Koi Pond with Incense

By Jody Lisberger

When I walk under Darrell and Tabby’s wooden archway leading into their flower garden and koi pond, I hope I’m not intruding. From the rural road we all live on, I waved hello and Darrell waved back. Not exactly an invitation, but the same happened a week ago, and they seemed happy to see me. Not that I came in that first day as far as their archway. 

This afternoon they’re sitting opposite each other on low beach chairs on the flat stones surrounding the koi pond. A glass of red wine stands beside each of them. The glasses have sealed tops that look like lily pads. As I approach, a frog jumps from near my foot into the water. The splash startles me. 

“Oh, we have lots of frogs,” Darrell says. “Grew them since they were babies. Only this big to start.” He shapes his thick fingers to make a circle the size of a quarter.

Last week, when I first met Darrell and Tabby, a wildfire was billowing black smoke a half mile from our houses. The wind was blowing the fire the other direction. Otherwise, we might have been more scared than we were. 

Nothing like a wildfire to bring people out of their houses. 

I didn’t know until that first meeting that Darrell and Tabby were both retired, like me. Darrell was an elevator inspector and Tabby an optometrist’s assistant. Nor did I see the fish in their koi pond. Not big orange koi fish with their skin peeling, looking raw and blotched as I’d seen elsewhere, but small orange fish, more like large minnows darting under the lily pads spiked with magenta flowers. I also didn’t see or smell incense. Not like today, when I smell the incense before I see the smoke curling from a stick propped in a round stone in front of Tabby. It strikes me as odd to burn incense outdoors. Does it have the same impact as incense indoors? But then again, I smell the incense, so it must impact something. Tabby keeps her gaze fixed on the curling smoke. I wonder if she lit the incense for a special reason. An offering? An effort to let something go?

“And look who else is here.” Darrell’s voice pierces the quiet. He reaches over a coiled hose behind him and pats the head of a small black spaniel lying on a low bench. The dog is so quiet it could be dead for all I know. I guess Darrell’s pot belly precludes having a dog on his lap. “She’s an old dog, that’s for sure.” He nods like he knows old better than anyone. “Once in a blue moon, she’s been known to eat a frog.” He laughs, sort of. A thin wheeze through his nose. “Don’t know who’s been more surprised. Her or the frog.” He laughs again. Tabby doesn’t laugh with him. 

Rural neighborhoods like this one in Rhode Island can be odd places. For years, we see each other coming and going, but we don’t know each other’s names or occupations. No Welcome Wagon out here or nice lady who brings cookies to say hello. 

I did once suggest to Pete, my husband who died a few months ago in his sleep, that I make cookies for the neighbors or invite them all over for a cookout. I envisioned name tags for everyone with a picture of their house next to their names. First names only. But then some guy up the street murdered his wife and my idea sizzled of its own accord. For the longest time, yellow tape surrounded that whole property. Caution. Don’t cross. Then some young guy bought the house and totally rebuilt it. It doesn’t look anything like the old house, at least from the outside. 

I don’t know the young guy’s name, but I know he has a lumbering tan mastiff, a blonde wife, and three young girls. I try to ignore his Veterans for Trump banner hanging from his garage, though sometimes when I walk by and wave to his wife, I’m tempted to ask her what she thinks about an ex-President who believes it’s okay to “grab someone by the pussy.” I mean, how would she feel if he grabbed her girls’ “pussies”? Or her “pussy”? Has she ever asked her husband that? 

When you live alone in a rural place, the quiet and trees can be a source of comfort. They can also make you feel lonely. Like they’re swallowing you up. 

The only reason I’m getting to know people now is because I retired as a postal clerk a few months ago, and the May weather is finally nice enough to take daily walks. When I started my job in 1963, stamps cost five cents and you had to lick them. You could buy Eleanor Roosevelt in purple or a torch with the words Alliance for Progress on it. Airmail was eight cents. People sent letters in envelopes then. I always thought it was funny that Amelia Earhart was on the air mail stamp. You know. Amelia Earhart. Air mail? Ha ha. These days you have to pay sixty-six cents for a stamp, and you can get anything on it. Elephants, flowers, tiger for the Lunar Year, wood ducks, LOVE, John Lewis, bridges, you name it. But if you lick the stamp, you’ll have only goo on your tongue. So much for Forever Stamps. 

Working as I did at the post office, you’d think I’d know everybody’s name and address around here. But I worked four towns over. My husband, a plumber who retired years before I did, used to ask why I never switched offices to be closer to home. “I like my drive,” I told him. “And the radio filling my ears, talking to me. As if it wants me to be there.” 

But I never said that last bit to him. Water over a dam is water over a dam, even if for years you wish it otherwise.

