But if the Savior made her worthy, who are you to reject her?

- Gnostic Scriptures

1. The Vestal Virgin

It was my mother who first taught me to bow before the statue of a woman who’d gotten pregnant without ever touching a man. I remember envying the figure, surrounded by white impatiens on her peninsula at the front of the church—a form in white marble, mysteriously calm, pupil-less eyes, with a fountain bubbling placidly at her feet. I’d already stopped believing I would be saved by some unseen masculine force; in my sixteen-year-old eyes, I’d already been forsaken. Mary, she was a woman, and she knew what it was like—realizing a female body could change the temperature of an entire room.

Despite the fact that I wasn’t allowed to wear jeans, flip-flops, or any type of clothing that could possibly be construed as disrespectful to the Lord, each Sunday’s Mass wasn’t totally unbearable. My sister and I spent most of the hour scanning the pews for acne-free guys who (we knew) were only pretending to be devout. But it was rare that we spotted any close enough to make eye contact with, or stand next to in line for communion.

There was one boy. He had a huge family—devout Catholics, no doubt—four older siblings, and three younger ones. They all climbed out of a dark blue suburban every week. One Sunday, they sat directly in front of my sister and me—the boy’s long, mulch colored hair obstructing my view.

“I know who you are,” the boy said quietly when he sat back down after communion. The rest of his family was still waiting to drink the Blood of Christ.

“Jim, and you are?” My father slid in beside me on the pew. He was always the first in my family to introduce himself to the guys I talked to, which was strange, considering he’d usually tell me after the fact that he didn’t like the guy one bit, got bad vibes from him.

“Palmer.” The boy held out a long-fingered hand.

Palmer had grown too fast for his own skin, which was stretched tight across his cheekbones, shoulders, and elbows. His chest was flat and t-shaped, wide across the length of his collarbones, then tapering to his barely-there waist.

“Good to meetcha, big guy.” My father smacked him on the shoulder, then directed my mother and sister out of the pew. I offered a silent apology to Palmer, giving him my hand. His fingers loitered in mine, feeling the piece of paper between us. I slid my hand away and he stuffed the note into his pocket.

He called the house phone later that night—two hours later, actually. My parents had gone out to dinner, and my sister was waiting for the water to boil on the stove.

“Maggie?” He sounded convinced I’d given him the wrong number, duped him in the middle of church.

“Yeah?” I was just as unbelieving.

He pulled into the driveway in a boxy white van, the kind you see dry-cleaner deliverymen circling the neighborhood in. The passenger seat felt like a throne; I could see miles down the road in front of us. An emerald rosary swung from the rear-view mirror. It had started to rain; little pitter-patters landed on the windshield, swept away in intervals by the unsteady wipers. The wind picked up when we got to the beach, throwing my hair across my face and sand into my eyes.

Palmer didn’t say much. He asked me where I went to school, who my friends were. He kept saying he’d met me before, at a party or through a friend, maybe.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Yeah, you just have one of those faces.”

I pinched the tip of my nose. I’d had surgery on it a few summers ago. None of that rhinoplasty nonsense, just some minor cutting and opening of the nasal passages. Now it was smaller, straighter, and didn’t feel the same on my face.

We sat on a plastic sun chair someone had left on the beach. Palmer put a hand on my leg. He spoke about how he spent hours in the water everyday, surfing whitecaps with the other locals. He kissed me softly, and I liked that he almost tasted like fish. There was no one else around. The weather had turned worse, thick storm clouds rolling in. My sweatshirt was soaked.

He unbuttoned his pants and let me slide off the chair into the sand, my jeans taking on water. I moved my neck methodically for what felt like hours but was surely only minutes. When he pushed my head away and turned to clean himself off, I closed my eyes, rolling my tongue over the syrup on the roof of my mouth, staring at the blankness behind my lids. It was only the third or fourth time I’d ever done it, but I knew Palmer would keep coming back for it, if nothing else. Through the backlit deep red behind my eyelids, I saw the Virgin Mary dancing in the impatiens around her fountain. She was draped in bright blues and reds instead of her usual white robes, like the Lady of Guadalupe who appeared to Juan Diego. She turned to me, holding out her hand with a single petal in it; then she let the petal fall, and it spiraled toward the ground.

