Turbula
Online since August 2002
Fiction

The First Annual Loma Alta Frog-Jumping Contest

The Hooters Girls damned near stole the show before it even got rolling. The organizers of the City of Loma Alta's First Annual Frog-Jumping Contest thought it would be a good idea to have the busty young ladies in their very tight t-shirts and short-short shorts in attendance to promote their restaurant and participate in a leap-frog contest before the actual frog-jumping. Twelve girls, six teams of two, hopping and squatting across the parking lot, setting the place to steaming from more than just the sun blazing on the roped-off Wal-Mart blacktop.

Ninety percent of the men in attendance forgot all about the frogs while that was going on.

But all good things must end, and a guy with a bullhorn called the distracted crowd over to the day's feature by promising that the girls would be out there in the jump zone, measuring the leaps of the frogs.

Frog It was decided that the order in which the frogs jumped would be determined by their size, smallest to largest, so Clete Johnson's little Paraguayan tree frog, Pedro – he could sit on a quarter, with room to spare – was first up. And it looked, as the little green guy sailed away from the starting pad, soaring high into the air, that his would be the leap to beat.

In the world of professional frog jumping, the conventional wisdom says you do not feed your athlete before the contest. Food in the belly weighs them down. Perhaps the owner of the African Blue Speckled frog, a massive eighty-seven pound amphibian, able to leap the mighty Congo River in a single bound (if his press release could be believed), should have re-thought that wisdom; because as Pedro rose to the zenith of his leap, the long pink tongue of the African Blue emerged and snapped him right out of the sky, and pulled him back to digestion land.

The gathered crowd emitted a collective gasp. One of the Hooters girls, measuring tape in hand, broke into a nervous giggle, and an unchaperoned dachshund broke out of a forest of legs and pranced into the jump zone to castigate the African Blue for this transgression with yaps that evolved into yips when the tongue hit him and drew him frog-ward; yips that went off like a light switch as he disappeared into the face-spanning mouth of the frog.

The African Blue smacked its lips, blinked as the dachshund went down. A man cursed into the sudden silence. A woman in the crowd fainted away. One of the Hooters girls screamed, as one of her co-workers, Alison, strode forward, jut-jawed, ball-fisted, to confront the owner of the killer of the small cute dog.

The tongue emerged again. It wrapped itself tightly around Alison's shapely ankle, and then Alison was on her butt, screaming, sliding toward the maw of the African Blue.

The rescue – a team of Hooters girls in a two-minute tug-of-war with a massive glob of a frog – succeeded. They freed Alison, though the Blue did get her shoe; and this showed up on YouTube, of course, putting the city on the map, and generating a huge interest in Loma Alta's Second Annual Frog-Jumping Contest.


Published May 2009



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