the frog man
As I walked down the bustling high street, I gazed up into the early afternoon sky. It was autumn, but unseasonably warm and the sky was clear and blue. Hiding in plain sight, tucked between two distant chimney stacks, was the dirty smear of a crescent moon. I sneered as I looked away from it, indignant that it would dare venture out in the daytime, outside of its allotted hours of sky. I continued on my way, hurrying slightly even though I had no destination, I began to hear a noise. It started quietly at first, a faint slapping noise, and as it drew nearer it became a booming noise, mingling with the growing murmur of the degenerates lining the street. I froze as the noise approached me, and the crowd parted, revealing its source. There, a handful of metres away from me, and closing the distance at considerable speed, was a man-creature. I’m sure that at some point he was a real man, but time and misfortune had clearly twisted him into another sort of being. He moved in short, sharp bursts of motion, the jerky movements of a poorly animated cartoon character. He was hunched over somewhat, and he looked up at me through his brows with bulging, bloodshot eyes. The skin of his face was a mess of angry boils that seemed to pulse with his every move, and what remained of his hair was thin and sparse, situated on top of his flaky and badly burned scalp. He stopped, standing at arms length, and continued to look at me. As the assembled crowd around us became silent, I realised that he was trying to speak. His words were unintelligible, coming out as a low croak, but his tone was unmistakable. He was angry. “I’m sorry,” I said, fighting to keep my revulsion in check, “Is something the matter?” As I spoke, a light breeze blew, and his aroma blasted me in the face, hot and sticky and reminiscent of rotting meat. I gagged violently, and in spite of myself a small amount of bile filled my mouth. The smell of this creature was hampering my ability to swallow it back down, and instead it trickled out of my mouth and over my chin, soaking into my silk shirt. “Mmmm…grrrmmm…rrrrkkkkk. Mkkk-mkk-mkk.” The creature seemed to find this amusing, and his features twisted into an impossible smile, revealing his toothless mouth and the black gums inside of it. I gagged again, this time managing to keep my bodily fluids contained. The crowd around us began to chuckle, and the creature spread his arms out wide. The crowd’s laughter turned into cheering, and the creatures arms shot inwards, the blistered claws that were once his hands grabbing at his face. His long fingers found the largest boil on his face, a great, pulsating mass that was dwarfing and almost encompassing his nose. He started pressing on it, squeezing it, and I braced myself for a sickening explosion of pus. To my horror, when it burst, there were no bodily fluids. Instead, it erupted with hundreds of tiny flies, and even as they were spreading their wings for the first time, the creatures mouth was snapping them up. His hands were moving almost imperceptibly fast, snatching them out of the air and into his mouth, and the crowd around us was going wild, cheering and applauding, ecstatic to see him feasting on the creatures that had been nesting in his face. When he had finished his meal, he looked at me once again. “Grrrrkkk… mrrmm?” His eyes were assessing me, waiting for an answer to his question. I smiled and nodded, and the crowd cheered once more.