A raindrop landed in the middle of my forehead and I opened my eyes. Palmer was watching me.

“You okay?” he asked.

I stood, brushing wet sand from my pants.

“We should go.”

“You sure you’re all right?”

What could I say? That I had just seen the Virgin Mother? That’s not what he wants to hear, I thought.

Instead, I said, “My parents might be home soon. I didn’t tell them I was going out.”

What fascinated me about Mary wasn’t her mysterious insemination, or even the fact that she’d given birth to a son who grew up to be a hero of sorts. That was all the hocus-pocus they fed us at CCD. What really got me was that Mary and Joseph were man and woman, legally married, and therefore permitted to be intimate. As much as the church liked to throw around the title Virgin Mother, I knew Mary didn’t stay a virgin forever. And I wanted to know what that was like for her, the before and after. Did she wish she’d gone about it the real way? Did she feel she was missing something?

I rode my bike to Palmer’s house after school. He only lived a few blocks away, and I could buy myself a couple hours by telling my parents I was going to train at the soccer fields. Palmer liked getting blowjobs on the couch downstairs in his parent’s entertainment room. We hardly spoke; our relationship was about getting to know each other’s bodies, exploring the surfaces of foreign planets. He never took his clothes off, nor I mine. We felt each other beneath the cotton and lycra and polyester. His penis would make its way out of his pants, but never more than was needed for me to get him off.

His dad owned a chain of Tex-Mex restaurants and offered me free meals whenever I was over. Palmer would probably inherit the business; his other brothers and sisters had big dreams of becoming lawyers, teachers, even zookeepers. Palmer liked sitting on the couch watching Family Guy reruns and talking about how the waves might pick up tomorrow. I didn’t really care. I was sixteen—the future still seemed like a distant relative, waving to me from far down the road.

I saw Mary again in the parking lot behind an office building that backed up to a nearby lake. We were in Palmer’s dad’s car, an old Volvo whose seats folded down in the back. The windows had fogged over, but we’d hung towels over them anyway. I was on my knees, toes going numb, Palmer mumbling things he didn’t intend for me to understand. The car was turned off but the radio was on, a rock song playing loud.  The muscles in my jaw felt like stretched-out putty. A hand touched the back of my head, but I knew it wasn’t Palmer’s; the fingers were light, soothing. There was a flash of blue-green, then the Virgin Mother was there, in all her heavy robes. Her hair was loose, tumbling over her shoulders. Her arms were stretched out; she was speaking to me, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. Instinctively, my hands reached out to try to touch her.

“Easy there,” Palmer said.

I sat up and let go of him.

“You were squeezing a little too hard,” he said.

“Sorry,” I said.

I rolled back in the seat. Palmer reached for my breast, and I let him hold it. He started to squeeze it like a dog toy. I looked out the front windshield at the fountain in the middle of the lake.

“So that’s it?” he said.

I looked at him. I don’t think he even knew when my birthday was. I went down on him again, but Mary didn’t come back.

Palmer invited me to a party, then told me we should stop seeing each other. He said he felt like he barely knew me, that we’d spent all our time on his parents’ couch when we could have been out to dinner, talking about ourselves, what we liked, disliked. Our favorite fucking colors.

I told him we could do that, there was still time. “We can talk, let’s talk,” I said.  Big stupid tears falling.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. But we can’t right now. I have to go back inside.” He walked back into his friend’s house. The music seemed to get louder so that I couldn’t even hear him telling his buddies about it, though I figured he was.

A few days later, two of my friends heard my story and went to the gas station to buy a carton of eggs and some ketchup.

“Do you have any tampons?” they asked.

We drove up to Palmer’s house and killed the lights in the car. One friend popped open the ketchup bottle while the other friend unwrapped the tampon. They dunked it in the ketchup and strung the thing over the mail flag. I smashed a few eggs inside the mailbox. We drove away, my head whirling like I’d just done a dizzy bat race.

My father came into my room the next morning to yell at me. I was still halfway out of my dream, hearing only mailbox, Jesus Christ, get up.

I got up, stumbled out to the end of the driveway, and pulled down the door to our brand-new white mailbox. The smell almost kicked me backwards. Staring at the pile of dog shit smeared inside, I knew right away it was Palmer. We both knew how to make a terrible mess of things.

