Saturday, December 29, 2012

Happy Holidays

 Well, merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone. I hope everyone enjoyed the holidays so far, especially since we've finally got some decent snow for skiing and the like. I've been spending my time reading the mountain of books I got for Christmas, and working on a new short story.
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!

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