detaching

On Sunday, my brothers went swimming and inadvertently left the screen door open, allowing a lizard to enter the house. Gross. It remained safe until today when my mom saw it standing motionless in the family room. She said it was big--about 10-12" (I don't know how lizard stories compare to fish stories). She was holding my brothers' textbooks at the time and decided that she couldn't let this opportunity pass, that she had to sacrifice one of the books (those were her exact words). She took my brother's math book and whacked the lizard. Some of its guts splattered on the book. The lizard landed on its back and my mom grabbed one of the bricks she had prepared just for this situation. She explained to me that she had been waiting for that lizard to come out of hiding and when the time came, she couldn't spend it looking for something to throw. After she hit the lizard's body with the brick, its body broke into two pieces. Its detached tail flipped and wiggled sporatically. My mom put a brick on the tail and confirmed it dead. She was very thankful that she caught the lizard on a platic mat rather than the carpet. That should make clean-up a whole lot easier.