Funny thing: I ran into him six years later, at an outdoor concert in the middle of July. I was full of cheap beer and smelled like cigarettes, and I was dancing in the crowd in front of the stage, sunglasses obscuring the details around me. Palmer walked up and put a hand on my shoulder, told me it was crazy running into each other like this. I looked at him—same overgrown limbs, a t-shirt that swallowed him. He took my beer so he could put his spider legs around me, hugging me as if we were old friends. His hand brushed the back of my neck, triggering a flash of red and blue. That’s when I decided I was going home with him.

Same house, same couch. The picture frames with dried flowers and the seashells in a vase on the coffee table. Even his bedroom looked untouched. I fell on top of him, and in the darkness I tried to crawl my way back to that peninsula where I knew Mary would be waiting. I did see her, but only her statue. The white marble had yellowed over the years, her toes worn from decades of rubbing. And she didn’t move; she stayed frozen and hard, like a mannequin that had been stirring only moments before.

Palmer shifted underneath me. I felt his hipbones jab the insides of my thighs, and knew Mary had never stepped down from her fountain. She had never been here, she had never been like this.

2. The Leaves

He slipped a seed inside me the first time we kissed, fed it through my parted lips and coaxed it down my throat with his tongue. I felt the lump traveling toward my stomach but took it for nerves. We were tangled together on a strange couch in a beachside condo. An address was smeared across the back of my hand, bleeding either from the rain outside or the heat of the room. It felt strange, being so close to a face that until then I’d known only through pixels on the Internet. Yet he was already leaving things behind in my mouth—waiting to see if I would swallow them, or spit them out.

Two young boys he’d been hired to watch were asleep on the bed just beyond our toes. A horror film was buzzing on the TV, pulling my attention away from him every time the heroine screamed. I was sure the boys would wake up, catch us with his hand down my jeans. But one of them was snoring rhythmically, and the other one was buried under the covers.

“What are you thinking?” Ren asked. A question he posed whenever he was sure I’d left my body and wandered off.

“Nothing,” I said, because it was true.

“What are you feeling, then?”

“I don’t want to get caught.”

In the months we dated, he always complained I never gave him straight answers. He was insistent on breaking down my nature, and I was intent on foiling him at every turn.

“I know you, Maggie, you can’t hide from me,” he said when I looked away.

I was leaving the next morning to drive back to Ann Arbor. He was trying to make me fall in love with him while we were pressed together on his boss’ couch, trying to get me to sleep with him so I couldn’t just up and leave. If we fucked, I’d feel the guilt of my mother’s disapproval hanging over me, and I’d stick around to promise myself it meant something.

The seed started to grow when I left the condo. It felt like I’d swallowed a penny, something indigestible that needed to come out. My body tried to tell me—I just assumed I was pregnant. He’d used a condom, but I started thinking about all the ways his sperm could’ve broken free.

In the car the next morning, I felt the first roots take hold. They burrowed like earthworms into the lining of my stomach, quietly stealing their share of blood. My father looked at me in the rear view mirror; I wondered if he’d noticed my hesitation to look back. My mother hadn’t told him about this one yet. She probably wouldn’t either, not until she absolutely had to. In high school, my dad had shoved a guy up against a fence at a football game, told him to stay the fuck away from his daughter.

Ren called the first night I got to Ann Arbor to make sure I wasn’t with some other guy.

“I’m in my dorm,” I said.

“Who’s there?”

“Just me.”

“Fly back and see me.”

I had to bend over in my desk chair because the first shoots began to unfurl inside of me. They didn’t hurt, really. The sensation was more like an itch buried beneath the surface of my skin; it made my body contract.

“Why don’t you come up here?”

“I don’t have the money.”

“Well, neither do I.”

That was it. I was flying back home to see him. I was buying the tickets with the only money I had left, and lying to my parents about what I’d spent it on.

Ren’s mother was hit by a car when he was seven. He told me the story, and I cradled him in my arms, believing I could fix what was broken. I paid his cellphone bills, did his laundry when I was in town, cooked him meals, and he fertilized the leaves sprouting in my belly.

