He was best friends with the man in the white coat. They met when he was a mere tadpole lost in that container among his school. The rest were mindless drones, of course – none had the same light in their vacant eyes as he did. But for three days, those eyes were all he knew. It was all he thought he’d ever know. Yet, he knew he could know, so something had to be different.

That was why he chose him. He was different.

The fourth day, a hand came down into the water and sorted through his siblings. It was the first time he’d ever seen…well, anything besides gray tails and black, beady eyes. Whatever it was, it was like a god to him. And, as if acknowledging this, the hand lifted out of the tank for only a moment and came back with a plastic bag, ignoring the others just for him.

From then on, his life was one full of firsts, and each seemed full of wonder and joy: a habitat all to his own, an assortment of tastes he never could’ve dreamed of, and most intriguingly, a curiosity of the outside world that grew in almost as fast as his legs.

At first, he couldn’t make out the strange sounds his friend made. Through the glass, they seemed like a random, muffled collection of clicks and mumbles. But over the next few months, he began to put them together, and the strings of utterances connected one by one.

It became his pastime to listen whenever he could. The first words he understood were “test” and “food,” though what the former meant he couldn’t quite figure out. The latter, however, seemed to come at “five-o-clock” every few days, which he eventually discovered corresponded to the numbers on that circle at the far end of the room.

“Five-o-clock…” “Clock…”

That must have been what it was called. A “clock.”

The frog liked the clock. It told him everything he needed to know about the day, so much more than just when the “food” came. It showed him how long he’d engage in his listening, and the ticking rhythm it made soothed him every night. Knowing time was passing proved he was alive.

By the second year, eavesdropping his friend branded spoken English into his head. Although he knew he couldn’t relay anything he thought, every time the white-collared human opened his little glass microcosm and retrieved him into his worked hands, he wanted so badly to talk to him about it all. Are there others just like you? Where do you go when the lights are out? Can I go with you too some day soon?

The frog fit on the man’s paw with more than enough room to spare – no bigger than a penny. This place, he learned, was where those “tests” took place. His friend’s soft eyes peered down before pointing a small instrument crowned with light at him, and after a while he lowered the tool and gently returned him to an enclosed leaf. He didn’t know what that thing was; he never bothered to name it even when using it.

But the frog didn’t care. He loved the texture of his friend’s old skin. This, too, he knew he couldn’t tell him, but being held was his favorite time of the day. It was the only time the clock could never predict.

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One day, his friend came in with two others he didn’t recognize. As an introduction to other humans, they were not what he expected. They wore black jackets, and their faces were rigid in a manner he couldn’t decipher, especially due to the shiny black squares covering their eyes. They looked at him with these indiscernible expressions and then turned to his caretaker.

“Let’s start today.”

This confused him. Start what? Another test? Do you know what they’re talking about?

Evidently so. The next moment, the frog rode his friend’s palms as the three men exited the room. This was also unusual. He hadn’t seen the hallway since he was rescued from his school. Well, at least he was being kept in those hands for longer than normal.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

They eventually released him in a pale, tiled room with no windows. A camera dangling under the ceiling in the corner watched him carefully with its red eye. He felt out the uncomfortably soft floor with his webbed feet, feeling like he might fall right through.

More striking than this, however, was the other figure in the room. He wore an orange jumpsuit, and his shabby brown hair looked as if it hadn’t seen a single drop of water for months. This aside, his eyes prompted a strange feeling the frog thought he’d forgotten. Like his brothers and sisters all that time ago, nothing but complete emptiness was visible behind them. He stared at a standing corpse. Seeing this condition on a human – a creature that was supposed to know – unsettled him many times more than seeing it with his kind. Despite this, he’d come to understand these beings as harmless, even if a bit strange like the other new men, so he hopped cautiously toward this one to get a better look.

That’s when it happened.

A voice sounded through the room from the camera. The tone was one the frog recognized, a gravelly mumble he knew as the song of kindness itself.

“Subject. Kill the frog.”

The next instant passed in a literal flash. The orange clad human charged. As his maw-like boot loomed over him, red filled the frog’s line of sight while his body tensed in instinctual fear. A piercing ring accompanied the velvet. And then, two wet thuds, and silence.

The red cleared. In front of him, the far wall was seared black, the sound-proofed foam up in flames in a perfectly straight, vertical line. Below it, two mangled halves of the subject remained. They leaked smoke as well as a red and pink substance he’d never seen. An eye rolled to a stop next to a detached foot. Staring into its dilated pupil, the frog saw it was as dead as it was before.

After that, he was picked up by those hands again. Yet, it wasn’t the same feeling as the one he thought he knew so well. He felt dirty. Violated. Something so unlike all the colorful firsts he’d experienced over the years; something gray, rotten, and spoiled.

He was eventually put back in his tank. But that room, too, was different. The quiet was ill and foreboding, as if it judged him for his discord. The space went dark, and for the first time, he couldn’t sleep to the ticking clock.

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He saw the human asleep at his desk. Unlike most other nights, he hadn’t left. The day’s commotion must have left him swamped with more work than he could handle.

A rectangular glow emanated from above him – the computer screen. His head and shoulders always left it obstructed during his normal hours, and he never failed to shut it off when he left the room, even if it was just for a drink. This was the first time the frog could see it so clearly.

When he focused, he saw a diagram of some sort. It depicted a black and gray outline of something resembling himself, and its head was highlighted in a striking, animated orange. Next to it was a separate window playing the subject’s bisection on repeat. The frog was nothing more than a few light pixels on the footage, as was the thin stream which erupted from him, severing one half of the man from the other every few seconds in an eternal execution.

He’d held the storm of unfamiliar emotions at bay since the white room. But for some reason, it began to boil up against his skull at this sight.

He didn’t know what it meant.

He didn’t know why the man had really chosen him.

He didn’t know he was chosen for others.

But despite all this, despite his nature remaining a complete mystery, he felt – no, knew – he had been used. Over and over, like the video in front of him, the voice looped in his head. All he’d ever loved, and the cold, blunt order it gave to the dead man. Kill the frog.

He thought of the subject’s blank eyes, then the man’s. All those times he smiled down into the tiny fauna in his hands, was it truly so warm? The frog couldn’t remember anymore. No matter what tricks he tried to pull in his mind, no matter how hard he worked to blot out the memory, it remained all the same. His eyes surely had been dead, too. Kill the frog.

He was no god. He was no savior. He was no friend.

The frog realized the man had been beneath him all this time, as were all the others before with those eyes, those who weren’t capable of knowing. He wracked his mind for the correct word for what this could be, for what he could call the one who stood above others. And then, he found it.

“King.”

He averted his gaze from the screen back at the human. As he expected, none of the wonder, joy, or love he felt for him only a few hours earlier remained.

Trying to beckon him back to his simple past, the clock’s ticking echoed in his head. But as long as he was king, he knew this wasn’t possible. Kings are not bound even to you, he silently answered.

A deep crimson crawled into the corner of his vision before all was red once more, the ring more violent and deliberate than the first. He poured all the malice he could muster into it. He poured and poured, straining his temple until the red filling his view began to sear his retinas and the scorching brain behind them.

He would go into the light alone.