February 14, 2008

Cane Toads

I was being teased by a bully (I think I was a teenage boy). We were in the grass, and he was bigger than me, and there was a ball that he was kicking around like a soccer ball, challenging me to play with him while he was teasing me about not being good. We played for a while. 

Then I noticed there was something weird in the grass. It was standing up like a thin brick. When I looked closely, I saw it was a dark but pearlescent toad. Ugly. I didn’t tell the bully. But then I noticed other ones too. I finally told him, and he was grossed out too. We stopped playing (by then it was the back yard of the house I grew up in). 

Then I wasn’t a teenage boy, I was a teenage girl. The bully was still the bully though, but I was in love with him, even though he was popular and I was a geek. After years of bullying me, we had become close, and I started to feel like he was falling in love with me too. There was a tenderness. I felt that I was unattractive but that he saw my inner beauty. 

Then I was myself and was watching a TV show at the house I grew up in about cane toads. I said to my mom, “Mom, guess what you have in your back yard? Cane toads.” She was mad and disgusted and thought that she must have had them because either Sandy or I brought them there. I was like “Why the hell would we do that?” But she was like, “Well how the hell else would they get there?” And I was like, “Well one thing is for sure you have to get that yard taken care of it’s disgusting.” (It was overgrown and had jagged garbage and dead grass.)