A rough week

I remember the blood vividly; spraying back at me like it was ready to attack, shedding air as a machete cuts paper. Never before have I seen so much blood anywhere, let alone on my friend, in the air, and not five seconds later, on my brand new white shirt that I unluckily had the opportunity to be wearing. It’s been over 4years since the moment in question, and it still haunts me. My bottle, my broken glass, my fault, Frankie paid the consequences of my arrogance. I was 13, Frankie was 14 and everyone else in question was 14 or 15. We were just kids, going through adolescence and enjoying life. Every week we had a new hobby, every day a new game, and every hour a different set of rules.
It was in the middle of July and we had just finished our last “hobby” which happened to be hockey. I remember clearly because I had been given brand new hockey blades and a new hockey stick for my birthday on July 16th. Friday we were coming back from a hockey scrimmage that we played daily at the park by my house. It was a luxurious place compared to all the other places to play, usually we’d play at my cul-de-sac but our neighbor got sick of us hitting his new car with the tennis ball. As we passed this swamp, that really wasn’t even a swamp just some crappy section beside the road with a sewage tube extending right above the murky water. To get to the swamp we had to go about 10feet from the road across some rocks that were placed their, and then we were there, it never got very deep – 5feet max. That is how we discovered our latest hobby catching frogs.
It was a liberating experience at first we would go there and stand by the edge or stand on fallen logs to scoop up from with whatever we could find but that soon got boring. After a few days of catching petty frogs or tadpoles we decided to up the stakes and got set to actually go all the way in the water. We came prepared with old clothes, and usually some disposable pants or special overalls used for just this type of thing. For catching the frogs we used bottles that we could find around the house, glass or plastic whatever was available, and we went to work. Everything was going great until we spotted what we called “The Beast”. It was a giant frog or toad we never found out, the first spotting was while we were spread out in the water, me, Frankie, and Chad. Chad spotted it and we all immediately were in awe with this thing. It had to be 10x the size of any frog we’d ever caught. But as we approached it fled.
As word spread of the monster frog sighting more friends decided to come check it out and eventually we had a whole squad of 5-7men who would comb the swamp for the beast. But people soon lost spirit as they never did see the Beast and the word of a 13 is not very reliable to start with especially without any good proof. Somewhere around 7days after the sighting of the Beast he was spotted again. To fully understand the significance of this scene though I must first start from the morning and how unfortunate events leading up to the climax really could have been avoided.
It was like any other day; I woke up around 10:00am to a bright lustful day. The sign was already shining brightly through my dimly lit room and I had a sense of de-ja-vu. I met with Frankie and the guys around 12:00 after breakfast and we talked about going back to the swamp. But most of the guys had lost moral and weren’t so ecstatic about revisiting the swamp on some superstitious “beast” that probably didn’t exist at all. After about 30minutes of mindless jabber it was decided that only me and Frankie would go to the swamp, but we didn’t have anything to catch frogs with. So we took what was available which happened to be an empty vodka bottle found in the trash.
As we searched the swamp for the local ecology where frogs happened to be near the top of the food chart, we had this sense that today would be different. Maybe it was because we were alone, which very rarely happened except when no one was home. Towards the end we even started to believe we made up the whole thing and had convinced ourselves that it never really happened, until we were leaving did he show. I didn’t notice it until

Frankie said
“Shhh, Peter look behind us to the right, there he is..The Beast.”

She was beautiful, 5times bigger then any frog we’d ever seen before and in the same spot as the previous time she’d been spotted. At first glance one might have believed that she wanted us to see her, like some freaky sign for the future maybe. When I laid eyes on her I was so surprised I actually dropped the bottle into the swamp towards the entrance and it shattered on the rocks. So surprised was I though that I barely took notice and continued to stare at this wonderful creature not 10feet from us. Immediately we stealthily left the swamp and ran home as fast as we could and gathered the guys.
But on return The Beast was absolutely gone. After 5minutes of fruitless searching the guys started to actually get hostile and most started to disperse. Eventually we were alone yet again, this time titled liars, cheaters, jokers, practically every bad name in the book. After we also looked for some time and found no trace of her anywhere we started to leave. It all happened in slow motion though; Frankie went first while I was about 3 feet back. While he was walking on the rocks he slipped and his hand was sliced open but the broken Vodka bottle. The blood was gushing, pouring through the air and Frankie was irrational. Screaming and staring at the blood he didn’t even stop to think just ran home leaving his and my bike behind. I was dumbfounded covered in my friend’s blood and realized that had I not have broken the bottle this wouldn’t have happened. Had we not seen the supernatural everything would have turned out fine.
Frankie got over 30 stitches in his hand and confined himself to his house for days. When he did finally journey outside his home into the evening sun he looked like some kind of ghost. We talked of course, but never of the evening before. That was very rough ground for Frankie as I believe he thought it was partially my fault; though he never showed it. Frankie moved away in 3 short months from that moment the second their house sold, he told no one where he moved, just that it was out of state. We never went back to the swamp again. The closest we get is on that street walking to the park to play the occasional game of baseball, basketball, football, or soccer. Today it’s almost impossible to get to the swamp, without moving through ages of weeds, plants, and spider webs untouched over the years.