A peculiar croaking resonated in the morning stillness and woke me from my dreams. I slipped on my sweatpants and sneakers and hurried out to the living room. Raquel’s candle was burning in the bay window, but when I pressed my nose to the windowpane, cupping my eyes with my hands, I saw hundreds of tiny creatures hopping around the front yard in the predawn light. Crisscrossing in random arcs, across the lawn, up and down the driveway, out on the street, were hordes of leaping frogs. I rushed outside, and the morning air was hot, almost tropical, which was odd for that time of year. The oak tree that dominated the yard was swaying in a balmy breeze that carried with it a distinct odor that could only be described as primordial—wet and dank and feral.
For every leaping frog there were others squatting in the grass or hiding under the bushes. The croaking was tremendous in the open air, crescendoing in waves like a chorus of cicadas. The sheer volume was alien and intense; it gave me the creeps. I could imagine the frogs swarming me, knocking me over, smothering me with their communal slime. I told myself not to be silly. Nevertheless, I jogged my memory for any personal indiscretions against frogs, toads, or other amphibians.
My conscience was clear. I was a high-school math teacher.
It was the late 1990s, the end of the century, the end of the millennium. Vigilant fanatics were forecasting the end of the world. Credentialed prognosticators were pinning their hopes on the Y2K event, convincing everyone to prepare for disaster as data-entry land said goodbye to the bedrock of two digits for each date, month, year, 01/01/00. The unintended looping between the 1900s and 2000s threatened to tear civilization from its digital moorings.
I tiptoed across the lawn, keeping to the slabs of slate we used as a pathway. Frogs dove this way and that, scrabbling off as if I were the intruder. They bolted in every direction and sprang across the yard, swarms of them, little configurations of vitality, bouncing, croaking, pulsing with raw life. I had never seen anything like it before, not in my own front yard anyway.
I ventured out back to see what was happening by the creek and discovered that the backyard was carpeted with them. The sun had now risen, and the splendor of the frogs was undeniable in the effulgence of the morning light, their myriad colors, green and yellow, blue and grey, brown and black, and I was truly impressed by the horrific beauty. Frogs were slinking around aimlessly while others lazed under the big magnolia, the pride of the backyard, calm and corpulent and self-possessed.
The weeds near the creek were overgrown so I needed something heavy to hack my way through. We stored our gardening tools, sports equipment, and everything else we never used in a dilapidated tool shed at the corner of the property. When I opened the door, a nest of frogs tumbled out, surprising me as if I expected the shed to be immune from their invasion. I searched around for a hoe or scythe or something good for hacking weeds.
I was never the gardening type and more or less limited my landscaping to mowing the front lawn. I had purchased a manual lawn mower at a yard sale when we first moved down South. It had a cylinder of slightly rusted rotary blades and was a real pain to push around, but I liked its simplicity, although it kept me from mowing the lawn as often as I should. Our lawn was not exactly trimmed, and there were parts that some people, like our next-door neighbor Prendergas, considered out of control. The area by the creek was one of them. It was so overgrown that originally unmowed weeds had graduated into the category of trees.
I pulled an old splintered baseball bat from the tool shed and went to work. With every whack of the overgrowth, frogs dodged out. They were nestled in thickets, and the more I hacked, the more they spilled forth, swarms of pop-eyed little critters, croaking, creeping, crawling. The situation reminded me of a scouting trip I had taken as a kid hiking in the Jersey Meadowlands when we stumbled upon a frog infestation. The scout master told us it was breeding season, and one of the minimally badged scouts burst out in song about frogs a-humping in the swamplands all the livelong day, frogs a-humping in the swamplands just to pass the time away, and we all chimed in like a choir of fools to the tune of “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” laughing until we nearly peed in our pants.
I was not laughing this time.
I hacked and kicked and stamped my way through the overgrowth to the creek. The water was teeming with tadpoles and half-formed polliwogs sprouting tiny legs. Froglets cleaved to the muck and rocks along the muddy bank. It was fascinating yet repulsive at the same time. I held onto the baseball bat for moral support and lumbered along the creek. As far as I could see, it was brimming with slimy activity, mucous membranes bobbing in the clear stream, webbed feet clawing at the air, dark vacuous eyeballs peeping all the way down to the periphery where the flow of the creek, thick with amphibia, cascaded into the subterranean flood drain that penetrated the next neighborhood.
