Chronicles of Dex the Bearded Dragon: Gotcha Day (Part 13)
Chronicles of Dex the Bearded Dragon: Gotcha Day (Part 13)
Dex did not know what a year was, precisely, but he had learned to recognize its shape, and its shape looked exactly like this.
Dex had never once, in the whole of his considered life, kept track of an ordinary day, on the grounds that ordinary days did not require tracking, being by definition indistinguishable from the day before and the day after and largely concerned with the reliable business of heat, food, and the long uncontested rule of his basking rock. And yet some private instrument in him, one he could not name and would not have admitted to owning, had learned over the seasons to register a particular kind of morning, the kind where Mike moved through the routine a half step slower than usual, wiping the glass with more care than the glass strictly required, pausing at the driftwood branch to look at nothing in particular for several seconds longer than any task demanded, small deviations Dex had long since taken to filing away in the part of his mind reserved for Evidence Worth Revisiting. This was one of those mornings. Dex could not have said how many times it had come around, numbers of that size sitting well outside the instruments available to a creature who measured most things in cricket counts and degrees of warmth, but he knew, the way he knew rain before it ever touched the glass, that today asked something different of him, and he met it the way he met most things, by rising early, assuming the most dignified posture available, crossing to the center of his territory at a sovereign pace, and waiting to see what the day intended to do about it.
What the day intended, it turned out, was a small ceramic structure, delivered into the enclosure sometime before Dex had fully committed to being awake and positioned with evident care on the sand near the driftwood branch, a squat little turret glazed the color of old stone, with a single arched doorway just large enough for a dragon of reasonable proportions to occupy with maximum ceremony. His first instinct, honed over long experience with unauthorized additions to his territory, was suspicion, and he approached the thing sideways, beard held at a cautious amber, fully prepared to issue whatever ultimatum the circumstances required. But there was no yawning from inside it, no unbothered blinking, no rival tucked behind the little arch waiting to test him, only smooth, sun warmed ceramic that had clearly been sitting under the lamp since well before he woke, and once he had circled it twice and pressed his chin briefly to its threshold, he arrived at the only reasonable conclusion available to a creature of his standing, which was that someone had finally built him a monument, and that the appropriate response was to climb inside immediately and decline to explain himself further.
He stayed in there long enough to do some quiet arithmetic of his own, the kind he rarely allowed himself in full daylight. The tank around him, on the first day he had any memory of it, had smelled entirely of cardboard and unfamiliar hands, and the driftwood branch now worn smooth under his feet had then been a foreign, faintly damp obstacle he had regarded with deep and, in his opinion, entirely justified mistrust for the better part of a week. There had been no orange shape at the window that first year, no smaller shape tucked in beside it either, no ritual of any kind at the glass, no memory yet of grass underfoot in a mesh pen that smelled of a hundred things he still had not fully identified, no waiting room full of strangers, no dream, if it even counted as one, of wind moving beneath wings he did not actually possess. None of it had existed yet, on that first cardboard scented day, and Dex, folded now into a turret built expressly for him a full year of cricket seasons later, found the comparison less like tallying up winnings and more like the particular, quiet surprise of finding an old shed skin in the corner and realizing exactly how much smaller it was than the one he currently wore.
Lunch, when it came, came in the form of three wax worms delivered to the flat rock with a solemnity Dex felt was entirely appropriate to the occasion, an indulgence he understood, from long and careful observation, to be reserved strictly for days that were not ordinary days, and he ate them with the unhurried, deliberate relish of a monarch sampling a course prepared for him alone rather than the usual brisk business of survival. The lamp, when its customary hour came and went, did not click off, and Dex noticed the extra twenty minutes of warmth the way he noticed anything that deviated from schedule, with immediate and total attention, stretching himself flat along the ceramic threshold of his new turret to receive every last available degree of it before that, too, eventually ended.
Mike came by that evening to switch off the last of the lights and crouched at the glass for a while, the way he always seemed to on this particular day, taking in the turret and the empty worm dish and his lizard sprawled the length of still warm ceramic. "Happy Gotcha Day, bud," he said, in the tone Dex had long since filed under fond and entirely too knowing, "one year today, and you've already got yourself a castle. Try to stay humble." Dex did not dignify any of it with so much as a blink, because a year meant nothing to him as a number, only as a shape he was slowly learning to feel arriving. He settled deeper into the turret's small stone shadow as the lamp finally dimmed toward evening, and found himself doing the thing he always seemed to do on days like this without ever quite deciding to, which was wondering, unhurried and more than a little proprietary, what shape the next one might take, and whether it would think to bring a turret of its own.
Dex is a bearded dragon. If you keep one, our bearded dragon care guide covers the lighting, heat and diet the real ones need.