Panting Eyes, Panting Dreams

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Cackling, it was like the fire laughed at him. It spit sparks, the embers of fireworks, showering the enclave, bursting through the screen. Beneath the grate, coals shone a neon furry. The fire was hot. It blazed a furnace heat, and yet he lay so near, soaking in the waves like sand. His thick red coat glowed under the orange flickers. I waited for him to smolder in ash, but stubbornly he refused, and turned his heavy head to rest upon the hearth. And there he watched with keen interest, eyebrows dancing with each pull of the cork; champagne frothing with energy, sizzling as gases bubbled, rising to the surface. We knew him to be the simpleton, dull of mind, but filled with an exuberant joy, though at times as thus, with his eyes gazing dreamily into the fire’s consumption, I had to ponder at the depths of his possible reveries. What like did he recall from the past? Where had the mind withdrawn to, and what fantasy did it now trace? Or even stranger, were his senses so tuned with the subtlest energies of our existence that it was in fact a communion in the works; our dog, and the fire of our fireplace, conversing on the scales of telepathy where every form of matters has its say, its deeper message? What were they saying?

I know things to be possible—and I speak of things as all things, in general and of the esoteric. And as I sat in my arm chair, my bones molding into muscles molding into fine leather, I saw our dog Howie, Big Red, as a creature of an ordained complexity in the natural order of Life. I saw him, Howie our dog, as an entity with a completely separate distinction as to his place in reality. He was not just Howie with a large destructive tail and a dog bowl complete with its own water dish set within its own doggy table, but he was Howie; a distinct creature with his own sense, his own past, unbeknown to us, despite the pounds of dry organic dog food and the raw lamb and chicken patties served. I thought I saw him steaming. I thought I saw him boiling under the skin. I thought I heard the flames whimpering, “Howie, Howie.” Eyes glared into the fire where the tails of flames coiled like serpents. They rattled. They cackled. I heard my name.

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Photos

Howie, our Big Red
His eyes glaze plainly at the world at large, but within his Heart there is something more complex than words may utter.

Comments

[Yathi]

Good one again.
Great write this time and I have a dog too.