It was always the same, when the door opened. The faint tremors of footsteps outside, the hazy figure through the tastefully frosted glass, the shrill yipping in pale, neotenized imitation of millennia of instincts to warn and protect that could no longer be borne out by this tiny, fragile body. The immaculate wood would swing inward to admit some caller or caregiver or courier, and just for that brief moment, a blade of pure sunlight would slice through the carefully manicured space, marking the sole direct ingress of the uncontrolled outside world into this meticulously artificial one.
It was then, always, that she would run.
Her shortened legs afforded her the advantage in stealth that they robbed her of in speed, and if she was lucky, she might slip along the sunlight and follow its path outside unnoticed for the briefest of moments. There would be commotion, of course, ruckus and yelling and chasing and scooping her up into the elderly woman’s pale, thin arms; and infrequent though it was, this commotion was the closest she ever felt to the truth of herself.
Mostly, the rush she always contained but could not let out within the walls of her world found its outlet in other ways. She was not alone even when so low to the ground, but the matter of her mate was a tempestuous one. Try as she did to make the other dog understand the wind that gusted through her veins in lieu of gusting through her fur, there was not even the slightest breeze that stirred within her wife of circumstance. Only one of them would ever sprint for the door. Even the fights that so often led the elderly woman to leash them on opposite sides of the room for fear of the injury they might do to each other seemed lackluster, one-sided. One was always trying in vain to tip the tenuous balance to either side of domestication, but neither love nor blood would move the other.
One day, the curse of those opposing leashes became a very roundabout blessing.
The tremors, the figure, the yipping, the door, the blade. They’d had another argument again, last night, and so that morning found them both tethered out of range from each other. The leashes were the retractable sort, and while sometimes the old woman would lock the lengths in place manually, sometimes it was just the friction of their being tied to whatever convenient furniture was at hand. With this false security in place, the door was left open just a moment too long, the leash slid along the smooth wood of the tasteful maple rocking chair, and tiny legs carried a tiny body outside in one instinctive instant.
The jerk of the leash reaching the end of itself and snapping her back to domestication by her pretty pink harness would come any moment, she knew. The moment would end, the woman would collect her from her forbidden jaunt, and history would repeat itself once again. She could already hear and feel the change in the tone of the cord as it sang off the spring-loaded reel. Here it comes–
–snap!
The leash had reached its fullest extent. She, however, had not.
The harness strained to contain her for a moment longer, then gave way. It was still clipped to the leash, and tangled in the impractically long fur the old woman had so adored, and as she kept running, she could have sworn it was unraveling her–not painfully, but drawing away the threads that had confined her for so long in this inadequate form. She felt the sensation of ropes that had been so tightly wound around her self finally loosening and, one by one, peeling away to let the true extent of her take its shape. Finally, she could breathe again.
It was as though she expanded, the more of her that spooled off into oblivion behind her. She became longer, leaner, sturdier. What she had become far predated the world of show criteria and distinguished purebred lineages that had birthed her–she had no breed, only legs and the wind rushing to meet her. She sprinted back through the eons, undoing the taming that had both cost her and given her so much. She was no longer adapted to a sedentary life where food was abundant and shelter was guaranteed, but a hardscrabble existence on the fringes of the habitable world, her speed the only thing keeping her alive. She stretched into the lanky desert dog of her ancestry, then lengthened still more. She barely had feet for the ground to touch, if ground were still a concept with meaning to her. The unspooling had not stopped, and would not stop, as she raced along, more wind than dog by now. Only when the last loose end of her popped free and lay abandoned in the dust as she sped on without it did the leash finally slacken.