Exploding Toads, Unzipping Dogbellies, and the Further Evils of Packbawkies

I surface from my work-imposed exile bearing a burden of horrible news. Nightmare news. News guaranteed to spread a plague of insomnia around the Internet, from node to node, indeed, from server to server; from Auchtermuchty to Zabljak, from Death Valley to the Himalayas. You might've heard it already, but if you haven't, you ought to brace yourself. It's awful, positively awful. One would've expected it to be on everyone's lips by now. One had imagined it violating the silence of libraries, scudding down telephone lines, blaring from television sets, crashing to earth from a thousand satellites, breaking over the ears of humanity like the Great Flood itself--fwoooooosh!

Except, see, nobody's paying much attention, really, aside from PZ:

"This Pond of Death thing, what? I mean, blimey! Can you imagine?"

"Death who, now?"

"You--you haven't heard?"

"I don't think so. What is it?"

"It's the toads, see. They're--"

--they're exploding. It's a Bufo incendiarius situation, is what we've got. Let me explain it more properly: there's this pond in Hamburg, and it's full of toads, which are turning into hamburger. Or, no, wait. That wasn't right. I'm a little discombobulated. I've got to start at the beginning, and not get ahead of myself.

GETTING IT ALL STRAIGHT IN MY HEAD

Where? At a pond in Hamburg, and now in Denmark, too.

What? Toads are coming out of the water, writhing and twitching in agony. They puff up to thrice their ordinary size, then detonate in a horrible geyser of guts and toadflesh. I mean, they really splatter themselves, sort of thing. There's a whole...toad blast-radius involved. There could be a leg beside your foot, and an eye in a nearby tree, and a loop of intestine on your dog. There could even be some in your handbag, or in a box of caramels, and you'd never know till you stuck in your hand and touched it. You'd--

When? It's been happening for a week or two now, I think. And it happened once before, in the 1990s, in Brandenburg. But there were less of them, then. It's thousands this time, thousands of toads. This year's toad crop will fail abysmally, I'm afraid.

Who? They think it's birds. I was right, before, when I said birds were horrible. All those things I wrote, they were true. I guess this'll show Virge, eh?

How? The horrible wee buggers--filthy, filthy packbawkies that they are--are ripping holes in the toads, to get at their livers. Once the toads have a hole in them, water gets in, and the pressure builds up, and next time they try to puff themselves up, kablooie! It's crows doing it, of course. I remember when I was wee, Mother would put out the rubbish in big black bags, and it would be just the same. Crows would swoop in (great, hulking crows, bigger than my head), and they'd tear the binliners to pieces. A poke here, a poke there, and the dust would come spewing out, banana peels, Maxi pads, chicken bones, everything crows love to eat. Oh, and how they'd caw: Awk! Awk! Awk! Mother, she'd run out with a broom, shouting and waving her arms, but it'd be too late. There'd be rubbish spread out over the road, and the binmen'd drive past and leave it there. They don't like picking stuff up, binmen, although that's meant to be their job. They--

Why? --oh, right. I got a bit lost, again. Off-topic, sort of thing. I was supposed to be sorting it all out, getting the story straight. So I could spread it around the Internet better. Why, then? Why are crows eating toad-livers in their thousands, all of a sudden? Why has no-one seen them doing it? I mean, they've found beakmarks on the dead toads, but nobody seems to have observed an actual crow assault in progress. It's all too bizarre. It's making my brain hurt.

They're not sure, quite yet, if it even is the crows. They've got some especially vicious ones round those parts, though, ones that have been known to involve themselves in Hitchcock-esque bombing raids in the park. You'd expect that sort of crow to liverpeck a toad and leave it to detonate like a grenade with its pin pulled. If they were only strong enough, they'd probably carry primed toads around and throw them in people's windows. You'd be washing the dishes, or maybe folding laundry, when--BOUF!--a toad! You'd just have time to register its presence, before--BOUF! again--warts everywhere! Your dog would have a heart attack, and your kids would mistake you for a witch.

I knew someone, once, who put on her shoe and crushed a toad that had been hiding inside. I've been checking my shoes for toads ever since. Not just toads, that is--I don't think we even get them in Vancouver--but any small and crushable life-forms that might have concealed themselves in the toes. A spider came out once. I stepped on that anyway, though. I hate spiders.

This toad story, it reminds me of another recent news item, about a lady whose skin melded with the fabric of her couch, following a long period of inactivity. It's got that same godawfulness to it: that same supreme wrongness--that quality which keeps one up till all hours, searching for...oh, I don't know. Mitigating circumstances, maybe. Something to take the edge off. Something to put them back in the realm of ordinary experience. With the lady in the couch, for instance, one hoped she might simply have had a bit of material sweated onto her, perhaps, or wedged in the cleft of her bottom. Or that she had been there for only a month or two, rather than several years, or that she'd been unconscious the whole time, or--or just anything, really, to lessen the horror.

With the toads, well, they say the guts fairly burst out, flying three feet at a time. They splatter people's trouser-legs. The whole toad is ripped apart, limb from limb, stem from stern, head from body, spine from skull. The parts are hardly identifiable (aside, apparently, from the birdmarks). You can't tell where one toad ends and the next begins. It's like the landing at Normandy, with toads. Except...except maybe they're exaggerating for effect. Maybe the guts just leak out a little. Maybe they only extrude an inch or two, and then the toad tears them out on its own, trying to hop in that condition. Or, wait--that's actually worse, I think.

When I was maybe six or seven years old, some kid (I wish I remembered who, so I could kick their arse) told me a story about a dog that ate so much its stomach ruptured. Except she didn't say "ruptured"--she said "burst open". So I got this mental image of the whole abdomen tearing asunder, in a rain of blood and guts and dog food. I had quite the overwrought imagination back then. My mental picture had sound-effects, and everything. Splishes and patters, and a sort of fleshy unzipping sound. It was a--a mental talkie. And then my father, trying to take my mind off it, said "Imagine your head is a giant bowl." I have no idea where he was going with that thought. He never got a chance to finish. I pictured this seething tub of brains, see, with cerebrospinal fluid sloshing over the sides, and started to scream.

It's stuck with me, too. Every time something like the couch lady or the exploding toad epidemic comes along, I hear my father's voice: "Imagine your head is a giant bowl." I get a double shudder, then--the original awful image, and the sloshing cranial vat.

Think about it. That is to say, see it:

toad

TOAD

T O A D

t

               o 

                                             d











                           a

"I found a toad, Mum. It was under a leaf, and on a lilypad, and in a hole, and stuffing my vol-au-vent. Later on, I found it again, in my knapsack."

"Augh! I slipped! My aching arse."

"What was it, a banana peel?"

"No, it's--well, unless my senses deceive me, a piece of warted skin."

"Whose warted skin?"

"Your mother's? How the hell should I know?"

"Alas, I've been bird-limed!"

"Let's have a look.... No, unless that bird had some bloody diarrhea, I'd say you've been toad-slimed, matey."

You could be anywhere, and a toad could--and you could--and....

One hopes it doesn't spread. One may just claw one's eyes out if confronted with an exploding toad.