My mother used to say if I swallowed the slimy black seeds of a watermelon, one would grow inside my stomach. I half believed her; sometimes I swallowed them on purpose just to test her logic. The seed Ren had slipped inside me didn’t produce a heavy fruit; it was more like billowy fronds of kelp, or translucent green leaves. I felt them when he was inside of me—they reached toward his penis as if towards the sun. And each day the roots dug deeper.

After we had been dating for four months, Ren gave me an ultimatum: come home or never speak to him again. So I left Michigan—I had to. Being alone was like being on a ship gliding through the water in the shade of night; I could never see where I was going. When I was with Ren, at least I had some sense of where the shore was.

“I need you,” he said when he called late at night, drunk on the waterbed in his parents’ house.

“I need you, too,” I said.

But Ren wanted to be loved the way his mother would have loved him. And I wanted to be loved the way he loved his favorite record album, or his packs of American Spirit—that unconditional, make-bad-decisions, lose-sight-of-everything kind of love that he threw around as if it didn’t matter.

When I moved home, Ren started to change—and so did the leaves inside me. Ren was living with his best friend Tyler, and he was convinced there was something going on between Tyler and me.

“Tyler’s sixteen,” I screamed at him from the curb outside their house.

“So what? That’s gonna stop you?”

“Jesus Christ.” I ground my teeth together, flexing all the muscles in my cheeks.

“Think about what you’re doing,” he said.

It was always my fault when he was feeling wedged. He didn’t have the guts to admit I was too good for him. But then again, neither did I.

“Are we breaking up?” I asked. The leaves were thrashing about in my stomach.

“That’s up to you. Are you gonna keep flirting with my best friend?”

“No.”

And there it was: the sheepish bow, the please don’t leave me, I’ll do anything.

He wanted me to have his children. We were lying in Tyler’s bed (Ren’s way of wordlessly marking his territory so that I’d never be able to sleep with his best friend) when he turned to me and put his hands on my stomach, saying he wouldn’t mind if I was pregnant. At first, this made me dizzy with pride. Of course I would have his children. I would be the good mother; I wouldn’t abandon him. I would take care of him and all the miniature hims running around the house. And he would be there always, needing me always, demanding from me, even when I couldn’t possibly cut off another piece of myself to give to him.

“I don’t want to be pregnant,” I said.

“You might be right now,” he teased.

The thought of this, of his sperm inside of me, suddenly made me feel sick to my stomach. I went to the bathroom to throw up, and a green tangle of leaves rushed from my throat. I stared at the remnants floating in the toilet and felt my stomach heave again. Another mass of green came up. I sat back on the floor and my head was suddenly clear, filled with the stillness of an empty building. Ren didn’t come from me, nor had any part of him ever lived inside me. And I would never be able to care for him, or any part of him.

I left the apartment without saying anything. I got in my car and drove for hours along the beach, listening to the night as it came in through the windows.

Ren had me come over the next day so he could tell me I was making him paranoid.

“I’m seeing shit, Maggie,” he said. I knew he used to drop acid; maybe he was having flashes. “Were you even here last night?” he asked.

“I left early.”

“You just left? Well, that’s great. Look what you’re doing to me.”

I was quiet. I let him dump and dump until he had nothing else to guilt me for. Then I grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him. He was too stunned to do anything at first, so I shook him harder. His head wobbled back and forth; he looked like a turtle, or a bobble head, or a baby. I shook him so hard his teeth started to knock together. Then he slapped me and I stopped.

We knew that was it. I’d treated him like the child that he was and he’d batted me away like the dead mother.

When I returned to my car, my stomach was still turning. No longer sick and overcrowded, it seemed to be hinting at something else. There was a banana peel in the cup holder, a few broken Cheezits on the floor mat. I wasn’t desperate enough to eat crackers from the floor, but I also knew that wasn’t what I wanted. I considered again the idea of being filled with a child. For some reason, it didn’t make me sick anymore. Probably because I knew it wasn’t his. If I were pregnant, if another living thing were growing inside of me, it wouldn’t be anyone’s but my own. Made of me and born of me. And that was something I could care for.

