Pink Tongue Flailing by Dana Rollins

The chemistry of life in an era of endless miracles can be deceptively corrosive. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Like putting a hen’s egg in vinegar, it reveals the soft, internal wonders of the world—the things we’re so prone to build shells and containers around. Living in this era of endless miracles does, however, require special handling and some degree of caution. It often demands we abandon our reliance on the element of reason. Just as you should never mix vinegar with bleach, parsing miracles with reason and rationality can blister your lungs and blind you where you stand.

A magician taught me this.

Before my finger twitched, I recalled the look in Lucy’s hazy, half-blind eyes as she implored me to keep up. My body softened. Then I clicked a blue box on the computer screen. Binary digits changed on servers in Hohhot, Tokyo, Chicago, and Bangalore, and just like that I secured places for us in a metal tube capable of traveling 600 miles per hour.

A link to our airline boarding pass was delivered to my device. I call it a device because I don’t know what else to call it. I used to refer to it as a cellular phone. For a brief time I called it a mobile, a term that distinguished it from the wire-bound box it was replacing. Then, even though I seldom used it to call anyone, I defaulted back to phone. Now, because this thin glass and metal box can time a soft-boiled egg, help me learn Spanish, and triangulate between satellites to recalibrate and audibly call out revised driving directions after I miss the airport exit on the interstate, I refer to it as a device.

Miracles are happening faster than I can name them.

As usual, boarding was a crowded and solemn event. I’d selected 28F, a window seat. My wife took the middle. Contorting into place I could see the trailing edge flap, aileron, and engine of the starboard wing. It was a Boeing 757 and from this vantage point my view was mostly exhaust nozzle and rivets.

A teacher once explained that because a wing is curved, the top surface is longer than the bottom. This forces molecules in the air to travel over the top faster to meet up with molecules flowing underneath, thus generating lower pressure above the wing which creates lift. NASA hates it when people talk like this—calling this an incorrect airfoil theory. Air does flow over the top faster. Pressure is lower in keeping with Bernoulli’s Theorem. But this doesn’t explain how planes can continue to fly when inverted. Perhaps that’s a secret only stunt pilots know.

 Truthfully no one can simply, and completely explain the miracle of lift. Personally, I like the incorrect airfoil theory. I like the idea of forcibly separated oxygen and nitrogen molecules rushing to catch up with one another. Where, once reunited, they take each other’s hand and resume their conversation by asking, Where were we? How are the kids?

* * *

We bought Lucy a yard and a fence. Because, in the era of unending miracles, that’s how you demonstrate love. With children you buy them protective bicycle helmets and drive them three blocks in airbag-rich SUVs to their adult-supervised soccer practices. With dogs you buy them yards and fences.

Lucy was a rescue dog with an uncanny ability to recognize a sucker. This (along with a gift for misdirection and the apparent ability to temporarily liquify her bones) was part of her craft. Lucy was a magician, more specifically, an escape artist.

There was a lot they couldn’t tell us about Lucy. How long she’d been a stray. Exactly how old she was. Was someone out there missing her? We wanted to know. The volunteers at the no-kill shelter offered what they could. They’d gotten a call about a dog with no tags wandering precariously close to a highway. They stated the obvious: a mixed breed, probably Border Collie and shepherd. Around five years old, they said. The excessive wear on her front teeth was from chewing rocks. Some dogs do that, they added. In retrospect, I wished I’d asked how they managed to keep her penned up for as long as they did.

We never learned exactly how Lucy managed to continually escape our yard. It always seemed more than just a keen ability to slip through a kink in the gate or a gap under the fence. We figured it was the canine version of the dark arts. Though she taught us a lot, there were some lessons she guarded as trade secrets. However she managed to do it, escape gave her free rein to run the creek behind our house, clear the woods of anything that moved, and return hours later sopping, winded—and smiling from ear to ear. Certain that her place in the world was just beyond her nose, Lucy knew something aerodynamicists didn’t: momentum is lift.

As the years passed, Lucy mellowed. She became hollow-hipped and slow. Fences were superfluous. She still loved to walk. Always on leash. Even with the knowledge that time was something she couldn’t outrun, her conviction never dampened. There was always more to see. More to smell. Eventually, age dissolved the mechanics of her. She’d shit her bed in her sleep. Stairs became unmanageable. When her rear legs finally gave out, I carried her into the veterinary clinic where, in an act of supreme kindness, they stopped her heart. We kissed her goodbye and left in tears—her expired body still warm.

We got home and picked up the scattering of recently washed dog beds. Except for the distant squeak of a rusty gate, the world seemed very, very quiet. A hole had opened in life’s fence. While still hiding red-eyed behind my sunglasses, I went upstairs to the computer and did exactly what Lucy taught me to do.

It took just minutes to book a flight to Keflavik.

* * *

My wife held my hand. The cabin had been checked—every buckle fastened and every seatback in its upright and locked position. As the pilot increased engine thrust and the fuselage trembled under the strain of speed, I swore I felt something warm brush against my legs. Then, there, outside the window I could see Lucy sprinting in the jet wash—her pink tongue flailing with each lunge of her springy, aggressive gait. She looked at me approvingly. The primary miracle in life is life itself. For as long as you can keep up there will be magic.

Dana Rollins

Image by bottlein from Pixabay. Aeroplane wing against a blue sky with white clouds