"How do you mend a broken three-chambered heart? This question tailed me as I wandered lost and lonely from the burrow of the frog I once loved most ardently. It is true she endeavored to devour me, rend me limb from spotted limb, and yet, in my eyes, she had been perfect. Mayhap, I mused, I was not destined for love in this life, at least not the romantic kind, that full-body luminescence conjured when two hearts meet, mingle, and meld."
"Enough! I can spare no more space in my heart for a vile temptress. Having escaped with everything but my dignity intact, I literally hopped with my proverbial tail betwixt my legs. I hankered for the comfort of home, that old familiar plastic cube in the laboratory, and knew thither I must go. These clinical strictures, which once felt suffocating, now offered me a sense of comfort, how wrapping yourself in a blanket is sometimes the closest you can come to being held."
"And so my days became humdrum once more. I splayed my webbed toes against the plastic and watched the others do what we frogs are known to do: sit, stare, and haphazardly hop. I felt no love for the beings whose enormous hands dropped mealworms into my cube, but at least the terms of our arrangement were clear and transactional. We each knew what we were getting from each other."
A frog narrator laments a broken three-chambered heart after a violent relationship with a frog that attempted to devour him. He flees to the laboratory plastic cube, finding solace in predictable clinical routines and the transactional care of handlers who drop mealworms. The frog oscillates between longing for romantic ecstasy and relief at safety from harm. Habit restores bland comfort until a new insect disrupts the monotony, prompting instinctual hunger and a willingness to risk injury for taste. The narrator balances fear, memory, and appetite while coping with solitude and diminished expectations of love.
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