Story by Anonymous

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I had one job to do: rent an incredibly expensive frog suit to wear to my nephew's eighth birthday party.

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I'm not very close to my siblings and their kids, at least not in the we-can-finish-each-other's-sandwiches sort of way. We're close in obligation, though. When one of us needs something, the other is there. My older sister lives in Arizona, and drove all the way to northern California when I got in a minor motorcycle accident. We never talk on the phone for more than twenty minutes, but we'll cross half a country when the time calls for it.

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But it's not that dramatic. We do simple things for each other, too. My brother needed a pair of black shoes for a wedding, so I drove to his place, dropped him off a pair of good ones I had from college, and left, no questions asked. One other time I asked my younger sister to grab groceries for me, and she did. We hadn't talked in a week, and she did it. This is how we do things.

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So my nephew's eighth birthday rolls up, and apparently he loves alligators. He's going to have a whole frog theme. My younger sister (his mom) got me and my other siblings doing tasks: my brother was making a cake, my older sister was driving into down and helping set up the house. I was tasked with dressing up as a frog, at least for an hour. Why not?

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Well, here's why not. I forgot to reserve the outfit. My sister had told me about this half a year ago, and I put it off. I didn't realize frog suits would be in high demand, or how expensive they were. Renting one was a hundred bucks an hour, without insurance, and the only frog suit they had was being used somewhere else. Why? Who knows? Probably some weird frog kink.

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So I got an alligator suit instead. Or was it a crocodile? I have no idea. But it wasn't a frog. I rented it with insurance. And then I spent four hours cutting off its large snout and sewing it by hand to kind of look like a frog—a frog-proximation of one. The lips were crooked and knobbed in the way only a bad stitching can do. The way I saw it, amphibian trans-reptiliation wasn't too complex in cloth.​

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So I arrived, all suited up, ready to ribbit and croak for my nephew, whom I love, but again, don't really talk to much. He was eight. I hopped in and my younger sister was looking at me like I was toxic. My brother started laughing. I knew the suit wasn't exactly super professional, but I felt like it got the idea across. I even shaved my beard so that my face didn't look as mammalian coming out of the frog's wonky maw.

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But then I noticed. The decorations, the dolls, the plates, the napkins... it was all alligator themed.

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I had screwed up. Somehow, in my mind, I had forgotten it was an alligator party and thought it was a frog party. Now I looked like an alligator whose snout had been ripped off—I guess that's what it was.

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It ended in a laugh, sure. We love each other, like I said, and even if my nephew didn't fully understand what was going on, my siblings and I will always have this moment. But this is a sad anecdote, right? So where's the sad?

 

The truly sad thing was what happened to my wallet. My sew job was not covered by the insurance.

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