Road kill catalog

Any daily activity gives you the opportunity to carefully examine the minutiae of your surroundings and so it is with the daily morning walk I take with Jack, my dog. A fine connoisseur of coyote pooh, dried turds, and piss-glazed garbage bins, Jack takes his time exploring our rural road. And I tend to focus on its asphalt surface, as a precaution against road hazards in this dog-infested neighborhood.

Jerusalem cricket, from Wikipedia

 So I’ve noticed the annual cycle of small road-kills that appear on the blacktop with some regularity. There’s an astonishing bug that appears, a grotesque creature like a miniaturized human baby, a chitin-armored fetus, its round infant head larger than its claw-limbed body. Pale fleshy gold in color, its appearance made me recoil in horror the first time I saw it, but now I appreciate it. It’s a Stenopelmatus fuscus, or Jerusalem cricket.

Our small local lizards end up smashed on the road too frequently. For some reason, they always appear belly up, curled in a kind of ecstatic agony, something akin to Jack’s own luxurious belly-up defenseless sleep.

Lizard safe on my windowsill

 I don't know how it is the lizards end up smashed on the road, because everytime I see a live one, stock still in the sun, my tiniest movement makes him dart away in a streak. Have they swooned belly up, lolling on the sun-hot asphalt, only to be taken unaware by a car tire?

By the time I see them they’re usually flattened husks dessicated like a cut-out from duct tape, but once I came upon one freshly smashed, its silvery belly like supple leather, its jaws oozing a deep dark red blood as flushed with oxygen as yours or mine. I hadn’t thought before that lizards would bleed red.