At the top of the hill, a chorus of frogs hollows out the dark meat of night. It had been dense and pressing until their song cut a bowl deep from its middle. No one belongs here but those quick beasts, no one except the deer, of course, creeping through the iris and hydrangeas, sampling from early summer’s smorgasbord.
They love it here, the frogs. They love this place for the reasons humans hate it. The swamped earth and diverted rivers return, forever return, to their native channels. Difficult Run has to fight her way through metal culverts and concrete spillways. Incorrigible, she splits carefully crafted barriers and seeps into the low gardens of the neighbors who thought they had her beat. Water striders and minnows frisk along her shallow trickle, happy for anything, happy just for the moving wet.
It isn’t long before the mosquitoes move in. They come with company: tiny biting gnats in clouds, a frantic halo of deer flies, drunken moths. Right behind comes the steady advance of deer ticks clinging to the underside of leaves, waiting for a hungry host to press past so they can slake their own thirst. Cast across the towering firs is a constellation of lightning bugs animating limbs from root to sky.
Oh, the feast! The frogs and toads have every reason to sing. This soft crescent of earth, this horn of plenty, provides for every finicky taste. Even at dusk when bats emerge to carry off more than their share from the streetlamps and porch lights, still, such abundance! It is maddening. It is a bacchanal. Out from greased throats belch voices of gluttony. Satisfied grunts echo off scoured maples still dizzy from the rapid retreat of winter.
The amphibian symphony rains down on the blank brick of gargantuan houses. Blue haze flickers from second-floor bedrooms. At the windows, moths beat their desperate wings and hurl their bodies against screens. As busy and dim as it is, they lust and lust for the light.
What did the luna moths and biting flies desire before our arrival? They must have hungered for the moon. That single cool beacon, forever in a state of partial undress, lingered just beyond reach. Did they all throb for her? They take what they can get now that the moon is the smallest light in the sky.
Bellies bursting, the frogs sing on in the low damp of the borderlands. Night skims her ladle across the font and spills gospel through the deaf streets.
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