Lizards: Short Story Read Online Free

extinguished fire. The top buttons of his shirt were undone. “You’re just fine, baby,” he said in a soft, low voice that rumbled through Emma like drums, and he might have been talking to White Thing, and he might have been talking to her. Either way, it would have taken a strait-jacket for her not to put down her scissors and slide her hand into his shirt.
    He gave her a big smile.
    She undid the rest of his buttons, moved her hand down to his stomach, over his buckle and against his crotch. He covered her hand with his and pressed and let go again, as if to make sure she hadn’t missed anything.
    She unzipped his fly.
    “Feast your eyes”—he didn’t come out and say it, but when his penis slapped into her hand like a relay-race baton, he was thinking it so loud she heard.
    He visited her two or three times a week, but after a month, whenever they had intercourse, she imagined that his penis was thudding against her womb and denting her baby’s skull, and she decided to call it quits.
    By then she was way past guilt. Love had so little to do with what went on between her and Ed that it was hard for her to think in terms of betrayal. Her regret was that she couldn’t amaze Gerry with the fact that Ed’s penis changed colour, from mahogany when he was flaccid to dark purple when he was hard. She couldn’t tell Gerry that whereas his testicles were smooth, Ed’s had the texture of brain coral.
    She wondered what her father would have compared Ed to—a crane fly, a racer snake. Gerry, her father said, was a glaucousgull because of his white-blond hair and the red rings around his eyes. Her father was crazy about Gerry’s different-coloured eyes. Emma was crazy about his flawless, white skin. In the mornings sometimes, when he was half asleep, she ran her hand over his body and rubbed herself against his leg until she came. She did this with Ed, too, except that Ed was black and moving.
    After she and Ed had parted company she figured that that was it for other men, at least until the baby was a few years old, but in her fourth month, two more prospects turned up. The first was the previous tenant of their apartment, whose junk mail, featuring free brochures for Craftmatic beds, had been cramming their mailbox and who knocked on their door one day asking if they had found five one-hundred-dollar bills in the medicine cabinet. They hadn’t but she said they had and had given them to the Salvation Army.
    “Fair enough,” he said, moving her to tell him the truth and to invite him in for coffee.
    He was a motor-home salesman, just transferred back to town. About thirty years old, jock’s body, receding hairline, small blue eyes glued to her legs, small hands, which she was too inexperienced to know didn’t necessarily indicate a small penis, the only kind she was prepared, at this point in her pregnancy, to risk. As she was expecting a client in half an hour, nothing happened, but before he left he managed to throw in that pregnant women were a turn-on, and he gave her his card in case she wanted to have a drink sometime.
    Two days later, after four nights in a row of Gerry working late and then coming home and falling asleep in front of the tv, she was on the verge of phoning him when a red-haired guy arrived at her door carrying a cat he’d run over in the apartmentbuilding parking lot. Somebody had told him she was a vet.
    “It’s dead,” she pointed out. Its mouth was clogged with blood, and its eyes were open and blank.
    The guy, who appeared to be in his late teens—black leather pants, leather jacket, motorcycle helmet dangling from his arm—held the cat up and said, “Oh. Right. Fuck.”
    “Come on in,” she said. He looked like he was going to be sick. She took the cat and put it in a plastic Shoppers Drug Mart bag, and he sat on the living-room couch with his head in his hands, saying he knew the cat, its name was Fred, it belonged to that cross-eyed teacher in 104.
    “I’m sure it