The blue and black striped lizard started to worry. Directly on the other side of the glass was what he feared most: the little boy. About 8 years old, the boy with pudgy fingers was tapping on the glass right underneath the lizard’s orange belly. His sister stood next to him making faces.
Suddenly the sister, who celebrated her sixth birthday just the week before, ran off screaming, “Mom! A poisonous lizard tried to bite me.”
“Nothing could be further from the truth,” the lizard thought. “I neither tried to bite anyone nor am I poisonous. At least I don’t think I am. And I don’t bite unless provoked.”
Caught between his world and theirs, the lizard clung to the outside of the window glass, trapped by the screen at his back. Escape wasn’t possible. How he got in his current situation he really couldn’t remember. After all, lizards aren’t really known for their memories. But they are known for their long colorful tails.
He tilted his head to one side and, with a quick flick from a sticky tongue, snatched a fly that was also trapped between the glass and screen. It disappeared with a single gulp.
Once again, looking at where his tail was supposed to be, he thought, “Chasing after that fly. That’s how I got caught in here.” Sadly, his tail was no longer colorful nor long. In its place was a mere stub – still raw.
A week earlier, the blue and black striped lizard with the bright orange belly had tried climbing a nearby tree to avoid being grabbed. He had failed. It was that encounter with the boy that left him tailless – the lizard, not the pudgy-fingered little boy. Dropping one’s tail is the last resort when all other methods of escape have been attempted – even the occasional finger bite.
With another snap of his sticky tongue, the lizard made sure another fly no longer needed to worry about escaping from the window/screen trap. He shuddered just a little as he gulped down the morsel and continued crawling higher in what, up to now, had been a fruitless effort to get away from the constant tapping on the glass.
His only comfort was that the little boy and his family were traveling to the zoo in the morning. Once there, they would encounter animals of all kinds including, of course, his lizard cousins. Much larger than he, they would definitely bite and, yes, some would even be poisonous.
He didn’t wish that on the boy. But he did hope the encounter would frighten him enough to let him be, and perhaps also give him a respect for all animals – both big and small. Something, he had witnessed, the boy needed badly.
Warmer weather had brought the yard to life, and the boy with the pudgy fingers outside. The lizard had witnessed countless horrors committed by the boy: ants fried by magnifying glass, wings pulled off of butterflies, and thread tied to the back legs of large beetles so they would fly in a circle and not be able to escape. What happened when they became so exhausted they could fly no longer? The lizard shuddered once again at the cruelty he had witnessed that day.
The boy had downed birds by way of rocks and slingshot, frogs were caught and tortured, and caterpillars’ nests lit on fire. The lizard was amazed at the carnage one person could do and amazed he’d survived as long as he had. Eyeing yet another fly, the lizards’ life in confinement was about to come to an end.
With one final rap on the window from the boy, the glass shattered, sending the little girl running and screaming for her mother once again. She was yelling something about the poison lizard breaking free and attacking, but the lizard wasn’t attacking and certainly wasn’t staying around to hear the entire story.
A large shard of glass pushed against the screen, slicing a small gash, but large enough to make a hasty escape. The blue and black striped lizard with the orange belly scampered through the gash, barely avoiding one final grasp from pudgy fingers. At the last moment, mom jerked the boy away from the lizard and started berating the child for the damage.
“Funny”, the lizard thought as he climbed to safety in a nearby pine tree quickly blending into the bark, “Little boy gets punished for breaking a window inside of the house, but nothing is said to him about all the destruction he’s done on the outside. Sad she doesn’t know about the statistics of children who enjoy harming animals. They have a good chance of growing up and harming others.”
How the blue and black striped lizard with the orange belly knew about the animal cruelty statistics, he couldn’t really say. After all, lizards aren’t known for their memories.
[Rick Ryckeley, who lives in Senoia, served as a firefighter for more than two decades and has been a weekly columnist since 2001. His email is storiesbyrick@gmail.com. His books are available at www.RickRyckeley.com.]
