Tongue Tied Episode 12

Grant

Bessie hurtled down from the sky.

“Not so fast girl,” I yelled so she could hear me over the screaming descent. It felt like I was riding a hawk diving for a rabbit.

She didn’t slow down.

As we neared the ground, I felt her tense.

Thirty feet above the desert floor she adjusted the angle of her wings and stalled, she shuddered, her wings went limp, and we hit the ground — hard.

Drake popped out of Bessie’s mouth on the first bounce.

The impact threw me forward over Bessie’s head, and I tumbled into the only mud hole for fifty miles.

I didn’t see what happened to Aria, or where she ended up.

I struggled to my hands and knees, and I saw red.

Thick red clay clung to my face like a death mask. “What kind of lame-brained excuse for a landing was that?” I sputtered. I wiped gooey mud off my face, and squinted to see.

Bessie lay on her side with her back to me. “Did you hear me, you over-sized lizard?”

Aria poked her head over Bessie’s neck. “She’s hurt.” Aria limped toward Bessie’s chest and disappeared out of sight. “She’s bleeding,” Aria yelled. “Come quick.”

I ran as fast as I could. Between carrying an extra hundred pounds of mud, and feeling like a band of Ubuntu’s had just used me for a killing-stick practice dummy, it wasn’t all that quick.

When I rounded Bessie’s tail, I stumbled and brushed against it. She twitched, like she did during a bad dream, and knocked me down. When I looked up, I saw Aria’s knee inches in front of me.

“Not now, Grant,” Aria said. “Bessie’s hurt. Look at this.” She pointed to a blaster gash in Bessie’s side big enough for me to put my fist into. A trail of dried blood ran down her side from the wound all the way to her tail.

“She’s lost a lot of blood,” I said. “We’ve got to get her some water to make up for it.”

Aria started ripping a strip from her skirt. “And she needs that bandaged before she loses any more.”

“Wait.”

“What?”

“Bessie ain’t a person,” I said. “She don’t need no human germ infected cloth bandage mucking up her system. She’s already in bad enough shape.”

Aria flashed me a look that seemed to border between you’re an idiot, and we can’t just let her bleed to death. “What do you suggest?”

“Mud,” I said. “And less attitude.”

“Mud,” she said. “Talk about infected. And, where you gonna find enough mud to patch that?” She pointed at the gaping wound still oozing blood.

“Trust me,” I said. “I can find the mud.”

She really looked at me for the first time. “Looks like you already did.”

“As far as patching her with it,” I said. “It’s what dragons do.”

“They’re dragons. What’re they gonna do?”

“Them dragon’s been living for thousands of years without no people help.”

(If you popped into my blog here and are wondering what in tarnation is going on, maybe you might want to click on over to Episode 1 to find out)

(Did you miss the last episode? Here is the link to Episode 11)