The flyer advertised a lost cat named Toaster, last seen on 59th and Hamilton. I tore one of the phone numbers from the fringe at the bottom and put it in my pocket, carried it home, dialed it into my phone and sat on the floor of my kitchen.

When a woman picked up, I asked how she was doing. When she asked who I was, I introduced myself. When she paused, and then apologized and asked where we knew each other from, I said I’d found the number on Toaster’s poster. That perked her right up, and she asked where I’d seen the cat. Here I had to correct her: no, I hadn’t seen Toaster. I just wanted to talk.

Click. Dial tone. I stared at a week-old spaghetti sauce stain on my stove from a dinner that my daughter and her husband hadn’t shown up to, the exact color and texture of a freshly formed scab.

***

The gecko didn’t start off mine and never became mine. The man who’d given me my daughter thirty years ago also left his gecko in my house when he left two years later. Who knew geckos could live for twenty years. This one had outdone itself, lived for almost forty. I didn’t know what to do with a gecko that didn’t belong to me, but lived in my house. When I ran out of its crickets, I drove to the vivarium and bought another tin of them. When I opened the tank to drop them in, the gecko climbed the walls towards my hand. It pressed its hand to the side of mine. It wasn’t sticky, like you would expect. It was cold and alive at the same time, like nothing I had ever felt. I involuntarily shook my hand and the gecko flew across the room, hit the wall and dropped, so then I was the monster. 

On the ground, it appeared unharmed, coolly absorbing its new surroundings with glass marble eyes. I asked it if it was okay, and it was. It sat on the fake log in its terrarium when I lowered it gingerly back inside, as if nothing had happened. I thought of what my mother, a sinewy-tough woman who never stepped outside Texas a day of her life, had told me when I came home with a caved-in cheek where Princess the horse had kicked me. She drove me to the hospital and when we got back, gave me instructions for interacting with Princess: don’t ever let her know that she hurt you.

The remaining evidence on my cheek is a dark stain of dull maroon. They set some plates under my cheekbones and sewed the skin back together on top, a whole ordeal of blood and bruising when I was thirteen that has since faded and stretched into an Alaska-shaped scar.

***

The phone rang just as I was getting ready to go upstairs to bed.

“Hi, it’s Marsha.”

“Who?”

“Sorry—I’m Toaster’s mom. The cat. From earlier. What did you want to talk about?”

***

My daughter stopped talking to me again after I told her what I really thought of the wedding invitations. When I said they were strange, we both knew I was talking about the boyfriend, now fiancé, and the father of her child, my grandson. The first time she’d brought the boyfriend over, his throat was all plugged up and he couldn’t even say hello to me. It was plugged because when my daughter had the baby, they didn’t cut the umbilical cord right away. After they cut it, they quick, quick, before it could heal—affixed it to his throat. He couldn’t talk. How am I supposed to get to know him? I asked my daughter, and she told me to look into his eyes, that I could see everything in there. 

I looked and saw two craters: concave and beautiful and uncomplicated, the same material all the way through. You knew there was nothing underneath. I asked what he did for work, and his eyes stayed silent and still. When my daughter said it was landscaping, I wondered if she had to accompany him to jobs, or if they performed temporary surgery every day to allow their parting. 

I didn’t feel right asking about this. It didn’t feel right either to acknowledge the umbilical cord, though, so I just nodded as if this were a normal conversation. Asked about his favorite style of clipping shears.

My daughter cried over the wedding invitations and I thought I might cry too, seeing her like that, but it also isn’t right for a daughter to see her mother cry. In fact, I know for certain I’d never seen my mother cry. She said the best way to deal with crying is to stop. I’d been crying whitewater when Princess kicked my face in–it hurt so bad. She asked me if I thought my tears would make it hurt any less. That dried me right up. Because they did not. My mother is long dead and I never shed another tear after that, in front of her or otherwise. Not when she got too sick to move. Not at her funeral.

***

What did I want to talk about? Marsha had me with that one, I’ll admit. I don’t know if anyone had asked me that before. I talked about my garden. I talked about the cabinet liner I’d bought on clearance, someone’s discarded perfect fit, and how it came just one inch short of perfectly lining my cabinet. I asked her what she would do if someone left their gecko in her house. Marsha swelled with appreciation and had an answer for everything. In the end, she admitted that there was no Toaster, that she’d chosen the most generic cat photo she could find in the hopes that someone would mistake any old cat for that cat and give her a call. I’ve never even had a cat, she told me, I’m just lonely. Didn’t think anyone would actually fall for it, so I lost my nerve when you called.

