"Toad Mountain" is the winner of the 2026 Louis Begley Prize, judged by Andrew Krivák.
The day it rained toads over Pink City, my mother told me it was my father’s gift to me for my eleventh birthday. I asked her if it was also his gift for the ones that had come before it, and she sent me to clear the mess in the hog pen with a trash bag hooked on the prongs of her garden rake. The hogs had already bloodied the straw with toads’ guts, so after I’d scooped up the last of the live ones, I pocketed a few legs and an eyeball as hard and black as an olive pit. In the afternoon, I rinsed the legs in the bathroom sink until the water ran clear and laid them on the window sill to bake in the sun. They turned to translucent leather, crumpled like wet socks, and I used glue to stick them to the window so they spilled the color green across my bedroom when the sun set.
Later, I took one of the pickle jars from the basement and spent the hours after dinner chewing sour cabbage until my tongue numbed and my gums throbbed from the cold. Ma always said the liquid in a pickle jar kept things alive forever. That night, I slept with my arms wrapped around the glass container like Jenny did with her grease-stained rabbit doll every night, the eyeball drifting in circles in the cloudy brine like a dark pearl. I moved the jar to my desk in the morning when I left for school, so that when the eyeball woke up, it could see I had tucked the edges of the bedsheets under the mattress and closed the window tight so the horseflies couldn’t get in.
The kids at school talked about the different ways their families had dealt with the toads after the storm. Linda Ye said her two grandmothers had come together and cooked a feast for her relatives from all over Iowa. They’d had deep-fried toad legs and diced toad sauteed with garlic and whole toads sliced open and grilled like pancakes. Caris Hu said her brothers had emptied their hogs’ troughs and laid them out in rows all over the yard to catch the toads falling from the sky. When we asked her if her family was going to eat them like Linda’s had, she called us fresh-off-the-boat and said they were going to take them to the big pet store in the town over and sell them. She said they could make a business out of it. We’ll keep a dozen of them and breed them in my father’s rabbit hutch. They turned to me and I told them about the leather-legs and the eyeball watching over my room. Caris asked me if I would turn the legs into keychains and sell them as good-luck charms to tourists. I said I couldn’t do that because the toads were a birthday gift from my father. He left us when Jenny was born, but he feels bad about it now. I told them the value of a thousand toads was many times that of a dozen cakes and some candles from the Dollar Tree—probably twenty or thirty times. The girls took turns giving me hugs and Linda told me she would bring me some steamed toad with soy sauce eggs the next day.
I told Ma what my classmates had said and she told me Pink City was full of lunatics; that’s why the last white people had left this place years ago. Chinese people will eat anything and try to sell what’s left. I asked her if she believed my father had sent the toads because he meant to come back. She said no, because birthdays were a temporary thing, and when the birthday sun had sunk behind the Wongs’ cornfield to our west, that meant my father’s love had left the town, too. Don’t worry; he’ll be back next year. She said if I was good, he might make it rain Coca-Cola when I turned twelve. So I took her out back to the trash bag full of croaking bodies roiling against black plastic and asked her why the toads were still here, then, why they hadn’t been swallowed by the horizon with yesterday’s light. I told her my theory that my father had sent the toads from the sky to form families down here in Iowa, among the hogs and the corn, the kind he’d never managed to sculpt for himself. I told her how somewhere, among all the little wet creatures skipping and groaning over our farms, I believed there were two toads named after Jenny and me. There might even be a toad named Ma.
In response, my mother tied a knot three times on the trash bag and shoved it into my chest. The toads’ cries layered one on top of the other made me imagine a butter knife in her hand, the veins on the back popping thick and blue as she slaughtered one of the hogs’ water buckets, producing a siren of metal on metal—a shriek then a pause, a thousand times over, each toad’s call filling the calm of the next. She said, There is a swamp two miles south of here where your father took me the night he lassoed me with you. See if he will show you how frogs make love. See if he will teach you how to build a family from the dirt.
