Every day now after dinner, Maryam slipped away from the grown-ups and went out to the front yard to look for her lizards. Outside the Arizona sun shined burns into her shoulders, heated the graveled yard, and threw waves up from cars. The air was still as leaves. Inside, the grown-ups had holed up drinking hot tea and turning the air down so low you’d think her dad’s body was actually in there and needed to be preserved. Maryam knelt in the gravel beside the row of black wooden bricks that separated their yard from the neighbors’. The bricks were a foot long, low and wide, always with damp spongy sides and cool bottoms despite the arid heat. She lifted one of the bricks, turned it on its side. The ground sprang to action. Earthworms wiggled in surprise and sucked themselves down into the dark soil. Potato bugs ran in every direction. If she was still little she would have given them a tap, watched them roll into a tight ball, and tucked them between two molars to feel the crunch.
Her method with the lizards was simple: turn it on its back and write a name in Sharpie marker on its belly. When she caught one, she would check to see if they’d been caught before. She wanted to see if lizards ever came back, or if once they were gone they were gone for good.
*
The day it happened, she pushed her face in her mother’s belly and cried. He hadn’t been sick: had gone to work that morning like any other. She couldn’t remember seeing her baby sister around anywhere, but she did remember her uncles’ faces, stunned, red-eyed, and exhausted with grief. And how they looked at her. How looking at her seemed to bring them more grief. Then she was in her room lying in bed with her mind so blank she could hardly remember her name. The sounds of family downstairs, of visitors, could have been orcas bleating across ocean. That night after everyone had left, she tiptoed downstairs to sit next to her mother on the couch. Her mom wasn’t watching TV or reading, just staring into the empty room as if it were speaking to her. Maryam settled beside her mother and picked up a hand from her lap, stroked the long fingers, felt the edges of her perfectly round nails. Her mother didn’t look at her or move, her hand playing dead. Mom, she asked, does this mean I can wear nail polish now?
These were the things she tried to think about. Her dad didn’t like her to do anything she liked, like wear nail polish or eat sweets or play with dogs. He would compress his heavy eyebrows and from deep within his barrel chest he would admonish: Maryam. It was all he needed to say. When he was at work she did whatever she wanted, watched TV and ate cookies and talked to her friends on the phone. But once he was home she felt herself get small, her footsteps lighter, wondering what she was going to do wrong.
*
Her favorite insects were the spiders. Monsters with a halo of legs and spinnerets, nothing could touch the soft meat of their body. She longed to stroke a smooth abdomen, to tickle the line of feet so delicate she would barely feel them. When a brick was raised, the spiders were the ones who didn’t panic. They didn’t scatter in an ecstatic frenzy, simply tensed, watchful, then slipped into the nearest hole.
She had started coming out front the day after he was gone. Out back was full of wreaths and big elaborate flower arrangements she didn’t see the point of. It’s not like her dad was ever going to see them. Kept home from school all day, Maryam received sympathy cards from her fourth-grade classmates, flowery pockets of earnest well-wishes with the occasional five-pack of Juicy Fruit tucked inside. She chewed the gum but didn’t read a single card. She couldn’t concentrate on TV or books either, so she had started to catalogue the lizards that lived in her front yard. Tree lizards mostly, though once a long time ago she had found a long elegant gecko, light brown with rainbow stripes down the length of its body. She’d tried to keep it for a pet, but had forgotten it in the pocket of her windbreaker. When she finally pulled its limp corpse from the lining of her jacket, her dad had snatched her small wrist and pulled her stumbling toward the bathroom where he flushed the animal away and then washed her hands roughly and repeatedly in silence.
The tree lizards had delicate striped heads that gave way to scaly spines, mottled brown spots, and adorably splayed feet. They all looked more or less the same, but she figured they had to be some sort of family, that though they didn’t talk, there must be something that tied them to each other. She imagined a nest where they huddled together just to feel another pulse. She picked one up, running her finger along its rough back, gingerly gripping its sides. It let loose the inevitable dribble of pee and then she turned it over, looking for any sign that it was one of hers.
*
In the movies and after-school specials, they would always ask the kid if they knew what death was. Like they hadn’t seen a million violent TV shows and baby birds fallen from nests and toads flattened and baked into crisp discs on the street outside. Nobody bothered to ask her because they knew she wasn’t an idiot. Death looked the same whether you dressed it in its nicest suit or found it curled up on a windowsill. What she wanted to know was what life looked like. Once the casseroles full of creamy sauces and canned tuna, pungent-sweet onion dishes and pies nobody wanted disappeared, when the wreaths out by the pool dried out and were thrown away and her uncles stopped coming over every evening in their belts and work shirts, what did life look like then? It didn’t have holiday home videos, she was sure—only her dad knew how to operate the camera. It didn’t have workbooks so she didn’t forget what she learned over the summer. Would it have their house, their neighborhood, their family road trips to San Diego? Her mind couldn’t separate the parts of their life that needed him from the ones that didn’t, couldn’t imagine what this new life looked like at all.
