Flash Frog
Small. Brightly colored. Deadly to the touch.
The 250th Annual Radishtown Day Summer Parade by Ani King
*THE BLUE FROG 1st PLACE WINNER*
Introduction by Guest Judge KRISTEN ARNETT
The titular Radishtown of the story–set to sink beneath the rising waves while simultaneously celebrating an annual parade–immediately snagged my interest. A peculiar concept! How might one attend a parade while also preparing for a surge of biblical proportions? Why is a town named after a dirt-grown object fodder for a deluge? Why aren’t any of the residents doomsday prepping instead of watching Grandma perfectly boil her famous potatoes? I found that I did not care to dig free the answers to these questions. I was content (and thrilled) to sit back and watch the festivities play out as possible danger approached. The writing here felt akin to something Kelly Link might ink, hyper focused on the granular and lyrically delicious, leaving me ready to enjoy whatever came my way, whether that be feast or flood (or in this case, both).
We prepare for the flood and the parade at the same time. Early in the morning we chop the braces of the big farmhouse porch clean through and lash it to fence posts with rope, like a proper boat. Pontoons salvaged from junkyard boats replace the lattice and the empty space underneath the porch. Groaning resentfully, the porch takes our full weight over from the house.
Sure, we could coax the Ford into limping out onto the freeway in a doomed race for higher ground, kids crying in the back with bare necessities jam packed in the bed, dog yowling out the window at a yellow-gray sky bruised all over with dark clouds. But we wouldn’t make it anywhere better on eight miles a gallon if we could find gas and it’s the 250th Annual Radishtown Day, which we’d never miss for anything.
A twelve-foot picnic table is bolted to the porch and a short row of lawn chairs face west for when the sun sets. The water is rising in the distance as we tug a cooler full of drinks into one corner of the porch while the kids get in the way, chasing each other in and out of the house and tripping dangerously while playing games of give me that back, or you can’t catch me. We give them cherry-lime popsicles and shoo them off to play: Stay on the porch, I’m not kidding! Our people like to lay out a spread like you wouldn’t believe–burgers, brats, one cold salad after another, sandwiches and casseroles despite the heat, and a whole mess of brownies, blondies, and pink-frosted sugar cookies. We cut watermelon into wedges and slice radishes into bright pink flowers to line the tuna salad. We all stay the hell away from the ancient wood stove where, for the last time, Grandma stands over the boiling potatoes with a fork, conducting the meal and testing the sink of the tines: how creamy does it feel? How yielding is the skin?
Used to be our family went to the big Radishtown Day picnic over at the union hall, listening to old timers talk about back when their old timers talked about back when this place was nothing more than a mining camp, a radish farm, three churches, and a general store. The high school marching band kicked the whole thing off, bright and brassy under the summer sun, then the volunteer fire department would fling candy into the crowd, and a classic pink Cadillac painted radish pink would bear Miss Radishtown to the festival stage at the fairgrounds. We’d beat back the humidity with cans of beer or soda and soak that up with potato chips and grilled hotdogs. Younger kids would wild around the elementary school playground across the parking lot, older ones would head to the fairgrounds to shrug at the Ferris wheel, the Gravitron, the Tilt-A-Whirl, but still would wait in line for their turn over and over.
In the distance, fields turn to lakes and before we know it the water climbs the hill towards the house with more urgency. We convene at the table as the crowns of shivering stalks of corn disappear; the rusty tractor and its rotten tires go next, and the rubber tire swing floats away from the bicentennial maple tree like a balloon loosely shackled to a child’s wrist. We sing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”in a double round, some voices high and reedy as a tooth whistle, a couple low and sad as a hound’s. The hound sleeps underfoot while we do. When the water lifts us away from the house we yank the rope to be released from the fence, and we only dip slightly before we’re floating towards town. The adults sing row, row, row your boat, the kids sing gently down the stream over and over, clear and clean underneath. This is how we say goodbye to the house, the path to the house, the road to the house.
Over drowned radish and wheat fields, past the VFW hall, city hall and the union hall, where Grandpa hung the first UMWA banner and where the latest flag sags damply around the pole, past the hard angles of the Methodist church jutting through dark water, and the Pentecostal church with its aluminum warehouse roof barely visible, and St. Anne’s Cathedral piercing the dark sky overhead, past the courthouse and the hospital, we say goodbye. Goodbye to the places where we were born, baptized, wed and divorced. Goodbye to all the places we were delivered to or from each other.
Last year’s Miss Radishtown waves plump and pink and crying from a rubber raft in front of the pharmacy’s peaked roof, wearing her bright, white sash over a life jacket, the bright fuchsia letters of her title stretched tight. Moving in perfect time with the song, her arm is a freckled metronome pendulum, her girlfriend’s hand loose around her other wrist.
More people join our parade as we drift through town, bunting lining their porches or pontoons or fishing boats or swimming platforms in the particular bright pink of the radish, some singing like us, and then most everyone joining in until the song loops perfectly through itself, over and over again, slippery down our spines, traveling longitudinal waves over freeways lined with abandoned cars and forests raising their ancient hands in farewell, and hills laced with caves and mines that cannot turn their faces away as we go and yes we are weeping but yes we keep singing.
ANI KING — Ani is a queer, gender non-compliant activist, writer, and artist from Michigan. More about them and their work can be found at aniking.net.
Art by RURI KATO — Ruri is an artist based in Tokyo, Japan. Her current artwork primarily focuses on the experience of isolation. She explores the process of finding sanctuary within oneself and the world often in the most mundane of places, like the sunlight or a moment with an energetic colleague that carries on the conversation while you are in the toilet cubicle. Ruri currently works in a range of mediums, including gouache, pencils, and digital. She also enjoys a private project of writing fantastical stories, with accompanying illustrations.