Mouth wide open

Last night, when I was out driving with a friend, we almost hit a frog. Or maybe we did hit the frog. They have no traffic sense in their heads, whatsoever. They’re like demented two-year-olds.
But moving right along… It got me thinking of when I was a kid. Mum would take me and my little sister up into the mountains every year, where we’d park near a large pond. There would always be tadpoles there, and we’d always catch some of them in jars and bring them home. Of course, they would all die relatively quickly. Tadpoles weren’t meant to grow up in jars and live off of bread crumbs, now were they?
Except one year… There was this one little creature, which probably had super-strong genes, or something, that made it all the way into frogginess. I called it Frog (because I was a very inventive child) and it lived in the windowsill, in its little jar.
One day, Frog’s legs had finally become strong enough for it to leap all the way out of its jar. Oh joy. As luck would have it, my grandparents were visiting us at the time, and grandpa was sleeping on the sofa underneath that very window, mouth wide open and snoring like a rabid wildebeest.
Frog braced itself, leaped out of the jar onto the windowsill, and from there it jumped on into freedom – and into my grandfathers open mouth. Easy come, easy go, I guess. Grandpa, who mastered the art of sleeping like no other human being alive, made an odd sort of a snore-gobble-snore sound without even stirring and eyelid. Frog was never seen or heard from again.
What was heard, however, was my grandmother screaming. She’d been awake and had caught the whole show. The screeches she produced upon seeing poor little Frog vanish into grandpa’s open mouth, was enough to wake the dead. It was certainly enough to wake grandpa.

That was the last year that mum took us to catch tadpoles. Of course, if she had just let us have some tadpoles every now and then, she would have avoided that whole mess with the mosquitoes. But that’s a story for next time:)