Welcome to Tiny Worlds!
We’re shifting our focus to explore Mexico's eastern coast with twelve-year-old George Perez in the serialized novel: ISLA.
For longer fiction visit Stories, and for flash fiction go to Sketchbook.
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Fronds part on the palapa as the sun makes a late but scheduled appearance. The wave of yesterday has shuffled off, and Kathryn’s face is now unprotected by night. Even without a watch, she knows it’s far too early to be awake after the ripples of the previous days.
She pulls at the covers, their edges weighted down and unwilling to move.
“George,” she mumbles, “you’re hogging the blanket.”
She tugs again, this time gaining a few more inches, answered by a grunt from her bedmate. She squeezes her eyes shut, but they’re no match for the sunlight slipping between the blankets, lighting up her eyelids.
The weight on her feet is unbearable. She twitches, trying to shake off what must be George’s legs. He always sleeps like he’s mid-stride in a marathon, she thinks—arms and legs tossed to opposite corners of the earth.
Another grunt. A low, guttural hiss.
Then something else: a raspy snort, followed by the faint scrape of claws on wood.
Kathryn freezes. Blinks. Her eyes follow the top of the knee-high wall beside her.
Perched on its edge, she sees the shape of gargoyles—dozens—figures she hadn’t noticed the night before. Had it been too dark upon arrival to really take in her surroundings? Likely, considering their path had been lit only by the dull orange glow of streetlights, shadows trailing their every step as they collapsed into the palapa’s makeshift rooftop bed.
“George, what time is it?” she calls out, shielding her eyes from the glare of the sun. No answer.
She turns to George’s pillow—it’s missing. The blankets are pulled back, revealing only the wooden platform... and another one of the gargoyles.
Kathryn sits up.
The breath catches in her throat.
Beside her. Around her. On her foot: iguanas.
They’re draped across the roof like relics, leathery shapes soaking in the sun. Dozens of them. Bumpy, ridged, motionless—except for their eyes. And above, the broken palm fronds of the palapa shift with faint movement. More of them: miniature dinosaurs, shuffling across the rafters, slipping into daylight.
They scatter, claws tapping toward the roof’s edge. The one on her leg doesn’t run. Its eyes flick toward her, slow and deliberate. Its jaw opens slightly, then closes again—regarding her. Watching.
Kathryn scrambles backward, flinging the blanket off her body. The iguana pivots fast, tail whipping like a bullwhip.
She screams. “George?!”
In seconds, she’s half-hopping, half-sliding down the stairwell, skipping every third step like they’re on fire. She grips the banister with one hand, the other arm overflowing with clothes, her purse clamped to her chest like a life vest.
Iguanas scatter ahead of her—startled, cold, and not nearly fast enough for Kathryn’s descent. She lets out another shriek as one skitters beneath her foot, and nearly rides it like a skateboard.
At the bottom of the stairs—blocking the final step like a bouncer at a jungle nightclub—sits the largest iguana she’s ever seen. It doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t blink. Just stares.
She does not stop to negotiate.
She vaults the last step, sidesteps the lizard with a strangled yelp, and sprints past the faded sign: Palacio de Garrobo.
And then she’s gone—charging barefoot down the paseo like the morning’s been on fire since dawn.
George hears her first—another scream, echoing off the buildings, carried by the wind out to sea.
Then he sees her: standing at the edge of the beach, frantically looking in every direction. Her arms are piled high with clothes and a bag, half open, contents spilling onto the ground.
“Mom?” George yells.
He hops over a low wall along the paseo, spills to the ground, nearly planting his face in the sand. He recovers and quickly closes the distance. Kathryn is panting, her hair as wild as her expression.
“That place—the Palacio—!” she gasps. She drops everything, letting it fall in a heaping pile. “Effing monsters! All over me when I woke up! Where were you? I was— they were on my body… legs… your pillow! Where have you been?”
The Lion joins them, his face caught somewhere between concern and… something else. Curiosity? Amusement?
“Mom, wha—?”
“I can’t…” she stammers, still trying to catch her breath. “Monsters, George!”
George tries to calm her—she’s nearly hyperventilating. Monsters? He doesn’t know what to make of it. To him, his mother has clearly lost her mind.
Suddenly, she spots something. Her eyes go wide.
She points and screams, “Monsters!”
George and the Lion turn.
An iguana, nestled in the sand nearby, has shifted a few inches—from the shade of a palm into the full sun. Kathryn backs up, tripping over her coat, nearly crab-walking away.
Stepping forward, the Lion moves instinctively—not protectively, but to create a visual barrier between Kathryn and the creature.
“Garrobo,” he says softly. “Aterrador, pero dócil.”
