The frog, the mandolin, and the fish (and the carpenter)

My strange friend Julie has asked me, and I only live to do her bidding, to write a story incorporating a fish, a frog, a carpenter and a mandolin, so here goes;

The frog, the mandolin, and the fish (and the carpenter)

Once upon a time, and in a land far away, there was a frog who had discovered a wonderful talent for playing the mandolin (it would have been the cello but that would be just ridiculous!). To say that this puzzled the poor frog would have been an understatement for it possessed few, if any, of the basic requirements for such a task.

He, for it was a he, had no hands to speak of, let alone opposable thumbs. How was he able to hold and strum the instrument? His habit of frequently leaping about from frond to frond mitigated disastrously against him being able to sustain a tune for any length of time. It really was a source of great bewilderment to the poor frog, and greatly strained his froggy sensibilties.

When all at once a fish appeared from beneath the murky waters and offered this advice;

"Be not alarmed friend frog, for the ways of the world are not always easily explained. The God of all things, the master of creation has bestowed upon you a beautiful, if unusual gift. It is not the stuff of frogs to question his almighty wisdom. Play, play your mandolin and let the sweet music penetrate the heavens and reach the kingdom of the divine".

The frog, who was actually a keen advocate of the Darwinian theory of evolution, and the pre-eminence of science over religion, begged to differ with the pious fish and did so, thus;

"That I am the possessor of such stringly proclivities is not the work of some omnipotent diety, not some celestial transendence, it is clearly a freak of nature. The fact that we are talking to each other is also rather a bizarre aberration, but not the issue at hand. No! The answer to this riddle has mortal base. Organic selection has chosen that I be the perpetrator of mandolific lilts and strains and such is my lot in life.

Just then, a carpenter from the local town was passing the pond and, on seeing a mandolin-playing frog talking to a fish vowed to knock the magic mushrooms on the head for a bit.