Frogs

– Hey, can I ask you something? Why do human children dissect us?

– It’s part of their education. They cut open our bodies in school and write reports about their findings.

– Huh. Well, I guess it could be worse, right? I mean, at least we’re not dying in vain.

– How do you figure?

– Well… our deaths are furthering the spread of knowledge. It’s a huge sacrifice we’re making, but at least some good comes out of it.

– Let me show you something.

– What’s this?

– It’s a frog dissection report.

– Who wrote it?

– A fourteen-year-old human from New York City. Some kid named Simon.

– (flipping through it) This is it? This is the whole thing?

– Uh-huh.

– Geez … it doesn’t look like he put a whole lot of time into this.

– Look at the diagram on the last page.

– Oh my God … it’s so crude. It’s almost as if he wasn’t even looking down at the paper while he was drawing it. Like he was watching TV or something.

– Read the conclusion.

– In conclusion, frogs are a scientific wonder of biology. What does that even mean?

– It doesn’t mean anything.

– Why are the margins so big?

– He was trying to make it look as if he had written five pages, even though he had only written four.

– He couldn’t come up with one more page of observations about our dead bodies?

– I guess not.

– This paragraph looks like it was copied straight out of an encyclopedia. I’d be shocked if he retained any of this information.

– Did you see that he spelled “science” wrong in the heading?

– Whoa … I missed that. That’s incredible.

– He didn’t even bother to run it through spell check.

– Who did he dissect?

– Harold.

– Betsy’s husband? Jesus. So this is why Harold was killed. To produce this … “report.”

– (Nods.) This is why his life was taken from him.

(long pause)

– Well, at least it has a cover sheet.

– Yeah. The plastic’s a nice touch.