I know my brother will be back. There’s no one else who remembers why he is called Spike. But I did want to ask him a question I can’t seem to answer. Was I called “Toad” as a child? It seems to me there was some time when that was a name of mine, but I can’t be sure. The thought occurred to me last week sometime, when I was sitting out in the garden easing my bunions on the grass and watching my bachelor friend. My brother will remember if it was ever true.

In first-year biology, I dissected a toad, a big brown one from a stinging vat of formaldehyde. I flinched and cringed getting the corpse to the worktable and then pegging him down. But then, with that first incision, that sly peeling of the skin flaps away from the abdomen, I saw the delicacy of the beast. How lovely his belly muscle, a solid disc, pink and round. And the strong casing of the pelvis and the powerful bone of the leg, its stem turning like some fine imagining out of the joint. It seemed beautiful to me. It seemed a desirable thing to die and be hooked out of a vat, all puffed and brown, so some young girl could slice and insinuate into me, and be moved to joy by the turning of my thigh bone.

Toad. Witches’ brews, warts. The amazing Mr. Geddoes recommended an onion rubbed on the wart daily. It works. The thing just shrank up and tumbled off after a few weeks.

And once in another country, I rode in the back seat of a car at night, in the rain, and was stopped by a horde of toads, yellow, the size of plates, tidily winking as they crossed the streaming road. Dozens of them, there were, caught in the car lights, flopping in the sheeted water falling on the road, from one vineyard to the next.

My bachelor toad doesn’t do much. I watch him. He hangs on the rock wall. If I tap too close he pulls himself into a dark crack where I can’t see him. He sits in the sun waiting. When a fly wanders by he nonchalantly flips out his tongue, stubbier than I’d expected, and tips it in. When he swallows, his eyes convulse. That’s all. At night and in the early morning he sings, his pale throat fluttering. Not exactly a parade, not precisely a circus, but he’s entertaining enough when I’m sitting out there in the dirt with my skirt rucked up, the sun warming my thick veins, and my bunions cooling in the grass.

Mr. Geddoes once told me that toads secrete an odd variety of poisons from their skin in stressful situations. One South American tree toad oozes a curare-like toxin that the Indians use for tipping their arrows. It produces paralysis and death.