The stick had slipped. The screen, no longer propped open, had trapped the toads in the hot barrel. Everything was dead, the water was soup, not even green with algae anymore. At the top of the stick, clustered in some places three deep, were shriveled bodies of dried-out baby toads. Thousands of tiny, shiny lives.

I ran and told my mother.

She told me to clean up the mess before I went to bed.

After much gagging and pacing the yard, I shouldered the barrel over, hosed it out, and rolled it away. But the dead clung to each other, some individuated, some rotten in a grey mass matting the lawn. I washed it all away. Sometime near dark, hours after the stink was gone and the last tadpole was soaking in the wet, black, garden, Mom called to me to come in. I was still holding my shirt over my mouth, my right hand locked around the end of the hose, my thumb knuckle white from the pressure.

My mother knew the screen had slipped. She knew I didn’t check on the tadpoles. She knew about the beat of a baby toad’s heart against pale young skin, and she let me kill them anyway. It was supposed to be a lesson about responsibility. I was supposed to make something of it all, make it all a parable, manufacture a moral to the story, redeem it with later wisdom and a greater good. But all I can really do is remember the hot pain of my hand frozen around the garden hose, and how, in the half light, the broad heavy blades of grass shone silver.