THE SITUATION by Aurelie Sheehan

The small lizard did a pushup. Then another. It was a sunny day, but it could turn cold soon and easily. On the cinderblock, a second pushup. Up, down. Close or far. He had a range of enemies and one lizard friend, a lady. She had the thinnest stripes and her nails were to die for. He’d seen her once, and yet now she was gone. The place she’d been was a curve of absence, like a scrape on his underside. He missed her, he missed all that had come before, all that – let us not believe in the missing, here on the cinderblock in the blotchy sun, with the shadow scrape on my belly.
“Behold! Me!” the lizard cried. “I am pushing up, I am breathing!”
To no avail.
The lizard walked under the screen door, and then under the wooden door. There was no place in this house for even one solitary pushup, or the least amount of self-reflection. There was or was not a cat here, or a human.
It’s the life force that can drive you forward, compel the tiniest heart stretched like a patch of bubble gum over a twig, a tiny twig, between tiny ribs, in a tiny body sack.
Behind his knees, the lizard felt a little sweaty. His feet stuck to the floor. A sound like an abrasion, the stomped head sensation, came upon him. Someone had turned on a vacuum. The figure pushing the machine drooped, globs of flesh trembling from his chin and arms. The lizard remained standing behind a chair. We call it tstanding, for the tsunami was close and real. “Lady lizard! Lady lizard!” he called into the din.

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Aurelie Sheehan is the author of four short story collections: Once into the Night (FC2), Demigods on Speedway (University of Arizona Press), Jewelry Box: A Collection of Histories (BOA Editions, Ltd.), and Jack Kerouac Is Pregnant (Dalkey Archive Press), as well as two novels: History Lesson for Girls (Viking Penguin) and The Anxiety of Everyday Objects (Penguin).