Short Stories

Dragons

By S.R. Koch

Dragons live in the north. It’s their homeland. Their race was born from the roots of a great mountain that has long since been lost to time and memory, and so they have an inherent love of the cold that drives them to live in the far north where the snows never leave. They wander, of course. They like to travel and see the world, and many dragons are born in warmer climates while their parents roam. They all end up migrating back to the north, however. Never the far south. Perhaps it’s something scientific, like magnetism, but they and I both believe that it has more to do with being on top. Their race was born of the mountains, and they like to be at the top of things.

I knew a dragon—Tormund, was his name—and he was an amiable enough fellow. Few people get to meet dragons these days. They were hunted mercilessly during the middle ages, and since then their race has avoided humans as often as possible. I met Tormund as a yearling, when he was young and inexperienced and had not yet made his pilgrimage to the north. He’d gotten himself stuck in a cow pasture, with his wings tangled in the barbed wire fence, and was panicking because the cows had found him interesting. It was almost funny—a creature well over the size of a good-sized draft horse squalling and shrieking in terror as a herd of big-eyed cows shuffled and lowed curiously around him. I had to get wire-cutters to get his wings free, and afterward he tried to hide behind me, all the while hissing fearfully at the cows, who were still trying to get a good look at him. He came from an island out in the pacific where his parents had hatched his egg, and he’d never seen anything like cows before. I had to explain to him, as I was dressing and binding the scratches and cuts on his wings, that they were not dangerous, though the men who usually kept them could be if they caught a large predatory animal prowling around their cattle. He listened raptly with big, luminous, gold-and-green eyes staring fixedly at my face.

            Dragons are actually strangely catlike in appearance. Tormund was green—like emeralds—with black edges to his scales that made him seem like a patch of shadow beneath a tree. His body was lean, muscular, and streamlined, with slim but powerful limbs tipped with long claws set on surprisingly deft fingers. His head was long and horse-ish, with spined crests above the eyes and running down the length of his back, and his wings were wide sails of thin green membrane stretched between five clawed fingers and traced with delicate blue veins. He was a beautiful creature, and he knew it very well. Not all dragons are vain, or greedy, or kind-hearted. They’re like people—different. Tormund happened to be a very vain creature, though he was gentle, and he had an avid sense of curiosity. We became friends, and he stayed with me for a time while his wing was healing.

            He eventually left, for which I had mixed feelings—sadness because he’d been a great companion for the month or so that he’d stayed, but also relieved because he ate half his weight once a week and the deer in the area were on the verge of running out. Where he went to, I did not know. I waited, and watched the skies, but didn’t see him again for another ten years. By then, I had my own family, and he surprised my wife and me as we were walking in the woods behind our house when he suddenly touched down in a clearing nearby. He’d grown a lot since I’d last seen him—he was now easily bigger than my big pickup truck, and longer than a bus even if you didn’t count his tail, and the beginnings of a small, spined beard had grown on his chin and down his neck a little ways.

            After introducing Tormund and my wife, I asked how he’d been. He said fine, and he told me what he’d been up to; He’d visited the Amazon for a time, prowling along the banks of the river watching snakes and crocodiles and their hunting. After that, he said, he’d traveled to Egypt, where he flew to the top of the pyramids at Giza during the night and perched there to watch the stars. He said that he liked the desert because of the sand and the way the sandstorms polished his scales like glass, but he felt slightly wrong there because of the heat, and he’d eventually left to fly the ocean just to feel a cool breeze. He’d met a few other dragons, he said, old ones, and they’d gotten him thinking about making a pilgrimage to the north. He’d decided to wait, though.

            When he asked how I had been, I replied that I too had been doing well. I had Mary and my two kids—Rodney and Brianne—and a nice home out in the country with a dog and a small flock of chickens. I told him of college—about business school, and how I’d met Mary at a party one night and we’d decided to get married a few years later—and I talked of the business I’d put together—a small booksellers just on the corner of Snelling and Cross down in the little town nearby. He seemed pleased that I was happy, though he asked me if I would like to travel with him for awhile. I politely declined, saying that I had my family to look after, though I would have liked to come. He nodded, understanding, and after goodbyes and expressing his pleasure in meeting my wife, he left in a clap of wings and a burst of dried leaves.

            I didn’t see him for another fifteen years, in which time my kids grew, one by one, and left. My wife and I continued to run the bookshop and tend our chickens. The dog had died, years ago of a cancer in his neck, and we’d never had the heart to get another one. We got a cat instead—a scrawny stray tortie that my wife rescued off the side of the road. We named her Milly, and she was a terrible beggar at the dinner table. I blame my wife—she encouraged her.

            I was alone this time, tending the chickens, when Tormund appeared again, this time with something clutched carefully in his foreclaws. When I asked him what it was, he presented it to me proudly—a huge, obsidian egg, with red and blue veins shimmering along its surface like streams of ruby and sapphire. He’d found a mate, he said, and as the male, it was his duty to care for the egg until it hatched. He’d been so excited, he needed to tell me right away, and so he’d flown all the way from India to show me without stopping once. I asked him if he was hungry after such a long flight, and replied no, he’d eaten one of my neighbor’s cows just a few minutes ago. He was too obviously proud of his egg to get angry at.

            He was bigger again, but not by much—his growing had finally leveled out and stopped at maturity—and the horns on his eye ridges and down his back were longer. The beard was longer, and his muscles thick and well-developed. He asked me how I’d been, and I told him. He asked me again if I wanted to travel with him, but I said no, my wife had been ill lately, and I couldn’t leave her. He nodded again, and gazed lovingly at his egg, and after a hasty farewell, he lifted off again, sending my chickens into a panic and making the weather vane on the coop roof spin wildly.

