A Melancholic Lullaby
Calvin Mills
The water in my mother-in-law’s pool was a ferocious algae-green when I’d first seen a handful of them coming up for air. I was skimming loads of decrepit leaves—black on one side, silver on the other—from the bottom. That was the day we arrived. The stuff that came up in the skimming net smelled awful. “Death warmed over”, my wife said. That day my mother-in-law was wearing a pink scarf tied around her head.
After reading the instructions on a plastic bucket, I threw something called “shock” into the pool. I broadcast the pale granules, stalked along the tile perimeter, shaking the stuff into the water. I felt like Jim Jones with so much powdered drink mix. Then there was the plastic jug—not unlike the kind I keep in my car in case I run out of gas. This one, though, was full of liquid chlorine. In went the entire contents. “The whole thing?” I asked, my voice nasal against the fumes.
“Yes, the whole shebang,” my mother-in-law said, standing just inside the barely open sliding glass door. I saw her clutching her nightgown around her neck. She was wearing a paisley scarf now, purple on light blue.
That evening the surface was peppered with thousands of tadpoles, armless, legless, still as leaves. I skimmed them out. They were gray and scummy around the edges, already decomposing in the Florida heat. I was dripping with sweat.
They found it again in December. The chemo started right away this time. She was candid with my wife. Around me, she kept the scarves on, stayed in her room until she drew on eyebrows. She didn’t allow me to see her without the scarf, but she forced her own son and daughter to—probably hoping to help them come to terms. I had lost my mother to cancer just one year before. I had already come to terms with what was happening here.
The pool started going downhill six months before our visit. In that brief time hundreds of frogs had appeared as eggs, hatched into tadpoles, and morphed into adults. The adults, who had legs now, were able to scramble away when I came with the chemicals. The tadpoles couldn’t run.
When the sun set, the hundreds of frogs who’d escaped began to sing from the damp corners of the lush yard. For a while, I watched television to drown out their music. But when I finally lay on the sweat damp sheets in my mother-in-law’s spare room, I was forced to hear their mournful songs. Before long I was delivering silent apologies they would never hear.
Still, the frogs sang on late into the night. They sang on and on until their awful lullaby carried me off to sleep.
Calvin Mills hosts the Raymond Carver Podcast. He is the author of The Caged Man (Stories), forthcoming from Cornerstone Press (2025). A Handful of Tragic Days, a chapbook of creative nonfiction essays is also forthcoming (2024). His work has appeared in Short Story, Weird Tales, Tales from the South, and Short Form Creative Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology.
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