A Garden Variety WhoDunnit or......Those Damn Toads

August 30, 2025

Way back in 2013 The Garden was different than it is today.  The garden was a bar a grill on Bourbon Street, decorated in rich wood and red leather it looked and felt like a cross between a wine bar, an Irish pub, and a brothel. The patrons of the Garden were still called toads, not toads like we think of ourselves today, but toads of the low and slimy variety, artists that everyone who wasn't a toad loathed because they were sure these "artists" had never worked a day in their lives, writing down their "emotions," painting pictures of idealistic nonsense and crafting a second rate reality form the scraps that other "decent people gave them."

The proprietor of the Garden was a lovely woman whose name escapes me, but she was from South Africa, she moved to New Orleans after a herd of wild rhino's flattened her house. Her family blamed her because she was always feeding the stray Rhino's.  The garden was her fresh attempt at her own second rate reality. On this day, she was sitting at the long ornate garden bar, sipping a glass of dandelion wine chatting up the hot bartender, and working on what would one day be heralded as the perfect poem. She was one line from finishing it and already quite buzzed from the wine and the muscular arms that busied themselves in front of her.

The other toads were lounging, talking, writing and fighting at various tables and booths around the Garden, the trash talk was always a bit uncomfortable and was laced with more than just a bit of truth.  Hedge was planting some Night Blooming Freesias in a pot at a corner table and trying to avoid eye contact with Herotomost.  She found him loathsome and boring and a bit pudgy for her liking.  An arrogant bastard with a penchant for the drink. Lola Mouse, Grace (looking up hot pictures for her hot posts) and Margaret were in the corner trying to help Kay come up with a word that rhymes with bastard, while Susie, Kim and Ella played groupies to Shay as she strummed her Martin D28 and began to play every Emmy Lou Harris song she could muster. The fact that Susie was in nothing but a tube top, hot pants and six inch wedges surprised no one as she rarely wore any clothes at all while in the garden.

Mama Zen sat alone in a corner of the room fashioning voo doo dolls of some of the toads, the ones that made flippant comments on her writing and the ones that just annoyed her in general would be the first to feel the curse of the Z....she laughed to herself and sipped at her Absinthe. Sherry, Amy, Latonya and Peggy were drawing pictures for ideas that they had for tattoos that Hannah was going to tattoo on them that evening.  Every one had a good idea for a tattoo except Sherry who insisted that she wanted a full back piece that involved two fat naked Sumo Wrestlers brandishing light sabers and eating fried chicken.

At 3:30 a door on the mezzanine opened and out flowed Izy, and when I say flowed, I mean flowed.  Draped in white chiffon and lace, one of those longish cigarette holders in one hand and a Chocolate martini in the other, "dessert in a glass," she would always say....and she had dessert a lot. Izy leaned over the railing and screamed that all the toads where fakes and posers, "and further more, you pathetic excuses for artists, I want to inform you all," just then the lights went out, Herotomost screamed like a little girl. When they came back on, the only thing that was different, was that the chic from South Africa had her head on the bar, she was sobbing. Marian rushed to see what was wrong, and to ask her when she was going to finish her damn book, when she saw it.  On the bar top was a news release announcing the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry had been awarded to a poet by the name of Filthy Frog.  The problem was that the poem was the one that South Africa had just finished with the exception of the last line........which really didn't fit.

Today fair toads (and I know you all are not the low and slimy kind), your challenge is to write a poem, story, alliteration, single word, song, rant, affidavit or so forth telling us which toad was the poem thief and what the missing last line was that didn't quite fit.

I have to let you know that all of the characters in this story (if you can call it that) are purely fictional (except Susie and her tube top) and any similarities are coincidence only.

Yours truly....with no discernible emotional content in this one...

Herotomost

P.S. Headed to New Orleans til' next Thursday, but will have my I pad with me so I can review your wonderful work.  But, be patient as I might have a cocktail or two while I am there.  Have a great week and Thanks!!!

Fat Catz photo credit: bitzcelt via photopin cc
Absinthe photo credit: wallyg via photopin cc
Death photo credit: °]° via photopin cc