Wes Jamison
Amas Veritas
First Runner-up for the American Literary Review Award in Essays, Judged by Ira Sukrungruang
The frogs were omen—how, one night, when the moon was only a sliver in Libra and Neptune was retrograding in Pisces, they simply appeared. It was Biblical: Their croaks were many, sounding from all sides, syncopated, a cacophony that seemed to come even from above. They were so many and so very alive that one of their unafraid, soft bodies had not yet even fallen back to the ground before another jumped up at my leg, and they had to be kicked gently away lest they be crushed underfoot—like the bird I accidentally ran over on my bike; like the smear of bodies across the train tracks; like the people I dream about who jump into the road and suicide by my car.
Wading through the bodies, I thought that their numbers would thin the further I walked my dog, who recoiled from each small touch, through the yard. Certainly, I thought, this wasn’t plague at all. This was rational, coincidence: These were the same frogs from throughout the entire yard but all momentarily at my doorstep in the dark, all momentarily visible. One frog came up from the loose soil or out from under the patio to sit on the grass at the same time as another, and so did another and another and—.
Except we never found their end. No matter how far I walked with my dog, they never disappeared. Although she pulled to escape the unrelenting horror, I knew they weren’t dangerous, these frogs. I was alarmed, though, because their skin, so unlike my own, touched my own; because anything so small and in such quantity becomes abject, like a virus, like cockroaches, like deer ticks clung to an arm dangling out a window. My breath finally caught, because, even though I knew this, this phenomenon was possible, I never expected my life to become so very isolated and entirely amphibian.
Coincidence, I know, has something to do with entropy and math and pigeons. It’s math, all of it. Phenomena like this—like coincidence, like planetary alignment or omen, or a plague of frogs, possibly from the sky, a conjoined twin, blood in the yolk, a raven flying in the west, getting struck by lightning—is all just possible, mathematically permissible. Other phenomena, like déjà vu, like premonition, like scopaesthesia, like all my intuition and all your vibrations, have an internal source that explains itself away. And how easily we dismiss these, when they happen to someone else. How easily, when the person who experiences them is so absolutely certain that it means. But when there is math, it matters. And it matters because these things happen all the time without notice anyway. We know that these matter precisely because we notice them.
The next morning, when I stepped out with my dog again, I noticed all the burrows: fifteen or so little mud volcanoes, never any higher than my ankle. Unseen in the dark, these were certainly from where the frogs came—except they weren’t frogs, were they. No, I realized in this moment that they were toads. I confirmed this for myself by peering inside: I can’t say that these burrows were empty, but all that I saw inside was more mud-colored than green, more lumpy like this, slumped over on itself like this mud, than smooth and sleek.
But I was wrong twice, not because I don’t know animals—I do, many, mostly birds mostly known to the Midwest, like the robin that doesn’t live here—but because I’ve lived in the South for such a short period of time. Everything is new to me: These burrows are like volcanoes, erupting a primordial life formerly lived underground. I’ve since learned that these belong to crawfish (crawdads, if I’m still rural Ohioan), and they’re called chimneys, these smokestacks of tunnel refuse. Deep within, down the tunnels, maybe even three feet down, a fork or a branch or a straight shot are little rooms filled with poorly oxygenated water. So very different from the occasional one we’d see as kids in the woods, there at the base of the mountain, blue and all alone in a creek so small it never registered as muddy for how easily our child legs could step over it.
I wrote a spell, once, to make you out of mud. More than once, really, and it wasn’t really a spell so much as it was a procedure. I don’t know that I ever expected it to work, and maybe that’s why I tried it: Outside of my own mind, that friction (thus heat, physical sensation) of metaphor could only exist on the page. It could never manifest. The antecedents, though, were always very real: the ginger for your knuckles, the frass, the black bust of Lenin, the baseball, the red string, the boar and the rattlesnake and those flies and the pitcher plants, the stack of books for your spine—all these were real. The spell metabolized them, reshaped and repurposed them.
