Due to the weird formatting that occurred during the previous post of htis excerpt of my NaNoWriMo, I'm re-posting here. Hopefully free of weird characters showing up in weird places, like a bad Comedy Central re-run.


Wart the Frog

Preface


As you may have noticed, this story does not begin with, “Once upon a time.” Stories that begin with “Once upon a time,” are ordinary fairytales, and this fairytale is anything but ordinary. There will be no beautiful princesses, no chivalrous knights, and not a single fire-breathing dragon. There will be no daring rescues, and there certainly will not be any romance. There will, however, be a frog. If you’re wondering to yourself why you should continue reading a fairytale that does not contain beautiful princesses, chivalrous knights, and not even a single fire-breathing dragon, then you have seen one too many dreadful cinematic ventures—dreadful cinematic ventures, meaning here, the kinds of movies that are chock full of ordinary and predictable characters and plotlines. If you happen to enjoy the ordinary and the predictable, then I inform you honestly that you should put down this book and choose another that will cater more to your tastes—catering to your tastes here means: corporations commercializing dreadfully ordinary tales but including dance numbers to make them slightly less ordinary. There are also no dance numbers in this book, and so if you enjoy a raucous good time every now and again, I advise you to turn on the radio and do the Twist whilst meandering through the pages of this story.


Wart is the hero of this story, and he is a frog. Wart was an unlikely hero, I’ll admit, but a hero he was nonetheless. He was small by human standards, since the average height of human beings is five-feet eight-inches, and since Wart was by no means five-feet eight-inches tall, in human terms he would be considered small, but by frog standards he was quite large—large here being meant in stature, and not in portliness. Wart was large, about the size of a pumpkin some used to say. However, sizes and shapes of pumpkins nowadays vary drastically, so drastically, in fact, that those some who lived long ago, but are now dead, would never have believed the size pumpkins can now achieve through fertilization and bio-engineering. And so, I am afraid, their notion of pumpkins has been lost through the ages, and we will never truly know the size of Wart. Although we may not know Wart’s true size, I can impart upon you the color and texture of his skin. Wart’s name, Wart, suggests an amphibian muddy in complexion and pimply to the touch, something more toad-like than frog-like, and anyone who knows their herpetology will know that toads and frogs are completely different species. However, someone who does not know their herpetology will honestly observe that toads are just not as pretty as frogs. Frogs are smooth, sometimes speckled with different colors, and sing beautiful songs with ukuleles. Toads are nasty creatures that burp instead of sing with musical accompaniment, and they are full of bumps, zits and warts. And therein lies the dilemma, for Wart was not a toad at all, but indeed a frog.


Wart was green. Sadly, this description is seriously lacking and is a horrible ambiguity because the shade of green comes in many different varieties. Was he more olive green or neon-electric green? Was he chartreuse or sea foam? Was he the kind of green that looked almost brown or was he the kind of green you’d find in a box of crayons? Unfortunately, we will never know. However, I can tell you that he was bespeckled, and it said that the colors of his freckles upon his speckly back were diverse in color, ranging from warm gooey purples to sunflower seed yellow.


Wart loved to sing. He was a member of the East Valley Choir, which was renown in its time for being the second best choir in all the land, the land back then consisting of the North Kingdom, the East Kingdom, the West Kingdom and the South Kingdom. He sung dragon rhymes, lullabies, and sea shanties but he chiefly enjoyed showtunes, the “Copa Cabana” being rumored to be his particular favorite.


And so now, dear reader, you know as much as I know about our beloved amphibious hero. He was large. He was green. He loved to sing. And he was a frog.


Not a toad.


Chapter Two

In Which There Will Be No Beautiful Princesses


Wart was hopping, not walking, through a magnificent meadow while humming a dragon’s rhyme that he had learned during his stay with the East Valley Choir. Wart was hopping, and not walking, because frogs only walk for four reasons: 1) When they are trying to be sneaky, because walking is less noisy and less squishy than hopping 2) When they are moving across a slippery surface, because walking is less hazardous to the frog’s tushy 3) When they are in a hurry, because each hop a frog takes is at least three times as far as he can take a single step, which makes hopping a frog’s equivalent of running and 4) When they are trying to look superior to toads, because it is a well known fact that toads are incapable of walking, which means toads make horrible thieves with their inability to be sneaky. And so Wart was hopping on this particular occasion because he was in a hurry because he was on his way to visit his family near Lilypad Lake.


