My lips taste of salt, like the breath of a breeze that caresses the surface of the ocean.\u00a0 The kiss of the coast, the mistress of sand and surf.\u00a0 My lips taste of blood.<\/p>\n
“-crzzzt- we have a fire”<\/p>\n
“-nack-nack- just laying here”<\/p>\n
“broken”<\/p>\n
“no identification”<\/p>\n
“Maggie said-”<\/p>\n
Do leaves feel like this, swept up by the wind, buffeted by nothing so common and yet so precious as air?<\/p>\n
“-snrack!\u00a0 FZZZZT!-”<\/p>\n
I cannot breathe.<\/p>\n
“-seriously, the same guy.\u00a0 Dairy Queen, remember?”<\/p>\n
“I was birthed in thorns, and buried in ashes.”<\/p>\n
No, that voice was just in my head.<\/p>\n
I felt myself being pulled up onto the gurney.\u00a0 I felt movement, and I felt pain, but I also felt disassociated.\u00a0 This wasn’t me – the real me was kicking closed doors until it was just me and a Dragon.<\/p>\n
“-fire under control-”<\/p>\n
“Started in the kitchens–”<\/p>\n
“It is one of the three ways I will assist.”<\/p>\n
That left one more, and I thought it would sound better if he said, “It is the second of the three ways I will assist,” but I didn’t argue it.\u00a0 I couldn’t move.\u00a0 I was strapped down again.\u00a0 I guess since the words were all in my head I could argue quietly.\u00a0 Were the words speaking to me or just memories of sound?<\/p>\n
I couldn’t hear anything.\u00a0 My head was made of fuzzy muffins.<\/p>\n
“No, small potatoes.”<\/p>\n
In a hashbrown world.\u00a0\u00a0 I remembered grinning at that.\u00a0 My head was made of small potatoes.\u00a0\u00a0 Was I good for baking, maybe a russet, or better for boiling, like a red nordland?<\/p>\n
“If soaking your head was boiling.\u00a0 Maybe a fingerling?”<\/p>\n
That was a response to my thought.\u00a0 Or maybe I said it aloud.\u00a0 Or maybe I answered myself.<\/p>\n
I am like a potato because to a Dragon I am crunchy and good with ketchup.\u00a0 And that’s pretty much the only time to eat ketchup.\u00a0 I am a french fry.\u00a0 A lost potato.\u00a0 Peter, Peter, potato eater, had a French maid but couldn’t keep her… put her in a ketchup bowl, and made up for all the time he stole.<\/p>\n
I might have been delirious.<\/p>\n
Someone up front was shouting numbers for a moment.\u00a0 I hoped they were good numbers.\u00a0 Maybe they were Jenny’s phone number.\u00a0 I hated that song.<\/p>\n
There were too many lights and too much sound and all I wanted was my friend back.\u00a0<\/p>\n
She hadn’t been a very good friend, but that was alright, because she hadn’t had a lot of experience being a person.\u00a0\u00a0 I can be forgiving in that case.<\/p>\n
“But did you love her?”<\/p>\n
Love her?\u00a0 What kind of question was that?\u00a0 That’s the kind of thing your id sneaks in when you’re not paying attention.\u00a0 It always wants the spotlight.\u00a0 It’s like little fantasies of being recognized by fame and\/or people you\u00a0admire.\u00a0\u00a0 We all have them, and unless we’re some weird groupie type, we know they’re pretty dumb.\u00a0 It’s the kind of rational rationale that keeps us reasonable folk from showing too much enthusiasm.\u00a0 Goodness knows, we can’t like anything.\u00a0 That’d be bad for our too cool for school image.<\/p>\n
“But did you love her?”<\/p>\n
Love her?<\/p>\n
How do you answer that?\u00a0 I can’t.\u00a0 I can’t answer, “Yes,” because I wouldn’t have described it as love.\u00a0 The language doesn’t have the right word.\u00a0 I cared for her in all the meanings of the phrase, “cared for,” which might be a kind of love.\u00a0 I liked it when she laughed at the meerkats.\u00a0 I knew her favourite flavour (not that “anything chocolate” was hard to grasp)\u00a0of ice cream.\u00a0 I knew she always scanned the crowd for dangers only she could detect.\u00a0 I knew she was an entity that did not belong fully in my world, and that she was a temporary thing, mine until her promise was fulfilled, and the whims of her makers could just as easily unmake what consciousness she had.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Can a group be said to have a consciousness (or a conscience?) different than the make-up of its individuals?<\/p>\n
I think I had a headache.<\/p>\n
But did I love her?\u00a0 If I was going to go to bed with anyone soon, it was probably going to be Sylvia, provided she liked me without the influence of the incubus.\u00a0 Doloise was too different.\u00a0 You don’t go to bed with an entity without ending up owing it a favour.\u00a0\u00a0 Someone told me that once.\u00a0 Or maybe I read it in a book.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“E?”<\/p>\n
I recognized that voice.\u00a0 It was Maggie.\u00a0 She sounded like she’d been crying.\u00a0 Or arguing.\u00a0 Or both.\u00a0 I don’t get women.\u00a0 I wonder why they made Doloise a woman.\u00a0 I would have listened if it had been a man.\u00a0 Or a tree, apparently.\u00a0 I saw what Artur had done, trying to help me.\u00a0 I guess it takes two bites by a Dragon to get to the center of a lesyie pop.<\/p>\n
“Let me have a minute with him, alone, please?”<\/p>\n
She was talking to someone else.\u00a0 It was quieter here, but the lights were still too bright.\u00a0 My eyes weren’t working.\u00a0 Maybe I left them in the dark of the cavern.\u00a0 Maybe they were just resting.\u00a0 Yeah, I was just resting them.<\/p>\n
“What have you done?”<\/p>\n
The screams of the Dragon still roared in my ears.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It’s odd, not knowing where you are, what position you’re in, if you’re still alone in the dark of a cavern while a Dragon spits out thorns and curses you for closing off access to its power, or if you’re in a hospital bed far from home.\u00a0 Is that moss, or a tiny stream, or a cold IV dripping into your arm?\u00a0<\/p>\n
Then the presence was gone, gone, and I was alone.\u00a0 Alone inside my head, where I was away from the pain.\u00a0 Alone away from my friends, the short fellow with the tree-like legs, and the tall one who smelled like dandelions, and the velvet bat, and the witches, and the smell of Ivan burning, and the wolves.<\/p>\n
Don’t leave me.\u00a0 There are wolves out there.<\/p>\n
“I’m not leaving.\u00a0 I’m here, E.”\u00a0 A cool hand against my forehead and I started to feel my body again.\u00a0 I curled up rather than scream.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The wolves were inside me, weren’t they?<\/p>\n
“I’ll protect you from the wolves.”<\/p>\n
Who protects me from the Dragons?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I couldn’t hear anything. My head was made of fuzzy muffins.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001002,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chapter-five"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001002"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=493"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}