3. The Herpetologist

When I changed the sheets on my bed once a month, I always thought of the piles of dead skin, invisible to my eye, but there all the same. I tried to exfoliate regularly, scrubbing my skin in the shower, or picking at it with my fingers, though this required longer nails. I wouldn’t say I was a true nail biter. I just liked to chew on the ends of them, feel the smooth hardness between my teeth. After reading how many pounds of dead skin I’d produce in a lifetime, I decided to quit biting my nails once and for all. But as soon as I was nervous, bored, or talking uncomfortably with a stranger, I’d start to chew on the pretty white tips until they became brittle, and I’d be forced to cut them off.

My nails were long, coated in a bitter apple flavored polish to curb my habit, when Francis led me up to his place in November. The wallpaper in the hallway outside of his apartment reminded me of bad drapery, the kind that involved floral prints and too many colors. We were drunk, I remember, because I ran into the wall as we rounded the corner to his door. A wine-colored bruise appeared on my shoulder, and he pressed his thumb against the skin until it went white.

“What do you think,” he said through the hair on the back of my neck as he kissed me there. His tongue emerged, flicking at my vertebrae in a slow, steady rhythm. I giggled like the young girl I wasn’t and didn’t want to be. We were in his kitchen. It was intolerably warm. Fruit flies buzzed around the dishes in the sink, and I had the urge to wash them for him, a compulsion that kept me from turning around to kiss him back. Francis was thirty-five; he had tiny ruts in his forehead even when he wasn’t smiling.

He’d taken me to a tapas bar, ordered a plate of meats, toured me through several other bars along the strip. I knew men did these things to mark their territory; but I felt like a dodo in a room full of peacocks. We finally ended up at a loud, shadowy lounge that had metal cages positioned at random throughout the room. It reminded me of a strip club, even though I’d never been to one before. I sensed he wanted me to get inside one of the cages—a feeling I’d had the entire night. Like I was being treated to fine cuisine and cocktails so that later I would perform a cabaret for him.

“Look what time it is,” he said when he’d given up trying to make me come.

“It’s not usually this way,” I said. He was bad; I should have told him he was bad, or he wasn’t trying hard enough. But his sweat and saliva were mixing with my own, and there were tiny bits of his flesh underneath my fingernails.

He flopped down on the bed beside me, his face to the alarm clock. I saw the raised lines along his back and touched them. Some of his skin came off in my hands, revealing a greenish, scaly layer beneath.

“You scratched the shit out of me, Mags,” he said, his breathing settling into a faint purr. I hadn’t told him to call me that. No one called me that.

“Admit it. You kind of enjoyed it,” I said, bursting with a need to keep him interested in my body. To ask him to claw me so my new skin could emerge, too. He didn’t respond. He was asleep.

Scared I had done something to the delicate balance of his body chemistry, I chewed my nails down to nothing in the subway car on the way home. I made a discrete pile of the clippings and tossed them on the floor when no one was looking. My fingers looked stouter, like the ends had been snipped off. Clean, rounded cuts. They were a child’s hands. Grubby, not quite grown-in-to.

Francis didn’t notice my nails were gone. He looked offended when I told him I didn’t want to hold hands, that I didn’t like the feeling of being clutched at by someone—it made me feel trapped. Like those green salamanders I used to catch as a kid. Waiting around the corner in the garage, then pouncing on their tail and pressing it into the stucco wall with my forefinger. Sometimes they’d drop their tails and get away—more often, I’d seize them by the ribs and carry them to my terrarium.

Later that night, when Francis asked me to rub his back after a shower, he could tell I wasn’t doing as much damage.

“Do it harder,” he mumbled, face smooshed into a blanket, his pink tongue rolling out of his mouth.

I dragged my nails firmly down his spine and discovered that he had little green ridges. I asked him if they were a sign of aging, or a rash; he pinched the back of my arm.

“That hurts,” I cried.

“Keep scratching,” he said. “I’m itching all over.”

So I did. I raked my hands up and down his back until there was a mound of skin large enough to fill a small pillow. The green scales beneath were iridescent, catching the light from his nightstand and reflecting it as purple-blue-green. At the base of his spine, the stump of a tail wiggled free from the cracking, pale skin. He shook beneath me, scattering the dead skin across his room.

“I’m going to take another shower,” he said and got up from the bed.

