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I was barely ten, leaning into an infinite summer. The large garden - enormous to a child filled with imagination - was a lush rectangle of adventures, leading gently down onto the lake - another beautiful, sunstruck world of its own. Days raced by and were forgotten - the past was nothing, the future a hazy, far-off uncertainty.
The house was a slow, tired place of dust and shade - base camp, nothing more. A centre of quick convalescence, to eat and sleep, desperate to be outside again. A springboard back into the real world of cyan skies and cotton clouds, bare feet and the smells of summer.
So I lived, a careless, wild girl of the present. I wouldn’t speak for days, living inside my head, and in the ever-warm, endlessly joyous world I found myself in. Occasionally, mother and I would eat a snack or our lunch out on the patio - me swinging my legs from the white-painted iron garden chairs; her as reserved, as softly beautiful as always - watching the boats skim along the lake and the birds in the sky.
I never saw my brother - he was always home after I went to bed, often away for days, or locked in his room, inside the restless house with some girl or other - screaming and giggling behind the closed door.
But none of that mattered. I was only for the sky, and the shades of green.
Father worked in his small office upstairs, looking back down over the garden, the lake, and across to the houses far on the other side. I never knew how often exactly - but often enough I would stop dead in my play and catch him looking down on me, a half-face behind the glass, the lid of his pen resting against his lips. And I felt suddenly self-conscious, awkward and alone in yesterday’s crinkled dress.
It was the world of adults, of rules and endless timetables looking out at me - a heavy, tiring feeling would start somewhere in my stomach, and all thought of play and adventures and freedom would quickly dissipate into the hazy midday heat.
For this reason, I sought to play totally alone - untethered by the taut steel lines, pulling me back into a world where I didn’t belong.
The garden was split in two by a neat, square-cut privet hedge - long ago, this was the barrier I was never to stray beyond, so that small, careless girl was always in clear sight. But, for some reason, even when I was no longer watched over, I still chose to play in the top half of the garden.
Not anymore. Stopping at the perfectly trimmed archway, I turned back - slightly cautious - to see my father sunk deep in concentration, balding head bowed low over his paperwork in the upstairs office. With not a single farewell, I slipped on - deeper into a world of my own.
*
I was, at once, at peace. The large, square, red-brick house seemed a world away - and my perfect, natural reality infinitely closer. The sky dipped lower, the grass stretched from the earth to meet me, and a cool, clear breeze rolled constantly off the lake.
I ran to the shoreline where large grey rocks called to be leapt upon - they lay scattered along the thin, smooth-gravel beach that curved around the lake, linking each garden to the next and launching wooden jetties far into the crystal water. Ours was faded and splintered - I could hardly remember the last time I had stood on those wooden boards, waiting for someone to ready a borrowed boat, or simply staring out at the other families laughing as they sailed the lake. To either side, green-painted or wood-stained, finely-sanded platforms stretched proudly into depths our sorry jetty would never reach.
I soon became engrossed in jumping from rock to rock - the world condensed around me, and there was only the distance from one boulder to the next and the position of my tiny feet. In a world of grey tones, a rainbow emerged, flashing across my vision, luring me out of my trance.
Turquoise and silver, vivid bands of deep colour flashed brilliantly under the heavy sunlight. Hopping closer, I saw, sitting neatly on top of another identical rock, the most beautiful thing I had ever laid eyes upon.
It looked like a shell - slightly curved, tapered at one end - and was about the size of a dinner plate. I gazed back down the shoreline - I had come a long way from home, marked obviously by the rough, worn jetty - but the iridescent shell drew me back again. Stooping to pick it up, a movement caught my eye.
The land leading onto the shore was banked up here, and a cave had been worn back into the rock - screened by bushes on each side, and trees on top from a garden that didn’t lead down to the lake - it was a small, secret sanctuary. Again, something moved inside. I stepped closer, holding the shell in my hands.
The dragon - and it was, undisputedly, a dragon, albeit not a very large one - regarded my with endless, deep blue eyes. He moved back further into the cave, and I just looked on in shock, my mind trying to place the scene into fantasy or reality. I stepped closer and stopped, wide-eyed on the threshold - fascinated and frightening in equal measures.
“What?”
Still speechless, I just held the strange, breathtaking object out in front of me - noticing the colour and shape fitted perfectly in with the dragon’s shimmering scales.
“Ah, s**t.” The dragon stretched his long neck backwards, checking over his whole body, then lifted a leg and peered around his belly. “Where’d that come from?”
I shrugged, a little, sharp gesture. My mouth twitched somewhere between wonder and fright.
“So, you just gonna stand there all day?” He blinked. “A name? A voice? Little girl, just do something, or I might just eat you up right here and now.” He grimaced, showing painfully sharp, curved teeth.
“I kid, I kid!” he said, in a flat voice crackling with magic, as I flinched in terror. “... Well ...?”
“Sophie.” Barely a whisper.
“Ah, right, nice. Hey-” he bobbed his arrow-shaped head down at the scale I held in my hand, “-you can hold onto that if you like. Can’t see where it goes at any rate.”
I wrapped my arms around the scale and held it tight into my chest, trying not to stare at the obvious gap in the dragon’s armour just behind his front leg.
“Thanks ...” For about a minute, we just stared at each other. His great eyes - free of iris or pupil, just giant blue spheres, like the glass buoys the fisherman string out across the lake - sucked me in, unravelled me.
He shifted slightly, padding his feet against the rock.
“Oh go on, ask away. Whatever you like.”
“Um ... okay ... what’s you name?”
“Ah, um.” He looked genuinely puzzled. “Ooh ... I dunno. Bob? Larry? Elliott? Isaac? Sam? Geoff? Take your pick.”
“Isaac?” I ventured.
“Yeah ... suits me. Whatever you like, Soph, whatever you like.”
At the rear of the cave, the level sloped down again - creating a band of water along the wall, about a foot deep, along the back wall. Isaac slid down into this with a sigh and as the water covered his back a pained groan rolled around his throat.
Under the surface, he was totally invisible - his scales matched perfectly with the green-tinged water. Only his two magnificent eyes shone out, gazing at me with slight amusement. He blinked twice, flickering in and out of view.
“Well ...” he started, “If you’ll excuse me.”
His eyes slid closed and I was alone.
That was the first time.
From then, the house became unbearable. I hardly slept and ate as little and as fast as I could. As soon as I woke I was away - sprinting down towards the lake, the dew fresh on my eager feet, the sun tight and warm on the back of my neck, always hoping the dream had not ended.
*
And so the summer drew on, every day a flash of warm, golden sunlight across my infinite happiness. The days were much the same, but every time I stepped cautiously into the cave and found Isaac still there - not a dream or a cruel trick - my amazement grew again.
Most days we would just sit together a little way back into the cave - his smooth, rounded belly propping up my head, rocking me as his reptile lungs drew in the summer air, his neck and tail curved around either side of me. He never questioned my presence, just accepted me there.
We were connected - two of the same, strung together by fate or chance.
It didn’t matter which, but when we were together, the summer was perfect - the sun shone brighter, the world was crisper, lighter, complete. Our hearts grew together, and I was never alone.
So we sat, content, usually in silence - sometimes talking idly, but only ever about me: I never dared ask Isaac about himself, lest the fairy-tale illusion be shattered. Sometimes we would laugh gently, as a boy from across the lake tried to windsurf, and sometimes we would sleep, slipping gently, deeper into the warmth of the world.
One of these times, I was just drifting off, my cheek against Isaac’s cool, smooth scales, when I heard footsteps on the worn gravel shore. Panic flared, and my mind raced - I leapt up, trying to think of something to do. What would happen if anyone found him here - a dragon?
Images started to flash through my mind - blood, white walls, heavy doors - but I was jerked, desperately, back to the present as my mother appeared at the cave entrance, smiling. I spun around, tears brimming in my eyes, but Isaac was nowhere to be seen. I stared at the blank rock - perhaps it had all been a figment of my imagination, a conjured companion for that lonely girl.
“What’s the matter, sweetheart?” My mother asked, seeing my troubled face. She came and stood by my side, put a thin arm around my neck and ran her fingers slowly through my wild red hair. We stood facing the lake for a few moments, but I did not see it. I was alone, abandoned.
“This is a nice little den, eh?” She said, in her quiet, disconnected voice. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you - come on, let’s go back to the house, I’ve got a surprise for you.”
I let her lead me away, across the shore and back up the garden. It must have been a weekend for her to be home during the day. I don’t remember what the surprise was, but I do remember the sadness in her eyes as I asked if I could go back outside again, and her choked voice calling something after me I didn’t hear.
I sprinted back to the cave, silently leaping across the shore stones like an expert. Please, please, let it all be real, let him still be there.
He was. But not the same.
As I entered, breathless, relieved, speechless, I saw his eyes flare in shock and his leathery lips draw back, revealing those gleaming teeth. Wings I never realised he had snapped open in the cramped space - he looked twice as big, all tooth and claw, death and rage. I stumbled backwards against the wall, terrified.
