Frogs continued...

The frog hopped over to the lady and put his head on her splayed lap, dejectedly. "I'm sorry. I saw your husband in the street. You must have been beside yourself. I forgive you, dear. What have you gotten yourself into now?"

"Honey, I figured, if he's dead, I may as well.....""Dead? Heavens, no, dear. He's not dead! Just very, very flat. He was running amok. Something like a card. He's been through a lot, I tell you what."

He pulled her off the table, and she hopped, splayed, organs dripping, to the window, and looked towards the street. There was her husband, whom she had assumed was dead, who had recovered consciousness. He had a crazed look in his eye, and a tire track down his pulsing spleen.

She looked at her husband's best friend. Her eyes were wide, the whites at the top showing maniacally. Her big mouth was open, the tongue off to one side.

"I can't help it!" She bawled. "I love you! I always have! Hold me!"

He reached out tentatively to her skinless organs, the pins here and there at odd angles, the mucus and tear swollen face, the crazed eyes, and pulled his hand back again, as it was getting too close to the nasty food still stuck on her from the drain, and the nameless brown from the sewer.

"My husband can go wild for all I care, and I think he will. I can see him chasing women now, frog women everywhere. Everywhere."

"But he's flat as a card. In fact, he could be used as a kind of Tarot card. He could be infused with great obscure and occult meaning by a witchy woman some day, if anyone picks him up. He could be used very wisely to tell fortunes, as he is conscious as well as being flat. That's highly unusual, Miss."

"Well, do you want me or not?"

"Want you? You're my best friend's wife? What do you take me for? A closet luster? Let me take you home, dear."

She threw herself down on the floor, sobbing uncontrollably. "I might as well be a card too, then." She flung herself out the window, but her pins got stuck, so she was stranded in the air outside the laboratory. Her longed for lover carefully disentangled her, and tried to catch her before she fell three stories to the parking lot below.

She didn't really feel like moving.

A car ran over her.

She regained consciousness that evening.

When she did, she thought again about her ambition to be a card. She was a mature woman with ideals. She wanted to be a good card if she was going to be one. She meditated on what she would represent. She wasn't really sure, but kept asking her subconscious, and her Higher Self.

She got to Alpha brain-wave states easily, and was a firm believer in accessing the unconscious parts of the self. But nothing was coming. She induced the hypnogogic state of mind. She asked it the question.

As she lay there, on the asphalt, her subconscious bubbled forth. She started seeing visions, as her brain-waves slowed to the Theta level. She saw pink frog fat clouds, in the sunset, stippled by the sounds of crickets that synethesiacically moved the shapes of the fat clouds. She heard melodies she remembered vaguely from a music box from Prague. She felt more deeply, and saw that her worth was connected to her need for affection. Her worth as a female lay in being appreciated by another. By someone male. And otherwise, she was worthless. She saw before her, an ugly frog lady lurching along in her vision, unloved, forever, damned, torn apart at the end of her existence and thrown into nothingness. She saw herself as a card, picked up by a woman with a turban, a soothsayer, and she felt worthless. She saw herself picked up by a man in a suit, used for scrying, Crowleyesque ceremonial magic, or John Dee-like spying codes, and she felt useful. She came to a conclusion.

She had problems. From her childhood with her dad.

He had never loved her.

Or so she thought.

When he walked along at just that synchronicitous moment, and picked her up, and then walked over to the street, and picked up her husband, and put them in his car, and drove off, she felt useful. He was a magician. He would use them well. He wouldn't just look at the cards randomly picked in some damn spread. No.

If he picked them from his stack of unusual cards, he would let his fingers linger over them, as his subconscious, knowing which one was which on some level, would feel which card was the true one to answer his question. Maybe he would pick her. Maybe he wouldn't.

And more likely, he would place the cards with intention, magical intention, around him in a circle, her, and her husband, and whatever other animals flattened into cards, their meaning divine and vivid to his genius brain, and do his rituals in the center of them. He would go into the depths of cosmic love. He would fly. Fly into the higher levels of himself. Using her. Using her husband. Using every tool at his disposal.

Because he was a real ceremonial magician. And he would finally accept her, and her husband as something of value. To him.

END