Amphibian by Carla Gunn Page A

together after their fight. Fighting is just a part of life. All the animals do it but those in the same social group – like my mom and my dad – mostly make up afterwards.
    After my parents separated, my father started working even more as a foreign correspondent. Now he is hardly ever, ever home. Among primates, the only ones who just get up and leave the social group are the kids who are grown up. They go off to find another group so that they can mate. Parent primates don’t justpick up and leave. If there was anyone who was supposed to be doing the leaving around here, it should be me, when I’m older – not my dad.
    Tonight before bed I couldn’t stop thinking about Cuddles. I thought about him when I was watching the Green Channel, I thought of him as I was eating my bedtime snack, I thought about him when I was brushing my teeth. I just couldn’t get him out of my mind. It was like he was in there hopping through my brain pathways and each time he made a turn, he split into two and went down two more roads and those roads split into two and so did he and so on and so on and so on until there were thousands of Cuddleses hopping all through my brain until it overflowed and frogs started coming out my ears.
    I told my mother this and she got a weird look on her face.
    Her lips twitched a little bit and then she said, ‘Phin, why can’t you stop thinking about that frog? It’s a frog, Phin. A frog! Would you like me to look up some information on the web to show you how little frogs know and experience compared to us? Maybe it would help you to stop worrying about him.’
    I shook my head no. I already knew all about frogs.
That
was my problem.
    My mother said, ‘You know, Phin, like I said before, you can’t think of a frog as though it’s a person. They’re just not as intelligent.’
    I asked my mother if aliens came down to the planet earth and they were one million times smarter than humans, would it be all right to capture all the humans with nets and put them in solitary cages and feed them once in a while and watch them bang their heads against the glass until the day they died?
    My mother opened her mouth to say something and then closed it again. Then she opened it again and closed it. She told me to jump in my bed and then she went downstairs to get me her relaxation CD s. They didn’t work. In fact, they made me feel more scared and worried. One CD was of thunder and lightning stormsand all I could think of was being struck by lightning. The next one was of the ocean and it made me think of drowning. The next was called
Rainforest
. That was the worst of all. If you went to a rain-forest these days likely all you’d hear would be the sounds of power saws and big trucks and animals running and howling and crying because their homes are falling down all around and on top of them. That’s supposed to relax me? What I really want is for my mom to let me have a computer in my room so that I can listen to what’s happening at Pete’s Pond.
    I got up out of bed and walked down the stairs really quietly. I peeked into my mother’s office and when she heard me I ducked and then ran in behind the couch so that she wouldn’t hit me with her mad rays.
    She said, ‘Phin, what are you doing? Why aren’t you in bed? You know I have two hours of work to do after you go to bed, you know that! Why are you doing this again? You’re making me crazy! I have a deadline to meet and I don’t have the time to lie down with you, I just don’t, Phin, I don’t!’
    I said, ‘I know, but I can’t sleep and the CD s aren’t helping a bit.’ She sighed a really loud sigh and slammed her book shut and walked me back up the stairs. I ran up them fast because I couldn’t see her behind me. She’s scary when she’s mad.
    Sometimes I look at my mother and say
Mom Mom Mom
over and over again and the more