Back in the old days, dragons were monsters, and the humans knew about them, and wanted them all dead.
Why? Because they were strong. They were strange and strong and when they pulled out their wings, the span could be eight to twelve feet and they could flap and carry themselves up into the very top of the troposphere, higher than an airplane.
You’d think it would get hard to breathe up there and for some, it did. For the untrained. But for those who’d lived their lives like dragons should, and had practiced dropping a few hundred feet at a time while holding their breath or blowing up a balloon, it was possible. It was more than possible. It was a lifestyle.
The humans didn’t like that. They pulled out their huge metal guns and shot dragons from the sky. They asked questions like, “Do you have a penis?” Sometimes the humans didn’t believe them when they all said no so they found the dead ones and checked.
It was always true, so sometimes they did worse.
Remember, even if a dragon dies in disguise, their body goes back to its natural state once they’re dead. You can’t die as someone else.
You can’t die as someone else.
Are you listening, Aeon? Or are you only paying attention to the yellow line?
It’s a double yellow which means don’t cross.
It’s a single yellow but that still means don’t cross.
So now we don’t trust the humans and most of them, if they remember us and aren’t dead, think we’re something else. Even if they remember us they don’t remember how similar we are to them. Different, but not alien.
We’re all the children of the Earth. We just evolved a little differently. We’ve been around since the great meteorite. The one that killed the dinosaurs, our cousins—or most of them. Some of our cousins are still around. But they’re different than they were. Our brains are bigger. Life’s complicated.
Turn signal. Left! Not right, you silly goose. No right on red, anyway. I forget what state we’re in and which state law says what, so just always assume you can’t do it, okay? We don’t want to get pulled over by the police. The police are never nice to people like us. I don’t want to have to do something I don’t want to do.
What’s that? No, you don’t get to know. Let’s find a Wawa if they have them around here. I want a cheap coffee with too much caramel sauce. I’m tired of instant. And it’s not too late for coffee. It’s never too late for coffee.
Why? Because once you’re tired of driving, I’ll drive the rest of the night. You can go sleep in the back then. So I want you driving till you’re about to pass out, get it?
It’s practice for the real world. We’ll have to face it at some point.
This—the real world, I guessed—wasn’t what I thought Mom meant to say. Maybe it wasn’t. I heard Morv stirring next to me and I subconsciously ground my teeth.
When I started to become too exhausted to drive properly, I pulled us into a rest-stop with a sign that said “free parking” and “bathrooms not open to the public.” The paying customer-only bathrooms were always better than the public ones, and even if Morv and I would continue to eat our rocks, Cindy would definitely need to eat some human food by this point.
As expected, when I parked Ruby, she let out a little sigh, slithered out of the door, and made a beeline for the rest-stop. I jumped out to follow closely behind her.
When we got inside, she went straight for the coffee station, filling up a large cup of caramel-flavored coffee—which was Mom’s favorite, too. I felt a tightness in my chest watching her. She looked nothing like Mom, of course—Mom had dark hair, always messy, a kind of narrow face with a steepled nose, and long fingers with knuckles red from keeping her talons hidden at all times. Often Mom wore pink knit mittens to cover her knuckles and allow her talons to peek out just the slightest bit within the safety of her oversized mittens.
But Cindy was small and young and had a doll-like, heart-shaped face, her hands delicate-looking with the long nails painted blue. And then there was her clearly pregnant stomach, round as a beach ball under her t-shirt and unzipped parka.
The way Mom told it to me, dragons were born when the parents made a stew. They’d get a pot and put it on a fire, a really big pot on a really big fire, and then they’d fill the pot with boiling water and all the precious stones they could get their hands on. And they’d boil it all up with herbs and spells.
Then, one by one, each of the parents—dragons could have innumerable parents, as far as I knew—would put a piece of themselves into the pot. What that piece was, how they got it, none of that I knew. But I understood that eventually, after some months, all the contents of the pot would start to coagulate, and an egg would form.
A huge, glistening egg like a massive gemstone itself.
Slowly, over the course of another couple of months, the water would all boil off, and eventually just the egg would be left. The egg would be removed from the pot and placed directly on the fire. It would stay there for another period of time—I wasn’t sure how long, exactly—until the baby dragon would start to peck its way out of the shell. Once the baby was all the way out of its shell, looking like a wet lump, the parents would bathe it in fire, and it would become harder and drier and finally ready to be exposed to the world.
At this point the baby dragon was considered fully born. It would have wings, but over the first few months of its life it would undergo a series of extraordinary transformations. The wings would disappear into the baby’s scapula. Its kaleidoscopic eyes would gleam like suns one day, glow like fired gems another, and be black as night the next. And it would alternate trying to fly, walk, and crawl.
Although I had no pictures of myself as a baby, Mom described me in such detail that I felt as though I had been there—consciously.
I had been on the smaller side for a dragon at first. I’d never thought about it before, but now I thought it could’ve been malnutrition, unless Mom had been feeding me gems secretly. But then I’d suddenly lengthened, looked like a worm, seemed blue and red at the same time. My eyes had looked like kilns, like caves full of fire, surrounded by smoke instead of white, and I’d cried all day. Nothing could make me stop.
And I’d kept trying to fly, which when Mom had told me, had seemed silly, because who could fly? But now I knew that dragons could fly, and I wondered what had happened.
What had led me to be flightless, and Mom, too. If she was flightless.
There was so much I didn’t know.