Rosie, Carlitos, and her human servants have abandoned her beloved lair for reasons she couldn’t possibly explain and set off into the unknown, a thing that can be feared and loathed by dogs, dragons, and humans alike.
This is part two of an ongoing adventure. Read the first part here…
Dogs are famous or should we say infamous for their love of cars. No one knows why, but we’ve all seen someone cruising down the highway or pulling up to a stop light with their canine’s head out the window, either blowing in the breeze or checking out their new neighbors for a time, perhaps even barking vociferously to defend their little piece of moving territory. Whether it’s the sights, the smells, the wind in their fur, or the feeling of freedom, a lot of dogs simply love it. For better or worse, Rosie the three-legged dragon – or should I write Three-legged Dragon as it’s her official title now after her exploits have become famous on this blog? – wasn’t one of those dogs. Even if you set aside that Rosie believed she was a dragon instead of a dog, she was far from a fan of cars. In fact, she hated them and perhaps in this regard, we should not blame her too much. We mentioned in the last installment that Rosie lost her leg from cancer, technically known as an osteosarcoma. As a dog who thinks she’s a dragon, she might not remember the details of that traumatic experience and has since concluded her body remains perfect in every possible way, the ideal of dragon-hood and every other hood imaginable if not actual godhood, Rosie associates the car with her time of troubles. The car – not that she really knew what it was – took her too and from the surgery center – not that she knew what that was either – returning her home missing a leg, looking more like the Bride of Frankenstein with an incision from her shoulder across her entire chest than a dragon at the time, and then taking her back over and over again for chemotherapy – not that she knew what was either. Though she did not yet consider herself a dragon even in her own mind and she bore it with a stoic strength most humans would envy, she developed an unconscious association as even people do, fearing and hating the thing she felt somehow responsible even if she had no idea precisely why.
Thus, before Rosie even entered the vehicle her servants had decided to use to abandon her lair during the black out, she had no choice except to make her displeasure known, both about leaving the lair in the first place and being forced to get into the car. Rather than hopping right in the backseat like her generally better behaved little brother Carlitos, the black and white whippet who looked like an old man, she paced around the exterior on her three legs, sizing it up, and letting the entire neighborhood know she was concerned her servants had gone crazy. Could not someone else’s servants come and help her? Not only did hers want to leave behind all the things she held dear for no apparent reason – her treasures, her territory, her special throne – but they weren’t even doing so like a dignified dragon and simply taking flight in the great beyond, or at least like a proper dog and walking away, sniffing everything in sight as they went. They were using some kind of infernal, impossible for her to explain contraption instead.
For several long minutes, Rosie the Three-Legged Dragon circled the vehicle as imperious as her name sake, her silky black fur flashing like actual scales, whining and complaining from deep within her sculpted chest as only an upset dog can do, but here we should pause to understand something about dogs generally. While we might like to believe they are upset or frightened exclusively on their own behalf, and these feelings are a result of concern about their own personal well-being, they have their human servants to worry about. In their own little minds, I, at least, am quite convinced they are frightened for their humans and other furry companions more-so than themselves and just as likely to be wondering why they are sounding an alarm no one seems to be hearing. If they are upset, shouldn’t everyone else be as well? Similarly, this is also most likely the case when they appear to follow a human around the house from room to room, not letting them out of their sight. In our own egocentric minds, we tend to think they’re too attached to us to be left alone for even a single moment. In reality, I believe they’ve concluded in their own way that this particular servant is too incompetent to be left alone and like a mother with a baby, must be kept in sight at all times for fear they will get ourselves in serious trouble, as humans, dogs, and dragons are known to do on occasion.
Whatever the case, Rosie eventually acquiesced to enter the vehicle, but she was no more comfortable inside, whether the car was moving or standing still. Though Carlitos was content to lay quietly in the back, cozy next to her preferred human servant, Rosie insisted on standing up, perched on the seat on her three legs. She was far too tall for the space unfortunately, resulting in a contorted position, as though a spider-thin doll was jammed into a box and then the lid was jammed on. If it was a limousine, perhaps her head and neck would’ve stuck out the sunroof in a scene from an 80s movie and she could depart in style, but alas, it wasn’t. Beyond any physical discomfort, Rosie was panting and whining the entire time as though she were being taken to the pound, not that she knew what one was, possibly imagined that anyone would voluntarily give a creature as miraculous as she was up, much less for dead assuming she knew what that was as well, or that she could be anywhere except her lair with her servants. The problem was that she wasn’t there anymore for reasons impossible to understand when one didn’t know what reasons were in the first place, and the entire experience was monstrously, deeply, terrifyingly, shakingly confusing as a result. There was also the reality that dogs and dragons have a very limited understanding of space. They mark their territory based on the ground they can cover in a relatively short patrol. The idea that something exists beyond those borders – that there is a wide world out there boasting billions of humans and dogs if not many dragons anymore is inconceivable to them, like one of us taking a short trip to Jupiter. In this regard, it was a trip into the unknown, another dimension, like plunging into a black hole.
