When she stumbled back to the campground alone, to the smell of her friends cooking eggs and roast-vegetables over the campfire, it was hardly a surprise. Sara-with-no-H who now preferred the name Starchild, who’d previously gone by Rumiko, by Fatima and oddly for one brief spell went by Sarah-with-an-H, often wandered off into deep woods the night after a festival concert, communing with what she believed to be the forest spirits or at least a particularly good-lookin’ woman or man. She was what her grandma politely labelled a “freespirit”. Others said “crazy”.
What was far odder than usual was the story she returned with. Starchild had been wandering, she claimed, in the swamps between the port-a-potties from the festival and the farmer’s field next door to the venue, when she saw the most beautiful frog she had ever seen. It wasn’t the dark greens and browns she was used it, it was all oranges-and-reds, practically neon in hues.
Maybe it was the drum-circles and tiki-torches still thumping at a distance, maybe it was the childhood stories still in her head, but she thought it might be fun to pick it up in her cupped hands and give the thing a little kiss. And Starchild being Starchild, she did just that. Slimy!
Setting the hopper back onto the dirt, she figured that was that. But after a minute, the most wonderous-and-strange event occurred. It started to turn into the man of her dreams, though perhaps of only her dreams. As she described him for them, they realized her tastes were as bizarre as her actions. She said he was heavily-tanned and lean, had dyed-blonde white-boy dreadlocks and pukashell-bracelets. Cargo shorts and a t-shirt from Abercrombie-and-Fitch.
He sounded like a sexual predator at a Dave Matthews concert? The other women at their campsite tried not to gag at the description, but for Sara-with-no-H? Her idea of a prince!
She looked down at their breakfast-eggs and remarked how he’d taught her such wonders. Starchild had never known that you don’t have to add a fresh egg to powdered cake mixes, they’re just there to make the cooks feel like they did something but the powdered eggs in Duncan Hines were more than good enough. Her frog prince taught her that! So amazing!
But when she woke up in the morning, he disappeared, as man or frog not one single trace remaining, no hemp thread, no dead flies, nothing. She debated herself, out-loud, if Prince Charming had been a magic creature that only crossed into this world once a century, like Glomer the wish-granting leprechaun in the Punky Brewster cartoon, or if she should run desperately through the woods to find her dream man yet again? It was around then that a concerned-looking hippie approached camp, asking if anyone had seen the hallucinogenic amphibians he kept in his van for lickin’, some had escaped. She got rather quiet just then, considering if maybe she’d start going by Sara-with-no-H again, to live happily ever after.
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