Pedro Eler is 23 and live in Petrópolis, which is a small city in the mountain area of the state of Rio de Janeiro. He recently got his BA in Journalism from the University of Rio de Janeiro and is now waiting to see how his writing career will unfold.

The Fear of the Frog (April 20, 2011. Issue 27.)

Cocooned in a tiny little space at a corner of a busy street is a frog, red and wet, uttering undulating sounds, from high screeches to low groans, claiming the space with its weird song. It is decided to own the unknown, make it less scary, but it isn't sufficiently bold, so it remains isolated in a corner of the urban wasteland. A coward little thing, colored with passion but lacking any real bravery.

The fear is in it self a revelation, for it tells all about the essence of the frog. A frog is made for jumping, that seems clear, yet that frog would not move a single inch, its muscles undisturbed. What experience in that frog's past could have been so powerful as to prevent the discharge of such a natural movement?

There came a time when Martin understood that tiny frog's fear, in a moment of his life when he had that urge to conquer the world but his insecurity kept him from doing anything relevant.

All aspirations that ever inhabited the McHollers house had vanished to open room for practicality. Martin's folk had always been more indulgent towards pragmatics. His father because he saw nothing more to life than what he lived daily, and his mother because being a mother and a wife was all she had ever aspired to and once those were achieved, aspirations ceased to excite her.

Vacant of aspirations that house was. But there were other things. Ordinarily, there was order and organization, a domestic calculation that ruled daily errands and even conversations. Sometimes there would be the insurgence of something unexpected, but even those things were then received and tamed and brought to their rightful place of order and resignation. Anything you did was supposed to take into account the extent of the day, nothing more. The future was not something to be disturbed. Only out of a sense of duty did you wake up.

When Martin awoke in a particular morning of a snowy and extremely cold January morning, he was startled by something different. It was weird waking up to that smell, bacon and onions and black beans.

"What the heck?"

When he looked at the alarm clock he understood: it was midday. He was utterly, deeply ashamed. So ashamed that he almost lacked the courage to get out of bed and leave the bedroom. What would people think? It is one thing to wake up at midday if you are a teenager or if you are terribly ill. But he was neither. He was twenty-two, healthy, never having had a job and dragging his feet toward a worthless Journalism Degree for the past three years.

He couldn't stay in bed all day long, at least not without having to fake a disease, which at the time seemed like to much trouble over too little a humiliation. So he got up and left, his bedroom door opening into a hall that led to the kitchen. He was greeted with a big smile and a heart-felt good morning from his mother, a sweet tiny woman.

"Morning mom", he mumbled. "I don't suppose this is breakfast you're cooking."

She laughed loudly while mixing something, at the same time uncorking a big can of olives using her spare hand and the minuscule space between her chin and the base of her neck. He grinned at how perfectly the can's metal lid fit the space.

"Oh, are you hungry, sweetie?" she said, leaving the pans unattended for a minute as she moved closer to Martin.

"Well, I guess I am… but it looks like this will be ready in a few minutes so I don't see..."

"Oh, I'll be dammed if my boy will go hungry for even one minute", she responded immediately, grinning widely as she pushed into sight a tiny ladder she used to reach the higher cabinets that stood adjacent to the ceiling, on top of the large sink.

"No mom, really, it's not necessary. I don't want anything!"

She did not listen and went on to climb the ladder up to the last step, her whole upper body disappearing inside of the wooden structure, only her legs and bottom left outside, a jovial whistle always accompanying this routine of going through the food cupboards.

"Mom, forget it. I'm not hungry! I don't want to eat breakfast", he said.

Then she emerged from the cabinet holding a cereal box and a look of complete unawareness. "Did you say something dear?"

"I'm not hungry mom!"

"Oh, but yes you are! And look what I bought the last time I went grocery shopping? These are your favorites!"

Martin didn't even know what his favorites were but decided not to say anything. His mom was real sensitive to any kind of attack on her abilities as a housekeeper and, specially, a proper mother.

So he resigned, sat down, and allowed her to pour some of the cereal with milk on a bowl. "I know this is not enough but lunch will be out in a few minutes and you will be able to eat properly then, besides, look at the time you woke up honey!", she said.

He sighed. "Thanks mom!"

