He didn’t always catch the frogs, but went after them as often as he could. The pursuit would sometimes decay into laughter and splashing around, or rolling through the reeds as the slippery amphibians darted safely away from his distractions.
He didn’t want to hurt them, necessarily, but knew through his own addled observation that frogs ate grasshoppers – and that the grasshoppers were his only friends. The husky, coal-haired boy lost track of his foe when he heard a shout from up the hill.
“Roy! Come on back up to the house, child. You ain’t done chorin’ by a Texas mile.”
Roy waded to the bank and pulled some tangled weeds from his legs. Barefoot and dejected, he walked slowly back toward the shack he shared with his great grandparents. Summer sun pelted the their tiny tract of land: a meager parcel tucked between two sprawling farms, mostly the hand-hewn home and a dusty trough of a path from the back porch to the pond, which was technically over the property line.
Royal Rex Kingsley, born to a doe-eyed teenager who named him with neither comedy nor irony in mind, found himself being raised by a senile couple some seventy years his senior. He didn’t know where his mother went or who his father was, and in the decade he’d been alive, had barely considered such questions.
“I’m comin’ Gram, no need to holler.”
As he trudged toward the house, he stopped to pluck a grasshopper from an errant shoot of alfalfa, taking great care not to disturb the delicate purple blossoms, and tucked it gently into his breast pocket.
Climbing the stairs up to a crooked porch, where the old woman spent most days sipping unsweetened tea and trying to recall shreds of who she once was, Roy knew exactly what to expect. He grabbed the tin washtub from just inside the threshold, piled to the top with fabric he’d already folded, and lugged it out into the yard. She wouldn’t notice that none of it was wet, and couldn’t remember what happened since breakfast.
As he’d done so many days before, Roy pulled the clean, finished laundry from its container and slung it back onto the clothesline. He’d pretend to sweep inside again, take another empty basin to the make believe compost, and pull the clothes right back down, all to the disgruntled satisfaction of the idle old lady on the porch. His only real duty, as it was after every restless evening spent devouring pages by lamplight, was to organize the castaprophe of fantasy paperbacks strewn around his bed. Roy read them several at a time while his would be parents snored away. Three straw mattresses, side by side by side on the floor.
It had been eleven days since Gramp stood out on the road in his nightclothes, announcing a stroll into town for horse apples. They had no horse, and the tragic intersection they referred to as “town” was twenty miles away. Gram didn’t say a word, and hadn’t mentioned it since.
Roy finished his pantomime tasks and headed back for the pond grumbling under his breath.
“That hag. That crone. Wouldn’t know I was alive if it weren’t for the work. Prolly forget to eat.”
A few steps from the house, another frog flopped from the crabgrass and Roy stomped it without a whiff of hesitation. Upon contact with the calloused, unquestioning heel of the boy’s foot, the poor organism ruptured, spilling aqueous guts and dampening the path with amphibian viscera. The act of an exterminator, or worse, a murderer.
As he sauntered toward the water, the boy riffled his hands through the waist high weeds. A few grasshoppers bounced from the flora and clung to his legs. Then a few more. He laughed as they bounded onto his body, regaining the joy he regularly felt the further he got from the shack.
Wading into the scummy pond, Roy let the insects gather on his shoulders, more joining them with long leaps from the shore, and settled right back into his afternoon routine. He shuffled around, gathering fistfulls of mud and sticks to toss up on land, playfully batting at the little creatures hopping into his hair.
With sufficient material already starting to bake on the bank, Roy sloshed out of the water and gathered the pile into his slime stained arms.
At a perfect point on the pond’s edge, exactly opposite of the path, a tiny hill leveled into a plateau – the site of Roy’s ongoing project. The boy dropped his armload of muck and twigs, brushing a grasshopper from his cheek with a smile. He knelt and continued his work, piling and shaping the clumps with meticulous attention.
In a whir of winged fervor, Roy’s companions dissipated into the tall grass. Gram limped down the dusty rut in a rage. She hadn’t set foot off the porch in weeks.
“Ungrateful! Damn you, child! Damn you, Royal! Gone gone gone, they’re all gone! Everyone left you! Left me with you! Playing in the dirt when there’s so much to do!”
The old woman stumbled forward as the grasshoppers gathered around her ankles. She lurched toward the water’s edge as they hurled themselves against her back, encasing her torso and crawling onto her face.
The swarm undulated and jumped in unison, shoving Gram headlong into the pond. Thrashing in the algae, Roy’s tiny warriors pulled her under the surface to be trapped in the soft earth below.
On the little plateau, the boy proudly smashed the last bit of his creation into place and admired its tall, stick-spiked back, the curvature of the arms, the precise countour of its seat.
The only sounds across the field were gentle breeze and the quiet, syncopated flutter of jumping wings.
With a satisfied sigh, Roy ascended his muddy throne and gazed across the settling pond, lord of the grasshoppers at last.