A Second Chance: Chase

This is “book” three in the ‘A Second Chance’ series.

Chase crouched down low and concentrated every part of her being on the line drawn in the damp earth a few feet ahead. The dank, dirty smell the alleyways always seemed to have crept up her nostrils, and they flared as she breathed out to calm her racing heart. She settled her paws into the damp earth, though her small crippled paw only shifted loosely in the dirt, but Chase didn’t even notice as a glint came into her red-brown eyes, eyes that were tinted with the palest gold. She was going to do this. She had to.

With a cry of defiance she sprang forward and hit the dirt hard, her paws pounding and churning the ground as she loped towards the line, her own finish line. ‘I’m doing it!’ she let herself think proudly, ‘I’m running! I’m going to make it!’ Then her sharp ears heard the sound like something being dragged over wet sand, and her right back leg gave a twinge of pain. Her crippled leg was dragging behind her, making a rough trail through the dirt. She felt a spark of anger and desperation as her finish line neared, and she gritted her teeth harder every time a bolt of pain slashed through her leg.

‘I’m not going to make it,’ she thought helplessly, and twitched her head as a fiery explosion seemed to go off inside her leg. She was almost there; her finish line was only a few steps away. But then she felt her crippled leg spasm and its muscles lock, and the whole back half of her body suddenly weakened.

‘No!’ Chase screamed inside her head as she felt herself fall, and she tumbled over the finish line in a furry mess, her healthy legs flailing out in all directions and her twisted leg jerking painfully. She rolled, and banged her back into the gray brick wall of the alleyway. Her spine throbbed, and for a minute she saw stars.

Her vision returned after awhile, and eventually she struggled upwards, breathing hard. She quickly looked back to see her trail imprinted in the damp earth. Her crippled leg had dragged a crooked line in the ground from the start, and the middle of her finishing line was completely wiped out by whorls and waves in the dirt, evidence of her fall. Chase took it all in, and suddenly felt the urgent desire to scream, scream until she lost her voice, scream until she lost her mind, scream her heart out to get out all the frustration and anger building up inside her like a volcano about to erupt. Instead, she glared her hatred at her crooked leg and started to lick it, trying to ease a bit of the pain still bursting from inside it. The muscles of the twisted limb slowly relaxed, and Chase started to shiver ever so slightly as the wind began to blow over the damp dirt smeared through her ruby red and snow white fur. She kept licking her crippled leg to ease any of its pain, as if it were a dear friend, though really it was her worst enemy.

“Chase.”

Chase’s head snapped up to see her father Balto padding softly towards her. Immediately her heart hardened.

He sat down next to her and gently rubbed her twisted leg, and she tried to pull it away but it only jerked and then went limp again. He saw this and considerately moved his paw away. Chase stared hard at her filthy front paws as Balto sighed heavily.

“I saw what just happened,” he said quietly.

Shame and embarrassment clogged Chase’s throat, and she felt an angry spark come to her eye. At the sight of his youngest daughter’s expression Balto quickly changed the subject.

“Copper’s going to get his cast off in a few days,” he said, looking somewhere off in the distance. “He’s happy about that. We all are. Staying cooped up in the house all day just isn’t his style, and we all suffered because of it. Now he’ll be able to get up and do things and go places, and we won’t hear any more of his ‘I’m bored’ complaints.” Balto’s quiet chuckle rang uneasily through the silent alleyway. Chase said nothing. It had been more than a few weeks since her brother Copper, along with her sister Kaila and Balto, had returned from their separate adventures. Chase had gone to hug all of them and welcome them back, but as she embraced each family member she had felt a slight separation between herself and them. She was sure it had been because they felt awkward being around a dog with only three working legs, or because they felt sorry for her. She resented each one of them for that and had done the best she could to avoid them since then. One part of her mind told her she was being mean and unreasonable, but she couldn’t help being so touchy about her leg. Every situation she had ever been in that included other dogs or people had turned into a disaster. One moment she would join the crowd and be welcomed with cheerful greetings, or get a pat on the head accompanied by flattering words…and then they would see her crooked leg, and the dogs would awkwardly withdraw from her and go somewhere else, or the human would step back in surprise or disgust and continue going about their business, or they would move to coo to the next dog. It seemed to her she would have been accepted in any one of those situations if it hadn’t been for her leg. It made her different, abnormal, an alien to the rest of the world. She hated it.