That was a weird thing about his mom: she was a nice lady, there was no doubt about that, and she was deeply devoted to her family and friends, but only in a domestic way. In order to really get through to her one had to force one's way past all of the cordiality that protected her. It was for that reason that Martin had the constant feeling that his mother only pretended to listen to what he said, as if she was isolated by motherly obligation to a place where she had no real say in anything that escaped its dominium. In fact, he could not even remember if he had ever had a real conversation with her, one that meant something outside of familial realm.

His father, on the other hand, was the exact contrast. He would never show any affection or cordiality, remaining as stolid as possible, which his mother would explain as traits of his masculine character. However, he was deeply engaged in his son's life, an irony only explained by the fact that his engagement never actually translated it self into affability. He asked questions and, most importantly, listened to all the answers, no matter how infantile they might seem. Also, to Martin, his father's composure and bravura had always been very impressive, a sign of a knowledge which he owned so thoroughly that it granted validity to everything he did or said. His wisdom was, however, put to test in tasks of everyday life, not in philosophic musings or spiritual considerations.

The fact that his mother and his father so deeply completed each other, one possessing the characteristic the other so blazingly lacked, was the reason why Martin had endured. Had he not had his mother's care and affection he would not have survived his father's coldness. Had he not had his father's intellectual engagement and wisdom he would not have survived his mother's fussiness. But now, at the age of twenty two, he felt he had endured enough. As he finished his cereals and watched his mother prepare a lunch he would be eating in a few minutes, he decided it was time to claim a life for himself, one he was entitled to. Whatever it was that owned him in that moment it was enough to create an urge that both scared and eluded him. As far as he knew it could be either transient or perpetual, but it presented a route out, and only when he understood the route's existence did he come to understand how much he needed it.

As the days passed, Martin nurtured the need and contemplated the route until he could no longer keep himself from exploring it. And then one morning he got out of bedand he was ready to get into motion.

"Where are you going, sunshine?" was the first thing he heard the minute he put his feet outside his bedroom.

"Oh, hi there mom…"

"You sure took a long time on the bathroom today huh?", she said, half smiling, half frowning. "Why are you all dressed up? Where are you going?". Martin was wearing a jacket over a nice dress shirt, something as quotidian as eclipses of the sun.

He didn't say anything, just stood there as his mother readjusted every fold of his jacket.

"Is it a girl? It's a girl, isn't it? I mean… you look so good!", his mother said, her eyebrows curving down but her smile spreading. "I hope she's a great girl. Only a great girl could ever deserve you!", and then she chuckled and grinned and grimaced, almost all at once. His mother was like that, capable of a thousand different facial expressions in an incredibly small period of time.

"No mom… it's not a girl!"

"Ok, ok… if you say so," and she blinked at him, a signal Martin struggled to understand. "Well, anyway, whatever it is you should wait a little while. I'll have breakfast ready in no less than two minutes."

"Mum…" he was going to protest but decided to resign himself to eating the breakfast. Because his household was steeped in resignation he had allowed him self to drain some of it. The only problem being that resignation is kind of fine after you've turned forty and gotten married and had kids and found your self a career (therefore the resignation that soaked his parents was not evil). That's OK then because you have something to resign yourself to. How can you resign yourself to sleeping all day on a bed you didn't buy in a house you do not own? Well, Martin had never made this judgment before anyway, because had he done it, he would not have owned his resignation as thoroughly as he needed to in order to find himself so utterly lost.

The real problem were the prospects. Or the lack of any. How can you sum up an idea of a life when you are so strongly devoted to the fear of living it? And the bottom line was that Martin was in some sort of displacement, as if his place in the world hadn't been discovered yet, hadn't been carved for him. And that was scary, creating a fear that geared Martin's stillness and resolution.

But now he was almost finishing college and a career prospect was becoming more and more bulging. He would have to find a job, he would have to amount to something, he would have to find a purpose to his degree, he would have to find a way to make money, have to, have to, have to… "have to go out today honey?", his mother was looking at him amusingly.

"Do you really have to do that? Because the guy on the radio was just talking about this big repair thing going on at the highway and that traffic is horrendous!"

Only then did he realize that his mother was actually talking to him, and not around him.

"Horrendous! Honey… I don't know… it just sounds like a lot of trouble to go through just to see a girl…"

"Mother, I've told you already. I'm not going out to see a girl", Martin uttered.

His mother looked relieved to hear that statement one more time. "Well, what is it then?"