Wart thought the meadow in particularly magnificent because the sun glinted off the brilliant blades of shimmering Spring grass not unlike the way the sun glinted off his own shimmering green skin. Once Wart reached the peek of a small hill—small hills to humans are regularly usually quite mountainous to creatures of the amphibious persuasion—the beauty of the magnificently green meadow was interrupted by the presence of a princess and an ox cart.


The girl was clearly a princess, as evidenced by the pearly white crown that crested above her mounds of gnarled hair. The crown shimmered in the light, not unlike the way the light had shimmered on the blades of grass, or over Wart’s smooth bespeckled skin, and so Wart could not help but notice the girl’s royal affiliation. The princess’s hair was the color of sun-ripened wheat, but anyone who has grown up on a farm knows that wheat is not a particularly beautiful color. In fact, wheat generally has a dirty brown tint to the otherwise perfect yellow. Wheat is fine in a field, and it is fine food for horses and cows, and it makes a fine nest for chickens, but wheat is not particularly a color one desires their hair color to be.


What made Wart stop in his tracks, though, was not the surprise of an ironic picture of royalty standing next to an ox cart. What stopped Wart in the middle of a hop was the princess’s nose. Her nose was not really a nose at all, but rather a piggish snout. None of her other features seemed to be particularly hoggish in appearance. Just her snout. But still, Wart did not consider this princess to be beautiful.


“How are you this fine afternoon, your highness?” Wart asked, speaking loudly to ensure that his voice would reach the human’s ear.


The princess looked down her wrinkled snout at the frog and turned the folds of skin creating the snout up in disgust. “I have no time for toads today,” and with that she turned her back to him, the folds of burgundy skirt near slapping Wart in the face.


“I am Wart the frog, madam. I am clearly not a toad, as you can see I am capable of walking, it is an achievement of which toads are incapable.” Wart took several steps, strutting about the peek of the hill in order to demonstrate his point.


Entertaining the idea that this toad—or frog, rather—might be an enchanted prince, and of course not wanting to be too impolite, she replied, “I am Sophia the Plump. Are you an enchanted prince who has been turned into a toad?”


It took much effort, but Wart managed to roll his bulbous eyes on top of his smallish head. “Witches never turn princes into toads. It was Proposition * that was passed after last year’s elections. The royal families were upset that they seemed to retain the pimply after-effects after being turned into toads. So now, witches are only permitted to transform royalty into frogs. As you can see, the skin of frogs is smooth and more befitting of royalty. Besides, frogs are the more noble of the amphibious species, don’t you agree?”


“Are you an enchanted frog then?” The princess’s beady black eyes were taking on a greedy, porcine quality that Wart had previously overlooked.


If frogs could sigh, then Wart did. “No.”


“Art thou lying to me? If I throw you against this ox cart, you will turn into a handsome prince! I remember the tales!”


Wart had never heard of a story that involved throwing frogs, or toads for that matter, against ox carts. He had heard from a cousin who had been mistaken for an enchanted prince, and the princess made a habit of kissing his cousin on his thin, green lips every morning. His cousin quickly switched lily ponds. But still, he had never heard of—


Before Wart could complete another thought, the snout-nosed princess seized him and threw our defenseless amphibious hero into the side of a wooden ox cart. Sophia the Plump had thrown him as hard as she could, and although her name implied lazy flesh, she packed a mean wallop—wallop, here suggesting, a dastardly fa-lump resounded when Wart’s pumpkin-sized body impacted the side of the cart.


The frog slid down the side of the cart, contracting several splinters along the way. “You didn’t change!” Sophia the Plump shrieked. She was amazed that her plan hadn’t worked, and quite the misinformed plan it had been. Since she had no more use for him, Sophia turned her portly back and quickly stalked away, and the magnificent meadow’s beauty returned intact.

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