I understood pretty quickly how Morv intended to balance on the back wheel of my bike.
Their wings were like nothing I’d ever seen before—bigger, thicker, and more beautiful than mine or Mom’s by far. It was like looking into an ocean which sometimes curled in front of me, then disappearing behind me, all blues and purples and translucence. They said nothing the whole time apart from simple directions, but I felt their claws resting lightly on my shoulders, and when I pulled into a turn, I felt their weight shifting side to side.
It was good they were giving me directions, because it was really too dark for me to see properly. I almost went over a squirrel, and I forgot to change gears when we approached a small hill, because I didn’t see it coming. I didn’t want Morv to know, though, so I just panted my way up it.
“Here,” they said finally. I eased on the brakes, and they leapt off my shoulders easily, their wings extended, landing in a small crouch. Then they froze. “There’s people here!”
I looked around. We seemed to be in a small park—a few trees, a sidewalk through the grass. “Then act chill,” I said. I spotted a bike rack and pedaled slowly over.
When I turned around, Morv was gone. Two people were walking on the sidewalk toward me, chatting. Someone else sped by on a bike. Someone sat on a bench around ten feet away, head in her hands.
“Here, Ae,” the young woman on the bench hissed. It was unmistakably Morv’s voice, but it wasn’t Morv sitting there—was it?
I walked slowly over, trying to act normal. I sat down next to the woman and looked her in the eyes. They were Morv’s eyes, but they were now also the eyes of this woman whom I’d never seen before in my life, dressed in a dark blue hoodie and jeans. “Don’t stare at me like that,” she whispered. “You’ve never seen a dragon change their scales?”
“Why would I have?” I whispered back, my eyes still struggling to take her in. “Mymomcan’t do that.”
“Maybe not,” Morv said, “but it’s not an uncommon skill. It’s just—adapting to your environment. As dragons do.”
“Hm.Idon’t need to hide here. I just look like a person.”
Morv did not respond, and my stomach rumbled to fill the silence.
“I guess it’s time for dinner,” she said. “But I don’t want you to be concerned—or confused—so why don’t you just wait here, and I’ll do it?”
“Okay,” I said. “Do I need to close my eyes?”
“You’re blind in the dark anyway, aren’t you?”
I frowned, because I knew Morv could see it. I continued to stare into the dark as the woman walked away, losing sight of her almost immediately.
She was gone only a few minutes, and then she returned, seemingly empty-handed. But when she sat down on the bench next to me, she reached her hands into her hoodie pocket and pulled out something small. I squinted at it, but I didn’t need to: it shimmered in the dark. In her hand rested two rubies.
I wanted it to make sense, so I said nothing. Morv picked up one in her other hand and put it in her mouth. “You just swallow it like a pill,” she said.
I was skeptical, but I obeyed, thinking that it would be funny if I choked, and she had to give me the Heimlich maneuver and we ended up going to Taco Bell anyway. But when I swallowed the ruby, it went down my throat like water—I almost didn’t notice myself swallowing it. It was like the ruby was sucked down the vacuum of my throat.
I felt nothing. “Am I supposed to feel something?”
“It takes a few hours to work. Let’s go back to your house.”
“House is a strong way of putting it,” I said, but I led her back to where I’d locked my bike. As I pedaled back to Ruby—once again taking directions from Morv—I felt their claws slowly sliding out of their fingers again, and then that lightness on the back of my bike, as though they had become smoke. When I glanced around—just for an instant—I saw their wings extended, so black they were practically night.
Over the next five days, I kept thinking of a particular story Mom had once told me, about an orphaned dragon.
I didn’t want to think I was an orphaned dragon, but I also couldn’t keep my mind off Mom and the non-zero possibility that she was no longer alive. And she had always talked to me as though she one day would be. She had told me this story while driving, like always. We were in Alabama, and I kept asking if we could stop at a post office, so I could mail a letter I’d written to Lola. But Mom kept saying no and after a long time I became quiet and her story began.
I had never not wanted to hear a story of Mom’s before; they were always the highlight of my day, sometimes even my week. That is, until now. I was already missing Lola, and it had only been four months since we’d left Orlando. I wanted to get back on the highway and drive back to Orlando. I wanted to go to Lola’s house again and play Mario Kart. I wanted to sit on her L-shaped couch and drink water out of a glass.
But there was no Mario Kart, no L-shaped couch, and no cups made of glass inside Ruby. Those things were incompatible with our life.
