Stories Inspired by HFR

The third story! These young writers from BASIS in Scottsdale certainly have a way with words. (The prompt: to write a 500 word story or scene inspired by a photo from HFR #47) This skilled piece by George Y. is inspired by "Sleeping Lizards" by Debbie Fleming Caffery.


* The young boy looked down into his palm, his dead lizard’s tail hanging from it. The lizard he had only caught a month ago, its two legs cut off by him when it was still wild and free, had attempted to free itself, and now, it would never see the boy again. He never knew what species it had been, or even bothered to search. All he did was enjoy watching it scampering around, and, after a while of amusement, catching it with one of his carefully crafted nets.

Somehow, the girls at Hereon Elementary School did not take pleasure in his anecdotes; one of which including how he preformed “surgery” on his lizard, catching it in a net and cutting off its legs. A schoolmate once said they would grow back, but after a while, to his dismay, he realized his lizard’s front legs would never come back. Nonetheless, even without its two front legs, the lizard had always managed to move around, and the boy constantly thought it peculiar for a lizard to stand on hind legs. But now, as he held up the severed tail, he thought that that would never happen again. He would have to buy a new animal from the store or catch one to play with, and so far he had no such luck; for the thousandth time, he gazed at the empty net that had once caught so many animals: his furry white mouse, his recently deceased lizard, and his “adorable” huge eyed bunny, as the girls called it before it was amputated.

The next day, a surprise awaited him in an expensive cage filled with green foliage. Looking into the cage, there seemed to be nothing striking or particular that was at first of interest. But after staring for a long, hard ten seconds, he perceived a chameleon, the lizard he had always wanted to catch, the same type his friend claimed to be able to turn invisible. He eagerly grabbed the cage and sprinted off to the garden.

His father murmured, “Happy birthday, son.”

“Geez, you’re always that boring, aren’t you? I mean, you’re not like even turning invisible and stuffs,” he said, yearning for the thrill brought by the previous animals. The boy then opened the cage, hoping the lizard would finally act as his predecessor. With miraculous agility for the once lazy and motionless lizard, the chameleon shot through the boy’s legs and darted into an adjacent bush, feet moving in a blur. “Wow, you’re like really fast!” The boy, enthralled by the sudden movement, hurried into his luxurious mountainside mansion, grabbed his net, and set up the trap on a Palo Verde tree. He kicked at the infinite desert brooms for a few minutes and heard a snapping sound: the distinct reverberation of his trap springing into action. He sprinted to the Palo Verde tree and saw a lizard; the two front legs and the tail missing confirmed it was the same lizard which he thought was dead, and upon closer inspection, the gecko was also there, remarkably camouflaged in a striped fashion.