On the far side of time.The giant frog was suffering the same nightmare he’d been haunted by every night, since his body had mysteriously transformed from a plump bullfrog, into the size of a Naval battleship.

The dream always started out pleasantly enough, in his normal sized body, sunning on his favorite boulder, in the middle of the lagoon.

He’d just snatched a buzzing fly with his tongue, when the four headed alligator burst out of the murky depths. The frog frantically hopped from lily pad to lily pad, across the green lagoon, narrowly eluding the alligator’s four snapping jaws of death.

Finally, about to be fatally cornered, the frog leapt out of the water, and landed at the foot of a crumbling, ivy-covered stone wall. The frog sensed, possibly from the faintest of distant memories of an ancient ancestor, its only chance for survival lay behind the stone wall’s door.

The four-headed alligator muscled its thick torso up onto the mossy bank. Its yellow eyes glowered at the cowering frog, daring him to even think escape. Seconds later, the alligator lunged, easily snatching its slippery prey, inside its extreme left jaw.

As the alligator opened its mouth and bit down, the frog wiggled out, plopping to the ground, and jumped back towards the lagoon. But, just before the frog hit water, the gator caught the frog, in the crook of its tail, and in the same motion, hurled him 190 miles an hour at the wall.

The frog, as always, awoke with a horrific shriek, a split second before splattering off the stone wall. The startled flock of seagulls, which had been using the frog’s back as their perch, flew up and away in flurried panic.

A few minutes later though, the seagull brigade, sensing the coast was clear, flew back above the scene of the crime, gliding on the early morning ocean breeze, just out past the breakwater, twenty feet above the now conscious frog. A few brave gulls began landing on their flock’s new massive, pea green perch. The giant frog didn’t seem to mind their company, or perhaps he was too exhausted and distracted with his own problems to even notice their presence.

The frog’s stomach felt queasy this morning. He was suffering franextreme case of heartburn. Understandably so, considering thefa that he’d swallowed a 100-foot, Fifteenth Century woodesailingvessel late the night before.

Inside the frog’s bloated belly, the four survivors of the good ship, San Paulo, gathered on the starboard side of the Captain’s Bridge, their mouths covered with rags to keep from gagging on the noxious stench that hung heavy in the hot, fetid air they were forced to breath.

Only bearded Captain Amalfi, age 52, unlike his shipmates, was dressed in his formal navy woolen uniform. Despite thick humidity and a temperature hovering around 119 degrees, his face looked only slightly flushed, hinting at worst, modest discomfort.

The brass lamp set on the wooden railing flickered and went out, leaving them in semi- darkness.“Third time she’d died this hour, Captain. Plenty of oil, it just needs air like the rest of us,” a handsome man with brown curly hair said.

“Light it again,” just as the frog let loose with a tremendous belch, knocking everyone down as buckets of the frog’s inner sweat continued to rain down on the teak wood deck. Captain Amalfi sprang to his feet, shaking his fist at this fresh insult to his beloved vessel.

“Now you are treading dangerous ground thy ugly fiend. Mop up!” he ordered the boy.

Captain Amalfi, though known across the seven seas as a stickler fodiscipline, was not by nature a petty man. He’d been inventing similar busy work for the boy, all night long, in a conscious effort to keep the youth’s mind off their dire predicament.

Three minutes later the boy stood at attention, as the Captain knelt down and touched the teak deck with the fingertips of his white glove. He pretended to lift up a particle of dust on his baby finger, frowned as he blew it off, then smiled as he said, “We’ll make a sailor out of you yet.”

From deep in the bowels of the ship, timbers groaned under extreme pressure from the frog. The curly haired man said, “I fear the frog’s body is still decompressing. His skin is absorbing the ocean’s salt and is rapidly drying out and adversely affecting his cells’ molecular structure. The inside of its body is burning up, which explains the excessive sweating, and possibly the cause of his violent contractions. The long and short of it is, sir, this monster frog is shrinking before our eyes. After he crushes the San Paulo, we’ll be his next victims.”

