Chronicles of Dex the Bearded Dragon: The Terrarium 500 (Part 15)
Chronicles of Dex the Bearded Dragon: The Terrarium 500 (Part 15)
Dex did not startle easily. He merely, on occasion, relocated with unusual speed.
The vacuum cleaner had come through that afternoon in its usual thunderous, upright fashion, and Dex, who maintained an official policy of total indifference toward the machine while privately tracking its every pass along the baseboards with the sharp, unblinking attention of a sentry, had puffed his beard at it exactly once, out of principle, before allowing curiosity to win out over dignity and watching the whole roaring business cross the room and back. By the time Mike wound the cord up and the house fell back into its ordinary quiet, something about the noise and the hum and his own small, private burst of alarm had left Dex thoroughly keyed up and, paradoxically, ready for a nap, and it was in that particular buzzing, unspent state that he closed his eyes on the warm rock and went somewhere else entirely.
He opened them again in a garage that smelled of rubber and cut grass, fluorescent light bouncing off a floor painted with a single bold stripe, and beyond the open bay door, stretching off into improbable distance, a racetrack built entirely out of garden hose tunnels and old aquarium glass, looping and diving and catching the light like something built by an engineer with an unusually specific childhood. A banner overhead, hand-lettered in a confident, looping script, announced this as the Terrarium 500, and stitched to the banner's corner, small and easy to miss unless you were looking for it, an even smaller patch read Defending Champion: D. Dragon.
His car was waiting for him nose-out in the third bay, a low, gleaming thing built from a repurposed matchbox shell with his name lettered along the side in flame decals he had definitely not approved but found, on reflection, difficult to argue with, and clustered around its open hood were his pit crew, a brisk, no-nonsense trio of pillbugs in identical coveralls who communicated entirely in a series of confident, rolling gestures and had his tires checked, his mirrors angled, and a tiny helmet fitted to his head before he had fully finished admiring the flame decals.
"You're up against Sparky again," said the lead pillbug, not looking up from the engine, in the tone of someone delivering both a fact and a warning in the same breath, and Dex followed her gaze across the garage to where a hamster of unnerving intensity was already vibrating gently inside a wheel shaped car of his own, cheeks stuffed with what Dex could only assume was several hours' worth of pre-race fuel, eyes fixed on some middle distance only he could see. "Beat you by a whisker last season," Sparky said, apropos of nothing, to the windshield in front of him. "Whole. Whisker." Dex, who had absolutely no memory of a previous season, decided the most dignified response was to say nothing and settle more firmly into his own considerably more composed vehicle.
Overhead, mounted on a rafter with the easy authority of someone who had never once doubted his own microphone technique, a parrot in a checkered vest was already deep into pre-race commentary, a rolling, enthusiastic play-by-play of absolutely nothing happening yet that nonetheless somehow built real tension, and when the two cars finally rolled up to the starting line, painted stripe gleaming under the lights, his voice climbed to a pitch that rattled the garage windows. "Ladies and gentlemen, LIZARDS and RODENTS, start your engines, because the defending champion is looking cool, calm, and suspiciously unbothered, and Sparky, folks, Sparky has had FOUR sunflower seeds in the last ten minutes and I don't like what that's going to do to his cornering."
The flag dropped, and the garage door's ordinary daylight gave way, on the other side, to the first hose tunnel, a long green throat of curved plastic lit at intervals by whatever impossible dream logic ran this place, and Dex's tires found their grip half a second before his nerve did, both cars launching forward into a straightaway that bent, almost immediately, into the sort of tight, banked turn no sensible engineer would have approved in daylight.
Sparky took the turn like a small, furred catastrophe, cutting inside with a spray of gravel and a gleeful, wordless shriek that Dex felt more than heard, and for one dizzying stretch the two cars ran wheel to wheel through a second tunnel, close enough that Dex could see, in painful detail, exactly how many sunflower seeds a truly committed hamster could consume before a race and still function at this velocity, right up until the tunnel spat them both out into open air and a hazard neither car's crew had apparently thought to mention: a vast, sleeping, marmalade colored shape stretched directly across the track, one half-closed eye tracking the cars with the mild, unbothered interest of a creature who had clearly wandered onto this track from somewhere else entirely and had no intention of moving for anyone's championship.
Sparky went left in a full, uncontrolled panic that sent him briefly airborne off a berm; Dex, with considerably less panic and considerably more instinct than he'd known he possessed, felt his own long tail whip out hard against the floor of the car, an old, ordinary reflex he'd used his whole life for nothing more dramatic than not falling off a branch, and discovered, mid-drift, that the exact same reflex that kept a bearded dragon steady on a swaying limb also happened, under the right and extremely specific dream circumstances, to correct the slide of a race car at speed, the tail cracking against an imaginary rudder only he seemed to have and hauling the car back onto its line a whisker's width from the marmalade obstacle's unconcerned tail.
The parrot, somewhere above and behind them now, had reached a volume Dex would previously have called structurally unsound. "HE USED THE TAIL, folks, I don't know what that WAS but he used the TAIL," and Dex, adrenaline singing through him in a way no basking rock had ever managed, leaned into the next turn and found that once discovered, the trick did not need to be found again, only trusted, tail cracking left and right against each curve like a rudder he'd been driving without for his entire life up to this point.
The last tunnel opened onto a straightaway striped in checkered light, Sparky's car recovering fast and close on his flank, close enough that Dex could hear, over his own engine, the hamster's small, furious muttering about whiskers and seasons and unfinished business, and the two of them crossed whatever passed for a finish line in this world so close together that even the parrot, for one full and uncharacteristic second, said nothing at all, before the banner overhead flickered and resolved itself, by whatever margin dream physics allow, in Dex's favor.
Sparky took it, in the end, with more grace than his pre-race muttering had promised, climbing out of his car to deliver a single firm, seed-scented nod that Dex understood, in the universal language of competitors, to mean next season, and the pillbug crew hoisted him bodily onto the roof of his own car for a lap of honor he had not requested but found, once underway, entirely appropriate to his position, the parrot narrating every inch of it with the reverence usually reserved for actual history.
He woke on the flat rock still faintly buzzing, the vacuum long since put away, the house gone quiet around him, and found Mike crouched at the glass with the particular expression of a man checking that his lizard's rapid, twitching breathing was excitement and not the beginning of a problem. "Big feelings about the vacuum, huh, bud," Mike said, and Dex, beard still faintly flared from a race that had ended several dream-hours and zero real ones ago, settled back onto the warm stone and decided, privately and with considerable satisfaction, that his tail had apparently been steering him correctly his whole life, and no one had thought to mention it.
Dex is a bearded dragon. If you keep one, our bearded dragon care guide covers the lighting, heat and diet the real ones need.