Chase looked up quickly as Balto gave another tired sigh, then looked back down. “Look, Chase, I know your leg drags you down a lot. I wish there was some way I could help. I know what it feels like to be different and excluded…but that won’t help anything, will it?” He leaned over and laid his head on top of hers. She stiffened for a second, but gradually let herself calm. She felt his chest expand at the same time as hers, and they sighed together in unison.

“I wish you didn’t have to go through this,” Balto said, his eyes darting down to study her crippled limb. “Does it still hurt you sometimes?”

Chase spoke her first words to her father that day. “It hurts,” she said simply, then squared her shoulders. “But I can handle it.”

Balto nodded with a small smile and slipped his head off to look into his daughter’s fierce eyes. “You’ve been practicing hard at running, huh?”

Chase nodded. “I come down to this alley everyday to practice running. I think I’m getting better,” she said, ignoring her failure a few minutes ago. Fire came into her dark eyes as she gazed at her father. “Someday I’ll be able to run like a normal dog. No stumbles, no falls, no nothing. Just running, free. And then maybe the other dogs won’t think my leg’s as bad as it looks.”

That was her dream, why she ate, slept, breathed, why she bothered to keep herself alive. Someday she would show the world that having a twisted leg didn’t make her an alien. She could still run, and she would do it with pride.

Balto bit his lip as the memory of something Chase’s mother Jenna had said when she saw her youngest daughter’s twisted leg for the first time came back to him. “I know you will…but, wouldn’t it be easier if…well…”

Chase could see where this was going, and immediately turned her back to her father. “No, Dad,” she said in a firm tone meant to ice him speechless.

“I know we’ve been through this before,” Balto said in a frustrated tone, “I just don’t understand why you won’t go through with it. The doctor is more than willing to take away the pain your leg causes you. Wouldn’t it be easier if you had your leg amputated? There would be no more pain, no more nights where you can’t sleep because your leg hurts so bad. You could run without pain, without…well, a WEIGHT dragging you down. It would be so much easier on you, Chase. I don’t understand what makes you think having a leg amputated is worse than all the pain you’ve had to live with already. It hurts ME to see how much you’re hurting, Chase. Just one operation…Chase?”

Chase had grown calm and quiet on the outside, but on the inside her eyes were shooting out sparks, and she thought of how much she wanted to tear something apart like she was coming apart inside now…

“DAD!” Chase exploded, whipping around and seeing red as she glared up into her father’s face. “You think getting my mutated leg chopped off is going to solve all my problems, right? Well, you’re wrong!! Having three legs is worse than having a crippled leg! I’m enough of a freak already, don’t you think? Just to add to that, let’s cut off one of my body parts and see how I feel!” With that, Chase directed her focus inside her head and ignored any words that came out of Balto’s mouth in disagreement. Whenever she needed to escape, she simply cut off the real world and went inside her own head, thinking and dreaming and scheming as she could only do in this silence, the silence of her brain invaded only by the constant ticking of her thoughts. Somewhere far away she could hear Balto yelling at her, but his words were blurred and faded as she blocked them out. She sat in her inward trance for a few minutes, thinking nothing, just waiting until the shouts were gone…

Chase blinked rapidly and shook herself as she focused her eyes back on the real world and got her bearings back. Balto was gone, and she smiled grimly at how well her ignoring him had worked. But his words were still with her.

A hot, bubbling blade sliced through her heart, and she lurched forward and sped off into the maze of alleys, her foot dragging and