His eyes at once softened, seeing who I really was, and he slowly deflated - wings fell flat to his back, claws retracted, and the angry red bands of colour faded from his scales. He turned, head hung low, and exhaled - the breath ending in an ugly, rumbling choke. His whole body shuddered violently, and something red and wet fell from his mouth.
He drank deeply from the ribbon of water at the back of the cave, then turned to me. The twin orbs of his eyes - like two perfect moons, distant and mysterious - were empty, scared.
“Sophie, I’m sorry ... I didn’t mean ...”
Swallowing back the hard, tight lump in my throat, I moved cautiously over to him. I placed my shaking hand on his smooth nose, and the spines on his head flattened down onto his neck. He sighed, relived and tired, smiled for a second, then turned away again and lay heavily down in the shadows.
I saw then, for the first time, that something was wrong. All along his back, and down one side, his scales had faded to grey - cracked and pitted, like so many slices of timeworn, expired rock. I thought back, and realised that he always sat with me in the same way - so my head would rest against his shining, perfect scales, not the dulled, rough rows on his other side.
I moved over to him, and reached out to the grey scales. They were as brittle as dead twigs, and crusted with dry blood. Isaac groaned deeply, I heard his tears falling to the floor. One of the scales broke away under my gentle touch - the dragon flinched away, scrambling to the cave entrance, a pained growl in his throat.
But I had still seen it - the gleam of new, pale skin underneath. Like the whitest flesh under a scab, perfect and fully healed. Human skin. Under a dead layer of armour, human skin.
“Isaac ...” I started. The lump his risen in my throat again, tasting of bile. I had to talk past it. “Why are you here?”
The question my perfect summer forbid hung heavy in the air between us. My friend closed his eyes tight, squeezing the tears from his lids, and looked straight at me. I was lost in the vivid blue, unprepared for the blow that followed.
“I’m dying, Sophie. I came here to die.”
He fled from the cave, leapt into the lake and was gone. I wished then, that he had just been a dream, something fictional, a vivid fantasy. Dreams could live forever - they never died, they were never angry or sad. They were immortal, and they never left you unless you gave them up.
The dark, bitter reality was a spiteful punch to my stomach. The ripples faded, and I threw up onto the sunstruck shoreline, spitting the pieces of my ten-year-old heart onto the smooth gravel
*
Everyday I returned, running into a cold and empty cave. I always saw his eyes, peering at me from the ribbon of water along the back wall, but jumping into the freezing water up to my waist, my hands found nothing but a bitter memory.
Sometimes I would find one of his dead scales, fallen to the floor, or a patch of blood, or a deep claw-cut in the rock. These little things, they never let me pretend it was only imagination that had kept me company. But I collected up the scales, and buried them along the shore. I washed the blood from the rock. I filled the gouges with the finest sand - always hoping that, one day, I would blink into reality and realise that it was all a game.
I just wanted to see him again, real or not, so he could tell me what I wanted to hear. That he wasn’t going to die. That I’d never be alone. But my nights were void of dreams, and my days spent clearing away any trace that he ever existed at all.
I lived behind my tears, hoping that I’d got it all wrong.
*
I woke - slipping from deeply asleep to fully awake in a smooth, timeless instant. So used to bright mornings and jumping straight out of bed, the night took me by surprise. As did the cold, and the distant, forgotten sound of thunder roaring far off across the lake. Sitting up, I wondered how many storms had come and gone between my perfect, cloudless days as I slept.
I moved to the window and looked out into the night. The lake, a void, twisted and writhed in the darkness. A harsh wind tore up the garden, sending the neatly clipped shrubs into a frenzied dance. A face emerged from the darkness - pale, tear-strung, a girl I didn’t recognise - coming up towards the house under the archway.
I pressed my face against the icy glass, peering past the fog that bloomed on the window pane - my worried breath, harsh and quick in the empty stillness of the house. Soon, a familiar face came into view - my brother, looking equally as shocked as the girl.
He shouted something - torn by the wind into ragged strips of meaningless sound - and ran towards her, grabbing her arm and turning her around. She tried to pull away, shouted something back at him, but he would not let go. He motioned wildly with his free hand, down towards the lake, and shrugged his shoulder violently. She stopped struggling and shook her head slowly, whispered something, then stared down at the ground.
He let her arm go and his shoulders sagged - she walked off, around the side of the house, small and frightened - leaving him alone, his unbuttoned shirt flapping in the wind.
The wind died down and a great silence rushed in around the house. Into the soundless night, a slow, pitiful wail sliced through the window pane. Thunder boomed once again, closer, louder, and I raced downstairs.
I met my brother at the patio doors and ran right past without slowing - out into the storm, into a world I hardly recognised. I knew where that terrible scream had come from.
“Sophie!” My brother shouted after me, “Sophie! It’s not safe!”
I ran on, delicate legs streaming over the freezing lawn, and heard my brother shouting up to my parents. Lights burst on behind me, more shouts, orange rays chased me down the garden - but nothing could catch me now, something was wrong with Isaac. My heart strained out against my ribcage, its fragile, innocent strings taught with worry. Please, please, please.
Down the shore line I sped, scrambling over the stoic rocks, feeling my toenails crack against their impassive, ragged faces. The pain was nothing - he was alive, he was here. Despite the dark, despite the cold and the storm, summer grew again in my heart. I love, I was free again.
A figure hunched a few feet into the cave - a human figure, naked and shivering. All around him dull, grey plates lay scattered across the stone floor. I stopped dead as he looked up at me - those beautiful eyes shining in pain, with love, knifing through my soul.
Eyes, streaming, I ran to him - this was no stranger. Relief masked my confusion. I dragged his body up, onto his knees - his bare skin pale, blue-tinged under the vicious thunderhead raging above us.
He placed a heavy hand on my shoulder - a trembling thumb against my neck, icy cold in the night and the storm. His endless blue eyes drew me in, stripped everything away, and loved me still. We stayed, lost in each other’s eyes, and it was all that made sense.
“Thank you, Sophie.” he whispered. “Thank you.”
“Isaac, I ... I don’t-” He cut me off, slowly shaking his head. From human skin, he brushed the last of his scales - thin, lifeless plates, falling to the rock.
He looked out across the lake, past my tearful, childish eyes and smiled.
Those lips drew down to me, and placed a single, gentle kiss upon my cheek. It was everything. Memories were made, forgotten, and made again. Understanding flickered, waxed and waned in my heart. The world condensed down, and it was only us - this strange, unbelievable summer cut down, sliced neatly down to me and him. Two figures standing together on the rock, the brush of his lips burning it all down to this one moment.
“Sophie!”
Lightning lit the sky, and a foreign shadow snapped through the cave, across us both.
I turned, the air dying around me, everything falling down into stagnant nothing.
My father stood on the shoreline, eyes burning out holes in the storm. His fingers flexed and tightened. I was dragged from the cave - away, out into my mother’s cold arms - every second forgotten as it passed. Other faces flashed by me as I strained my eyes back to the cave, carried away in vice-like arms. I saw nothing but a dark cut in the rock.
I remember screaming.
I remember my mother whispering into my hair.
Everything’s okay. Everything’s okay.
But it wasn’t.
I remember a long, empty, nothing-night.
I remember shouts, and slammed doors.
I remember the blood stains in the kitchen sink, I remember my father’s ruined knuckles.
I remember the chasm in my fragile heart.
**
The house became my solitude.
The dust and shade sucked me in, away from the sharp shapes of light drifting acorns the garden. I lived for the shadows, for the square symmetry of empty corridors and locked doors. The summer sun dried the tears in my eyes and fell away into autumn, then on to an empty winter.
I only once set foot in the garden again.
I woke suddenly in the night, a full moon in a clear sky sending silver beams through my window. A strange, turquoise object caught my eye - it looked like a shell, perched on my shelf, bands of colour flashing across the slightly curved surface. I had almost forgotten - his grey scales and his pale skin so vivid in my mind - that once, these beautiful colours were his.
I took it in my hands, and in my thin cotton night-dress, went out into the garden, into several inches of snow and a blistering wind. The soft white blanket hid away some of the memories, but new tears bloomed and froze on my cheeks. Clutching the scale to my chest, I stumbled down the garden, my feet numb already, the pain falling like drops of nothing into the hole in my heart.
At the archway - overgrown now - I stopped dead. Falling to my knees, I pushed the snow from the ground with shaking fingers. The earth underneath was frozen solid. Holding the strange, shining objects in both hands, I plunged it again and again into the grass, gouging out a sorry, shallow grave among the grey dirt.
With the earth back in place, and the snow piled on top, you could never tell what lay beneath that archway. Icicles grew on my eyelashes, ice gripped my heart, and my grief grew but was, at least, firmly defined. My knees sang out their discomfort and my breath stuck, frozen, tight in my throat.
I stared blankly out across the lake saw the ruthless hand of winter grip our wooden jetty. Ice spread slowly across the boards in the darkness and the forgotten timber cracked and fell silently into the water. Under a heavy moon, small, silver waves lapped the shore, and there was nothing.
*
The house was a slow, tired place of dust and shade - base camp, nothing more. A centre of quick convalescence, to eat and sleep, desperate to be outside again. A springboard back into the real world of cyan skies and cotton clouds, bare feet and the smells of summer.
