A Boy, a Lizard and a List
He has no idea why grandfather started digging the backyard the moment father went out with his customary last-minute shopping list for essentials. The squelching mud and his sisters’ annoying game, running up and down the house, are irritants to his concentrated effort to rid his room of its pesky illegal occupant. He should really be getting his camper backpack ready for their trip tomorrow. Like a mother who is stuffing leftovers into tote bags in her kitchen lit by the pale moonlight and the fading wick of the stove.
It’s there on the ceiling now, flexing its tail like a baby dinosaur and its bulbous eyes fixated on his near empty bookshelf. He picks up one of his battered tennis balls. With a resounding thump it hits the ceiling and ricochets into the lizard which leaps on to the study table, then the conical table lamp. It's good the power cuts have become so regular. The lizard springs onto the floor. The lamp clutters to the ground.
In the backyard, the squelching sound of damp mud is replaced by soft thuds. His sisters are on the floor above.
Leaving its tail to squirm on the floor, the lizard jumps and plops on its slimy belly towards the window sill. He watches its struggles with pleasure and is about to aid it in its desperate exodus.
“Leave it alone,” mother looks as if the wardrobe has swallowed her; she is wearing every possible outfit she owns.
His sisters come charging in.
“19,”
“No, 21,”
Maybe he ought to have joined them. Right now, it all seems silly and stupid to go around the house counting all the rooms.
Mother arrests them with a stern “We leave before dawn. Remember what you must pack and wear.”
Father has bumped a gunny bag full of their essentials across the hallway.
“Travel light, always.” Father mutters his motto eyeing the books spilling out of the camper backpack.
The squelching-thudding noise from the backyard ceases and his sisters stop their game as soon as the sirens begin.
The lizard continues its struggles imperturbed.
The sirens stop. The death-decrees commence. The names are like roll calls in his school. Father grips the door knob, his knuckles pale and white.
The lists were usually a disenchantment to the boy; they were only endless names of strangers, people who disappeared the very next day after the roll call and never came back.
He hugs father’s legs.
Today the six names creep in like the familiar cold and the dark that has been creeping in on them from the time they shut the power.
Afterwards, though disappointed that the trip was only to their neighbour’s old, damp cellar and annoyed with his sisters who keep whispering about being like someone called Anne Frank, he would still be glad he brought his Dr Seuss, unlike silly grandfather who went and buried all his books in their backyard hoping the pages would become trees that can never be uprooted.
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