About a month before Sports Day, Mickey Watson hoisted a rotten log at the edge of the mulch line and found himself a new God.
I watched him pinch it by its lizard scruff—a skink, vein-blue from the legs down, squirming like it was catapulted from hibernation mid-dream. Bored children tangled in their swing chains and jungle gyms seemed to pick up their heads at once, like they knew there was a reptile present, and the entangled particles between child and lizard briefly became one small, sacred, cold-blooded photon. Mickey held the skink to the sky in communion with the earth, and the other children encircled them, slowly but intently, until they were all shouting Skink! Skink! Skink! and the little thing seemed to glow in the light of their entertainment.
When recess was over, I asked Mickey if I could see the skink. He said no in a way that made it seem like he’d never had it, or that it never existed, and that I had asked a stupid question. The other children booed me in chorus. They enjoyed doing that on occasion—to whisper their disdain from behind walls of fibered book socks. Challenging authority is part of being a child, I accepted that, but understanding those kids had always been a leaky sail. We saw too many holes in each other, and wind kept finding new, noisy ways of whistling through.
In the weeks that followed, the skink established a sphere of influence. Mickey began whispering into his shirt pocket during quiet reading time. He set the skink atop his math quizzes, gauging correct answers by which Scantron bubble was first blessed by forked lizard-tongue. He brought spiders and placed them on lunch trays, watching expectantly as they were taken apart, leg by leg, in the floppy, thoughtless jaws of a new savior. One spider ended up in Missy Hilfinger’s braids, and after a bout of high-octave screaming, I told Mickey to flip his card on the behavioral chart. He did, performing the gallows-walk that all children persecuted must do, but at the end of class, as I clapped the dust from the erasers outside the window, I saw the skink, tucked into the plastic card-holder, foregrounded in deep red, overlooking his kingdom.
The classroom became a linoleum chapel. Education was worship. The children cheered when the skink basked in the gray of the windowsill. They wept when it shed into the pockets of their desks. On days I confiscated the skink, the children would come together and pray, like their spirits alone could swell the lizard until it was two stories tall, and in its eyes I would become nothing but a morsel. Something easy to chew.
I’d set the skink free often, afraid they might be right.
A week before Sports Day, the children developed a ritual to deepen their unity with the skink. They’d fall in behind Mickey, a Band-of-Brothers line of sketchers and wheely boards, and they would set the lizard down, free on the rubber nuggets by the slide, to follow in unison. Swerve for swerve, skitter for skitter, like thread tailing needle through fabric, the children walked in the four-toed footprints of their king. I found myself imagining the skink as a compass, and the children as its north, always desperate to be aligned in the world they’d created. And I found myself admiring the skink—how, impossibly, it never seemed to consider fleeing into the brush.
On Sports Day, I couldn’t find Mickey, and I couldn’t find the skink. I poured Gatorade into the punch bowl, covered scrapes with Neosporin, got dragged ass-first across the sand by the gym teacher during tug-of-war. I kept looking for my kids between events, and they remained rigid, tiered in rows, eyes alight at something I could not determine. They held hands and hummed and quickly slinked out their tongues, buzzing the way you do when you’ve waited for something to happen for a long, long time.
Then I saw it. Mickey, putting the skink atop the monkey bars, its once-blue tail plucked clean off, scales become nebula, his entire face rapt in satisfaction. He gave a harmless shrug as he walked away, like he knew what predestination meant, and he was thrilled by it. My skin became a cobblestone of nervous premonition, one that saw Mickey as the pale horse he had always been—a messenger of terrible things to come. I looked to the left, the right, in the bucket of spoons and eggs and beneath the seesaw, but found no lizard parts. Nothing shaped like a tail. My throat became parched. I needed something to drink.
In a moment of clarity, I found myself rushing back to the Gatorade, where Missy sat nursing a cup. Before I knew what I was doing, I had tackled her, along with the table, and watched a day’s worth of refreshment spill onto mulch in a deep, velvet splay, along with a nubby hunk of soaked skink flesh. It sat, now and forever tainted, only inches from my face. It occurred to me that skinks only amputate their tails when in the jaws of a predator. There’s a lesson to be learned there, certainly, but lessons are, in a way, like miracles.
They never exist until you beg for one.
We became stained in that moment, Missy and I, not by the Red 40 on our clothes, but by the eyes of passersby. Faculty, parents, children and strangers—the two of us sacrificed to the moment’s novelty. Suddenly, the other children began to cheer wildly, like a comet had passed, or a new king had been crowned, and they chanted my name in cadence under the new summer sun, and between Missy’s sobbing face and all of the rapture surrounding it, I spotted the skink atop the monkey bars, its body brown and coarse and stiff, clung to surfaces it had never known, with no easy way back to soil.

Connor Harding is a fiction writer and current MFA candidate at George Mason University. His works have been published in HAD, Flash Frog, Crow & Cross Keys, Unstamatic, Every Day Fiction, Bullshit Lit, and Black Warrior Review. He is originally from Youngstown Ohio, and primarily writes stories set in the Midwest.
Leave a Reply