Lizard Brain
Carlin knows he’s a goner the second he drops his Slush Puppie—Lemon Lime and an honest mistake. One sip deep, it erupts at his feet in a syrupy-green geyser, showering the back of the driver’s seat.
His mind defaults to excuse mode—The cup was too slick! You’re driving too fast!—the words poised on his lime-streaked tongue. But his mother burns excuses to ash. Evaporates them with a glance. And already he can feel her cinder-grey eyes roasting him in the rear-view.
“Is that what I think it is?”
Her voice is steam. Barely audible. Like a hiss beneath her breath.
Slithery, Carlin thinks, revolted by the word’s intrusion.
Sweat pools in his pits. He reaches for the window but the Corolla’s already slowing, eating gravel as his mother swerves onto the highway’s shoulder. She jerks to a stop.
“Out.”
Carlin blubbers a weak attempt at protest.
“Out,” she snaps. She gets out herself and opens the back door, blocking the sky with her muscular frame. Carlin doesn’t argue. He can tell by her flaring nostrils, the blood darkening her cheeks to a voracious maroon, that he’s crossed a line.
Let it run its course, Car. Anything else and you’re just jabbing the dragon.
Parting advice from Parry an hour ago, before he fled the circus to backpack in Peru. His eyes were tender yet steeped in a desperate gravity. Nine years younger, Carlin always took his brother’s words seriously, but this time Parry didn’t look away, lifting his eyebrows as if to say, Capeesh?
It wasn’t the first time Parry had given him the look—there, at the terminal, their mother out of earshot in one of the duty-free shops. There was the time Carlin burned a pot of oatmeal. Or missed his mark in the bathroom. Or failed to clean up his Lego before she came home from work. (And hadn’t he known better? Hadn’t she been working overtime?) She snapped her head at him in a reflexive sort of way, as if a dusting of Lego on the living room carpet was as savage as that Spanish tomato-throwing festival Carlin had read about in his Ripley’s Believe It or Not! book. Recognizing her rage, Parry tapped him on the shoulder. “Stay in your room,” he said. And Carlin did.
Here, now, Carlin wants to hate his brother for leaving home, for leaving him, but he can’t blame him. Everything’s temporary, he mutters beneath his breath, warmed by his new mantra.
The feeling doesn’t last. There’s something Carlin thinks he sees as his mother takes in the mess firsthand: the Slush Puppie seeping into the fabric of her new car, the algae-coloured flood at his feet. A pattern like chain mail pimples up across her face. A flash and then it’s gone, like a slip in her composure.
Carlin’s nerves light up from his toes to his scalp, a million insects scuttling across his skin. Suddenly he’s at his tenth birthday party last month, at Big Brad’s Reptile Zoo, a similar pattern etched across a nine-foot Komodo.
She clears her throat. “I’m not asking,” she says—and her tone confirms it.
Carlin stands beside the car, maybe the only car out here, he thinks, all too aware of how rural the road home is. The mid-September wind, always cooler come twilight, pulls goosebumps from his arms. His sweat starts to chill.
He doesn’t see her face as she pulls back onto the asphalt, just the Corolla’s taillights burning down the highway. But then they disappear, too. Where the gravel meets the ditch, he shuts his eyes and thinks.
How long before she circles back, tears streaking her cheeks? How long before the cycle reboots? The pampering and pancakes for dinner. Kisses on the crown of his head. How long will it last this time? How long before the venom returns?
A foghorn chills him out of his skin. Carlin bolts for the ditch, but the gust in the eighteen-wheeler’s wake knocks him off balance. Gravel bites his knees. A familiar wave swells behind his eyes. Under early starlight, he lets the tears do their thing.
* * *
The cold’s worked him over, handcuffed his focus on calming his chattering teeth. Still, when the gravel stirs behind him, he doesn’t run to meet the car. He takes in the landscape one more time. The pothole-ridden road is a red carpet for roadkill. The fields on either side are hostile, no home for a boy, yet Carlin considers them all the same.
Like always, his fingers find the handle.
The heat’s blaring inside the car, but it brings no relief. Her knuckles are white on the steering wheel. Her cuticles are tinged green. The mess is gone but still haunts the interior: a stain on the back of her seat, the tangy-sweet smell of Slush Puppie lingering like a cheap air freshener.
Carlin waits for his mother to speak, to take them home, but there’s no apology. No tears. When she finally does pull the car back onto the road, another memory from Big Brad’s sneaks up on him like a beast on its prey:
“This here fella’s lucky to be alive,” the zookeeper said, his hand lovingly clamped over the baby Komodo’s jaws. “Usually only a five or six percent chance a momma’s gonna eat a hatchling. And usually due to stress. This guy’s momma ate half her pod. Musta been some bratty kids!”
He remembers the handler’s laugh at the punchline. The half-grins on his friends’ faces. He remembers how it felt, the tiny lizard’s skin, and how, unlike his friends, who kept prodding its gritty armor, he recoiled, fear wading into his stomach.
Carlin meets his mother’s gaze in the rear-view and mouths his brother’s name. Her irises shimmer a pearlescent green, pupils constricting to vertical slits as a milky membrane slips across each eye.
Slow and deliberate, she locks the doors.
Chris Campeau is an Ottawa, Canada-based writer of dark fiction and creative non-fiction. His stories and essays have appeared in 34 Orchard Magazine, The Globe and Mail, Crow & Cross Keys, and others. His debut novella, Resisters, takes place in rural Ontario during the Ice Storm of 1998—a wintery version of Psycho meets The Fog. You can find him at chriscampeau.com.
