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I could see the reflection of my lights in his eyes, making the flecks of gold come to life.
Lifting my hands over my head, the lights rose from my palms and shot up like tiny fireworks, swirling into the night sky like a tiny flurry of lightning.
The lights went high up into the treetops and then vanished, leaving us in the darkness once again.
“So. What was that all about?” he asked, his face still angled to the sky.
“I was saying hello.”
“You don’t say hello to me like that.”
I smirked. “I usually know where you are, because you’re usually with me. This is a long-distance calling card. Sort of like a lighthouse sending its beacon out into the night sea.”
“Stop getting all poetic, you’re making me feel like I should have prepared a book report.”
I glanced around the treetops, trying to spot any lingering trail of the lights I’d sent out. They seemed to have vanished, but I kept catching the faintest hints of illumination through the branches. Those could have been my imagination, or they could have been actual fireflies.
“What do we do now?” He toyed with the string on the motor, ready to start the boat up again.
“Give it a minute. This isn’t as easy to gauge as something like a locating spell, where the beacon goes out and keeps going until it finds what you’re looking for. This is more like a hope and pray spell. She might answer, she might not. I just want to see if anything happens.”
We sat quietly, the choir of frogs reaching a crescendo in their operatic endeavors, before falling completely silent.
Everything was still, so quiet I could hear my heart beating and the faint intake of Wilder’s breath. Where the bayou noises had been eerie in their own way, this new cloak of silence was deafening.
A single frog croaked so close to us I almost jumped out of my skin.
Ribbit.
It was like an ancient door creaking in the breeze. I scanned the nearby shoreline, hoping it would make a sound again. It abided my wish. Ribbit.
I spotted the little dude sitting amid the roots of a nearby tree, his glossy black eyes shining. His throat swelled with another crackly moan. A small part of me dismissed it offhand. One frog among thousands was nothing to take note of.
One frog among thousands when the rest had fallen silent, though, was something to take note of. Especially when I’d just put out a hello, here I am beacon. Coincidence was one thing, but in my life I found it was very rarely the case of what was really happening.
“Hello, frog,” I said.
“Ribbit,” said the frog.
“Do you speak amphibian?” Wilder asked.
I shot him a look and turned my attention back to the frog. “Are, uh… are you here for me?”
The frog hopped a little closer, and I wrestled the canoe paddle out of the bottom of the boat and sank it into the water, pushing the boat towards the shore. As I performed this awkward ballet, the frog continued to stare at me and periodically croak.
The boat bumped up against the tree roots, and the frog took a few bold hops closer to me.
Yeah, no way a frog all the way out here, this far from tourist areas, would just come up to a boat of humans and be like, “Hey, what’s up?”
He hopped right past my arm and kept going, but would periodically pause to turn around and look back, as if to make sure I was following. I used the canoe paddle to keep us moving along in its path, never getting far enough behind to lose track of it in the dark.
Wilder had to think this whole thing was insane, but if he did, he was too polite to say anything. He had come all the way out here on this wild goose chase to meet a woman he couldn’t be sure even existed, after all. It would be pretty stupid for him to start pointing out how crazy this was now.
We were probably well beyond the point of him commenting on the weirder aspects of my life, anyway.
The frog continued to hop along until the tree line turned into an inlet, and there was a small, mossy area where I was able to pull the boat up to shore. At first it looked like any other part of the shoreline where you could actually set foot—something that was rare enough in the swamp—but then I noticed one of my little firefly lights.
I climbed out of the boat, my feet immediately sinking deep into the mucky debris on the shore, soaking through my socks.
