If Rosie thought her human servants were strange, they were nothing compared to the smaller, far more energetic and unruly versions that invaded her lair from time to time. These little ones, she could make no sense of at all.
If Rosie the Three-legged Dragon thought her human servants were strange, they were nothing compared to the smaller, far more energetic and unruly versions that invaded her lair from time to time. These little ones, she could make no sense of at all. They looked like their larger counterparts, only shorter, lighter, and somehow more fragile. They smelled like them as well, only somehow much fresher and cleaner, filled with more promise like a puppy though they certainly weren’t puppies. At times, they sounded like the larger versions too, except they were if anything more nonsensical. While neither dogs nor dragons understand human speech beyond a few relevant words, having no idea why anyone needs all of those sounds when a bark, a whine, and a growl can communicate anything and everything, Rosie could detect the difference in pitch between a full size human and a little one, and was also aware that the little ones rarely said the few words she did know. Rather than talk about treats and food and going out and taking a walk and petting her on the bed or the couch, the things of extreme importance to her and her kind, they seemed to babble endlessly about nothing and no one. All of this, she could live with, but beneath the surface what really irked her the most was the way her normally reliable human servants doted on the little ones whenever they were around, rather than her. Under normal circumstances, Rosie, being the undisputed queen of her dominion, was the rightful center of attention, the focus of any and all affection save the small amount she allowed her younger brother, Carlitos, but when the little ones were around, she was almost completely forgotten or even worse, forced to alter her precious routine to meet their needs. Instead of having the run of the lair as was her right as its ruler, Rosie would frequently be confined to here or there or anywhere for no apparent reason, except the root cause was undoubtedly these little human servants, who daddy – that unruly son of hers – referred to as “munchkins,” which only confused her further because she thought they were something you could eat at least.
On top of all that, Rosie wasn’t sure if it was better or worse that she never had any idea when the munchkins would be invading. Dogs, as you know, have a completely different understanding of time than we do and while they have their beloved routines, they don’t, as a point, make plans about the future or reminiscence about the past. In fact, it’s unclear whether they truly have a conception of the future or the past in any meaningful way, beyond anticipating getting something they want or associating something happening to them at the moment with something that had happened previously, whether good, bad, or indifferent. To them and likely to dragons as well, tomorrow will be exactly as it is today, as it was yesterday, and there’s no difference between the three beyond the vagaries of any moment in time. While this doesn’t mean they cannot feel differently from day to day, or that they fail to notice major changes in their routine, such as when mommy and daddy are gone or they are forced on an adventure like during the three days of night when Rosie had to abandon her beloved lair, it suggests that they take each moment as it comes, comparing it not to obscure human concepts like past and future, but to their own unique memories untethered by time. Thus, a dog expects every day to be the same as the last and they do so without even knowing what that sameness is in the first place, until they encounter a change they never expected to begin with. Once the change occurs, it is evaluated according to their memories and instincts, judged either good, bad, or not worth paying attention to in relatively short order. If it’s determined to be good, such as the human servants coming home, Rosie the Three Legged Dragon will hop around as though she might take flight, wagging her tail which is something like a fleshy whip covered in fur, and prancing about the place. If it’s bad, she’ll growl and bark and wish she could breathe fire as she either chased down the intruder to give whatever it was a piece of her mind – as she liked to do with the deer and especially the rabbits – or she might get scared and cower, though she would be hesitant to admit that in polite company. If indifferent, she’d either go about her business as though nothing happened or continue to contemplate the situation until coming to another conclusion. You know the look: Head slightly tilted, eyes a little confused, and ears pointed in different directions or high above the head, like Rosie was pretending to be a rabbit.
