Death of an Heirloom

Tucked underneath the staircase to our basement is a little storage closet; until recently the only denizen dwelling within was a dozen or so moving boxes filled with books. Those and a curiosity that had followed my partner through the apartments, a trailer, and two duplexes. It was better traveled than our damn dog, this oversized fluff-filled replica of a poison tree frog, one of the lethal variety found in the Amazon or some such.

Mr. Froggers. A gift from a great-great-grandfather on the Salvadorian side of her family, the keepsake supposedly held a diamond toting gold ring worth a few grand.

I say supposedly because I watched as my partner ripped every last last shred of stuffing out of Mr. Froggers; a desperate bid to keep the boiler going during a particularly vicious New Hampshire winter when we were both out of work. The bastard didn’t cough anything up, no loot.

So we did our best to stay warm, blankets everywhere and a space heater, tarp covered windows and more blankets; plus the occasional stay at a friend's place. We went on this way deep into January. Still no luck finding work, still no oil in the tank. The couches left to surf grew fewer and further between. Then the squalls hit. Two, three weeks of absolute winter brutality. The house never eclipsed 40.

Another week of desperation and impending blizzards, forced us to check Mr. Froggers again, maybe we missed something, right? For weeks I couldn’t get the frog’s face out of my head; now the smug smile and the way it’s eyes lit up with demented delight actively mocked us, as if he was enjoying the sight of us shivering, fingers moving with the alacrity of icicles, pulling out puff after puff of his guts. If inanimate eyes could talk they’d have spit contempt at us, two scoundrels on the hunt for precious heirlooms to pawn.

What is wealth to a stuffed animal? Yet I could feel the weight of Mr. Froggers’ gaze, his vicious laughter at the silence of our defeat. A cloud of doom hung over us as we retreated back up the stairs, back into the pile of blankets we lived in to survive the negatives and the frostbite and the wind that whipped away at the walls of the three season cabin we’d braved the fourth in... yeah, you could’ve called us fools, but that supposes a choice poorly made, as if we’d been fortunate enough to have an alternative.

What did that matter to the tree frog? It was his innards ripped out in gory piecemeal, then picked apart and left on the floor; it was him, discarded among his viscera, a mere chore, a mess to be swept up in warmer weather. And when we did come back down to cast his body across the Styx with Charon (along with several other bags of trash that had accumulated over winter) did his true worth register, the total lack of sentiment, the non-existence of the one thing that surely earned him a permanent keep… no, that’d all been his misconception.

Only the jewelry tucked within had granted Froggers a place in the moving van seven times. His life was nothing but a break in case of emergency, smash the glass with panicked hands to ward off the big freeze, shit has hit the fan, you're our last best hope oh pretty please Mr. Frogger conjure up that diamond ring. What good is exquisite jewelry on the hands of a dead man? We needed oil, the boiler’s all out. C’mon man run the jewels or we’re gonna have a real problem. I kept trying to talk to the guy as I stuffed his innards in the glad bag, alternating between bad cop and desperate cop while I picked apart bigger tufts of fluff in vain, looking for a way to ease the pain of a chill that cuts deeper than bone.

Maybe it was her family's doing, a prank or maybe a gaff and there really was supposed to be a ring... either way now they're laughing at the idiot that plucked their daughter from the Sierra Madres and stuck here in the backwoods of the White Mountains. Aptly named as we were the most color this place had, and thanks to a fucked up social safety net it’d be a short-lived communion.

The ghosts of several generations circled round, kicking back and waiting for me to crack and admit this had been the wrong move. Damn how the spite kept me going in the sub-30-degree basement, seeing the dead laugh at me and her, still somehow among the living. I tore through the room like a mad man, tackling the frog and shredding his cloth skin without mercy. “FINE!” I screamed at the circle of ghouls surrounding Frogger’s murder scene, the iced over concrete somehow warming my back as I stared up at the dilapidated floor joists above me. It was all red and sticky and as Frogger’s dead eyes stared back into mine I swear to the allfather below a diamond shone through the left peeper.

I screamed again as I twisted onto my side and ripped out that all-seeing eye and there it was, a stunning thing of beauty, a gift absolutely worthy of my bride. I called out to her choking between the sobs of relief, I hollered until I couldn’t, I hollered until the end. I swore I heard her footsteps, a rush down the mountain of stairs, a gasp of shock – then there was nothing, nothing but that final glimpse of Mr. Froggers, one-eyed and smiling; a venomous, hateful grin from the unwanted being.

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Want more words from this guy? Check out the first installment of Yue's story, "Heretics in the Temple?" here!

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