Chronicles of Dex the Bearded Dragon: The Guest Tank (Part 12)
Chronicles of Dex the Bearded Dragon: The Guest Tank (Part 12)
He had spent his whole life being visited, and it turned out there was a very different feeling to being the one who showed up.
Dex had ridden in the travel tub before, twice now if he was counting, and both times the arrangement had held to a certain unspoken contract: a short indignity, a destination not of his choosing, and, eventually, a return to the 120 gallons that were unmistakably his own. The morning Mike packed a duffel bag alongside the travel tub, Dex understood, in the slow dawning way a monarch understands that a coup is underway, that this particular trip was going to break the contract. There was talk, delivered in the same unhurried voice Mike used for things he expected accepted without argument, of a few days away and a friend named Denise who kept reptiles of her own and had agreed, as a favor, to keep one more, and Dex spent the car ride, six turns this time, a new record he filed away with real bitterness, working out that for the first time in his memory he was not being taken somewhere and brought home again. He was being left.
The tank Denise set him up in was, Dex noted with the swift, wounded precision of a creature auditing an insult, some forty gallons smaller than his own and situated in a back bedroom that smelled of someone else's laundry, its basking rock a flatter and far less distinguished stone than the one he had left behind, its heat lamp humming at a faintly wrong pitch, and its back corner (every terrarium worth respecting had one, he had always assumed, though this one's felt more like an afterthought than a birthright) barely deep enough to disappear into. He took stock of the place the way a displaced head of state takes stock of a hotel suite not built to his specifications, cataloguing every shortfall for a memoir he would never write, and reflected, not for the first time, that a creature of his standing ought not to have to tolerate a demotion of this scale more than once in a lifetime. He filed the whole arrangement away in the part of his mind reserved for Diminished Circumstances, Temporary, He Hoped.
He was still composing his objections when he noticed he was not alone in the room, because on a low shelf against the far wall sat a second tank, wide and shallow and carpeted in a chaos of leaf litter that no self-respecting bearded dragon would have tolerated for an afternoon, and out of that leaf litter, with no ceremony whatsoever, emerged a blue-tongued skink named Nettie, thick-bodied and entirely unbothered, who took one look at the new arrival and delivered her opinion of him by flattening her body, hissing once, and unfurling a tongue the startling blue of a struck match in his general direction. Dex, who had a threat display of his own and had never in his life declined to use it, puffed his beard to its fullest black and answered in kind, and for a long moment the two of them held their positions across eleven feet of unfamiliar carpet, a bearded dragon and a skink each fully convinced the room belonged to them, until Nettie, apparently satisfied that her point had been made, simply turned around and burrowed back into the leaf litter without further comment, which struck Dex, if nothing else, as an admirably economical way to run a kingdom.
Over the following days a rhythm established itself that Dex would not have chosen and could not entirely argue with either. Nettie showed no interest in basking rocks or morning ceremony, preferring instead to dig a fresh burrow each afternoon as though the previous one had personally offended her, and she ate with an enthusiasm so blunt and total, a whole chunk of melon gone in one motion, no pause for reflection, no pretense of restraint, that Dex found himself almost admiring the honesty of it even as he filed her table manners away in the part of his mind reserved for Conduct Unbecoming a Terrarium. She, for her part, seemed to regard his basking hour as an elaborate and faintly ridiculous production, and said as much in her own way, which was mostly a long unimpressed stare from the leaf litter, though on the fourth evening, when Denise's grandson banged too hard on the glass of Dex's tank, it was Nettie who hissed first, rising half out of her burrow to glare the boy off before Dex had even finished puffing his beard, an act of alliance so unexpected that Dex spent the rest of the night turning it over, filing it at last not among his Grievances but in the part of his mind reserved for Respect, Grudging, Possibly Earned.
Mike arrived on the fifth day with the duffel bag over one shoulder and the travel tub under his arm, and crouched down to look through the glass at Dex with the particular fondness of a man checking that his lizard had survived being someone else's houseguest. "Made a friend, huh," he said, glancing over at the skink tank and back again, in the same dry, unhurried tone he used for most things that quietly pleased him, and Dex said nothing, being incapable of it, and allowed himself to be lifted into the tub without his usual token resistance. He caught one last look at Nettie on the way out, half buried and entirely unbothered, and found, riding home through turns he no longer had any interest in counting, that he was thinking less about the diminished basking rock or the wrong-pitched lamp and more about what it meant that his kingdom, apparently, could survive being handed to someone else for a few days, and what else out there might run on rules entirely different from his own and still, somehow, deserve a nod of respect.
Dex is a bearded dragon. If you keep one, our bearded dragon care guide covers the lighting, heat and diet the real ones need.