You'll Remember Me Anyway.

Or, the one where the Frog makes a reasonable decision and dies anyway. Either way, I have convinced myself I'm a scorpion, and I'm telling you this story to justify never getting in the water.

In the beginning, there was Frog, and Frog was unemployed.

Not unemployed in the modern sense, where you’re supposed to feel guilty about it and spend forty hours a week applying for jobs that require five years of experience for entry-level positions.

He was unemployed in the older, better sense, where you just... existed. Ate flies. Sat in the sun. Participated in the ecosystem without a LinkedIn profile.

So when this particular frog woke up on the bank of the river and saw a scorpion standing there, looking vaguely embarrassed about needing help, he didn’t think: arachnid, dangerous, run.

He thought: finally, someone interesting.

Because the river was boring. You have to understand. The river had been flowing in the same direction for approximately twelve million years, and it showed no signs of developing a personality.

The other frogs talked about mayflies and herons and the price of lily pads. If frogs had currency, which they don’t, but if they did, that’s absolutely what they’d talk about. Small talk. Pond talk. The kind of conversation that makes you want to let a heron eat you just to escape it.

So when the scorpion cleared her throat—a dry, clicking sound, like two rocks appreciating a joke—the frog felt something he hadn’t felt in years.

Curiosity.

Dangerous thing, curiosity. Evolution should have stamped it out millions of years ago, right alongside the impulse to sniff predators and the belief that falling from great heights is something you can walk off. But evolution is not a parent. Evolution is more like a landlord: it fixes the bare minimum and calls it a day.

“I have a proposition,” said the scorpion.

Now, you’re probably settling into that comfortable feeling of superiority that comes from knowing the ending before the characters do. The same feeling you get watching horror movies and yelling at teenagers not to go into the basement.

Go ahead. Enjoy it. You’ve earned it by being born after this story.

But if the frog made a reasonable decision based on available evidence? If the scorpion’s argument was actually sound? If there was no way to know, no sign to read, no basement to avoid? Then, is this really a story about stupidity versus evil?

But rather a story about how the world sometimes kills you for making the same choice that saved you yesterday.

And there’s nothing—absolutely nothing—you can do about it except stop crossing rivers entirely. Which is not a life. That’s just a different kind of drowning.

Anyway. Back at the river.

The scorpion gestured with one claw toward the opposite bank. “I need to get across.”

“Then I have good news and bad news,” said the frog. “Good news: it’s possible. Bad news: not for you.”

“I’m aware,” said the scorpion. “That’s why I’m talking to the only boat in the vicinity.”

“I’m not a boat.”

“You have a back, don’t you?”

“I also have a spleen. Doesn’t make me a hospital.”

The scorpion made that clicking sound again. Laughter, maybe. Or appreciation for someone who argued back. “To a creature without a back,” she said, “any back becomes a ferry. It’s all about perspective.”

This was, technically, true. The frog had never thought about his back as transport before. It was the kind of observation that made you see yourself differently. Made you feel useful. Which, if you think about it, is how most jobs get created. Someone has a problem. You happen to be nearby. Suddenly you’re in customer service.

“I could sting you,” the scorpion added, because she believed in transparency. “I have this—” she lifted her tail, let the light catch the needle, “—and people get nervous. But here’s the question to ask yourself : why would I sting you? We’ll be halfway across the river, you die, I drown. Why would I do anything that would lead to my death?”

The frog considered this.

It was, he had to admit, a compelling argument. The scorpion wasn’t denying what she was. She wasn’t pretending to be a butterfly or a friendly twig. She was saying: I am a creature with a weapon, but I am also a creature with self-interest. And self-interest says we both make it to the other side.

This is what philosophers call the social contract. The frog didn’t know that, because frogs don’t read Hobbes, but he understood the basic principle: if we both want the same thing, and hurting each other ruins it for both of us, we’re probably safe.

It’s the same logic humans use when they trust bankers. Or employers. Or politicians. Or anyone whose job description includes the phrase “fiduciary responsibility.”

It’s a logic that says: surely, the person holding the knife has more to gain from not using it.

And it’s not wrong, exactly. It’s just incomplete.

Because it assumes that everyone involved shares the same definition of “winning.”

The scorpion, for instance, had been thinking about death a lot lately. Not in a morbid way—scorpions don’t do morbid, they do practical. She’d lived long enough to notice that everything dies, and most of it dies confused, and she’d started to wonder If maybe there was a way to meet the end that felt chosen.

You could call this a philosophical awakening.

You could also call it the kind of thinking that gets you killed, right before you kill someone else.

The frog looked at the river. He looked at the other side, where the sun was hitting the reeds in a way that suggested better hunting, better conversations, a life slightly less damp. He looked back at the scorpion, who was waiting with the patience of something that had already outlived several better options.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

The scorpion considered lying. It would have been easy. My name is Butterfly. My name is Safety. My name is Not a Threat. But she’d spent her whole life being the thing everyone feared, and she was, against all odds, a little bit proud of it.

