Ghost Ranch, New Mexico
I hear the gray-haired man say, “I believe animals have souls.” “And feelings,” his granddaughter adds, “and opinions.” A lizard flattens itself against the stump top beside me, level with my gaze as I sit at the old picnic table closer to the adobe building than the woods, hand stilled atop my journal as the family passes. The kid grandson whistles “Yellow Submarine” and waves to me. I think to point out the lizard, but the two of us—lizard and I—stay quiet, grow small, do our best not to be seen, to be so present we aren’t seen, aren’t extinguished—no, I mean distinguished, distinguishable—from this dead wood we sit on, flattening our torsos against our own thoughts. The grain beneath us dry and distressed from decades of wind.
I recall my sudden disgust in the cafeteria when I watched a woman dump a plate of chicken leg bones—metatarsals, maybe a fibula, meaty calves and thighs like our own—into “food waste” instead of “trash.” Our tended disgust of eating certain animals versus others. Squirming when Mad Max slings a lizard between his lips and crunches, yet inhaling the pig frying in its own fat, the tendering cow flesh. Milk-giving, small broods. Warm blood and hair. A riddle of fat. We eat the ones more like us. But not the lizard, tiny dinosaur shrunken by eons of fear, bobbing, skittering, eyeing the dangers of the day. What’s a lizard’s fear to our own? In the end, all fear is about death. I startle at every buzz of the bee scrounging the scarce grass for a stamen, a reaction ingrained in me from a Midwest childhood of frantic wasp-filled evenings. Some fears are written on our bones.
I wonder how lizards reproduce. How capitalist, that verb. Reducing animals to numbered items in their species’ production, tending the assembly line. To make an exact replica, carbon copies. Animals have offspring: clutches or litters (often with the quintessential runt). Humans have families. Progeny. Successors. We “give birth” rather than “reproduce.” We are allowed to create anew. We craft distance, first, in language. A pig becomes “pork.” A cow becomes “beef.” Then, we inhabit that distance, allow it to enter our bodies, become part of us.
I take that back, though, because wings and ribs remain “wings” and “ribs,” despite being cracked from skin and spine. As a child, I was told the story of a woman who craved knowledge more than her own protection. Eve is born from Adam’s rib to be his wife. As rib, the woman is food. Their love, I see now, is a myth of cannibalism, the desire to consume, to consummate, oneself. The man yearns for his own flesh, to be inside himself, to empty himself in himself. Before Eve arrives, Adam is tasked with naming every plant and animal in the world, but naming is not the same as calling something what it is.
I look up from my journal, look back at the stump. The lizard is gone, but not my questions: What is the symbolism of lizards? Do they play an esoteric role? Their tiny tiny claws. Do they bite? Their delicate torsos. Do they have ribs? I don’t know the words. Where do they live? What do they eat? Do they leave bones behind?
I read the piece of printer paper taped inside the women’s bathroom stall: eleven rhyming lines of verse titled “Pied Beauty,” praising God for “dappled things…Whatever is fickle, freckled.” A lizard pokes its head over the edge of the adobe roof above me, then disappears. I can’t tell if it is the same one as before. Let us praise, yes, “all things counter, original, spare, strange.” But let us not stop there. Let us praise the spied beauty as well. That which crawls, skitters, squirms. That which makes us squirm ourselves. Let us praise the ones that love to feel the sun on their chilly skin. Let us praise their coded coloring, their flickering tongues. Praise all the lizards we will never see. All the lizards we will never eat. Praise their cold blood, their souls, their bones. Praise their tiny tiny bones.
I found a bookmark inside a library book the other day with a picture of a roadrunner, followed by the bird’s advice: “Be quick / Hit the ground running / Spring into action / Get off the beaten path / Kick up some dust!” We want to be like certain animals only to the extent that those animals already reflect us. Metaphor over mimesis. In addition to snacking on scorpions and bees, roadrunners mostly dine on lizards. But what pithy advice comes from beating a small brittle body against the ground to pulverize its bones? Turn to religion, memory, poetry. Whatever makes it easier to swallow.
JESSICA HUDSON has been published in DIAGRAM, New Delta Review, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. She received her Creative Writing MFA from Northern Michigan University and now lives in Albuquerque.
The art that appears alongside this piece is “The Land & Me #8” by JONATHAN KENT ADAMS.