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Regressive Progress

Posted on December 29, 2006
Filed Under The Stories |

It was an odd sensation. I was trying to catch up to the man who had promised to wait for me. As I took each step forward it felt like the progress of my feet was being hampered, as if I was walking through knee-deep water or something. I looked down and realised that a street mutt was pressing his torso against me as he arched away from another dog loitering nearby. The canine at my feet didn’t ever stop my progress completely but there was this constant nudging at my shins that made forward progress at a rapid pace difficult. I looked up once and saw the man waiting for me. We were finally out on the main road and I looked down again to see the dog circling my legs, always watchful of the other dog sniffing around him. There was no hostility but the one pooch clearly did not want to have anything to do with the other one. I looked up again and the man was gone. At my feet, so were the dogs.

What did it all mean?

I continued forward because I wasn’t sure I knew how to return and moving seemed to be the only way to keep myself from sliding backwards off this steep, steep road. All around me were buildings I didn’t recognise and people who seemed simultaneously beautiful and strangely without features to distinguish one from the other. The architecture was impressive, imposing even and I had to do everything in my power to prevent myself from simply stopping and staring at the giant windmill that loomed over me or the imposing stone and wood structure that covered one corner of an imposing crossroads. I paused for a moment to debate the direction of my progress and realised that all I could really do was keep going, always onwards, forever forward. The points I passed along the way would merely be signposts, flags in the ground to indicate that I had been there for a brief moment in time.

As I continued my progress, for the first time without a destination or a moving target in sight, I thought of the man, and the dogs. Had the gentle canine been attempting to discourage me from continuing to seek the approval of a man who no longer wanted to be impressed by me? Or had he simply been in the man’s employ? Trained to distract me long enough for the man to disappear from sight so that he could hang on to his secrets a while longer…

It didn’t matter. No matter why he had chosen to do it, the dog had done me a favour. Maybe someday I could pay him back.

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