We laughed so hard that I felt a pinch at the base of my spine, and then we laughed some more, until I settled down enough to ask if I could steal her trick.

Sure, she said. Contrary to popular belief, there are some things in this world where, when you want them, you can’t just ask.

***

Before I forget to mention it: I hadn’t cheaped out on a jar of spaghetti sauce from the grocery store. I’d made it from scratch. Fresh tomatoes sun-ripened in the garden, salted and broiled down to their meaty sweetness. I’d roasted garlic whole, activated fresh herbs between my fingertips before stirring them in, the whole house thick with an aroma that kept unfurling like a peony in spring.

I went outside to sit on the porch because the smell had become so heady I couldn’t breathe. The neighbors across the street had termites, and men had come to wrap a circus tent around the house. I waited for my daughter and her husband to arrive, even as the six o’clock I’d recommended came and went, and practiced receiving the bottle of wine they would bring. Oh, you shouldn’t have, I told the house across the street as the streetlights snapped to life. What’s this? You shouldn’t have!

They said they’d found me inside the circus tent. I thought about the termite bodies, dead inside the wood where they couldn’t be found. And my body: not quite dead, too big to hide, just laid out alive and obvious, where they could see me and drag me out. I thought I remembered a circus happening inside, something about a rat aflame and leaping through a hoop. I tried to tell the EMT about it, but he just put a tube in my mouth and told me to exhale.

***

Geckos’ eyes are three hundred and fifty times more sensitive to light than the human eye. That means they’re still able to see brilliant color in what looks like darkness to us. 

The gecko lived in what used to be the man’s office, but the walls in this house are made of tissue paper and are hollow inside, so I could always hear it shuffling around in its tank at night. It was as if that room were still occupied. It could see out the window from where it was positioned by the door, and I always wondered what, if anything, it was seeing on those restless nights. Was it seeing something that I was missing? Something that the darkness hid from me? 

I’ve had trouble sleeping all my life, and those nights made me want to bust down the door and pinch the gecko by its neck and tell it: you don’t have to keep proving that you are a body occupying a space; ask it: what are you looking at out there? What is out there?

Sometimes, when I finally did sleep, I dreamed I had a scalpel. I dreamed the gecko spread open and pinned to a plate. One night I woke up with something chewy inside my mouth; I ignored the coppery taste and convinced myself it was a kidney stone so that I could swallow it back into the deep.

***

Marsha’s answer to what she would do if someone left their gecko in her house: leave it on their doorstep. Which meant I had to ask: what if you don’t know where they live?

“Well, I suppose I’d find out the gecko’s natural habitat, so I could set it free.”

We met up and Marsha looked like someone I already knew: smoke tendrils of hair, sunken eyes, jaw melting into neck and into the rest of her body. She looked almost like me. We drove out of the suburbs and towards the forest. She kept telling me it was going to be okay the whole time. I know it’s going to be okay, I thought, I asked you what to do and now we’re doing it. What could be more okay than that?

When we got to the forest, she tucked my hair into place, over and over in a soothing little crescent. Her fingertips tracing behind my ear felt nice. It was late afternoon; the sun had dropped low in the sky and cast its rays almost sideways. The low light reflected from the waxen leaves on the trees, setting them aflame. I placed the gecko’s tank on the ground and tipped it slowly so the open top pointed straight into the wilderness. The gecko stared out with its wet eyes, then looked at me, and when we locked eyes, it happened: I thought I saw everything in there. All the answers. 

I mean, it was staring like it wanted something from me. 

I stared back at those eyes, more alive than my daughter’s husband’s had been, absolutely teeming with knowledge, and I realized I couldn’t let the gecko roam free in an unintelligent wilderness that would never reward it for anything beyond its survival skills. I wondered what the forest looked like to it, I wanted to see the world through the gecko’s eyes, I needed to. I couldn’t go home to an empty house—not even a gecko inside anymore, just the emptiest of empty. So I lunged for the gecko, away from Marsha’s placating hand. But the gecko had disappeared, skittering off to camouflage itself among the leaves. 

My own umbilical cord was cut by unfeeling clinical shears as soon as my daughter was born. It didn’t hurt.. I hardly remember it. I felt a familiar space in my chest swell up as my vision lost track of the gecko, something birthed in the hollows that join loss and regret. I scanned the forest floor and wondered, for the first time, if I had made a mistake.

Jennifer Love is an Oakland-based writer, artist, zine-maker, and clown born and raised in the Bay Area. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in X-RAY, Storm Cellar, Caesura, Crab Fat Magazine, and Autre. Her first novella, I’m Supposed to Be a Carnivore, is out now from Fruit Bat Press.

Image by Peter Burdon @peterburdon