Cocktails by Endo: Taro and Toad

“Once, when I was a kid, I was playing with an old toad on a little concrete street and my granny called me in for lunch so I covered him with some bricks. I made him a little brick house so he wouldn’t run away.” 

The last time he’d told this story was when his partner and himself were only just courting, and despite having heard it and its subsequent references endlessly, Toshi cradled his glass comfortably as he leaned in to hear it. The attention from his lover only encouraged Endo to be more grandiose with both his description and gesture. After all, he was nothing if not fueled by attention, especially from people who were way out of his interpreted league. 

“Little did I know that what I actually made,”

A pause, brief enough to sound natural, planned enough to sound rehearsed, “was an oven. That’s literally what ovens are.” 

Endo’s small audience had their reactions: Nori muttered an “oh, no…” while Toshi offered his unintentionally stern look of concern. 

None of it pushed Endo to console the victims of his tale as he continued his story. 

“So li'l ole me goes in and has lunch. I drink my tea and eat my rice balls and even have my favourite taro dessert. Boy, granny treats a kid nice. I come back out, I ain’t got a frog anymore. I got a fuckin’.”

He waved his hands in a grasp for something more eloquent than, “crispy boy. Completely dehydrated. Rock solid. Frog chip.”

“Frog chip…” It was just a whisper of sympathy, certainly not to Endo but yet another of his victims of cluelessness. 

“I fuckin’ Auschwitz’ed my frog. So what's a kid to do? I found an old jar and filled it with water. frogs like water, right? it'll get him good as new. Plopped him in and waited for him to start moving around. Except he never started moving around. The fucker was dead floating.”

Toshi frowned. Of course, it was hard to say why. “You poor thing. It shows how kind you are to think only to save it as best you knew how.” 

“Well anyway, it wasn’t a frog the whole time. It was a toad after all. Dumb ass kid.”

“Crispy…” Nori muttered. 

“Yeah. I watched that jar for days, too, until it turned all cloudy and I poured it out. Wasn’t anything inside.” 

“It disappeared?” 

“Somethin’ probably ate it from its nasty toad water. That, or it disintegrated being that it was basically ash when it went in there. I was actually kind of sad.” 

Sweet Miki, who had come along for the ride when noticing Endo’s enthusiastic storytelling, chirped, “Poor sweet little Endo.” It was the last story he expected to gain sympathy over. 

“Well, it was more that I wanted to know where my frog went. For a long time I believed that he hopped away after getting watered.” 

“Like magic.” 

“That’s not magic, it’s perfectly logical! They probably have really minimally complicated systems maybe they could just bake a while and come back. Like those things- tardigrades!”

As so often was the case, the story derailed into affectionate banter over the logistics of something irrelevant, but between his rants, Endo sipped at his drink and found that life was pretty good to him. Despite all the toads, there were always people around to hear about them. 

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