"I'm going out to look for a job", he said, the words surprising him almost as soon as they left his mouth.

His mother looked at him with distinctive shock on her face. Then she frowned and rubbed her hands on her cheeks and her look was one of deep worry. Then she laughed and tilted her head for a while. "A job? Oh honey, that's… fine, I guess".

Great, even she knows it's a ludicrous idea, Martin thought.

"It's a great idea!", she said as she served him breakfast. "But do you need to do that today of all days? I mean, didn't you hear about traffic. Jobs will always be out there, so why spend hours in traffic to do something that you can do tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow?"

"And where are you going to find a job?", his father said, suddenly appearing in the kitchen wearing his morning robe and holding a Graham Greene paperback on his right hand.

"Well… I'll kind of see how it goes and…", but there was nothing to say.

"Job's just don't sprout from the ground, not in this job market. So… it's a good thing that you are going out to find them. Nevertheless, a strategy must be developed!", his father actually spoke like that, as if a news camera was on him all the time, everyday.

No one answered to that. Martin's mother had fleeted the scene as soon as she heard the word nevertheless. Martin himself was trying hard to somehow conjure aresponse, think of possibilities, maybe even fathom the eerie meaning of the expression "job market".

"Have you thought about where you might go to ask for a job?", his father eventually said, as he laid his Graham Greene aside and filled a big cup with black coffee.

Martin then decided that as long as he was going to play with this whole job thing he could embark on it full-heartedly. So he answered his father with a confidence that not even he could doubt.

"Yes, I'm going to ask for an internship position at one of the city's newspapers."

"Well, that sounds good, son. Just don't accept an unpaid internship!", his father said.

"Well, maybe father. It's just that the thing about internships is experience and everything else."

"I don't care about that. It's not fair for someone to work for no money. Being paid accordingly to the worth of your professional activity is the basis of our entire work ethic. And what's the point of working for no money, anyway? It's just a big waste of time!"

"Well, I guess I kind of agree", Martin said, the idea of making some money sounding awfully good.

His father took a long big gulp of his black coffee, steam rising from the fringes of the cup, his eye's penetrating them to scrutinize Martin. Then he opened his Graham Greene and before immersing into it said "OK, what are you waiting for?"

It took Martin a few seconds to answer the question. The fact that he wasn't waiting for anything and had nothing to wait for made it incredibly hard to answer the question. "I guess the traffic. Mother said it's horrible and…"

"Traffic is always horrible", his father whispered before loosing himself entirely into his book, and Martin knew that once that happened there was no point in trying to continue a conversation. His mother was somewhere else, doing something domestic and motherly. And he was stuck for a while but then felt intimidated by his father's last question. What are you waiting for?

It made him move. Move through the kitchen door, out of the house, into the street, onto the world. Move.

A frog doesn't move systematically or slowly. Its progression is slow though. It takes forever for a frog to go from one place to another, but movement itself happens in a second, in a moment of impetuosity and release. In a corner, a red frog is terribly still. Nothing in him moves. Suddenly, it jumps. It flies, in a stroke, in a rush through the air.

Its charge is courageous and alarming. And then it reaches the ground and once again it becomes paralyzed. If you look closely at it there are no symptoms of the past movement, of the amount of courage the red thing had to muster just a few seconds before, of the bravery and the heart of the jump, what it represented, what it meant. Now it is just a red frog, cocooned and afraid once again.

Martin stood still. He didn't know how to navigate in the city. He didn't know how he had gotten there in the first place. Not really, not consciously. He remembered getting out of the house and into the bus, and then everything was mixed up and in his head it made no sense. He was now standing in a busy street, that was all he knew, his T-shirt was wet with sweat, his eyes were burning and he was lost.

He saw the faces of the people surrounding him, going up and down the street, some in a hurry and others taking their time, and they all looked so purposeful, each step filled with meaning and not just an empty movement required because of the tide of the crowd. Martin knew that something eluded him now. Some sense of purpose that he had been mustering for days. The patronizing look on his mother's eyes. The stony demand of his father's voice. The same old room and the same old walls. But now he was paralyzed once again. The streets were chaos and in them Martin found no answer.

In an attempt to locate himself he spun his head around, and at once several things hit him. The blazing light of the sun striking from somewhere above, in the middle of all those huge towering buildings. Faces crossing in fast succession, none singular. Many sounds, none identified, all just a huge everlasting havoc. And suddenly there were black spots, and the ground moved under his feet as if made of jelly, and then there was the sidewalk, black and white pebbles.