It took me a long time to learn that sometimes silence can drown you.

“So, how do you like your frogs?” Darrell must see me staring at the koi pond, looking for hillocks of glossy eyes peering above the water. I wonder if he knows that frogs, having eyes on top of their heads, can see almost 180 degrees. Or that when a frog swallows, it pulls its eyes into the roof of its mouth to help push food down its throat. As to how I like my frogs, I’m not sure what he means. 

“I guess I like them wet,” I say, watching as two smooth green frogs leap from the shallows into the depths. Their sleek bodies and long legs nothing like the bumpiness of the toads my kids used to find. Or the gooey stinky stuff they’d get on their hands if they picked up the toads. Toxic stuff.

“You like them wet?” Darrell laughs as he reaches to pat his quiet dog. “Ha ha. But I mean, what kind of frog do you like? We have a variety here. Northern leopard. Pickerel. Wood frog. Bullfrog. We’re lucky they don’t eat each other. Not like our sweet dog here.” This time, when he pats the dog’s head and it doesn’t move, I have the oddest feeling. “Once, she even ate a toad,” he says.

“Once?” Tabby’s voice is not nice. She keeps staring at the incense. Her narrow face looks all the more pointy as she looks down, her gray curls resting on her thin shoulders.

“Yes, just once,” Darrell says very quietly, looking toward the trees as if he can smell the wildfire again. Or maybe he smells something else. 

“You know,” he says, hand still on the dog, “it’s hard for some people to tell the difference between a frog and a toad. For a dog, I guess it’s near impossible.” He looks at Tabby. Bites his lower lip. 

The day the wildfire started, we all smelled the smoke first. Some of us are still shaking our heads at our luck. A mere shift in the wind and our houses would have been in the line of fire.

I wonder if that young guy with the Trump banner ever thinks about the line of fire. And I don’t mean the wildfire. I mean the one he faced in Afghanistan, where he saw things he should never have had to see, and did things no human should have to do. I try to have sympathy for him—and his wife. But I still want to ask her—how can you be married to a man who thinks it’s okay “to grab someone by the pussy”? Not that I’d ever ask her. I grew up in a time when you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps, went along with things, and kept your mouth shut. “None of your business,” my mother used to say. 

Sometimes I walk by their house and see the wife and girls outside playing with the big dog, the girls kissing and hugging him, riding him around. God, they love that dog.

I didn’t know my husband was dead until he didn’t come down for lunch. By the time I went upstairs to find him in his bed, his body was so cold and stiff, I almost didn’t want to touch him. 

Yesterday, I walked through the nature preserve where all the trees got burned. The skinny pine trees, charred and black now, have fallen all over the ground, crisscrossed like so many matchsticks. A few remain standing, black and bare, their pointed tops piercing the blue sky. The mountain laurels, which should be blooming now, fill the groves below, their black gnarly branches reaching out like a thousand ghostly arms screaming for help. One spark. That’s all it took. 

I never knew mountain laurel had such gnarly branches. Not until they were stripped bare. 

By the koi pond, Tabby keeps staring at the smoke curling from the incense. The wind has changed directions, but still she stares, even as Darrell twists around, gathers the stiff dog in his arms, and tries to cuddle it. It won’t bend. 

I can’t help myself. Or maybe I can. 

“You know,” I say mostly to Darrell, the lurch of my voice, its own surprise. At least to me. “Bullfrogs and leopard frogs are the most common frogs people eat. And if you want to cook them, you have to first cut off their legs above the hips while they’re still alive, skin the legs, and soak them in cold water, saltwater, or a milk bath. ‘The skin pulls off like a glove.’ Or so my husband always said.” I pause and swallow hard before I step closer to Tabby, her eyes still on the incense, and speak as if my throat weren’t closing up, my mouth filling with long overdue regret. “And when a dog eats a toad,” I whisper, “and her mouth starts foaming and she starts convulsing, you do need to rinse out her mouth with a lot of water, but you need to be careful not to force the water down her throat or you might drown her. I should know.”

Then, I thank them for my visit and turn back to my house, my trees. As I walk, I tell myself I was kind not to mention how frogs keep twitching long after they’ve been flayed. 

About the Author

Jody Lisberger’s stories have been published in Fugue, Michigan Quarterly Review, Confrontation, Louisville Review, Timberline Review, Jabberwock Review, and Minerva Rising Press, among others, and have also won prizes at Quarterly West, American Literary Review, and Sequestrum. Her 2008 story collection Remember Love was nominated for a National Book Award. She retired in 2020 from the fiction faculty of the low residency MFA in Writing Program at Spalding University, and from the University of Rhode Island in 2022.