            Five years later, my wife died. Skin cancer. She fought long and hard, but in the end, she was too tired to go on, and she told me as she lay in the hospital bed, among all those unnatural white smells and the harsh fluorescent lights, that she wanted to be in the sun. I nodded silently and took her up in my arms, and snuck her out the back door. I took her to my car and drove her out to the countryside—to a state park we’d visited when we were dating—and I walked with her in my arms far out into the woods, until we found a sunny little patch of moss at the edge of a clearing, right at the base of an old, old maple tree with twining roots. We sat there together for a time, just listening to the leaves and the birds, her with her head on my chest, and me with my arm around her, and we stayed there without speaking until she eventually left me. I carried her back to my house without a word or tear, and the funeral came a month later. I didn’t cry until after the funeral, when I came home and saw the old hiking stick she’d carved for herself, back when she’d been carrying Brianne as a baby. I was sad then, but in a way, I was happy, too. One of the great mysteries of the world.

            I lived alone for two more years. Milly was still with me—an old, scraggly, but still deeply affectionate thing who still begged at the table and who curled up at my feet and drooled on the coverlet at night—but she was bound to leave soon as well, and I was growing tired. One day, on a whim, I walked out to the woods, my cane making a third, round footprint wherever I went, up to the field where I’d first met Tormund as a yearling. The farmer who owned the place was five years dead, and the field had gone wild, but the fence was still there, and I could see where the wire was different from having to be replaced after I cut it out. I stood there looking at it for a while, and was somehow not surprised when the thunder of wings and a rush of wind told me Tormund was back.

            He was in his prime, now—about twenty-five by human terms—with a deep, powerful chest, a proud, spiny beard beneath his chin, and horns jutting from behind his jaws as well as over his eye ridges and down the length of his back. He looked at me with those huge, wise, golden-green eyes, and asked me how my wife was. I told him, and he said he was sorry. He sounded sorry. I asked him how his baby was, and he said that it had been a young drake (male), and that it had hatched blue like sapphires. He had parted ways with it in Egypt—still his favorite place in the world, so far—and then traveled listlessly across China. He’d come back, he said, because he was about to embark on his pilgrimage, and he wanted to ask me one last time if I wanted to come.

            I thought. I was old, very old, probably too old to travel, but like him, I was listless. I had nothing left here—my wife was gone, my children grown, and the bookstore I’d been forced to close two years ago because of the advancement of kindles and the lack of buyers of old books. I wondered what the land of dragons was like, and if anyone like me had ever been there before.

            I told Tormund to wait, and hobbled back to the house. I found an old pack from when my wife and I had taken our hikes around the woods out back, and I filled it with some food, a little money (just in case), denture cleaner, and warm clothes. I replaced my cane with my wife’s old walking stick, and then I hobbled back out to the field with and old blanket and a rope slung under my arm. I told Tormund to crouch down. He did so, his arm proffered for a step, and allowed me to tie the blanket to the slight depression behind his shoulders, where the spines were widely spaced enough for me to sit. When I was done, I heaved my old, aching bones into the makeshift saddle, slung my pack on my back, and told him I was ready. He nodded, told me to hang on, and took off.

            I’ve never experienced anything more thrilling than dragonflight. It took my breath away at the first beat of his massive, powerful wings, and I felt my soul soaring as the two of us lifted higher and higher into the sky. I could see everything for miles—trees, farms, the house where I’d lived my life—and I could feel the wind in my thinning hair as Tormund angled himself forward and into a thermal that brought us even higher. When he’d reached his cruising altitude—the happy medium where he wouldn’t be seen from the ground and I could still breathe—he slipped back out of the thermal and began winging his way forward, towards the north. I leaned back against the spine behind me, and found that I was content.

            I was going to see the dragons, one first and final time.

THE END     

Metamorphosis

By S.R. Koch

People always ask the wrong questions. “What is the meaning of life?” is the most common. Philosophers and other great thinkers tend to worry and ponder over the big questions, when in truth, it’s the little ones they should be asking. “Why do socks always disappear in the laundry?” is a good question, and happens to be one that I can actually explain. There are other questions, of course, like, “Why does toast always land buttered-side down?” or “How do cats always know when you don’t want to be bothered?” Those ones, unfortunately, I can’t answer, though I suspect there’s someone out there who can. Someone who, like me, stumbled into something they weren’t meant to see.

            It was the middle of February, and about three months after my eighth birthday. It had been a cold year, and though I don’t normally mind snow or cold, the fact that our socks seemed to be disappearing at an unusually rapid rate was becoming really irritating. Nine days out of ten, I had to wear mismatched socks, and my poor mom was making weekly runs to the local department store to buy bags of socks for everyone. It was ridiculous, and it never seemed to matter how careful my mom was when she was loading the washer. The socks just vanished, and even after several searches behind the dryer and numerous sweeps of the corners of the laundry room, we could never find them again. I suspected that my dog was stealing them out of the hamper or that my brother was playing a joke on everyone, so I came to the conclusion any sensible person would; I needed to go on a stakeout.

            At age ten, I was a slightly unusual specimen of my gender in that I had absolutely no interest in ponies, princesses, or dressing up dolls. My passion was spying, and my Barbies were usually armed with GI-Joe weapons and sent on daring missions around the house. I owned a dozen code-writing books, I had secret notebooks with invisible-ink pens for all my spy information, and even a pair of night-vision binoculars that my parents bought me for Christmas. Seeing the strange sock shortage as a perfect opportunity to exercise my spying skills in a real-life mission, I went to work full of excitement.

