For hours, Edgar Polrattle, known to fellow classmates and crueler town-folk as the Lizard Boy, wandered down the streets of Yokemile, Florida, shrinking away from the voices in his head.

Lizard Boy!
Sup Lizzy, lookin’ scaly! Why dontcha go live in the swamp!
Feel OK? Eat too many flies for lunch?
Lizard boy!
Listen Lizzy, why don’t you go back to the nuthouse now.
Lizard –
Hey Lizzy –

Most days he knew when the voices were real and when they weren’t, but tonight he threw his hands up in front of his face to shield himself from the attack. Finally, he cried out, voice bouncing off the walls of Some Like It Hot, the coffee shop where he used to work. He realized he was alone, and it was well past midnight. He pulled an apple from his pocket and bit down on the meat. With the town this empty, he could almost pretend he was the only one left. That they’d all gone in some latent migration. Them, the birds. Him, the lizard.

Yo, Lizard Boy! Go foul-up someone else’s air.
Liz-ard-o, I ran over one of your pals with my bike today. Squished him real good.

Shifting a backpack on his shoulders, he waved away the voice and finished the apple in three bites. He had two more miles to walk before he could go home to his aunt. She would panic if she peeked into his room and didn’t see his tuft of red hair poking out from beneath the covers.

Lizzy. Pssst! Hey Lizzy – How’s it feel to know your daddy shot your own momma?

He spun to find who said it – sounded like Pip Stafford or one of his other meathead friends – but it couldn’t be. Pip, the originator of the name Lizard Boy, moved up north at the beginning of the year. Maybe with him gone, Edgar could just be Edgar again. He paused and almost turned around, but shook his head and carried on. It was too late for that.

About a mile past Some Like It Hot, he smelled sewer water. It drifted up on the wind and blew toward town, following the pipeline that connected Buggins Swamp with the river, which meandered past the school, the church, and his own house. He hiked up his backpack and felt something squirm against his spine.

“Almost there. Don’t you worry. I’ve got you.”

His father, Leonard Polrattle, had been a strange man who only got stranger and angrier with the years. No one knew what set him off in the end, but he took his hunting rifle with a silencer and put a bullet in his wife’s head while Edgar, eight at the time, caught geckos in the backyard.

The town assumed Delilah had been having an affair, but no one really knew. After he killed her, he swallowed all the pills in the medicine cabinet – sleeping pills, pain pills, even the vitamins – and laid down in their wedding bed. No one called Edgar in for dinner. He eventually came looking for his parents, hoping to show them the gecko he caught. Instead, he found his mother on the floor and his father with a note pinned to his chest: I’m sorry, Edgar. Call your Aunt Jolene. She’ll take care of you.

Once his parents were buried, next to each other, which unsettled quite a few, Edgar went to live with his mother’s sister, two streets over. That’s when he began to collect reptiles.

Lizard Boy is a freak.
Send him to the swamp.
Send him back to the nuthouse.

Before he passed, Aunt Jolene’s late husband, Frank, built a tool shed out back and used it as a sanctuary of sorts, to drink beer and use his hands. He crafted rocking chairs and stepping stools, even a crib for Edgar many years before. He considered the shed his legacy, but Jolene considered it an unwelcome reminder of happier days, and so she never wandered out to discover what Edgar, now eleven-years-old, had turned it into: a shrine to reptiles.

He gathered plastic bins from the dump and turned them into habitats for snakes and lizards, some of which he caught, others he bought in pet stores. Later, he ordered rare, mostly illegal species online. There were hundreds.

Edgar stood quietly at the center of it all and closed his eyes, listening to his creatures flick their tongues and taste the air. Jolene let him roam freely most of the time, still reeling from the loss of her sister and this new-found responsibility of a dependent. She and Frank never could have kids themselves. But she didn’t once guess that the shed was anything other than a place to for Edgar to sit and think.

