Chapter 10: Close Encounters of the Human Kind

Andy was headbutting a grub out of a rotting log when he heard the footstep.

Not felt it. Heard it. His rudimentary auditory system picked up the compression wave of something heavy striking the ground. Close. Getting closer. Heavier than anything that had walked past this log before.

He froze. The grub, half-extracted from its burrow and dangling from the tip of his horn like a particularly unappetizing ornament, wiggled in the air between Andy’s face and the log. His eyes, blurry but functional, oriented toward the source of the sound and resolved a shape that made his entire body go rigid with a recognition so deep, so instantaneous, so fundamentally human that it bypassed every intervening layer of amphibian biology and hit the consciousness underneath with the force of a truck at an intersection where the signal was green.

A person.

A person.

Two legs. Two arms. Upright posture. Features arranged in the configuration that Andy’s brain, despite three tiers of non-human existence, still recognized as “person.” They wore clothing (clothing! Fabric! Artifacts of a culture that made things!), rough-woven and practical. They carried a fishing rod. A fishing rod meant society, and Andy had been living in their fishing hole his entire aquatic existence without knowing it.

Hands.

Andy stared at the hands with the desperate focus of a man in a desert staring at water. Five fingers on each. Articulated. Dexterous. Capable of all the thousand small manipulations he had not performed since dying. The person shifted their grip on the fishing rod and the fingers moved, flexed, adjusted with casual, thoughtless competence, and the sheer mundane miracle of it made something inside Andy’s amphibian chest ache with a feeling his frog body was not equipped to process.

He missed being a person.

He had known, abstractly, since his first moments as a cell. But knowing it and seeing it were different animals (a phrase that landed differently when you were, yourself, a different animal). Seeing a real person made the loss concrete. The destination had been theoretical. Now he was seeing it. And the gap between a nine-centimeter frog with a grub on his horn and a person with hands and a voice and a place in the world had never felt wider.

The person hadn’t noticed him yet. From their perspective, the shoreline was rocks and moss and the occasional amphibian. Part of the scenery.

Then the grub on Andy’s horn wiggled, and the person’s gaze dropped to the log, and they saw him.

The reaction was immediate and, from Andy’s perspective, mortifying. The person’s eyes widened. They leaned closer. Their mouth moved, producing sounds too complex for Andy to decode. Speech. The person was speaking, and the sound of a human voice lit up regions of his consciousness that had been dormant since he died.

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The person reached for him.

Not with malice. With curiosity. The careful “let me pick that up” gesture that Andy had performed a thousand times at the vet clinic with patients who were scared and small and did not understand that the giant meant no harm.

He was the patient now. The small, scared creature on the log. And the giant reaching for him had no idea that the small scared creature had a human consciousness, a rare horn chain, a complicated relationship with the concept of virginity, and a very strong preference for not being put in a jar.

Andy bolted.