SmokeLong Quarterly

I step out onto the back porch near as soon as the storm ends. It’s black outside, cold and wet, the beam of my flashlight bouncing off all the little raindrops and making the whole yard sparkle. Cicadas are screaming in the early morning, the clouds are blocking out the stars, and I’m shivering in my light jacket as I take in the scene in front of me.

I’m out here on a mission. There was a noise in the night, a great resounding crash somewhere outside that woke up the whole house and sent us scrambling to every window, trying to find the source of the sound. But we couldn’t see past the pitch black, couldn’t hear any more disruptions in the unrelenting din of the storm beating down on our roof. The night was so dark it was as if our house was floating in an endless void, the rain so violent and so loud that I could close my eyes and imagine I was listening to the sound of the end of the world. The rest of the family gave up and went back to sleep, content to leave it ‘til morning. I lingered.

Now, standing outside with my flashlight, I can see the problem.

A tree was downed in the storm. Not just any tree, the tree: the last longleaf pine left in my neighborhood. A hundred feet tall, or rather, a hundred feet long now, it starts just past my newly caved in fence and reaches clear across my backyard to brush my next door neighbor’s property line, taking out the inflatable above ground pool along the way. The Cuban treefrogs are making do with the last half inch of dirty water sitting at the bottom of the deflated pool, dozens of pairs of tiny reflective eyes watching me. Watching me from the water, watching me from the folds in the cheap blue plastic, watching me from atop the body of the last longleaf pine.

I click my flashlight off. The eyes vanish, but the singing starts. In the darkness the frogs croak out a mocking song, or a funeral song, or a mating song. I stand there in a cold noisy nothing and feel compelled to weep.

Ten years back, I am sitting on our back porch watching with mild, helpless pity as a bigger frog devours a smaller one. The freshly cleared plot next to the house is rumbling with the sounds of construction, a suitably dramatic BANG! ringing out as the smaller frog stops struggling. Finality.

My eyes wander past my own backyard to the dense patch of forest on the other side of the house, where someone in the distance is weaving through the trees, spray painting them with big blue X’s. Marking them for annihilation. It’s a sunny day, but the wind is blowing strong, and the pines are thin enough to bend like pipe cleaners, bodily swaying in wide arcs high above that construction worker’s head, and mine. The enormity of it makes me feel two feet tall. I am struck with mild, helpless pity for those trees, or maybe that man, or maybe myself, and I try to keep in mind he’s just making a living but I cannot understand how he can stand at the base of a hundred-foot-tall, hundred-year-old tree and look up and up and up all the way to the top and see something so much bigger than him and mark it with an X.

And twenty years back, summer nights sound like the thundering chorus of hundreds upon hundreds of tiny squirrel treefrogs. They descend upon our house in swarms, drawn to the bugs hovering around the lights, blanketing the whole building in a living, breathing, singing curtain. I press my little hands against the sliding glass door, and watch them do the same from the other side. The sky is a late yellow, the towering black silhouettes of the trees surrounding us reaching upwards in sharp-fingered shapes, and all at once the world feels both staggeringly big and vanishingly small.

And now, I am standing alone in the dark, and the excess rainwater dripping from the roof gutters sounds like drumming fingers, and the croak of invasive frogs sounds like a conquering army, and the wind is still blowing but there’s no rustle through the trees. I click my flashlight back on, and the singing stops.

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“On Trees and Treefrogs” is the first-place winner of The SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction 2026. This is the author’s first publication.