I decided I had seen enough.
Out front, I spotted Prendergas idling his vehicle. He had already spotted me. Prendergas was a prosecutor in the District Attorney’s office, widely known for his devotion to capital punishment, and, at age sixty, still nurturing unrealized political ambitions. He sat in the throne of his four-wheel-drive pickup, double-sized cab, double rear wheels, double decals of the National Rifle Association on the tailgate, and a bumper sticker that read, “If it ain’t King James, it ain’t Bible.” The truck was silver and waxed into a glamour. Frogs thudded against its sides. Innumerable victims had already been mashed beneath its tires.
Prendergas lowered his window and waved me over.
“What in the Lord’s name do you make of this, Stanley?” he asked me.
I had to be careful with Prendergas. He did not like me, nor anyone like me, Northerners, carpetbaggers in his mind, come to reap from the South what we did not sow. He fancied himself a born-again Christian although he struck me as more of a born-again Nimrod.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Definitely strange.”
“Strange?” Prendergas knit his brow. His hair was thick and closely cropped. “What’s so strange? Says in the Bible in the last days there will be dreadful portents and great signs from the heavens, famines and plagues.”
I stared in silence, hoping Prendergas was in a rush to a crime scene, or a duck hunt, or an early morning haircut, but he idled his vehicle steadfastly. Frogs nosed up to the truck and crept beneath the chassis.
“It’s even worse out back by the creek,” I said. “Maybe it’s the recent rains.”
“I imagine Pharaoh entertained similar thoughts,” Prendergas said. “This here’s got nothing to do with the rains.” He waved his arm at the landscape of frogs. “This here’s a plague.” He brought a shiny cuspidor to his lips, like a morning cup of coffee, and spat out a dollop of crud. “Bible says, I shalt plague your whole country with frogs. The river shall swarmeth with them. They shall cometh into your palace, into your bedchamber and bed, and into your ovens and kneading bowls.”
“What about into spittoons?” I asked. “Shall the frogs cometh there?”
Prendergas locked his eyes onto mine.
“You think you’re funny,” he said. “But shalt the fool question the Almighty?”
His window thwacked shut, and Prendergas plowed down the street, frogs slapping against the waxed flanks of his vehicle, his regulation-inflated tires flattening amphibious bone, leaving trails of mush in their wake.
I went back inside. We had a three-bedroom ranch. When we moved to the South, we had chosen the house in our buoyant optimism: the spacious family room, the half-acre lot, the oak tree in front to hang a swing from, the unctuous magnolia out back with its innumerable handy limbs, a natural place for our kids to learn to climb. “It’s a wonderful home to raise children in,” the realtor singsonged, parroting for us what she knew we wanted to hear.
Raquel was still asleep, so I woke her.
“Frogs?” Her face went sour with disdain.
I knew she would not like it. She was not the outdoors, nature-loving type. I had taken her camping a few times in upstate New York while we were newlyweds, but she loathed every minute of it. Reading Shakespeare next to a fireplace, sans lamp, was her idea of roughing it.
“They’re everywhere,” I said.
She got out of bed and slipped a bathrobe over her nightie. We approached the bay window in the living room together.
“Oh. My. God,” she said.
“Can you believe it?”
We pressed our faces to the window, our breath forming circles of vapor.
“Where’d they come from?” she asked.
“It’s got to be the recent rains.” I kept my mouth shut about Prendergas’s plague. “Probably like the mosquitoes and gnats we always get.”
“But frogs?” Raquel stared at the yard. “I thought frogs were kind of going extinct.”
“I guess they’re making a comeback.”
Raquel blew out her candle as she did every morning. It was her daily ritual. She lit the candle at sundown and blew it out each morning. A neighbor once asked me why we lit the candle in the window every night. I was out pushing the manual lawn mower, and he was strolling by. He stopped to tell me that he and his family were new to the neighborhood. A genial man merely introducing himself, his question was innocuous enough, but it unnerved me. I knew I could not tell him the truth, so I said to him, “It’s something my wife does,” and I smiled back at him.
Afterwards, I felt ashamed for making it sound as if the candle were frivolous, as if it were beneath me to admit it held meaning for me, too, like a lodestar.
Raquel put her arms around me.
