The lizard sat on the hot rock and stared out into the air. It was crisp, so hot it felt as if the atmosphere had crinkled and sunk down in upon itself.
The lizard did not know fear, but it did not know aspiration either. The lizard knew hunger, and pain, and something like satisfaction when the sun was just right. The lizard was not a social animal and thus it did not mind that its days were long and solitary.
Until the men had come. The one man leading the other with a long steel rod that shattered the quiet of the desert like a bolt of lightning.
And now the one man was quiet. His eyes, frozen forever, open until the first creature pecks them out. The lizard blinked and watched as the figure of the other man slowly diminished into the haze. It dared not move. Something in its instinct told it to wait, just a few moments longer.
And so it did. The lizard looked at those dead eyes now and their layer of mucus shimmering in the desert heat and seemed to pause as it formulated a thought; then, like the gun, it snapped out and grabbed onto the left eye — the one closest to the ground — and as it tugged it tore the eye open and the internal fluid spilled down upon the lizard and it shook its nose free but then just as quick it thrust its jaws into the meat again.