by James Sears
My brother Tom hunted the woods behind our house, moving through all the sharp plants North Florida offered, saw palmetto and yellow pines who leaned like sick old men. Nothing could live well here. Not trees. Not boys. Everything was vile and hard, or else it withered away. The midday sun blazed.
“Wait up,” I yelled, still firmly planted in our lawn. I’d finally worked up the nerve to follow him. I’d cross the ill-defined line that separated our home from the wilderness.
Courage mustered, crossing imminent, a familiar sting radiated through my calf. The burning, unmistakable. I was being eaten alive. Fire-ants. My untied Converse were planted in one of their angry beds.
Goddamnit!
Soldiers swarmed my leg like the static snow between television channels, a primal force, powerful, that forever divided Perry Comofrom The Honeymooners. Zealots, madness, all in the name of a pile of sand.
Water, I thought. Water puts out fire.
Hard rain had fallen the night before, drunk father rain, it beat against walls and windows because it could, and I plunged my leg into a puddle it had left behind. The ants washed away, but my skin would still blister into moonscape. Blood and pus called by fingernail and ceaseless scratching.
“Jeez,” I moaned.
I shook my cuffed jeans in an attempt to dry myself, then sprinted to catch Tom. His bare sun-burned shoulders were prominent against the earth-tones of the woods. I would have lost him if not for his perma-glow. He’d completely missed my ordeal with the ants, or ignored it, and stalked silently on. That was his way. A quiet way. Solitary.
Tom retreated to the woods often. Fled.
I know now that I was far too much for him. At least most of the time. A real chatterbox. He, on the other hand, had a pent-up disdain for conversation, rarely spoke.
I don’t know why it bothered our mother the way it did. It reflected poorly on her somehow. Surely, he’d one day grow into the ideal southern man, never speaking of feelings or other nonsense. A supremely masculine vow, emotionless silence.
But Tom did speak, if the circumstances were right. It was usually out of exasperation. I was chewing too loudly. I was breathing too heavily. My hectic sounds bred a sort of restlessness in him. He didn’t hate me, just most of the things I did to live.
Tom preferred the company of lizards. To me. To anyone. Green anoles, specifically, the native species. They were elusive things. Rice paper skin stretched over ribs. Darting eyes. Prey. Fragile anomalies in the hardened South. I’d find them dead mostly, gut-torn by a cat, spilled lizard baking on the sidewalk. If you wanted to find a live one you’d better head into the woods. That’s what Tom did. He had a whole life out here with his cherished anoles, a second secret family.
I caught up.
“Did you see that?” I asked.
He said nothing. I pulled up my jeans and revealed my ravaged leg. Tom didn’t look. Instead, he circled a scrawny pine. An anole crept up the valleys of its bark and tucked into a sappy crevasse. I assume he prayed and made promises to his lizard god for deliverance. Tom cupped his hands and pounced.
“There he goes,” I said.
The anole had escaped, up the pine in a shot of green. But something wiggled between Tom’s fingers. It was the tail. Bone and meat still alive. It rolled like a belly-dancer and painted his palm with faint red strokes. Tom’s face was as pale as a ghost.
“God built him like that so he can get away,” I said. That was true. Maybe not the God part. But it was a defense mechanism. The sacrificial appendage. We should all have one.
Tom broke a silent streak that had lasted several days.
“I didn’t mean to,” his voice cracked. “I hurt him.” He dropped the tail.
A week later, Tom had to leave. Our parents, on a rare collective front, said they’d found some people who could help him. Find out why he was the way he was. Why he didn’t speak. Why he hated all the sounds we made. Why he’d only make friends with lizards.
The tail beat against the ground long after we left it. Churning life, it called to the ants. They’d march, reduce it to nothing more than a calcium twig. They’d carry everything vital and precious away. They’d devour everything soft and vulnerable in those woods. Hell, maybe the whole damn world.
James Sears lives in Charleston, WV with his wife Louisa and their rescue dog Dewey. He recently graduated with his master's degree in creative writing and literature from Harvard Extension School. His short story, "Big T Meets Artie Becker" will appear in the upcoming 30th issue of Zooscape. Currently he is finishing up work on his first novel, a horror story entitled "Hollow".
January House Literary Journal 
Leave a comment