Every night he saw the dogs fly past his window. He didn't mention them anymore as it tended to draw attention to himself and he didn't want that. He just looked forward to seeing them. He figured altogether there might be two dozen dogs.
He never saw them all on one night. Some nights there were only two or three, others as many as twenty. He recognized each one and over the years he named each dog. And the dogs did not get older as he did.
He knew they weren't real of course, but still when one of the dogs flew in his window he was taken aback.
``Why do you watch us every night?'' the dog asked. He was a black lab mix, apparently. His wings were dark and leathery like a bat's or a dragon's.
``Why wouldn't I watch you? How often do I see flying dogs?''
``Don't you have anything else to do?''
``Well no, I don't,'' he answered.
The dog was reclining in the man's easy chair. From some recess on his person he had taken a sturdy briar pipe and he was puffing on it with obvious enjoyment. There was something oddly touching about the sight of this dog indulging blissfully in a human activity now discredited by association with cancer, emphysema and other disease. A sense of well being emanated from him.
``You wonder perhaps how we came to be?'' The dog asked with a faint smile.
``Indeed,'' said the man, though in fact he did not believe that the dog came to be at all as he was obviously an illusion.
``Well it all came about in the Franco Prussian War,'' the dog said. ``A young student, Crislip Tuk, was expelled from the University of Jena for riotous thinking. He made his way to Paris, where the plight of overburdened messenger pigeons, laden down with the verbosity of petty functionaries, caused him to try to think of a different means of communication between government and army.
Tuk devised experiments which today would be considered quite unacceptable - involving as they did stray dogs, his mistress Bettina and a fruit eating bat from the region of Chiapas in Mexico which he purloined from the Jardin des Plantes.
The upshot of it all was a new breed.
Tuk did not think in terms of DNA but rather of dog essence, bat essence and human essence - essentially the same idea. Unfortunately it took decades to perfect us, and when Tuk approached the government with his new breed he was declared a hoax and a fraud.'' The dog puffed on his dead pipe for a moment then emptied the dottle into the garbage can. ``And they would look at us, you know, but they would never acknowledge that they saw us. And since then it has always been so.'' The dog looked wearily out of the window. ``We are an outdated weapon. Our usefulness passed before we were even there. We are like the great horses, but never acknowledged.''
The dog sat on the window sill and leaned backward and somersaulted away, his telescoped wings opening gracefully to bear him off into the darkness.
The man was about to call the aide to tell him what he had seen, but then thought the better of it.