When he returned, he’d shed the rest of his colorless skin. I saw that his eyes were actually golden instead of brown, and beneath his chin, a red throat fan was pulsing with each breath. He wrapped his four legs around me and we went down to the floor, his tongue extending to taste every part of me.

With his claws free of their smaller, more restrictive skin, Francis could pin down my arms and legs and nibble on me until my vision went blurry. I’d cry, “Stop! Your skin is freezing!” and he’d find this amusing.

“Go sit in the sun or something,” I told him when he finally let me go.

“I have an electric blanket. The switch is just there, by the lamp.”

He burrowed his way under the covers and closed both sets of eyelids. I got into bed with him and his head whipped around to snap at me. It was like this most nights; I could never tell whether he’d be docile or aggressive. Sensing my movements, he reacted instinctively. He forced  his way on top of me, his entire body weight pressing into my shoulder and the backs of my thighs, my face pressed into the sheets, heartbeat erratic with panic. I worried that I wasn’t getting enough air. I tried playing dead so he’d tire of bullying me.

“I’m your girlfriend, not your rival. Can’t you smell the difference?” I said.

“If we were really fighting, I’d expect you to bite back,” he said. My face was hidden, but he’d left a hole for me to suck air through.

“I can’t move,” I said. It sounded like I was shouting through a mouth guard.

“That’s a lousy excuse,” he said. He released me and began licking his fingers with his sticky tongue.

Francis never accounted for the moments when he’d be exposed to me, spread wide open, all the tender flesh of his underbelly available. In the morning, he lay like that in a strip of sunlight, legs twitching in the air. My need to scratch him was initially born from a desire to bring him closer to me, to please him; it was a natural response to his body on top of mine, to moments when he’d begin pulling away from me when I wanted him melded to my skin.  I tried to control my hands. But what else could I hold on with, how else could I remind him that I was still there beneath him while he was crawling around the room?

My fingers would search for a handhold, sliding between his narrow shoulder blades, then grasping for the muscles on either side of his extended neck. He’d flex and redistribute his weight as I did this, billowing his throat fan. The swelling pink skin was meant to arouse me, but it didn’t. I don’t think I was conscious of the first time my nails actually penetrated into his flesh. It surprised us both to look at the marks, the swelling and flash of brown that occurred each time after our playing got too rough.

“Are you afraid I’ll find another mate?” he asked once.

“I don’t think so,” I said. The light in his bedroom was 200 watts, and the intensity forced me to close my eyes. I spoke to him without seeing the way his two independent eyes studied me. “Isn’t your species monogamous?”

“This could become a real problem,” he said. The bed wobbled, and I knew he’d gotten up. “One of these times I might eat you.”

“You wouldn’t do that.”

“If necessary, any animal will eat its own.”

“That’s a lousy explanation.” I stretched for his tail. He flicked it just out of reach.

“I’m not due for another shed yet,” he said, taking my wrists with his long fingers and locking them in place above my head.

“You’re not normal,” I said. “I shouldn’t have to sleep with a lizard.”

“You’ll stick around,” he said.

And I did. Because each time he shed, he only grew bigger.

I liked that he called once a week, and only to make plans for Friday night—or to tell me he was going to be out hunting, so I shouldn’t try to come over (I hated his bug breath). He introduced me to his friends, and I was proclaimed to be the prettiest thing they’d ever seen him coupled with. The people he hung out with worked for law firms, banks, accounting agencies; they were at least five years older than I was, all of them brown or green skinned, just like Francis. I hated answering their what do you do? questions because I didn’t do anything; I had a degree in art history and worked in a real estate office. What I was really good at, what I was slowly becoming a professional in, was leaving traces of myself over the unexposed skin on Francis’ back. His friends couldn’t see it, but my hands had been all over his scales.

My father was excited every time I called to tell him where Francis had taken me that weekend.  He wanted to meet this boyfriend, wanted to talk business school and baseball and Italian food. I rattled off Francis’ resume, told him about our trips to the Cloisters and New Haven. He said things like “that’s great” and  “you deserve to be happy.” My mother bragged to her friends. It was hard making them understand why they couldn’t meet him in person. They weren’t ready to accept the skittering legs, the forked tongue, or even the way he snatched dragonflies from the air.  I tried to collect bits of Francis’ skin from under my fingernails so I could have something tangible to show them. But what they needed to see was deep beneath my own skin, in a place I couldn’t reach or wash off.

