Westchester - Tuesday, 7:13pm

"There was no sign of forced entry," I was told by the officer standing near the front window. He continued, "but I'm sorry to say..." He paused and nodded his head toward the house behind him.

By the time I got there, it looked as if a natural disaster or bar brawl had found its way into the living room. Everything was in disarray. What seemed like the work of some desperate axe left huge gashes in parts of the south wall and laid what looked like giant's teeth marks into all the cushions of the beige sectional. Vases, pictures, lamps all were shattered on the floor. An even larger chunk was hollowed out of the west wall so that you could see right into the newly destroyed study - which was a different story altogether.

What could have once been respected as a home version of a well-organized Barnes & Noble bookstore was now a disasterous literary pile - each novel cast aside like just-smoked-cigarettes into the center of the room, complete with the dying embers of Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad. Vandals would not have been so thoroughly destructive, and too many valuables remained for this to be the work of thieves. However, someone knew what the house potentially contained and arrived with purpose. But what had they been looking for?

I heard a tiny crash as I walked down the hallway to see what other destruction awaited. I turned around and stepped back over the broken endtable to see what had happened and noticed a gaudy, ceramic reproduction of the drama theater masks now broken in three pieces on the floor. "It's probably better off that way," I muttered.

The officer overheard me and asked, playfully, "What? Not one of your favorite purchases?"

"Oh," I answered, "That wasn't mine."

He laughed softly and said, "Yeah my wife buys some crazy things too."

"I'm not married," I said.

"You don't live all alone in this big house, do you?" he continued.

"No," I said.

Confused, he asked, "Well then who else lives here?"

"I'm not too sure," I replied

Monty's

-1-

"Your food's getting cold."

"I don't want it."

"Look, I know it might not be as good as the food your father would make for you, but I promise it's good. I'm sure that you'd like it if you'd just give it a tr-"

"I'm not hungry. I told you already," he interrupted.

"This is the second night in a row that those words come out of your mouth. A growing boy like you needs to eat something... Are you even listening? Ryan?"

The sound of the building settling drowned out the silence that followed as Ryan and the woman sat across from each other, neither of them daring to initiate eye contact. Between them, the worn, olive-tinted wooden table from decades ago acted as a painful reminder that December had come, and Ryan would no longer be able to spend his evenings watching the sun set over the pecan trees from the roof of his father's barn. Here, there was brick. There was metal and there was concrete. Clouds, noise, smog, and people - thousands of them. Sunsets in the city were only a time of day, not a work of art.

His clothes felt too tight and too loose at the same time. Dark came too early and the walls smelled like paint thinner and when the old man in the apartment above them flushed, he could hear it trickle all the way down like little watery spiders running through through the pipes in the kitchen. Idle drafts infested the woman's apartment like unwelcome rats. Ryan's breathing grew thick. He pressed his dangling legs close together and pulled his shirt's short sleeves down as far as he could but his cheeks still wore red and the hairs on his arms grew little bumps near the surface of his pale skin. His body and his words shivering, he finally spoke.

"I'm cold."

"Well, eat your food... you'll be warmer if you-"

"I wanna go to my room," he interrupted.

"But you need-"

"May I please be excused?"

"I'll go get you your jacket from the-"

"Please? May I be excused?"

He was twirling the dull, aged silverware around, expecting a quick, angry retaliation, but none came. Her silence startled him. After a brief, wordless moment, his watery gaze slowly, timidly crept up from the table's chipping paint and the untouched plate of colorless food to meet hers. Flooded eye to flooded eye.

She shook her head in disbelief or disappointment or guilt or some jigsaw puzzle of emotions that she couldn't make fit together. A defeated, frustrated sigh escaped her like it was a dying breath and she could only find enough composure to nod and shakily whisper, "Yes, son. You may go to your room."

This is my message to you.

Frog tattoos. Frog silverware. Frog napkins. Frog towels. Frog couch. Frog chairs. Frog earrings. Frog slippers. Frog shirts, buttons, robes, pictures, steering wheel covers, corn holders, nail clippers. You name it, he had it. You don't need to be told how much he loves frogs. It's just something everyone knew. Where this came from, however, wasn't common knowledge. It was one of those things you were just a little too nervous to ask about.

He was young when his obsession started. He was one of those summer camp kids that would go to the lake at maybe thirteen years old with his friends. The good, classic kind of fun. It wasn't like he was sitting at home in a circle with a bunch of his friends playing Dungeons & Dragons or playing some weird Gameboy game with all of his friends. Fun's changed nowadays. Back in the early 1980's, when he would go to summer camp, it was different. He was never the cool kid that had the cool haircut and the cool way to wear his shirt. He was the anti-cool-kid. The typical overweight, runny nose, heavy breathing, candy stashing, coke-bottle framed, short shorts camp kid. The nerd to win all nerds.

Just looking at a picture now, you'd immediately be able to tell that it was taken during the 1980's. You know how the camp had uniforms for all of its kids? And most kids at that age were presumed to be active and running? Athletic at least. They ordered mostly small, medium and large shirts, usually skipping on the XL's. So he wore a large, which was still too small. It was one of those camp shirts that was that thin material that you'd find at a vintage clothing place on an old shirt. They don't really make shirts from that same material anymore. Most shirts are a bit thicker. But his was thin, and yellow, with red lettering on it and a picture of a kid in boy scout getup also outlined in red. But it was stretched, so even the boy scout on his shirt looked fat.

And as he stood there waiting to be picked for hide and go seek, or kickball, he breathed in heavily and let out a snotty sigh as even Jimmy with a broken arm got picked before he did. Then, sure enough, at the end there were an odd number of kids there, meaning that one team would have more than the other. As soon as the last broken armed kid was picked, the captains pointed out the numbers and said they couldn't take anymore because that would make the teams uneven. So our curly-haired, overweight, pit-stained yellow shirt friend turned his back on all the kids, tied his light up sneakers up tight and walked out toward the lake. In the evening light, with dusk beginning to shade all around him, his sight was absorbed and his ears took the reigns, leaving his glowing tennis-shoes alone in the dark. And as he stood in front of the lake he heard a splash to his left. Then one more. And then two quick splashes. Whatever was splashing around settled itself right next to him about two feet away. He took out his camping flashlight and shined it at the foot of a log. A single frog was sitting there, staring back at the flashlight, confused. He approached cautiously and to his surprise, the frog didn't run away. Excitedly, but not too excitedly so he wouldn't startle his new friend, he picked it up and sat back down on the log. Every night from then on, when all the cool kids were playing kickball or were by a fire making smores, he went away by himself. Light-up sneakers, lake, log, and frogs that never ran away.