A Piece of Tail

Today while I was working at my computer, Steven called me over with some alarm in his voice. “I think it’s a lizard”, he said.

I walked over to the entrance to my office to find Steven and three or four cats staring intently at something wriggling on the ground. They (the cats) were trying to grab it and were huddling over it, so I whipped out my ever-present LED flashlight to take a look.

It wasn’t actually a lizard, but only a tail, bending fantastically this way and that, like a demented ballpoint pen refill on drugs. From the looks of it, it had belonged to a small alligator lizard that was now hiding somewhere amidst the cardboard boxes in the immediate area. Dropping a tail is a last-ditch survival trick of lizards that I had heard of many times, but had never seen in real life.

I thought it was pretty cool. Steven vowed not to eat anything longer than it’s wide, at least for several days.

Yang eventually carried it away proudly and presumably ate it. Yech.