            Our laundry room is a small, cramped room that actually used to be an oversized closet. The washer and dryer take up one entire wall, while the other wall has a huge shelf structure with storage cupboards all along the top. It is there that we keep the canned veggies that we harvest from our garden every year, along with spare quart jars and a couple huge, black pots. I’ve discovered, through intense games of hide-and-seek at my birthday parties, that I can fit into the cupboards if I scrunch my knees up to my chin and squeeze myself between the two big pots. It’s a perfect place to hide, because the divider on the door hides me even if the door is opened, and if I leave it open a crack, I have an excellent view of the room. I use the place whenever I need to avoid practicing piano or when my brother’s being a jerk. No one, to this day, has ever discovered it.

            On the night of the stakeout, I waited until my mom had kissed me goodnight and both she and my dad had gone to bed. I then, very carefully, rose, grabbed my spy pack from under the bed, and padded downstairs on bare feet so as not to make a sound. I left all the lights off, and clambered into the cupboard mostly by touch. It was a tight fit and hard to do without light, but I eventually got myself in and was able to settle down with my notebook and invisible ink pens in my lap and my night binoculars in my hand. I was all set.

            For the first half hour, my excitement kept me awake and eager so that I didn’t even notice how cramped I was. I scanned the room with my binoculars every five minutes, and I kept running scenarios through my head where I leaped from the cupboard and caught the sock thief red-handed when he attempted to make off with the contents of the laundry hamper. Some of the stories I came up with were pretty exciting, and often involved some ulterior motive for stealing the socks that was usually along the lines of there being a secret code or priceless jewel hidden in with our dirty clothes. I had a pretty fantastic imagination, but truth be told, I think my stories were rather tame in comparison to what really happened.

            My exhilaration kept me going strong for little over half an hour, but at around ten-thirty, I suddenly realized that my butt had gone numb. As my excitement eventually waned, so did my enthusiasm. I checked the room less and less often, and shifted a lot in a futile attempt to relieve the various numbed surfaces on my back, legs, and rear. I began thinking more and more of my bed. I thought of how soft and comfy the covers were, and of how much cooler my bedroom was than that stuffy little cupboard. I began noticing every sharp corner and angle poking into me from all sides, and soon that was all my brain could focus on. The only reason I didn’t leave was because I was, and remain to this day, one of the most stubborn people on the planet. I was sleepy, too, but I couldn’t drift off because of all those corners poking me. In the end, it’s a good thing they were. Otherwise, I never would have seen what happened next.

            I don’t know what time it was, really, but I like to think that it was midnight. Sleep was actually beginning to overcome discomfort by that point, and I had my chin resting on my chest despite a bad neck cramp, my eyes slowly drooping closed. I was just about to drift off entirely, when the sound of something moving in the darkness caught my attention, and I jolted awake with an electric tingling of fear and excitement.  

            The sock thief had arrived.

            Very quietly, I moved my binoculars up from where they’d been resting on my knees and trained them on the crack I’d left in the door. From there, I could clearly see the sliding door that led into the room, the laundry hamper, and one corner of the washing machine. Since I was expecting my thief to come through the door, I focused on that. You can imagine my surprise when the brief flash of movement that I caught in the corner of my night binoculars came from somewhere entirely different—the hamper.

            The lid had jumped.

            Startled, I quickly swung the binoculars around to look at the hamper, just in time to see the lid snap closed. I frowned, confused, and squinted through the lenses.

            A soft rustling on the floor drew my attention away from the hamper, and I quickly shifted my gaze to the base of the wash machine. I just caught a glimpse of something scooting out of sight behind a mop bucket. In the green of the night binoculars, I couldn’t tell what color it was, but it was small and long of body, like a rat. A sour feeling of uneasiness settled on me at the thought that there might be rats in the room with me, and suddenly my stake-out was beginning to seem like a really bad idea. Another snap from the hamper made me jump slightly, my nerves tingling.

            I still couldn’t see what was making the hamper open and close, so I decided to watch and wait for it to happen again. I stared at it for a full minute, ignoring the soft rustling noises from the floor and the rising sense of panic building in the back of my throat. My eyes started to water from holding them open for so long, and I think I was holding my breath. I was just on the verge of blinking and heaving a loud gasp of air when the lid opened again, and I finally saw what had been making the noises.

            A sock.

            I recognized it—one of my white ones with a blue heel and toe and a gaping hole where my big toe had poked through. It slid through the gap that it made by pushing the toe end of its body against the lid, and then crawled, inchworm-style, down the side of the hamper towards the floor. It looked to be in a hurry.

            There were now three of them gathered on the floor, including the newcomer. The first two—both big ones from my dad—had come out of hiding from behind the mop bucket, and were sitting in a loose half-circle with their toe-ends facing inward. They looked like a gathering of flat, oddly-colored caterpillars. I heard the hamper snap twice more, and two more socks joined the first three—one from my mom, and one from my brother. The five of them sat in their little circle, occasionally waving their front ends in a manner that looked to me like some form of greeting. At that point, I still wasn’t entirely sure what I was watching; they looked as if they were gathering together for some purpose, yet they hadn’t done anything since they’d crawled out of the hamper. A minute later, however, I figured out what was going on.

            As if by some sort of signal, all five sock-caterpillars suddenly let themselves drop flat against the floor, and they all stopped moving. I watched, fascinated, as they began to spin some sort of silky thread from the heel-ends of their bodies, each of them encapsulating itself in a cocoon of silk. Soon, all five where completely covered, and the flow of silk stopped. All that was left was five white, bean-shaped lumps on the floor in a little circle.

            I was absolutely ecstatic; I was witnessing the metamorphosis of socks. It was just like the monarch butterflies that we sometimes caught as caterpillars and raised to adulthood, only it was taking place over the course of a few hours. All thoughts of my soft, comfy bed were long gone, and I waited expectantly for the cocoons to hatch and for the adult form of the sock creatures to emerge.

