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The Lizard

A message from the past

By Szilvia BeylikPublished 3 years ago 9 min read
2

She liked Spring. Could hardly wait for the first warm day, when it was comfortable enough to wear only a knitted pullover and stay outside in the sun long enough to find the first snow flowers poke their little green fingers through the snow without her toes starting to ache from the cold. She still called them snow flowers, because that’s what her grandma called them when she was a little girl. Nobody else calls them that here, she learned that over the years. They are called Lilies of the Valley in America. Which is silly. They are obviously Snow Flowers; they grow right out of the snow. What other flower is resilient like that? SO many other flowers grow in a valley. Fragrant, colorful and flamboyant… But can they survive and break through snow like these plain little white flowers? That’s not the only thing Americans got wrong... She learned that over the years too. She’s been here for 25 years now. It’s home, sort of. She doesn’t belong in the old country anymore, everything has changed and left her behind. But she never truly felt like she belongs here either; her soul felt homeless. She worked as a night shift nurse in a hospital and hated it. Not because of the work, but because of the people. She was a great nurse; sharp, knowledgeable, dependable and efficient but… she didn’t like people much, which is pretty unfortunate when one is a nurse. It wasn’t always like that, but time broke her. Time spent with people broke her. She couldn’t understand why people were so demanding, self-centered, cold, superficial, empty and deaf to truths. That’s not what she remembered from the old country, but that was so long ago… Maybe it’s not just the people here. Maybe people are just different now, everywhere. Or… maybe she became different. She didn’t know, but she grew tired of having to contemplate it often. She noticed that she forgets to think about all this when she is in nature. So she surrounded herself in it as much as she could. It was rejuvenating, liberating and the only time her soul felt at peace.

Today was one of those early warm spring days and she decided it was time to spring clean her closet, packing away winter clothes, while simultaneously making a big donation pile of old clothes on the floor. She was going through pockets, hoping to maybe find some forgotten cash. It feels like winning some grand prize when that happens; such a rush and so satisfying! But as she slipped her hand in and out of pockets, she felt something bigger, chunky and hard in the pocket of an old, dusty coat she hadn’t worn in decades. She furrowed her brows, trying to figure out what it was, as she was wiggling it through the pocket opening which was much too narrow for it. A little black notebook slowly revealed itself.

She stared at it in disbelief. She recognized it instantly, though she hasn’t seen it in 25 years… she’d given up on it. She was sure it was lost, forever. She slowly opened it and her mind was immediately swept away in a memory…

...It was one of those first warm spring days that year. She was on a yellow bus again. She’d often take these yellow buses (the blue ones never left the city) from the busy, slush-covered gray streets, away from people, noise and concrete. She wanted to go somewhere, it didn't matter where, and sometimes she wouldn’t even know where. As long as the towering buildings of the city would slowly back away, bowing down, giving way to wide open balmy meadows or dark green broccoli-textured hills or silver snake rivers slithering through the landscape. When the scenery changed, it was her cue. She got off the bus, tightened the laces on her boots, then, shading her eyes from rays of the piercing spring sun, she slowly took a 360 degree turn, surveying her surroundings. As the bus shrank to a yellow dot on the horizon, the noxious smell of the exhaust cleared and the engine noise faded, she finally started to hear the silence she’d been craving. It was profound, and only reinforced by bird song and the buzzing of insects.

She set out to walk, distracted by the rich, aromatic scent of wet earth and the first flies of the year zipping around her. She even loved the flies on those days. After all, they were alive. Their brilliant metallic blue-green bodies imprinted fleeting bright streaks on her retina. The flies were dodging the dozens of swifts darting above, and that sight reminded her of her great-grandma. Mamika would say: “One swift does not make spring” which really meant that one can not jump into conclusions based on little evidence. But then and there, she took those words literally, staring up into the crystal blue sky, trying to trace the paths of the lightning-fast birds, noting that Spring, indeed, must have arrived.