So I lived, a careless, wild girl of the present. I wouldn’t speak for days, living inside my head, and in the ever-warm, endlessly joyous world I found myself in. Occasionally, mother and I would eat a snack or our lunch out on the patio - me swinging my legs from the white-painted iron garden chairs; her as reserved, as softly beautiful as always - watching the boats skim along the lake and the birds in the sky.
I never saw my brother - he was always home after I went to bed, often away for days, or locked in his room, inside the restless house with some girl or other - screaming and giggling behind the closed door.
But none of that mattered. I was only for the sky, and the shades of green.
Father worked in his small office upstairs, looking back down over the garden, the lake, and across to the houses far on the other side. I never knew how often exactly - but often enough I would stop dead in my play and catch him looking down on me, a half-face behind the glass, the lid of his pen resting against his lips. And I felt suddenly self-conscious, awkward and alone in yesterday’s crinkled dress.
It was the world of adults, of rules and endless timetables looking out at me - a heavy, tiring feeling would start somewhere in my stomach, and all thought of play and adventures and freedom would quickly dissipate into the hazy midday heat.
For this reason, I sought to play totally alone - untethered by the taut steel lines, pulling me back into a world where I didn’t belong.
The garden was split in two by a neat, square-cut privet hedge - long ago, this was the barrier I was never to stray beyond, so that small, careless girl was always in clear sight. But, for some reason, even when I was no longer watched over, I still chose to play in the top half of the garden.
Not anymore. Stopping at the perfectly trimmed archway, I turned back - slightly cautious - to see my father sunk deep in concentration, balding head bowed low over his paperwork in the upstairs office. With not a single farewell, I slipped on - deeper into a world of my own.
*
I was, at once, at peace. The large, square, red-brick house seemed a world away - and my perfect, natural reality infinitely closer. The sky dipped lower, the grass stretched from the earth to meet me, and a cool, clear breeze rolled constantly off the lake.
I ran to the shoreline where large grey rocks called to be leapt upon - they lay scattered along the thin, smooth-gravel beach that curved around the lake, linking each garden to the next and launching wooden jetties far into the crystal water. Ours was faded and splintered - I could hardly remember the last time I had stood on those wooden boards, waiting for someone to ready a borrowed boat, or simply staring out at the other families laughing as they sailed the lake. To either side, green-painted or wood-stained, finely-sanded platforms stretched proudly into depths our sorry jetty would never reach.
I soon became engrossed in jumping from rock to rock - the world condensed around me, and there was only the distance from one boulder to the next and the position of my tiny feet. In a world of grey tones, a rainbow emerged, flashing across my vision, luring me out of my trance.
Turquoise and silver, vivid bands of deep colour flashed brilliantly under the heavy sunlight. Hopping closer, I saw, sitting neatly on top of another identical rock, the most beautiful thing I had ever laid eyes upon.
It looked like a shell - slightly curved, tapered at one end - and was about the size of a dinner plate. I gazed back down the shoreline - I had come a long way from home, marked obviously by the rough, worn jetty - but the iridescent shell drew me back again. Stooping to pick it up, a movement caught my eye.
The land leading onto the shore was banked up here, and a cave had been worn back into the rock - screened by bushes on each side, and trees on top from a garden that didn’t lead down to the lake - it was a small, secret sanctuary. Again, something moved inside. I stepped closer, holding the shell in my hands.
The dragon - and it was, undisputedly, a dragon, albeit not a very large one - regarded my with endless, deep blue eyes. He moved back further into the cave, and I just looked on in shock, my mind trying to place the scene into fantasy or reality. I stepped closer and stopped, wide-eyed on the threshold - fascinated and frightening in equal measures.
“What?”
Still speechless, I just held the strange, breathtaking object out in front of me - noticing the colour and shape fitted perfectly in with the dragon’s shimmering scales.
“Ah, s**t.” The dragon stretched his long neck backwards, checking over his whole body, then lifted a leg and peered around his belly. “Where’d that come from?”
I shrugged, a little, sharp gesture. My mouth twitched somewhere between wonder and fright.
“So, you just gonna stand there all day?” He blinked. “A name? A voice? Little girl, just do something, or I might just eat you up right here and now.” He grimaced, showing painfully sharp, curved teeth.
“I kid, I kid!” he said, in a flat voice crackling with magic, as I flinched in terror. “... Well ...?”
“Sophie.” Barely a whisper.
“Ah, right, nice. Hey-” he bobbed his arrow-shaped head down at the scale I held in my hand, “-you can hold onto that if you like. Can’t see where it goes at any rate.”
I wrapped my arms around the scale and held it tight into my chest, trying not to stare at the obvious gap in the dragon’s armour just behind his front leg.
“Thanks ...” For about a minute, we just stared at each other. His great eyes - free of iris or pupil, just giant blue spheres, like the glass buoys the fisherman string out across the lake - sucked me in, unravelled me.
He shifted slightly, padding his feet against the rock.
“Oh go on, ask away. Whatever you like.”
“Um ... okay ... what’s you name?”
“Ah, um.” He looked genuinely puzzled. “Ooh ... I dunno. Bob? Larry? Elliott? Isaac? Sam? Geoff? Take your pick.”
“Isaac?” I ventured.
“Yeah ... suits me. Whatever you like, Soph, whatever you like.”
At the rear of the cave, the level sloped down again - creating a band of water along the wall, about a foot deep, along the back wall. Isaac slid down into this with a sigh and as the water covered his back a pained groan rolled around his throat.
Under the surface, he was totally invisible - his scales matched perfectly with the green-tinged water. Only his two magnificent eyes shone out, gazing at me with slight amusement. He blinked twice, flickering in and out of view.
“Well ...” he started, “If you’ll excuse me.”
His eyes slid closed and I was alone.
That was the first time.
From then, the house became unbearable. I hardly slept and ate as little and as fast as I could. As soon as I woke I was away - sprinting down towards the lake, the dew fresh on my eager feet, the sun tight and warm on the back of my neck, always hoping the dream had not ended.
*
And so the summer drew on, every day a flash of warm, golden sunlight across my infinite happiness. The days were much the same, but every time I stepped cautiously into the cave and found Isaac still there - not a dream or a cruel trick - my amazement grew again.
Most days we would just sit together a little way back into the cave - his smooth, rounded belly propping up my head, rocking me as his reptile lungs drew in the summer air, his neck and tail curved around either side of me. He never questioned my presence, just accepted me there.
We were connected - two of the same, strung together by fate or chance.
It didn’t matter which, but when we were together, the summer was perfect - the sun shone brighter, the world was crisper, lighter, complete. Our hearts grew together, and I was never alone.
So we sat, content, usually in silence - sometimes talking idly, but only ever about me: I never dared ask Isaac about himself, lest the fairy-tale illusion be shattered. Sometimes we would laugh gently, as a boy from across the lake tried to windsurf, and sometimes we would sleep, slipping gently, deeper into the warmth of the world.
One of these times, I was just drifting off, my cheek against Isaac’s cool, smooth scales, when I heard footsteps on the worn gravel shore. Panic flared, and my mind raced - I leapt up, trying to think of something to do. What would happen if anyone found him here - a dragon?
Images started to flash through my mind - blood, white walls, heavy doors - but I was jerked, desperately, back to the present as my mother appeared at the cave entrance, smiling. I spun around, tears brimming in my eyes, but Isaac was nowhere to be seen. I stared at the blank rock - perhaps it had all been a figment of my imagination, a conjured companion for that lonely girl.
“What’s the matter, sweetheart?” My mother asked, seeing my troubled face. She came and stood by my side, put a thin arm around my neck and ran her fingers slowly through my wild red hair. We stood facing the lake for a few moments, but I did not see it. I was alone, abandoned.
“This is a nice little den, eh?” She said, in her quiet, disconnected voice. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you - come on, let’s go back to the house, I’ve got a surprise for you.”
I let her lead me away, across the shore and back up the garden. It must have been a weekend for her to be home during the day. I don’t remember what the surprise was, but I do remember the sadness in her eyes as I asked if I could go back outside again, and her choked voice calling something after me I didn’t hear.
I sprinted back to the cave, silently leaping across the shore stones like an expert. Please, please, let it all be real, let him still be there.
He was. But not the same.
As I entered, breathless, relieved, speechless, I saw his eyes flare in shock and his leathery lips draw back, revealing those gleaming teeth. Wings I never realised he had snapped open in the cramped space - he looked twice as big, all tooth and claw, death and rage. I stumbled backwards against the wall, terrified.
His eyes at once softened, seeing who I really was, and he slowly deflated - wings fell flat to his back, claws retracted, and the angry red bands of colour faded from his scales. He turned, head hung low, and exhaled - the breath ending in an ugly, rumbling choke. His whole body shuddered violently, and something red and wet fell from his mouth.
He drank deeply from the ribbon of water at the back of the cave, then turned to me. The twin orbs of his eyes - like two perfect moons, distant and mysterious - were empty, scared.
