She took one of the mysterious seeds and tossed it up in the air three times catching it in her mouth on the third toss. Daffy grinned at the glaring frog and swallowed.
"Now you've done it!" croaked the frog. "These are the last seeds of the last tunlaw tree. Handle with care."
"Oh dear," said Daffy. "I'm making a tree go ext...." Daffy stopped short as an itchy feeling started in her stomach and rippled out to her fingers and toes. She reached to scratch her stomach only to find twigs with buds emerging from her fingers. She gasped and tried to step away from the frog. She couldn't move. Roots pushed out of her heels and toes and tunneled into the ground.
She attempted to bend over and find what had her stuck, but bark now stiffened her body. "What did you do to me?" she whimpered at the frog.
The frog shook its head, blinked and with a huge leap landed back in the pond from which it had come. The tree stood tall. New leaves now gracing its branches quivered in the breeze.
Susan Herr-Hoyman lives in Madison, WI, and works at TeachingBooks.net, a company that has built an online database of children's literature resources for librarians and teachers. In her "spare" time Susan plays with words.
© 2008 Susan Herr-Hoyman. Original for CCF (Herr-Hoyman grants CCF first electronic rights for one month; CCF may archive the material indefinitely and include it in an eBook anthology).
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