 I didn’t have to wait long—after all, the change had to be done quickly in order to avoid detection by humans, so it stood to reason that it wouldn’t take long for the adults to develop in their little cocoons. Within an hour (which went by in the blink of an eye), the cocoon that my sock had spun was beginning to hatch. A long, ragged crack appeared down the side of the white surface, and a segmented leg poked its way through the shell of hardened silk. The legs were immediately followed by a big, furry head with feathered antenna mounted on top and tiny, black, beadlike eyes positioned directly below the antenna. The thorax followed the head, along with the creature’s fat, fuzzy abdomen and the drooped, rumpled form of its wings.

Two others—my mom’s and one of my dad’s—were beginning to hatch by this point, and the remaining two were beginning to wiggle and rock. As the two latest ones tugged their way free, mine proceeded to twitch and shiver its rumpled wings, drying them out and removing the creases. By the time the last two had begun to crawl out of their cocoons, mine was completely dry, and was giving little experimental flutters of its wings. 

The entire creature, though cast in green by my night binoculars, was a pale, off-white color from head to abdomen. Its wings were the same color, with odd, cross-hatched lines running up and down their length. The tips of each lobe of its wings were dark blue in color, with patterns at the base that looked suspiciously like stitch marks. As my mom’s sock slowly unfurled its wings, I noted that it was a bit different—the wingtips were dark gray instead of blue. Each sock-moth, I realized, matched the pattern of the sock that it had changed from, down to the spiderman pattern on my brother’s red and blue sock.

When all five of them were completely hatched, they promptly set about eating the remains of their cocoons. Their strange, multicolored wings shivered as they audibly munched on the dried husks of silk, making them almost look like a flock of pigeons (they were, as you might imagine, quite huge). When they were done with that, they proceeded to test out their new winds, hopping and fluttering about across the laundry room floor in gradually-lengthening bursts of short flight. I was so entranced by it all that I didn’t even noticed that I had been unconsciously leaning forward against the door, balancing on my toes with my free hand gripping one of the big black pots for support. I suppose what happened next was inevitable.

            I eventually reached the point where I was leaning just an inch too far over my center of balance, and my weight became too much for the pot. With a startled shout, I began to fall forward, the cupboard door flying open under my weight and the heavy metal pot falling out after me as I tumbled out into the open, my eyes wide.

            I never saw what happened to the sock-moths—I was too focused on the assortment of jars and sharp corners that I caught on my way down. I managed to curl into a fetal ball on the trip floorwards so as not to injure myself too badly, but the corners and edges that I hit left some uncomfortable bruises, and I must have knocked every jar on the shelf off to judge by the noise. Me, the black pot, a dozen jars of canned beans and some other random things that had been stacked on the shelf all hit the ground at roughly the same time, producing an almighty crash of metal and shattering glass that could have woken the dead. I just sat there, stunned, and watched the patch on the floor where the sock-moths had been. They’d fled, as could be expected, though where to, I never found out. A minute later my mother burst into the room, and promptly shrieked in horror when she saw the state of me and the laundry room.

            I tried to explain—how I’d noticed the unusual number of missing socks and how I’d done the stakeout to catch the thief, and then how the socks had crawled out of the hamper and turned into moths. I did it calmly and with plenty of descriptive facts to back up my claims, yet I might as well have not spoken. My mom, and no one else for that matter, believed me—there wasn’t even a shred of cocoon silk left on the ground as evidence of the strange nighttime transformation—and I was accused of stealing the missing socks in order to make up the story. Never mind that one of them had been my own. In the end, I was given a bath and sent back to bed, and my night binoculars were taken away for a week as punishment for trashing the laundry room.

            I knew I was right, though.

            I’ve tried, multiple times, since that day, to catch the metamorphosis of sock-caterpillars again. Ours must have moved somewhere else, though, since I never saw them in the laundry room again. I suppose I don’t blame them; after all, I intruded on something no human is meant to see, and in order to protect themselves, they had to find somewhere we can’t find them to go about their business.

            In the end, I answered one question: “Why do socks always disappear in the laundry?” Yet I ended up asking a hundred more. For instance, “How do cats always know when you don’t want to be bothered?” and “Why does toast always land buttered-side down?”

            Or even, “If socks can turn into butterflies, what does it mean when one’s underwear goes missing?”

            Perhaps, someday, we’ll find out.

THE END

My Sister's Lizard

  It was an interesting day when the lizard escaped.

            That the lizard escaped in the first place was, A: a catastrophe, since my sister loves that thing, and B: a miracle, since the lizard was six feet long and about the width of a large bobsled. How anyone could lose something that size in a three-story house (four, if you count the basement) was nothing short of incredible. Yet lose him we did.

            My sister’s the one who’s supposed to look after Bink. She got him as a baby at a pet store; a tiny, scaly runt of a thing with a skinny body and a head that was way too big for the rest of him. The storekeeper told us he was a bearded dragon, but I think even he had doubts. Don’t even ask how my sister came up with his name. I think it was a character from a book she read or something like that.

            Upon arrival at our house, six years ago, Bink underwent an incredible series of growth spurts. He kept shedding his skin (which my sister thought was gross), leaving pale, papery impressions of himself scattered around his tank. He more than doubled in size the first week that we had him, and within a month, we were buying a new tank that was four times the size of the old one. He kept on growing, and soon even the dog was afraid of him. We had to feed him mice (which, I’ll admit, was indeed disgusting), and he seemed to have an unusual taste for anything spicy as well. We would feed him bowls of dried chili peppers doused in teriyaki sauce, and he would eat them in huge gulps until his spiny belly was swollen and he could barely move. He would then sit back on his haunches, puff out the scaled sac at his throat, and burp out a cloud of noxious pepper fumes. It made our eyes water, but he always looked disappointed.

