THE POND OF DOOM

 THE POND OF DOOM

A flamingo sunset spreads over the Everglades. Walter sings with happiness and wiggles his toes on the wet lilypad that gently floats in his home pond. Mating season is here! He can feel it in the balmy air. Taking a deep breath, he puffs up and sings as loudly and as enticingly as he can, for there is a female on a nearby lilypad that he has fixed his sights on. She is a beauty, with a green-gold slimy hue and shining golden eyes so enticing he can barely contain himself.

But how can he reach her safely? The deceptively tranquil pond is full of nocturnal perils below, above, and all around. Friends and rivals have disappeared one by one, mysteriously and not always silently; sometimes with a scream or a gurgle cut short, then silence. Once, he saw part of a leg much too like his own floating past him, bodiless. Just yesterday – Walter shudders at the memory – a familiar blue eyeball bobbed in the water trailing sinew and gore, turning black and dull as he looked on in horror. This alarming reduction in mating competitors is both an advantage and a danger. With each one’s demise, Walter’s chances of gaining his objective increase. Yet he seems to be the only male left singing tonight, and so he fears that his chances of being gruesomely murdered have increased as well.

Unexpectedly, Walter’s water lily shakes. Could some dangerous and flesh-eating creature be slinking beneath, toying with him before dislodging him from his perch and swallowing him whole? Walter spreads his fingers and toes and clings more tightly to his water lily until it floats undisturbed once more. 

Several of the lilypads between him and his heart’s desire are too far apart to leapfrog across. Can he risk abandoning relative safety to swim to her? He peers over the edge just as the placid water between him and his goal violently quakes. Walter interrupts his song with an embarrassing croak of fear. He is almost knocked into the pond by the radiating waves sucking hungrily and noisily against the mucky shore and the floating leaves all around them. He resumes singing, hoping that the female will not reject him for his cowardice.  

A fickle moon rises, now shimmering and winking in the pond, now hiding behind rolling clouds that threaten rain or perhaps a storm that could interrupt his efforts this night. Walter begins to panic. His need to mate wrestles with his growing alarm at the multitude of threats that seem to surround him. Risking the dangers hidden below the dark water’s surface would surely impress the lady he increasingly desires with every millimeter of his tiny loins. But could some pond-monster be sneaking toward him with the cloud-shadows, winding through submerged lily-tendrils, closer and closer? Walter’s irises tighten, then swell with the shifting light until they are gleaming reflections of the moon above. He blinks. The lady-frog impatiently shifts and turns her back to him, glimmering in the moonlight. Is she really there, this golden-eyed temptress preening on her leafy bed mere hops away, or is she a ghostly moon-glow, moon-cloud figment of his lustful imagination, luring him to paddle to his death?  

Wait! This is no cloud-shadow that looms over his head, trailing a whoosh of air like a gigantic pair of wings and a slash of claws! Walter flinches and crouches low, feigning death, green body on green lilypad, ready to dive for his life. He looks up with eyes widened in horror at the silhouette of a hunter-bird with enormous talons, turning and diving again– at him! Walter jumps! Furiously he swims to the next lilypad and shivers in terror beneath its closing bloom, heedless of the opinion of the luscious frog lounging on the next leaf. Then, gathering his courage, he darts from beneath it and makes for her. Nearby the water trembles again, and so does Walter’s little heart. Some submerged predator is slithering closer…closer… Walter reaches the female’s lilypad and desperately scrambles over its rim. He has just made it! Exhausted, he watches as the ominous water-trail slices past him and around the next floating leaf, then seems to disappear. He faces the female and shakes his rump to prove his bravery.

Defying the real and imagined dangers all around them, in his renewed ardor he leaps toward her. An enormous shadow towers over him and he is suspended mid-jump above the lilypad of his dreams, impaled on a frog-hunter’s spear. Walter blinks his green eyes once and is no more. The lady frog jumps into the water, unconcerned, toward the next floating leaf and is swallowed by a water snake. The snake slithers through the pond under the bunch of lilypads and is snatched out of the water by the sharp talons of a predatory bird. An alligator snaps the low-flying bird in its jaws, smiling as it corkscrews in the shallows and dismembers its dinner.