If you will forgive me one more pause in the action, this is probably a good time to step outside the narrative for a moment to better describe the human so-called servants traveling with Rosie and Carlitos. As you probably guessed, I am one of them as is my lovely wife. We like to think of ourselves as their mommy and daddy, but I doubt Rosie in particular sees it that way and since she believes she’s the queen of the world, probably thinks we are closer to a wayward son and daughter who needs constant attention. There is also my stepdaughter, a young woman on the autism spectrum who adores dogs, and is extremely tight with Carlitos, the two frequently taking walks well beyond their acknowledged territory, though the little old man of a whippet does tend to strut like he owns everything in sight, at least when his sister’s not around. There is another stepdaughter as well, but she wasn’t a part of this particular adventure and we will have to return to her in some other story. Also, names will not be used at this point in the interests of privacy, though that may change as the needs of the story evolve. In any event, ss we left the house this time fleeing from the blackout, I was behind the wheel, my wife was in the passenger seat, and my stepdaughter was in the back with the dog and the three-legged dragon. The car itself is loaded with cargo including a large cooler packed with the food we were able to salvage from the refrigerator – what Rosie referred to as the special treasure chest last time – all of the accouterments for the dogs, and everything we will likely need for a few days to escape the blackout. The ride was expected to take an hour, but considering I haven’t showered because we have well water, Rosie was panting over my shoulder, and Carlitos had placed his little head on the armrest as though he was my copilot, it wasn’t expected to be a pleasant one and would likely feel much longer.
Sadly for this part of the story, we know very little about how dragon-dogs perceive the passage of time and cannot say much about what they experienced while we were traveling. Certainly, they have a routine and Rosie is nothing if not unpredictably predictable in that regard. She rises at almost exactly the same time every day, gets up on the bed and demands her morning worship, lying beside me or my wife and snipping at us until we pet her profusely, so precisely one could set a clock. She knows when it’s meal time, walk time, treat time, and every other time. In that sense, she understands the passage of time enough to repeat the important rituals of her daily life, but in another there’s the distinct sense that between these moments, she – and dogs and perhaps even actual dragons – exist in a sort of stasis, a timeless state where they are waiting for something to happen and in that stasis, things seem to last forever or as close as anything comes to it in this world. Whether Rosie the Three-legged Dragon was trapped in the car for what felt like a either a split second or a short eternity to her, perhaps some blend of the two humans simply cannot experience – frightened and perturbed by the strange sounds of the engine, the constant motion, the explosion of images and smells from the other cars, and places we drove through for about an hour – we will never know. We can, however, use that lack of knowledge to imagine that it was unpleasant for her in a way we cannot experience of describe ourselves.
Ultimately, the best we can say is that she exited the backseat of the car with no small sense of relief – for her, her brother, and her human servants’ safe arrival – and promptly followed that with another round of anxious insecurity. In her dragon-dog of a mind, Rosie couldn’t help but feel that her human servants were decidedly lax when it came to security. Here, they had arrived a totally new location – one that was not her lair by any means, though there were certain resemblances like the color, white, a yard, and a front entry way – and yet they were acting like everything was completely fine, taking absolutely no precautions at all, as if hidden dangers and other intruders simply didn’t exist. This, of course would not do, and once again thinking if you wanted a job done right, you needed to do it yourself, Rosie began a thorough inspection and patrol of the perimeter, circling around the front of this new lair in the way dogs are known for more than dragons, ears alert and sniffing everything in sight as noted earlier. To say she didn’t like what she found would be massive understatement for a dog or a dragon. For starters, this lair was smaller than her own and the lairs nearby were packed much closer together, as though they were about to fall over one another. While there were trees, a few bushes, plants, and other flowers, most of the ground she trod upon with her three legs was hard and rocky, rather than the lush grass she was accustomed to and it took her a moment to realize what that really meant: Her enchanted forest, where she roamed free and where the land was green in almost every direction was gone, replaced by something much more confusing and disorienting, a world of grey stone and human construction, though she wouldn’t have phrased it that way.
