Prize and the 2022 Mslexia Flash Fiction Prize. Her geriatric orgy story won this year’s Bath Flash Fiction Festival Meg Pokrass Prize and she has been shortlisted twice for the Bath Flash Fiction Award. She can be found at @sagreene1.bsky.social