Red Efts

Beginning paragraphs of a work in progress:
It was about the time the newts started to arrive in the back garden—angling with shiny, thin skins around the stones and mosses—that Leonard left. We found dozens of them every day for weeks and weeks, their bright spotted bodies pulling through the grass blades with fine amphibian toes, dotting the whole space with striking orange. They came after the first big rain of September, perhaps a few days after Leonard had taken the last of his things. My daughter Thea found the first one, plucked it up from the damp foliage and carried it between thumb and pointer to the back door of the kitchen so I could see what she had discovered. She held the bright wriggling thing up to me where I sat at the breakfast table, so close I could see each braille-spot speckled along its skin and the bulbous damp of its eyeball.

She had dreams of keeping it in a terrarium on her bedside table (“I’ll feed it and play with it every single day!” she promised), but in the end we agreed it was best to return it to the wild of the mud and the leaves and the rain, where it belonged. So she carried it back to the garden and set it in the patch of wet fallen leaves where she had found it; from the kitchen window I watched her squat down, dress hem just brushing the muddy ground, waiting patiently in her yellow rain boots as it ambled away through the maze of debris fallen from the birches that edged our lawn.

We began to name the newts after a while, recognizing them by their spotting patterns and preferred places of rest around the garden. If they stuck around long enough, they got a name. Favorites were Pablo, Terrance, Mildred, Snatch, Tupper, Ricky, Juliet, Hancock, Ernest and Ladybird. With the names came elaborate personalities and, eventually, grand collective histories and shared interactions within the newt community that had, for one reason or another, sprung up just outside our home. Most were of Thea’s invention; she spent afternoons after school studying their habits and activities, scratching down her findings in a notebook. But the incorporation of their imagined stories into our daily lives was, in the end, probably as much my doing as it was hers. The house had fallen into a grey sort of quiet when Leonard moved out, and I suppose we filled the hushed absence with those newts that simply happened to arrive at the right time.

Photo.