A Taddle Tale, as recalled by the Hollow (or someone pretending to listen)
Taddle was a frog, or so he claimed.
No one quite knew when he arrived in the Hollow. One day, the pond simply had a croak it hadn’t had before.
Not loud. Not proud.
Just… persistent.
He was small. Speckled.
Eyes wide in the way only those who’ve seen too much — or nothing at all — tend to stare.
And he was high. Not on status. Not on ambition.
On mushrooms. Likely his own doing.
He told tales.
Well… one tale, mostly.
About her.
“Bernadette,” he’d whisper, eyes fogged like morning mist,
“She moved like poetry. A poem written in slime…”
She was, by all credible accounts, a snail.
A common garden snail, at that.
Shell like polished moonlight.
Voice like… well, she never actually spoke.
But Taddle claimed he could hear her thoughts through “vibrational slug language,” which he also claimed to be fluent in.
They met — allegedly — on a damp log near the east fen.
She was crossing. He was napping.
When he awoke, she was already inches away — an eternity in snail terms, a tragedy in frog.
“I followed her,” he’d croak. “Not because I had to, but because the trail… smelled like truth.”
And so he hopped after her. Through the Hollow. Through time. Through several philosophical spirals involving reflective puddles and “the moral implications of slime.”
He lost her, of course.
Some say she was never there.
Some say she still circles the fen, unbothered, unaware of the frog’s heartbreak.
Taddle, for his part, claimed to forget her—until a certain scent drifted through the reeds one evening.
Sweet. Faintly fungal. Familiar.
He froze. Tongue numb.
Nostalgia blooming in his brain like puffball spores.
“Was it real?”
“Was she?”
“…Ooh look. A firefly.”
Scriblet’s Note:
I’ve heard the tale a dozen times. Each version changes slightly — sometimes Bernadette is a philosopher, sometimes a spy.
Once she was a pastry.
But always, always, she is the one who got away.
And Taddle… is the one who kept hopping anyway.
Because in the Hollow, even a frog who’s higher than the treetops can still find something worth chasing.
Even if it’s just a memory shaped like a slime trail.
