Each winter, when Kansas City was cold, Twyla would forget what the city would become in the summer. By and by, July would come and, once again, she would be stunned. She would take to the couch in the lowermost room of the house and she would lie still and she would repeat to herself questions like:

Who can live under these circumstances?

Why the hell do I stay here? Why the hell? I can go anywhere.

I could go to the Antarctic. Lots of ice. Sweet, welcoming penguins. They’d swarm me.

Tall one, what are you? What have you brought for us?

It’s all just due south! I could head south right now. Be there in a decade.

This July, two years after the July that had bred the sickness that had cooked the life out of most of the people on the planet, again Twyla wondered:

Why didn’t I die?

There wasn’t even a word for what Kansas City was in the summer. OK, there were words, a lot of them—but they were all inadequate. In fact, she would not even say any of these words to herself. She resented all these words for their failure to describe the misery of living in Kansas City in July with no air conditioning.

You call this living?

This is stasis. This is staying as still as you can because moving produces more—

Don’t say the word.

This is like being on the bottom of a test tube held over a Bunsen burner. No wonder all those tiny plague germs had loved it! With great energy they had hopped from host to host. Guys, this being boiled in a slender tube over a flame, I’m tellin’ ya, this is a little slice o’—

Don’t use any words beginning with the letter “h.”

Especially don’t say aloud an “h” word. Even going “huh!” would expel a breath, not cool, into an atmosphere that was already—

If any one of the people she’d said goodbye to those two summers ago had walked into this moist, close, darkened oven underground, well, she might not even have raised a hand and said—

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After a few days of this, though—this lolling on the couch and not moving and not exhaling and not thinking any “h” words—Twyla started to think of water. She thought she would like to come upon a body of water—cool water—and stand before it and imagine for a moment how different it was from the air. Once upon a time, there’d been pools like this all around the area. Many neighbors had had them. With the wonders of electricity and chemicals, the water in the pools, during the summer months, was kept cool, lovely, and clear. Free of germs. She wanted some of this water right now and she wanted it all around her.

She sat up.

Get me the hell out of here.

There it was, then: she’d let go one of the “h” words.

Fuck it. She let them all loose.

Hot. Heat. Hell. Hades. Hi! Halt. Hallway. Hothouse. Hellhole. Hookah. Hallucinate. Holocaust. Heavy. Horrid. Hopeless. Hilarious. Hysteria. Hypochondria. Harried.

Hurry.

She rose from the sofa in the basement and went through the door to the garage. The garage was Dachau. She held her breath—not that there was air—as she trod on the concrete, making her way to the button on the side wall that lifted the garage door, and she pushed it. Nothing moved. She remembered: no power. Often she would catch herself doing this: pushing buttons and expecting movement. She wondered whether this would ever evolve out of her.

In any case, before she went out, she’d need some shoes. Sandals. The most she could stand was sandals.

She found a pair, under the couch, and she rushed upstairs.

We’re lucky to have escaped with our lives! she said to the sandals, as she reached the front door, which was standing open, and she went out. She stopped on the stoop to put on her sandals. First, she sniffed them. They smelled like horses’ stalls. My god, how old are these things? She held them up and appraised them.

Have I had these relics, she wondered, since the seventh grade?

Perhaps the leather had once been pliable. But now, even in this heat, it was stiff as jerky. It’s been baked each summer, Twyla thought, and then frozen each winter. This is a hard path to walk when you’re not much more than two pieces of animal hide. She strapped the two hides to her feet, and she headed over to the house of the dead family of Dr. Yee, the dentist.

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When Twyla got to the street, remembering Violet Yee, she skipped a little, despite the heat—or because of it. The Yees had a big backyard pool. The summer Twyla was seventeen, Violet Yee, then age seven, had repeatedly invited her over to swim.

Twice a week Violet would ring the James’s bell and stand at the front door until Twyla opened it. Skinny little Violet would be standing there in her Speedo tank suit, glossy black with aqua side panels. She wore swimming goggles as a hairband, the thick rubber straps pulling her black hair severely, making her look even more Asian.

“We have a pool,” she reminded Twyla.

“Violet, I’m not your age,” Twyla told her.

“That’s OK.” Violet smiled broadly, showing her overlapping mixture of baby and permanent teeth. She had two pairs of incisors, one pair above the other. It must be hard on her father, Twyla thought, having to look at those crazy teeth day after day.

“Have you met Della?” Tywla asked Violet, the first time. “She’s your peer.”

Della, who lived around the corner, was eight. Twyla babysat her. Della had taught Twyla how to knit.