            Thankfully for our financial stability, Bink’s growth spurts panned out when he was six months old, and his voracious eating habits mellowed out. For five and a half years, he mostly sat in his tank, eating his mice when we gave them to him, pooping, and burping chili. He was actually a pretty boring pet…that is, until the day he escaped.

            We probably wouldn’t have found out for days, since we’d been packing lately for a big trip to Wyoming, and we were about to leave for a week. Just as we were about to walk out the door, my sister suddenly remembered that she’d left her phone in her bedroom. She ran upstairs to get it, and then promptly returned empty-handed, her face ashen.

            “Bink’s gone!” she exclaimed.

            That threw us all into a panic. Marcy (my sister) got it into her head that the cat had eaten her lizard. I countered with a lecture on weight ratio and how Lavender—our slightly overweight calico—would need iron-capped teeth and protective plates of metal lining her gullet in order to ingest something as big and spiny as Bink. My argument won, not surprisingly.

            Mom and Dad were both very convinced that Bink was still somewhere in the house, hiding somewhere, too afraid to come out. That struck me as improbable as well, since he was six feet long and pretty hard to miss, but we were running out of ideas, and we had to start somewhere.

            And so the hunt began.

            Our house is old, not to mention cluttered, thanks to my mom and my aunt’s annual garage sale, so my parents’ idea that Bink was hiding somewhere in the house could have been true. My parents started in the basement, while my sister checked the first floor and I searched the second, all of us checking every conceivable hiding place for the missing lizard.

            I crawled under dusty beds, pawed through closets that I’d swear opened into another dimension, and slid bookshelves away from walls, and yet I encountered no sign of the lizard. In half an hour, I was so dusty I could have been sitting in the attic for centuries, and I’d inhaled enough dust-bunnies and mothball funk to give me some form of asthma. When at last I was on the verge of giving up and offering to buy my sister a snake as a replacement, I stumbled back to her room to give her closet one last look. As I was walking by the lizard tank, something caught my eye, and I almost cried out in triumph before I did a quick double-take and realized my mistake.

            For a moment, I’d thought I’d found Bink. There was something pale, scaly, and big hunkered down behind the rocks in his cage, sitting absolutely motionless with its long length wedged between the wall of the tank and the rocks. I looked closer, and realized that it wasn’t Bink, like I’d initially thought. It was another one of his sheds.

            Unlike the broken, scattered ones he’d left when he was little, this one was perfect. It had every little detail; from his horn-rimmed eyelids; to the weird bump at the end of his tail that the pet shop people had claimed was a bite mark from another male lizard; to the odd lumps on his back that they’d never even tried to explain. The nose was split open where he’d crawled out, and the glass around it was scratched where his scaled sides had dragged across the pane. The claw prints in the crushed walnut shells around the shed were bigger than I remembered, and I realized with a deep sinking feeling what was happening.

            Bink was having another growth spurt.

            I made for the stairs leading up to the attic as fast as I could. I’d dismissed the attic before, since Bink had been too small to push open the door before. When I got there, the door wasn’t just pushed aside—it had been demolished. Wood chips were scattered everywhere, and the remains hung at a cant on twisted hinges. Amidst the rubble, I found another shed—this one about three times as large as the last one, with a strange triangular bulge near the shoulders where the weird lumps used to be. I dodged inside, this time following a series of gaping rents in the floor that had been torn there by the passage of some gargantuan beast. I could see where Bink’s claws had dug into the wood—three claws per foot, which was too few to belong to a bearded dragon—and there were large, arched slashes cut into the flooring that seemed to trail the leading tracks. I followed the wreckage through a tumbled-over pile of boxes and the carnage of what used to be an overstuffed couch, all the way to the tiny window at the far end of the room.

            The window, like the door, had been utterly destroyed, this time taking a huge chunk of the wall off with it. As I clambered through the hole, I noticed another shed, and this time, it looked nothing like a lizard.

            The vertigo of being at the uppermost story of a three-floor house seized me momentarily as I edged out onto the gutter, but I quickly overcame it as I heard the sound of tramping footsteps crunching across the tiled roof of our house. Throwing caution to the wind, I scrambled up, following the trail of wreckage that Bink had left along the side of our house. I made it to the roof, and took off in a crouched shuffle across the tiles, some of which had been torn from the roof and crushed beneath Bink’s sharp claws or his spined, sweeping tail. I scuttled up and over the peak of the house, and on the other side, I froze, my mouth gaping open in awe.

            There was Bink, no longer an awkward lizard with a flat body and gangly limbs, but a great beast of prey. His long, arched neck was supple and graceful, and his torso was slim and powerfully muscled for flight. Four scaled legs like those of a dinosaur supported his massive body, and his long tail kept his balance at the edge of the roof by curling around his legs and hooking onto the tiles with the leaf-shaped blade at the tip. His head had grown long, horselike, and ridged with spines of bone, and his jaws were huge and lined with teeth like a shark.

            The most magnificent part of all, however, was his wings. The weird little bumps on his back had turned into the most beautiful wings a creature on this earth has ever had; they were at least as big as he was, with long, bony fingers stretched between webbed membranes like a bat’s, which caught the sunlight and glowed red with hundreds of tiny blood vessels.

            He spread those incredible wings even as I watched, his hind legs bunched up beneath him and his neck curled down in preparation for a jump. A half moment before he leaped, one of his great golden eyes rolled back to meet mine, and I could have sworn I saw the scaled corners of his mouth lift in an amused, draconic smile. An instant later, his powerful legs launched him into the air, and his massive wings snapped downward and bowled me over backwards with the sheer force of the air they displaced. As a parting gesture, he gave a loud bellow and stretched open his jaws, sending a gout of red fire shooting into the sky and nearly burning off our T.V antenna. A minute later, he was a gray dot on the horizon that could have been a pigeon winging away to the north, which soon disappeared inside a cloud.