When I dreamt in his bed, I saw myself inside a different future, as though my desires had stretched out in every direction, held fast to the threads I’d need to follow to arrive at my happiness, and compressed all of this into one fluid dream sequence that panned out like another life. But when I woke, I was the same. Francis in bed beside me, his tongue instinctively tasting the air. Within his grasp, I was slowly learning to separate myself from the past. From what had happened many years ago, or only seconds before. What was necessary and right was always floating some distance away in the future. It was unpredictable, like his temper. The only warning signs were when his eyes went milky and his skin began to peel.

One Saturday morning, Francis was still asleep under the heated blanket. His eyes were covered by a thick film, to protect them as he rubbed the old skin off. I lay very still, hardly breathing, because his third eye could detect any changes to his surroundings. I wondered if he remembered what he’d said to me the night before: I was using him, I was using his nest as a place to sleep—to sleep with someone, rather. He was my entertainment, my pet, as he called himself.

I entered the bathroom and locked the door behind me. If I left right then, would he ask me to dinner later? I couldn’t be sure. It was just as likely that he’d call around midnight to tell me he was dying and needed me to come rub olive oil on him so he could stop feeling like he was splitting apart.

I was afraid of fatality, too. Like a child hesitating to get out of bed at night for fear of the monster in the closet. Francis had told me a story like that once, about how he’d sat in bed in his parents’ house in the mountains of Colorado contemplating his mortality, knowing he’d have to stop breathing at some point. After he told me this, I’d felt like we’d always been moving towards each other, claws extended, til we found our bodies together in bed on a Saturday morning, his tail wrapped around me like a fifth arm.

That morning, there was a deep pink gash on the inside of Francis’ leg. It had been bleeding the night before; a blood-crusted tissue lay on the floor beside the bed. Lizard blood was thick and smelled like swampland. I didn’t remember having such an urge to make him hurt, but realized afterwards that it was possible. He’d stopped in the middle, started cursing. Left me on my back like an upside-down beetle, legs still hanging in the air.

“Cut your nails,” he’d said, returning from the bathroom with a nail clipper. I’d produced my hands to show him they were still the stubby nails of a child.

He’d taken me by the shoulders, sat me down on the bed and prepared to scold me. My eye began to twitch, and he might’ve thought I would cry.

“We can talk about this later,” he said. He went into the kitchen to make us sugar water.

That night I lay awake on my side, chewing on the nails I’d labored to grow until I reached the nail beds and tasted copper from the blood. Had he seen my skin then, the way it flushed when I was anxious or scared, he wouldn’t have thought we were so different.

I emerged from the bathroom. Francis said he was going away for a week. I didn’t expect a call from Costa Rica. He would think of me only when the scratch on his leg stung in the shower, or when he had to put a bandage over the scar because his clothing rubbed at the scab and made it bleed again. It was unjust, in a way. He had a constant reminder of our mating ritual, the showy display of possession that we both performed. It was all okay as long as it only stung us. The problem was, I’d made Francis bleed, and that was too close to what we were trying both to get away from and to accept—his body, my body, together. It was too much like dying.

I called my parents to tell them the half-truth. Francis was going away for a few months. He would be extremely busy with work and wouldn’t be able to call very often, so I decided it would be best to take a break, let us both focus on our careers. The real estate office needed me to work overtime. I could hear my mother in the background saying, “That one’s a keeper.” My father said I was acting grown-up.

A few weeks after Francis left, I found a dead lizard at the bottom of the washing machine in my apartment building. To think, my clothes had been tumbling around for an hour or so, suds and water mixing around, and the poor lizard had been caught in it all.  The lizard was much smaller than Francis, and an entirely different species from what I could tell. But the sight of his broken body still made me feel sorry. I picked him up and discovered how hard he was, his skin dry and crunchy, even after soaking in water. I couldn’t hold onto him when I realized this. My wrist shook and the lizard was flung across the room into a corner. I reset the washing machine and sent my clothes through another cycle.

The next time I did my laundry, the petrified lizard was still there.

And the next time.

At some point, I stopped looking for it.