“This is too weird,” she said. “It’s straight out of a Stephen King story.”
“There must be some explanation,” I said.
“But what?”
“Well, what do you think?”
“Maybe it’s a plague,” she said.
“You sound like Prendergas.” Raquel liked Prendergas as much as she liked frogs. We sat down together on the couch, and I told her about my conversation with him.
“Well, there is precedent,” she said.
“But that’s myth.”
“And?” she responded. “What’s not myth?”
Raquel was a teacher, too. English.
I was in no mood for literary theory. I recused myself and headed into the kitchen to prepare the morning coffee. Raquel disappeared into the bedroom.
*
By early afternoon there was no power. We had each tried going about our business, Raquel grading papers, me preparing classes, but then we flipped through the channels on the TV, searching for information about frog infestations or plagues; there was nothing. We dialed up the Internet but found nothing there, either, although it was encouraging to be reminded that frogs were the canaries in the coal mine of nature. We also called some friends on the phone, but none had seen so much as a single amphibian in months. Our families in New York offered no more than their usual response: “We told you not to move down there.” Seemingly, except for our immediate neighbors, we were alone in the world in our circumstances.
We had no choice but to try to go about our business.
When the lights went out and the hum of the air conditioner stopped, however, and the clocks on the oven and microwave began blinking the time over and over again as if warning us that we were caught in a time warp, the circumstances changed.
“A blackout,” I said matter-of-factly.
“How?”
“How not?”
We stood together in the dim light of the kitchen.
“Where’s the radio?” I asked.
“In the closet with no batteries.”
Raquel glanced at the stove and so did I—the electric stove.
We looked at each other nonplussed.
“We’ve got the grill in the tool shed,” I said.
“But we’ve never used it before.”
“Then maybe the tank is full.”
I returned to the shed with my baseball bat and the book of matches from Raquel’s candleholder. The grill was hidden behind a tangle of broken Christmas lights and split garden hoses. Frogs dispersed in all directions as I tugged the grill from the mess of worthless junk and wheeled it outside, the propane tank bobbing happily at the side of the grill. I lit a match, turned the knob, and a flame popped up like a geyser.
“Yes!”
I turned it off and wheeled the whole contraption up front.
“At least we can cook,” I said when I got back inside.
“What about food?”
This was another problem. Saturday afternoon was normally our time for grocery shopping. We liked to live simply, never stockpiling as if preparing for armageddon; we simply bought what we needed from week to week.
“What’s in the fridge?”
“Some veggies? and maybe some eggs?” Raquel reached to open it.
“Keep it closed.” I spoke as if the situation were controllable. “We’ll open it only when necessary.”
“Fine,” she said. Then she informed me Prendergas had called.
“About what?”
“He invited us over.”
“Now?”
“He said he’s got plenty of generators and enough food to feed the whole plantation.”
“He said that?”
“Verbatim.”
I shook my head.
“If we go over there we’ll pay for it,” I said.
“Probably so.”
“He wants to gloat.”
“But who knows what we’re facing, and he’s offering help.”
“I’m not stepping foot inside his house,” I said, “not even during a plague.”
“Well, at least he’s not a cynic.”
We stared at each other in silence.
Then she said, “So what’s the plan?”
*
For close to a year after our only child had died, Raquel became someone else, someone I had not known before. She took a leave of absence from teaching and remained at home, living the life of a recluse, not cooking, not reading, not exercising, not going to church, not doing any of the things she had always done. Instead, she watched TV and she cried. I feared she would commit suicide. Then on his birthday, she lit the first candle, a candle that had been lying dormant in the kitchen cabinet, nothing special, just one of those small utility candles, which we had picked up in a hardware store when we first moved into the house, having been told they were necessary for the blackouts during hurricane season.
I understood that first candle. It was our child’s birthday. But the next night, she lit the candle again, and the third night, too, and every night after that, on and on, until she was lighting candles till they burned down to the wick. Then she began replacing them in succession without cease. Along with the candles, the old Raquel reappeared, too, as if from the dead. She returned to teaching, she began cooking again, she resumed her exercising, and rather than the Eucharistic minister visiting every Saturday night as if Raquel were a convalescent, she attended mass again on Sundays, dressed for the living, and I was more than happy to join her.
I once asked her the meaning of the candles. I guess I already knew the answer, and she called me on it.
