Fred and Mauve

by Yve Chairez

Today is Valentine’s Day, the most important mating day of the year. I watch from beneath my favorite tree as members of the community line up at the edge of the pond, eager to be kissed by a string of desperate humans.

For every 250,000 frogs in the world, one of us has the genetic predisposition to convert into a homosapien when human saliva makes its way through our pores and into our blood streams. “Converting” is regarded as the ultimate, most precious fate in the frog world. Dozens of fairytales exist – in both the frog world and human world (I have heard) – about frogs that have been kissed into humans and go on to live happily ever after. 

At my mother's insistence, I have been kissed by at least a hundred humans with questionable motives. She forced me to sit at attention by the pond every weekend for a year, beginning on the weekend I turned eighteen. I resented her for it, but enjoyed watching the adverse reactions the humans had to my skin. I remained a frog, just like I knew I would. If I had the ability to convert into a human, it would have happened immediately with the first kiss. Too many frogs choose to believe it can happen at any kiss, at any point in their lives, so long as the kiss is from the right human – the human they are meant to be with, as designated by some higher power.

They waste their lives this way, holding out for a fairy tale existence.

My best friend, Fred, he's among the 1 in 250,000. He was converted into a human not too long ago. When we were ten, he said he knew he was one of them. Converts feel a bit different growing up, he says. They sense they are not “normal” – and they have a strange sexual attraction to humans. 

It was Valentine’s Day last year when Fred decided he was ready to convert. 

I told him he didn’t have to do it.

But he said he couldn’t keep living that way. He couldn’t keep pretending to feel like a frog. 

I pointed out that I have never heard of a real life convert living happily ever after.

And he answered, “We wouldn’t be born this way simply to be miserable.”

So when Fred was ready that Valentine’s Day, I squatted next to him for support. I secretly hoped no one good enough would come along. I hoped he’d change his mind after a close-up look at the types of low-quality human beings that frequented the pond. But when a surprisingly beautiful young female with green eyes and auburn hair sauntered into view, Fred was immediately compelled to hop right up to her. As she knelt before him, hands out, ready to scoop him up, he looked back at me with hope and excitement in his eyes and gave a good-bye smile. He sprang onto her palms and I watched, unblinking and apprehensive, as she kissed his large mouth and made his green frog legs stretch and twist into gold-toned human limbs. His big brown eyes shifted towards the center of his head, then sank in, and his familiar face morphed into one of the most aesthetically-pleasing human heads I have ever seen – even despite the scowl of physical pain on his brand new pink lips. 

The green-eyed girl was in love immediately. Her hands grasped ecstatically at Fred’s changed form and she burst into tears. He stroked her hair and touched her dry skin. He was in love, too. But that’s how it goes. The kisser is automatically regarded as the Convert’s life-line to the human world; thus, the Convert believes he loves her and cannot live without her. 

This was the case with Fred and his converter, Gretchen.

Fred visits the pond every week. He cleans up the trash and brings us bags of bugs to snack on. He shows us noisy, obnoxious paraphernalia from the human world. He is a certified celebrity around here. 

But his life is not glamorous. He is reluctant to tell our community so. He doesn’t want pity, nor does he want to be responsible for squashing the other frogs’ dreams.

Gretchen accompanied him to the pond twice, and never came with him again. Fred says the whole situation is hard for her. And when we sit under our favorite tree each week, he laments about new reasons why Gretchen is unhappy.

Even though he is technically human, Fred’s genetic make-up still contains traces of a frog’s. He still gets the urge to hop and ribbit every day. Gretchen finds this extremely problematic. She does not allow such self-expressions to take place in their home. Fred must go off to secluded areas of their neighborhood in the middle of the night to satisfy his urges. Though he is perfectly honest with Gretchen about where he is and what he is doing, she has started accusing Fred of being unfaithful every time he needs to take a few hours away for himself.

But Fred is too insecure to cheat. Early on, Gretchen made it perfectly clear that he can’t satisfy her sexually. No one ever mentions the hardships that a Convert with trace amounts of frog DNA faces when trying to have a human sex life. At the onset of their relationship, Gretchen was excited by the assumption that Fred would be an expert at using his long tongue during foreplay. But she has since given up asking for oral sex. Apparently, even as a Convert, too much tongue activity will activate the mucus gland, which then produces the sticky substance that coats frogs’ tongues to assist us in catching our food. This not only causes Gretchen discomfort but it disgusts her too. And, though Converts do breathe through their noses, about fifty percent of their oxygen is still absorbed through their skin. So Fred’s relationship is cuddle-less. Cuddling blocks his airflow. Certain sexual positions are dangerous to his breathing, too. All the romantic love-making and afternoons snuggling in bed that Gretchen dreamed of do not allow Fred’s skin to breathe. He nearly suffocated the first night he went home with her. When he mentioned that doggy-style, froggy-style, and woman-on-top were the only sexual positions he could tolerate, Gretchen threw a fit and said he was a dog just like all the other men she had dated. Fred chose to avoid sex with his partner rather than argue about the life and death logistics of it.

