By Cliff Taylor

"These are the toads that need us to become Gods."

The two boys squatted beside the dusty, blinking, unmoving toad in their dull silver rover suits. The night sky blurred and yawned with the geometry of the slowly twisting galaxies overhead; burning white, alight.

"Just take off your finger cap and touch it. This was the first thing Jeremiah did when he came here with his uncles."

The heavier boy sat down in the red dust and looked at the bony fist of the toad. His dad had filled his head with crazy war-stories the summer his mom took a refinery job the next system over and never came back. Droid debris scavenged and turned into ornate nomad's equipment clothing blood-hungry mammoths. Poisonous trenches filled with history-bits that moved and swirled like smoke, pulling hard-shelled rodents down into their depths. Headless men implanted with weak controllers pawing at the windows of their base, ghosts with no identities. The greater cosmos was full of barbarity and strangeness, odd phenomena and mysteries. He looked closely at the toad. It seemed to be asking him a question and he found himself wanting to answer it.

"All right. You had your chance. I guess I'm going to do it then."

The other boy, with a face like a smashed tomato, creased and poor-looking, screwed off the cap of his pointer finger and held it about an inch over the toad's still body. "Now watch." He touched the toad's dusty head and instantly its flesh began to expand and disassemble, enlarge and thin out, turn luminescent, dimensionally porous, impossible to see clearly with the eye no matter how they looked at it. It broadened and fanned out, condensed, became more light than body, then became a frozen multi-sided image of itself, then shot up directly into the sky like a perfectly engineered firework leaving behind a thread of vaporous light that appeared to stretch all the way up into the clouds and rover paths.

"Now it's a God?" The heavier boy asked aloud, more to himself than to his friend.

They each moved their hands through the light thread, watched it stick to their gloves and then unravel and fade. They did this until the remaining thread hung and wavered out of their reach. They eyeballed the so-called 'tail of the toad God,' laughing and marveling at the first real treat of their vacation, kicking at the red dust where it'd been, and then they started talking about dinner and maybe heading back.

"You gonna tell your dad about that?"

The heavier boy thought about his dad and the arm he lost in the war and then he answered his friend, "Yeah, sure. Probably someday."

Tail of the Toad God copyright 2016 Cliff Taylor used with permission