“Do you really need to ask?”
“I just wanted to hear your words.”
“But that’s why I do it,” she responded, “because most days there are no words.”
*
I needed to get to the supermarket. It was Saturday, we needed food, and I needed to do something besides patiently wait for the plague to end.
That was the plan.
“You want to come?” I asked.
“I’m not going out there, no way.”
In the garage, I pressed the remote control, but of course nothing happened, and I nearly broke my back pulling up the garage door. Frogs crept into the garage like burglars.
I put the car in reverse and backed out. Little bodies thumped against the sides, and in the side view mirror, I could see some scrambling away. This was going to be ugly. Through the windshield, two tracks of gore began to unroll before me. I kept backing the car into the street and pulled away. As I picked up speed, frog matter spewed from both sides of the car. I steered onto the main road and accelerated. Frog debris was smeared across the lanes of the entire roadway. An oncoming truck passed in the opposite lane, spraying guts in its wake and onto my windshield. I flicked on the windshield wipers, but they only began smearing bloody gloop back and forth. I pressed the fluid button, which only added to the mess.
I could barely see.
I hit the brakes, and that sent the car into a tailspin. I turned the steering wheel trying to regain control, but the car began hydroplaning—if you could call it that—until it careened across the entire road, over a curb, and down a short embankment. It came to a standstill next to a small cemetery that I had passed countless times before, so many times I no longer paid it any attention. I pulled open the car door, and frogs bounded away in every direction. They had already accumulated in the graveyard, atop the tombstones and across the stone markers, jittery and restless among the dead.
The cemetery belonged to a family whose dates seemingly passed back into oblivion. Some of the markers were no longer legible, the names and dates worn away by the elements and centuries, the stones toppled and sunken into the earth. The names that were legible were Old Testament names like Isaiah and Ezekiel, Sarai and Rebecca. One of the dates appeared to be from the 1700s. They were all Castleburys, the former owners of all the surrounding land, including our neighborhood, which was once farmland that had been sold and redeveloped in the mid-1960s, as one of our elderly neighbors had told me, an original occupant of the neighborhood, a man known as Pastor James.
In the cemetery, the Daughters of the Confederacy had established their presence with metallic markers affixed to some of the tombstones. One marker read Obededom Castlebury 1842-1863, another Zebulon Castlebury 1845-1864. In the corner of the yard, several large conspicuous unmarked rocks had been wedged firmly into the ground, and I suspected this was the slave section. The discrepancy between the decrepit tombstones of the Castleburys and the sturdy rocks in the corner reminded me of the gospel verse, “The last shall be first and the first shall be last”; the etchings on so many of the Castlebury stones were worn away and gone and the stones themselves were so thin and weakened by time in comparison to the bold unmarked rocks of the slaves that it seemed uncanny, as if a macabre testament to the biblical verse, a verse I had come to regard as more caustic and cruel than optimistic.
*
Our only child was born premature, his lungs not fully formed, his breathing erratic, the plastic ventilator taped to his face his only hope for life. For three days, while Raquel recovered from the trauma of the what the doctors said was a very dangerous birth, I visited him in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit and gently touched him through the openings in the incubator, caressing his thin body with my fingertips, his skin so soft and delicate it seemed ethereal. We prayed for a miracle, but after the doctors told us the situation was grim, Raquel asked if he could be baptized.
When the priest on call arrived and asked us his name, Raquel and I looked at each other in confusion. We were unprepared for the birth as it came months before the due date, and even at that, we had not yet chosen a name. Then after the birth, with Raquel weak and bedridden and me so preoccupied with keeping track of all the sensors and monitors, the pulsing lines and unsteady beeps, we simply had not discussed any names.
Although we both hoped the baptism would somehow save him, I suspected in my heart it would be the main event of his too brief life, so I said to Raquel, “How about John?”
“Why not Stanley?” she replied. “Like you.”
She looked at me, and I stared into her eyes and said, “Because today is his baptism, and we can’t know what tomorrow will bring.”
In her tears, she said to me, “Okay, but how about Jean-Baptiste?”
Although neither of us was French, we had met in French for Reading, a summer class to fulfill the grad-school foreign language requirement, and after we were married the following June, we honeymooned in Quebec where we joined the locals dancing around a bonfire on the Fête de la Saint-Jean-Baptiste.
