Free Leopold

For a moment let’s say that Leopold is a young and rather smallish prehistoric beast. Let’s further say that through a series of rather strange and ill-understood events (probably along the lines of not listening to his mothers instructions about the location of the ‘great valley’) Leopold was propelled forward in time and perhaps place. He was discovered sulking in a cave, renamed ‘dragon’ and promptly captured. His new master was rewarded the hand of a princess and Leopold was traded to the local wizard of ill repute for a sword that sung enemies to sleep. The wizard cloaked him in magic impenetrable armor for his much needed protection and began experimenting with various potions, spells, and elixirs to grant the ‘dragon’ fire and usable wings. One unfortunate stutter during a rather lengthy incantation snapped poor half-dragon Leopold out of space and time into a sort of purple-hazed limbo until a rather bedraggled black cat happened to sneeze and hiccup at the same time and call a well-armored beast out of oblivion on top of itself. The heretofore unmentioned farmer consoled his wife over the loss of poor ‘Mitzy-boo’ with the promise of a ‘Jacuzzi tub’, painted the rather cold and stiff and still well-armored Leopold a ghastly shade of orange ‘for the protection of the general public,’ sold him to the local machine shop under the guise of ‘used farm equipment’ and found a quarter in the gutter on the way to the bathroom fixtures store which brought the grand sum total of ‘funds recently earned’ to a high enough and round enough number to allow for ‘professional installation.’ Some months later Leopold was loaded onto a truck with machinery that resembled well-armored prehistoric beasts but lacked the certain spark that comes from multiple loops through time and space and sipping cocktails with aged wizards named Lou. He was unloaded with his ‘companions’ in a fenced in pasture and for a few glorious weeks he began to believe that he had in fact finally reached the ‘great valley’ of childhood dreams (albeit slightly downsized due the devaluation of tree-stars as international currency). Then, one day a rather robust gentleman leapt upon the unsuspecting dragon-machine and began to pull levers and flip switches causing Leopold’s armor to pull and spark and twitch. This gave Leopold such great discomfort (not to mention that the man was very large) that he groaned and cried and thrashed about. Apparently this was the effect that the man desired for he smiled and steered the poor beast in the direction of the ‘frog pond’ and with great skill ‘coerced’ Leopold to chew the bottom of the pool to bits and throw it about the once ‘pristine’, now more than a little sandy ‘great valley.’

Let’s say all of this is true. In that case I rest no blame on the orange pile of bolts and sinews and beast-bits in my backyard for the fact that I no longer have a back yard. I may even try to free him.