The Last Croak

Bob III - Not Kittens

"Help is only a scream away. But what if you can't scream? "

--Robert Armstrong

It fell from the top of the sewer and landed on Bob's slumbering face, barely missing his gaping mouth. It paused for only a moment, as if considering whether or not to enter his welcoming mouth, then quickly crawled across his face, hopped to the sewer floor, and made its way up the side wall and back into its cluster on the ceiling where a brooding darkness lurked. In the pitch blackness of the sewer, the cluster was invisible, yet ever-present and ever-watching, just inches away.

If the sewer were illuminated the darkness would still be present for it was composed of tens of thousands of arachnids commonly known as daddy-longlegs. They are not technically spiders and are actually quite harmless, but if one of these were to crawl up your leg while sitting in your lavatory, the fear would be palpable and intense. What a swarm of thousands would do to the psyche of a little boy who was deathly afraid of spiders, was unimaginable. For the last two days, just above Bob's head was this cluster of daddy-longlegs as he crawled, heedless, ever deeper into the sewer labyrinth.

Bob was dreaming again and when mommy tickled his cheek with a feather, he woke to another day of darkness. His only comfort was that he was not alone. There was the constant presence of kittens, hundreds of them, crawling all over him, licking his face, playfully biting his nose, rubbing their cold noses against his ears. Such a presence of love surrounded him, caressed him, and kept him company during these darkest hours giving him the strength to continue. More and more kittens had joined him as he crawled the sewer. They were his kitten-pack and he their leader. He tried to snuggle them many times but they always squeaked and squirmed out of his grasp. He found it odd that these kittens squeaked instead of meowed and had assumed it was because they were lost and afraid, just like him. Bob had crawled into the sewer two or three days ago and was now emaciated from lack of food. As the last shreds of dream evaporated, he looked around him into the darkness and thought he could see a faint glow in the distance, but his mind had been playing tricks on him lately, tricking him, showing him things that were not there. But he had nothing else to do so, imaginary or not, he made his way toward this faint glow in the distance.

After what seemed like most of the day Bob finally arrived at the source of the glow and discovered that it was a storm drain opening to the street above, like the one he had entered several days ago. He crawled into the sewer lobby and had to close his eyes due to the brightness of the light. He slowly rose on trembling legs and could feel the warmth of the sun on his face. Slowly he opened his eyes so they could adjust to the light. Once his eyes adjusted he saw blue sky and a few clouds floating along. It was so beautiful. He could hear the welcome sound of cars driving by, people laughing, some music playing somewhere close by. Bob was ecstatic! Soon he would be discovered and returned to his mommy's arms. This was the happiest day of his life. Then he remembered his beloved clowder...

When Bob looked down to tell the kittens the good news he was unable to focus at first. He thought his eyes were tricking him again. First, an undulating sea of fur came into focus then, after rubbing his eyes, he saw their individual bodies. What he saw was so hideous, so repulsive, so horrible that his mind could not process what his eyes were screaming at him. The cognitive dissonance was overpowering and incapacitating. His body froze as his mind raced to process, to make sense out of, to reconcile what he saw with what he knew. What he saw looked like mice but they were so much bigger. What he saw did not exist in his world and were definitely not kittens. Bob came to the realization that these grotesque creatures were some hideous, abominable, mutant variety of mice. There were hundreds of them, maybe thousands, completely covering the floor of the sewer, crawling over each other in constant frenetic movement.

There was a pressure building in Bob's body that could find no outlet. Adrenaline filled his veins and pulsed his brain. Looking for some kind of release he opened his mouth to scream but found that he could not breathe. All that adrenaline being pumped into his body and still he remained frozen. Hypoxia began to suffuse his body.

Just when things could not be more dire, he noticed a blackness on the ceiling moving! No, it was shrinking. How could that be? When Bob focused on the ceiling it became apparent that the blackness was created by thousands upon thousands of giant spiders with really long legs all clustered together. Only now, Bob's panic had disturbed the cluster and its fringe was disintegrating into individual spiders, quickly crawling away at the edges, crawling down the walls, across the sea of rats, and up his pants. He feared that soon they would enter his mouth, his nose, his eyes.

Bob's face turned blue from lack of oxygen. Just before he passed out he inhaled and let loose the most horrible, blood-chilling scream imaginable. A passerby thought she heard something, stopped to listen but hearing nothing more, continued on her way.

The human body has a self-defense mechanism that allows it to cope with situations that are too traumatic or painful to be assimilated by the conscious self. It will dissociate the psyche from the horrendous reality; splitting itself into two discrete entities. It does this to protect the psyche from the horrors of the present. The bifurcated self absorbs all the damage to the psyche yet remains outside of conscious awareness.

As Bob dissociated he felt a strange calm overtake him. He felt as if he were floating away from his body, watching it from a distance as he would a movie. He was no longer in control. He saw himself jumping for the storm drain opening but there was nothing to grab hold of. With each jump, he squished a rat or two with his weight when he landed. Some were killed instantly but others were wounded and instinctively bit him. He saw the mischief swarm his body as they were overcome with excitement, and engulf his entire body with their mass. The swarming rats were not injured and did not bite him; they were only excited by the commotion and at some level eager to participate in the frenzy. He saw his body collapse into the sea of rats where it was quickly inundated. As Bob's awareness dimmed, he found himself tenaciously holding on to a distant memory of eating peanut butter from a spoon, but once he let that slip away there was nothing.

The sudden surge in adrenalin, blood-pressure, breathing, in concert with Bob's weakened condition from lack of food conspired to engender a heart arrhythmia that precipitated a severe drop in blood-pressure. As Bob's body struggled to regain homeostasis an unfortunate event occurred deep inside his brain tissue that changed him forever. The event was a very small aneurysm that developed and then quickly ruptured in an area of Bob's brain associated with identity. As the toxic blood spread, many neurons were killed and his identity was lost, but his obsession with the frog and its pursuit in the sewer had acted like a template as his brain rewired itself during his convalescence. This was the day Bob became a frog. He still had an insatiable desire to find mommy, but mommy was now a frog.