The Lint Lizard: An Original Essay

My mother must have been sick, because she stayed home from work. Maybe she had a migraine. She had been getting those a lot. Whatever the reason, it was reason enough to stay home from work, and when my mother stayed home from work, she always brought me to school, picking me up at the end of the day too. This time, though, on the way home, she had some not-so-good news to tell me.

“Charlie, I have some good news, and some bad news,” she said to me. Our house was just blocks away from the middle school I was going to, so it was timed just right so that by the time she told me, we were turning onto our street.

“I’ll start by telling you that something happened to Ziggy.”

Ziggy was my pet iguana.

“Charlie, Ziggy died today,” she told me.”

I was speechless. I stared straight forward through the windshield, slowly nodding my head. She turned the car into the driveway.

“I don’t know what happened to him, but he’s gone away now,” she said. He’s moved on,” she said. “It’s sad, I know. We can bury him today.”

I slowly nodded, biting my lower lip in dismay.

“Aww, I’m so sorry, Charlie.” She put the car into park. She turned the car off and removed the key from the ignition, dropping her hand onto her lap with sympathy.

“But hey. I have good news too. While you were at school, I went to the pet store.”

I didn’t quite know what she meant.

“There’s a new baby iguana waiting for you inside.”

I became uplifted out of my sulky demeanor. There seems to be this instant gratification in children that allows parents to very easily learn ways of the “quick fix.” Too many quick fixes, though, results in spoiled children. I certainly wasn’t one of them, so the quick fix technique worked really well on me, because I wasn’t used to it.

She smiled and said, “Let’s go meet him.”

Inside, I met my new pet iguana. When I first opened the paper bag, I noticed he was a lot smaller than Ziggy. He was cute! I got excited.

I brought him upstairs to my bedroom. I put his new home on the floor, and then placed the paper bag next to it. I reached inside the bag to take him out, and as soon as I could acknowledge it, he had leaped onto my arm, and then off of my arm, out of the bag, and onto my carpeted floor.

I chased him and chased him and chased him around my room. I had never seen a lizard run so fast. I yelled for my mother to come help me. When she got upstairs, he had run into a small vent located at floor level, around a corner deep inside a closet. She handed me a flashlight and told me to be careful.

I reached in slowly, the flashlight barely doing anything. After reaching and searching, my fingers eventually found their way to something rough and tail-like.

“Hey! I think I got him!” I yelled. I slowly pulled him out, but he seemed a bit light. I pulled him all the way out and up in front of my face to take a look.

What I was holding was just a tail.

And from that moment on, my mother found herself having recurring nightmares of The Lint Lizard.