Indebted to a Sick Frog

     This week I will tell you about the second story in Aberrant Selected, entitled A Very Quiet Guest. This particular story is very important in my ouevre as it is the story that began my writing again after a break of about three years. I took a break because I had briefly experienced fame as a writer and I absolutely loathed the experience; I was made to feel like the object of my destiny rather than the subject. Basically, one day in Newtown, a bohemian suburb of inner city Sydney, I was selling self published booklets from an impromptu stall. I had been successfully selling these stories to passers-by in Newtown for a few months and had consequently been very favourably reviewed by The Sydney Morning Herald for them, both for the literary merit of the stories, as well as my unique selling method. This article resulted in my brief, loathsome, experience with fame. It was so horrible that I was simply too traumatised to write, for around three years.
     A frog however got me back to my writing. This frog, large, and green, I noticed one morning when I was heading up to my local supermarket to buy the milk for my morning coffee. I initially thought it was a large maple leaf, but since there were no maple trees in the grounds of my block of flats I thought I must have been hallucinating. Returning home, though, the 'maple leaf' was still there, and a closer inspection showed it to be a large, green frog.
     My neighbour, about thirty minutes later, also noticed this frog and after a brief discussion and inspection of the amphibian we surmised that the frog, whom I named Frederick Hibernia Wilder, was a bit depressed, and had sought out our block of flats as a retreat. Over about the next week or two my neighbour and I looked after the frog, setting him up with a little home, and always keeping fresh water and a water soaked towel within his/her easy reach. I introduced Frederick to another friend, who easily picked him up and gave him a few pats. Frederick must have been really depressed to thus let himself be so handled.
     And then one day, around two weeks after Frederick had taken up residence, he disappeared. He hasn't been back since. Whether he simply moved on, recovered from his depression, or fell victim to a predator, I have not the foggiest notion.
     I was naturally very taken with Frederick's situation and very soon after he left us I wrote about him. Writing this story reinvigorated my joy in writing, allowing me to recover from the trauma of my brush with fame. I have written fairly constantly and regularly since completing this story and I still thank Frederick for his help. I sometimes still think about him and hope he's okay, the parent of many, many healthy tadpoles. I owe him a lot.