“I know Della,” Violet replied. She scratched a row of three scarlet bug bites on her forearm, avidly, digging for blood. “She’s the one who told me to come ask you.”

“Doesn’t Della want to swim?”

“She wants to swim, just not often. She said she’s avoiding sun damage. But I think”—Violet pursed her lips—“I think she just doesn’t like to be seen in a swim suit.”

This observation, which had the ring of truth to it, profoundly depressed Twyla. The child is eight, she thought, and already she hates her body.

Tsk.

But Twyla understood why: Della was chunky. Della was dwarvish. Della was as wide as she was high. Della was Miss Piggy, in fourth grade. No wonder she didn’t want to appear in a bathing suit. Listen to the things people were thinking about her. Listen to the assessments they’d made. And this was after seeing her covered in clothes. Why would she want to show even more of herself?

Why would anyone?

Oh, it was fine for skinnies like Violet. These girls, no flesh on their bones, could walk the neighborhood in their Speedos and people wouldn’t look twice.

But, see, Twyla had tits. She had hips. She had buttocks. Violet, having none of these things, would stare.

Twyla didn’t want to have anyone ogling her as if she were something rarely brought out: the lunatic in the attic; the geek at the sideshow; the Elephant Man, unhooded.

So the summer Violet asked Twyla twice a week to go swimming in the Yees’ lovely pool, even though that summer was as intolerably hot as any other around those parts and the lure of cool water cradled in a cement box painted aquamarine was terribly powerful—imagining the smell of chlorine made Twyla queasy with desire—that summer whenever Violet asked her to come swim, Twyla kept saying no.

Violet always took it great. “OK, thanks,” she’d say, cheerily, and she’d turn and skip home.

“You’re a good sport!” Twyla called after her.

As Violet’s tiny form danced across the traffic circle, Twyla thought, It’s easy for people who look perfect in Speedos to be good sports.

+

Twyla approached the Yee house, and she grew anxious. She stopped in their front yard—not a yard anymore, but a weedy meadow, full of tall puffed dandelions that touched her knees and burst, putting their seeds into the still air where they hovered like germs close to her wet face—and she cupped her hands to her mouth and tried to keep breathing. She looked at the grand, stucco edifice of the Yee mansion and she realized she kept coming back here and looting this place. But why? Because she liked it. She liked it so much she looted it. And if there was a pool to visit, she’d like to visit this one. She’d been asked enough back in the day, and always said no—so, finally, here she was with a yes. Yes! But she was scared in this instant, though, of what she would find in the backyard instead of a blue pool. She was weary of being astonished. Why did her mind keep thinking the clock was stopped? When she pictured things, she kept picturing them preserved, as if her long-ago neighborhood was her very own diorama. But all the world’s controls were gone. Heat and humidity had taken charge, and things were spoiling. Stifling, she took her cupped hands from her mouth and she gulped the floating seeds.

I want to find something clean.

She started again, cutting her swath through the restless puffballs, and she was offended by the way the fuzz stuck everywhere she was wet and tried to enter places it found open. As she approached the west end of the Yees’ house, she pictured reaching the edge of the pure blue pool and hurling herself in and chasing off all the furry seeds. Cast off, tilting, they would skim the surface like little failed parachutes, the seeds rendered infertile by the pool’s chemicals. Would she jump into the water, feet first, or would she dive? No, she thought she would lower herself into the water dramatically, taking the metal steps into the deep end, making a slow count, one step, two steps, three, and she’d see the water fill her loose t-shirt and bear it away from her skin and float it around her like a bag, a gauzy white water-keeping bag, comical, and she’d press it deftly with all of her fingertips and watch it belch.

She turned around the side of the house and there was the backyard and there was the area of the yard that held the pool but she didn’t spot a bit of blue. The pool was an excavated shape of brown now, with patches of darkly green, and none of it was bright or translucent or glittering. Here again, she felt cowed by the humidity’s bulk, but she towed her way through it, workmanlike, because she had to get close to the Yees’ pool to examine what it had turned itself into.

She took five steps and stopped. The odor was a wall. What was that smell? It was mud. It was bugs. It was bacteria. It was stagnant green ooze. The Yees’ backyard pool was given over to the animals and the bugs and the heat and the plants—but not the pretty plants. Not the begonias, the geraniums, the impatiens, the petunias, the pansies. It was given over to the algae. The moss. The fungi. The seaweed. The ocean was nowhere near here but somehow seaweed had started in this pool. It didn’t care that this wasn’t the ocean. This stuff had survival instincts, baby. It had got here, somehow, and it was taking over. By now the seaweed had the pool in a chokehold. It was here in banners, ribbons, pom poms. It was here in tangles of slimy fronds ending in poppable ducts. It lay over the pool like a hand over a mouth.

