Ed Higgins

Drei Erzählungen

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Interview with a Jesus Lizard

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Interviewer: So, you walk on water, right? How is that possible?

 

Jesus Lizard: Well, I only run on water, and upright on my hind legs. Haha, if I tried just walking on water I’d sink quicker than St. Peter! 

 

J. L.: I may be called a Jesus Lizard but I can’t pull off Jesus’ stroll atop the Sea of Galilee. Like Peter, I’d need a Savior’s quick hand to haul me up from would-be drowning! Although, when I do sink I can stay under for as long as 30 minutes.

 

Interviewer: Oh, so you only run on water. What occasions such a feat?

 

J. L.: Well, danger, straight up! As you can see I’m no giant of a lizard. Yet size enough to make a tasty meal for some damn quetzal bird, or rainforest snake––whoa, snakes give me the willies. And fish will eat me, as well, given the chance!

 

Interviewer: Quite the abundant threats. But at thirty inches or so you’re mostly that long skinny tail. Not much to eat there.

 

J. L.: Easy for you to say without a quetzal or owl swooping in to slurp me down tail and all! Ugh, makes my basilisk skin crawl, sheesh! Yes, at 30 inches I’m mostly tail, but it’s apparently all tasty-edible stuff, haha.   

 

J. L.: Anyway, I run my ass off when something wants to pounce and swallow me. On water it’s a full 15 mph. And, as I said, when I sink I can stay under water for some 30 minutes. That’s holding your breath an especially long time. You humans would be long gone obviously.

 

Interviewer: What do you do when you’re not in escape mode running across a stream?

 

J. L.: Generally, I hang about soaking up the sun and catching a meal of midges, the occasional dragonfly. I love bird eggs when I find ‘em unguarded in trees or ground nests. Even ripe fruit. Small frogs are a tasty yum! Obviously I’m an omnivore, hehe. 

 

Interviewer: A necessary appetite to fill out those 30 inches, I’d say.

 

J. L.: Yeah, but I really, really have to stay alert for anything with an eye and appetite for tender lizard meat!

 

J. L.: Sometimes a snapping twig will set me off running across a stream or river to then sink into the relative safety of deep water. A descending shadow of a quetzal or owl bent on my destruction can usually catch my nervous upturned bulging eyeballs. We lizards have notable good eyesight for avoiding predators!

 

Interviewer: So, how do you actually stay up running on top of a stream—upright at that?

 

J. L.: Panic coupled with anatomy. See these flaps between my toes (holding a foot up for the interview’s inspection). Those are my Jesus feet. I hit the water running, slapping my feet down hard on the water’s surface.

 

J. L.: Those toe flaps turn to mini-cups churning tiny air bubbles holding me up. Mind, I’m not thinking of air bubbles or the mechanics of the thing, I’m just trying to save my lizard ass from judgment day’s gnashing beak or chomping teeth.

 

Interviewer: Haha, do you at least offer up some kind of prayer as you panic run? You know, like Jesus taught: “Deliver us from evil,” or maybe “If it’s possible, may this cup be taken from me,” that sorta thing? 

 

J. L.: No such thoughts. Just me running scared like hell! Maybe a blurted expletive “Jesus Christ,” as kind of an unintended prayer. Or making my escape to the far side of the stream a relieved forehead-wiping “Thank God,” or “Holy shit, I made it!” Unintentional post-prayers you might say.

 

Interviewer: Well, it was a pleasure meeting you and I appreciate your taking the time.

 

J. L.: My pleasure. You likely know the basilisk legend about my gaze turning men to stone? Glad that didn’t unnerve you doing the interview. Kept my eyes downturned, just in case. Haha, if I even look at myself in a mirror I can turn to stone. So that’s a worry too!

 

Starting At The Very End of the Story

 

“And they all died. Well, almost all.”

 

“When?” 

 

“When what?” “Oh, in my story?” Kelsey’s looking over her shoulder at the traffic whizzing by the park. 

 

“Yeah, well, near the end, of course, but also throughout the story quite a bit too,” she says absently, still distracted by the traffic. “Obviously everything leads to the final scene’s blood-flowing, ankle-deep sorrow. That’s at the very end of the story, which is the convention, after all. ‘The end’ being a kinda dead give-away pun, if you get my meaning.” Kelsey smiles her best self-satisfied smile.

 

“Yeah, right, but how did it happen? What caused it?” Jake probably didn’t get her wry meaning, but Kelsey decides to let it go. He was precisely her height and as he spoke his large brown eyes seemed to grow larger, more puzzled.

