lizard_music kerry i picked it for reasons i could not explain because i was ten, maybe eleven. we still used the dewey decimal system in the school library and mrs boyd was always so smiley. i liked the cover, red and yellow with a column of lizards in black silhouette. i was never really a lizard kid but that was the year peter’s class went to the botanical gardens to see the new poison dart frogs, and he was definitely a poison dart frog kid, and for some reason the local news wanted to what these first graders thought about the frogs. he had such shiny dark hair—now he is slowly balding, shh—and missing a front tooth, and he told the news anchor check these frogs out because they are so cool. and deadly. so you better watch out. frogs and lizards were more or less the same to me then. maybe that’s what drew me to the lizards on the cover, timing, the frogs. it was a hardback covered in that library plastic, hefty and respectable, on the level of little women instead of babysitter’s club. and i didn’t know who daniel pinkwater was but i thought somebody with a name like pinkwater might have a good story to tell. finally, frogs croak, snakes hiss, toads belch, but come to think of it, lizards did seem awfully quiet. i’d never thought of an animal making music before. i have wondered off and on about this book ever since i read it but, just like blather, at some point i forgot the title and it existed on the very tip of my mind’s tongue, couldn’t find it. i found it in iz’s bookshop seeing the shop for the first time, not how i imagined, so bright with a massive magic and tarot collection and labels like “regular fiction” and “yep more fiction.” she showed me the children’s book room and it was glorious sentimentality; dim, warm, yellow, with a patterned carpet and piles of pillows. and it hit me: LIZARD MUSIC! she ordered me a copy. i tried to rewrite this story after first reading it.everything was new and strange on every page. but victor’s voice is the same, the chicken man's laugh is still high and creepy, and there is still a very distinct beyond. the end of one world and the beginning of another. i have never heard a lizard make music but i saw one the summer mary and i went to iz’s parents’ house in alabama and that was when everything changed. i don’t know the exact moment but i know it was before the beyond began, and i was lying on a rock at the swimming hole drinking a tallboy and wearing clothes i still wear now. i felt like a lizard sunning itself. and then i actually saw one, very small, blue and black and iridescent. it was only there for a moment, a breath. 211024 what's it to you? who go blather from