There was once a dragon who was her mother’s shadow. She had other parents, only a mother, and she thought of her mother like a goddess: beautiful and kind and all-knowingly wise. But in reality her mother was none of those things. Her mother was barely even a dragon, so weak and old and malnourishedly sad she was. But because she raised her child with love her child worshipped her.
And then, as always happens, especially to the oldest among us, she died. She died because she went to bed and hated herself so much that she was unable to wake up again. In dreams she was happiest and saw herself flying and swooping down low to pull a child out of the talons of a vulture and let a tear fall upon an old man and make him young again. In her dreams she saw within herself all these powers and she knew she was happy. So of course she never chose to wake up again.
Without her mother there, the little dragon realized her mother could not have loved her as fully as she had thought. Why else then would she leave her child and abandon her for the sake of mere dreams?
The little dragon had to survive alone, cleaning up after herself, taking care of the plants, and carving furniture to make a small living. After some years, the dragon was so lonely that she had all the time in the world to carve furniture and became one of the most renowned carvers in all of the land. She did nothing but carve and whole forests bowed to her will.
But soon all the land had acquired all the furniture it needed, and she was rich and had nothing to do. Only then did she begin to think about her loneliness, sitting in her cave surrounded by unfilled chairs and empty desks and unset dinner tables.
She wanted badly to find love, but she had never loved before, nor after, apart from her mother. And there is no love like a love for one’s mother, which one can find elsewhere. She had been a shadow once and a shadow she still was.
Even though by then she was old, yet she still thought of herself as an orphaned dragon, and others thought of her in the same way.
I never knew why Mom told me the stories she did, in the way she told them, and whether they were fully made-up or only a little made-up. But I did know that I wasn’t alone, because Morv was there.
But did that make it better?
At night, they watched me brush my teeth but said nothing. One morning, they disappeared for a long time and I ate some granola bars, as I was getting hungry. When they returned, they asked for a jar, and I gave them one we’d had in the trailer for long enough I was sure no one would buy it. It was small and squat and patterned with little trolls. Morv opened their cloak and from some seemingly invisible pocket poured forth a few dozen rubies into the jar.
“This is dragon food, and it’ll help you much more than human food ever could. Have one of these whenever you feel hungry. Do you promise to do that?”
“Yes, I promise.”
Maybe it was just because it had taken a few days to begin working, but I had started to notice a warm sort of feeling in my chest every time I swallowed a ruby—and I looked forward to this feeling, too.
Money, which Mom and I were both always short of and never seemed to quite run out of, didn’t seem like it should be an issue at this time, with Morv bringing me rubies to eat and no driving to use up gas. And, as usual, I bathed every couple of days by sneaking into a local gym and using their soap and water.
But Mom always let me in on enough for me to know that expenses were not the kinds of things you could always predict, and I was scared that all of a sudden we’d need some amount of money and we wouldn’t have it. I knew Morv was powerful, in more ways than I could understand, but I also knew that I was not as powerful, and I didn’t know—and didn’t think, anyway—that their powers could extend to solving money problems. So every day after that first one, like always, I opened the trailer up for business.
It was a dead old parking lot, connected to nowhere, its only purpose appearing to be a bus stop a few hundred feet away. Cars entered and exited and most disregarded me and my tchotchkes. But occasionally one would stop, a middle-aged man with a beard or a mom with squealing kids in a minivan would get out, peer around, and purchase nothing.
And then on rarer occasions someone a little odder, usually smelling like cats, dressed corduroys, or with pince-nez perched on the bridge of their nose, would actually spend a little money. Over the five days, I sold a candelabra in the shape of a golfer swinging a club, a set of dinner plates with a pattern of koalas, a pair of garden gnomes (one with devil horns, the other with angel wings), and a small wooden model ship. It was a better week than I’d expected and I only half-wondered if it had anything to do with the fact that I, at least for now, looked only slightly off from normal—just a tall skinny kid with feathery hair in my eyes, and fingers as long as pencils.
Because Mom looked a bit more strange. She too was tall, and her hair was much wilder than mine: almost waist-length and thick and never exactly brushed. And she wore coke-bottle glasses that made her eyes look warped and fractured, like they were on the other side of a kaleidoscope. And her nose was somewhat off-center, and she always kind of loomed at people.
Just because I loved my mom didn’t mean I didn’t know how strange she seemed to other people. And I would be lying if I didn’t say I knew she sometimes scared potential customers away, through no fault of her own.