“Sophie, I’m sorry ... I didn’t mean ...”
Swallowing back the hard, tight lump in my throat, I moved cautiously over to him. I placed my shaking hand on his smooth nose, and the spines on his head flattened down onto his neck. He sighed, relived and tired, smiled for a second, then turned away again and lay heavily down in the shadows.
I saw then, for the first time, that something was wrong. All along his back, and down one side, his scales had faded to grey - cracked and pitted, like so many slices of timeworn, expired rock. I thought back, and realised that he always sat with me in the same way - so my head would rest against his shining, perfect scales, not the dulled, rough rows on his other side.
I moved over to him, and reached out to the grey scales. They were as brittle as dead twigs, and crusted with dry blood. Isaac groaned deeply, I heard his tears falling to the floor. One of the scales broke away under my gentle touch - the dragon flinched away, scrambling to the cave entrance, a pained growl in his throat.
But I had still seen it - the gleam of new, pale skin underneath. Like the whitest flesh under a scab, perfect and fully healed. Human skin. Under a dead layer of armour, human skin.
“Isaac ...” I started. The lump his risen in my throat again, tasting of bile. I had to talk past it. “Why are you here?”
The question my perfect summer forbid hung heavy in the air between us. My friend closed his eyes tight, squeezing the tears from his lids, and looked straight at me. I was lost in the vivid blue, unprepared for the blow that followed.
“I’m dying, Sophie. I came here to die.”
He fled from the cave, leapt into the lake and was gone. I wished then, that he had just been a dream, something fictional, a vivid fantasy. Dreams could live forever - they never died, they were never angry or sad. They were immortal, and they never left you unless you gave them up.
The dark, bitter reality was a spiteful punch to my stomach. The ripples faded, and I threw up onto the sunstruck shoreline, spitting the pieces of my ten-year-old heart onto the smooth gravel
*
Everyday I returned, running into a cold and empty cave. I always saw his eyes, peering at me from the ribbon of water along the back wall, but jumping into the freezing water up to my waist, my hands found nothing but a bitter memory.
Sometimes I would find one of his dead scales, fallen to the floor, or a patch of blood, or a deep claw-cut in the rock. These little things, they never let me pretend it was only imagination that had kept me company. But I collected up the scales, and buried them along the shore. I washed the blood from the rock. I filled the gouges with the finest sand - always hoping that, one day, I would blink into reality and realise that it was all a game.
I just wanted to see him again, real or not, so he could tell me what I wanted to hear. That he wasn’t going to die. That I’d never be alone. But my nights were void of dreams, and my days spent clearing away any trace that he ever existed at all.
I lived behind my tears, hoping that I’d got it all wrong.
*
I woke - slipping from deeply asleep to fully awake in a smooth, timeless instant. So used to bright mornings and jumping straight out of bed, the night took me by surprise. As did the cold, and the distant, forgotten sound of thunder roaring far off across the lake. Sitting up, I wondered how many storms had come and gone between my perfect, cloudless days as I slept.
I moved to the window and looked out into the night. The lake, a void, twisted and writhed in the darkness. A harsh wind tore up the garden, sending the neatly clipped shrubs into a frenzied dance. A face emerged from the darkness - pale, tear-strung, a girl I didn’t recognise - coming up towards the house under the archway.
I pressed my face against the icy glass, peering past the fog that bloomed on the window pane - my worried breath, harsh and quick in the empty stillness of the house. Soon, a familiar face came into view - my brother, looking equally as shocked as the girl.
He shouted something - torn by the wind into ragged strips of meaningless sound - and ran towards her, grabbing her arm and turning her around. She tried to pull away, shouted something back at him, but he would not let go. He motioned wildly with his free hand, down towards the lake, and shrugged his shoulder violently. She stopped struggling and shook her head slowly, whispered something, then stared down at the ground.
He let her arm go and his shoulders sagged - she walked off, around the side of the house, small and frightened - leaving him alone, his unbuttoned shirt flapping in the wind.
The wind died down and a great silence rushed in around the house. Into the soundless night, a slow, pitiful wail sliced through the window pane. Thunder boomed once again, closer, louder, and I raced downstairs.
I met my brother at the patio doors and ran right past without slowing - out into the storm, into a world I hardly recognised. I knew where that terrible scream had come from.
“Sophie!” My brother shouted after me, “Sophie! It’s not safe!”
I ran on, delicate legs streaming over the freezing lawn, and heard my brother shouting up to my parents. Lights burst on behind me, more shouts, orange rays chased me down the garden - but nothing could catch me now, something was wrong with Isaac. My heart strained out against my ribcage, its fragile, innocent strings taught with worry. Please, please, please.
Down the shore line I sped, scrambling over the stoic rocks, feeling my toenails crack against their impassive, ragged faces. The pain was nothing - he was alive, he was here. Despite the dark, despite the cold and the storm, summer grew again in my heart. I love, I was free again.
A figure hunched a few feet into the cave - a human figure, naked and shivering. All around him dull, grey plates lay scattered across the stone floor. I stopped dead as he looked up at me - those beautiful eyes shining in pain, with love, knifing through my soul.
Eyes, streaming, I ran to him - this was no stranger. Relief masked my confusion. I dragged his body up, onto his knees - his bare skin pale, blue-tinged under the vicious thunderhead raging above us.
He placed a heavy hand on my shoulder - a trembling thumb against my neck, icy cold in the night and the storm. His endless blue eyes drew me in, stripped everything away, and loved me still. We stayed, lost in each other’s eyes, and it was all that made sense.
“Thank you, Sophie.” he whispered. “Thank you.”
“Isaac, I ... I don’t-” He cut me off, slowly shaking his head. From human skin, he brushed the last of his scales - thin, lifeless plates, falling to the rock.
He looked out across the lake, past my tearful, childish eyes and smiled.
Those lips drew down to me, and placed a single, gentle kiss upon my cheek. It was everything. Memories were made, forgotten, and made again. Understanding flickered, waxed and waned in my heart. The world condensed down, and it was only us - this strange, unbelievable summer cut down, sliced neatly down to me and him. Two figures standing together on the rock, the brush of his lips burning it all down to this one moment.
“Sophie!”
Lightning lit the sky, and a foreign shadow snapped through the cave, across us both.
I turned, the air dying around me, everything falling down into stagnant nothing.
My father stood on the shoreline, eyes burning out holes in the storm. His fingers flexed and tightened. I was dragged from the cave - away, out into my mother’s cold arms - every second forgotten as it passed. Other faces flashed by me as I strained my eyes back to the cave, carried away in vice-like arms. I saw nothing but a dark cut in the rock.
I remember screaming.
I remember my mother whispering into my hair.
Everything’s okay. Everything’s okay.
But it wasn’t.
I remember a long, empty, nothing-night.
I remember shouts, and slammed doors.
I remember the blood stains in the kitchen sink, I remember my father’s ruined knuckles.
I remember the chasm in my fragile heart.
**
The house became my solitude.
The dust and shade sucked me in, away from the sharp shapes of light drifting acorns the garden. I lived for the shadows, for the square symmetry of empty corridors and locked doors. The summer sun dried the tears in my eyes and fell away into autumn, then on to an empty winter.
I only once set foot in the garden again.
I woke suddenly in the night, a full moon in a clear sky sending silver beams through my window. A strange, turquoise object caught my eye - it looked like a shell, perched on my shelf, bands of colour flashing across the slightly curved surface. I had almost forgotten - his grey scales and his pale skin so vivid in my mind - that once, these beautiful colours were his.
I took it in my hands, and in my thin cotton night-dress, went out into the garden, into several inches of snow and a blistering wind. The soft white blanket hid away some of the memories, but new tears bloomed and froze on my cheeks. Clutching the scale to my chest, I stumbled down the garden, my feet numb already, the pain falling like drops of nothing into the hole in my heart.
At the archway - overgrown now - I stopped dead. Falling to my knees, I pushed the snow from the ground with shaking fingers. The earth underneath was frozen solid. Holding the strange, shining objects in both hands, I plunged it again and again into the grass, gouging out a sorry, shallow grave among the grey dirt.
With the earth back in place, and the snow piled on top, you could never tell what lay beneath that archway. Icicles grew on my eyelashes, ice gripped my heart, and my grief grew but was, at least, firmly defined. My knees sang out their discomfort and my breath stuck, frozen, tight in my throat.
I stared blankly out across the lake saw the ruthless hand of winter grip our wooden jetty. Ice spread slowly across the boards in the darkness and the forgotten timber cracked and fell silently into the water. Under a heavy moon, small, silver waves lapped the shore, and there was nothing.
*
Wow, another reader. Go team.
Oh wait, silly me, this isn't a SSC21 entry.
Oops.
biatches
Oh wait, silly me, this isn't a SSC21 entry.
Oops.
biatches
Superb.
I had a summerish childhoodish story in mind for your competition and this has given me more ideas for it.
I had a summerish childhoodish story in mind for your competition and this has given me more ideas for it.
Always.
I think I deserve it.
Now read the story, you freak-haired hovelad.
Now read the story, you freak-haired hovelad.
