#boomerfroggins

He saw the first one when he’d gone down to empty the basement dehumidifier. It ran all day everyday. From summer to fall. Otherwise the build up of moisture would cause a speed bump to rise in the floor.

His joints popped and cracked as he dropped into a squat and slid the removable bucket out. With a grunt, the man lifted the 3 gallons of water, amazed at the amount of moisture that was sucked out of the air daily. A little sloshed over the rim onto his slippers.

At the utility room door, he paused, balanced the bucket on one knee, and turned the knob with his free hand. The man used to have a dehumidifier with a hose that emptied straight into the sump. Never needed handling. Easy peasy. But that one didn’t even last a season before burning out. 

In the corner of the utility room, near the stairway that led to the BILCO doors, the man tilted the bucket over the well the sump pump was in and stopped halfway. Something was in the pool of dark water. A frog. 

The man blinked. He’d seen plenty of insects—mostly crickets—and the rare dead mouse in the well, but never a frog. It was just kinda floating there. All peaceful like. 

The man tipped the bucket slightly to trickle out a splash of water. The frog moved. Dim light reflected off tiny ripples. Well, it’s not dead.

The man put the bucket down by his feet, got on his knees, reached in and gently scooped up the frog. It had a light-brown stripe on each side. Dark-brown markings on its legs and behind the eyes.

He hurried upstairs with it cupped in his hands. His wife and kids sucked in air when the man showed them. “Strange,” his wife said, hearing where he’d found it. The frog jumped out of the man’s open palms and landed on the kitchen floor. It hopped around erratically. Like it didn’t know where to go. Because it didn’t. It was a frog trapped in a kitchen. 

The man’s youngest was quickest. She managed to corner the frog against the baseboard and scoop it up. “Can I keep it?” she asked. The man and his wife laughed. “No,” he said, “He’s a frog. He should go back to his frog family. Outside.” But they let her put the frog in a pail and play with it for a while before she brought it outside, giggling as she let it go by the drainage ditch. 

Next time the man went to empty the dehumidifier the same thing happened. Only there were 4 frogs in the well this time. The man put down the bucket of water and looked around. He took his eldest’s old bicycle helmet off a shelf of forgotten things. It was red and scuffed with an image of Lightning McQueen. The catchphrase Ka-Chow! in yellow, slanted letters. The man used it to scoop up the 4 frogs. He was impressed with how well the Lightning McQueen helmet worked. The air holes allowed water to pass through like a colander, leaving the frogs comfortably cradled on the soft foam padding. Ka-Chow! 

When he brought the helmet full of frogs upstairs, the kids thought it was cool and funny. But the man and his wife just shared a look. They didn’t know what to think.

The kids freed the 4 frogs in the drainage ditch as mom and dad went downstairs. Shined their phone flashlights into the sump well. The man reached in and felt the pipe that connected to the drain outside. “They must be getting in through here,” he said, feeling proud for solving the mystery so quickly. 

The man googled what to do. There was a simple solution. He measured the pipe opening. Went to the hardware store. Bought a pump screen. When the man knelt down to install the pump screen he saw more frogs. Counted 7. “This place is really getting hop-ular,” the man said to the frogs with a good-natured hehehe kind of laugh and scooped them up in the McQueen helmet. The pipe screen fit perfectly. Snapped right into place with a rubber gasket for a tight seal. 

The following morning the man went down to empty the dehumidifier. He’d heard it beep 3 times late the night before, signaling that it was full, but the man was too tired to care. Since it missed a dehumidifying cycle, the basement floor had a slight rise in it. No big deal. Yet. 

In a groggy cruise control, the man slid the bucket out of the machine and opened the door to the utility room. When he stepped in his foot came down on something warm and mushy. The man made a noise that was somewhere between startled and disgusted. At first he thought it was cat shit or cat puke, then remembered they kept the door to the utility room closed. Unless the cat had suddenly learned how to turn a doorknob it couldn’t get in. 

The man slowly lifted his foot. 

A squashed frog. 

One of its disembodied legs twitched.

Reddish-black guts dripped off the man’s sole. 

He noticed a gentle gurgling sound coming from the sump. The man dropped the bucket, limped over, only using the toes on his frog-gut foot, and looked inside. The surface of the water was covered with floating frogs. Some of the frogs were crawling on top of others, hopping and flailing at the sides of the well. “The screen must’ve slipped out,” the man muttered. “Figures. Cheap ass bullshit.”

Once his foot was clean and he had scooped every frog out of the sump well with the McQueen helmet, the man reached into the water and felt around the pipe. The screen was still there. Nice and snug. No gaps. He frowned. They must be getting in somewhere else. He looked around the room. Ran his phone flashlight along the edges of the door that led out to the BILCO. Around the narrow, deep-set windows near the ceiling. Nothing, really. The stone was old and cracked in some places but not bad enough for a frog to slip in. Certainly not so many frogs. “Guess I’ll wait and see if it happens again.”

This time the man didn’t show his family the frogs. Before leaving the utility room, he found an old window screen, placed it over the well with paint cans to weigh down the corners. “If this doesn’t work . . .” he started, but didn’t know how to finish.

