The frog's pale, slick belly shone a little pink under the lab light. I pinned its mottled forelegs back, out, and above its head. Does its fourth finger have extra padding? the instructor asked. It didn't. It was a she.
           I cut the hinges of her mouth and found teeth I didn't know frog's had, Noted: eyes, nasal slits, tongue. Remembered: the vocabulary. Frogs don't have ears, they have "tympani." The room was quiet, the silence: visceral as that drum's tambour loveliness.

           The frog's pale, slick belly shone a little pink under the lab light. I pinned its mottled forelegs back, out, and above its head. Does its fourth finger have extra padding? the instructor asked. It didn't. It was a she.
           I cut the hinges of her mouth and found teeth I didn't know frog's had, Noted: eyes, nasal slits, tongue. Remembered: the vocabulary. Frogs don't have ears, they have "tympani." The room was quiet, the silence: visceral as that drum's tambour loveliness.
           Slip the forceps under her cloaca — I've always hated that word— and cut her from base to lip. God, you know, it was so easy to peel back her skin, so easy to open her up, it almost wasn't fair. Cutting through her abdominal muscles and her breastbone, scissors worked fine. No resistance. She was barely there. Did the eggs I found remind me then of the marbles I used to keep in a mason jar? They do now, when I try to picture them. Aggies were the ones that looked like fossils. Cat's Eyes were the ones too pretty to play with. Toothpaste marbles were the best. They were clear with wavy streaks of blues, blacks, reds, oranges, held in the glass like smoke. They, the eggs, looked like those, the Toothpaste marbles.
           Scooping them out, I tried not to think about the tadpoles in Beaverkill River, the familiar wiggle of their round bodies at the tips of toes in shallow waters. I thought about summers there instead, neck deep in the eddies where trout hover close to the surface, and bullfrogs synchronize, whole and healthy on the river's edge. I ran a gloved finger over the frog's black liver, her brown stomach, tracing the blue arteries that ran beneath, veins of lapis rooted to her spine. I thought: the lungs looked like watery orange slices. I marked: the large intestine (tiny), small intestine (tinier), and spleen.
           I touched her heart, so new to not beating, as gently as I could. Tenderness makes hands heavy. And her left atrium was so thin.
           Collect yourself, the proctor admonished, handing me tissue and pipettes, as if he were always steady. I collected: the peritoneal membrane covering the kidneys. I catalogued: her ureters, her bladder. I cut: each organ to its base and lifted them one by one from her abdomen until I could see the spinal nerves branching out, thicker than I'd expected, waxy like dental floss, white like lightning, empty of the electric life I tried to imagine filling her skin. I followed: a single nerve into the muscle of her left leg, pink and tender and of no use to her.
           Our first summer on the Beaverkill my cousin caught salamanders and baby frogs by the bucket load by day and by night she read us stories aloud from children's Encyclopedia of Patron Saints. St. Lucy is the only one I remember, the beautiful virgin martyr who gave her dowry to the poor and mailed her plucked-out eyeballs to her betrothed, because he loved them so, before giving herself to God. That's one way the story goes. In another, she's outed as a Christian and her beloved holds her down while Diocletian's guards take a fork to her face.
           I had to make up the grade on a computer, clicking a mouse-controlled scalpel over a cartoon twin of the animal I'd cut to pieces and left too whole.  I let the frog keep her eyes that day in the lab and for that I failed the practicum. When it was over, scalpels and forceps went into the autoclave. Frogs piled on top of each other in the trash, gaping and used and hollow, each indistinguishable from the animal above or below.
           But something always differentiates. Just look at the damp impression she left.