“Iguana Iguana” by Rebecca Foust (poetry, ’10)

An excerpt from “Iguana Iguana” by Rebecca Foust (poetry, ’10) published at the Massachusetts Review:

Iguana Iguana

Iggy was sweet. Everyone in the family said so, even if they didn’t share the boy’s belief that the iguana also was beautiful, with skin the milky shade of a raw lima bean, and along his spine a line of mauve dots, each ringed with an apricot halo. Picked up, he’d stretch along your forearm placid as cat sleeping on a sill, breath concaving his throat and inflating it again in a great, pale bubble. Bubble, blink. Bubble, blink. The boy sometimes stood like that for an hour or more until his arm went numb.

His mother found reptiles repulsive, but she was grateful that this one at least was not a meat eater. She couldn’t have faced buying live moth larvae, or worse, frozen mice embryos horribly called “pinkies” that had to be thawed then prodded with a broom straw to fool lizards into thinking they were stalking live prey. And, unlike the three-foot monster her brother-in-law had once kept in a bathtub, Iggy didn’t seem to be growing very fast.

Leslie had to admit that the lizard was a good friend to her son, for whom friends were in short supply even with expectations that shrank with each passing year. Small for his age, he avoided the team sports that bonded his fifth-grade classmates and after school generally went to his room to play video games or sit at the kitchen table to draw or do homework.

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