Secret Lives by Jeff VanderMeer Page B

boyfriend.) Among her many talents are cooking and an appreciation of good beer. But these particular talents do not constitute her secret life. No, her secret life involves another talent entirely. She’s had this talent for many years, but only recently became reacquainted with it. As a child, she first discovered her secret proclivity, but it long ago became enmeshed in the wash and warp of early memories, as distant as her first encounter with a bumblebee, her first lick of ice cream, her first ferris wheel ride. (Alone, sitting cross-legged in the sun on warm grass, next to a large, long rock eaten through by lichen. The green smell of grass and distant flowers. The feel of the tickly ground. And then the sly scuttle onto the stone: a small brown lizard or gecko, head bobbing, throat pink and throbbing. A trickling giggle from Gayle at the sight, a subconscious thought—a wisp of a thought, lighter than cotton candy—and her secret talent manifested, the lizard become as skillful as any Catskills song-and-dance man.)
    Recently, Gayle’s secret life manifested itself again. Sitting alone outside on her deck in the backyard, contented as she sipped a bottle of beer, a thin line of green—thin as a papercut—sped across the edge of her vision. Turning, she caught a glimpse of a tiny reptilian tail, a clever, narrow eye, claws light as sharpened pencil points gripping wood. And suddenly, Gayle remembered the first lizard, buried in her past, and what had happened on that long-ago afternoon.
    As she remembered it, the lizard on the edge of her deck rose onto its hindlegs and began to sway, foot forward, foot back, foot to the left, foot to the right. And slowly, by the ones and the twos and then the dozens, a torrent of lizards scuttled up to her deck and began to dance and gyrate and even do a little soft shoe, while she watched with a sense of astonishment, but also fear, because she had no idea how she had conjured up this vision, or how to unconjure it. Bright eyes staring up at her. The almost-silent scrape and patter of lizard foot and lizard tail. The faint sounds of delight issuing from their throats. Was she drunk? Were they? And why just lizards? She had no answer to any of these questions. People rarely understand the whys of their secret lives. Sometimes your secret life is just thrust upon you, without explanation.
    But later: in deep winter, in the bronzed dusk of a day when the snowflakes fell slowly and silently onto her deck while the lizards gathered around her despite the chill, Gayle felt a sudden upwelling of emotion, a surge of mingled joy and sadness in which every detail around her was magnified and more intense; it made her shudder and wrap her arms around her shoulders. And she no longer felt the need to know why .

THE SECRET LIVES OF
    JOHN AND MAUREEN DAVEY
    John and Maureen Davey lead productive, fast-paced lives as the founders and owners of the world infamous “Jayde Design: Building, Computing, & Publishing—Consultancy, Contracting, & Design,” although recently their company split like rapidly mutating cells into “Jayde Design: Publishing, Distributing, & Computing—Consultancy, Contracting, & Design” and “Jayde Designs: Building, Management, & Surveying—Consultancy, Contracting, & Design.” To simplify matters, John sometimes makes up letterhead for himself that reads “John Davey: Builder by Trade, Surveyor by Profession, Writer by Hobby.”
    “Sometimes,” Maureen has been known to say to John, “I think we have taken on too much. Sometimes I think there are small third-world countries that have less work to do than Jayde Design and Jayde Designs.”
    Then John smiles his clandestine smile and the sudden light in his eyes and the light in her eyes display a perfect harmony of secrecy.
    Neither he nor Maureen ever let on to their friends about the particulars of their secret life, however—a life they carve out for themselves in the minutes, the seconds, the moments,