Chapter 15: The Prairie Dog Protocol

The gravel of the parking lot didn’t just crunch; it announced us. Each stone shifted under the station wagon’s tires with the sound of small, dry bones breaking. A percussive fanfare for the freaks. Crack, crack, crack a rhythm that synced with the frantic hammer of my heart against my ribs and the desperate, grounding pressure of Ash’s hand in mine. She was practically glued to my side, a silent, warm weight tuned to my every micro-tremor. Her world had collapsed into the space I occupied; my slightest shift in posture, the tension in my fingers, the pace of my breath, these were her only compass points. She was dependent on me, clingy in her doll-state, responding to the subtlest movement of my finger like a seismograph to the earth’s core. I was her whole world, and in that moment, the weight of that dependency was the only thing holding me upright.

Prairie Dog Town. The sign was a cartoonish riot of color, a grinning rodent in a cowboy hat that felt like a jeer. Its violent cheer was obscene against the bleached, infinite South Dakota sky. Beyond the splintering fence, a dust-blown field was pockmarked with mounds, a topography of borrowed, frantic lives. The animals popped up, vanished, a ceaseless game of terrestrial whack-a-mole that felt like a sick parody of our own existence: exposed, scrutinized, diving for cover that didn’t exist.

But it was the human colony that stole the air from my lungs.

A congregation of normalcy. Families with strollers like armored personnel carriers. Grandparents in sun hats, binoculars hanging from their necks, lenses that could magnify shame as easily as a prairie dog’s whiskers. Kids shrieked, chasing each other with paper bags of feed. All of it, a vibrant, bustling testament to a world that had not ended.

The protocol began with the architects.

Dad killed the engine. The silence was immediate and profound. He didn’t turn around, didn’t issue commands. He simply opened his door and stepped out, a man in crisp jeans and a polo shirt, a curator arriving to unveil his exhibit.

Then Mom moved.

She opened her door and stood. Not quickly, not slowly. With a sovereign, terrible grace. The South Dakota sun, pitiless and clarifying, fell upon her nakedness without compromise. She was forty years old. Her body was not that of a magazine model, but of a woman who had borne four children. There were lines, softness, the honest map of a lived life. And she wore it all like a coronation robe.

She did not look at the crowd. She looked at the sky, at the distant buttes, as if drawing strength from the raw, exposed landscape itself. Then her hand came up, not to cover herself, but to settle lightly on Dad’s shoulder as he came around the car. It was a gesture of possession, of partnership. See? It screamed in the silent language of posture. I am not his victim. I am his counterpart. His equal, in this exposed truth. The confidence radiating from her was a force field. It didn’t invite leers; it demanded a reckoning. The murmured conversations nearby didn’t just die; they were smothered by the weight of her absolute, unshakeable authority. This wasn’t a naked woman. This was a principle, walking.

Claire emerged next from the sliding side door. She stood straight, her chin high, replicating Mom’s posture but without the deep, tectonic certainty. Her confidence was a performance, a suit of armor hammered thin from defiance. She was a soldier holding a line, not a queen inhabiting a throne. The stares hit her, and I saw the almost imperceptible flinch in the tight line of her jaw. She absorbed the shock, metabolized it into a colder, sharper glare, and aimed it back at a gawking man in a bucket hat until he looked away, discomforted.

Megan followed. Her exit was different. Analytical. She scanned the crowd as if it were a data set, categorizing reactions: disgust, prurient interest, confusion, pity. Her nudity was a clinical fact. She was testing a hypothesis in a live environment. Her confidence wasn’t born of authority or defiance, but of intellectual detachment. She was the most “clothed” of them all, in a uniform of pure cognition. Yet, when a group of teenage boys snickered, her arms, which had been held loosely at her sides, twitched infinitesimally, a brief, betrayed flicker towards a modesty that no longer existed in her world. She controlled it instantly, but the crack had been visible.

They were all exposed. But Mom’s exposure was a weapon. Claire’s was a shield. Megan was in a lab coat. And they created a perimeter of such potent, unsettling weirdness that it made space for my own entrance.

My turn. The clothed one. The handler.

I felt every eye swing to me as I slid open the heavy door. The heat was a wall. I had to lean back into the car’s dim, vinyl-scented sanctuary, my hands finding Ash’s waist.

“Ready, my doll,” I whispered, the words a shaky incantation.

I guided her out. She was pliant, her movements obedient but uncoordinated, her bare feet settling on the burning gravel. She stood, a pale, collared statue blinking in the sun, and immediately pressed her side against my leg, seeking anchor. The contrast was immediate and grotesque: me in my khakis and polo, the “good son,” holding the leash of a naked, silent girl.

