The Anomaly

by Hervé Le Tellier

Three weeks earlier Betty escaped from the terrarium, where she must have been bored out of her tiny mind, despite the pretty, damp mosses, the gleaming green plants, and the round, gray pebbles that Sophia chose for her, plus the half a coconut shell that acts as a swimming pool, but most of all the very-much-alive black flies Sophia fed her when she came home from school. Sophia had put the terrarium on a low table near her bed, and every evening she would get up, huddled in a blanket, and whisperingly describe her day to the frog, which sat motionless under the greenery. What Sophia wanted was for Betty to be safe, and happy too, but mostly safe, sheltered from predators, that’s a word she learned, and she really likes it, maybe precisely because it sounds a little disturbing. But the frog escaped in spite of everything. She must have hopped around all over the place in search of warmth and moisture before ending up there, on the floor below, against the lukewarm metal of the convection heater. She’d been hungry and thirsty and her skin had cracked like the dirt in the yard when it hasn’t rained for days, until—frozen in death—Betty had become an ectoplasm of a frog.