The last time I heard a garbage disposal making grinding sounds, I turned it off, then fished out a horribly mangled pair of formerly useful measuring spoons.

“You’re supposed to check it before you run it,” my wife despaired at my lack of wisdom. But don’t garbage disposals have a way of mysteriously turning on as soon as you stick your hand in?

This morning, I overcame those irrational fears. I felt around down in the dark, underneath those black rubber flaps, bare-handed. There was something in there, all right. Good thing I checked. I pulled out the bleached, decomposed remains of a medium-sized frog.

I shuddered. I shrieked. His dead black eye looked up at me. How the hell had he gotten in there? I rinsed and soaped and rinsed again. I found some cheap plastic forks to use as tongs to lift the body into a plastic bag, which I carried, grim and still shaking, down the hall, past my wife’s room, and out to the trash.

“Is anything the matter?”

“I’ll tell you later.”

I've touched frogs before. I went through a cruel childhood frog-killing phase. I've eaten frog legs in restaurants. Karmic justice would demand I suffer. Mercifully I got off easy today with a major case of the creeps.

a healthy froggie