Jenny sat on the fence where Ma had propped her, skinny legs swinging off the horse flies that landed on her shins. She wore that greasy rabbit like a scarf, his stringy arms knotted around her neck so his stuffed skull rested on her shoulder. He reeked of Jenny’s sweat and grime, of six years loyal. She clung to him as though one day, he’d swell to twice her size and hold her with firm arms, learn to brush her hair and maybe even braid it too, do everything a touch too rough. So I scooped her from the fence and took her with me. She came quietly, that worn-ragged doll shielding her back from our silent mother.
One time in the fifth grade, I had come home from school and asked my mother if it was true that if you pressed the palm of your hand against a boy’s, he would plant a baby to grow in your belly as a reward. I had seen Sharon Tsai do it once, plaster her tiny white fingers against Tyler Gao’s during snack break, the syrup from the new year’s peanut candy they’d shared gluing their skin together. Sharon had the smallest hands of all the girls in our class, and as we waited for the afternoon bus she explained to me that boys liked girls whose fingers were each shorter than a glue stick—the generic kind we each kept two of in our desks—because it meant they would be good mothers. I didn’t ask her why that was, because I already knew all good things came small: a small voice for when Ma crumpled onto the couch after dinner, a small ribcage to fit into the graphic T-shirts from the boys’ clearance bins. A small big toe, because according to Chinese superstition, that meant my father would die before my mother.
So I carried the bag of toads on my back like a daughter, humming lullabies to soothe their urgent calling. Jenny leashed herself behind me, pinching an edge of the trash bag to follow along. We only made it three-quarters of the first mile before I landed on my knees in between the Lams’ and Yeungs’ hog houses. Jenny sat in the grass and itched her skin, where the wet summer air had licked alive blistering red rashes on her throat and the crooks of her arms. She cried into the rabbit’s matted fur and said, Tutu says it’s getting dark and we need to go home now. He says there might be wolves and foxes out here who will eat us. I told her to stop crying because she was riling up the toads. I told her I was getting us our father back, who left us because she cried just like this, because everything about her was too big. She asked me what a father was and I pinched the snot-soaked crown of the doll on her back. I wiped her face clean with her T-shirt instead of its soggy ears and told her a father would do all the things stuffed rabbits and women couldn’t.
The toads tumbled against each other inside the bag, thudding against my palms and my chest as their trills echoed across the flatness around us. I tore a hole in the plastic under the triple-knot and poked my mouth through. Your Ma is here. It’ll be okay. They kissed my lips with their brailled backs and sticky feet. I wedged my hand through the hole and groped until I could lock my fingers around one of the slippery bodies. I smiled because this meant my father would meet his daughter as a mother, a creator of families, and he would know I knew his love was bigger than the lifespan of one day’s sun.
The time I’d recounted the story of Sharon Tsai to Ma, I remembered she’d sat me down in front of the television in the living room and played me her scratched-up DVD of Dirty Dancing while she fried pork chops for dinner, the crackle of oil slicing Solomon Burke’s lively tenor to pieces. What she didn’t know was that, long after she’d tucked us into bed, I’d sat up and unfurled Jenny’s chubby fist, one finger at a time, and lined mine up with hers, using the moonlight from the window to show me the flesh I held in excess. Ma didn’t even notice when, hours after midnight, I’d tiptoed into the room where she slept and stretched my mouth around her calloused knuckles, tasting the salt of sweat and lard, waiting for the extra inches of her bone to melt from my heat.
Now, I searched for my mother’s hands among the toads’ four-fingered paws as they came gushing forward from the trash bag, a dry, warted waterfall, blowing bubbles from their necks with each long, trilling scream. I locked them in my fists, pinching together flailing feet and squinting for any sign of a partner more bloated than the other. I told Jenny to help me, but her little hands were clasped around her rabbit doll, its ears stroking and soothing her wet face. But each sticky paw lined up perfectly. Every toad was identical, a thousand mothers with no one to seed their stomachs. I released the two in my hands and watched them scatter among the rest, their throats swelling and shrinking like a heartbeat. Restless as girls, they signaled something to the empty farmland, their ache electric in the dusk. I watched them climb each other, their black eyes cloudy with warmth and wisdom. The sky above hung in cotton silence as I watched them forge a mountain, climb higher and higher.
2026