Lizzy isn’t a boar. Or an orang-utan. Or a Pekinese cat. She is a lizard. A beautiful, lovely little gecko who loves to stick her tongue out and catch those sweet flavoured flies. She enjoys thin flies best as she likes to suck on their bone and it’s good for her. Everybody knows lean meat is the most healthy.
Though that’s not what is weird about her. She is a bit of a mad-potty-full-out-lunatic. Reason? She loves to get her tail cut and watch it wiggle. Isn’t that weird. Imagine chopping a bit of yourself and then taking amputated selfies.
Lizzy would try all kinds of ways to cut her tail. If the man of the house was cutting the back of his hair, she would silently crawl behind him and stick her tail between the open jaws of the scissors. As the upper shear blade and the lower shear blade came together, her tail would be chopped off and the man would think he has really thick hair at the back of his head.
Or if someone was closing a door, she would stealthily but swiftly crawl towards its edge, shut her eyes and stick her tail out. Bang! The door would close and her tail would be off. The only problem with this method was she couldn’t see that cut-bit of her wiggle-waggle-woggle all over the floor.
Once, when the little boy who lived in that room full of toy cars was practising his karate chops on bricks, Lizzy leaped on the red brick surface and waited wondering how this chop would feel. Ow! Ow! Ow! That hurt and the damn hand didn’t cut her, it probably just dented some part of her anatomy permanently.
Autotomy was better than TV. Imagine watching your own tail flip, leap, jump, lunge and dance for about for thirty minutes. It was fascinating and at the end of the show, the pain would set in, distracting you from the painful monotony of life.
Lizzy was really happy with the way her world was. As long as she had a tail, which she could detach and then regenerate at will she didn’t need anything more. One day, the young girl of the house was cutting carrots. She was a bit sensitive in nature, the kinds who reads poetry and weeps when things look too beautiful. The girl was dreamily thinking of all the unhappiness in the world, which she couldn’t wipe away as her hands moved fast and furiously making the carrots change shape from lean and long to round and fat.
Lizzy snuck up to the cutting board and swiftly put her tail in the path of the chopping knife. The knife made contact, Lizzy’s tail got severed, the girl shrieked hysterically and the lizard sat happily watching her tail do some fantastical moves.
The girl began crying looking at the poor lizard without a tail. She thought of herself as a monster, a murderer. With great courage she lifted the knife again and chopped off the poor, injured lizard’s head so that it wouldn’t suffer the unbearable pain of an amputated tail for one second longer. The tail wiggled for a long time in tune to the girl’s sobs as Lizzy’s decapitated head watched with the disinterest of the dead.
Moral: The power to hurt yourself should only be with you
Lizzy is drawn by the fabulous Bijoy Venugopal. You can find more of his wonderful stuff here bijoyvenugopal.com
NothingBeastlyAboutIt 