            I never did see him again, though I never stopped looking.

THE END

The Dragon and the Black Tree

In the beginning of the world, there was a great being--a dragon--who had seen the birth and destruction of three other worlds in the course of his lifetime. Ours was his fourth, and he was growing tired.
To help him hold this new world together, the dragon called forth from the core of the earth a great tree--a tree of incredible power, its heart a smoldering bed of coals and its roots still entwined around the center of the earth. Its great, black, leafless boughs stretched to the heavens to support the sky, and its tangled roots held the soil of the earth in place. The dragon was at last able to rest, and he settled down at the base of the tree to sleep for an age.
But all is not well.
The Black Tree is a being of fire, and more than anything, fire longs to burn. The smoldering heart of the tree needs only a breath of air to turn into a raging inferno, and should that happen, the dragon and all the rest of the world would be consumed in flame. Without the dragon, there will be no fifth world, and so existence will end. There will be only black.
So beware.


Thinking or Not

 

There once was a girl who started writing a novel.

It wasn't easy.

“Crap, crap crap crap…” she muttered, staring at the empty notebook and tugging at her ponytail. “Why can’t I come up with an idea?”

The large, black and brown-brindled tomcat on the chair in the corner snorted derisively and licked a paw.

            “Because you’re thinking,” he answered her, licking down the length of his foreleg and up his back. The girl gave him an annoyed look.

            “I’m thinking as hard as I can,” she grumbled back irritably.

            “No, you heard me wrong,” the cat said. “I didn’t say you weren’t thinking, I said you were thinking. There’s a difference.” He moved on to his hind legs, his back toes splayed so he could get between them with his tongue.

            “What do you mean by that?” the girl asked, annoyed.

            The cat finished with his toes and moved on to his butt. The girl rolled her eyes as he extended his leg upward and his head disappeared around his haunches. When he was finished, he eased back into a relaxed position, licking his chops satisfactorily.

            “That’s disgusting,” the girl said.

            “What, you don’t do it, too?” he asked innocently. The girl rolled her eyes.

            “You didn’t answer my question,” she said.

            “Nor do I intend to.”

            “Oh, come on! Stop being so cryptic! You mean I shouldn’t be thinking?”

            The cat sniffed and melted backwards into the chair cushions. His tail twitched lazily, and his eyes closed in a satisfied squint.

            “You won’t tell me?” the girl asked.

            “Didn’t I say so before?” he countered.

            The girl glowered at him, and turned back to her blank page. “Fine. Be that way,” she grumped.

            “I will.”

            The girl stared at the sheet of paper for a moment, tapping the pencil eraser against her forehead. Her mind was still blank, but she’d forgotten about that for a moment and was now contemplating what her life could have been had she not gotten a cat. Without really thinking about it, her pencil scrawled down a few lines on the paper:

            There once was a girl who started writing a novel.

            It wasn’t easy…

           

Changelings

            My brother is a troll.

            No, I’m not being mean. He is literally a troll. It’s actually a lot more common than one would think. A recent survey taken in 2006 revealed that an average of 0.02 children per household are in fact trolls—changelings swapped with human children at birth. It’s hard to tell at first sometimes, because the changelings usually don’t look that much different from humans.

            Seth has actually always been a good-looking boy; dark hair, tanned skin, etc., but if you look closely, you’ll notice that his eyes aren’t really light hazel—they’re gold. His pupils narrow into slits in dim light as well, and he can see extremely well in the dark. Even so, it wasn’t until he started talking that we realized what he was.

            When he was three, he asked my mother where her tail was.

            We all thought this was strange, but we assumed he’d been watching the cat, Sigurd, and had figured that all creatures have to have tails. We thought this, that is, until he turned six and asked my dad why mom hadn’t tried to eat me yet. We finally began to piece things together when he was eight, and he walked into the house with a huge black timber wolf following meekly at his heels like a trained dog.

            Despite all of this, we’ve treated him and loved him as part of the family. He and I fought together, committed small crimes together, and got in trouble together like regular siblings, though the thought occasionally crossed my mind, Who was my real brother? I always pushed that thought aside, because I love Seth as my brother, and I knew I never would meet my blood brother. At least so I thought.

            I finished high school four years ahead of Seth, and then we parted ways for a time while I went to college and he finished up high school. He was always very intelligent, especially in science classes. He once took an ecology class in which he had to go outside and identify birds. He swept through that unit without missing a question, but later confessed to me that he’d cheated; He’d asked the birds what people call them and they’d told him the answers.

            The summer after my first year of college, I returned home to visit. Seth and I talked a lot and walked out back in the hilly woods that surrounded our house, listening to birdsongs and turning over rocks in the creeks bed like when we were kids. Seth had Fenris, the timber wolf he’d befriended, following at his heels like he always had since he was eight. A couple of rabbits tried to follow him, too, but Fenris scared them off.

            I remember walking farther than we ever had before that day. The trees grew taller and taller as we walked, and the path that we were following became rougher and rougher until we had to hack aside tree branches and reaching tendrils of prickly thorns. We didn’t even think about turning back; we both felt a sort of urgency, as if we needed to be somewhere on time.

            We came to a part of the forest that was the beginning.

            There was no other word for it; the forest had begun there, and the trees that grew there were so old, so tall, and so incredibly wise that they knew every detail that had happened in the forest, from the mightiest forest fire to the tiniest fluttering of a bee’s wing. The air was very still.

