The Amazing Hand-Stand Cat
The grass was thick and brown, rubbery and heavy with the summer sun. The lake across the street was being drained that summer to make way for a new dam for the creek by my parent's house- leaving the bottom of what used to be a mystery just blazing, all out in the open and ready for exploration. Galoshes were too big back then, coming in the color black and one size only, with thin red trim. Thin breezy butterfly nets were supposed to catch frogs and snakes instead- I knew there were frogs down there because my dead cousin had once taken me to look at the tadpoles in the shallow way before the lake had been drained, and way before he had died of an asthma attack late one night. There were, as he had proven to me, frogs. There were frogs in the muck and mire and thick crusty brown mud that used to be the at the bottom of the lake, but now was just a sort of swamp. I chased the frog, slowly, the galoshes sinking down into the mud and sluuuuurping back up out of it. But then, but then! A snake! The flimsy butterfly net reached out for the frog just in time to brush against a snake- a heated competition for the same object, for one it would be food, for the other it would just be another summer pet, like the turtle kept in a box out on the porch, fed grass and water until the day I would let it go in the crick down the street.