As she walked on, blinding-white limestone boulders started to appear more frequently around her, as if giant salt crystals were sprinkled from an enormous salt shaker. She toyed with that idea for a second, imagining how big would a giant have to be to have a salt shaker that size. She looked up at the sky, trying to place an imaginary giant on the landscape, but had to look down real fast as her eyes met the sun, filling them with tears and tickling her nose. Looking at the sun always made her sneeze, which she found fascinating, as much as it annoyed her. She kept her gaze low after her bouts of sneezing, still sniffling, when she spotted the contour of a lizard sunbathing on one of the boulders. She watched it and it watched her, as she slowly moved in, closer. It was motionless, other than the rhythmic pulsation of its blue throat, it could have been a fantastically life-like sculpture, with its head and chest pushed and held up on its front legs, as if it was trying to reach the sun. She waited. She knew how to do this, she’s done it hundreds of times before; she had stacks of drawings of elusive wildlife. The lizard had to learn her. She had to become part of its surroundings. And that takes time. People don’t have time for lizards anymore. She moved ever so slowly, pulling a little black notebook and a piece of charcoal out of her leather satchel, keeping her eyes locked with the lizard’s. It stayed. She began sketching.

She couldn’t see well enough to draw anymore. That’s how she realized how late it had gotten. She looked up from her work drawing a tiny delicate pale purple flower, and could not find the sun in the sky. She closed the book and slipped it back into her bag, then picked up a brisk pace back towards the bus stop.

She spent the whole day out there, on that meadow, and in the surrounding sparse forest. She drew the lizard. Then a shepherd and his sheep, a black and yellow snake, a ground squirrel, a stag beetle with its enormous antler-like mandibles and a deer skull she found still attached to its decomposing body. Time flew by and she just now realized how hungry and thirsty and tired she was. She barely made it back to the bus stop in time for the last returning ride of the day. She sat down on a rock and pulled out a sandwich and her father’s old military canteen from her bag while she waited. She remembered green algae growing on the rim of the mouth of this canteen years ago, when her father used it on their hikes. She always thought it was really gross when he handed it to her for a drink. She missed him. They would often go on these outings together when she was a child. She didn’t remember much of him, but she knew she was out there that day, and all those other days, because of him and was eternally grateful for this. She fell asleep on the way home, happy and satisfied, lulled by the gentle rocking and the humming of the bus engine.

Her mind was abruptly yanked away from this memory of long ago, back to reality as the phone chimed next to her. It was just an alert of a new post on her neighborhood app. She opened it absentmindedly, still distracted by the tail end of her memory lingering. It was a post from a name she didn’t recognize, asking neighbors for feedback on a short story they wrote for a contest. The poster explained that the contest had only a few, albeit strange rules. It had to have a little black notebook in the story and the protagonist had to come by $20,000 unexpectedly. She read it. It was okay. She looked up the poster’s profile; a smiling young girl. There was a lot of good feedback, and the girl seemed very excited about the $20,000 first prize.

She clicked the button to close out her phone screen. She sat there for a minute, trying to refocus her thoughts and continue the closet cleaning when she noticed that her old black notebook was still in her hand. She forgot she was holding it. She lifted it for a closer look, like this was the very first time she’d ever seen it, slowly flipping through the pages, She suddenly had a wild idea. Her mind started to race. “What if…” she thought. “No, that’s silly” said her rational inner voice. She’d never written anything other than dry and boring careplans at work. She loved reading, but never had literary ambitions. She doesn’t know how to write stories! She glanced at the notebook, shrugged her shoulders, smiled, and got up to get her laptop.

Weeks went by. She forgot all about the book and the little story she typed in a hurry, on a whim that day which she hastily sent off just so her time spent on it wouldn’t be completely wasted. When she opened the email a few weeks later, she did not recognize the sender. “Congratulations!”, the subject line read. She almost deleted it at first, thinking it was just another scam. “Winning a competition?!” She thought, “That’s a new one… running out of African princes?” Then it hit her. She now recognized the sender. She won. Holy crap… she really did win that competition! And with it, the $20,000! But how?! She was in disbelief. She let out an involuntary high pitched squeal, trying to muffle it with her hands in front of her mouth. Then started giggling while tearing up simultaneously, leaning back on her chair just staring at the screen. Once she collected herself, she knew what to do. She opened a new browser and reserved a flight to the old country. Then in a new search window she typed in: “small black notebook for sketching”.

She was going to make some time for lizards.

nature
2

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