He started taking his pets to school in his backpack, one or two at a time to keep him company. Even before he was known as Lizard Boy, Edgar had few friends. Inevitably, the creatures escaped and wound up in desks, toilets, and even the swimming pool. And they started to breed. Now, it’s a testament to how many there were that the administration even found out. Surely a stray reptile here and there gets into a Florida elementary school. But there were so many at one point that the school had to cancel class until the problem could be resolved. Had Edgar fully understood the role of the exterminator, he would have been inconsolable, but until many years later, he thought they all just slithered away, back to muddy holes and tall grass, fit to be caught again another day.

It wasn’t until Edgar reached 7th grade that the teachers guessed who had been responsible for the infestation. That was the year his favorite boa, a rainbow specimen he’d ordered online, strangled and ate his neighbor’s Maltese, Cisco. Mrs. Brown shrieked, fell to her knees and wailed while the snake stretched out in the sun, digesting the lump in its middle.

Police eventually came around to Aunt Jolene’s and uncovered the truth of the tool shed. The place was a health hazard, not to mention a danger to Edgar and others. They seized the animals and sent them off to various wildlife shelters and sanctuaries. Upon hearing the news, Edgar bit one officer hard enough to draw blood. He had to be physically restrained for hours. They suggested Southern Saint May’s Center for mentally disturbed boys.

Hiya, Pip! Did ya hear about Lizard Boy Polrattle?
The freak is headed to the nuthouse!
Haha-hoho-heehee

Edgar stepped onto the dirt path that led to the swamp. Over the years, Buggins Swamp had been the site of many scandals, some of which he wasn’t old enough to remember. A tragic drowning, a publicized drug bust, then a sewage leak that still caused the town to collectively shiver (the smell had never really cleared).

The EPA protected the swamp due to a species of endangered fish that lived in it, bottom-feeders, but to passersby, the swamp looked like tar. Before the drowning, it used to be a popular spot for families to take their kids to picnic, but people tend to imagine spooks and haunts. Over the years, signs were posted at the entrance, Buggins Swamp – No fishing, no swimming, no drinking. Not unheard of. It was Florida and people had a healthy fear of gators. But the signs held a silent threat. No fishing, no swimming, no drinking… or else. Edgar bypassed the signs and felt the contents of his backpack stir again.

The year his boa ate Cisco, Aunt Jolene wouldn’t hear any nonsense about sending Edgar to Saint May’s. The poor boy just liked reptiles and she’d make sure he kept any future collection under control. Mrs. Brown dropped all charges, but it was agreed that he would do community service on the weekends. The first time Edgar saw Buggins Swamp, he was fishing cigarette cartons from it. Dirty as it was, he was thrilled that creatures could survive the stew.

His backpack stirred again, and then it squeaked. Edgar knelt down by the water’s edge and carefully pulled the pack around to his front. He unzipped it and smiled inside. He’d read that the crocodile has the strongest bite force ever recorded, stronger than the Tyrannosaurus Rex (though he wasn’t sure how they tested such a theory), and these weren’t just any crocodiles. These were Nile crocodiles. Anyone who knew anything about reptiles knew this was the king. The eggs had been hard to find, but after months of searching reptile chatrooms and black market websites, he found them. For now, they were babies, so Edgar handled them fine, but not without caution. This species killed 300 people per year. He felt a twinge of pain behind his left eye and settled back on his haunches to rub his temple.

Aunt Jolene didn’t change her mind about Saint May’s all at once. After Edgar finished his community service, he fell into a semi-regular routine. He got an after-school job at Some Like It Hot and kept his reptile collection to a bare minimum – one iguana named Dante. Around this time, the kids from school, led by Pip Stafford, started calling him Lizard Boy.

Lizard Boy eats flies for breakfast!
I heard Lizard Boy will eat your dog if you’re not careful!
Ew!
His dad shot himself just to get away from him.

