Chapter 1: My Name is Pierre

Sorry for any spelling mistakes. I am typing this with my legs because yesterday the students were learning about the anatomy of my arms. Being dissected by teenagers is hard. What’s even harder is watching them inhale dangerous chemicals like formaldehyde, an ingredient found in some vapes.

Anyway, my name is Pierre. I am a frog. Well, more like half a frog at this point. Growing up I was just like any other frog, nothing too exciting. I was one of 400, so we had a pretty tight-knit family. We lived in a big pond at the end of a wide tree-lined stream. School was straight downstream from us, which my grandfather thought made us soft because he, “had to go upstream both ways” when he was a tadpole. Overall I had a very easy tadpolehood.

Chapter 2: Ensnared and Entombed

That all changed when I got picked up by strange men and shipped off to a mysterious building. It was pretty sweet at first. Free travel is every young frog’s dream after all. But then everything went black and I think a part of me ascended to froggy heaven. After I regained consciousness, my dream really started to become a nightmare. They poked me with lots of needles and pumped me full of formaldehyde, a preserving agent that left me forever trapped in my immobile husk of a body. I was trapped, frozen in the front row of my own dissection, all I could do was watch and scream, a silent, lungless scream.

After the procedure, I was put in a dark chamber. I’d lost the ability to feel anything, including time. Days passed. Maybe months. The chains of my formaldehyde-saturated body were the only things keeping me tethered to this plane. 

Then one day, I was moved. Wrapped tight in a bag and put in a box full of other frogs who had suffered a similar fate. I would feel bad, except the chemicals didn’t allow me to feel much of anything. When the box was opened, we were in a bright room. Dozens of teenagers surrounded us and we were snatched up like flies on a lily pad.

Chapter 3: Silent Descent

The knives came next. Bit by bit, the teens followed the teacher’s lesson plan. No amount of mental fortitude can prepare you for seeing your internal organs become external. My arms were yesterday. It was horrible. But not nearly as horrible as what the teens were doing when the teacher wasn’t watching. Vaping. Even in the polluted ponds, the ones without a single lily pad, tadpoles were taught about the dangers of using those vapes. Some contain the very chemical that had trapped me in time. Formaldehyde. 

I couldn’t say anything though, not even the smallest ribbit of a warning could leave my lips. I was trapped in my body, forced to witness people ingesting the same chemical that had doomed me to this fate worse than death. Why they would inhale this wretched chemical is beyond me. As my limited time left in this existence wanes, perhaps I will discover why, or perhaps I won’t. Tomorrow we learn about the brain, so it doesn’t quite matter.