“Yes, Jean-Baptiste,” I said, and we both cried as the priest sprayed the top of our baby’s soft tiny head with warm sterilized water squirted from a syringe.
*
I would come back for the car when I could, but it was obvious that driving anymore was out of the question. I locked the car up. I just wanted to get back to Raquel. Adjacent to the cemetery was the pathway for the main power lines of the city. It was a swath of grass as wide as a two-lane highway, and the massive towers supporting the power lines stood in colossal rows extending in either direction. The clearing underneath the lines had become a thoroughfare for wildlife that regularly appeared in our neighborhood from who knows where, animals like deer and fox and coyote. I knew the far side of our neighborhood abutted this pathway, so after following it a short distance, I turned off in the general direction of our house.
As I pressed through a thicket of holly and arborvitae, I found myself on the property of Pastor James. He lived here with his wife since the mid-sixties, and each morning without fail, together they tended to their property. In the spring, it was resplendent with azaleas of various shades and cherry trees of different colors and so many kinds of flora that it would take a horticulturist to know all their names. But the pastor and his wife knew the names. Even in the cold months of the year, their property was verdant with holly and gardenia, junipers and boxwoods, rhododendron and wintercreeper, all names they had shared with me over the years.
Here too the frogs were springing with abandon, and as I slinked across their yard, lifting my feet as high as I could to avoid them, not wanting to harm what I conceived to be the pastor’s frogs, he spotted me from his open garage. He looked startled, and I felt ashamed, and I waved a hand to reassure him, shouting, “Pastor James, it’s me, Stanley.”
He was a small man, in his eighties, with trim gray hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and a kind, clean-shaven face. I explained to him about the accident and having to follow the power lines to get home. “I’m sorry for sneaking across your property.”
“Don’t be silly,” he said. “But why are you even out?” He waved his arm to indicate the frogs and smiled at me. “I hope it was important.”
“I was hoping to do some grocery shopping.”
“You need a tractor to get around here today. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Half out of curiosity, half joking, I said to him, “Prendergas thinks it’s a plague.”
The pastor laughed, which I was glad he did. “You mean like Egypt?”
“Where else?”
“Well, that’s kind of a stretch, don’t you think?”
He crouched down and intercepted one of the frogs with his hands, and holding it up tremulous in his palms, he said, “It’s life.”
The magnetic wonder of his eyes compelled me to lean forward and examine the frog more closely. In a flash, it heaved itself against my face, its raw slime slathering my cheek and lips before it bounded to the ground and darted away.
*
As I walked towards our house, I could see the light of Raquel’s candle quivering in the window. She had lit it early as the sun was still out, I guessed, because of the frogs. Once I got back, we would have to take whatever food was left in the refrigerator and together cook it on the grill, the two of us.
About a month after the burial of our son, Raquel began to bleed. Three times in one day we hurried to the ER, three times they treated her and told her she would be okay, to go home and rest, and three times, they sent us on our way, but still she continued to bleed. At home, I propped her legs on pillows and helped her wipe herself with towels while she applied packings of tampons and gauze and pads, but the flow was steady, slow, and relentless. By midnight, she had a look in her eyes that frightened me, and when she whispered, “There is something wrong, Stanley, something terribly wrong,” I immediately called 9-1-1, and within minutes, the ambulance was rushing her to the ER a fourth time. This time she was admitted, and in the darkness of that hopeless night, the doctors did what they thought they had to do: they stopped Raquel from bleeding ever again.
*
The quality of the air in the refrigerator was verging on tepid when we searched the shelves and crispers for what remained. Clasping what we found to our chests, we gathered it all together on the kitchen counter: green peppers, onions, yellow potatoes, half a bag of wilted spinach, a nearly empty container of milk, a hunk of Gouda cheese, a head of garlic, and five large brown grade-A once-fresh organic eggs. There were also three ripe tomatoes that Pastor James had given me.
We took the wooden cutting boards we had received as a wedding gift and placed them next to the food, and we got to work, dicing the vegetables into conic little piles. I peeled the garlic, the skin as thin as scritta, until I had several smooth little egg-like cloves, which Raquel crushed with the garlic press, another wedding gift. We went to work on the onions, first peeling off the skin, then slicing the flesh into scads of white crescents. Our eyes began to water, and together we laughed through our tears.