Least subtle pop in the history of popping
yey
Heartbreakingly breathlessly beautiful. I loved it. A proper story that pulled at my heart when they tore them apart.
It is one of the better ones I've read on here recently and I have a printed copy that may well become dog eared.
Did I mention that I loved it?
:D
It is one of the better ones I've read on here recently and I have a printed copy that may well become dog eared.
Did I mention that I loved it?
:D
Very nice. I liked the fact that the Dragon was pretty non-stereotypical. (I still have to finish my story).
Fook me thats epic. I'll get round to reading it tommorow.
I was barely ten, leaning into an infinite summer. The large garden - enormous to a child filled with imagination - was a lush rectangle of adventures, leading gently down onto the lake - another beautiful, sunstruck world of its own. Days raced by and were forgotten - the past was nothing, the future a hazy, far-off uncertainty.
The house was a slow, tired place of dust and shade - base camp, nothing more. A centre of quick convalescence, to eat and sleep, desperate to be outside again. A springboard back into the real world of cyan skies and cotton clouds, bare feet and the smells of summer.
So I lived, a careless, wild girl of the present. I wouldn’t speak for days, living inside my head, and in the ever-warm, endlessly joyous world I found myself in. Occasionally, mother and I would eat a snack or our lunch out on the patio - me swinging my legs from the white-painted iron garden chairs; her as reserved, as softly beautiful as always - watching the boats skim along the lake and the birds in the sky.
I never saw my brother - he was always home after I went to bed, often away for days, or locked in his room, inside the restless house with some girl or other - screaming and giggling behind the closed door.
But none of that mattered. I was only for the sky, and the shades of green.
Father worked in his small office upstairs, looking back down over the garden, the lake, and across to the houses far on the other side. I never knew how often exactly - but often enough I would stop dead in my play and catch him looking down on me, a half-face behind the glass, the lid of his pen resting against his lips. And I felt suddenly self-conscious, awkward and alone in yesterday’s crinkled dress.
It was the world of adults, of rules and endless timetables looking out at me - a heavy, tiring feeling would start somewhere in my stomach, and all thought of play and adventures and freedom would quickly dissipate into the hazy midday heat.
For this reason, I sought to play totally alone - untethered by the taut steel lines, pulling me back into a world where I didn’t belong.
The garden was split in two by a neat, square-cut privet hedge - long ago, this was the barrier I was never to stray beyond, so that small, careless girl was always in clear sight. But, for some reason, even when I was no longer watched over, I still chose to play in the top half of the garden.
Not anymore. Stopping at the perfectly trimmed archway, I turned back - slightly cautious - to see my father sunk deep in concentration, balding head bowed low over his paperwork in the upstairs office. With not a single farewell, I slipped on - deeper into a world of my own.
*
I was, at once, at peace. The large, square, red-brick house seemed a world away - and my perfect, natural reality infinitely closer. The sky dipped lower, the grass stretched from the earth to meet me, and a cool, clear breeze rolled constantly off the lake.
I ran to the shoreline where large grey rocks called to be leapt upon - they lay scattered along the thin, smooth-gravel beach that curved around the lake, linking each garden to the next and launching wooden jetties far into the crystal water. Ours was faded and splintered - I could hardly remember the last time I had stood on those wooden boards, waiting for someone to ready a borrowed boat, or simply staring out at the other families laughing as they sailed the lake. To either side, green-painted or wood-stained, finely-sanded platforms stretched proudly into depths our sorry jetty would never reach.
I soon became engrossed in jumping from rock to rock - the world condensed around me, and there was only the distance from one boulder to the next and the position of my tiny feet. In a world of grey tones, a rainbow emerged, flashing across my vision, luring me out of my trance.
Turquoise and silver, vivid bands of deep colour flashed brilliantly under the heavy sunlight. Hopping closer, I saw, sitting neatly on top of another identical rock, the most beautiful thing I had ever laid eyes upon.
It looked like a shell - slightly curved, tapered at one end - and was about the size of a dinner plate. I gazed back down the shoreline - I had come a long way from home, marked obviously by the rough, worn jetty - but the iridescent shell drew me back again. Stooping to pick it up, a movement caught my eye.
The land leading onto the shore was banked up here, and a cave had been worn back into the rock - screened by bushes on each side, and trees on top from a garden that didn’t lead down to the lake - it was a small, secret sanctuary. Again, something moved inside. I stepped closer, holding the shell in my hands.
The dragon - and it was, undisputedly, a dragon, albeit not a very large one - regarded my with endless, deep blue eyes. He moved back further into the cave, and I just looked on in shock, my mind trying to place the scene into fantasy or reality. I stepped closer and stopped, wide-eyed on the threshold - fascinated and frightening in equal measures.
“What?”
Still speechless, I just held the strange, breathtaking object out in front of me - noticing the colour and shape fitted perfectly in with the dragon’s shimmering scales.
“Ah, s**t.” The dragon stretched his long neck backwards, checking over his whole body, then lifted a leg and peered around his belly. “Where’d that come from?”
I shrugged, a little, sharp gesture. My mouth twitched somewhere between wonder and fright.
“So, you just gonna stand there all day?” He blinked. “A name? A voice? Little girl, just do something, or I might just eat you up right here and now.” He grimaced, showing painfully sharp, curved teeth.
“I kid, I kid!” he said, in a flat voice crackling with magic, as I flinched in terror. “... Well ...?”
“Sophie.” Barely a whisper.
“Ah, right, nice. Hey-” he bobbed his arrow-shaped head down at the scale I held in my hand, “-you can hold onto that if you like. Can’t see where it goes at any rate.”
I wrapped my arms around the scale and held it tight into my chest, trying not to stare at the obvious gap in the dragon’s armour just behind his front leg.
“Thanks ...” For about a minute, we just stared at each other. His great eyes - free of iris or pupil, just giant blue spheres, like the glass buoys the fisherman string out across the lake - sucked me in, unravelled me.
He shifted slightly, padding his feet against the rock.
“Oh go on, ask away. Whatever you like.”
“Um ... okay ... what’s you name?”
“Ah, um.” He looked genuinely puzzled. “Ooh ... I dunno. Bob? Larry? Elliott? Isaac? Sam? Geoff? Take your pick.”
“Isaac?” I ventured.
“Yeah ... suits me. Whatever you like, Soph, whatever you like.”
At the rear of the cave, the level sloped down again - creating a band of water along the wall, about a foot deep, along the back wall. Isaac slid down into this with a sigh and as the water covered his back a pained groan rolled around his throat.
Under the surface, he was totally invisible - his scales matched perfectly with the green-tinged water. Only his two magnificent eyes shone out, gazing at me with slight amusement. He blinked twice, flickering in and out of view.
“Well ...” he started, “If you’ll excuse me.”
His eyes slid closed and I was alone.
That was the first time.
From then, the house became unbearable. I hardly slept and ate as little and as fast as I could. As soon as I woke I was away - sprinting down towards the lake, the dew fresh on my eager feet, the sun tight and warm on the back of my neck, always hoping the dream had not ended.
*
And so the summer drew on, every day a flash of warm, golden sunlight across my infinite happiness. The days were much the same, but every time I stepped cautiously into the cave and found Isaac still there - not a dream or a cruel trick - my amazement grew again.
Most days we would just sit together a little way back into the cave - his smooth, rounded belly propping up my head, rocking me as his reptile lungs drew in the summer air, his neck and tail curved around either side of me. He never questioned my presence, just accepted me there.
We were connected - two of the same, strung together by fate or chance.
It didn’t matter which, but when we were together, the summer was perfect - the sun shone brighter, the world was crisper, lighter, complete. Our hearts grew together, and I was never alone.
So we sat, content, usually in silence - sometimes talking idly, but only ever about me: I never dared ask Isaac about himself, lest the fairy-tale illusion be shattered. Sometimes we would laugh gently, as a boy from across the lake tried to windsurf, and sometimes we would sleep, slipping gently, deeper into the warmth of the world.
One of these times, I was just drifting off, my cheek against Isaac’s cool, smooth scales, when I heard footsteps on the worn gravel shore. Panic flared, and my mind raced - I leapt up, trying to think of something to do. What would happen if anyone found him here - a dragon?
Images started to flash through my mind - blood, white walls, heavy doors - but I was jerked, desperately, back to the present as my mother appeared at the cave entrance, smiling. I spun around, tears brimming in my eyes, but Isaac was nowhere to be seen. I stared at the blank rock - perhaps it had all been a figment of my imagination, a conjured companion for that lonely girl.
“What’s the matter, sweetheart?” My mother asked, seeing my troubled face. She came and stood by my side, put a thin arm around my neck and ran her fingers slowly through my wild red hair. We stood facing the lake for a few moments, but I did not see it. I was alone, abandoned.
“This is a nice little den, eh?” She said, in her quiet, disconnected voice. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you - come on, let’s go back to the house, I’ve got a surprise for you.”
I let her lead me away, across the shore and back up the garden. It must have been a weekend for her to be home during the day. I don’t remember what the surprise was, but I do remember the sadness in her eyes as I asked if I could go back outside again, and her choked voice calling something after me I didn’t hear.
