Everyone insists there’s nothing to be afraid of.
Still, I stand in the doorway, struck dumb.
The frog sits on the concrete path. Impossible,
there shouldn’t be any frogs so close to home.
Frogs made summers in Eagle River unbearable,
menacing in the grass, quashed into dirt roads with legs splayed flat.
Yet here one is on a concrete path in Northbrook, unbudging until
it will surely launch off, uninhibited. This is the concrete path
where my grandfather fell a year and a half ago,
like this is what he gets for waiting eighty-five years
to take that walk. My mother confessed over the phone,
a hushed tone, “I really thought he was gone.” Instead,
he learned how to walk again, with a cane this time, but
never again for that long. Not down that concrete path,
or to the zoo, where he’d offer his shoulders for me to ride on.
Everyone else waits in the car, goads me from the doorway.
Please, it’s going to be okay. It can’t hurt you.
The reservation is for seven and we’re going to be late.
I know frogs can’t hurt me. It was always about the jump,
the suddenly gone, the plodding helplessness of my own two feet.
Please, he doesn’t stand in front of the TV like he used to.
They’re so small and stupid. I find myself missing things in advance
even when he’s still here. How he folded his hands
behind his back, those placid hazel eyes gazing on.
Please, I can’t get past it, the stupid frog refuses
to hop along, waiting for the worst moment
to spring. Even if I close my eyes and rush,
I know it’s there. I can’t help it. It’s all I see.
Golda Grais is a writer and artist from Chicago. Her works of prose and poetry have been published in BarBar, In Parentheses, Pink Disco Magazine, the Scripps College Journal, and the New York Times. She has a debilitating fear of frogs.