Chronicles of Dex the Bearded Dragon: The Dragon Who Flew (Part 8)
He had never before considered that the ceiling of his world might also be its floor, until one evening showed him the difference from above.
Deep clean day came once a month, and Dex had long since classified it as a siege: the sand scooped out in great gritty handfuls, the driftwood branch carried off to the sink, the water dish upended, and the ruler of 120 gallons evicted onto the couch cushions to wait out the renovation of his own kingdom. He had been fourteen minutes into the eviction, lying across the back of the couch in the last of the window light and maintaining an expression of total disapproval, when Mike scooped him up, settled him in the crook of one arm, and said, "Come on. You've never seen the upstairs."
The leaving of the ground was the part he would turn over in his mind for a long time afterward, filed carefully in the part of his mind reserved for things that happen exactly once and change the shape of everything that comes after. Every step of the staircase lifted him higher than he had ever been lifted, higher than the driftwood branch, higher than the top of the heat lamp, higher than the lid he had never once considered climbing, and the vertigo of it, the sheer unfamiliar business of having nothing beneath him but Mike's forearm and a great deal of air, ran through his small body like cold water, thrilling and terrible in equal measure. For a full two seconds he nearly forgot that he was a lord of anything at all. His shoulders itched first, then ached, and he would maintain to the end of his days that on that staircase something along his back had opened, two vast, invisible wings veined like driftwood leaves, unfurling with a slowness that felt less like growth and more like remembering. He decided, as a creature of his standing was entitled to decide about his own anatomy, that he had probably always had them and simply never required them before.
Then Mike stopped at the rail of the landing, and the wonder arrived and did not leave, because Dex looked down.
His whole world was there, laid out below him like a diorama built by someone who loved him, the terrarium itself smaller than he had ever imagined it, a lit rectangle glowing amber in the dim living room, no bigger from that height than a shoebox left open on a shelf. Emptied for cleaning, with the lamp still burning over bare glass, it looked less like a kingdom than a stage waiting for its one essential actor. His basking rock had shrunk to a mere pebble on the floor beside it, his water dish to the size of a dropped coin, his back corner (he was almost embarrassed to note) barely a shadow at all, and he hung there over the rail a moment simply to feel the strangeness of being a sovereign who could, for once, see the entire border of his sovereignty at a single glance.
Then Mike turned to the landing window, and beyond the glass lay Whiskey's yard, the fence line he had only ever known as a straight gray edge revealed from above as a crooked, generous sprawl of grass and shade, and there, unmistakable even from that height, a marmalade shape dozing in a last patch of sun, small and orange and entirely unaware it was being observed by something with wings. It struck him that this was the first time he had ever seen the whole of that boundary at once, the one he had spent his life respecting through glass, smaller from up here and stranger and, for one soft dusk moment, no more dangerous looking than a fallen leaf. Farther out the neighborhood unrolled itself in rooftops and driveways and one long pale ribbon of road, ordinary things rendered strange and lovely by the simple fact that no reptile of his acquaintance had ever been permitted to see them like this before, and Dex, a creature of considerable standing but, in that moment, mostly just a small animal held up to a window in a vast blue dusk, felt something in his chest for which he had no mock-royal word at all.
He was returned to his kingdom twenty minutes later, fresh sand leveled, branch reinstalled, water dish refilled, the lid lowered with the soft click that had always, until that evening, marked the top of the world. Mike stayed a minute at the glass. "Different from up there, huh," he said, and went to wash the scoop. Dex climbed straight to the top of the driftwood branch, the highest point his 120 gallons offered, and stayed there long after the lamp went off, looking not along the glass toward Whiskey's yard as he usually did, but up, at the dark shape of the ceiling, and past it to the landing he now knew was there. He flexed his shoulders once, experimentally, the way a king might test a crown he suspected had been made for someone else, and found the itch still there, patient, as though the wings had simply gone back to waiting for a staircase.
Dex is a bearded dragon. If you keep one, our bearded dragon care guide covers the lighting, heat and diet the real ones need.