I sprinted back to the cave, silently leaping across the shore stones like an expert. Please, please, let it all be real, let him still be there.
He was. But not the same.
As I entered, breathless, relieved, speechless, I saw his eyes flare in shock and his leathery lips draw back, revealing those gleaming teeth. Wings I never realised he had snapped open in the cramped space - he looked twice as big, all tooth and claw, death and rage. I stumbled backwards against the wall, terrified.
His eyes at once softened, seeing who I really was, and he slowly deflated - wings fell flat to his back, claws retracted, and the angry red bands of colour faded from his scales. He turned, head hung low, and exhaled - the breath ending in an ugly, rumbling choke. His whole body shuddered violently, and something red and wet fell from his mouth.
He drank deeply from the ribbon of water at the back of the cave, then turned to me. The twin orbs of his eyes - like two perfect moons, distant and mysterious - were empty, scared.
“Sophie, I’m sorry ... I didn’t mean ...”
Swallowing back the hard, tight lump in my throat, I moved cautiously over to him. I placed my shaking hand on his smooth nose, and the spines on his head flattened down onto his neck. He sighed, relived and tired, smiled for a second, then turned away again and lay heavily down in the shadows.
I saw then, for the first time, that something was wrong. All along his back, and down one side, his scales had faded to grey - cracked and pitted, like so many slices of timeworn, expired rock. I thought back, and realised that he always sat with me in the same way - so my head would rest against his shining, perfect scales, not the dulled, rough rows on his other side.
I moved over to him, and reached out to the grey scales. They were as brittle as dead twigs, and crusted with dry blood. Isaac groaned deeply, I heard his tears falling to the floor. One of the scales broke away under my gentle touch - the dragon flinched away, scrambling to the cave entrance, a pained growl in his throat.
But I had still seen it - the gleam of new, pale skin underneath. Like the whitest flesh under a scab, perfect and fully healed. Human skin. Under a dead layer of armour, human skin.
“Isaac ...” I started. The lump his risen in my throat again, tasting of bile. I had to talk past it. “Why are you here?”
The question my perfect summer forbid hung heavy in the air between us. My friend closed his eyes tight, squeezing the tears from his lids, and looked straight at me. I was lost in the vivid blue, unprepared for the blow that followed.
“I’m dying, Sophie. I came here to die.”
He fled from the cave, leapt into the lake and was gone. I wished then, that he had just been a dream, something fictional, a vivid fantasy. Dreams could live forever - they never died, they were never angry or sad. They were immortal, and they never left you unless you gave them up.
The dark, bitter reality was a spiteful punch to my stomach. The ripples faded, and I threw up onto the sunstruck shoreline, spitting the pieces of my ten-year-old heart onto the smooth gravel
*
Everyday I returned, running into a cold and empty cave. I always saw his eyes, peering at me from the ribbon of water along the back wall, but jumping into the freezing water up to my waist, my hands found nothing but a bitter memory.
Sometimes I would find one of his dead scales, fallen to the floor, or a patch of blood, or a deep claw-cut in the rock. These little things, they never let me pretend it was only imagination that had kept me company. But I collected up the scales, and buried them along the shore. I washed the blood from the rock. I filled the gouges with the finest sand - always hoping that, one day, I would blink into reality and realise that it was all a game.
I just wanted to see him again, real or not, so he could tell me what I wanted to hear. That he wasn’t going to die. That I’d never be alone. But my nights were void of dreams, and my days spent clearing away any trace that he ever existed at all.
I lived behind my tears, hoping that I’d got it all wrong.
*
I woke - slipping from deeply asleep to fully awake in a smooth, timeless instant. So used to bright mornings and jumping straight out of bed, the night took me by surprise. As did the cold, and the distant, forgotten sound of thunder roaring far off across the lake. Sitting up, I wondered how many storms had come and gone between my perfect, cloudless days as I slept.
I moved to the window and looked out into the night. The lake, a void, twisted and writhed in the darkness. A harsh wind tore up the garden, sending the neatly clipped shrubs into a frenzied dance. A face emerged from the darkness - pale, tear-strung, a girl I didn’t recognise - coming up towards the house under the archway.
I pressed my face against the icy glass, peering past the fog that bloomed on the window pane - my worried breath, harsh and quick in the empty stillness of the house. Soon, a familiar face came into view - my brother, looking equally as shocked as the girl.
He shouted something - torn by the wind into ragged strips of meaningless sound - and ran towards her, grabbing her arm and turning her around. She tried to pull away, shouted something back at him, but he would not let go. He motioned wildly with his free hand, down towards the lake, and shrugged his shoulder violently. She stopped struggling and shook her head slowly, whispered something, then stared down at the ground.
He let her arm go and his shoulders sagged - she walked off, around the side of the house, small and frightened - leaving him alone, his unbuttoned shirt flapping in the wind.
The wind died down and a great silence rushed in around the house. Into the soundless night, a slow, pitiful wail sliced through the window pane. Thunder boomed once again, closer, louder, and I raced downstairs.
I met my brother at the patio doors and ran right past without slowing - out into the storm, into a world I hardly recognised. I knew where that terrible scream had come from.
“Sophie!” My brother shouted after me, “Sophie! It’s not safe!”
I ran on, delicate legs streaming over the freezing lawn, and heard my brother shouting up to my parents. Lights burst on behind me, more shouts, orange rays chased me down the garden - but nothing could catch me now, something was wrong with Isaac. My heart strained out against my ribcage, its fragile, innocent strings taught with worry. Please, please, please.
Down the shore line I sped, scrambling over the stoic rocks, feeling my toenails crack against their impassive, ragged faces. The pain was nothing - he was alive, he was here. Despite the dark, despite the cold and the storm, summer grew again in my heart. I love, I was free again.
A figure hunched a few feet into the cave - a human figure, naked and shivering. All around him dull, grey plates lay scattered across the stone floor. I stopped dead as he looked up at me - those beautiful eyes shining in pain, with love, knifing through my soul.
Eyes, streaming, I ran to him - this was no stranger. Relief masked my confusion. I dragged his body up, onto his knees - his bare skin pale, blue-tinged under the vicious thunderhead raging above us.
He placed a heavy hand on my shoulder - a trembling thumb against my neck, icy cold in the night and the storm. His endless blue eyes drew me in, stripped everything away, and loved me still. We stayed, lost in each other’s eyes, and it was all that made sense.
“Thank you, Sophie.” he whispered. “Thank you.”
“Isaac, I ... I don’t-” He cut me off, slowly shaking his head. From human skin, he brushed the last of his scales - thin, lifeless plates, falling to the rock.
He looked out across the lake, past my tearful, childish eyes and smiled.
Those lips drew down to me, and placed a single, gentle kiss upon my cheek. It was everything. Memories were made, forgotten, and made again. Understanding flickered, waxed and waned in my heart. The world condensed down, and it was only us - this strange, unbelievable summer cut down, sliced neatly down to me and him. Two figures standing together on the rock, the brush of his lips burning it all down to this one moment.
“Sophie!”
Lightning lit the sky, and a foreign shadow snapped through the cave, across us both.
I turned, the air dying around me, everything falling down into stagnant nothing.
My father stood on the shoreline, eyes burning out holes in the storm. His fingers flexed and tightened. I was dragged from the cave - away, out into my mother’s cold arms - every second forgotten as it passed. Other faces flashed by me as I strained my eyes back to the cave, carried away in vice-like arms. I saw nothing but a dark cut in the rock.
I remember screaming.
I remember my mother whispering into my hair.
Everything’s okay. Everything’s okay.
But it wasn’t.
I remember a long, empty, nothing-night.
I remember shouts, and slammed doors.
I remember the blood stains in the kitchen sink, I remember my father’s ruined knuckles.
I remember the chasm in my fragile heart.
**
The house became my solitude.
The dust and shade sucked me in, away from the sharp shapes of light drifting acorns the garden. I lived for the shadows, for the square symmetry of empty corridors and locked doors. The summer sun dried the tears in my eyes and fell away into autumn, then on to an empty winter.
I only once set foot in the garden again.
I woke suddenly in the night, a full moon in a clear sky sending silver beams through my window. A strange, turquoise object caught my eye - it looked like a shell, perched on my shelf, bands of colour flashing across the slightly curved surface. I had almost forgotten - his grey scales and his pale skin so vivid in my mind - that once, these beautiful colours were his.
I took it in my hands, and in my thin cotton night-dress, went out into the garden, into several inches of snow and a blistering wind. The soft white blanket hid away some of the memories, but new tears bloomed and froze on my cheeks. Clutching the scale to my chest, I stumbled down the garden, my feet numb already, the pain falling like drops of nothing into the hole in my heart.
At the archway - overgrown now - I stopped dead. Falling to my knees, I pushed the snow from the ground with shaking fingers. The earth underneath was frozen solid. Holding the strange, shining objects in both hands, I plunged it again and again into the grass, gouging out a sorry, shallow grave among the grey dirt.