            We weren’t alone. There was another family of people at the other end of the grove. There were four of them, two of which looked older than the others, with wilder hair and longer tails. They all had very tanned, leathery skin and shaggy, coarse black hair tangled with twigs. They had long tails—like those of a donkey—which they kept curled around their bare feet.

            We moved towards them, and them towards us—silently, so as not to disturb the ancient quiet of the grove. We met in the middle and stared at one another for a spell, neither group speaking or moving.

            I recognized the two parent trolls; they had the same high cheekbones, hawk-like noses and serious eyes as Seth, as well as the shimmering gold irises and slitted pupils. The young girl troll looked like him as well, though younger. I recognized the fourth troll as well, though he was not quite like the other three.

            He was a little paler of skin, and his face a little less heavily lined by wind and rain. His nose matched my mother’s and his heavy eyebrows my father’s, and the way his hair curled looked like mine. Most important were his eyes—light blue in color, with rounded pupils and a tendency to squint in the dark. He and I stared at one another for a spell, while Seth and his blood sister stared at one another as well. The parent trolls watched us all, and I couldn’t help but wonder if they’d ever regretted switching their son for that of another.

            Finally, we turned and left—not a word spoken nor a sign exchanged—Seth and I towards our home and the trolls towards theirs. We left that grove of old, wise trees for the young, new trees of the woods we knew well, and eventually made our way back home to finish my visit with my parents. I eventually went back to college, and Seth moved on to become a naturalist. The two of us settled down to our respective lives and families, and between us, we kept mum on that which we saw in the old forest. That day stayed with me, though, all through my life; the day I saw my real brother.

Lost Things

When Alyssa entered her brother’s room, it was more of a disaster zone than usual—the desk chair was overturned, the dresser drawers were hanging open with clothes draped over them, and the closet’s entire contents had been spilled onto the floor and strewn all across the room. A pair of tennis shoes were protruding from underneath the bed, and they were surrounded by a cloud of dust bunnies and forgotten junk from the hidden depths beneath the bed.

            “Eric?” Alyssa said, bending over to look under the bed. A hand appeared, an old rubber ball clenched between its fingers. The hand then released the ball to roll across the floor and stop against Alyssa’s foot.

            “What on earth are you doing?” Alyssa asked, tapping one of the tennis shoes.

            A soft, barely audible voice rasped something unintelligible from beneath the bed.

            “What?” Alyssa asked. The voice sighed, and then the tennis shoes began to move as her little brother wriggled his way out from beneath the bed.

            “I said, I lost my voice. I’m trying to find it,” Eric said, his voice little more than a whisper. Alyssa rolled her eyes.

            “Again? How do you keep losing it?” she asked in exasperation, getting down on her belly so she could help her brother look under the bed. She sneezed as she inhaled a dust bunny.

            “I dunno,” Eric replied. “I just do.”

“It’s not down here,” Alyssa concluded, straightening. “You’d better stop losing it. I’m getting sick of this.”

            “It’s not my fault,” Eric complained, opening his foot locker. It was filled to the brim with old clothes, nerf guns, random rocks, and anything else a ten-year-old might feel inclined to collect.

            “That’s disgusting,” Alyssa said, nudging aside a pair of underwear with the end of a nerf gun. “It’s no wonder you’re always losing your voice.”

            “I’ll find it,” Eric insisted, dumping the footlocker open onto the floor. The two of them rummaged through the mess, but Eric’s voice was nowhere to be found.

            “Rrgh! We’ll never find it!” Eric whispered, throwing an old teddy bear with only three limbs across the room. Alyssa rolled her eyes, and in doing so, her gaze lit upon Eric’s backpack, which was lying open on his desk.

            “There it is!” she said, getting up. She pulled Eric’s voice from the little mesh side pocket and handed it to him. Eric took it back gratefully.

            “I can talk again!” he exclaimed happily. He experimentally sang the B flat concert scale, loudly and off-key.

            “Back to normal,” Alyssa sighed, promising herself that she would hide her brother’s voice the next time she saw it lying around.

Gooseberry Sea

The unfortunate consequences of not feeding one's cat on time...

