The Fawn and the Lizard

            Surrounded on all sides by boscage and brush, a fawn once spotted a listless lizard on an exposed rock close to its hiding place, as the cold-blooded creature warmed itself in the Sun. So still and quiet were the two, that they seemed to resemble the shrubby thickets and bushes nearby, enough to blend in. Out of a simple curiosity, the fawn fixated upon its scaly limbs and beady eye, both slight in sight of the serious scar across its back and abdomen, towards which any and all attention inevitably veered. So motionless did the marked saurian remain, that the young deer nearly jumped out of its skin when, without warning, the resilient reptile whipped the side of its head up at an angle, apparently at or approaching the speed of thought.

            Concurrently, a roadrunner came in out of nowhere, swooping down and scooping up the sunbathing sultan with its long beak, before disappearing again in a flash. Uncharacteristically, the dumbfounded fawn lifted its head to catch a glimpse of the beelining bird as it hurried hastily away from its still horizontal, hoofed hind and forelimbs, seemingly spooked by the unexpected company. Upset at the all too soon loss of its new friend and object of study, it stared sullenly straight ahead at the spot where the wriggling lizard was last seen, then sighed and asked rhetorically, without expecting an answer, “If we miss what we become attached to, why get attached to anything at all?” Gazing off into space in a slow act of surrender, the fawn hardly noticed when something entered back into its field of view—the same scarred lizard, having returned to its sunbathed stone, relatively unscathed, but now missing a tail.