Lizards: Short Story Read Free

If the client hated cats, Emma’s father pretended to feel the same way. “Mind your own business!” he’d yell at a cat off in a corner washing itself. “Just keep us out of it!” he’d yell. “Okay?”
    People either figured he was kidding (usually when he wasn’t), or they were disarmed by the look of starry-eyed, unflappable love he planted on everybody. Or they bought wholesale whatever he said. They believed, for instance, that if every square inch of your skin was splotched with huge freckles you resembled the sun-dappled forest floor at dawn.
    Emma considered herself immune to his doting rhapsodies. She might have thought she was a big deal when she was a kid, but she knew by the time she started high school that looking like a fruit bat wasn’t something you bragged about. She was short and had a sharp nose and chin. Otherwise, she wasn’t bad. She
did
have huge dark eyes and she remained proud of them. It wasn’t until she left home and fell in love with a creep named Paul Butt that she discovered how much flattery she had actually bought.
    For her size she had unusually long fingers and toes—like a tarsier, her father raved, and since “tarsier” sounded so exotic she went through her adolescence believing that everyone envied and adored her hands and feet. Then Paul Butt told her that Elvis Presley would never have dated a girl with scrawny hands like hers. He also said that her lips were too thin and that she should have electrolysis done on her arm hair.
    She was so crazy about him that she underwent one agonizing electrolysis session, but even then, even at her most insecure, she never really saw herself through his eyes. Arm hair to him was still, secretly, “down” to her. When he dropped her for the electrolysis technician, she blamed her father for making her unjustifiably vain.
    Eleven years later all she can think to blame her father for is marrying someone so unlike himself, because she is convinced that a person’s character is nothing more nor less than the battlefield where the personality of the mother and the personality of the father slug it out. When she told Karl Jagger this, at the beginning of their affair when they were indulging each other’s confessions, he said that his parents were exactly alike, and he speculated that the complete absence of contention creates a personality vacuum in which the animal nature of the baby takes over.
    “Wild?” she said.
    “Black.”
    “Dark,” she said, because he isn’t black. Once, she asked him why he had never killed anybody, and he said, “Shackled by compassion.”
    Why she asked was that he makes a lot of money writing pulp fiction about ex-marines and decent police officers getting even with crack-dealing paedophiles and mutilators. In every one of the twenty-three books he’s published, there are at least ten grisly murders, over two hundred and thirty in total, and he claims that no two murders are the same and that every one is described in authentic, meticulous detail. If some guy’s brains are all over the sidewalk, he says, and it’s winter in New York, those brains better be steaming.
    It occurs to Emma that Karl and Marion might be made for each other, so when Marion and Craig break up just around the time that sex with Karl starts to get predictable, she tries to arrange a blind date. Karl is game, but Marion takes offence at being told she has something in common with a man who invents stories about humans slaughtering each other.
She
doesn’t invent her pet-death stories, she says, and it’s not as if she goes out of her way to collect them either. It’s that being in the pet-store business and also the sister of a veterinarian she hears things other people wouldn’t.
    “I don’t find them
entertaining,”
she says.
    “Well, no,” Emma agrees.
    Marion picks dog fur off her sweater, one of five pet-motif sweaters she knit to wear in the store. Emma regrets that Karl will probably never see Marion in