Through the Ventral Surface by Mizuki Yamagen

The frog doesn’t move.

Not for a long time.

Its skin is the green of river glass, shimmering like a puddle after rain—light fractured across something thin and soft. The ventral surface is pale and transparent on a damp leaf, heart pulsing, small and certain. I can see the curve of its stomach, the outline of a liver, maybe. A few bright pink veins curve along the organ like strands of fishing line. The internal anatomy looks delicate, unfinished, drawn in pencil and never inked.

A boy, pressed to the glass beside me says, “You can see everything in there,” and I want to say, No, not everything. But I don’t. Tinny music leaks from his headphones. He walks away.

The frog breathes—barely. Inhale. Pause. Inhale. The tank glass reflects both our lungs like we’re part of the same respiration cycle. Its unblinking eyes are pale gold, rimmed with flecks like old bronze. It stares off at something beyond the darkness of the exhibit.

The air here smells like filtered water and chlorinated stone, pennies and algae.

Somewhere behind me, a maintenance cart squeaks past, leaving a wet trail across the tiles. A door opens and I hear faint shouts about penguins and popcorn , until the door swings back closed. The rubbery silence returns.

On the train ride here, I thought about texting my ex. Not to talk—just to say, hey, I passed your station, even though I didn’t. One of his sweatshirts still hangs off the chair in the kitchen, sleeve stretched, collar damp from the last rain. The curtain in the room hangs crooked, something he’d said he’d fix.

Inside the tank, a misting pipe releases a slow hiss.

The cold started in my throat, right after the break-up.

A small soreness, like a pebble embedded behind my tongue. Three days in bed. Ginger tea gone cold beside me, turning my sips bitter. I listened to the neighbor’s washing machine through the wall and fell asleep before the spin cycle ended.

The cough stayed longer than it should have. A week, then three. It settled deep in the intercostal spaces—between the ribs where breath is supposed to expand. I went in for a scan. “Just to be safe,” the doctor said, in the tone people use when they don’t want you to panic. The radiograph lit up my thoracic cavity like a false spring.

There was a shadow on the left lung. Small. Probably nothing.

I didn’t ask what nothing looks like on an X-ray.

I told my mother on the phone. She said, “These things show up all the time.” Then: “It could be an artifact.” Like it was a glitch in the system. A photographic error.

She once showed me a scan of a frog’s chest in her lab—I remember the image better than I remember the creature itself. The pale crescent of its vertebral column. The heart, luminous in grayscale.

“You can see everything,” she said. “Isn’t that beautiful?”

I told her it looked like the frog had swallowed a lightbulb.

She laughed, but she didn’t say I was wrong.

The plaque is worn at the corners, the ink fading to a soft gray where too many fingers have pointed.

Glass frogs are native to the cloud forests of Central and South America. Their translucent skin helps them blend with the leaf canopy, avoiding predators. Though their organs are visible, this is a form of camouflage—not vulnerability. Several species are considered endangered due to habitat loss and human activity.

I read it twice.

Once like a scientist, under my breath in my mother’s voice. Once in mine.

Last week I finally moved his toothbrush to the back of the drawer.

He used to say I was hard to read. That being with me felt like walking through fog. I didn’t know how to correct him without sounding like a metaphor.

My mother once told me, when I was twelve and too quiet at dinner, “You don’t have to hide if no one’s looking for you.” She said it like a matter of fact, like it was scientific law.

The frog hasn’t moved. I think it’s sleeping. Or waiting for something. It rests on a leaf like it’s part of the design. A small shimmer of life pretending not to be.

I lean forward, close enough that my breath fogs a soft oval on the tank glass. For a second, the condensation lines up with the frog’s body—my lungs over its lungs, like a ghosted transparency in an old textbook.

And then it blinks. Or maybe I do.

I close my eyes and imagine my skin transparent.

My ribs arch like softened branches around a faintly glowing heart, thudding against a ribcage too narrow for what it holds. Ribbon candy intestines coiled neatly, my liver dense, lobed and smooth.

My lungs rise and fall—and there, on the left side—the small, unremarkable shadow they told me not to worry about.

I imagine someone leaning in, eyes wide, looking through me.

I want them to see it all—the alveoli clouded with worry, the slow churn of uncertainty, the shadow, the wanting. The parts that stay hidden even when everything is exposed.

I open my eyes.

The frog is gone. A light in its tank flickers, buzzing faintly.

I lean closer, scan the leaves, the glass, the curled bark. The dark rippling water.

Then I notice the top of the aquarium—a loose lid, sitting slightly ajar.

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MIZUKI YAMAGEN — Mizuki is a writer from Japan, currently living in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Her writing has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Citron Review, HAD, and is forthcoming at Does It Have Pockets, Your Impossible Voice, and other places. She is the winner of The SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction 2025 and was shortlisted for the 31st Bath Flash Fiction Award. You can find her online at mizukiyamagen.com and @mizukiyamagen.bsky.social

Art by KEELY HONEYWELL — Keely is a designer and artist who lives in the Pacific Northwest. She enjoys making art for books, periodicals, and other venues. Her website is at keelyhoneywell.myportfolio.com.