She came closer. She stepped to the edge of the pool. She examined the phenomenal expanse of seaweed and she saw that there were animals on it. Amphibians. She stepped back. She stepped back twice. Back, back.

She saw that on top of the seaweed were frogs. Maybe thirty of them. Thirty big, ugly frogs. These were the biggest frogs Twyla had ever seen. She hadn’t known they made frogs this big. These frogs were broad as breadloaves. These frogs were ugly as genetic freaks. This is how they were supposed to look? God had shaped them like this?

They looked at her with smart oily eyes that were old and full of privilege.

My little girl person, what the fuck you want in this place?

Y’all weren’t wanting to swim in here?

Anyway, there wasn’t much water. Twyla could gauge that underneath the seaweed and the frogs, there wasn’t much of anything liquid holding it up. The shallow end of the pool was not dry—the bottom was slick with dewy algae—but it was filled with nothing. The deep end, then, had all the stuff in it. Under the seaweed and the frogs, Twyla surmised, there was some liquid, although she imagined it was not blue. She thought it was not clear. She thought it might be green, or greenish, but the not the sort of green any human would want to be surrounded with. She thought it was the sort of green that was actually more like ochre. She thought it was the sort of green that would fight being jumped into. She thought it was the sort of green that might even push back. She thought it was the sort of green that would support thirty big, ugly frogs, but not any creatures bigger and uglier than that.

She decided to examine the big, ugly frogs since she was here and so were they. Nobody was going anywhere, especially the frogs. She was trespassing, in fact. They belonged here. They’d always belonged here. The Yees hadn’t belonged here, really, for too long. They was just squatting.

We was all just squatting, wudn’t we.

Twyla wondered if these ugly frogs, the real, permanent, forever squatters, ever moved.

She watched their throats go in and out. It was as if they were warming up to speak. They were greasing the gears. They were getting prepped to say something really momentous, something that would really knock all of us on our asses.

Twyla thought: This is exactly what a human would think.

The frogs just stayed there on the still green surface and moved their throats. It was as good as breathing. When a dumb fly went by, all the ugly frogs would flick their gluey tongues and the flying-by motherfucker would not have a prayer. He would have long tongues whipping him from all sides, and these tongues were full of Super Glue, and he was stuck. He was a snack.

Flies did not need a virus to kill them. Their dumbness killed them every day. They’d fly low, la di dah, over fetid pools filled with long Super Glued tongues and did they think they could make it past?

Sure!

Watch! Buzz.

Thwap.

Well, there are more.

There are always more flies.

Even the dying ones are pregnant. They’re having babies the very moment of their deaths.

Ya gotta admire that style.

Twyla thought these frogs were probably not quite as replaceable. How could they be? They had a fine weight to them. They were there to hold down the seaweed, a necessary task that some ugly genetic mutationally motherfuckers had to do. Twyla could not see them going away. These horribles had found their rightful place and they were here for the damned duration.

These frogs had settled in.

She had to like this. She had to like creatures who had found their place in the universe without a whole hell of a lot of trouble and they were happy with it. They’d just hopped here and said, Yeah, friends and neighbors, this swamp is it.

We Are Here.

They surveyed her with their popped-open eyes. They flirted at her with their blown-up throats.

She pictured what they would look like with hair. What if she popped some wigs on all of those fat fuckers? Wigs could make a difference. She was picturing black pompadours, unparted, brilliantined. These frogs would look like tenors. After dark they’d try out their pipes. They’d send their eerie warbles into the soggy air and break some hearts among the princesses sleeping with their windows open in the hot attics in the mansions in the area within hearing distance.

Twyla then wondered: Wearing a wig, could one of them pass for a prince?

Depends, I guess, on what one’s expecting from a prince.

Day by day, one’s expectations, in this post-apocalypse planet, are lowering.

Soon those expectations, they’ll be no bigger than a breadbox.

Which was about right.

At this point Twyla had to get her bearings. She had to take stock of where she was standing—in the hottest, dampest part of a July afternoon in Mission Hills, Kansas, before the greenish, fetid pool in the Yees’ backyard—and what she was looking at—thirty greasy, obese genetic mutations squatting on rotting seaweed.

So, what, you want to take home a frog?

Nah.

I don’t need no steenkin’ frogs.

She turned her back on them. Perhaps she’d return for a visit at a colder time. July wouldn’t last. After a frost, she wouldn’t take them in, but she might knit them some scarves.

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