Gecko Love

Regina Trejo

I look through my rounded glasses to look through yellow-tinted glass to look at the life of my lazy gecko. It just sits in the heat lamp all day. I wish I could say that my life is like that, but I sit under a white light staring through my rounded glasses in order to look at a computer screen that’s lit up in blue tones. They say I should get those glasses that protect your eyes from screens, but I don’t know who they are or where I can get those in a round frame. I make sidebar ads; the kind with the old dancing men that say, “I just got my yearly prostate exam” to urge other old men to get theirs done. Or the kind with a grainy picture of a piece fruit that I market as “the superfruit doctors won’t tell you about” and have fake testimonials from Karen C. of Denver, CO and Michelle P. of Sacramento, CA that say they lost over fifty pounds and lowered their blood pressure once they ate said superfruit. I don’t like it, but it is a good use of my degree in communications, I guess.

Last week, one of my ads got 75,000 clicks in one day—2% of those clickers stayed on the pop-up page for over five minutes. I got a fifty-dollar bonus and thought about buying round sunglasses. Instead, I put it toward some stuff for me and my gecko. I bought him a new rock and a small baggie of crickets from the man who lives in the basement apartment. I got, for myself, the M&Ms with the pretzels inside and some frozen eggrolls. I’ve eaten all of the eggrolls and I’m resorting to eating just candy and ramen tonight. I don’t even dare to think about the crickets as food because I know that I’ll eat them. If my gecko can, I can. While I eat ramen, my mom calls. She asks how many quarters my laundry machine takes. Six to wash. Six to dry. Sometimes I need an extra to push the farthest right quarter into the dryer. It’s quite sticky. She’s on her way already since she only lives two buildings down. I can hear her clogs tapping down the sidewalk. I always open the door before she can assault it, which gets her mad. But I think it’s because she’d rather attack an inanimate object than her husband or her second husband.

She goes into my kitchen and asks for some vodka, but I remind her that I haven’t been able to find the rounded bottle I like to get at the Polish market. She calls me a lazy freak. I kinda like it because if I can be anything like my gecko, I can be living my dream. Funny how that works: some people aspire to be like Madonna or like Warren Buffet, but I aspire to be like my bug-lovin’ lizard. I think about his loose scales and my mom lets out a whooping sound, Spring 2020 | 15

as if she is a Viking…or an orangutan. She just wants me to make her food. Thirteen quarters are spread out in front of her, glinting off her gaudy stage jewelry. A fair trade for some food. So, I open up my fridge and pull out all its contents: half a jar of mayo, two mugs filled with soup and covered with plastic wrap, a container of pimentos taken out of green olives, and a fresh carton of whole milk due to expire in three days. She chooses the pimentos and dips her hands in, nails painted fuchsia and wrinkles you can see without a magnifying glass. They used to be pretty, her hands. Fresh and dainty without that arthritic sag. But then she got a wedding band and sun spots to accompany it. Then she got rid of it and got brittle nails as a replacement. With the second ring, she earned ashy palms and once that went away, so did all elastic signs of youth. If only we could shed skin and grow it anew like geckos.

She’s done with the pimentos and moves to the mayonnaise. I know she’s gonna dip her left pointer finger in it and I know she’s gonna do it twice, staring at me all the while. She does it. I turn away and listen to the long slurp of eggpaste, saliva getting caught between each crack and wrinkle of that finger. I listen again. When I turn around, she leaves the quarters on my counter and leaves my house. She’s good at leaving—once she left me at the zoo, the reptile house to be exact. I sat and pretended I was soaking up warm air with all the snakes and dragons and that’s when I met my first gecko. It didn’t have a mother with it either so we stared and talked and laughed and danced for hours. I swear I saw its mouth moving, so when I told my mom upon her drunken return, she put glasses on me and said that I had to learn to see right. Those glasses, those big square ones, hurt my eyes. I got rounded ones, poked the lenses out, and I’ve been able to see the world around me crystal clear ever since.