Wanderlust & Wordplay | Life Abroad & Indie Storytelling

Wanderlust & Wordplay | Life Abroad & Indie Storytelling

Flash Fiction 📓

Scars and Frogs

Balancing Malevolence with Unexpected Discontent

Gillian Fletcher
Feb 08, 2025
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This piece challenges our ideas of good and evil with a quirky twist. What does the balance between light and dark feel like to you?

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People don’t like to talk about me, but they’ll listen to a singing frog.

No, not the song with the banjo, although I hate that one, too. No, the one I’m talking about is where he’s sitting in a farmyard complaining about being green? Try being mean, motherfucker, just once! I dare you, you little amphibian bastard! I guarantee you’d find it even harder than riding a bicycle or dating a fully-grown pig…

Everyone likes to despise me and, over the millennia, I’ve gotten used to being a pariah. I’m not complaining, I understand my place. What most of you never seem to comprehend is that I don’t want to be here, I have to be here. That’s how it works when you’re a force of the universe. And since nothing you can say or do will change a bit of it, go fricassee a frog, why don’t you?

Most people like to seek out happiness, they seek to horde and luxuriate in it. It’s natural to prefer things that feel good, of course. They take pictures of sunsets and their plates in restaurants; they record grainy videos of the darkness at a concert and of groups doing synchronized dances. They make little memories that prove to them that they are happy.

They do all these things to try to ignore my existence.

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