One Picture One Story

Sun Thief

The courtyard flags baked to a flat, dull grey so that the lines of the horizon itself blurred in the heat. To any eyes, it was simply another hellishly hot mid-afternoon with the tarmac steaming. To Akanni though, the flags were a circle and he was the brightly gem-colored master of the rings.

Akanni was a Red-Headed Agama though he looked as if he was actually made of something like a starburst. From a neutral dusty grey morning chameleon, the mark on the mortar, he was made anew under the beating equatorial sun as his blood vibrated and it was released from a deeper, older history. He drank UV light as if it was a hungry spreading ink spill and it bled out into a bright gradating spread of blues, teals and construction cone oranges.

He stood stiffly in the bricks with his chest up and his front legs apart as if he were performing a push-up, the bright mark upon the bland white page. The warning of him the young males saw from within the shrubs of the garden as a monument to them by the females.

Then a shade dropped over the flagstones-a human with its shiny rectangle held up to its face. Akanni stayed still with his sunset-colored head tilted; its black eye steady upon the glass with no dread of the coming giant. The opposite-the approval was what Akanni sought. For three seconds the light of day hit all the angles of every iridescence upon his being, brilliant defender of whatever the courtyard stood for.

With a twitch and a snap of the tail he was gone in between the blocks of house and flagstone-a transient rainbow upon the dull gray.

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