With the earth back in place, and the snow piled on top, you could never tell what lay beneath that archway. Icicles grew on my eyelashes, ice gripped my heart, and my grief grew but was, at least, firmly defined. My knees sang out their discomfort and my breath stuck, frozen, tight in my throat.
I stared blankly out across the lake saw the ruthless hand of winter grip our wooden jetty. Ice spread slowly across the boards in the darkness and the forgotten timber cracked and fell silently into the water. Under a heavy moon, small, silver waves lapped the shore, and there was nothing.
*
The house was a slow, tired place of dust and shade - base camp, nothing more. A centre of quick convalescence, to eat and sleep, desperate to be outside again. A springboard back into the real world of cyan skies and cotton clouds, bare feet and the smells of summer.
So I lived, a careless, wild girl of the present. I wouldn’t speak for days, living inside my head, and in the ever-warm, endlessly joyous world I found myself in. Occasionally, mother and I would eat a snack or our lunch out on the patio - me swinging my legs from the white-painted iron garden chairs; her as reserved, as softly beautiful as always - watching the boats skim along the lake and the birds in the sky.
I never saw my brother - he was always home after I went to bed, often away for days, or locked in his room, inside the restless house with some girl or other - screaming and giggling behind the closed door.
But none of that mattered. I was only for the sky, and the shades of green.
Father worked in his small office upstairs, looking back down over the garden, the lake, and across to the houses far on the other side. I never knew how often exactly - but often enough I would stop dead in my play and catch him looking down on me, a half-face behind the glass, the lid of his pen resting against his lips. And I felt suddenly self-conscious, awkward and alone in yesterday’s crinkled dress.
It was the world of adults, of rules and endless timetables looking out at me - a heavy, tiring feeling would start somewhere in my stomach, and all thought of play and adventures and freedom would quickly dissipate into the hazy midday heat.
For this reason, I sought to play totally alone - untethered by the taut steel lines, pulling me back into a world where I didn’t belong.
The garden was split in two by a neat, square-cut privet hedge - long ago, this was the barrier I was never to stray beyond, so that small, careless girl was always in clear sight. But, for some reason, even when I was no longer watched over, I still chose to play in the top half of the garden.
Not anymore. Stopping at the perfectly trimmed archway, I turned back - slightly cautious - to see my father sunk deep in concentration, balding head bowed low over his paperwork in the upstairs office. With not a single farewell, I slipped on - deeper into a world of my own.
*
I was, at once, at peace. The large, square, red-brick house seemed a world away - and my perfect, natural reality infinitely closer. The sky dipped lower, the grass stretched from the earth to meet me, and a cool, clear breeze rolled constantly off the lake.
I ran to the shoreline where large grey rocks called to be leapt upon - they lay scattered along the thin, smooth-gravel beach that curved around the lake, linking each garden to the next and launching wooden jetties far into the crystal water. Ours was faded and splintered - I could hardly remember the last time I had stood on those wooden boards, waiting for someone to ready a borrowed boat, or simply staring out at the other families laughing as they sailed the lake. To either side, green-painted or wood-stained, finely-sanded platforms stretched proudly into depths our sorry jetty would never reach.
I soon became engrossed in jumping from rock to rock - the world condensed around me, and there was only the distance from one boulder to the next and the position of my tiny feet. In a world of grey tones, a rainbow emerged, flashing across my vision, luring me out of my trance.
Turquoise and silver, vivid bands of deep colour flashed brilliantly under the heavy sunlight. Hopping closer, I saw, sitting neatly on top of another identical rock, the most beautiful thing I had ever laid eyes upon.
It looked like a shell - slightly curved, tapered at one end - and was about the size of a dinner plate. I gazed back down the shoreline - I had come a long way from home, marked obviously by the rough, worn jetty - but the iridescent shell drew me back again. Stooping to pick it up, a movement caught my eye.
The land leading onto the shore was banked up here, and a cave had been worn back into the rock - screened by bushes on each side, and trees on top from a garden that didn’t lead down to the lake - it was a small, secret sanctuary. Again, something moved inside. I stepped closer, holding the shell in my hands.
The dragon - and it was, undisputedly, a dragon, albeit not a very large one - regarded my with endless, deep blue eyes. He moved back further into the cave, and I just looked on in shock, my mind trying to place the scene into fantasy or reality. I stepped closer and stopped, wide-eyed on the threshold - fascinated and frightening in equal measures.
“What?”
Still speechless, I just held the strange, breathtaking object out in front of me - noticing the colour and shape fitted perfectly in with the dragon’s shimmering scales.
“Ah, s**t.” The dragon stretched his long neck backwards, checking over his whole body, then lifted a leg and peered around his belly. “Where’d that come from?”
I shrugged, a little, sharp gesture. My mouth twitched somewhere between wonder and fright.
“So, you just gonna stand there all day?” He blinked. “A name? A voice? Little girl, just do something, or I might just eat you up right here and now.” He grimaced, showing painfully sharp, curved teeth.
“I kid, I kid!” he said, in a flat voice crackling with magic, as I flinched in terror. “... Well ...?”
“Sophie.” Barely a whisper.
“Ah, right, nice. Hey-” he bobbed his arrow-shaped head down at the scale I held in my hand, “-you can hold onto that if you like. Can’t see where it goes at any rate.”
I wrapped my arms around the scale and held it tight into my chest, trying not to stare at the obvious gap in the dragon’s armour just behind his front leg.
“Thanks ...” For about a minute, we just stared at each other. His great eyes - free of iris or pupil, just giant blue spheres, like the glass buoys the fisherman string out across the lake - sucked me in, unravelled me.
He shifted slightly, padding his feet against the rock.
“Oh go on, ask away. Whatever you like.”
“Um ... okay ... what’s you name?”
“Ah, um.” He looked genuinely puzzled. “Ooh ... I dunno. Bob? Larry? Elliott? Isaac? Sam? Geoff? Take your pick.”
“Isaac?” I ventured.
“Yeah ... suits me. Whatever you like, Soph, whatever you like.”
At the rear of the cave, the level sloped down again - creating a band of water along the wall, about a foot deep, along the back wall. Isaac slid down into this with a sigh and as the water covered his back a pained groan rolled around his throat.
Under the surface, he was totally invisible - his scales matched perfectly with the green-tinged water. Only his two magnificent eyes shone out, gazing at me with slight amusement. He blinked twice, flickering in and out of view.
“Well ...” he started, “If you’ll excuse me.”
His eyes slid closed and I was alone.
That was the first time.
From then, the house became unbearable. I hardly slept and ate as little and as fast as I could. As soon as I woke I was away - sprinting down towards the lake, the dew fresh on my eager feet, the sun tight and warm on the back of my neck, always hoping the dream had not ended.
*
And so the summer drew on, every day a flash of warm, golden sunlight across my infinite happiness. The days were much the same, but every time I stepped cautiously into the cave and found Isaac still there - not a dream or a cruel trick - my amazement grew again.
Most days we would just sit together a little way back into the cave - his smooth, rounded belly propping up my head, rocking me as his reptile lungs drew in the summer air, his neck and tail curved around either side of me. He never questioned my presence, just accepted me there.
We were connected - two of the same, strung together by fate or chance.
It didn’t matter which, but when we were together, the summer was perfect - the sun shone brighter, the world was crisper, lighter, complete. Our hearts grew together, and I was never alone.
So we sat, content, usually in silence - sometimes talking idly, but only ever about me: I never dared ask Isaac about himself, lest the fairy-tale illusion be shattered. Sometimes we would laugh gently, as a boy from across the lake tried to windsurf, and sometimes we would sleep, slipping gently, deeper into the warmth of the world.
One of these times, I was just drifting off, my cheek against Isaac’s cool, smooth scales, when I heard footsteps on the worn gravel shore. Panic flared, and my mind raced - I leapt up, trying to think of something to do. What would happen if anyone found him here - a dragon?
Images started to flash through my mind - blood, white walls, heavy doors - but I was jerked, desperately, back to the present as my mother appeared at the cave entrance, smiling. I spun around, tears brimming in my eyes, but Isaac was nowhere to be seen. I stared at the blank rock - perhaps it had all been a figment of my imagination, a conjured companion for that lonely girl.
“What’s the matter, sweetheart?” My mother asked, seeing my troubled face. She came and stood by my side, put a thin arm around my neck and ran her fingers slowly through my wild red hair. We stood facing the lake for a few moments, but I did not see it. I was alone, abandoned.
“This is a nice little den, eh?” She said, in her quiet, disconnected voice. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you - come on, let’s go back to the house, I’ve got a surprise for you.”
I let her lead me away, across the shore and back up the garden. It must have been a weekend for her to be home during the day. I don’t remember what the surprise was, but I do remember the sadness in her eyes as I asked if I could go back outside again, and her choked voice calling something after me I didn’t hear.
I sprinted back to the cave, silently leaping across the shore stones like an expert. Please, please, let it all be real, let him still be there.
He was. But not the same.
As I entered, breathless, relieved, speechless, I saw his eyes flare in shock and his leathery lips draw back, revealing those gleaming teeth. Wings I never realised he had snapped open in the cramped space - he looked twice as big, all tooth and claw, death and rage. I stumbled backwards against the wall, terrified.
