Once upon a time, there was a beautiful princess who was truly evil. All right, she wasn’t really a princess, but she was quite sure she ought to be. Perhaps she had been adopted. Her mother had the same silky blonde hair as her and her father the same delicate ears, but she considered that maybe they had been adopted themselves, or perhaps her great-grandparents had once been royalty before being wickedly deposed in a popular uprising.

She made many attempts to demonstrate her princessness. An early scheme had involved sneaking peas from her dinner plate to shove beneath her mattress, but after five minutes of violent tossings and turnings she had fallen asleep exhausted only to awake up the next morning refreshed and well-rested. Another plan had involved spreading rumors about a curse and stealing a bottle of sleeping pills from the medicine cabinet. Fortunately for her the rumor reached her mother, and her plan (and the pills) were discovered before she could put her plan into action. Undeterred, she watched every Disney princess movie and had her parents read her all the princess-related fairy tales they could find, but the majority of secret princesses had no choice but to undure hardships with long-suffering patience until someone eventually arrived to reveal their princessity.

Which seemed like far too much trouble, so she turned to magic. Never mind where she found the books, nor what she did to procure them. Trust me: You really don’t want to know. She mastered love potions quickly, but she could only test them on regular boys on behalf of regular girls, since there were so few princes in the area. None at all, in fact, which is why (though she had avoided this option for as long as she possibly could) she at last resorted to frog kissing.

First she developed a magical test to determine whether a frog was really a prince, and then she set about capturing and testing frogs. In truth, the magic was rather simple, and consisted of administering a dose of poisoned pocket-lint orally to each frog and seeing which one survived. As luck would have it, it took less than fifty tries to find one who passed the test. The frog was little and not particularly ugly, but she still could not suppress a shudder as she brought it to her mouth. She made sure her kiss was a good one, soft and lingering, so that she would not have to administer it a second time, but nothing happened. She watched him carefully for several minutes, and hefted him in her hand, but he showed no sign or growing or changing into anything. Disappointed, she tossed him back into the pond.

Poor frog. His great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather had been an evil prince, transformed by a spell intended for someone else that had backfired to the great relief of the country over which he would otherwise one day have ruled. This little frog knew nothing of any of that, but retained a vivid imagination far beyond the capability of most amphibians.

With that one, gentle kiss he fell instantly, hopelessly in love.

He clambered out of the pond and followed the evil princess everywhere. She, however, took no further notice of him. Having judged her frog experiments a failure, she moved on to other endeavors, and so frogs receded to the status of most other living creatures for which she had no use—complete invisibility. Which was just as well, for otherwise, she might have kicked, stomped upon or otherwise abused and ultimately killed him. The frog did not go out of his way to draw attention to himself but was content merely to stare openmouthed at the object of his great affection, occasionally snacking on some of the many flies that swarmed around the strewn corpses of other, less regal frogs.

He took little notice of activities, and so was largely ignorant of her wickedness. At those odd times when he couldn’t help but be shocked by her cruelty (such as when she swatted flies and let them drop, lifeless and uneaten, to the floor) he simply explained to himself that he was only a little frog in a big, big world, and he couldn’t be expected to know how other beings measured good and evil.

In time the evil princess hit upon a brilliant idea: Rather than striving endlessly (and fruitlessly) to prove her princessitude, she decided she would simply start acting the part. Reasoning that the only thing a princess really requires is a lady-in-waiting, she sought out and found a littler girl who adored her and was willing to be bullied and bossed around.

Is it necessary even to mention that the little frog was made greener still by envy at the attention paid this pudgy usurper? He would have given anything to be so bossed around and bullied by the one who had once smacked him deliciously on the lips.

It so happened that this littler girl really was a princess. Her great-great-grandmother had been a princess in Sweden before she’d been turned into a bear. Part of that story may be found elsewhere (specifically the part where the curse was eventually lifted), but the descendants of this bear princess had fallen onto hard times had forgotten their former royal ursinity. The little girl was not beautiful, though that may have been only because no one ever told her she was.

One day, when the evil princess was casting about for some new cruel command she could inflict upon her servant, her attention turned at last to the frog, who was sitting on a nearby rock feeling particuarly dry and itchy (he neglected sometimes to return periodically to the pond to remoisturize his skin). Needless to say she didn’t recognize him, but only saw a fresh chance to humiliate her victim-in-waiting. She picked up the frog (who was instantly in a state of rapturous bliss), presented him to the littler girl, told her he was really a handsome prince, and ordered her to kiss him. The little girl naturally recoiled in disgust, but, having maintained her gullibility in spite of the evil princess’s past manipulations and abuses, she overcame her revulsion, closed her eyes, puckered her lips, and leaned forward.

The frog would have jumped away in equal disgust had not the evil princess held such a firm grip upon his torso. She smooshed the frog’s face hard into the littler girl’s lips, so that they shared a moment’s intimate smooch, and then the evil princess dropped the frog as though she had received an electrical shock.

The little frog was not feeling well. Revolted as he was by the kiss and stunned as he was by the two-foot drop to the ground, his ill-feelings were greater than either cause could account for. He stretched and contorted his limbs pititably as they ached and swelled, and the little girls seemed to grow a little less little.

The littler girl shrieked, but the evil princess only stared at her with dull hatred. The cause of the frog’s distress was obvious: Being a true princess, she had succeeded in transforming him into a prince.

Well, almost.

It had been many generations since the evil prince had turned himself into a frog, and his hapless descendants were now mostly only frog. Human DNA is much stronger than frog DNA, but not as strong as all that. So now he was transformed into a grotesque, human-like frog-creature about the size of a toddler. The evil princess felt vindicated: “Aha!” she cried, “Not so much of a princess, I guess!” But the true princess, recovering somewhat from her initial shock, felt intense compassion for the monster. “We have to help him!” she cried.

The frog-prince was in unendurable pain. He breathed in short, spasmodic little gasps, gulping air as though the planet were running low. He could only say one human word, which he repeated over and over: “Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow.”

The true princess fell to the ground and embraced him, kissing the creature repeatedly, but it made no difference. Her tears fell upon his hideous cheeks to no avail.

The evil princess herself began to feel distress. The true princess’s emotions were so strong and poignant that they pierced every chink in the evil princess’s psychic armor. She hated the stabs of emotional pain, as she hated everything, and she wanted nothing more than to make them stop. So, without pausing to consider what she was doing, she pried the littler girl away from the frog-thing, bent down, and kissed him herself.

Immediately he was transformed back into a little frog, breathless and traumatized.

“You saved him!” the true princess cried and threw her arms tight around the evil princess’s neck. So relieved and grateful was the littler girl that she kissed the evil princess on the lips. Immediately the evil princess staggered back, afraid of the awful power in her lady-in-waiting’s kiss, but she did not appear to be transforming, and so she attempted to cover her panic with another sneer.

Nevertheless, there was indeed power in the littler girl’s kiss. Though neither was aware of it at the time, she had inadvertantly transformed her bossy playmate into a true princess.

During the rest of that long, hot summer, they had many adventures, and for the rest of their lives they were always close friends. The little frog was kept by his true love in a glass terrarium in her room, and she never failed to provide him with food, fresh water and (what he craved the most) attention, and they all lived happily ever after.

The End.