I wrote a spell to make you out of mud, but there was a separate spell for making the mud itself. Doing so always involved a beach, each time it was rewritten. Sometimes peat moss was added, some unspecified combination of soil from under a willow tree and from under a Southern live oak. Sometimes the type of water mattered too: oil-ruined Gulf water, lamprey-filled Great Lakes, river, tap, urine. It was an easy metaphor to make with my hands.
And then the toads came.
Toads are always somewhere between and part of both earth and water, animals of transition and change. They evolve before our eyes. Historically, they are plague, and they are omen, and they are associated with witchcraft—with the hag and with kisses. As symbols, a toad is undifferentiated from a frog, though what they symbolize is many and various. They croak at night to attract mates and to announce their territory—some space at an edge, at a periphery. And when they croak, they also herald the tides and portend rain.
I have seen one frog here, the sticky kind, one that clung to my front door for two days before disappearing. And I have seen one more frog, a dead one, the sticky kind, dried and shriveled up to a skeleton from basking in the sun near my car’s back windshield. These summoned nothing, announced nothing.
But do the math: If one frog is strong enough to cause it to rain, then how many to summon a hurricane. From my yard, they did—a hurricane eventually came. And if toads can summon a hurricane, then they can certainly summon anything else at least as large or as powerful. If generally, generically, unnumbered, they can move the moon enough to alter tides, then certainly this many, this intimate knot of them, this doorstep outbreak, can do much more. If they croak from all sides and from underneath, loudly enough, their power to herald could become the power to manifest, to create and conjure something out of nothing. Or anything. Like mud. Like a person.
They did—they croaked, that night, and I met you shortly after. They croaked; you existed. The vibrations of their collective voice traveled through the air and the earth, and the water too, and shook up enough material to collect the mass of you. That is the coincidence.
So I return to the spell: Maybe you aren’t stuffed with tubules of frass, and maybe your lungs aren’t honeycombs, metaphorically or otherwise; but maybe the spell worked nonetheless. Maybe I made an idol of you and wished hard enough that you were willed into existence. Because if gods can become more real by having more and sustained devotees, why can’t the purest faith of one in one for much longer do the same.
I labored over the spell for two years, crafting and then praying at your (metaphorical) feet, forehead pressed against the bike chain of your pelvis. Two years fixing and replacing parts of you, both the parts that were innately toxic to what I determined was the precarious system of you and the parts that I broke myself. I spent so long conjuring this other version of you in language and junk that I can’t quite separate you from it. And so you are always exactly as summoned by the toads as I imagine you to be.
The toads only ever have anything to do with you when I imagine they do, when I want them to. That is, you have nothing to do with frogs at all, but I can make, summon that meaning nonetheless. I can interpret that coincidence as omen, despite the toads having happened countless times before you and before me, without me. If I had never stepped outside, the frogs would still have been there; if I had never noticed them, they would have summoned you regardless. The association, then, is subjective, perhaps, and perhaps a little Schrodinger’s omen. So too, then, is the magic—and isn’t that the delight of it. We do it, perform it—we pray, we make mud—because we can’t know it is not real and can’t afford it not to be.
So I say it, here, on the page, just in case: The frogs called you. The frogs made you. It is undoubtedly because of the frogs that you and I met when we did. Maybe if there were fewer frogs, if I had stepped on one or two, the power would have dampened and we’d have met so much later.
This is the magic: That everything is as real as we believe it to be—if we have the evidence, the occasion, the antecedent; that none of this has anything to do, really, with the spell of making you.
Wes Jamison is the author of My Corpse Inside (Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction) and Carrion, winner of the 2021 Quill Prose Award, and their essay and Melancholia was selected as a winner of Essay Press’s Chapbook Contest. Their work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and selected as Notables in Best American Essays. Jamison currently lives in the Midwest with their partner and cat.