 More determined than ever to help Converts live happily ever after, Fred focused his energy those first few months on creating a strange, virtual world that exists inside, yet somehow beyond, the human world, in a place called the Internet. He refers to this world as “Converts United”. It’s a place where Converts can find other Converts in their areas and connect with them to offer friendship, support, and even love. He and local members of Converts United are working to organize rallies to raise awareness about the plight of Converts. Fred hopes to catch the attention of the government and ask for its help in setting up college scholarships, housing aid, and assimilation programs for Converts so they can have opportunities to be more productive members of society. Unlike natural-humans, when their love lives are falling apart, Converts don’t have the fleeting hope of hanging around ponds to find another frog to kiss into a human. Their lingering frog genes won’t work to transform a Convert who is still in frog form. 

Converts United has become the light at the end of many Converts’ tunnels. And through it, Fred found Mauve – a Convert-woman from a pond not too many miles from ours, who understands him and cherishes his ambitions. She makes him feel secure of his Convert-manhood and she needs to have sex in the same positions that he does. Fred visits Mauve’s pond and delivers messages from her to her family. He has promised her mother and father that he is going to put an end to the life of degradation that has befallen Mauve as a Convert. 

Mauve had always dreamt of a happily ever after and so, at every opportunity, waited with her head held high at the edge of her pond for an attractive, kind-hearted human to kiss her. Last Valentine’s Day, during the middle of the night, after the crowd had cleared and Mauve had gone un-kissed, an intoxicated female human stumbled over to Mauve’s lily pad and swooped her up. Mauve, having waited so long to be converted, was open to the idea of spending her happily ever after with a woman, even if same-sex couplings are taboo in the Convert world. But the human female who found Mauve did not feel the same. After their magical kiss, the ignorant human screamed in horror and went into a rage. She slapped Mauve’s newly formed face and kicked at her sore, shaking body, as though Mauve had done something wrong. After lashing out, the girl ran away. Not knowing what to do, Mauve stayed at her pond – naked by default – and some male humans passing through found her and had their ways with her in front of her entire community.

Ashamed, starving, and dressed in nothing but foliage, Mauve headed towards the city. Staying at the pond was not an option. Aside from the humiliation, her human stomach needed sustenance that could not be provided by the plant life and bugs in our environments. Most shunned Converts never find shelter among humans. Mauve found shelter right away, but I wouldn’t call that good luck. She lives with someone who makes her call him “Daddy.” He violates her every day and, for a fee, lets other men violate her, too. She told Fred she would get beaten if Daddy found out she was communicating with people outside the brothel. Now it’s been four days since Fred has heard from Mauve. After speaking to her twice a day for almost three months, he knows she is in trouble and thinks Daddy must have found out about them. 

If Fred or Mauve were poisonous, like I am, they would have an easier time getting rid of Gretchen and Daddy. Poisonous frogs who convert still carry traces of toxins with them in human form. Toxins are passed through the saliva and semen, making it that much more difficult for them to adapt in their new world. Animal species know I’m toxic because of my red body and blue legs. Their instincts tell them to stay away from me. Humans are the only species whose “instincts” tell them to kiss me. They find my colors irresistibly attractive. Kissing me won’t kill them, but it transmits enough poison into their systems to make their faces swell up for about forty-eight hours. However, in an entire day, I can sweat out enough poison to actually kill someone – which is what I am currently in the process of doing as I watch these pathetic frogs line up to greet these appalling humans this Valentine’s Day. 

My best friend, being the kind-hearted, non-violent guy he is, attempted to call the cops on that bastard Daddy before taking action into his own hands but the cops don’t take Converts seriously, seeing as how they make up a big portion of the imprisoned and homeless populations. And the cops know Fred is a Convert because Gretchen was required by law to register him as  such when she brought him into the human world. I think we should administer some poison to Gretchen, too, but Fred insists she hasn’t done anything that warrants murder. Frogs haven’t either, yet humans sometimes stomp us to death if we don’t convert for them.

Fred will be by later to collect the poison I am secreting, and we’re going to find this Daddy character. We have enlisted the help of a few of Fred’s new friends – guys he met through Converts United. They will show up at the brothel, pretending to be customers, and proceed to find Mauve and Daddy. When Daddy is located, he will be injected with my poison and left to die. Mauve’s sister and brother will accompany us too. They will help me create a diversion if necessary. 

There hasn’t been a Convert success story yet. But there’s Fred and Mauve. Despite unfathomable obstacles in the human world, they have managed to find love and are working diligently to equalize and empower a minority population of humans. They may be in the midst of creating a true-life fairytale. 

Yve Chairez is a Chicana writer of mainly feminist speculative fiction and experimental nonfiction. Her work has recently been featured in VoidSpace, Roi Faineant, and The British Fantasy Society’s Writing the Occult: The Fae series. Her travel column for Horror Tree will debut in Autumn 2024, and her nonfiction micro-chapbook In the Name of the __ is forthcoming from Rinky Dink Press. Chairez lives in the Texas hill country with her family and their Sphynx. She teaches English at Texas A&M University - San Antonio.