The shadows play hide-n-seek games in his peripheral vision as James hunts tiny lizards that are harder to catch than the flies that fill his home every summer in Indiana. He loves the flies and their cozy buzzing, the way they perch on his wrist, bug arms tickling his skin while he plots ways to claim them as pets. But the lizards with their four legs and tails feel closer to something normal.
Florida in the summer, his body as gummy as taffy, he tries to entertain himself while he waits to go home. His parents talking about a divorce all through the winter while they slept in the same bed. At ten, he feels things he can’t name. He doesn’t know this is normal. It’s something he keeps hidden like a coin.
He hates the way the crabgrass cups his feet, how the dirt is hidden beneath this greenery, how everything smells of mold and sun, the pond still behind him, his grandparents shelled into their recliners, the glass door to the Lanai closed, blocking out the heat and his possible screams. Joy or fear, they’ve had enough in this lifetime. The weather channel broadcasts storms and snowfall in Colorado and Iowa. Western wastelands they’ll never visit. It means something to them, but he doesn’t know the right questions to ask them. If they have answers about his parents, they’ve agreed not to share them with him. Two weeks past his regular visit, his mother calling only after a glass of wine, her promising that she’ll have a job soon, that she bets the sun feels nice on his skin, that he has to believe that she is sacrificing for him, that his father is going to send them the money for a flight back soon. A holding period is all this is, and she wants him to listen to his grandparents, that they’ve lived an interesting life if he just asked them about it, he’d learn more this summer than a whole school year.
He ends the call by telling her he won’t be tamed. That he feels the softness creeping into him. He asks his grandfather what the boiling point is for human skin? The old man’s response is to put another piece of bacon on his plate. James wanders what it would feel like to be chewed, to be swallowed?
He turns from the screen toward the pond, eyeing the grass for gators. He practices running in diagonals; he practices snatching, his hand opening and closing on empty air. He can hear them in the bushes, their little feet sticking to the landscaping rocks, the little divots coating the sidewalk’s surface that feel like a cat’s tongue on his feet. He pivots, groping with his left hand, and the lizard is a heartbeat in his palm, skin dry but pulsing. He pulls it close to his chest, covering it with his other hand. He swallows a shout, his legs high-kneeing in excitement.
Every pet needs a name. Mother, he whispers, afraid he won’t be able to hang on, the sun, a broken egg yolk, warning.