Chronicles of Dex the Bearded Dragon: The Afternoon in the Grass (Part 6)
Chronicles of Dex the Bearded Dragon: The Afternoon in the Grass (Part 6)
He had ruled a great deal of territory in his life, some four hundred square inches of it precisely, and none of it had prepared him for the sheer, unregulated size of a backyard.
Mike carried the mesh pen out across the lawn that Saturday like a man delivering a verdict, unfolding its collapsible hoops into a low dome of black netting staked into the grass, and when he reached into the terrarium and lifted Dex out with both hands cupped the way you'd carry something you were fairly sure was about to have opinions, Dex understood, dimly, that whatever was about to happen had never happened before. He was set down in the center of the pen on a carpet of grass that did not behave like anything he had basked on previously, cool and faintly damp and alive in a way his flat basking rock had never bothered to be, and for a long moment he simply sat there, absorbing the fact that the sun overhead was not a sixty watt bulb on a timer but an actual star, unfiltered, enormous, and entirely indifferent to his comfort settings. The wind arrived a second later, a real wind, gusting low across the yard and combing through the grass blades and up under his chin in a way no exhaust fan in the reptile aisle had ever replicated, and Dex flattened himself instinctively, gripping the earth with all four feet, cataloguing the sensation in the part of his mind reserved for things that were probably fine but bore watching.
It took him the better part of ten minutes to decide he was not, in fact, under attack, and once he arrived at that conclusion he did what any creature of his standing would do, which was to reassess the entire afternoon as a territorial acquisition rather than an ordeal. This was, he reasoned, simply more kingdom. The grass ran on farther than his eye had ever needed to focus before, the fence line stood in for a horizon he'd previously had to imagine, and he began to patrol the inside edge of the mesh at his customary sovereign pace, chin lifted, throat working slightly, feeling, for the first time in his memory, appropriately scaled to his own sense of himself. He had just settled into a particularly fine puddle of real, unfiltered sunlight, warming his flanks with the smug satisfaction of a monarch touring newly annexed land, when something dropped out of the maple tree with a clatter of wingbeats and landed on the grass eight inches from the netting.
It was blue, or bluish, with a crest and a harsh, unbothered sort of intelligence in its eye, and it was, Dex registered with some alarm, easily twice his size. He had never seen anything like it. Whiskey, for all its terrible orange bulk, at least had the decency to stay on the correct side of a sliding glass door and regard him with something like reverence; this creature had simply arrived, uninvited, mid territory tour, and was now tilting its head at him with the exact expression of a landlord inspecting a tenant's furniture. Dex drew himself up to his full height, puffed his beard black, and delivered the arm wave, slow, deliberate, unmistakably a warning to lesser beings, the same gesture that had once sent Whiskey's tail twitching in what he'd always chosen to interpret as respect. The jay did not flinch. It hopped a half step closer, cocked its head to the other side as if to get a better angle on him, let out one short, rude, appraising chirp, and then, with magnificent and total indifference, turned its attention to a beetle in the grass and ate it. Dex filed the whole encounter away in the part of his mind reserved for beings who had simply never heard of him, a category he had not previously needed.
Mike came back out an hour later to find him sunk low in the grass in a state that was not quite sulking and not quite awe, and scooped him back up toward the pen's little zippered door. "Big world out here, huh, buddy," he said, not unkindly, tucking Dex against his forearm for the walk back inside, and Dex, riding the familiar warmth of Mike's hands through the unfamiliar wideness of the yard, found he had no clever rebuttal ready for once. He looked back once at the grass, and the fence line, and the tree the jay had vanished back into without so much as a farewell nod, and understood, in the vague, unhurried way he understood most large things, that his territory had just gotten considerably harder to define, and that he was, for reasons he couldn't yet file anywhere, rather looking forward to finding out what else was out there.