CODA
There is an absolute stillness to the dusk surrounding those cedar trees as border the hotel’s little grotto, with not even flies hovering above the surface of its pond.
Suddenly upon the nearby grass, there is movement, even if at first indistinct and only peripherally visible: a single leather glove, so pale as to appear luminous, incongruously pristine, and moving seemingly of its own volition, imbued by magic or perhaps as if pulled along by an invisible thread, or pushed on forward by some unseen force.
Eventually the textured head of a large and elderly bullfrog emerges from the glove’s opening to assess the level of immediate peril,
cog: The scalpel is very sharp. Use discretion when you are cutting. There will be very little blood. There may be a few body fluids.
and having confirmed himself subject to no imminent threat turns now to gaze out across the lawn, regarding the hotel’s looming and twilit edifice, his eyes suffused with kindness and a curious melancholy.
Too, there is manifest within the relaxing of his face and the sigh audibly exhaled a welcome sense of relief: following his several previous attempts this is the first occasion he has arrived to find the pond’s surface not frozen over, affording him the opportunity to finally effect an obligation even he himself does not fully comprehend.
Dragging the glove closer to the water’s edge, he removes from around the bulbous folds in his neck a string, this threaded through a brass coin from which the gold-plate lustre has long since been abraded, and of which he had finally decided he has been the intermittent bearer for long enough.
Out into the air above the pond he tosses the coin, where it seems to hover indefinite and weightless; latent in the solemnity with which this ritual is transacted the notion Frog is returning some vital element to its source, which in a great many ways he actually is.
The splash, when it does come, announces itself incommensurately loud in the stillness, the coin scything back and forth beneath the surface as it descends through the murk before coming to rest among the submerged detritus as if ordained, landing face-up so that the words “YOU WILL SUCCEED” lie in visible proximity with the buckled Moosehead beer bottlecaps, a lone Canadian quarter, and the multiple crumpled profiles of John Fitzgerald Kennedy as decorate those foil coverings peeled from off chocolate coins and now half-buried in the sediment, themselves likewise long bleached of their any original gold colouring.
cog (as if reciting some ritual text): And thus are you returned to the pond...
Frog pulls tighter around himself the glove’s narrow opening, only now with his mission fulfilled acknowledging the drop in temperature, the adrenaline dissipate from throughout his bloodstream
cog (definitively): ..and rightly so, for when Fortune is our own to determine, a good luck coin must surely be the currency of madness.
sighing
cog: Still, I might hope to wish for...
hesitating for just that moment and then that moment longer, before again looking back up to the looming and brightly lit hotel, brighter still now in the evaporating twilight, wondering as he does which, if any, of those rooms he can see might have been momentarily hers, and which perhaps her last; too wondering if its current inhabitant could possibly have any idea whatsoever of all that had transpired, of those ripples extending myriad and concentric out and on out and across everything everywhere, before he turns this final time to begin again his long trek home, back to The Last Visible Dog.