Work usually ended on 3:15 on Mondays.
Jack Bernham arrived at his apartment home in Chicago at exactly 5:25 p.m. He dropped off his hat on a coat hanger, forgot he was wearing a coat, and walked into his kitchen with the newspaper slung under one arm. He sat down at the kitchen table, remembered his jacket, and pulled it off so he could sling it over the back of his chair. In the morning, he would forget where he put it, and would set off an a mad scramble to find it. In the meantime, however, he unfolded the newspaper and set about hunting for the sports page. He had just found it, and was about to settle in for the evening, when something bumped against his leg.
"Hi, Natasha," he said, reaching down to pet his cat on the top of her head. She gave a rumbling purr and pushed her nose into his palm. Jack smiled as her whiskers tickled his wrist, his eyes still focused on his newspaper.
Another furry body pressed itself against his leg.
Jack paused halfway through the motion of turning the page in the newspaper. His mind locked, desperately trying to remember whether or not he'd picked up another cat recently.
A third furry body pushed against his other leg.
Jack frowned, set down the newspaper, and lifted the edge of the tablecloth so he could look underneath. What he saw left him completely puzzled.
Not three, but five cats were gathered underneath the table. One was Natasha, a pretty orange, white and black calico with gooseberry green eyes. The other four were complete strangers, yet Natasha didn't seem to mind them. Two of them were white, one was black, and the other orange. They all had the same gooseberry green eyes as Natasha.
"Who let you in?" Jack asked, reaching under the table to grab the nearest cat by the scruff of the neck. It was one of the white ones, and it allowed itself to be pulled out from underneath the table without a fuss. It was female, and was about the same age as Natasha as far as Jack could tell. In fact, the other three looked to be female as well.
Odd.
Jack pulled the cats from under the table one by one, hauling them into the hallway outside his door and depositing them there. None of them seemed to be too put off by this, and allowed themselves to be moved quite amiably.
At last, Jack closed the door on the last cat. He sighed with relief at not having another litter box to clean, and turned so he could get back to his newspaper.
"Aaaah!" he shouted, leaping backwards in surprise and knocking his head painfully against the door. Standing in the doorway to his kitchen were six more cats, four of which were black while the other two were orange. Gooseberry green eyes stared unblinkingly back at him as he fumbled for the door latch.
"Out!" he urged, shooing them through the door into the hallway. The five he'd already pushed out the door were still there, staring at his apartment door as if hypnotized. Jack slammed the door closed after the six new arrivals, only to turn around and find ten more grouped around at his feet.
"What the hell is going on?" he shouted in confusion, wading through the cats to the kitchen. There he beheld Natasha, who was sitting atop the counter by the microwave, her tail curled elegantly around her paws. She was washing her fur with her rough, pink tongue, her eyes closed contentedly and her ears perked. Jack watched, amazed and horrified, as two hairs drifted from her pelt and landed on the counter top. One was white, the other black. The air above the hairs shimmered for a moment, similar to a heat wave one might see above the sidewalk on a hot day.
Two cats--one white, the other black--appeared out of thin air, right where the hairs had landed. Both of them were female, and both had the same gooseberry green eyes as Natasha.
"Oh my god," Jack breathed, his eyes wide with a mixture of fear and awe. He scanned the calm, green eyes fixed on him. There were about twenty, but Natasha was still grooming herself, and more and more were appearing in the time it took Jack to blink.
He considered the door, but quickly dismissed the idea. Natasha would keep shedding faster than Jack could kick the cats out, and he would soon be overwhelmed by a flood of cats.
What else was there to do?
Jack called the animal control center, though he had to wade through a sea of cats to get from his kitchen to his living room. He waited on the line as the other end rang, watching all the while as the throngs of cats spread steadily from his kitchen to his living room.
"Hello?" said a bored woman's voice from the other end of the line.
"Yes, animal control?" Jack inquired. "I'm having a cat problem. You see, my cat Natasha is shedding, but every hair she sheds is turned into a new cat.'
"So, she had kittens?" the woman asked, unimpressed.
"No...I mean, sort of," Jack answered. "She's spayed>"
"Then you have a shedding problem?" the woman asked.
"Yes!" Jack agreed emphatically.
"Sorry, buddy. That's more of a vet's job," the woman told him. Jack could tell she was about to hang up.
"No, wait! It isn't like tha--"
The dial tone cut him off.
Jack pulled nervously at his collar as he turned back to face the cats. By now, they'd spread to the living room, and were going about making themselves comfortable in his favorite chair and across his sofa. Just as he'd never declawed Natasha, each of her clones possessed her own set of razor sharp claws. Some of them began kneading at his couch, their claws popping loose threads and raking open weak seams. Jack tried to shoo them away, but to no avail. In the kitchen, Natasha was still busily shedding.
Jack thought desperately. Maybe he needed to please Natasha somehow. He knew how she liked to be brushed, so he pulled her pink kitty comb from a desk drawer and waded back into the kitchen where she was sitting.
Natasha regarded the brush indifferently, pausing only momentarily in her washing to give it a skeptical look. Jack ran the brush through her fur.
Twenty cats materialized right there on the counter, pouring from the brush like a liquid stream of cats. Jack yelped and dropped the brush as if it were poison as the twenty new cats jumped pas him to join the others on the floor.
Jack's mind raced, his glaze flitting fearfully across the kitchen. His eyes fell on the packet of catnip toys that he'd left on the counter the other night. He retrieved it and presented it to Natasha, who didn't seem impressed. Jack opened the packet, hoping to entice her with the smell.
Suddenly, the hundreds of cats began yowling and clawing at Jack's pant legs, each of them trying to get at the catnip toys. Terrified, Jack threw the toys as far away from him as he could. The cats raced after it, but not before leaving Jack's legs with a series of long red scratches running up and down them, his pant legs no longer even in existence below his knees.
Natasha continued to groom herself, the hairs spiraling into the air and materializing as cats. Jack stared in defeat at the calico, sweat beading on his forehead and his breath coming in ragged gasps.
Suddenly, Natasha stopped grooming.
Jacked watched as she paced along the counter, her head tilted expectantly towards the cupboard. Jack couldn't tell what she wanted until she suddenly dropped her nose towards her food bowl. Jack quickly jumped to attention.
He managed to find a can of cat food in the cupboard and shakily feed it into the can opener, his hands trembling nervously as he waited for the electric motor to spin the can all the way around. Natasha waited patiently, her gooseberry eyes fixed on the can. Jack quickly fumbled the can from the electric opener and popped the lid. Natasha's ears pricked expectantly.
Jack found a spoon and scraped the wet meat chunks from the bottom of the can into the bowl. When he was done, Natasha padded forward and stuck her head into the bowl, daintily gulping down a chunk of meat.
Jack turned around to face the living room.
The vast sea of orange, white and black with its dotting of gooseberry green was gone. In its place was a sprawling sheet of multicolored cat hair--a hair for every clone of Natasha and about a hundred more that each of those cats had in turn shed. Jack didn't even want to think about the trouble he would have to go through to clean it all up. He was just happy to have only one cat. He sighed, turning back to Natasha.
"I'm sorry I was late today," he apologized. "Can you remind me to feed you some other way next time?"
Natasha kept eating. It could have been Jack's imagination, but he could have sworn he saw her wink one vivid green eye at him.