“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “You’ll remember me anyway.”

And the frog, who had never in his life done anything worth remembering, felt something expand in his chest. Something that felt like destiny. Something that felt like story.

He turned around and presented his back.

Later, when people told this tale—and they would tell it, for thousands of years, in a thousand different ways—they would say the frog was naive. They would say he ignored the obvious. They would use him as a warning against trust, against hope, against the fundamental stupidity of believing that things could be different.

They would not mention that the frog knew exactly what he was doing.

They would not mention that he saw the stinger, heard the argument, weighed the odds, and made a choice.

They would not mention that somewhere, deep in his froggy heart, he suspected the scorpion might sting him anyway, and that he got on the water anyway, because he’d rather die in a story than live forever in a pond.

You see, the frog had spent seventeen seasons watching other frogs fuck and eat and croak about nothing. He’d watched them die one by one —heron, snake, old age—and not a single one of them had ever meant anything.

So, he understood the choice wasn’t between safety and danger. It was between one kind of death and another. Stay on the bank, and you die having never chosen anything. Get in the water, and at least the dying is yours.

They wouldn’t say that. But you know that part now.

Let’s cross the river.

They were halfway across when the frog felt it.

Not the sting. Not yet. He felt something else first. Something in the way the scorpion’s weight shifted. Something in the way her claws tightened, just slightly, on his back. Something in the way the current pushed them and she reacted.

She reacted the way creatures react when touched unexpectedly.

“I’m sorry,” said the scorpion.

And she meant it. That’s the part the story leaves out. She meant it completely. She meant it the way you mean something when you’re about to do it anyway, when you can feel it happening, when your body has already made the decision and your mind is just watching, just witnessing, just offering apologies to a universe that doesn’t accept them.

The frog felt her muscles tense. He felt the tail rise.

He closed his eyes.

The tail came down.

Later, much later, when humans found this story and turned it into a lesson, they made the scorpion the villain. They said: she couldn’t help herself. She was evil. That’s what evil does.

They needed her to be evil. Because if she wasn’t evil, then the frog was just dead. Not martyred. Not a victim of wickedness. Just dead, in the middle of a river.

Evil gives suffering meaning. Evil means you were targeted. Evil means someone chose you. Evil means your pain is part of a story, and stories have endings, and endings have point.

But mechanical failure?

Mechanical failure is just Tuesday. It’s my neighbour’s dog.

---

I had a neighbour once named Arturo.

Arturo lived in the apartment above mine, and Arturo had a dog. The dog was a small creature, the size and general disposition of a used dishrag, and it hated me with a passion that seemed, from where I was standing, deeply personal.

Every morning at 6:15, Arturo would open his door, the dog would shoot down the stairs like a furry bullet, and it would stand outside my door and bark. Not a warning bark. Not an “intruder alert” bark. This was a bark that said: I know what you did, and I have not forgotten, and I will never forget, and also I have nothing else going on today.

I tried everything. I ignored it. I tried making friends through the crack under the door, sliding it pieces of cheese. I tried the calm, authoritative voice that dog trainers use on television, the one that implies you have your life together and the dog respects that. The dog respected nothing. The dog respected only barking.

After three months, I arrived at a theory. Arturo hated me. Maybe I’d parked too close to his space. Maybe he’d overhead me laughing once and decided I was laughing at him. Maybe he was just one of those people who hates quietly, internally, the way other people collect stamps. And his method of expressing this hatred was to train his dog to stand outside my door every morning and remind me that I was despised.

It was a good theory. It explained everything. It made the world make sense. Someone was the villain, and the villain was Arturo, and the suffering was meaningful because it was intended.

I lived with this theory for six months. It got me through the barking. It gave me someone to blame.

Then the water heater broke.

It broke on a Tuesday, which is the Monday of actual Mondays, and the landlord sent a plumber who sent a notice that the water would be off for three days, and in the chaos of stairways filled with tools and tenants holding buckets, I ended up having a conversation with Arturo. The first one in a year.

I mentioned the dog. I mentioned the barking. I mentioned, with the kind of careful casualness that conceals actual madness, that it seemed to happen every morning, right around 6:15, like clockwork.

Arturo looked at me like I’d just explained that water was wet.

“Yes,” he said. “He barks at your door.”

“Right,” I said. “I was wondering—“

“He’s afraid of the number.”

I waited. Arturo did not elaborate. This is the thing about conversations with neighbours, they assume you share the same context. They assume you’ve been paying attention to the same details they have, which you haven’t, because you have a life.

“The number?” I said.

“On your door,” said Arturo. “Number seven. He’s afraid of seven.”

