Read The Lizard Cage for Free Online

silence. The silence spoke to him of 1988, when he and his mother lost Aung Min, his younger brother. Those eerily quiet days without Aung Min made them frantic, because they didn’t know who’d been shot in the streets, or how many, or where the bodies were taken after the big trucks came through and the soldiers jumped down and draggedthe students and other protesters off the sticky roads. All the bodies, even those with groaning mouths, were hauled away.
    Besides the blood and the broken, hand-drawn signs, many slippers were left behind, for hours, sometimes for days, missed in the cleanup by the regime’s squadron of overworked sweepers. The slippers lay scattered over the pavement, lodged in the gutters and at the base of the occasional shrine-bearing banyan tree. Shoes bereft of feet are capable of making terrible accusations. The people who scurried along the roads before the evening curfew knew ghosts were stepping into those slippers, the simple flip-flop kind with the single piece of leather or plastic that fits between the first two toes of each bony foot. During the day a few parents went out, and brothers and sisters, to search among the flip-flops, but it was hopeless, impossible to know which shoes belonged to whom. They were the kind everybody wore.
    Everybody wears them still. The singer always takes his off when he paces, because it’s not easy to get new slippers in the cage, and walking wears them out. He kicks them off just now, into a corner, as he always does before hunting. The flip-flop slap frightens his prey.
    Anyway, eating the lizards is a necessity. Most of his warders have had no idea, and surely Senior Jailer Chit Naing never knew. That sharp devil Sein Yun probably suspects—little bones in the shit pail—but he’s never said anything. Like masturbating and weeping, the singer tries to keep it private.
    Years from now, the lizard hunt will be a story to tell certain friends, close ones. It will become a tale from his heroic old days in prison. He won’t tell his mother, though. There are some things devoutly Buddhist mothers should never know.
    Here and now, in this cage of men, the singer thinks,
Let no one see. Let no one know I do this
.
    The bait is easy. He watches a moth spiral down toward the clay water pot, which he has set under the light for this purpose. Attracted to the light’s reflection, various flying insects end up in the water, wings spread and shuddering on the glassy surface. He plucks a velvety, pulpy moth out of the water. Almost immediately it starts to flap and dance between his left thumb and forefinger.
    Fingertips and knuckles glittering with silver dust, Teza raises the insect up as close as he can to the light, stretching his arm and standing on his toes. Within ten seconds the lizard sharply swivels its head toward thefluttering moth. Then the singer walks slowly to the wall; above him, on the ceiling, the creature follows in its darting, relentless way. From fingers to hand down through his straining arm and back, Teza’s ropy muscles pull long and taut. He likes to pretend he is magic, drawing the creature down with a spell. The lizard hesitates, trying to hold on to the enormity of the hand, the figure beyond the moth, but the reptile’s own predatory instinct leads it into the hand of a bigger predator. The wings whisper the irresistible
h’dah-h’dah-h’dah
, the sound of injury or entrapment, and on the lizard comes.
    The singer brings his body close to the wall so his right arm—the lethal weapon—will not have to extend too much. The moth whirs like a tiny engine as Teza’s elbow bends, pulling hand, insect, and lizard down. The reptile runs smoothly, then stops, returning to its jerky forward paces. The singer thinks, If I were a bird, I would pluck it off the wall this second, in my beak.
    Just a little farther down now.
    In the looming presence or scent or shadow of the human body, the creatures sometimes turn tail and scurry back up the