The counter was a smorgasbord of color before we collected the piles in a large ceramic mixing bowl. Then in another bowl, we cracked the brown eggs, the yellow yokes swimming in the white porcelain, me pouring in milk and adding salt and pepper, and Raquel beating the mixture into a smooth yellow liquid with a whisk. We placed the potatoes in a small pot and filled it with water trickling spasmodically from the faucet.
Our visitors were apparently in the water pipes now, too.
Raquel greased two pans with olive oil, and I proceeded outside to the grill, making several trips back and forth before preparing cheese omelets bulging with veggies for our dinner on the day of the frogs.
We ate in the dining room, the table lit with a candelabrum, and after we finished and the sun had set, we huddled on the couch in the candlelight, sipping wine and listening to the chorus of frogs.
Suddenly, we heard the blast of a shotgun coming from the direction of Prendergas’s.
“Was that a gunshot or fireworks?”
“What is he doing?”
“Maybe they’re in trouble.”
“From what?” I asked. “The frogs?”
Another blast resounded.
We peered out the windows, but we could see nothing due to the overgrowth between our properties.
“I’m going to call them,” Raquel said.
When no one answered, she asked me to go over. Neither one of us was a fan of the Prendergases, but as she said, whatever his motivations, Prendergas had offered to feed us. Besides, technically, they were our neighbors.
A boom pounded the air.
“You should take something.”
“Like what?”
“Like a weapon.”
I headed over to Prendergas’s with my baseball bat.
Frogs tried to skip away from me, but there were simply too many to avoid. I tried not to step on any directly, using the baseball bat as a kind of prow, but it was tricky business. Still, I did my best even for Prendergas’s frogs.
Prendergas’s house dwarfed all the others in the neighborhood. It was set on the equivalent of four lots, two full acres, and featured columns and gables and a sagging added-on veranda. Despite the blackout, it was lit up like Christmas, the heads of lamps and bulbs burning in every window. Prendergas was a man primed for disaster. He had his own gas pump installed ever since the gas shortages of the 1970s, which, according to him, he had predicted reading the Book of Revelation. I rang the doorbell and his wife Vernelle greeted me with a smile. She was fondling a martini glass. Savors of the kitchen emanated through the storm door, which remained closed between us.
“Oh, Stanley, you’ve decided to join us.”
Trouble was demonstrably not part of the equation here. “Is everything okay?” I asked sheepishly.
Vernelle mimicked consternation. “Elmer has the generators up and running, and we’re about to have us some pulled pork,” she said. “Many of the neighbors are here.”
Behind her, I could see faces familiar to me from the neighborhood milling about the house. The atmosphere seemed downright festive.
“We thought we heard gunshots.”
The echo of another blast rattled the glass of the storm door.
“Bless your heart, that’s just Elmer out back having a little fun.” Vernelle offered a wan smile. “Godforsaken little monsters, aren’t they?”
*
Raquel and I lay beside each other.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
A plague of frogs had descended upon our neighborhood. We had no electricity, no air conditioning, no working kitchen, no running water, no car, and for the past two hours, no operational toilets.
What was I thinking?
“We can lie here in despair…”
“I know, or we can hope for the best,” she said. “But the best doesn’t always happen.”
“Neither does the worst.”
She paused and I could hear her studied breathing.
“How can you say that to me?”
The frogs were croaking outside, and in the yard, and in the pipes of the house. There was a rhythm to their chorus.
“Because we’re alive.”
I turned towards Raquel, and together we held each other in the darkness.
*
Just before sunrise, I awoke to an eerie silence. I crept out of bed and rushed to the front window. Raquel’s candle was glowing brightly, but in the yard there was a stillness, no leaping, no creeping, no ribbitting.
“Holy.”
I hurried outside to the front porch. The air was no longer balmy, but cool and seasonable. The frogs were still present, stretched out across the lawns, in the bushes, under the trees, but they were motionless. They all seemed to be dead.
I stepped onto the grass to make sure they weren’t sleeping. Maybe frogs did that, played dead communally. I gently kicked a few, but there were no responses, not a tremor, not a twitch. Their bodies were deflated, just stiff little flat carcasses like autumn leaves strewn on the ground, ready to be bagged and carted away.
