A walker in a forest hears a downpour arrive in the treetops before it reaches the ground. He imagines it as a rain of arrows, then as falling frogs, a thought prompted by two dead or dying ones he saw in the road. He stops to photograph them, and that small detour turns out to matter. When the rain hits, he hunkers down like a turtle under poncho and umbrella, his phone tucked safely in a pocket. Then lightning strikes, and the crash comes from exactly where he would have been walking.
The speaker's tone stays calm, even amused, which makes the near miss land harder. He never says he was frightened. The title and last lines do the work: his attention to death, in the form of a bones-and-wasps frog, kept him alive. The mood moves from playful imagining to sudden awe, leaving a quiet sense of luck and the odd ways chance can protect us.