"Oh good grace of God, this kid is so white I can see right through his skin", was the first thing Martin heard after the collapse. The wrinkled face of an old black woman laughing was the first thing he saw. Her face was a deep brown and her hair was incandescently white, and her smile crossed her face from one side to the other.

"Are you alright, dear?", the woman said, staring into his eyes. Then she was smiling again and saying "God, he looks downright crazy! Ha-ha!".

"I'm… who're you?"

"Well, who am I? Who are you my boy? You look desperately lost!"

"I… I was trying to…, you know, and then I spun and everything else spun and…"

"Spun? How're you feeling?", she said as she held her arm forward for Martin to hold on to. As soon as he touched her sleeve she grasped him strongly and pushed him up with surprising strength. Martin looked at her in awe and then lowered his eyes.

"Fine. Thanks. I'll just get back on my way to…"

"To?"

"To…"

"Good grace of God, aren't you a poor little thing."

"Sorry?", Martin grunted, sounding more harsh than intended but still offended by her comment.

"Hum. Mad, are you? I'm sorry, but it takes no more than a few seconds of looking at you to understand that you are clueless."

"No ma'am", he said, trying to go back to a polite tone, still avoiding her eyes.

"I'm just a little bit… flabbergasted."

"Ha-ha! You're clueless."

"That too, perhaps."

"OK, so, where are you going?"

"I don't really know", he said, and then he looked around only to realize that he was in the same unfamiliar street, the same unknown faces, the same undiscovered corners.

"Ha-ha! It's a tough world, little frog! A tough world!", she said, and then she turned her head abruptly and left, quickly disappearing into the crowd before Martin could say anything else.

He stood there for a while, still completely clueless and thinking about the toughness of the world. Somebody bumped into him and he was pushed forward, but then he saw something that made him stop immediately. In a corner of the sidewalk where nothing moved and no one bothered to look, a tiny little frog stood still. But there was no way that Martin could have missed it, because even though this tiny little frog was as paralyzed as a tiny leaf unbothered by the wind, it was so blazingly red that once you spotted it there was no way to go on ignoring it.

Martin walked towards the frog. People stumbled on him, but that didn't remove Martin's attention from the little red reptile. He moved forward as if under a spell, fascinated, hypnotized.

The frog had chosen a place for himself under shade and where there was some water accumulated. Filthy, brown water. There was no wind in that corner. And every step someone took sent vibrations through the ground that shook the frog inside.

Outside he remained motionless. Martin bent down and lowered his head, his nose only a few inches away from the red thing. Normally he would be afraid that at any moment the frog would jump and land on his face. But somehow his fear was purged by the frog's own fear. He wondered about it, or why it was so frozen? It was not fear itself that kept that frog paralyzed. It was strangeness. It was the knowledge that as a creature from nature it had a place for itself in the world and that place was not a corner of a busy street. In nature that frog would not know everything in fullness. But at least in nature that frog could move under the certainty that that place belonged to him, that he was not alien or strange, that even the lack of complete knowledge could be balanced by the intensity with which the frog owned his savagery.

A red frog at a corner of a busy street in a big city. People and cars pass by, the ground is made of cement and the sky is hidden in the middle of gigantic buildings. A red frog dies at a corner of a busy street in a big city. It dies of hunger and of fear. Fear to move, fear to hunt.

A young man at a corner of a busy street in a big city. A young man crouches down and whimpers a weird cry. A man becomes a frog. A man closes his eyes and a man is a frog. A man is in a shaded forest. The sun shines high above but its rays only reach the leafy ground in scarcity. The wind moves through the trees as if knowing its route ever since the creation of the world. Thousands of years. Leaves fall from the trees, but not in a hurry. They touch the ground seamlessly. A frog is in that forest. At a corner, crouched.

A frog jumps in a leaf at a corner of a forest. A frog spots a mosquito. A frog releases its long tongue. In a split second the mosquito is gone and the frog is chewing.

It's a tiny little red frog. But it jumps again, and again, and again. Every jump leads to a new place, unknown before. But in the forest that frog jumps undaunted, in the forest it is completely entitled to be exactly what it knows it is supposed to be. In the forest a frog is.