A room full of goldfish

There comes a time in every frog’s life, especially if they are of a certain age and social standing, when they are expected to make a decision. They must forge forward from the comforts of the pool from whence they came to fulfil their Life’s Purpose. What the purpose of the Life’s Purpose is, no frog young or old, could tell you, and when questioned about it, they would mutter vaguely about the importance of ambition, the maintenance of the honour of frog society and how it was better to be fulfilling a Purpose than to be a denizen of a drain or a gutter. 

Victor was a young frog with all the usual accomplishments that were common among frogs of his generation. He was also strikingly coloured with skin the deep blue of an ocean trench streaked with iridescent violet ripples fading to a buttercup yellow towards the tail. But it was because he was an earnest young frog with a real desire to achieve his purpose, a naiad took pity upon him and decided to bestow upon him the promise that he would achieve any purpose he set his mind to.

With this in mind, he set to work on his grand plan of becoming a dancing frog. With dancing being a very prestigious profession in the amphibious world, it was a highly coveted and respectable position, requiring not only innate talent but also discipline, rigorous training, strength, and devotion to practice. 

With the naiad’s promise he succeeded in achieving employment. With his jewel-like appearance and self-possessed grace he was selected to become a music-box figurine. Everytime the box was wound and the heavy lid encrusted with precious stones lifted, he revealed himself with proud puffed chest, executing his rhythmic pirouettes, arabesque’s and pas de bouree’s with such extreme solemnity that his audiences could not fail to be charmed by his performance. 

The box was opened over and over again and delighted faces pressed close to the limber marvel of choreography within which never failed to perform on demand. Again and again they watched him twirl around his bejewelled enclosure. Only when the lid slammed shut again was he allowed to slump, exhausted but exhilarated to the floor of the box, always ready to spring up again for the next gang of excited watchful faces. 

The only gratification of the position was the pleasure of pleasing others, and of course the comfort of thinking that he was safe within the confines of the ornamental box.

It doesn’t take much to unsettle the delicate balance. There was the incidence when the music stopped playing, all of a sudden, through no fault of his. The angry impatient shouts was something Victor could never forget, as was the terror as his much larger audience picked up the box and shook it violently. Sometimes they would wind the music to play at an impossibly fast pace and jeer at him when he could not keep up. 

When he was not dancing, he would stare out of the little crystal apertures of the little jewelled box into the world without. He could not leave his glittering enclosure because, like any good musical box figurine, he had to be poised and ready for the next time the lid opened and the drowning music poured in, which could happen without warning. No chain or rope bound him to the velvet covered dias, no key or lock barred his escape from his container, and yet he stayed. He stayed and thought of how rain would sound on the surface if his home pond, of what it might be like to talk to other frogs, of what he might do if he were allowed to venture out of the box. But if he were to leave, he would lose his coveted position as the figurine of the box and be replaced by the hundreds of other young frog hopefuls who were vying for it.

And the world beyond was vast and full of broad lurking dangers. Outside, frogs might be eaten by storks or trampled on, or worse be unemployed and destitute. Far better to be in his glamorous cage then in uncertainty. We must not be ungrateful for the opportunities afforded to us even if we are not certain the outcome is entirely what we wanted. The gods do not favour ingratitude, and seem to enjoy in some measure the irony of success that brings even King Midas to his knees as he falls starving amongst his mountains of gold. 

Then, on one particularly busy watch, he glimpsed, at the corner of his eye, a small hand resting like a glove on the very boundary of the music box. He did not know where it had come from, or who it belonged to, or if it even was one of a pair. He was drawn to its’ calm, fleshy promise as it lay with mollusc-like innocence on the fringe of his suffocatingly windowless world. A sudden curiosity sprang up, he longed for the feel of it, of a texture that was not of his little box of demand and performance and repetitive, repetitive music. 

Tentatively he raised one webbed finger and stroked the back of it.

Immediately there was an indignant howl as the hand was reclaimed by a somewhat overplump child. Before reams of astonished, disgusted faces, the little dancing frog froze for a moment, his round dark eyes blinking rapidly, before he bounded lithely over his audience and hurled himself fast and far away from the music box as possible in what was possibly the only act of agility he had ever done that truly mattered. And ran.

In the real world, rain and hailstones pelted him till he bled, the sun’s hard gaze bleached him, the wind’s chastisements shrivelled him. By the time the naiad found him again, he was a jewel no longer. His once rich and varied colours had faded into a dull, cracked stoney grey. She knew him only by his pleading large, round unblinking dark eyes. 

She kept true to her Promise, she allowed him to die. It is said that the tears she wept as she cradled him gently in her hands formed a clear gemstone that she keeps as a reminder that escape from the prisons that we create for ourselves is always possible in one form or another.