Where the Wicked Witch of the West failed, I succeeded: I killed Toto. I made this discovery on a dark October morning as a malevolent breeze howled outside, making the air feel as stiff and cold as the limbs of my dead lizard. I stared silently as my father, wearing my mother’s dishwashing gloves, gingerly placed a deflated version of my Toto into a shoebox. My head spun with despair and remorse as I tried to make sense of my pet’s untimely demise.

Some years earlier, I had decided that I needed a bearded dragon. Dogs were forbidden in our building, my parents loathed cats, I feared birds, and our allegedly harmless catfish devoured anything we put into her tank. A gentle reptile seemed the ideal familiar. Unfortunately my parents disagreed, and placed Herculean tasks between me and my lizard.

As a first labor, my parents proclaimed that in order to win a pet lizard I would have to score a hat trick. In six prior seasons of ice hockey, my total goals could have been counted on a bearded dragon’s taloned toes; three goals in one game seemed an impossibility. I came frustratingly close on more than one occasion, though, pestering teammates and coaches for extra
shifts. Still, lack of opportunity, talent, or luck kept me from my prize. I yearned for a more favorable deal.

Opportunity presented itself as I began to study for my mid-year exam in math, the subject that had always given me the most trouble in school. My parents concocted another deal they assumed would defeat me: a lizard if I scored higher than ninety-five percent. I reviewed every topic covered in class weeks before the test, and worked doggedly through practice problems for days before the exam. Time dragged its feet as I awaited my results over winter break, but in early January I moved a new cage, lizard and all, into my bedroom.

I agonized over a name for my new pet, and finally decided upon an homage to my favorite childhood movie. Then the real labors began. Everything I knew about caring for Toto I gleaned from a pamphlet written for children. It took me weeks to learn how to feed him live crickets without letting the insects escape and fill my room with an unwanted midnight chorus. I struggled to position his water so that he could bathe in it without creating a crunchy soup out of the crushed walnut shells that lined the bottom of his tank. I cleaned up after Toto, and imagined that I had trained him to respond to his name. My lizard was a grateful companion: he would often sit on my shoulder as I did my homework, tearing holes in my favorite shirts with his claws and mindlessly chewing my hair.

For months, Toto was active and happy. Around the time he turned two, however, he stopped eating and his agile movements became lethargic. I fretted that Toto’s decline was my fault, that I had bungled some aspect of lizard husbandry. I tried to nurse him back to health, willfully ignoring the fact that he continued to refuse food and water despite my desperate exhortations. I felt that I needed to cure him as I had seemingly harmed him, on my own; that through devoted effort I could make him well.

But I could not. And so, on a rainy morning in October, I solemnly bore his shoebox-sealed remains through dirty puddles on the way to Lake Michigan, ready to commend my Toto to the deep. The lacquered cardboard floated atop the grey waves for a moment, just long enough for me to wish that somebody would fly by in a tornado and drop a house on my head. All of the weeks and months that I had spent plotting to obtain my lizard, caring for him, basking in his company, and bearing impotent witness to his decline played over and over in my head. “Toto,” I mused wretchedly, “we’re not in Kansas anymore.”