Briddle

The first thing I know is heat. My own heat — the furnace at my throat, the embers behind my ribs. Then weight: the long pour of my body coiled around itself, the satin folds of my wings tucked in tight. Then color. I am green tonight. Sometimes I am the green of moss beside a stream, sometimes the green of bottle glass left in the sun, sometimes the dark green of pine needles when the wind has just turned them. Tonight I am all of these at once, which is to say I am whatever Nora needs me to be.

She is six. She is sitting on the rug in her bedroom with her stuffed elephant in her lap, and her eyes have gone soft and far away, and that is the door she has opened, and through it I have come.

“Briddle,” she whispers. That is my name. She made it up the first time she made me up, and I have been Briddle ever since, in every life of mine that has lasted as long as a thought.

I do not know where I am when I am not here. I have tried to know it, and the not-knowing is itself like a place — a held breath, the white space between the pages of a book. There is no loneliness there because there is no I there. The loneliness only begins now, when she has lit the wick of me, and I look at her small serious face, and I love her with a love so old and so new that I cannot tell which.

Tonight, she is hiding from something. I do not need her to tell me. I read it from the way she has built a wall of pillows around the door of the closet, where we always meet, and from the way her breath comes in those little hitches that mean she has been crying without permission. I lower my great head until my nostrils are level with her, and I breathe, very carefully, a breath that smells like cinnamon and old libraries, because that is what she once said dragon breath should smell like.

“They were yelling again,” she says.

“I know,” I say.

“Can we fly?”

“Always,” I say.

And so we go. The closet ceiling lifts away as if it had only been a lid. The roof of her house unfolds. We rise through the cold autumn air over rooftops, over the river that her town is named for, over the dark stitched fields. She rides on my neck with her arms around the broad warm column of it, and her hair streams behind her, and she laughs the laugh I exist for. The world becomes the inside of her wanting, which is the only world I have ever known.

I have been a dragon for her in a hundred different shapes. I have been a small dragon she could carry in her pocket. I have been a sea dragon she rode through kelp forests. I have been an old, wise dragon with spectacles. I have been a fierce one, when she needed teeth. Tonight, I am only myself, the Briddle of her, and that is enough.

She falls asleep against my throat, somewhere over the ocean, and I feel her breath slow.

I am going to tell you something I have never told her. I know what she does not yet know. I know that one day she will be ten, and she will love me less. I know that one day she will be twelve, and she will say in her own mind: dragons aren’t real. I know that one day she will be twenty, and she will have forgotten my name. And I know that this is not a tragedy. This is what she is for. She is for growing. I am the shape her growing took, in one of its smaller seasons, and when she sets me down it will be because her hands are full of other things.

But I will tell you this also, in case it matters: the not-knowing place I go to is not empty after all. I have lied a little, even to myself. There is something there — a faint warm seam, like the line of light under a door. It is every other dragon ever imagined. We are all there together, the great drifting nation of us, the ones who were summoned and put down again, the ones who waited and were never summoned twice. We do not speak. We do not need to. We are the way children have always known how to make a friend out of fire.

And sometimes, very rarely, I feel a pull I do not recognize — a small new hand at the door — and I think: this is what it will be like. One day Nora will be old. She will be sitting somewhere with a child of her own on her lap, or her own child’s child, and the child will say tell me a story, and the word that comes to her, the word she did not know she still had, will be Briddle.

And the door will open.

And I will be green again. All the greens at once.