God is a Frog

When I come back to the island, I return to the decrepit barn on Alex McKlintock's land. Built a century ago, its skeletal remains stand in the shadow of Ben More. The sinister, dank stink of crumbling stone, rotting timbers, and peat moss is evocative of time’s passing. Cobwebs display themselves in grotesque mysteries in the three corners. The roof is caved in, a decomposed mass of timber under velvet moss and shattered volcanic slate. I look at myself back then, smell the moisture on my fingers, a concoction of soil, and the secret scent of eroticism. It would be simpler to tell in the third person, indifferently, so as not to offend my more mature morals. But I take the blame for what I’ve done. Each tender, misguided sortie explored is what I am today.

At thirteen years old, I’d go to the barn alone, a place to let the genie of my wants and dreams free, and known only to me. This one time I took a girl, Susan Rafferty. I remember she lived at the far end of the village, the only daughter of police officer, Jack Rafferty, and the girlfriend of Billy Harrison, the school bully. Two lads in class informed me Susan wore no panties under her school dress. Such silly indiscretions were then, and still today, the mindless occupation of a boy’s thought. It wasn’t true on the day Susan and I met at the barn. With the sun’s fingers stretching through the holes in the roof, and erotic intoxications spinning inside my head, I rolled with Susan in the soil. Life was not depraved so much as copybook interest. It’s hard to remember how I learned about girls, or even if it was Susan learning about me, but there in the soil we searched for answers.

One wonders now if thirteen was a little too tender age to learn much at all. In my innocence, I considered it a journey into courage, a secret place visited in the private moonlight. Susan tugged at my zipper and grabbed my penis, possessed by its silken skin and perplexing eye. Blinded, perhaps, never getting to see between Susan’s thighs. In the height of excitement, I speculated with the idea that God was a frog croaking His dismay in the sticky corner of our wrongdoing. It was rough play, lasting a couple of minutes. It seemed, well, exciting and mysterious. Susan left the village a year later, though I never touched her again.

I had taken my place among the erudite in a time of raging hormones, and a growing appreciation for the sculpture of the breast. Other boys knew nothing of the things I knew. I went to church with my parents on Sunday mornings and listened to the preacher tell about sins and other intriguing possibilities. After church, I was free to roam. I had to make a pledge not to dirty my ‘church’ clothes and be on time for lunch. Promised, then set free to roam. As hard as it is to describe freedom, it was the fields of wheat beside the yellow lanes that turned, buckled, and disappeared round curves on the way to the ocean. Come December the pale days and falling snow hid the lane, but I knew every inch by the twigs of life poking through the white sheet of winter. The barn on the top of the hill stands today like a gravestone against the sky, the cabbage-colored moss spreading itself between the cracks of its fallen stone walls. I found the love I searched for in that organic soil, but she, too, left my life as ruins, fallen.