Few such changes were harder for Rosie the Three Legged Dragon to evaluate than the arrival of the munchkins, which prompted a combination of all three reactions at once, and in many ways, perhaps it always being a surprise was the worst. Rosie couldn’t answer that question, certainly not this particularly sunny, warm, and breezy summer afternoon. In retrospect, she should’ve known something was up the moment mommy and daddy departed from their own usual Saturday routines. Instead of spending the morning relaxing as they normally did, both were a frenzy of activity from the moment they woke up and even the morning petting was shorter than usual. After, Daddy was in and out of the house doing something extremely interesting with large quantities of meat. First, he rubbed a huge, delicious even-when-raw piece – much bigger than he ever gave her for that matter – with oil and coated it with some kind of seasonings, then he went to work on smaller items before cooking them on some outside contraption that let out a lot of smoke and seemed to take forever, but did he give poor Rosie the slightest bit even though she followed him around the entire time? No. Mommy, meanwhile, was much less interestingly scrubbing everything in sight, apparently getting rid of something Rosie wasn’t even aware existed before running up and down the floor with that awfully, terribly noisy thing that makes a horrid sucking sound. Once these two tasks were done, the two of them left Rosie and Carlitos all alone inside and futzed around in the enchanted forest for a while, moving things for seemingly no reason, putting things they didn’t understand up, and generally acting very strange, especially as both dogs were relegated to watching this occur through the back door, as would prove to be an unfortunate pattern for most of the day. While neither had any idea what their crazy human servants were doing – except they certainly weren’t serving them – dogs can’t help suffering from separation anxiety at times. Rosie felt a little lonely and left out, staring at mommy and daddy, wondering what they could possibly be up to that was more important than properly worshipping her, but Carlitos – ever the drama queen even though he was a boy – whined and cried enough to drive her nuts. How about her little brother show some dignity, like a dragon?
Alas, this wasn’t the only indignity they would suffer that day or the only time they would be trapped inside. Though Rosie had plenty of warning something funny was going on, she was still surprised when the munchkins finally arrived and was perhaps even more surprised when rather than the usual two, there was now a third, even smaller, something more like a peanut than a munchkin, which had seemingly appeared out of nowhere. Who was this and why was he both so small and swaddled up so tightly, the boy could barely move? She had never seen a puppy in such a thing in her life, prompting her to consider once more precisely how strange these people truly were. Why did she live with them at all? Equipped with a sense of hearing and smell humans can only dream of, she noticed this new addition before they were even out of the car – speaking of which, why do humans always insist on traveling by car, those awful things, rather than simply running or flying? – which was just as well because they took a long time coming up the path to the house and when they finally arrived at rear entrance, it was pure pandemonium. Two big ones, like mommy and daddy but not mommy and daddy, at least not to her, and three little ones, packing enough stuff they could’ve been an army on the march, not that Rosie knew what armies were. Still, there was some kind of cart with wheels carrying the peanut, another with the smaller of the two munchkins, and an array of who knew what, enough to make Rosie question whether they were moving in rather than just coming for a visit, but any concerns were swiftly overwhelmed by the excitement of new arrivals, humans Rosie didn’t know well yet understood on the level of dogs and dragons, weren’t strangers. While it’s unclear how canines manage this feat, whether family smells like family and they simply know when people are related or they can sense their owner’s excitement, perhaps some combination of the two, there’s a certain infectiousness when relatives arrive. Mommy and daddy are excited, the arrivals including the munchkins are excited; therefore Rosie and Carlitos have no choice except to be excited, getting ready to greet them with the sort of tail-wagging hopping around reserved for royalty.
At this point, we should probably pause to set the stage in human terms to make our story easier to understand. If you hadn’t guessed, the arrivals were my stepdaughter, my son-in-law, and their three children, two girls and a boy, aged three, almost two, and barely six months. They live in Maryland and hadn’t been to the house since Christmas, before the baby boy was born. The two older ones had previously met both Rosie and Carlitos, and the older one in particular has followed her adventures thanks to the magic of video calls, though there is no word on whether the adventures written here have served as a good bedtime story. While Rosie the Three-legged Dragon wouldn’t know a video call from a radio star, she remembered the two little girls, especially having heard their voices frequently. Therefore, it was no surprise she treated their arrival the same as she would a member of the pack because they were members of the pack in her mind, however extended and wherever on the outside – remember, dogs can’t really understand distance beyond the scope of their domain or the idea that people live in different houses – they might make their lair. No, the real surprise was mommy’s reaction. Rather than appreciating the excited interest she took in the munchkins and the peanut, mommy in particular was far more apprehensive, almost frantically. Try as Rose might to get near the munchkins to say hello by playfully jumping on them, putting out her one front leg in greeting, and to better inspect the peanut swaddled in his blanket, sniffing him all over, maybe adding a lick or two to properly introduce him to the queen of the realm for the first time, mommy wouldn’t let her within three feet of any of them. Instead, she circled around like a half-crazy person, gently pushing her further and further away as though she was some kind of menace to small things, not the beloved matriarch of the entire family. To be fair to mommy, Rosie was not a biter of humans, but she was something of a menace to small things, particularly rabbits. By our count, she’s killed no fewer than six of them over the years and might have even eaten one because we couldn’t find the poor thing’s body, but she of course, wouldn’t remember this and wouldn’t care either way. Munchkins certainly weren’t rabbits after all, and nature – the wild nature of the lair and the enchanted forest – had always been red in tooth and claw.
