Chronicles of Dex the Bearded Dragon: The Dragon Who Flew (Part 8)
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 the dream showed him the difference from above.
Dex had been dozing on the basking rock in the unbothered way that only a reptile of considerable self-regard can doze, fourteen minutes into what he privately classified as his third nap of the afternoon, when the heat lamp's glow softened at the edges the way things did just before sleep took a lizard fully into its custody, and he understood, in the specific and unbothered way dreams announce themselves to those wise enough to recognize one, that he was no longer strictly within the confines of the 120 gallons he called his own. His shoulders itched first, then ached, then simply opened, and where there had been only the plain gray-brown hide of a bearded dragon there were now two vast, membranous wings, veined like driftwood leaves, unfurling with a slowness that felt less like growth and more like remembering. He flexed them once, experimentally, the way a king might test a crown he suspected had been made for someone else, and 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.
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. The first flap lifted him clean off the driftwood branch, and the vertigo of it, the sheer unfamiliar business of having nothing beneath him but air, ran through his small body like cold water, thrilling and terrible in equal measure, and for a full two seconds he nearly forgot that he was a lord of anything at all. Then the wonder arrived and did not leave. He rose past the lid he had never once considered climbing, past the top of the heat lamp, out into an evening the size of which he had no prior instrument to measure, and 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 a dark room, no bigger from that height than a shoebox left open on a shelf. His basking rock had shrunk to a mere pebble, 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 hovered there 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.
Beyond it, Mike's house spread its rooms like a shell pried open, gray and patient in the low light, and beyond that, close enough that his breath caught, 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 patch of sun, small and orange and entirely unaware it was being observed by something with wings. It struck him, hovering there, 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 dream soft 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 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 aloft in a vast blue dusk, felt something in his chest for which he had no mock-royal word at all.
He woke on the rock exactly where he had fallen asleep, the heat lamp ordinary again, the driftwood branch its usual modest size, no wings, no missing ceiling, only Mike's face somewhere above the glass, peering in with the particular fondness of a man checking that his lizard hadn't overheated himself into a nap coma. "You were twitching," Mike said, not unkindly, "must've been some dream." Dex said nothing, being incapable of it, and settled back onto the warm stone, looking out at the water dish and the branch and the far pane of glass beyond which Whiskey would eventually appear, and found that he was looking at all of it a little differently now, the way a person looks at a familiar street after seeing it once from a plane, small and strange and beautiful. He wondered, with the unhurried curiosity of a sovereign who had, technically, just returned from a great height, what else about his small and considerable kingdom he had simply never had cause to look down on.