I got the idea for this one while looking at my lizard, also named Bink. He's what is known as a bearded dragon--a long, squat reptile with a head like a horned toad and little spines sticking out around his and ribs. Normally, it's hard to distinguish him from the log he sits on, since he barely moves, but occasionally he'll get a sudden desire to move and run up and down the length of his tank. I was watching him do this the other night, and it suddenly occurred to me that maybe he isn't what he seems. Minutes later, I was at my desk with my journal and a pen, the following story unfolding itself beneath my fingers....
...and no, the real Bink is not six feet long.
My Sister's Lizard
It was an interesting day when the lizard escaped.
That the lizard escaped in the first
place was, A: a catastrophe, since my sister loves that thing, and B: a miracle,
since the lizard was six feet long and about the width of a large bobsled. How
anyone could lose something that size in a three-story house (four, if you count
the basement) was nothing short of incredible. Yet lose him we did.
My sister’s the one who’s supposed
to look after Bink. She got him as a baby at a pet store; a tiny, scaly runt of
a thing with a skinny body and a head that was way too big for the rest of him.
The storekeeper told us he was a bearded dragon, but I think even he had doubts.
Don’t even ask how my sister came up with his name. I think it was a character
from a book she read or something like that.
Upon arrival at our house, six years
ago, Bink underwent an incredible series of growth spurts. He kept shedding his
skin (which my sister thought was gross), leaving pale, papery impressions of
himself scattered around his tank. He more than doubled in size the first week
that we had him, and within a month, we were buying a new tank that was four
times the size of the old one. He kept on growing, and soon even the dog was
afraid of him. We had to feed him mice (which, I’ll admit, was indeed
disgusting), and he seemed to have an unusual taste for anything spicy as well.
We would feed him bowls of dried chili peppers doused in teriyaki sauce, and he
would eat them in huge gulps until his spiny belly was swollen and he could
barely move. He would then sit back on his haunches, puff out the scaled sac at
his throat, and burp out a cloud of noxious pepper fumes. It made our eyes
water, but he always looked disappointed.
Thankfully for our financial
stability, Bink’s growth spurts panned out when he was six months old, and his
voracious eating habits mellowed out. For five and a half years, he mostly sat
in his tank, eating his mice when we gave them to him, pooping, and burping
chili. He was actually a pretty boring pet…that is, until the day he escaped.
We probably wouldn’t have found out
for days, since we’d been packing lately for a big trip to Wyoming, and we were
about to leave for a week. Just as we were about to walk out the door, my sister
suddenly remembered that she’d left her phone in her bedroom. She ran upstairs
to get it, and then promptly returned empty-handed, her face ashen.
“Bink’s gone!” she exclaimed.
That threw us all into a panic.
Marcy (my sister) got it into her head that the cat had eaten her lizard. I
countered with a lecture on weight ratio and how Lavender—our slightly
overweight calico—would need iron-capped teeth and protective plates of metal
lining her gullet in order to ingest something as big and spiny as Bink. My
argument won, not surprisingly.
Mom and Dad were both very convinced
that Bink was still somewhere in the house, hiding somewhere, too afraid to come
out. That struck me as improbable as well, since he was six feet long and pretty
hard to miss, but we were running out of ideas, and we had to start somewhere.
And so the hunt began.
Our house is old, not to mention
cluttered, thanks to my mom and my aunt’s annual garage sale, so my parents’
idea that Bink was hiding somewhere in the house could have been true. My
parents started in the basement, while my sister checked the first floor and I
searched the second, all of us checking every conceivable hiding place for the
missing lizard.
I crawled under dusty beds, pawed
through closets that I’d swear opened into another dimension, and slid
bookshelves away from walls, and yet I encountered no sign of the lizard. In
half an hour, I was so dusty I could have been sitting in the attic for
centuries, and I’d inhaled enough dust-bunnies and mothball funk to give me some
form of asthma. When at last I was on the verge of giving up and offering to buy
my sister a snake as a replacement, I stumbled back to her room to give her
closet one last look. As I was walking by the lizard tank, something caught my
eye, and I almost cried out in triumph before I did a quick double-take and
realized my mistake.