The next morning the man tiptoed past the full and silent dehumidifier. Stepped over the bump rising higher in the floor. Went straight to the utility door. He placed his ear to the cool, humid surface, and listened. He could hear them. The muffled, high-pitched ribbits. He kinda knew he would, but was still shocked. “How?” He turned the knob. Pushed the door open. Stood staring at the concrete floor completely covered in frogs. A couple hopped through the doorway, past him into the finished part of the basement. The window screen and paint cans were out of place. The man ran a hand through his thinning hair. “What the—” Without taking his eyes off the frogs he called up to his wife.

It took everyone working together all morning to get the frogs out. Some didn’t make it. Got stepped on in the frenzy to chase and scoop them up. There were so many it couldn’t be helped. Sometimes they would hop right underfoot just as someone took a step. His wife and kids cried out in disgust when this happened. Once they got the frogs down to a smaller number they became harder to catch as there was more space for them to leap about. When they were done the man cleaned up the dead ones. “What the hell is going on?” his wife said. The man didn’t know what to say. Left the question unanswered.

Every day the situation was worse than the day before. More and more frogs. Getting rid of them began to take all day. The man and his wife missed work. The kids missed school. The man began to forget to empty the dehumidifier. The bump in the basement floor rose higher and higher. The man googled ways to get rid of the frogs. His wife and kids didn’t want them to be hurt so he tried holistic methods. He turned off all outside lights at night to avoid attracting them to the house. He kept the grass cut short. Raked up loose clippings and leaves to minimize moisture retention on the lawn, which he had read the frogs liked. He sealed up gaps in the fence. Spackled quick-dry cement in all the cracks around the house. When the holistic stuff didn’t work, the internet told the man to try and control the frogs’ food supply. Insects like mosquitoes, spiders, and beetles. Get rid of the food source, get rid of the frogs. It made sense. 

The man sent his wife and kids to his father-in-law’s house then went back to the hardware store. He bought PPE gear, insecticide, and a broadcast spreader. Wearing a disposable bodysuit, rubber gloves, mask, and goggles, the man filled the broadcast spreader with insecticide granules and sprinkled it around his property as instructed. He watered this area with another kind of insecticide that came in a bottle he connected to the garden hose sprayer. This toxic recipe would keep insects away for 90 days, the guy at the hardware store had told him. But the next morning everything was the same. Only worse.

The frogs just kept coming. In greater and greater numbers. The man still used the Lightning McQueen bike helmet to scoop out the frogs. But as good as it worked, one bike helmet was no longer enough. He had to add his youngest’s old unicorn helmet with the rainbow horn to his arsenal. As a boy, the man had heard about the plague of frogs from the bible. The 2nd of 10 punishments God inflicted on Egypt when the pharaoh wouldn’t let the Hebrews go free. But the man wasn’t a pharaoh. He hadn’t held anyone against their will. Yet this plague seemed like it was meant for him and him alone.

The frogs took over the man’s life. He spent all his time in the basement. Scooping frogs out through the BILCO with the bike helmets. Like he was bailing water from a sinking boat. Sometimes a frog would get impaled on the unicorn horn. He didn’t bother going to the drainage ditch anymore. So long as the frogs were out of the house. He didn’t care where they went. “You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here,” he said. People came seeking the man—friends, neighbors, his boss, his father-in-law, the mail carrier, people with pamphlets, someone from town hall, a reporter for a free local paper hardly anybody read—people with wide eyes, people with angry eyes, people with concerned eyes with tears. But the man would mostly just ignore them. He was like a zombie laden with frogs. “I can’t,” he’d mumble without making eye contact, “I have to deal with these frogs.”

The frogs gushed up from the sump like one of those underwater sea vents. The ribbits had become deafening. The man tried calling plumbers. He tried calling pest control. Awkwardly clamping the phone between shoulder and ear as he scooped helmet full after helmet full out the BILCO. His neck cricked at a painful angle. The voices on the other end all said the same thing. There was nothing they could do. The plumber said this was the new normal. “Was this happening everywhere?” the man said, his voice rising over the noise. He scrunched up his face as if this would help him hear the plumber better. “Not everywhere,” the plumber said. “What—what does that mean?” Before the man could get an answer, the phone slipped off his shoulder, and disappeared in the slimy pool of amphibia bubbling and squirming and hopping around his waistline.

He couldn’t close the utility room door all the way anymore. Too many frogs. The dehumidifier went unemptied and the floor split from the moisture. The cat disappeared at some point. The man had a faint memory of it pouncing on the pool of frogs only to get sucked under. Like quicksand. If his hands weren’t full the man would have reached in for it. No one else was around. It seemed like a dream, or some kind of stress induced hallucination, but he couldn’t be sure. And if it wasn’t, the cat probably got out. Somehow. They were resourceful like that. Either way the man kept it to himself. “No. I haven’t seen the cat,” he said when his wife and kids asked.