 

“Ok, well, caused-it, that’s pages and pages back actually. Do you really wanna go there, that far back I mean? Could take some time. Somewhere early-on the plot just thickens, as they’re supposed to do. Until eventually everyone’s dead. Got it?”

 

Jake stood quietly for a moment tugging slightly at the waistband of his denim hoodie, looking at her with his head slightly tilted. Kelsey read this, correctly, as being melodramatic. His interest was definitely waning in what she had been telling him about her story. 

 

“In retrospect, I suppose it was all inevitable. Given the choices different characters made. Or, actually, given the choices the author, me, made them make, after all.” The noise of the traffic passing the park where they had been sitting was becoming increasingly distracting to her. 

 

“Let’s go over there,” she pointed to a coffee shop across the street.

 

They waited for the light to turn. “Do you mind?” she asked, taking his hand. 

 

Jake looked down at her hand in his, felt the warmth. “Thought you’d never ask. No.” Kelsey smiled. “Let’s go, light’s changed.”

 

“Have you been here before?” he asked, taking in the fact it was a bookstore as well as a coffee shop with black, faux-leather couches and cushy chairs in various corners as well as more conventional small tables with wrought iron chairs. 

 

Several customers were milling about the bookstore section’s shelves. A couple of teen girls were at one of the small tables, each working on one of those frozen, slushy coffee things through straws, talking animatedly between sips; two identical backpacks sat near their feet, both had the same green and yellow beanie-baby frogs dangling from short keychains. At a table near one of the shop’s large picture windows looking onto the busy street and the park beyond, an older bald man was reading the morning paper. A cup of half-finished house coffee sat near his elbow while the empty saucer occupied the middle of the table. Each time the man turned a page of his fully open paper the ceramic coffee cup seemed in danger of being knocked to the floor by his unwitting elbow.

 

Kelsely watched distractedly, should she go over there and tell the man? Disturb his reading ritual? The two teen girls at the nearby table seemed unaware of what could obviously be a shattering, splashing missile flying in their direction. Kelsely winced as the man hastily turned another page, but she turned to the counter where the smiling baristas waited to take her order.   

 

“What’ll you have,” asked the funky-cut, burgundy-haired young woman waiting to take her order. Kelsely found herself counting the several studs running from the barista’s ear lobes up the cartilage curving past the tops of both ears. Seven, she said. What? asked the barista. Oh, I mean a 7 ounce almond latte. Jake ordered the same.  

 

At one of the small tables Kelsely took up the defense of her story again. “Anyway, you have these forebodings or foreshadowings all along, see. Like the time shortly after the opening when my main character has serious anger issues. Starts seeing things. Has a big nasty family secret revealed to him. He decides to kill his uncle, though on rather implausible evidence. Then he has to plan things just right. Really, you had to expect something was going to go off the rails with this character from page one.”

 

“So where are you going with all this page one hook for the reader? What, who, are we talking about here anyway?”

 

“Right, right, hang on. As a careful reader, Jake, you would have noticed all that And-they-all-died-Well-almost-all outcome was set up in the very beginning. But try and wait until we get back closer to the near blood-flowing, ankle-deep sorrow ending will you? It’s strictly a matter of back-paging and then trying to pick up the forward plot threads. Simple, really. You hardly need me to narrate things. Besides, if you know how it ends, maybe that’s enough to keep you reading. To see how you get to the end.

 

“You’re either being coy or cruel here” Jake replied “I can’t tell which. But if you’re not going to get down to the before-the-end backstory, I’m still unsure of what’s going on.”

 

My, my, touchy aren’t we! You’re here to be distracted, aren’t you? Entertained? Enriched? Trying to make sense out of your own world colandered through fiction? Did I ever mention my father wouldn’t read fiction, because it was untrue? No an uncommon response. He would read biography, history, and autobiography though, because they were true. Yeah, right. But he’s dead now, just like at the stated end of our story. Sad, really, my dad, that is. He was actually relatively young, mid-fifties. Heart attack. Lucky he lived that long, I suppose, since he been an alcoholic since his twenties. Would go on regular benders all his life when we kids were growing up. Mom heroically raised us three boys working as a cocktail waitress. Gotta be some irony there, eh? 

 

Whattahell are you talking about. Does any of this have to do with the story you are suppose to be telling?

