Frogpile: One Enchanted Evening, Codpiece Optional
by Jamie Kiffel
illustration by Eric Johnson
We’d been setting up six months for this. Every year, every fraternity on campus makes one really major party, and invites every school in the area. It’s how we meet freshman girls. The Kappa Delts – my house – have an ongoing rivalry with the Omega Nus for the best party. This year, because of some dumb screw-up, both our parties ended up scheduled for the same day, so the competition was really insane. The best party is the one that gets the most chicks, of course. We never really had a way to measure this before, since everyone could easily say the next morning that their party had been the best: who can tell the difference after mad tequila shots, anyway? But this year, there wouldn’t be any question because one house would get the girls and the other would probably be empty. Clear-cut. We’d win. We had an awesome plan.
Instead of drinking all our money ourselves by buying seven kinds of beer we’d just chug before the party anyway, this year, we decided to sink it all into a theme. It was “One Enchanted Evening.” It sounds corny, I know, but we’d heard of it working at another house. We put up a stage flat in front of the door, to make it look like the entrance to a castle. We bought pink champagne. We even got costumes. And we got 200 single red roses, with the idea of giving one to each girl who came in. It would impress the girls and help us keep a running count of how many passed through our doors.
The party started at nine o’clock, and even beyond our own hopes, by ten, the house was crammed with girls holding flowers. The brothers didn’t look bad, either, each in his own version of Prince Charming. I wore the typical princely gear: tunic, sword, tights. No codpiece. Hey, I’m not into that. So anyway, the party was going well, I guess; everyone was smiling and drinking up that champagne. I can’t really say that I was in the party mode; I like to compete with the O-Nudies, but I never try to meet anyone at these things. I see their cheesiness and generally just draw back to watch. But the weird thing is, it was different this time. I met somebody.
She was holding a rose, but I didn’t notice that until I gave her another. She smiled and took it. I couldn’t stop looking at her eyes; I guess that’s why I missed the rose. It’s not that her eyes were so pretty or anything like that. She was just looking at me, that’s all. Think about it, and you’ll see what I mean. People don’t usually look at each other at these things, not without some sexual idea. But she really saw me, and that made an impression. So I wasn’t surprised when we hit it off.
She told me her name was Miriam, I told her my name was Ry, and that was the end of our small talk. Right away, like she knew I was secretly bursting for it, she split this crazy vein of questions: are the real soul thoughts free outside me, crammed hopping inside me, are they squishy, ugly, clear, am I afraid to touch them? All the deep questions, the ones I was embarrassed or afraid to let out in public. And she got me into a corner real fast – no, she didn’t try to fool around with me, well, not physically anyway; she took out a deck of fortune telling cards and started telling me about myself.
It was kind of weird, letting someone into my head that easily and quickly, and I seriously looked around a few times during it to see if anyone was watching. I felt a little obscene, right out there, my brains all wide open to this woman, and yet the thing was, I just wanted her to keep dragging it out of me. She was so up front, so dead-on deep, when we were done, my whole body was pulsed. No neat and clean talk, just the real stuff, those wet and messy philosophical things I really always thought, but only late in the dark, maybe on the toilet somewhere. And the best part was, I didn’t feel used. Hell, I didn’t feel spent. I wanted more.
So you can imagine my emotions when I felt a large, heavy splat on my shoe. I looked down slowly, like maybe she wouldn’t notice. A toad. Enormous. Brown. Looking at me. What the hell?! My Miriam backed off real fast, you can bet, and I realized that a lot of people were making noise now, screaming, FROGS FROGS women all over like that, and do you know I was more disgusted by those girls’ screeches than I was by the damn toads? The things were jumping, croaking, flying I swear from the stairs, the corners, the railings, the roof. Slippery, goopy, naked things with these black, bugging eyes. And over it all, some guy’s voice: WHAT PRINCES? THESE LOOK LIKE A BUNCH OF HORNY TOADS!
It was an O-Nudies prank. I couldn’t believe it. I looked at myself, in my tights and frog-splatted shoes, and wanted to retch thinking about a codpiece. My Miriam, she probably split for the O-Nudies, I thought, but no, I looked up and there she was crying. With serious tears! This lady was scared of frogs? Not in character, I thought. Alright, I hadn’t known her that long, but if she wasn’t afraid to get inside the head of a codpiece-considerer, she couldn’t be afraid of a little frog juice. I put my hand on her shoulder, real slow, since I hadn’t touched her yet and I didn’t want her to think this was some big come-on, and I said something like “Don’t worry, it’s alright.” But actually, that wasn’t it; it was more like “You better go to the O-Nudes, they’re cooler anyway.” Plus some stuttering I don’t think is necessary to write down. Come on, this is embarrassing enough as it is…
So she didn’t say “Okay,” or even “No, I’ll be fine,” which is I guess what I’d expected. She said, “My frogs, my frogs!” I thought for a second to make sure this wasn’t some really obvious Shakespearean quote I’d forgotten to read, but then instead I asked, “Um, What?”
The frogs were her pets, she said. Turns out her brother is an O-Nudie. She’d skipped their party for ours. If it wasn’t for my internal self-congrats on being such a studly prince after all, I’d have really felt ashamed.
Then she asked me if the champagne keg was empty. That seemed a little weird, in the middle of all this, but then again, I could see why she’d need a drink. I said I didn’t know, so she ran up to it and opened the tap, right on the floor. I was afraid to say anything; I mean, she was freaking out. She looked at me, really honest and clear-eyed like before and asked, “Are you afraid of frogs?”
Well, no, of course I’m not afraid of frogs, I’m a guy, we touch gross stuff for kicks, but something weird happened and I said right out, “Yes, yes I am.” So she told me very calmly to please tip the empty keg toward her when she said to.
Now, she said. And I watched that kind of expensive champagne gurgle right down onto the gritty muddy wood floor with the feet prints. Wow, all that champagne, I thought – but just when I thought OK, this is going totally nuts, suddenly I noticed something happening. The frogs were all coming toward us, closer, closer, hopping right into the big, wet puddle. Still closer… And then they slowed down… and bunched up… in a big blubbery frogpile right at our feet. They were drunk.
“Alright,” she said, “Hold up the keg.” Then she just picked up these fat bullfrogs one by one, real gentle, and loaded them into the empty keg. She was finished in ten minutes.
“You know I once had frogs too,” I blurted.
“Really?” she asked. The frogs croaked quietly.
“Ugly, slimy ones, yeah,” I said, shaking a little. “I hid them in a tank in my closet when friends started telling me how gross they were. I kind of miss them now.” I laughed for a second.
“It’s good to let your frogs get out once in a while,” she smiled. She brushed a champagne frog-slime hand across my cheek. I trembled. She looked at me for a second, still smiling, then tilted the keg back on the dolly the guys had brought it in on, and started walking it out the door. Then I realized she was the last person left around, and felt something drop in me as I watched her leave me there. Gone, I decided to mop up some of the mess before everyone got back and started tramping through it. But while I was mopping, I slipped. I slid in the muck the whole way down the stairs into a dark, dirty, wet patch where some leaves from the roses were all stuck to the floor. No one could see. And I didn’t get up. I stayed there for a really long time, fascinated. And I watched the cold water seeping slowly through the seams of my costume.
