Love Magic

1

The cure she concocted resembled a dry rub one might press into the flesh of a pork tenderloin, gritty and blood red, with an air of spicy potency. She snapped on a pair of gloves and pulled the last specimen from the crate. It was a three-foot-long tree branch, mostly hollow, as were all of the dead Elm parts she studied. However, when she'd peered inside this particular branch, a pale grayish leaf, shriveled and dry, kept her from seeing all the way through. A moment later, she came to realize it was not a leaf, but the body of a gangly-legged tree frog that must have crawled inside the hollowed branch some time ago and died. She tried to pull it out using the pincers, but it remained beyond her reach. Without another specimen to work with, she went ahead with the experiment with the tree frog intact.

Sophie often joked to herself that she did the work of a mad scientist. Trying to turn the gnarled limbs of the osteopathic Elm into the nimble branches of a sapling sometimes seemed a lost cause. Dutch Elm disease spread its deadly fungi for hundreds of years, but Sophie still dedicated herself to finding a cure. She loved her work. The way she saw it, today the elms, firs, and oaks fought the good fight, but who knew who or what would fight it tomorrow? Somebody needed to step up, even if only a lone ranger like herself. 

She poured seven hundred anthems of water into the rub and applied a thick layer of salve over the bark of the branch, all the while observing up close with the high-powered microscope. The rub penetrated the outer layer of bark, which she was glad about, but at 120 seconds in, she noted no change at the cellular level. She shifted in the chair, a sigh building in her throat, as she considered what she might do next ... and then, like an eyelash in her eye, something tiny and wiry wavered—an antenna? Whatever it was poked through a miniscule crack in the bark like a tiny, lime green periscope.

Without abandoning the view from the microscope, Sophie scribbled an observation on the pad to her right. Attached to the tiny green wire, a fuzzy, round ... she squinted as the thing came up through the widening crack ...  lime green head appeared, a head that was mostly two shiny green eyeballs, one on each side. She came away from the microscope—for she needed to see this thing in its entirety—and like tissue paper from a box, two powdery lime green butterfly wings, decorated with one ruby red oval each, unfolded from the opening in the branch. They were the colors of a living tree frog "in the form of a butterfly," Sophie said airily, hardly believing her eyes.

She lifted the branch and looked down the end of it. The body of the tree frog was gone.