To Kill a Frog

This piece is dedicated to all the frogs and toads I've had the pleasure of killing, Blanche in particular, the first anuran I've ever named.

You listen in apprehension and suppressed excitement as you professor tells you the particulars of pithing. Hold the head down, find the depression, pierce it with the needle at a right angle, destroy the brain, destroy the spinal cord. Sounds easy enough. In a corner of the malodorous sink you hear the shuffling of frogs and toads inside a sack. Your gloved hands, itching with impatience and smelling of acrid latex, lay out your tools for the gory task ahead.
As you retrieve your toad from the depths of the sack, it begins flailing its limbs like a newborn baby. As you cup the toad's side in your palm along with a pair of its limbs, it struggles to escape, twitching its free leg, gulping nervously for breath, its throat bulging under your thumb.

The anxious toad blinks up at you, well aware of its fate. All of a sudden it spatters urine all over the dissecting table, which seeps into the grimy grout and floods the dissecting pan. You are grateful that you are wearing a lab gown, or else you would be wearing eau de crapaud for the rest of the day.

At long last, your professor begins to demonstrate the pithing process with her tiny toad. Your toad frantically tries to avoid the probe and flinches as you hold down its warty head; as the needle enters the skull through the spine, it writhes in agony, contracting inward, and releases frothy white poison from glands in its head. Blood, thick, dark, viscous, drips out of the cavity in the head. When the brain and spinal cord are destroyed,the toad's legs go limp, but its eyes remain open, watchful in the toad's uneasy coma. The toad, vulnerable and defenseless, lies prone on the dissecting pan, yielding to your scalpel and ready for sacrifice.

You begin skinning the toad by slitting the skin on its belly, which hangs open in two flaps, the insides of which are expanses of ghostly white membrane interspersed with branching capillaries. The pale skin of the belly is vastly different from the rest of the skin on the toad's body: it hangs loosely from the body, hatched all over with fine creases and lightly striped with green, unlike the warty skin on the head, back, and limbs reminiscent of murky marshes. Next, you cut around the legs and arms and pull the raw limbs out of their "gloves" and "stockings", an oddly satisfying thing to do. As you peel the toad, it exudes a slimy stench that belongs neither to fish nor fowl, imbued with the sweetish smell of blood. The more you expose the toad's body, the more you realize how much it resembles a man as you view its muscles through the iridescence of membrane, from the powerful leg muscles to the muscles of the abdomen.

There will be more occasions in which you will kill a frog. You will see its lungs balloon out of its chest, moist and pink and incredibly filmy and delicate; you will cut off its head above the eyes while it is still alive; you will sever its heart from it, still beating and suffused with blood. You will peel, preserve, and dissect more frogs until you are sick of them, the astringent vapor of formalin assailing your nose and eyes all the while. But at the moment there is something else that holds your attention, something you will always remember even in the killing of other frogs. You contemplate the toad's dead eyes, eyes that retain so much life in them. It is this you will remember as you stare into the unblinking eyes, now no longer obscured by the translucent eyelid, now rendered perfectly lucid: fathomless pools of obsidian ringed with gold, mute in life yet so eloquent in death.