Eight year-old Seth Dove (Jeremy Cooper) lives in an isolated American prairie community in the 1950s. The film opens with Seth and his friends Eben and Kim, playing with a frog Seth has found in the fields. The boys inflate the frog by inserting a reed up its anus and leave it by the side of the road. When a local English widow, Dolphin Blue (Lindsay Duncan), stops to inspect it, Seth shoots the inflated frog with a slingshot, causing it to explode over Dolphin.