The Frog That Hid Its Blood

The greenhouse smelled like wet soil and the inside of a green pepper. Maya had her face two inches from the leaf.

"It was here an hour ago," she said. "I watched it climb up."

"Then it's still here," Soren said. "Frogs don't teleport."

"I know frogs don't teleport. That's the problem. It's gone and it can't be gone."

Soren clicked the little red flashlight his dad let him borrow, the one that didn't wash out the animals. The leaf glowed. He moved the beam slow, the way you read a line of words.

"There," he said.

Maya didn't see it.

"No. There. Look where the leaf vein bends."

And then she did see it, and her whole body did a small jump. The frog was sitting right where she had been staring the entire time. Except she could see the leaf through it. The green of the leaf came up through the frog's back like the frog was a window with a faint frog-shape drawn on it.

"It was watching us the whole time," Maya said.

"It was asleep the whole time."

"How do you know it's asleep?"

"Because it's see-through." Soren crouched. "My dad told me. They only go like this when they sleep. In the day. We're up too late, that's the only reason we're seeing it."

Maya put her finger near the glass of the tank, not touching. "What is it made of that you can see through it?"

"Skin, mostly. The belly skin is clear normally. You can see its heart through the bottom. But the back isn't usually this clear." He turned the red light off and the frog vanished again into pure leaf. He turned it on and it came back, ghosted in. Off. On. "Okay," he said. "That's a little much."

"Where's the red," Maya said.

"What red."

"Blood is red. If I can see through it, where's the red? It should look like a strawberry. It doesn't have any red in it at all."

Soren stopped clicking the light.

He leaned in until his nose nearly touched the tank. He started at the head and moved down, slow, reading the frog. The arms, clear. The chest, clear. The long folded legs, clear. And then, low in the middle, one small spot that was not clear. A dark berry-colored lump, tucked up under where the ribs would be if frogs had ribs the way people do.

"It's all in one place," he said. His voice had gone quiet and exact. "The red. It's all bunched into one spot."

"Bunched into what?"

"I don't know. An organ. The liver, maybe." He swallowed. "It put its blood away."

Maya sat back on her heels. "You can't put your blood away. The blood has to go around. That's the whole point of blood. It goes around."

"It's not all the blood. It's the red part. The red cells." Soren was talking and figuring at the same time. "The red cells carry the air. The frog scooped its red cells out of the rest of itself and parked them. That's why we can see through it. There's no red left in the see-through parts."

"So it's sleeping with almost no red cells moving," Maya said. "On purpose. So nothing can see it."

"A bird flying over sees a leaf. Just a leaf."

They both looked at the little dark berry in the middle of the ghost. "That should kill it."

Soren looked at her.

"When you scrape your knee bad and the blood gets gluey," Maya said. "That's it clotting. Mom told me. If your blood clumps up inside you where it shouldn't, that's the bad kind, the kind that hurts people. You cram almost all your red cells into one tiny spot, packed in tight, not moving." She pointed at the berry. "That's a clot waiting to happen. That's exactly what a clot is. Packed and still."

"Maybe frogs don't clot."

"Everything with blood clots. It has to. Otherwise a scrape would just keep bleeding." She shook her head. "It needs to clot to not die one way. And it should die the other way from clotting. Every single morning. And it doesn't."

Soren had his notebook out. His pencil moved across the page and then stopped.

"Say it again," he said.

"It packs its red cells away to disappear. Packed blood clots. Clots kill. It does this every day of its life and wakes up fine." Maya looked at him. "How?"

Soren didn't write anything. He looked at the frog and then at her and his mouth was a little open.

"I don't know," he said. "My dad doesn't know either. I asked him why it didn't get hurt doing this and he said that's the part nobody's figured out yet. He said it like it was a normal thing to say." Soren's voice did something strange. "There's an animal in this greenhouse doing a thing every morning that would put a person in the hospital, and nobody on the whole planet knows how it gets away with it."

Maya looked at the frog. The frog did not look back, because the frog was asleep, with most of itself hidden inside a corner of itself, breathing slow, getting away with the impossible thing one more time.

"Somebody's going to find out," she said. "How it doesn't clot."

"Yeah."

"It could help people. If you knew how it kept the packed blood from going gluey. People with the bad clots." She was quiet. "A frog knows something a doctor doesn't."

"It doesn't know it," Soren said. "It just does it."

"Worse," Maya said. "It just does it."

Soren clicked the red light off.

The frog disappeared into the leaf, blood and all, the dark berry the last thing to go, and the greenhouse held a single green leaf with nothing visible sitting on it, breathing.