The Pockets in the Glass

The shop was closed and smelled like algae and fish food. Mr. Okafor had given them a sponge each and gone into the back to do the accounts, which meant they were alone with forty tanks and a radio playing too quietly to hear.

"Come look at this one," Maya said. "It's wrong."

Soren came. The tank in the corner held a single toad, brown and flat as a dropped glove. It had no real face, just two dot eyes near the front and a body like something stepped on and left there.

"It's not dead," he said. "Its throat is moving."

"I didn't say dead. I said wrong." Maya put her sponge down. "Look at its back."

The toad's back was covered in circles. Dozens of them. Little raised rings, each one with a darker center, packed together like bubble wrap that had grown out of the skin.

"That's a skin thing," Soren said. "A disease. We should tell Mr. Okafor."

"You don't think it's a disease."

"No," he admitted. "I don't. Diseases look messy. This looks built."

They both leaned in until their noses nearly touched the glass.

"The circles are even," Maya said. "Spaced out. Nothing in nature spaces things out that neatly by accident."

"Honeycomb does."

"Honeycomb is built too."

Soren got his notebook out and drew the pattern, the rings, the dark centers, the way they covered the whole back and stopped clean at the legs.

"Each circle has something in the middle," he said while he drew. "A dot. Like a seed."

"Or an eye."

"Don't say eye."

"You're the one who saw it."

The toad shifted. One foot lifted, set down. The circles did not move with the skin the way a rash would. They sat in the skin like coins pressed into wet clay.

"Okay," Maya said slowly. "What if it's the opposite of what you think."

"Meaning."

"You think something is on her. What if something is in her."

Soren stopped drawing.

"In her," he said.

"In the pockets." Maya pointed without touching the glass. "Each circle is a pocket. And the dot in the middle is the thing inside the pocket."

"That's a parasite. That's a horror movie."

"You don't believe that either. Look at her face."

They looked. The toad sat. The throat went in, out, in, out. Nothing about it looked like an animal being eaten from inside. It looked like an animal sitting in a tank waiting for nothing in particular.

"She's calm," Soren said. "If something were hollowing her out she would not be calm."

"Unless the things in the pockets are supposed to be there."

He wrote that down. Supposed to be there. He underlined it once and looked at it like it might bite.

"You're saying she made the pockets on purpose," he said.

"I'm saying somebody made them on purpose, and it's her back, so probably her."

They watched. The radio murmured. One of the dark dots near the toad's shoulder seemed darker than the others, and rounder, like a bead pushed up close to the surface.

"Maya." Soren's voice changed. "That one. The big one. Look at the center."

The center of that ring was not a dot anymore. It had split. A thin line had opened in the skin, and the line had an edge, and the edge was moving.

"Something's coming out," Maya breathed.

A leg came out. A real leg. Tiny, bent, perfect, with toes. It pushed against the rim of the pocket from the inside, and then a second leg joined it, and then a whole small head, and the thing that climbed out of the toad's back was a toad. A complete one. Smaller than a fingernail, fully shaped, blinking in the water.

"It's a baby," Soren said. "It's a whole baby toad. It came out of her back."

"It grew in the pocket." Maya had both hands flat on the table now, not on the glass, just flat, holding herself steady. "That's not a disease. That's not a parasite. That's her kids. She's been carrying a whole nursery in her skin."

The little toadlet swam off into the corner of the tank. Behind it, another ring was beginning to split. The mother did not flinch. She did not turn to look. She sat with her throat going in and out while her children unbuttoned themselves from her own back one by one.

"She's not even upset," Soren said. He sounded almost upset himself, on her behalf. "They're pushing out through her skin and she's just sitting there."

"Maybe it doesn't hurt. Maybe it's just what her body is for." Maya watched another head emerge. "We kept thinking something was being done to her. The whole time it was something she was doing."

Soren wrote it slowly. Eggs pressed into the back. Skin grows over them. Each one gets a pocket. They become toadlets in the pocket. Then they come out.

He stopped. He looked at the page, then at the toad, then at the page again.

"There's no nest," he said. "There's no egg outside. There's no in-between part we could see. The whole growing-up part happens where nobody can watch it. Inside the mother's skin."

"That's the part that gets me," Maya said. "Everything important about them happens in a place you can't look. You only ever see the start and the end. The middle is hidden inside another animal."

A third toadlet broke the surface of the back and kicked free.

"How many things are like that," Soren said quietly. It was not really a question. "How many things are growing right now in places we'll never get to see. Inside skin. Inside soil. Inside other things."

Maya didn't answer. She had moved to the very edge of the table, as close as she could get without breathing on the glass, counting the rings that hadn't opened yet.

Mr. Okafor's chair scraped in the back room. "You two breaking anything?"

"No," they said together, not turning around.

In the tank, a fourth pocket peeled open along its seam. The mother lifted one foot, set it down, and went on being calm while a new toad climbed out of her into the water and swam.