All these Saturdays when the sun is so hot and bright and every hour is like a merciless shining, just bright and bright and bright and inside there's nothing for me to do but wait out the heat, wait through my nap. I don't like all that big quiet space, everything so blinding and still. Except for outside: the slow hum of mourning doves cooing and that shadow, narrow as a wire sliver cutting across the blinds.

Nothing can sleep in all that sweltering, shining heat, nothing outside can be living… except for the lizard man. He comes if you're not taking your nap like you're supposed to. He walks by the window, and it's so bright you can see his silhouette on the wall, on the mini blinds.

Everyone is asleep and it's so hot and you're alone there with that heavy heat pressing on you and the silence pressing on you, and that shadow cutting across the room so quick and darting. It's the lizard man hunting. You're sweating and sweating and you know if you were asleep he wouldn't find you, but it's the idea of it, the idea that if you shut your eyes he'll creep into the room to look at you. And then you can't sleep, you can only try hard to shut your eyes and hope that he will be tricked, even though you know in your heart he won't, that you'll breathe wrong and he'll know, and you'll know, and just as you open your eyes he's leaping down with his mouth open—red and full of sharp little teeth. Only everyone else in the world is exhausted by the heat and languid and asleep. And nobody will hear you, and it's too hot to scream anyway.

It wasn't so bad when Gonzy was there with me. It wasn't so bad then. But he's dead now and my dad is gone and it's so deathly bright outside.

Even now, even though I'm grown and all that's bullshit, that part of the afternoon is still the hunting time. When the sun is in its zenith and the heat is like a piece of hot wool wrapping itself around me, that's the hour for the lizard man to creep by. Everything is so still and drowsy and bright, so bright I turn my face away and hide it in my arms, and the awful sunlight presses bright and orange on the backs of my eyelids, and the terror hammers inside me: Let him think I'm sleeping! Let him think I'm sleeping!