It was a Friday night the first time I found a lizard in my apartment. Aug. 9, 2019, to be exact. I know because I have the timestamped evidence — “THERES A LIZARD IN MY APT WHAT DO I DO OMG 🦎 ” — which I texted to more than one person. I’d opened the front door to see a beige something skitter high across the far living room wall. Panic bloomed in my chest.
My first encounter with lizards in recent memory had been two months before, when I pulled into the parking lot of a Hampton Inn in Stuart, Florida, my home while in town for a job interview. As I parked the rented Kia Niro, a flash of orange and blue darted beneath the shrubs beyond the hood. A snake? Wheeling my suitcase toward the lobby, I spotted several more, lizards for sure. The plucky reptiles — invasive African redhead agamas, I later learned — leapt onto garbage tumblers and ambled along scorching curbs. The creatures didn’t scare me, though they did startle my travel-weary brain into realizing I was in Virginia no longer. If anything, I saw their Princeton orange heads as a sign of good luck for my interview.
Blessedly, Agama agama africana wasn’t the lizard paused precariously above my bookshelf that August night. The species is neither venomous nor poisonous, but the last thing I wanted was a foot-long male perched between my dog-eared copy of “Rebecca” and the vintage Old Dominion wine bottles on display. On second thought, an agama would have been easier to spot.
I tiptoed toward the wall. Though it had seamlessly camouflaged itself to match the eggshell paint, the critter was the kind I’d seen everywhere since moving to Florida (I’d gotten the job, perhaps thanks to the good wishes of the agamas). By then the novelty of seeing the reptiles scaling buildings, hopping between plants, and hanging their tails out of car grilles had expired. I didn’t mind seeing them out and about, but discovering one had invaded my third-floor sanctuary kindled gooseflesh.
I shuddered and squealed, imagining the tiny trespasser scurrying along my skin. I texted my sister and a friend, as though they could make the creepy-crawly disappear. I wouldn’t have known what do to next if it hadn’t been for the internet’s wisdom.
Annoyed as I was by the lizard’s presence, I didn’t want to kill it. Survivors of similar predicaments advised online to spray the lizard with cold water to coax it outside. That’s how I wound up prostrate on the rug, purple spray bottle aimed under the TV console, where I wasn’t positive the trickster had hidden. It was fast, and in a blink I’d lost the lizard. Frenzied spurts of water dripped down the walls as testament to our tussle. I never found it.
My uninvited guest is aptly named the tropical house gecko, or Hemidactylus mabouia. The African natives top out at 5 inches long and have toe pads that help them cling, say, to apartment walls.
I can’t pinpoint when I stopped minding and began appreciating their company. I was startled when a gecko manifested in the kitchen sink that September, when another crept above the microwave in October, when a juvenile made a home behind the guest room desk in January. But they’re harmless to humans and quite cute once you get used to them.
Like clockwork, when the moon rises, the geckos ascend toward Apartment 304 — up the stairs, above the front door, beneath the handrails. There are two that like to nestle in the corners of my balcony; I wonder where they go on the nights they aren’t there.
One evening I tried to gently scoop up a tiny gecko from my dining room table and return it to the suburban wild. I failed. My cheeks flared with guilt as I buried it in the potted money tree on the balcony.
Months later, I plopped overflowing grocery bags on the doormat while fumbling for my keys. As I picked them up and stepped inside, I saw a baby gecko scuttle from beneath the Honey Nut Cheerios. I could’ve sworn it was the one I’d covered with soil.
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This essay was written for Lindsey Leake’s 491.700 Subatomic Writing course at the Johns Hopkins University Krieger School of Arts and Sciences on May 5, 2020.