Random people began to stop outside the man’s house. To watch him emerge again and again from the BILCO, the McQueen and unicorn helmets overflowing with frogs. They just parked their cars on the street outside his house. Causing traffic jams. Many held up phones and took pictures and videos they posted to the internet. Some took selfies—with the man hurrying around in his frog frenzy in the background—as they stuck out their tongues and made hand signals and said stuff like, RIBBIT, RIBBIT! The pics and videos went viral. One of the man saying, “These fuckin’ frogs!” broke a million views. The man became known as Boomer Froggins to the world. There were memes, gifs, even hashtags—#boomerfroggins, #thesefuckinfrogs—that trended daily on Twitter. Someone made an autotuned song with his voice. The man didn’t notice. He was too busy. And he didn’t have social media. Or if he did, he no longer thought about it.

His friends and neighbors no longer stopped by. The man’s kids were teased at school. His wife was voted off the Board of Education. Kicked out of her trivia club with “The Girls.” She pleaded with her husband to stop. There was nothing he could do. The frogs would keep coming no matter what. They should just move away. Never look back. But the man didn’t listen to her. All he could hear was the frogs.

A group of opportunistic young men set up a Boomer Froggins t-shirt stand on the man’s overgrown front lawn. They sold out of their stock every day. Spectators with THESE FUCKIN’ FROGS! printed across their chests in bubble letters began to bring portable charcoal grills and coolers full of beer. Food truck vendors argued over turf. Every time the man emerged from his basement laden with frogs the crowd would cheer, as if their team had just made a touchdown, and start a sing-song chant interspersed with spirited claps—”BOOM-ER FROGG-INS!” Clap-clap, clap-clap-clap! But the man never reacted. He never paused to look or answer anyone who bugged him for pictures or autographs. A young guy with big sunglasses and very clean sneakers he didn’t want frog guts on followed the man around at a distance for a few days, trying to talk to him about building his brand. The man said nothing.

But everything runs its course. Over time the cheers became less enthusiastic. There was no more chanting. No more clapping. Hardly anyone ran up for a quick selfie. The spectators became bored with the spectacle. They scrolled on their phones for other things to watch, as if they’d forgotten why they were there in the first place. The crowd thinned out. Moved on to other things. There was a crow lady in the next town over. The giant black birds would swarm her until she was no longer visible. Every day fewer and fewer people showed up to gawk at the man and his frogs.

One rainy day, the man was exiting the BILCO with the bike helmets full of writhing frogs when he slipped and fell face first into the trench of trodden guts. The helmets went flying. Frogs leaped away in all directions. The man pushed himself up. He sat on his haunches for a minute. Frog guts soaking into his clothes. A pressure had built up inside him. Like a fart that couldn’t be farted. He shot to his feet and began stomping on the frogs. It was like a killswitch had been flipped. When the man missed one, or slipped on guts, his rage would increase. He picked them up, squished fistfuls of frogs to death in his bare hands while screaming at the sky, then pitched the bodies at the house. The sound of dead meat smacking wet wood hypnotized the man. A straggler wearing a sideways cap leaned in, held his phone up for a selfie and said, “Ribbity-ribbit!”

When the man’s rage had passed, so had the rain. A setting sun broke through the clouds, knitting the horizon with pink and orange. The tiny, diminishing crowd had dispersed for the day. It was just the man and his frogs. Cold and sweaty, he looked at the gore sliding down the sides of his house. At all the dead frogs and pieces of frogs surrounding him. A frog missing its back legs tried to drag itself through the guts of its comrades. The man used his heel to put it out of its misery. Then he heard the ribbits rising from the basement. And he picked up the helmets and went back down through the BILCO.

The picture the straggler took made the rounds on the internet. Animal rights groups got wind of the incident and attacked the man in the press for killing frogs in such a gory and public display of violence. People said he should be canceled. From what, no one could say. Demonstrators showed up at the man’s house. They waved signs with catchy slogans and made up their own chants. Hundreds, maybe thousands of THESE FUCKIN’ FROGS! t-shirts were burned in protest. The man said nothing. He just kept scooping frogs out of his basement as if nothing else was going on. Eventually the animal rights people lost interest in him too.

Time passed. There were no more violent outbursts. The man’s clothes began to mold and rot. The McQueen helmet and the unicorn helmet fell apart. There were other vessels to take their place, but none ever compared to the frog scooping efficiency of the bike helmets. Ka-chow. Down at the bottom of the flood of frogs was a putrid soup of the dead and dying. The man’s scooping couldn’t keep up with it so the stench only grew stronger. The liquified remains of the frogs irritated the sores that had formed on his legs and feet. He couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten. Food didn’t matter to the man anymore. Sleep didn’t matter either. He no longer ate. He no longer slept. He no longer watched tv or did whatever it was he had once done for fun. He no longer felt. An automaton that toiled day and night. Something made to perform a programmed function over and over. His only sustenance derived from the stress of the task before him. 

More time passed. The man’s kids grew up. They went somewhere. Maybe college. Maybe jail. There might have been a grandkid or two. Someone died at some point. A relative on his wife’s side. Or was it his? 

And what ever happened to his wife? 

The man couldn’t be sure.