Author’s note: An amusing little short story about imagination, innocence, and compassion. Please share with others
The dragon was no bigger than a beagle, and it had gotten itself thoroughly stuck in the blackberry brambles at the edge of the backyard.
Levi found it first, the way five-year-olds find everything: by accident, by wandering, by following the sound of something crying.
He had been looking for pillbugs under the rotting log near the fence when he heard it: a thin, reedy sound, like a teakettle that had given up hope. He pushed through the tall grass, and there it was. Copper-scaled, with wings the color of autumn leaves still folded tight against its sides and enormous amber eyes swimming with tears.
“Wyatt,” Levi called back toward the house, using his serious voice. “Come here. And don’t tell Mom.”
Wyatt came at a trot, his rubber boots on the wrong feet as usual, a peanut butter cracker already in his fist. He stopped a yard away and stared. Then he held out the cracker. The dragon sniffed it, sneezed a ribbon of pale smoke, and ate the whole thing in one bite.
“It’s hungry,” Wyatt announced, with the confidence of someone who understood hunger above all other conditions.
“It’s stuck,” Levi said.
He knelt in the dirt and began, very carefully, to work the bramble thorns free from the places where they’d caught in the tender webbing of the dragon’s wings.
The dragon held very still. It watched him with those amber eyes the way animals watch children—differently than they watch adults—with a specific and uncomplicated trust.
By the time it was free, the afternoon light had gone golden and long. The dragon shook itself, sneezed again, and then did something neither boy expected: it pressed its warm, scaly forehead against Levi’s chest, directly over his heart.
“It loves you,” Wyatt said.
“It’s saying thank you,” Levi corrected, though he felt the same thing Wyatt had named and didn’t entirely want to disagree.
That was when the shadow passed over them. It came from above. A darkness that moved against the wind, carrying with it a smell like candle wax and old paper and something sour beneath both.
A man stood at the far end of the yard, at the gap in the fence, wearing a coat too heavy for summer. He was not a neighbor. Levi knew all the neighbors.
“Boys,” the man said, in a pleasant voice that was not actually pleasant. “That creature belongs to me.”
The dragon pressed itself against Levi’s legs and made a sound so low they felt it more than they heard it.
“She doesn’t,” Wyatt said. The man blinked. People did not often expect contradiction from someone Wyatt’s height.
“She belongs to her mom,” Wyatt continued.
He pointed—and this was the extraordinary thing, the thing Levi would try to explain for years afterward and never quite manage—he pointed toward the hill at the back of the property, toward the dark line of the old woods, and he pointed correctly.
The dragon made a sharp sound, almost a word, and its tail began to whip back and forth.
Levi grabbed his brother’s hand. He had no plan beyond this: move toward the woods, away from the man, and keep going. Sometimes five years of age is enough to know that forward is better than staying still.
They ran. The man shouted something that crackled at the edges, a word shaped like a command, but the dragon opened its wings for the first time, and the wind that came off them smelled like rain and copper and stone, and whatever the man had sent after them simply dissolved in it.
They reached the tree line. The woods were dark but not frightening, or not frightening in a bad way. Frightening in the way of things that are larger than you and also on your side.
Deep in, where the oaks grew so thick the sky was just a suggestion, they heard her. Not a cry this time. A call. Low and resonant and warm, the way a house sounds on the first cold night when someone finally lights the furnace.
The little dragon left the ground. It rose straight up through a shaft of remaining light, copper scales catching it and throwing it back in pieces, and then it was gone—up, through, away—and a sound rolled back down through the branches like distant thunder or approval.
The boys stood in the quiet for a moment. “We should go home,” Levi said.
“Yep,” said Wyatt.
He found another cracker in his pocket, examined it, and ate it himself. They walked back through the long grass. The gap in the fence was empty. The yard was just a yard.
At dinner, their mother asked about their afternoon. “We helped someone find her mom,” Levi said.
Wyatt nodded seriously. “She was stuck.”
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