I looked at my door. It had a number seven on it. It had always had a number seven on it. I had stopped noticing the number seven approximately forty-eight hours after moving in.

“He’s afraid of seven,” I repeated.

“All odd numbers,” said Arturo. “But seven especially. We think it’s the shape. The little line across the middle. It looks like a threat.”

“We?” I asked.

“Me and the vet,” said Arturo. “The vet says it’s a phobia. Like how some dogs are afraid of vacuum cleaners. The number seven is this dog’s vacuum cleaner.”

I stood there in the hallway, holding a bucket, and felt the collapse of a structure that had been built on the assumption that someone cared enough to hate me. The collapse of a six-month narrative about evil and intention and personal vendettas.

The dog wasn’t trained to torment me. The dog wasn’t even capable of tormenting me. The dog was following its programming. The dog saw the number seven, the number seven triggered something deep in its tiny dog brain, and the dog barked.

---

Which brings us back to the river.

The frog, you see, made the same mistake I did. When the Scorpion stung, he saw only a villain. A creature with intent. A creature choosing to be what she was.

But the scorpion wasn’t choosing anything. The scorpion was following her programming.

And the question—the real question, the one the story never asks—is whether the frog was following his.

He thought he was making a decision. He thought he was weighing options, calculating risks, being the hero of his own narrative.

But heroes don’t exist in nature. Only creatures do. Creatures with habits. Creatures with reflexes. Creatures that do what creatures do.

And the frog was a creature built to cross rivers when something interesting was on the other side. The scorpion was a creature built to sting when startled. Both were being exactly what they were designed to be.

The dog was the same. The dog was excellent at being a dog. Being a dog meant barking at things that triggered the bark response. The number seven triggered the bark response. Therefore: barking.

The dog was, arguably, stupid, but only in the sense that a toaster is stupid for burning your bread. The toaster isn’t trying to ruin your breakfast. The toaster is just very good at being a toaster, and being a toaster means applying heat until something stops it.

I started sleeping better after that. Not because the barking stopped—it didn’t, Arturo and the dog lived there for another two years, and the number seven remained aggressively itself—but, I stopped interpreting the barking as communication. It was now weather. And you don’t get angry at rain for falling on your head. You get an umbrella.

We accept that bad things happen as long as we can believe they happen to people who deserve it. Who were foolish. Who ignored the signs. Who should have known better. Because if the frog is stupid, we’re safe. We just have to be smarter than a frog, which feels achievable.

Maybe the real tragedy wasn’t the scorpion’s nature. Maybe the real tragedy was the frog’s hope. The hope that this time would be different. The hope that nature would take a day off. The hope that a creature designed to sting would somehow forget, just for this journey, just for him.

It wasn’t stupid, that hope. It was the most human thing about him.

The frog didn’t do anything wrong.

He just hoped that hope was enough.

And the scorpion didn’t do anything wrong either. Not in the moral sense. Not in the story sense. She just did what scorpions do, which is sting when the world touches them wrong. The river was touching her wrong, the frog was touching her wrong, the whole situation was touching her wrong, and her tail had an opinion about that.

Two creatures. Two sets of instructions. One river

No villain.

Just water, and legs, and the absence of breath.

---

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🍿 Author’s Note

This essay, by the way, traces back to a Thursday afternoon when my phone lit up with a text from someone I’d met exactly once at a party where I spent most of the time standing near the dip and pretending to recognize songs.

“Hey,” he wrote. “Really enjoyed our convo. Open to friendship?”

I stared at the screen for approximately sixty-seven seconds, which in text-response time is roughly equivalent to a full business quarter.

“I don’t have guy friends,” I wrote back.

Three dots appeared immediately. Disappeared. Reappeared. The pause was long enough to make toast.

“Can I ask why?”

And I, instead of saying something normal like “just never worked out that way” or “I’m more of a dog person” or “please God don’t make me explain my emotional architecture via SMS,” did what I always do when faced with a simple question that deserves a simple answer.

I asked if he’d heard the story of the scorpion and the frog.

He said yes.

I said: “There you go.”

He did not write back.

Which is fine. Probably for the best. He seemed nice. The kind of nice that would get him in the water and wonder, halfway across, why things were happening the way they were happening.

I spared him a scorpion.

Or maybe I spared myself a frog. Hard to tell from this side of the bank.

Anyway, this essay is what happens when someone asks a simple question and you answer it in the only way you know how: sideways, through parables, with footnotes.

He wanted friendship. He got philosophy.

The scorpion would understand. The frog, interestingly, would also understand. They’d just draw different conclusions.

I’ve thought about texting him back, just to explain. But explaining is its own kind of sting, isn’t it? You reach out because you think you’re clarifying, and the other person just ends up floating facedown.

Better to let him think I’m rude. Rude is simple. Rude makes sense.

Anything else requires crossing a river.