I used to catch frogs by the pond in my grandmother's garden. I would pin them under my hand, legs spread wide, webbed feet poking out from under my palm. I pressed and their heartbeat reverberated through my hand. The harder I pressed the quicker the rhythm of the beat, signaling something: I am here, perhaps. I remembered those frogs, when with my hand on his chest, covering his heartbeat, my lover of many months told me he couldn't betray his wife again. He lay unnaturally still after he spoke, his eyes searching my face for an indication of how I would behave.

In my grandmother's garden, the frog's legs were sticky. I pulled them; flexed the joints that protruded from under my palm. Once, I pushed against the natural motion of the bone, harder than I should. I rolled the thigh muscle in my fingers, feeling the muscle slide about inside the skin. I did no damage. I checked. I let the frog go and watched him jump before I caught him again.

“Say something,” my lover said.

My hand had cooled on his chest. I wanted to say that it was too late to prevent betrayal if he insisted that was what this was. But instead, I remembered the feel of the foot of the frog in my hand and the tension as I pulled the muscular limb.

“Never hurt a life,” my grandmother told me during those summers when I would play in her garden. She had a way of speaking as if I wasn't there, although she knew I was listening. “Imagine,” she said, “and take great care with your power.”

I asked, “What power?” thinking she would reveal some latent familial secret that would set me apart from other children and confirm the instinct that told me I was special.

With my grandmother in mind, I told him, “I have always known,” and I tried my best to create a reassuring tone. I replaced my desire for revenge with memories of the feel of small bony feet of captured frogs between my fingers.

I held the hind leg straight and I imagined pulling further: the slow tearing of ligament isolating bone from muscle, leaving the knee joint unprotected, then the gradual build-up of pressure and the uncontrolled pop of ball joint as it detached from the knee socket. I imagined the control necessary to contain that release and enjoy the soft slide of muscle across muscle until the second quieter snap of over-stretched skin.

“What have you always known?” my lover asked.

“That you have a wife,” I said. And just as in that late summer afternoon, in my grandmother's garden when I released the extended hind leg of the frog, I discovered the instinct to protect. I let the animal leap onto the path and scramble away from me, darting in one direction and then another. I bent over my lover and I kissed him before getting out of bed.