Frog Prince

Ella Enchanted Book-verse

MK

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"Every little girl is a Princess, and there would be no need to say anything about it except that she is always in danger of forgetting her rank, and behaving as if she had grown out of the mud. ... That is why they need to be told they are princesses. And that is why, when I tell a story of this kind, I like to tell it about a princess." George MacDonald, The Princess & The Goblin

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Sugar and spice and all things nice were what little girls were supposed to be made of, but Ella had chewed thoroughly on her arm for an entire afternoon when she was four and had come to disagree. "I think I am made of mud and frog-legs," she said with all of her little-girl seriousness to Mandy. Mandy had turned around, one hand on her waist and the other occupied with a large wooden spoon to take survey.

"You would not think you were made of dirt," she replied, "if you were clean. Anyone who is covered in mud and grass stains would think that."

"And pond-water," Ella added stubbornly.

"And pond-water," Mandy agreed. "It would be bad to be made of frog legs, though," she added, sighing a little. "What a terrible waste."

"Why?"

"I'll tell you if you'll take a bath." Ella was not particularly fond of the idea of baths at this stage, but Mandy had offered a compromise instead of a direct order. She nodded once, sharply.

The bathroom was not half bad. During bath time it was bright and filled with steamy air made up of tiny floating dots that Mandy said were water, and it smelled nice enough, but Ella knew that she could be doing many other, more important things than bathing when she was only going to get dirty again. Like sliding down banisters.

Mandy sometimes told fantastic stories, and always said that they were true, no matter what anyone else told Ella. Today, she talked about Princes who made the mistake of getting on the bad side of a witch or fairy and wound up turned into Frogs.

"Do they stay frogs forever?" Ella couldn't imagine having to live as a frog. What if someone tried to eat her, or told her to stay put in their bucket? It would be even worse than being cursed into obedience.

"Usually a Princess comes along to kiss the frog," Mandy explained, laughing at Ella's scrunched-up nose, "And if it's true love, he returns to normal!"

"It's magic, then?"

"The best kind of magic," Mandy confided. "True love can overcome all sorts of obstacles."

Ella was quiet and submitted nicely to her daily scrubbing after that. She had a lot to think about.

There was a pond a ways out back from the house where the ground grew wet and marshy and different kinds of plants grew up, towering over four-year-old-Ella's head. The water smelled funny, and only went down about half her arm before it turned into a weird kind of airy-mud that should could dig deep into without much effort at all. The best thing about the pond, aside from how mucky and strange it was, was the weird things that lived there. Dragonflies and lady bugs and weird floating-leggy-things that shot across the water in little zips. And of course, the frogs.

Previously, Ella had felt that one of the greatest adventures to be had away from the banister was to see how many frogs she could catch in one day, even if it meant catching the same frog over and over. Today, Ella's whole world-view had changed.

She let her bare feet squish just so in the mucky grass and pushed her fussy skirts out of the way to hunch down by the edge of the pond. The scoot-scoot bugs were scoot-scooting across the surface of the water, which smelled funny as always. The trick to finding frogs was to scrunch your eyes up and then relax them and stare blankly at the water, sitting very, very still.

Eventually, the frogs would make the mistake of moving, or, before that, her eyes would pick out the pattern of mottled skin against and under the smooth muddy water. After that, she would shuffle forward through the grass and mucky dirt, inch her fingers still and silently forward and make the mad-grasp.

It worked. Half the time. Today, her fingers closed over slick-smooth swampy-skin, the flutter of a rapidly-beating heart and squirming legs. "Stay still! I'll help you!" her chubby fingers battled with the flailing webbed-limbs of the frog for a good minute before it settled down and she felt confidant enough to turn it around to face her.

"You don't look like much of a Prince," Ella huffed. Her feet hurt from crouching like that, so she settled down in the muck, tucking her dress underneath her again. "But Mother says 'Every little girl is a Princess'!" Talking at the frog didn't change the stupid look on it's face. A wide, flat mouth, large round eyes, and lots of somethings like freckles. If he turned normal, he might be weird looking. But if he was her True Love, that wouldn't matter, would it?

And then, if that were true...

Ella thought good and hard for a long moment about saying, "No!", just for the sheer joy of it. She would say "No!" to twenty, thirty things a day! Silly, stupid things. If Mandy asked her if she wanted to wear the blue or the green, Ella would say, "No!", and wear the purple instead, just because she could.

It would be amazing.

The frog croaked once, plaintively, looking a little harried. Ella smiled, wrinkling her nose up in happiness this time. "Don't worry! This is magic!" Just because it was magic though didn't mean that she shouldn't plug her nose. She smooched out her lips, closed her eyes and kissed Frog.

R-ribbit?

The worst part of the day probably wasn't even the fact that she had kissed three frogs eight times, or that none of them had turned into Princes. She had wiped her mouth with the back of her muddy hand each time and set the frogs back into the pond quickly enough, and moved on to the next one. It wasn't even that after a day's hard work she hadn't saved any Princes and by association cured her of the curse. No, the worst part of the day was when she went back inside and got scolded for wearing her nice dress frog-catching and getting the seat of it entirely covered in mud.

She was grounded for a week, no banister-sliding allowed. And that had been a very adamant command from both her Mother and from Mandy. It wasn't fair!

"What were you thinking, Ella? It'll take ages to wash that out!"

Ella jabbed her toe into the carpet, staring down at her red, grubby knees. She could wish all she wanted, but she would never get to pout and scream, "NO!"