Edgar felt alone, except when he was with his iguana. He let it sleep on his pillow. Aunt Jolene despised the thing, and constantly worried she would find it in her shower, but she told herself that she owed it to her late sister to take care of Edgar, and thought the lizard might keep him company at the very least. But, why did it have to sleep on his pillow?

Lizzy loves lizards!
I bet he’s a lizard-licker!
Haha-Hoho-Heehee

Aunt Jolene was at work when the coffee shop called. They were concerned. Edgar had been acting, well, stranger. Far off looks, wrong orders, refusing to answer when called by name. And now he was missing from work. Jolene remembered Mrs. Brown’s scream when Edgar’s boa ate her pint-sized dog. She remembered how Edgar mourned when the police removed his animals. She left work early, hoping to find him home with a fever. But Edgar was in the kitchen, cradling his iguana. Two empty wine bottles sat on the counter beside him.

He hiccupped and wobbled toward her. Her lips were red, from the wine she thought, but then she saw the teeth marks on his forearm, deep enough to scar.

Jolene lost it—she wound up and slapped him full in the face. She gave the iguana to a pet store the next day.

Edgar went to Saint May’s Center for mentally disturbed boys when he turned 16, received regular shock treatments for two years, and came home at 18. They couldn’t say what exactly they were treating him for, or whether he was cured of it, but there were too many disturbed boys and not enough beds to bunk them.

He tried to go back to school and get his GED, but he couldn’t remember things anymore. Studying became a terror, and reading was almost impossible. His aunt fought his teachers, blamed Saint May’s and their methods, and blamed herself for ever sending him there. In the end, Edgar dropped out and went back to his job at the coffee shop.

Customers came in for their choice of 21 flavor shots and to gawk at the Lizard Boy. They’d ask if he thought Mrs. Brown (now two years dead) ever forgave him for Cisco’s untimely death. They’d ask if he laid eggs, or shed his skin. When he left work, he got pelted with beer cans, sometimes rocks. And the voices. Looking back, Edgar wasn’t sure if they started before or after Saint May’s, he just knew they wouldn’t leave.

Loony Lizard! Loony Lizard! Loony Lizard!

Edgar returned to his comfort zone. Soon he was unloading a bag of young crocodiles near the water’s edge. Edgar picked up the first crocodile, impossible to tell if it was male or female without probing. He held it right behind the head and gently placed it on the bank. There were eight total. The pain behind his eye swelled and he pulled back his hand as the future-giant slid into the murk. He wasn’t sure about the voices, but the pain had begun after the shock treatments.

One-by-one he freed them, knowing they’d have enough EPA-protected fish to eat, and no competition except for each other. Once they cleared the swamp of resources, they would venture into the pipe that led to town. Perhaps one of two would be caught early, but no one here would know the difference between a regular Florida gator and these foreign monsters, at least not at first. They would grow, maybe up to 20-feet. Maybe longer. And Edgar would wait. He could almost hear the jaws snap. And everyone in town, the ones who threw rocks, his teachers, the doctors at Saint May’s, even Pip Stafford all the way up north would hear it. They’d know.

Loony Lizard!
Mrs. Brown loved that dog, and you killed it.
He barely flinched at the voice, but acknowledged it all the same. “I never meant to hurt Mrs. Brown.”

He remembered a time, before his parents died, when Mrs. Brown made shortbread for him. She’d been a wonderful neighbor. He’d liked her stories, and her little dog. She was the only one he remembered seeing cry after his parents died. “Edgar,” she sniffed, standing at the fence between their yards, not long after the funeral. “When the world gets tough, the tough get going.” She was plump, rosy, and always kind.

How does it feel, Lizzy?

This time, the voice whispered.

To know your daddy shot your own momma? Then killed himself to get away from you.

Edgar washed his hands in the swamp and tugged down his sleeve to cover the scar on his forearm. He pulled another apple from his pocket, turned toward home, and listened to the ripples of the swamp against the shore.