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greeting.
    â€œLet’s get you more comfortable.” Buffy thumped down to the basement, where she found some heavy wire mesh left over from the landlord’s idea of fencing; she appropriated a section, took it up, and laid it over the aquarium in lieu of the atlas. There, now her baby had air. She crimped the corners to hold the mesh in place, then hustled (with portions of her bobbing) to the back yard and brought four bricks to weight the corners and keep baby safe in his playpen. Next, she positioned her Gro-Lite over the aquarium to keep baby warm, sacrificing houseplants as willingly as she had proposed to sacrifice goldfish. The beetles were crawling out of the aquarium and the red worm had drowned in the water; she removed it. “Supper’s coming in a little bit,” she cooed. Satisfied with herself and her mothering skills, Buffy had a shower and changed her clothes (finally), put her jeans in the washing machine, nuked herself a fried chicken dinner in the microwave, cut tender white meat off the wing, lifted the aquarium’s new mesh roof, took the shard of fowl between her fingers, and offered it to her frog, wiggling it.
    He bit her.
    He lunged like a cornered mouse and bit her hand. It was like being attacked by a Cub stapler with gums. The two pathetic teeth in his upper jaw accomplished only two tiny drops of blood on her knuckle—a mouse would have done more damage. Yet the bite chilled her to her navel, and infuriated her. She snatched her hand, and the food, away. “You can just damn well starve!” she yelled.
    â€œGladly, O adipose slattern.”
    Letting her chicken dinner sit, Buffy stomped to the freezer for brownie-chunk ice cream.
    Hunkered at the table, she attempted to soothe herself by applying the cold stuff internally. But the frog had broken his sullen silence to yammer incessantly. “I am a PRINCE give me a QUINCE when I have fears that I may cease to be were there but room enough and time the small rain down can rain fowles in the frith and fisshes in the floode Adam lay ybounden, bounden in a bond, lully, lullay, lullay, let me out you snaggletoothed hag!”
    Buffy reached for a bag of Hershey’s Kisses. “Shut up.”
    â€œOverstuffed knackingwench!”
    â€œShut up .”
    â€œI will not. I am a prince of the royal blood of Aurca. I—”
    Buffy reared to her feet. “ONCE UPON A TIME,” she roared, “THERE WAS A LOUD PRINCESS. SHE COULD HOWL LOUDER THAN WOLVES PLUS WIND PLUS THUNDER, SHE COULD BOOM LOUDER THAN A BITTERN, SHE COULD CRY DOWN GEESE FROM THE SKY. BUT HER MOTHER TOLD HER—” Buffy’s voice grew whisper-quiet as the frog squatted, watching her pop-eyed. “Her mother told her that if she did not speak softly, no prince would ever marry her. So she spoke softly and smiled sweetly and a prince married her. And her mother was happy. But the prince’s mother was a witch.” Buffy grimaced, thinking of her own former mother-in-law. She was making up the story as she went along, but it curled her toes and she knew it was good. “One day the princess had a baby, a little girl like a pink rose. And as she lay in her lacy white bed with her new daughter, the witch said to her, ‘Give me the baby,’ and the princess said loudly, ‘ NO ,’ because she did not want the witch to touch her little girl. Then, because the princess had spoken loudly, the witch pronounced a curse …”
    Buffy paused to breathe deeply and think of the curse. The frog waited for her to go on.
    â€œThe witch cursed the loud princess that when she spoke and wished to be heard, only the birds of the air would hear her.
    â€œAnd so it came to be. Her child grew, and when the loud princess said, ‘I am your mother,’ wrens flew to her shoulders, but the little girl could not hear her. When the loud princess said, ‘I love you,’ swans came and lay at her feet, but the