On the inside, things might have been even worse. There were no piles of treasure in the form of toys or treats, there were strangers – humans, other dogs, unknown critters, and the like – in the other lairs close enough she could hear and smell them piling in upon her like a human packed in at a concert, there was no throne upon which to preside over her dominion, and the stairs were not plush with rugs. They were instead covered with plain wood, and though Rosie was convinced she could fly free as a dragon, the far more slippery surface posed serious problems to any creature trying to hop up and down on one front leg. Beyond the alien nature of the place and the potential safety hazards, she was irked for reasons she couldn’t explain about this new, hopefully temporary, far inferior in her opinion lair, being lit up inside and kept at the correct temperature unlike her own, the one they had fled. In a way strange to dragon-dogs, the presence of these things reminded Rosie of the absence of them at her lair, her glorious, wonderful, incredible, magical lair, making her homesick in addition to fretting over this new situation, worried beyond anything in recent memory about the future. Regardless, humans, dogs, and dragons all needed to do what needed to be done from time to time, and after Rosie’s inspection of the perimeter, she resigned herself to staying for at least a little while, even figuring out how to get up and down the stairs.
With her human servants busy doing what humans do – hopefully preparing her food and gathering the necessary treats, though everything was so strange, she couldn’t even be sure of such simple facts of life – she attempted to settle in. Though this lair was smaller, there was a nicely canopied and protected yard in the rear, surrounded by a large white fence – to her, it seemed a high castle wall – which made her feel at least somewhat secure by preventing her from seeing the competing territories nearby and keeping her free from prying eyes. It remained a tad drizzly, the heatwave having been broken by the rain which Rosie hated even if there was none of the cursed noises from the sky, the sun was at least partially visible, and the air had cooled since the adventure began. Despite her deep, deep concerns and inexplicable yearning for her own, far more comfortable in her opinion lair – here, it’s important to remind ourselves again that dragon-dogs can’t possibly fathom the distance traveled in a car, so to Rosie her rightful home might as well have been in a forgotten universe entirely, a dream, or some other phantom memory that couldn’t be explained – she began to settle in under an awning free from the pesky raindrops and found herself surprisingly comfortable. Perhaps this wouldn’t be as bad as she feared. While she still couldn’t bring herself to fully trust the human servants, they didn’t seem the least bit concerned and neither was her little brother Carlitos, not that Rosie trusted him much either.
Still, the presence of another dog, even one that was most certainly not a dragon, looking more like a little old man than anything else, soothed her in a deep way impossible for us to understand, except to say dogs were animals so devoted and attached to their pack, and so averse to being alone, it was like a human finding another person after years apart on a deserted island. Unfortunately for them, Rosie the Three Legged Dragon and Carlitos were not on a deserted island. Instead, they were in an unfamiliar backyard with a lake – that is a pool like their own lair, only this one was not behind a wall and as if to prove he couldn’t be trusted as soon as caninely possible, Carlitos promptly fell in, tumbling into the great blue expanse as though he’d fallen over a cliff, lost the unknown forever. Though humans know that dogs can swim, dogs do not know this themselves, of course, whether or not they believe they are dragons. Looking down upon Carlitos in the water, paddling away frantically, all of Rosie’s fears about this adventure were made real, crashing over her as if she was drowning herself. The fear was accompanied by a memory, or a piece of a nightmare from when she first arrived at her own beloved lair, some time in the past beyond what she could understand, more than five years in human terms. Hidden somewhere in a dark corner of her mind, there was the sense that she too fell in a lake once and not even being aware she might drown, the cold clarity of the water, the lack of the ground under her paws – this was before she was convinced she was a dragon, long before she lost her leg – felt like it could’ve killed her on their own, gripping her with a fear like she’d never known, a huge hand crushing her in its fist, enough to block even the shadow of the memory until now. She had no idea how she got out that time, and for a full year refused to go near the lake again – until she discovered a den of rabbits nearby, which is a story for another time – and now Carlitos was in the same position only he was smaller and therefore more pathetic and desperate. Only Rosie the Three-Legged Dragon could save him, she was sure of that somehow, but how a dog or a dragon who doesn’t swim do such a thing was the question. If she couldn’t save herself, how could she possibly help Carlitos before he drowned?
TO BE CONTINUED…
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 