Post #4

The frogs had forced Grumble Bee to close only a few minutes after she got there in the morning.
Donna enjoyed working there much more than she did her job at the gas station. She’d been working 
there for the better part of a decade so she had the respect of the younger employees and some 
managerial responsibilities. Her bosses were good people: the Godwin’s. A married couple who’d
just recently moved away from the neighborhood and closer to their franchise’s two other locations, 
they’d helped her navigate the relationship with Officer Conway and his people when Tommy had his 
run-ins with them.

Donna often thought she’d be better off dropping the job at the gas station: the shifts were terrible 
and lonely. But she worried she’d never leave the neighborhood if she did that, and it was that same 
sense of wanting to get away some that drove her to initially follow the frogs which were parading away 
from the river.

Some folks were trying to carry them back to the water, but when she went to pick one up, it hopped 
away from her hands. She walked alongside the trail of green beasts heading east, away from their 
homes downstream of the old Glenn plant. They’d said they’d be cleaning that area up when the plant 
closed some years ago, but if even these slimiest of creatures couldn’t stand the water anymore, she 
figured the river was soiled beyond repair. If the frogs had been there for the meetings and 
announcements posted around the Foxberry that Glenn Electric had put in place when they withdrew, 
they’d feel the righteous sense of violation many of the plant’s former employees felt to this day.

As she walked with them, they continued to avoid her. They left a gap in their file at the level where 
she walked alongside, but would gladly brush other passers by. It did really seem like it was just her 
they didn’t want to come in contact with.

I’m not responsible for the destruction of your home, she thought. That broken promise wasn’t mine 
to keep.

Maybe they felt her guilt though, and assumed she must be the one to blame for their troubles: 
animals, like children, sometimes understood what they couldn’t articulate, sensed when something 
was off even when they couldn’t possibly conceive the gravity of a situation.

She wanted to follow them to the place they’d go because their old life wasn’t viable anymore; 
see what they’d do now that the time for cleaning up and making amends was over and a saga was 
irreversibly closed; would they end up coming back to the same place, stuck on the injustice of their 
home’s contamination? She remembered she had some papers to square away, for the rent due by 
the week’s end. So she turned around and headed home, turning off the path of exodus as soon as 
she could to put out of sight the victims of a past left unsettled.