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As a lawyer with plenty of life experience, my mother should have known that lizards were a bad choice. Lizards are pets you cannot even pet. Touching them opens the risk of salmonella or something more sinister. Picking up a lizard triggers its instinct that it is about to be killed in a crush of weight. You can surely be bitten, and you cannot bond with it. At best, you may be tolerated. Its heart is the size of an eyelash. Only a psychopath wants to hold anything that fragile.

But my family stood in Petco, just a week after my mom married my stepdad, air-bagging five sticky reptiles we knew so little about. As a new unit, me, my brothers, and my new step-siblings went in almost Brady Bunch-perfect order. At one point during each calendar year, we’d be five ages in a row, like planets aligning briefly in a dark sky. When our parents eloped on a Harley to Spokane after only knowing each other one month: nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen.

The lizard diet consists of mealworms and crickets. Crickets will drown in the tank’s water bowl if there is no cotton in it to buoy their grassy legs. So all night in my bedroom, equipped with bunks to contain the newly blended family, I could hear them moan. Crickets chirp in darkness to fend off potential threats. They’ll sing an aggressive song to claim a female. And a triumphant one for mating.

My new stepdad thought it would be a family bonding experience for each kid to own a lizard. A full lounge of them. As if in the neon light of the terrarium, our bodies might become a happy family lining the sofas. I chose a pink-flecked gecko. My mother chose a man who was addicted to every substance he’d ever sampled. Handy, funny, functional, all under the edge of night. He built a bespoke top for the terrarium. Occasionally, it would get knocked askew, allowing a thin-enough creature to sneak out with some of the more adventurous crickets. We’d only know a lizard was gone when we’d discover a misalignment of the cage and tank. A week later, one mottled-pink gecko might scamper across a wall at dinnertime and we would know it was still alive. Someone would grab Tupperware and try to trap it before it slipped behind the TV to bask in whatever light came from Jerry Springer.

It was lonely in a house full of people who felt like strangers. And reptiles. I didn’t even want the lizards in my home and now I realize that I might actually wake up with an escaped one on my face. Looking back, I sometimes imagine what my mother thought at this point, one month into a marriage and two months into a relationship. Perhaps she thought we had expanded. We’d tried Thai food for the first time and gone to an NFL game. We’d seen our parents yell at each other, pulled over from a viewpoint in Olympic National Park. One night, my stepdad threw a plate and no one was sure who it was aimed at. He got us minibikes. Sometimes we’d ride them far out into a sand pit and they’d break down, leaving us to walk home pushing them in a downpour. And on our first Fourth of July together, we blew up a barely ripe watermelon with M80s pushed into the rind like birthday candles.

I knew the lizards wouldn’t last. I knew it wouldn’t take long for us to tire of their alien bodies and weird needs. But I also knew we would have to stick it out. This is not when I became an adult, but it was when I grew out of childhood. Because I knew there would be more obligations and commitments, like the Chevy conversion van they bought and then the slightly bigger house we moved to. The entrenched spaces where so many holidays and regular days would perish. We eventually relinquished the glass terrarium to the local Goodwill. Like all ideas, the lizards would have required continuous commitment, a steady stream of money, and functional adults to flourish. My mother stayed married to my stepdad until I was eighteen, then divorced. They remarried at Alki Beach two years later. And then divorced again in 2015, the same week I gave birth to a baby son.

I will never have lizards as pets again, even when my children ask. I still hear crickets at night and imagine them in the other room—cotton clouds barely holding them up so they might live for a while and then be eaten. I still think of my family and motorcycles, gecko footprints on the walls, and the mercy of time. I think of trapped things. Of five kids walking home silently in the rain to feed unwanted lizards. And mostly, I think of all that I want to set free.

 

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KATY LUXEM lives in Salt Lake City. She is a graduate of the creative writing program at University of Washington and has a master’s degree from the University of Utah. Her work is anthologized in Love Is For All Of Us (Hachette, 2025) and has appeared in Rattle, McSweeney’s, SWWIM Every Day, One Art, Poetry Online, and others. She is the author of Until It Is True (Kelsay Books, 2023). Find her on the pickleball court or on Instagram @katyluxem.

Featured image by David Clode, courtesy of Unsplash.