Further, it was doubly humiliating to Rosie when the larger of the two munchkins – still small at much less than three feet tall, but exceedingly cute and sassy with floppy brown-blonde hair and lovely hazel eyes, the one who talked to her on one of those strange, glowing devices – seemed equally excited to say hello, calling to “Wosie, Wosie” for some reason rather than her proper name and spreading out her arms for a big hug. Mommy, however, was having none of it, positioning herself between the two before Rosie could hug her back and give her a warm, welcome, sloppy lick on the face. After preventing, she swept the munchkins and the peanuts away into the enchanted forest without another word and left her with Carlitos once again looking out the backdoor, wondering what was going on out there. Over the next hour – or something like that in human terms – things got even stranger as more and more people arrived, people she generally knew and liked and would’ve liked to say hello to as well, except they too disappeared into the forest, either in a group or one by one. While being left alone would be frustrating for a human, it was the equivalent of torture for either a dog or dragon in situations like this. The separation anxiety was bad enough when it was just mommy and daddy out there doing things that made no sense, but now it was a whole group and though it wasn’t clear exactly what they were doing, the sights, sounds, and smells certainly seemed interesting enough to warrant a closer look. While her line of sight wasn’t entirely clear, she could see them gathered around the pool in the enchanted forest and hear them splashing around the water the way humans sometimes did for reasons she couldn’t possibly explain given she was terrified of falling in. It seemed more munchkins from some other pack had joined them, and there were excited cries and more than a little laughter. She didn’t know what it was, but there was music in the background, underlying everything, as though there was a concert going on.
Far more important and frustrating to her with the smells. Food, food, they had food! It seemed that every breath she took rang like a bell in her mind, a clear, irresistible chime for each treat that was out there, just beyond her grasp. There were chips, there was dip, there were shrimp wrapped in dough and fried (empanadas), and there was baked cheese of a kind mommy didn’t make often, but was absolutely delicious (an Armenian dish known as cheese boreg). Rosie wanted some. In fact, she wanted it all. Combined with the wonderful smells coming from the food still cooking right outside the lair, what daddy had been working on all day, it was enough to drive her mad with desire, but unfortunately neither Rosie nor Carlitos could open a door on their own. The only thing they could do was stand there, staring out at the fun and the food they weren’t a part of and wanted by nature to be, miserable and forlorn without having any understanding of why. If anything, the feeling was compounded for a dog given their strange perception of time, which makes events seem to last either forever or for just a moment with perhaps nothing between the two. While we cannot say for sure, we can imagine that being forced to watch something Rosie and Carlitos were excluded from, especially food which constituted one of their main purposes in life, lasted forever, an eternity of being alone, on the outside looking in, even if they had each other. Rosie wasn’t sure if she barked, whined, cried, scratched at the opening, paced back and forth before it, even reared up on her hind legs hoping she could push her way through somehow the entire time, or if she did nothing at all, only staring and smelling wistfully, dreaming of getting out there and eating some of it.
She was only certain of three things during this period. First, getting out there was the most important thin in the in world. Second, Carlitos was useless as ever. Her little brother might’ve thought he was a superhero, a spy, or a cartoon character, but all he did was whine, whine, whine, making the problem more acute rather than solving it. Second, it was up to Rosie to come up with a plan if they had any hope of joining the festivities and more importantly, partaking of the food, but as mentioned earlier, dogs and plans tend not to mix well. She did, however, have one hope. If there was one thing Rosie the Three-Legged Dragon could count on, it was daddy being a sucker for her charms, unable to resist her when it came to just about anything. In this case, just when she was convinced they’d be trapped inside until the end of time, he came back to the lair on one of his many confusing runs to and from, carrying something somewhere for reasons she couldn’t not explain, not that they mattered anyway. It was the perfect opportunity to flash her puppy dog eyes, whine a little, wag her tail, and make it all too clear remaining here while there were seemingly fun things happening outside was absolutely intolerable, an affront to her queenly and dragonly nature. Unfortunately, daddy was also known to do what mommy told him and since she wanted Rosie and Carlitos excluded for whatever reason, it was unclear whose side he would take in the matter. Would he defy mommy and let Rosie loose in the enchanted forest or would he leave her sitting there forever with her useless younger brother?
TO BE CONTINUED….
In the meantime, check out Rosie the Three-legged Dragon’s first adventure, the three days of endless night.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 