*
When she was really little, Maryam watched a movie called Dot and the Kangaroo. In it, a girl called Dot became friends with a Kangaroo. They had an adventure, Dot rode around in the pouch, and in the end the Kangaroo had to leave. Dot cried and Maryam cried, and the Kangaroo made a sympathetic face, but she had to go frolic and have little kanga babies. Maryam had been inconsolable, the hopeful song of the film’s ending no match for the sense of loss she felt. She had gone to her room, lay down on the bed, and cried until she fell asleep. When she awoke at dinner time, it was like a pit had opened in her stomach, and she came out of her bedroom bleary-eyed and light-headed. She took her seat at the dinner table and gobbled the koresh her mom put in front of her. It was delicious, full of celery stewed down to its slimy base and rich, chewy black-eyed peas. She ate until she felt sick, then went back to bed and pulled her shirt up over her belly, gently stroking it until the feeling went away.
Now she watched the movie but couldn’t conjure up a single tear. The ending felt necessary, her grief unjustified. The kangaroo was gone and there was nothing anyone was going to do about it.
*
The second lizard she caught that day had a stumpy tail, the kind that had detached when something grabbed it or had caught between two rocks. Maryam didn’t think it could be one of hers. She didn’t usually mark these ones, figuring they had had it hard enough already. But today she thought, maybe he lost his tail after he met me, or it was injured but hadn’t yet come off. You never know what’s going to happen. She gripped his soft sides, the flesh giving slightly under her gentle grasp. She turned it over, inspecting its stomach for the usual signs—a name preferably, or at least a smudge of marker, even a shaded blob of gray. She pushed the flesh around with a finger, in case there was still ink trapped in the tiny folds of its skin. But she found nothing. A small thing, already injured, it probably wouldn’t make it long anyway. She put the lizard down without marking it and it scurried away like it could outrun fate.
*
Every time she picked up a lizard, Maryam’s stomach clenched a little and her throat closed up, remembering the time a few months ago when she had found the injured one on the back patio. It had been lying on its side, its abdomen moving in and out with jerking gasps. Her dad was in the front yard doing his usual Sunday weeding. Every so often, Maryam would join him to inspect his work, then take his empty beer can into the house, drink the last of the warm bittersweet liquid, and scamper out moments later with a fresh, cold can. She had thought the lizard was stunned, that she could help it; she crawled up slowly so it didn’t frighten away. It didn’t react, just stared into the space in front of it with swimming, water-drop eyes. I’m not going to hurt you, she said softly, her hand outstretched. The lizard felt oddly firm as she lifted it from the middle, the rest of its body limp. Before it even left the ground, its head sunk forward, mouth open, as lively writhing maggots poured from it.
For a second she had tensed, staring at the maggots and the lizard’s face. Its eyes bulged, mouth open as if in astonishment. She tried to cry, but instead a scream ripped through her, and she scrambled backward across the concrete, her shins landing in hot gravel. She wanted to get up and run, to look away, but her strength had evaporated. Her breath came in wheezing moans. Her dad came around the side of the house, knees covered in dirt, a small spill stain on his shirt’s protruding abdomen. Maryam? he said, and then followed her gaze to the lizard. Maggots were squirming back into its mouth, making it look like it was eating them. Her dad’s presence broke the spell, and her face crumpled, a wail coming from her and tears pouring down her face. Oh, oh, he said, scooping her up in his arms and carrying her inside. Normally he wouldn’t sit on the couch in his dirty clothes, but today he did, holding her against his chest. She felt his solid warmth underneath her body as she cried, her head on his shoulder. Eventually the fluttering spasms of her chest subsided and all of the tears pumped out and she just lay there, quiet.
*
After an hour or so of catching dazed lizards, inspecting their bellies, and occasionally marking them, Maryam found a small gray one on the back of one of the bricks. Its head tapered to a wide mouth that almost looked like a smile. She held it lightly in her closed hand as she thought of a name. It waited patiently, its pulse like a reassurance in her palm. Finally she pulled a marker from her pocket, uncapped it, and held the quivering body belly-up in her hand, slowly and carefully tracing the name into its soft flesh. When she finished, he just lay there, breaths pumping, hands slack, smiling his beatific smile. She held him for a few minutes before letting him go, felt the measured pumping in her hand, his tiny fading warmth. She lifted him closer as she bent her face to his. Come back, she whispered into his pin-sized ear, come back to me.
—————
Roya Khatiblou is an Iranian- and British-American author based in Birmingham, UK, and the recipient of a grant from Arts Council England toward her debut novel. She received a Short Story Apprenticeship from Word Factory, is a member of Room 204, Writing West Midlands’ professional development scheme, and has twice been a finalist for the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Fellowship. Her essays and stories have appeared in Salon, Litro, Chicago Review, Passages North, and elsewhere.