His eyes at once softened, seeing who I really was, and he slowly deflated - wings fell flat to his back, claws retracted, and the angry red bands of colour faded from his scales. He turned, head hung low, and exhaled - the breath ending in an ugly, rumbling choke. His whole body shuddered violently, and something red and wet fell from his mouth.
He drank deeply from the ribbon of water at the back of the cave, then turned to me. The twin orbs of his eyes - like two perfect moons, distant and mysterious - were empty, scared.
“Sophie, I’m sorry ... I didn’t mean ...”
Swallowing back the hard, tight lump in my throat, I moved cautiously over to him. I placed my shaking hand on his smooth nose, and the spines on his head flattened down onto his neck. He sighed, relived and tired, smiled for a second, then turned away again and lay heavily down in the shadows.
I saw then, for the first time, that something was wrong. All along his back, and down one side, his scales had faded to grey - cracked and pitted, like so many slices of timeworn, expired rock. I thought back, and realised that he always sat with me in the same way - so my head would rest against his shining, perfect scales, not the dulled, rough rows on his other side.
I moved over to him, and reached out to the grey scales. They were as brittle as dead twigs, and crusted with dry blood. Isaac groaned deeply, I heard his tears falling to the floor. One of the scales broke away under my gentle touch - the dragon flinched away, scrambling to the cave entrance, a pained growl in his throat.
But I had still seen it - the gleam of new, pale skin underneath. Like the whitest flesh under a scab, perfect and fully healed. Human skin. Under a dead layer of armour, human skin.
“Isaac ...” I started. The lump his risen in my throat again, tasting of bile. I had to talk past it. “Why are you here?”
The question my perfect summer forbid hung heavy in the air between us. My friend closed his eyes tight, squeezing the tears from his lids, and looked straight at me. I was lost in the vivid blue, unprepared for the blow that followed.
“I’m dying, Sophie. I came here to die.”
He fled from the cave, leapt into the lake and was gone. I wished then, that he had just been a dream, something fictional, a vivid fantasy. Dreams could live forever - they never died, they were never angry or sad. They were immortal, and they never left you unless you gave them up.
The dark, bitter reality was a spiteful punch to my stomach. The ripples faded, and I threw up onto the sunstruck shoreline, spitting the pieces of my ten-year-old heart onto the smooth gravel
*
Everyday I returned, running into a cold and empty cave. I always saw his eyes, peering at me from the ribbon of water along the back wall, but jumping into the freezing water up to my waist, my hands found nothing but a bitter memory.
Sometimes I would find one of his dead scales, fallen to the floor, or a patch of blood, or a deep claw-cut in the rock. These little things, they never let me pretend it was only imagination that had kept me company. But I collected up the scales, and buried them along the shore. I washed the blood from the rock. I filled the gouges with the finest sand - always hoping that, one day, I would blink into reality and realise that it was all a game.
I just wanted to see him again, real or not, so he could tell me what I wanted to hear. That he wasn’t going to die. That I’d never be alone. But my nights were void of dreams, and my days spent clearing away any trace that he ever existed at all.
I lived behind my tears, hoping that I’d got it all wrong.
*
I woke - slipping from deeply asleep to fully awake in a smooth, timeless instant. So used to bright mornings and jumping straight out of bed, the night took me by surprise. As did the cold, and the distant, forgotten sound of thunder roaring far off across the lake. Sitting up, I wondered how many storms had come and gone between my perfect, cloudless days as I slept.
I moved to the window and looked out into the night. The lake, a void, twisted and writhed in the darkness. A harsh wind tore up the garden, sending the neatly clipped shrubs into a frenzied dance. A face emerged from the darkness - pale, tear-strung, a girl I didn’t recognise - coming up towards the house under the archway.
I pressed my face against the icy glass, peering past the fog that bloomed on the window pane - my worried breath, harsh and quick in the empty stillness of the house. Soon, a familiar face came into view - my brother, looking equally as shocked as the girl.
He shouted something - torn by the wind into ragged strips of meaningless sound - and ran towards her, grabbing her arm and turning her around. She tried to pull away, shouted something back at him, but he would not let go. He motioned wildly with his free hand, down towards the lake, and shrugged his shoulder violently. She stopped struggling and shook her head slowly, whispered something, then stared down at the ground.
He let her arm go and his shoulders sagged - she walked off, around the side of the house, small and frightened - leaving him alone, his unbuttoned shirt flapping in the wind.
The wind died down and a great silence rushed in around the house. Into the soundless night, a slow, pitiful wail sliced through the window pane. Thunder boomed once again, closer, louder, and I raced downstairs.
I met my brother at the patio doors and ran right past without slowing - out into the storm, into a world I hardly recognised. I knew where that terrible scream had come from.
“Sophie!” My brother shouted after me, “Sophie! It’s not safe!”
I ran on, delicate legs streaming over the freezing lawn, and heard my brother shouting up to my parents. Lights burst on behind me, more shouts, orange rays chased me down the garden - but nothing could catch me now, something was wrong with Isaac. My heart strained out against my ribcage, its fragile, innocent strings taught with worry. Please, please, please.
Down the shore line I sped, scrambling over the stoic rocks, feeling my toenails crack against their impassive, ragged faces. The pain was nothing - he was alive, he was here. Despite the dark, despite the cold and the storm, summer grew again in my heart. I love, I was free again.
A figure hunched a few feet into the cave - a human figure, naked and shivering. All around him dull, grey plates lay scattered across the stone floor. I stopped dead as he looked up at me - those beautiful eyes shining in pain, with love, knifing through my soul.
Eyes, streaming, I ran to him - this was no stranger. Relief masked my confusion. I dragged his body up, onto his knees - his bare skin pale, blue-tinged under the vicious thunderhead raging above us.
He placed a heavy hand on my shoulder - a trembling thumb against my neck, icy cold in the night and the storm. His endless blue eyes drew me in, stripped everything away, and loved me still. We stayed, lost in each other’s eyes, and it was all that made sense.
“Thank you, Sophie.” he whispered. “Thank you.”
“Isaac, I ... I don’t-” He cut me off, slowly shaking his head. From human skin, he brushed the last of his scales - thin, lifeless plates, falling to the rock.
He looked out across the lake, past my tearful, childish eyes and smiled.
Those lips drew down to me, and placed a single, gentle kiss upon my cheek. It was everything. Memories were made, forgotten, and made again. Understanding flickered, waxed and waned in my heart. The world condensed down, and it was only us - this strange, unbelievable summer cut down, sliced neatly down to me and him. Two figures standing together on the rock, the brush of his lips burning it all down to this one moment.
“Sophie!”
Lightning lit the sky, and a foreign shadow snapped through the cave, across us both.
I turned, the air dying around me, everything falling down into stagnant nothing.
My father stood on the shoreline, eyes burning out holes in the storm. His fingers flexed and tightened. I was dragged from the cave - away, out into my mother’s cold arms - every second forgotten as it passed. Other faces flashed by me as I strained my eyes back to the cave, carried away in vice-like arms. I saw nothing but a dark cut in the rock.
I remember screaming.
I remember my mother whispering into my hair.
Everything’s okay. Everything’s okay.
But it wasn’t.
I remember a long, empty, nothing-night.
I remember shouts, and slammed doors.
I remember the blood stains in the kitchen sink, I remember my father’s ruined knuckles.
I remember the chasm in my fragile heart.
**
The house became my solitude.
The dust and shade sucked me in, away from the sharp shapes of light drifting acorns the garden. I lived for the shadows, for the square symmetry of empty corridors and locked doors. The summer sun dried the tears in my eyes and fell away into autumn, then on to an empty winter.
I only once set foot in the garden again.
I woke suddenly in the night, a full moon in a clear sky sending silver beams through my window. A strange, turquoise object caught my eye - it looked like a shell, perched on my shelf, bands of colour flashing across the slightly curved surface. I had almost forgotten - his grey scales and his pale skin so vivid in my mind - that once, these beautiful colours were his.
I took it in my hands, and in my thin cotton night-dress, went out into the garden, into several inches of snow and a blistering wind. The soft white blanket hid away some of the memories, but new tears bloomed and froze on my cheeks. Clutching the scale to my chest, I stumbled down the garden, my feet numb already, the pain falling like drops of nothing into the hole in my heart.
At the archway - overgrown now - I stopped dead. Falling to my knees, I pushed the snow from the ground with shaking fingers. The earth underneath was frozen solid. Holding the strange, shining objects in both hands, I plunged it again and again into the grass, gouging out a sorry, shallow grave among the grey dirt.
With the earth back in place, and the snow piled on top, you could never tell what lay beneath that archway. Icicles grew on my eyelashes, ice gripped my heart, and my grief grew but was, at least, firmly defined. My knees sang out their discomfort and my breath stuck, frozen, tight in my throat.
I stared blankly out across the lake saw the ruthless hand of winter grip our wooden jetty. Ice spread slowly across the boards in the darkness and the forgotten timber cracked and fell silently into the water. Under a heavy moon, small, silver waves lapped the shore, and there was nothing.
*