I write this in the hopes that it stops someone out there from making a grave mistake; a mistake I almost made.
I, like many of you reading, was born an abomination. I can only assume my story isn’t dissimilar from the ones you’ve heard many times.
It all started when this mad scientist thought he was on the brink of a world-changing discovery. I think he was trying to end world thirst because “ending world hunger was getting too much attention in those days.” I don’t exactly remember.
One day the scientist went to this big meeting with the government, or the investors, or the army, or something, and they told him, “we just don’t see the military value in ‘helping’ people, we’re cutting your funding.” The mad scientist stormed out.
Big surprise, the next place he went was right into his lab. He snuck past the guards, clicked some buttons, poured some liquid into some test tubes, got his big sciencey machine going, and boom. He made me… This human/frog hybrid “monster.”
What did making a frog/human have to do with the betterment of humanity. I don’t know, but in that laboratory, I was born. From the start, I felt nothing but pain.
I start moaning and wailing in agony. I look over and the scientist is just standing there looking at his hands muttering some dumb shit like, “what have I done?” over and over again.
It’s like “hey, I was just squeezed into existence and things are not going well. Could you get me a Tylenol or something to ease the pain, or are you just going to feel bad for yourself?”
Those first hours of life are not easy. All your human parts don’t know how to work with your frog parts, everything hurts, and, on top of it all, the scientist thought that he was the one who should be having a mental breakdown.
As you can imagine, I got pretty tired of the whole living situation fast. I hadn’t been around long enough to get a complete grasp of the language, so I had to dig deep within myself to find the words. Even with my frog voice, I managed to squeeze it out: “Kill me.”
Had this scientist been a little less worried about himself to heed my request, this would have been the end of my story. But luckily, he didn’t and let me continue my suffering.
As time went on, the pain started to get more and more tolerable. One day I stopped vomiting uncontrollably, the next I gained control of my bowels. Soon, I learned to say other phrases, like “it hurts,” or “make it stop.
More importantly, I learned that just because I was half frog genetically, it didn’t make me any less of a human deep down in my human/frog heart.
I eventually found a flyer in the laboratory break room advertising a support group for human/animal hybrids. Given how tired I was of all the scientists, poking and prodding me, I decided to give it a shot.
I snuck out one night and headed to the TGI Friday's next to the Riverbend Mall for the meeting. That’s when I met her. She was the most perfect abomination I had ever seen.
We all went around telling people our story, our name, what we were supposed to be. By the fifth person, every story started to sound the same.
Until we got to her. She had my undivided attention.
Her story wasn’t too different from mine. Her scientist was obsessed with ending the food industry's reliance on cows, so they decided to create cruelty-free dairy products by making cows who can’t feel pain. One day she forgot to wash her hands before mixing some chemicals and boom, this bovine beauty was brought into the world, a beautiful cow/woman hybrid. She said her name was “Half Calf.”
One day I finally mustered up the courage to ask Half Calf out on a date and the rest was history. We’ve been married for three beautiful years. Half Calf and I are happier than ever, and the pain of existence doesn’t seem so bad anymore.
Doctors told us that we wouldn’t be able to have kids because our “DNA isn’t compatible.” But they also didn’t say a Frogman could ever exist. And wouldn’t you know it, we beat the odds again.
Half Calf is pregnant with the first-ever Cow-Frog-Person Hybrid. We couldn’t be more excited.
And when that little monstrosity is thrust into this painful world, and their body is on fire, and they are wailing in agony to the point where they begin begging for the sweet release of death. I’ll hold them in my arms and tell them this story.
They’ll know it gets better.