Seventeen: Leslie

She sat on the hard metal stool and cried softly.  The black lab table refused to absorb her tears, but let them instead pool individually, until there was a united states of black orbs spread across the edge of the surface.  The cloying stench of formaldehyde grabbed at everyone’s nostrils and threatened to live there forever, but only Leslie succumbed to the desperate act of tears.

Before each student was a tray, cork-lined.  They could have been the size of cake pans.  Upon each bed of cork lay a frog, preserved for all eternity, or at least until the end of seventh period Wednesday, when this lab would be over and the manner of voyeuristic experiments along with it.  Leslie’s frog’s front paws were clasped together.  The thing had been gassed, or drowned, or clubbed, or however the fuck they killed it, in the middle of a prayer.

As the students all listened to the teacher discuss I-flaps and pinning and the need for slow and steady, Leslie gathered together all the fragments of their lives (hers and the frog’s), that had led them to this point.  Just as a mirror shattered on the drive still has the potential to reflect some crazy skewed version in a thousand different shards, Leslie imagined the myriad steps and threads that had led her and the frog-monk to meet at this space and time.

Her father had left her mother when Leslie was three.  They moved to an apartment in Dallas instead of staying in Austin in the white house.  Leslie’s cat had once caught a frog there.  It could have been a relative.  Did they raise these frogs in a lab for kids to cut up?  They were all in a bucket marked “Laboratory Study”.  She could never work in a place like that, knowing that every life she upheld was only to bring it to its unavoidable death.

In a flash of intuition, Leslie knew what it was like to be God.  She gasped.  The teacher looked at her sharply.  Every couple of years a kid really wigged out during this lab and had to sit it out.  His hand reached toward the papers Leslie would need to complete the work sans corpse.  When she looked up and met his gaze, he thought for a second there was an irridescent glow surrounding her.

She picked up the tray and walked to the front of the room.  “I can’t cut open this frog,” she said reasonably.  “He was a priest.  May I have another?”

As the sax player in front snickered, the teacher pointed toward the white bucket on the floor.  Leslie gently laid her frog to one side of the teacher’s table, took another frog from the yellowish juice, and calmly went back to her table to work.  The teacher looked at Leslie’s frog, with its two paws frozen against its chest, and felt uncomfortably like he was spying on a private moment.