Dickens Crane and the Frog | Eli Evans

Dickens Crane had to go to work, and he’d had just about enough of that shit. For starters, there were the tasks he was expected to complete, and then there was the manner in which he was expected to dress presentably, in clothes that had holes in neither the elbows nor the knees. Furthermore, he was expected to maintain cordial relations with his colleagues and an attitude of deference toward his superiors – and as if all of that weren’t enough, now he had this situation with the dead frog in his little backyard pond to ruminate on. When he’d first found the thing, it hadn’t been terribly disgusting objectively speaking, but at the same time it was dead, which is disgusting in and of itself, so instead of removing it with, for instance, a gloved hand or even an implement such as a kitchen tongs, Dickens decided to just leave it be and wait for it to decompose or be eaten by some invertebrate bottom feeder. But instead of decomposing or being eaten, the damn thing had just gone on floating there, becoming more and more dead as Dickens became correspondingly more and more loath to interact with it in order to induce its removal. All in all, the whole situation reminded him of the time he’d left a bean sandwich in his locker in high school, and after a week had gone by he could no longer bear the thought of confronting it in what he imagined was a quite moldy condition, and so he simply didn’t visit his locker again until the last day of school, when he paid a classmate a dollar to remove the sandwich – or whatever the sandwich had become – on his behalf. In this case, however, he was dealing not with a sandwich but a dead frog, and it was not in his high school locker but in his small backyard pond, and there was no one to whom he could pay a dollar to remove it on behalf. Well, there was his neighbor, but what did his neighbor care about making a dollar when he had a good job in the healthcare industry?
Halfway to work – he always traveled by foot, in case his car broke down – the proverbial light bulb went off above Dickens’ head. He could kill two birds with one stone, he realized, by simply quitting his job, thereby rendering himself no longer capable of making his monthly mortgage payments, thereby causing his house to be repossessed by the bank that owned the mortgage on it, thereby causing the backyard that came with the house, and the small pond with the rotting dead frog in that backyard, to no longer belong to him, nor, therefore, be his to contend with.
“I quit!” Dickens announced to his boss upon arriving at the office.
“Good,” replied his boss, “because I was just about to put your ass on a performance improvement plan!”
Subsequently, Dickens was very happy. However, he was also extremely hungry, because without his salary, he could no longer afford food. Also, he was extremely wet, because it so happens that it was raining at the time, and owing to the aforementioned repossession he no longer had a house in which to seek refuge from the elements.
Meanwhile, do you know was just as cozy as a box of kittens? The frog, who’d saved up enough money to buy Dickens’ house for an absolute song when it went to auction. You see, it turns out that conniving amphibian had never actually been dead at all – he’d just been playing possum.

Eli S. Evans has scattered his absurdist fictions all about the internet. Two books of small stories, Obscure & Irregular and Various Stories About Specific Individuals in Particular Situations, have been published by Moon Rabbit Books & Ephemera.