I dreamed last night that I was playing in the street with a group of strangers–children, mostly–in the damp shadow of a leaking fire hydrant. As we ran entirely absentminded along the concrete gutter, I noticed a strange silver ovoid shape emerging from a drainage ditch. I squatted to meet it, and there discovered a baby seal, glistening and purring in the uneasy sun. Its face was as warm and inviting as a plush toy, and its soft, slick body–though unsuited and unfamiliar to land–seemed to beckon my hands to caress and touch it. I watched as it awkwardly paddled itself up the curb’s steep shoulder and through the shallow island of grass above it, wholly transfixed as its short flippers pressed uselessly against the humid air.
"If only there were more water,” I thought, “this seal could be so beautiful.”
Suddenly, up from the drainage ditch emerged a giant frog, tracing its way along the oily path the seal had left on the ground. His fat mighty legs crossed effortlessly the landscape which had so troubled and confined the other animal; its broad, round toes divoting the soft, wet earth with each gross and effortless step. In its first leap it had totally cleared the ditch and gutter. By the second it had nearly traveled the seal’s entire path. By the third, it had completely overtaken the other animal, turning its thin, green body to study its gray and shining companion.
Without warning, the frog opened its jaws wider than its whole self, revealing its gaping black-and-yellow insides to all around. With a lazy tilted step, the frog enveloped nearly the whole of the seal’s pearlescent body, leaving only the head and flippers among the company of the summer heat.
Its flippers flipped and its wrigglers wriggled, but with each movement of the seal the sphincter of the frog’s mouth only drew closer to shut. Soon one flipper slipped inside, then the next, and all that was left was its slick greasy head, now etched with terror and gurgling for breath. Exhausted by the meaningless flapping of its arms, the seal had little recourse but to flail and thrash its body against the frog’s wide jaws and narrow throat. Nothing worked. Soon enough, its head fell in and it was swallowed whole, and the frog hopped jolly along the gutter as its fat new stomach dragged atop the asphalt.
I thought to myself, “the seal is still alive and there is absolutely nothing he can do to save himself,” my body rolling away into deeper sleep.