Today Ranor and I were walking from my room towards the West. We ran into a group of people whose attention was directed at the ground, where what looked like a small snake was writhing wildly in the leaves by the side of the path. On closer inspection of both their horrified faces and the creature on the ground, it became apparent that it was not a snake at all, but the severed tail of a lizard. One of the passersby had accidentally stepped on its tail as it went dashing past, and as a natural escape mechanism, the tail came off and the lizard went on without it.

The tail, though, the tail continued to flicker, writhe, squirm, shy away from the people standing around it, and was seemingly trying to locomote a short distance onto the path. It looked like it was in extreme pain, like the kitten Caroline, Michael and I saw get run over one day while we were delivering the newspaper. Only the kitten was spurting blood in wild spasms all over the pavement, and in the lizard tail blood only evident in a strange stasis at the edge of the severed end, the scales still sitting ready like it was at the end of a stack of circular grey lego pieces, white bone shining from the center even as its sticky surface began picking up leaves and dirt from the pavement.

Its gyrations were wild and panicked, all of us who had stopped and looked were unable to look away. Finally one girl couldn't take it anymore and felt sick. The long tail crawled onto the pavement like an earthworm, its bloody end seeming to look around for a moment to find the best path. Was it looking for its body? Where was its body? I told Ranor that we should leave, that maybe when we were gone the lizard would come back out and calm and recollect its tail and this horror would be over. Another group of passersby asked if it would grow back. They wondered if a new lizard would grow out of the severed tail. The lizard may live, but it will never again have a tail like it did. Its chance of survival will be greatly reduced. The days of the large Claremont lizards are numbered.

As I skated away, my mind turned to the lizard, hiding in the bushes, watching in utter horror as his predators pointed at and chatted about the part of his body desperately wrenching for upwards of 5 minutes in the middle of the sidewalk. For us, this event was an interesting story, a gross little anecdote, maybe something to bring up with our ecology professors on Monday. For the lizard, his one misstep, his split second decision to cross the path when he did has changed the course of his entire life. Like that one side-kick that broke my leg and changed the course of my life for the next four years... like that one patch of ice that Catherine didn't see which broke her jaw and knocked out all of her teeth... like that one left turn you go for because you think you can make it........ the one split-second decision that you have to live with for the rest of your life.

One split second decision that takes you from someone together and full and whole and complete to pieces: one private one, hiding in the bushes in perfect shock

and the other for the public to gawk at, to tell stories about. One part of you left there writhing blindly, madly, mindlessly, on the sidewalk for all to see.

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