The crowd’s murmur changed pitch. It wasn’t the shocked silence that greeted Mom, or the hostile curiosity for Claire and Megan. It was a low, buzzing confusion laced with a new, specific kind of revulsion. I wasn’t a victim. I was a participant. An owner. My clothed state wasn’t normal; it was a costume for the ringmaster.

A woman with a toddler on her hip gasped, not at my sisters, but at Ash. “Oh, my Lord. She’s got a ... Is that a collar?”

A man’s voice, gruff and judgmental, carried. “What’s wrong with her? Is she simple?”

“Maybe she’s cold,” a girl my age whispered to her friend, not unkindly, before being shushed by her mortified mother.

I ignored them. I focused on the geometry of us. I took Ash’s hand, lacing my fingers with hers, and began the short, excruciating walk to where my family stood. Each step on the gravel was a public declaration. I kept my eyes forward, on the back of my mother’s head, but my peripheral vision was a hellscape of pointed fingers and cupped mouths.

I leaned down, my lips brushing the shell of Ash’s ear, our private channel in the public storm. My voice was low, a stream of liquid command meant to shape her reality.

“You are my comfort-companion doll,” I breathed, each word a brick in the wall between her and the world. “You see only what I allow you to see. You hear only what I permit you to hear. Their noise is nothing. Their stares are dust. Your world is my voice, my touch, my will. Nothing else is real. Nothing else matters.”

I felt her breath hitch, then even out. Her trembling stilled. Her grip on my hand shifted from desperate to deliberate. She was locking onto my frequency, tuning out the static. Her head, which had been swiveling slightly at the new sounds, now fixed forward, her eyes glazing into that familiar, peaceful vacancy. The doll was present. Ashley was receding. The calibration was held.

We reached the others. We were a complete set now. A bizarre monument. Dad paid for tickets at the booth, the elderly cashier’s eyes wide as dinner plates, her hands shaking as she took his money without a word.

We moved as a unit into the park proper, a phalanx of flesh and fabric. The path wound past pens and viewing platforms. The prairie dogs chirped and dove. And everywhere, the human spectators performed a complex dance of avoidance and obsession, pretending not to stare while drinking us in with sideways glances.

The tension was a wire strung taut across the whole park. It snapped when a little girl, maybe four, in a bright yellow sundress, broke away from her parents near a fenced-off burrow area. She was chasing a butterfly, her laughter pure and oblivious. Then her foot caught on a rut in the hard-packed dirt.

She went down with a soft thump and a delayed, startled wail.

Her parents were twenty feet away, turned the other way.

My body moved before my mind could formulate a thought. A sharp intake of breath. A fractional step forward. But I was holding Ash’s hand, anchoring the doll. I couldn’t.

So I communicated without words. A pulse of pressure through our joined hands. A subtle turn of my body toward the fallen child. A low, urgent sound in my throat that wasn’t a word, but a command of intent: Go. Assist.

Ash’s head turned. Her eyes, a moment ago vacant, found the sobbing little girl. There was no hesitation, no social calculation. She had a directive.

She dropped my hand and was moving, a silent, pale streak. She didn’t run; she flowed, kneeling in the dust beside the child in one fluid motion. The little girl, shocked and scared, flailed, her cries rising. Ash didn’t speak. She simply gathered the girl into her lap, using her own body to cradle her, one hand gently patting her back, the other checking her ankle with surprising delicacy. She was a statue of comfort, naked and serene, her collared throat bent over the yellow sundress.

It was so profoundly alien, so stripped of normal human interaction, that it froze everyone who saw it, including the girl’s parents, who now turned and hurried over, their faces masks of panic morphing into stunned confusion.

“Chloe! Honey, are you?” The mother skidded to a halt, staring at the naked young woman holding her daughter. “What...?”

I was there then, my hand coming to rest on the small of Ash’s back, a marker of ownership and a signal to release. “She’s alright,” I said, my voice surprisingly steady. “Just tripped. My ... companion. She reacts to distress.”

The father, wary, knelt and gently extracted his daughter from Ash’s arms. The little girl, Chloe, had stopped crying. She was sniffling, staring at Ash with wide, curious eyes, one grubby hand reaching out to touch the strange leather band around her neck before her mother quickly pulled it back.

“Thank you,” the mother said, the words tight and strained, her eyes darting from Ash’s calm, dusty face to my own, searching for an explanation that wouldn’t come. “That was ... quick of her.”