Livia’s Dream

Here was Livia’s dream:

Gilbert had always just been a regular frog. He had always lived on a standard sized pad, in an average-sized frog-partment, in the near suburbs of the mostly normal yet hummingly metropolitan city of Frogtham. There had never been anything special about Gilbert. He had gone to his daily, nine-to-five frog job doing frog-counting for a fly supply company, and maybe some days he’d hit a froggy hour after work with his frog mates, but other than that, Gilbert was a simple frog. An unremarkable frog in a sea of frogs, most of which looked largely greenish-brown or brownish-green and all with the same squat constitution and harped folded legs. Here and there there were the arrow frogs or various other exotics types painted with oranges and golds and lively other colors but there was an average type of regular, good ole’ frog that was most frogs and Gilbert was definitely one of those frogs.

His only distinguishing feature, really, was that sometimes frog strangers, upon meeting or interacting with him for the first time, would remark that he had a bit of a wide mouth. Having heard it only a thousand times before, he would smile his wide smile and acknowledge their comment with a certain shyness, lowering his eyes and saying something like, “Yeah, I get that a lot,” or “Oh, uh, thank you I suppose,” or if he was having a particularly bold day, “You know, I’m starting to think that’s true!”

Life was good — well, maybe not good necessarily but life was normal and everything was getting along pretty average.

Then the spiral-shield aliens attacked. And Frogtham and the whole frog world would never be the same.

A lot had changed in the last week for Gilbert. The spiral-shield aliens had come quick and mercilessly. They landed in gigantic piñatas shaped liked bloated rams and sheep. They streamed off the ships’ ramps in the thousands, juggling glowing orbs of space-ray energy and holding their enormous spiral shields, hurling juggling balls of energy and cutting straight through any obstacle with their whirling shields. They laid waste to almost all of Frogtham, one of the largest amphibian cities, in the lesser part of that week. Thousands perished. Survivors trembled and cowered among the ruins, searching for warmth, food, but most of all, protection. Still the spiral shields advanced, spinning and glowing and producing a horrifying whistling sound that sent regular frogs into a panic.

But Gilbert had discovered that he was no regular frog.

The third night after the attack, Gilbert was crouched below a shattered log with his elderly neighbor Mrs. Jahosephat, tired, hungry, and afraid, all of which he had been for three days straight now. There, under the log, hearing the city break and burn around him, Gilbert found himself breathing in a particular way he had never felt himself breathing before. His mind felt suddenly very clear. A peace came upon him. He stopped being scared and he stopped hearing the whistling of the spinning spiral shields. He knew in that moment that they would never scare him again.

His mouth opened in almost a full O and he filled his froggy lungs with what felt like pure smooth white jelly. It burned inside him but did not hurt him. Instead it felt like rocket fuel, as if he could take the air around him and turn it into superheated carbonated magma. He felt like he was moving so fast even the air he breathed into his lungs was moving slowly, like his lungs were pulling fine grains of sand pulled through nanometer-wide mesh.

When we closed his mouth again he saw that Mrs. Jahosephat was staring at him, aghast. She looked frightened.

“Gilbert,” she said shakily, “what happened to you?”

He just smiled at her, and eventually she began to smile back. She felt safe.

Gilbert hopped out from behind the log.

“Stay here,” he said to the old frog. “You’ll be safe. We’ll all be safe.”

And he began to hop towards the city, where the fighting was still raging.

Aliens fell like dominoes in front of Gilbert. He hopped and dodged from warrior to warrior, and with a single touch from his kicking accordion legs the spiral-shields were sent flying, shattering through brick walls or sometimes just disintegrating into a green silt. He fought through first tens, then dozens, then hundreds and hundreds of the aliens. They juggled orbs of energy and flung them wildly towards the rampaging front, but he dodged every projectile with ease, never slowing his rampaging advance.

Soon he worked his way to the core of the alien force, and by then a resistance had sprung up behind him and thousands of emboldened frogs kicked and hopped behind him, smashing their webbed feet into alien faces. The frogs were now winning the fight, led by the wide-mouthed Gilbert.

The inner circle of aliens were bigger, tougher, and had huge guns that shot zig-zagged fields of energy. Many frogs fell, minced into jagged pieces. But still they fought valiantly and Gilbert grew and grew in power. He had swelled to twice his size and swept whole battalions of aliens aside with giant legs and shot huge blasts of energy out of his perfectly round mouth.

The battle was fierce — the fiercest the frogs had ever known or ever would know. But now, Gilbert stood in front of the alien king, a huge sluggish being half-mushroom and half-chocolate fudge, with wildly flailing appendages that wrapped squirming around entire buildings. Gilbert crouched in front of the beast, clutching in his sticky palms an entire telephone pole and a giant trident made of pure energy. Gilbert was no longer any regular frog.

“Leave us!” Gilbert croaked, his mouth open wider than ever, “Leave us and promise us peace, and I promise I will let you live out a peaceful existence far from here.”

The alien king regarded him and sneered. It laughed, a sound like a klaxon and neon bar signs all woven together, and it said:

“Oh you do, do you? And who are you to make such promises, insect?”

Gilbert knew there would be no reasoning with this galactic tyrant.

He reared onto his hinds legs, drawing himself to his full and impressive new height. His mouth began to widen and inside it glowed incandescent pink-purple.

The beamed exploded onto the wriggling blob. Immediately, the alien king began to wail, a chilling sound that knocked down buildings for miles and drove many of still-living frogs insane. It’s bulbous marshmallow body writhed and bubbled and smoked. Still the light grew brighter and more blinding, more and more and more, and the alien king moved frantically and frenetically but could not escape the ten-million-lighthouses-worth of kinetic energy that issued forth from Gilbert’s wide, wide mouth.

And all at once the alien exploded into a primordial goop. A chain reaction started outwards from the king, preceded by the blinding pink purple aura. In an expanding wave, aliens exploded into a fine mist of small crystals that coated everything in a glowing layer of viscera.

The light disappeared and with it the last traces that aliens had ever been there. Gilbert crouched now, returned to his normal size, panting slightly from the exertion, but otherwise intact.

The froggy eyes of the entire city were upon him. He drew himself up again, plucking a Frogtham flag from the wreckage and waving it slowly over his head. Frog tears rolled down frog cheeks and a low, steady, victorious croaking began. The hum grew into a roar, and the roar grew into a soul-shaking seism. Gilbert was still louder than all of it:

“My name is Gilbert. AND I! AM! THE! WIDEMOUTHED FROG!”

Livia awoke laughing hysterically, and this woke up her mother Robin next to her, and they were both covered in fine, dull shards of purple glass.