The good news, if it could really be considered that, was that the frog’s stomach acid was steadily eating into the hull’s cedar construction, and actually favorably scenting the foul air.

The frog suffered another spastic convulsion, raining more gallons of sweat onto the deck. The boy looked over at the scowling Captain, who waved him off. He said to the man, “I know not, what these mysteries you speak of mean. I do know we must presently force this fiend’s mouth open wide enough to save my vessel and our lives. We’ve but the single cannonball left and half of one sack of black gunpowder from the previous battle. Remember to heed thy frog’s formidable tongue. And gentlemen, I order you both to take care of our young man at all costs.”

The boy asked, “What about you, sir?”

The Captain smiled wistfully, “There are worse fates than going down with one’s vessel, even in the belly of a Goliath frog.”

Fingering the handle of the silver dagger stuck inside his leather belt on his right hip, the Captain said, “May our heavenly father protect us from evil.” After making the sign of the cross, he walked over and loaded the number one portside cannon.

The two men, followed by the boy, descended the pilot ladder. Once down, they trudged through the turbulent pool of gurgling stomach acid and immediately smelled the burning wool and cotton material from their pants that the acid was eating into.

Stopping near the left side of the frog’s mouth, the boy yelled to the Captain that they were now in position. The Captain struck his flint twice, lit the cannon’s fuse and a few seconds later, “Boom!”

The frog shrieked, opening its big mouth a mile wide, as a tidal wave of seawater washed in, sweeping the captives back towards the hull.

The enraged frog blindly groped and soon found the Captain. Gripping his waist with its gargantuan tongue, it brought him outside to face the music.

The frog studied its prisoner with mad, beady eyes. The Captain stared back defiantly. After a time, the frog began to play dunk the donut with the Captain. He periodically brought him up for further examination, before again dunking him underwater, longer and longer each time, for yet another round of his favorite new game.

The whole time the Captain fought valiantly, wiggling and squirming for all he was worth. He finally loosened the frog’s python grip enough to yank out his silver dagger, as the frog brought him up for the beginning of round ten of, “Dunk the Captain.”

Amalfi pointed into the frog’s open mouth at the ship, yelling, “Remember the seasons!” He tried to say more, but the frog dunked him down again, as the Captain stabbed the tip of the frog’s tongue half a dozen times.

The frog shrieked, dropped his prisoner, and pulled its bloody tongue inside its mouth. The Captain took off swimming with a steady crawl towards shore, one hundred and twenty yards away. His speed was impressive, considering he was in full dress uniform and wearing knee high leather boots.

The Captain dashed fifty yards up the beach. He paused for breath under a grove of palm trees till the frog snaked out its injured tongue, knocking him down on the sand. The Captain bounced up and shimmied halfway up a palm tree, but the frog uprooted it with one tremendous jerk, heaving tree and Captain thirty feet into the air.

Coolly riding the tree trunk down like a freight elevator, the Captain jumped off on the second floor, just before the palm tree crashed onto a sand dune.

The Captain scrambled up the dune, but the frog’s lethal tongue caught his waist and dragged him back onto the sand, through the breaking surf, till it again held him up in front of his mad beady eyes for sick inspection.

In no mood for further games, the frog let loose a victorious shriek and viciously flung the Captain into his mouth, slamming him off the portside hull with a thunderous thud heard all the way to China.

Rushing over, the curly haired man held the fallen Captain’s head up out of the stomach acid. Looking over at the boy, as he touched two fingers on the right side of the Captain’s neck, searching for a pulse he could not find, he said, “Go topside. Crank up the winch and send down the cargo net. First grab hold his feet and help us turn him over. Careful, or he could end up paralyzed. Not that it matters much. From the looks of him, looks like our good Captains’ dead.”

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