Virgil was still the frog boy…December 18, 2007
This story isn’t exactly a story, it’s an exercise that I completed for a class this semester. The stipulation of the exercise was this: somewhere in the story, you have to say “Virgil was still the frog boy.” We got together during finals week and everyone read their story. Some were about kissing frogs, one incorporated the frog suit from Super Mario Brothers 3, which I thought was rather clever. Anyway, here was my addition to the pot:
Because common arithmetic failed to explain the situation, Dr. Sound developed an entirely new set of mathematics. The problem was this: in past two months, the earth’s rotation had slowed to a halt. Physicists across the world were reacting to the situation in unexpected ways. A physicist in
Dr. Sound dropped a mirror into the fishbowl on his worktable as he was accustomed to do every other day in order to exercise his Beta-fish, Virgil. The black, tasseled fish jerked back and forth in zig-zag lines from one side of the mirror to the other. Beta-fish are easily confused and they will eagerly attack other Beta-fish, especially if the enemy moves and looks exactly like they do.
“We’ll be alright, Virgil,” said the old man into the mouth of the fishbowl. “We’ll be fine ‘cause we’re not scared. Are we?” Dr. Sound’s new mathematics would soon provide the formula to explain why the Earth had stopped. He worked for hours in the low light of the kerosene lantern, feverishly penning the final lines of the formula. Sigma equals a triangle with a squiggly line through it which yields three dots in a row, is less than or equal to a little smiling frog-boy drawing, divided by gravity, times the cubed root of Hamlet, equals a sketch of an upside-down umbrella. With a remainder of plus or minus two elephants.
“
Dr. Sound turned on the radio. White noise on one station. Emergency broadcast system on the next. None of the stations came through except one: a rational, aluminum voice was reading from the book of Genesis. Dr. Sound knew that soon the Earth would halt completely and gravity would loosen its grip and all things not fastened to the Earth would float away forever, including oxygen. The air was already thin and his breaths were shallow.
He flicked a lighter and held it to the hand-rolled Cuban cigar in his mouth. The flame was small, but it did the job. And through a ring of smoke he noticed that the fish had stopped fluttering around the fishbowl. He leaned closer and saw that the mirror was cracked. A thin trail of translucent blood hung weightless in the water. Above it a slick black lump barely penetrated the surface. Virgil was still.
“The frog-boy symbol,” he muttered. The cigar fell from his mouth and smoldered a black hole into the wooden desk. Dr. Sound was looking at his math. The smiling frog-boy hovered just inches from his nose, burning like a coal. It was an error. He ran his finger up the lines and labyrinths of symbols and meanings, trying to find the source of his mistake. He made a correction, then another, and the further back he went the more mistakes he found. His worn, yellow pencil scratched out rows of false symbols and it scribbled in new symbols, tearing paper, cracking graphite, until it slipped from the sweaty hand that held it and spiraled slowly, quietly, toward the ceiling.