Kathryn looks up at him, then at George. Her face says what her mouth doesn’t: What did he just say?
George glances at the iguana, then at the man.
The Lion looks up the walk from where Kathryn has just run. His eyes squint knowingly. “Garrobo… maybe you say iguana?”
Kathryn throws her hands over her face and screams again—then collapses, flat on the sand. Winded. A mess. Like someone shot her out of bed from a cannon.
“We’re leaving, George. Today.”
George doesn’t respond right away, but the shape of his face changes. This was not at all what he thought might happen—having the magic carpet yanked out from underneath just as it might’ve been going skyward.
Might have. He didn’t know anything for sure.
What he did know was that everything was in freefall.
It had been less than twenty-four hours since they’d arrived. And yet, somewhere in his mind, he thought they’d be deep in the jungle by now. Maybe they’d have found the treasure already.
He was so bad at figuring this stuff out—adult stuff. And time? Time was definitely not on his side right now, not with the ground rushing up to meet him.
Kathryn, still on the ground—breath ragged, clothes scattered—takes another look around for the leathery beasts.
The Lion offers her a hand. She doesn’t take it.
He extends it again, adds a small, complimentary smile.
“Roberto,” he says.
George watches her consider it—and watches a smile on Roberto’s face take shape. He hadn’t been sure that face could smile. In some ways, it looks painful, forgotten: the flecks of gray in his beard like paint chips that might flake off if the smile widened or stayed too long.
But it does.
Kathryn waves a hand—no thanks—as she shifts in the sand. She looks from Roberto to George, her eyes focusing on the boy.
“I know why we’re here,” she says.
George’s eyes go wide. The plane. The cab. The lies he was ready to tell.
“But…” is all he can manage.
Kathryn dusts off her pants, steadying herself as she stands. She runs a hand through her hair, shaping it out of her face as much as brushing off the sand. George sees her now, the mid-morning light brightening her face. For a moment, she’s not Mom, Mother, or even Kathryn—she has the look of a benched quarterback being called in at the last moment. The clutch player who doesn’t need swagger to get it done. She just does it.
With a slight frown on her face she says, “I’m not stupid. I’ve read the journal. Many times.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
Kathryn never bent down to talk to George. She never squatted or met him at eye level, always keeping her distance—that gene the rest of her family had been gifted but skipped her entirely. The warmth that seemed to come so easy to everyone else felt like an ill-fitting mask when she tried to wear it. So she didn’t. She’d stopped even trying it on. That was just who she was. Is.
“Because…” her tongue settles on her teeth for a moment, choosing the words, “the world needs dreamers, George. I’m not one of them. That was never my role, it was your father’s.”
Kathryn glances up the paseo, past the few tourists, and down to the beach. For a long moment, she looks out at the water, scanning the horizon, letting the sun climb just a few inches higher.
“And those stories—the myths, the belief in allegory, in good and evil. Oh, how he could spin a tale…” Kathryn smiles, remembering. “I loved him for it. I was enchanted by it. And I saw him enchant you, too.”
George looks at her, confused, trying to follow the trail.
Kathryn’s eyes harden on him for just a moment as she says, “They’re really good stories.”
The splash of waves stop for just a heartbeat as George considers what he’s hearing. Something like a tea kettle whistle rises in his ears as hear her say again and again:
They’re… really… good… stories.
He opens his mouth to speak but the words snag and stumble as he tries to form them.
“Are you saying…” George’s throat tightens. It’s not just disappointment—it’s an entire history unraveling. Like watching a star go out, and realizing you’d been navigating by its light. “He made it up?”
Kathryn doesn’t answer. But she doesn’t have to, her face writes it plainly. Unmistakably.
And then it surfaces—uninvited. His father’s voice, tucked in the back of George’s mind like a dog eared page, from the bedtime story that lit the fire, a whisper in a half-lit room: “This isn’t ‘X marks the spot.’ There is no spot. Just riddles and rumors.”
As his mind spins through the moments trying to cajole details from his father he hears the words with a deafening echo: “Maps don’t show the world as it is, Jorge. They show how someone imagined it might be.”
George swallows hard. The words cycle through him—riddles and rumors, imagined lands. Had he been chasing smoke?
His chest tightens. He can’t look at her, not directly, but he sees the tilt of her head, the way her eyes pull at the corners. Sympathy? The kind you give someone who’s still clinging to magic.
Was it all made up?
Then Roberto breaks the silence, “It’s there.”
They turn.
Roberto raises a stumped finger toward the horizon. “Finding it is not hard. What matters is why.”
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You stuck gold with the scene on the beach, J. We are on a roll now. I got a good laugh out of the translation of garrobo, Palace of Iguanas. Ha!
IGUANAS! Urk.
That's a hell of a last line, J.