For a moment, I’d thought I’d found
Bink. There was something pale, scaly, and big hunkered down behind the rocks in
his cage, sitting absolutely motionless with its long length wedged between the
wall of the tank and the rocks. I looked closer, and realized that it wasn’t
Bink, like I’d initially thought. It was another one of his sheds.
Unlike the broken, scattered ones
he’d left when he was little, this one was perfect. It had every little detail;
from his horn-rimmed eyelids; to the weird bump at the end of his tail that the
pet shop people had claimed was a bite mark from another male lizard; to the odd
lumps on his back that they’d never even tried to explain. The nose was split
open where he’d crawled out, and the glass around it was scratched where his
scaled sides had dragged across the pane. The claw prints in the crushed walnut
shells around the shed were bigger than I remembered, and I realized with a deep
sinking feeling what was happening.
Bink was having another growth
spurt.
I made for the stairs leading up to
the attic as fast as I could. I’d dismissed the attic before, since Bink had
been too small to push open the door before. When I got there, the door wasn’t
just pushed aside—it had been demolished. Wood chips were scattered everywhere,
and the remains hung at a cant on twisted hinges. Amidst the rubble, I found
another shed—this one about three times as large as the last one, with a strange
triangular bulge near the shoulders where the weird lumps used to be. I dodged
inside, this time following a series of gaping rents in the floor that had been
torn there by the passage of some gargantuan beast. I could see where Bink’s
claws had dug into the wood—three claws per foot, which was too few to belong to
a bearded dragon—and there were large, arched slashes cut into the flooring that
seemed to trail the leading tracks. I followed the wreckage through a
tumbled-over pile of boxes and the carnage of what used to be an overstuffed
couch, all the way to the tiny window at the far end of the
room.
The window, like the door, had been
utterly destroyed, this time taking a huge chunk of the wall off with it. As I
clambered through the hole, I noticed another shed, and this time, it looked
nothing like a lizard.
The vertigo of being at the
uppermost story of a three-floor house seized me momentarily as I edged out onto
the gutter, but I quickly overcame it as I heard the sound of tramping footsteps
crunching across the tiled roof of our house. Throwing caution to the wind, I
scrambled up, following the trail of wreckage that Bink had left along the side
of our house. I made it to the roof, and took off in a crouched shuffle across
the tiles, some of which had been torn from the roof and crushed beneath Bink’s
sharp claws or his spined, sweeping tail. I scuttled up and over the peak of the
house, and on the other side, I froze, my mouth gaping open in
awe.
There was Bink, no longer an awkward
lizard with a flat body and gangly limbs, but a great beast of prey. His long,
arched neck was supple and graceful, and his torso was slim and powerfully
muscled for flight. Four scaled legs like those of a dinosaur supported his
massive body, and his long tail kept his balance at the edge of the roof by
curling around his legs and hooking onto the tiles with the leaf-shaped blade at
the tip. His head had grown long, horselike, and ridged with spines of bone, and
his jaws were huge and lined with teeth like a shark.
The most magnificent part of all,
however, was his wings. The weird little bumps on his back had turned into the
most beautiful wings a creature on this earth has ever had; they were at least
as big as he was, with long, bony fingers stretched between webbed membranes
like a bat’s, which caught the sunlight and glowed red with hundreds of tiny
blood vessels.
He spread those incredible wings
even as I watched, his hind legs bunched up beneath him and his neck curled down
in preparation for a jump. A half moment before he leaped, one of his great
golden eyes rolled back to meet mine, and I could have sworn I saw the scaled
corners of his mouth lift in an amused, draconic smile. An instant later, his
powerful legs launched him into the air, and his massive wings snapped downward
and bowled me over backwards with the sheer force of the air they displaced. As
a parting gesture, he gave a loud bellow and stretched open his jaws, sending a
gout of red fire shooting into the sky and nearly burning off our T.V antenna. A
minute later, he was a gray dot on the horizon that could have been a pigeon
winging away to the north, which soon disappeared inside a cloud.
I never did see him again, though I
never stopped looking.
THE
END
As an end note, I'll add that the print-ready copy of Centaur Ranch is up on the lulu marketplace. The e-book's there as well, and the keywords for the search engine are: 'Diddle', 'Centaur Ranch', and 'Centaur'.
Happy reading!
