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Spiny Lizard

Sun, 18 Sep 2016, 06:21 PM (-06:00) Creative Commons License

We sat in the front yard on the bench, Izzy and I. It was shady under the Monterey Oak, and we both needed to cool down. So we just sat there looking around and enjoying the breeze.

Then something caught my eye. Against the house. Behind the Coral Honeysuckle. In the dappled light. Between the vine’s leaves and the brown cedar of the trellis. There was a pattern that didn’t belong. Some kind of camouflaged thing.

It didn’t move, but it was the kind of motionlessness that leaves you knowing you’re being watched.

I kept my eye on it. Was it a snake? No, it was just about the length of an outstretched hand. Not a snake. And anyway, our rat snake lives in the backyard.

I looked down at Miss Izzy, to see if she saw it. But she was napping. I looked back up at the thing, and then it moved. One tentative flick to a different spot where the sun dapples fell differently on the vine and I almost lost it in the shadows. And then it moved again. And again. 

There was a long, skinny reptile tail. And some cross-hatched, zig-zaggy lines. And then a Spiny Lizard head staring directly at me while I stared at it staring directly at me.

And then it disappeared behind the trellis and was gone.

© jumpingfish by David Hasan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License