By Jennifer Boyden
If my parents ever found the pile of blood-soaked intestines decaying in the front yard, they never mentioned it.
I had found the toad buried beneath some rotting leaves on a warm day in July. A chubby thing, it didn’t move as I rustled through its home. Even when I picked it up, one tiny eight-year-old hand on either side of its fat body, it remained frozen; only its throat moved in the rhythmic pattern of breathing.
Without a smile, I threw it. The toad’s body arced gracefully in the air, mimicked by its shadow, its stubby legs reaching out for something, anything, to prevent its inevitable fall, a mesmerizing cycle of gravity and anti-gravity. It landed with a soft thud in the grass and rolled a few feet down the hill. I followed. I picked it up and threw it again. The violence fascinated me for ten minutes. Bored, I kicked the toad into the side of my house, grinding it against the cement foundation.
By September, I forgot about the toad. I had more important things on my mind. At the start of third grade, my parents sent me to St. Thomas Aquinas, a Catholic school in the next town. They hated the public school in my town. They hoped a private school with its private teachers and its private funding might consider skipping me ahead to the fifth grade. I only hoped I could make friends.
But at my new school, it took more than grades to pass the third grade. It took a Christian soul, a desire to become faithful amid the faithless: it took Confession.
It was winter, the start of the second semester, and the incense on the altar made my nose run. My class filed through the church in alphabetical order: after P. Barker, I entered the Confessional.
In the darkness of the booth, surrounded by the echoes of the slightly-labored breathing of the priest, I remembered my six-month-old crime. I realized I was going to Hell, and I panicked.
The toad had not been the first thing I ever killed, but it had been the first thing I ever killed that could stare back at me. In its eyes, glassy and bulbous, sunken in its wrinkled flesh, I had seen my reflection.
My parents always asked me to kill any caterpillars I found crawling across the driveway. Every year, our yard was infected with Eastern tent caterpillars, insects that could destroy entire trees overnight. My executions were precise: I placed my shoe below the caterpillar’s bud-like head and pressed down slowly until its head flew off, propelled by a green stream of fluid like the dust tail of a comet. Once, I collected every caterpillar I found in a rusted Maxwell House coffee can. I filled it with water from the hose and left it out during the first early-autumn frost. The ice cube rested in the backyard through the winter, the tiny worm-like bodies frozen inside like victims of a second Ice Age.
No, I had been a killer before.
“It’s okay, you are in His presence,” the priest spoke softly, either out of pity or impatience. With a deep breath, I let the truth flood from my heart and my mouth, the story of malice and the quivering mass of flesh that still, in some sickly way, served as a source of pride. For over forty-five minutes I recounted every detail, every image. Throughout my desperate confession, the tears continued to slide down my cheeks, down my neck, soaking the collar of my button-down Oxford.
“God could never hate a little girl like you. He will always love you.” The priest paused, and I thought he could sense my disbelief, the distrust in my sudden silence and the blatant absence of sniffling. “I know this; He told me so.”
The priest gave me a penance of ten Hail Mary’s. If I whispered them once I left the Confessional, hunched over in a pew before the Crucifix, I would be absolved, forgiven.
I had begun my Confession so distraught at the realization that I had killed for pleasure, for fun; that I had found the toad to be beautiful in its misery, slowly twirling in the air before its inevitable death; that I had imagined it screaming as I tortured it. Yet how easily everything could be forgotten.
I refused to say the ten Hail Mary’s. I didn’t want to be forgiven.
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