 

No, no, of course not. We all get distracted, you know? But let’s see now, where do I move back to the original story so that it makes sense. Or at least as much as a man who goes of to WWII as a teenager, leaving a two year old kid and a much pregnant high school heartthrob wife living back with her parents in Bangor, Maine.  

 

Hey, at this point I’d just settle skipping to the end again.

 

We have fallen outside the story somehow. But at least the end was brilliant. If not satisfyingly blood soaked. Of course, you can’t please everyone.

 

“Well, death is exactly fair, is it?”

 

No, obviously not. But that’s not the point, you could have saved them if you wanted.

 

No, I couldn’t. You just can’t ignore what they do, what they think and act upon.

 

But you’re talking as if they were real, real people. He twisted his paper latté cup in a nervous circle on the table top. Kelsely had noticed this before, this nervous habit of his, but Jake seemed unaware of it.

 

Grasping to defend himself, Jake opened his hands in a gesture of helplessness, or else posed mild frustrating. Either way Kelsely found herself amused, but quietly hiding the fact. 

 

“What can’t you control if you’re the writer,” he said, puzzled to concede any other possibility.

 

She sipped her latté, bemused the conversation had gone this way.

 

“So, ok, I grant your point. But fictional characters are still real, sorta. Even when you kill them all off, they are still there for the re-read. See?    

 

 

Catch and release

 

Frank has stood her up for what was supposed to be their second Friday night dinner-movie date. Silvia decides to write something in her journal she knows likely will slide into self-pity but shrugs off the thought pouring herself a glass of merlot.

 

She writes but then lines out:

I won't write about Frank. I won't write about eating out. I won't write about movies I've loved or hated. Well, maybe about disgorging Frank and not eating out tonight. Ok, ok, too, too petty-pity, come on, stop this!

 

She tries again, draining her merlot, pouring another:

 

Frank was actually something of a melting popsicle from the beginning, I have to confess. On our first dinner date, at Jake’s Famous Crawfish in downtown Portland, I was looking over salmon stuffed with crab, shrimp, and brie on the menu. Sounded total yum. But admittedly one of the spendier entrées on the dinner menu. We were both sipping chardonnay and looking over the menu while the waiter stood at our table somewhat impatiently awaiting our order, after having poured the wine. 

 

I was waiting for Frank’s lead to decide if I should order the tempting stuffed salmon entrée. Frank, alternately looking over his menu, kept looking up to tell me how he was actually a trout fly fisherman himself. Not a catch and release type. He loved to eat what he caught. I thought maybe he was hinting at the almond-topped trout with beuree blanc, the cheapest entrée on the menu. I like trout--although I had no idea what beuree blanc was. (So much for my college French). But then Frank was off in the middle of explaining to me how he ties his own trout flies. I’m of course pretending I’m fascinated. The waiter was not, rolling his eyes at what he could tell was my less-than-clever dissembling. Just then then I remembered reading something back in college, so I butted in on Frank asking if he’d ever read Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America? 

 

No, I don’t think so, he replied, wrinkling his brow, pondering my allusion to something that for him was clearly a trout-fly-tying lecture interruption. But I’ve read so many books on trout fishing, he announced, so maybe I’ve forgotten that one. About to return, I could see, to his not-so-fascinating how-to tie-trout-flies lesson. Oh, no, I quickly exclaimed, it’s a 60s novel, it’s not really about trout fishing. Kind of a hippie send-up on American culture. Very funny though, I add, to Frank’s further puzzled-brow look. I don’t read novels much, he offers—actually, not at all. My father always says fiction isn’t true and he doesn’t understand how my mother spends so much wasted time reading such trash. Me, I’m more into practical things. But, say, he asked, smilingly: Do you wanna go trout fishing sometime? I do a lot of that. And what’s great, you get to eat what you catch!

 

I looked up at the bemused, smiling waiter--who I swear had rolled his eyes up past his own brow. I decided to order the salmon stuffed with crab, shrimp, and brie, after all. Very good, the waiter offered, wryly. As well as another glass of chardonnay, I added. Myself wryly smiling at the waiter. 

 

Frank was definitely going be a catch and release.

 

Ed Higgins' poems and short fiction have appeared in various print and online journals including: Raw Journal of Arts, Ekphrastic Review, and Modern Haiku, among others. Ed is Writer-in-Residence at George Fox University. He is also Asst. Fiction Editor for Brilliant Flash Fiction. Ed has a small organic farm in Yamhill, OR, raising a menagerie of animals—including a rooster named StarTrek. A collection of his poems, Near Truth Only, has recently been published by Fernwood Press, 2022.

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