Kerlak Enterprises - Reading Room

Dragons Composed Edited by James Ferris

"Singing Bones" by Everette Bell
"Dragon Solstice" by Trudy Herring
"Leave it to the Experts" by Angelia Sparrow
"Sometimes Nature Smiles" by Joy Ward

"Singing Bones" by Everette Bell
   My Dad saved the world when I was ten years old. My sister Audrey and I stood right next to him when he did it. On any other night I wouldn't have dared to hold his hand out of fear that one of my friends might see me, but when I saw the scales of the mighty Slag I was terrified. My little sister started to whimper, but the gentle warrior, Fred Harold Stevens put his arm around her, pulling her close. Then we heard it…the phrase that defined our father, the Western Kentucky University Music Professor, "Shhh, listen, honey." It felt good to hear those words. They were normal, and normal was what we wanted so badly that Moment standing ankle deep in water in the middle of a cave on the edge of town. We paid no attention to the horde of snakes slithering past us in the dark water. Likewise, they took no notice of us. I didn't hear anything.
   It took Audrey a few minutes to quiet herself. I couldn't move. My legs were paralyzed from the sight. He assured me of my safety with a squeeze of his hand. "Audrey, Chris, don't be scared. This is why your mother and I teach you to behave the way we do." He paused. "Audrey, honey, shine the flashlight on the head."
   "I don't want to, Daddy." She was breathing hard and her voice was about to break. "I don't want to look at it. I don't want to see it, please."
   "Honey, if it's too hard, give the light to Chris. He'll do it."
   I took it from her. I didn't want to, but I didn't want to let Dad down. As best I could I held the beam steady on the ferocious head of Slag the mightiest of all the dragons that had ever roamed the Earth. A crown of horns sprang upward from his massive head. Tips of razor sharp teeth peeking out of the huge snout hinted at the creature's deadly nature. What I noticed most of all was the eyes-thank God they were closed.
   "Kids, the most important thing I can tell you is this. Dragons are arrogant. They think they are absolutely one hundred percent the most important thing in the world. If they feel challenged they attack."
   Audrey's seven-year-old mind could no longer contain the flood of emotion erupting from her. Her voice broke, and she buried her head in Dad's shirt. "I want to go home! We have to go now before it wakes up!"

"Dragon Solstice" by Trudy Herring
   Anthor raised his head in surprise, the lethargy of hibernation falling off of him like a discarded traveling cloak. He sniffed the air of the warm cave anxiously, but only the smell of freshly killed sheep and a mild scent of anticipation from his mother disturbed the usual smells of the cave. Anthor got up and stretched, extending each leg and wing in turn. Though barely just one year old, he already measured twelve feet in length, and his wingspan was one that made his mother proud.
   "Mama?" Anthor called.
   "Ah, you are awake, my little One!" crooned Mama coming around the back of the cave. "Come, eat quickly, we have much to do this night!"
   "But Mama! I thought we slept all winter. The air feels cold!" Anthor shivered a little.
   "True enough, " said Mama. "But one night each winter, Great Father Draco calls to us and we must fly to the Mountains at the Top of the World." Mama nudged the steaming sheep closer to Anthor. "Eat up, now as we have a long way to go."
   Anthor ate his dinner quickly, a thousand questions running through his mind. Why were they flying to the Mountains at the Top of the World? Why tonight? Why did Father Draco call to them this particular night? He remembered seeing Great Father Draco chasing his tail in the night sky but he had never heard him call. He wanted to ask so many questions, but he knew Mama would not answer until he had finished his dinner. So he finished quickly, and joined his mother at the mouth of the cave.
   What a sight greeted his eyes! What he remembered as green fields and great dark forests were covered with a white that sparkled like silver in the bright light of the full moon. The stars glittered like hard diamonds in a cold and velvet black sky. And to his great surprise, his breath came out in little puffs of steam although he wasn't practicing breathing fire.
   "Mama," asked Anthor in a small voice. "Is this what winter looks like?"
   "Yes, my little One," said Mama looking out over the fields. "This is winter, and tonight is the darkest of nights. When we begin our winter sleep, the fields are just losing their green. But then the leaves of some of the trees turn bright yellow and red and finally fall to the ground. Then come the snows, that white blanket, and covers everything, and the world sleeps."

"Leave it to the Experts" by Angelia Sparrow
   Charlie knew he was in trouble when he got the dragon assignment. He was used to unusual stories, as the only crypto-zoological reporter on staff. He'd written about everything from tea with a Sasquatch to a moonlit swim with lake monsters. But a dragon...
   Everyone knew there were no such things as dragons. This was the new editor's way of sending him on a wild goose chase and humiliating him so he could be quietly let go. The parent company had been pushing for months to get rid of the Crypto-zoo and Paranormal sections, in order to lump those in with the usual cute animal and human interest stories.
   "How in the world can you have a human interest story when the subject isn't human?" Charlie grumbled to himself for the thousandth time since the take-over. He checked the address against the house numbers as he turned onto Flambeau Street. It was right where the map had said it would be, for a change. Charlie hated out-of-town trips. He hoped this Professor R. MacKinnon knew his stuff and wasn't just some old crackpot.
   He parked and rang the bell in front of 229 Flambeau, a sturdy brick cottage. A gorgeous redhead with green almond eyes opened it. Her dress matched her eyes and when she smiled, Charlie felt the whole world go spinny. A random snippet of song about a green-eyed lady, child of nature, floated through his brain and promptly melted under the watttage of the smile.
   "I'm looking for R. MacKinnon? My editor sent me. I'm Charlie Boyd from the Post-Picayune."
   "Yes, I'm Dr. Rosalee MacKinnon. Hello, Mr. Boyd." She almost purred the introduction.
   Charlie caught himself goggling and stopped at once. "I'm sorry, Ma'am. I expected a tweedy old man." Charlie cleared his throat and blinked. He never acted so badly. He had no idea what had come over him.
   "Please forgive my rudeness. I have dragon trouble. Editor trouble too, but mostly dragon trouble."

"Sometimes Nature Smiles" by Joy Ward

   Nature can be cruel. Grandmothers die. Puppies are stillborn. Little girls and dogs can feel that Nature has marooned them in their loneliness.
   But sometimes Nature smiles and changes the rules of the game. Sometimes the lonely are comforted and dreams, even the most unlikely of dreams, come true.
   *****
   The melting glacier let loose a shiny form to be carried into the wider snow-and ice-covered world. How long the egg had lain in its crystalline rest we'll never know.
   Certainly the polar bear mother and cub who tried to grab it in their hairy paws had never seen an egg quite like this one. Nor had the five young seals as they tossed it around among them and took turns balancing it on their noses. They knew the roundness and instinctively realized they wouldn't break it.
   No, this was no usual egg. Never mind that few eggs floated loose from dissolving glaciers, this egg looked and felt very different than any other egg that had been seen under the bright glare of the arctic sun or anywhere else for that matter for thousands of years. This egg was about a foot long. The egg itself felt like rubber that maybe had been too long in the sun. If the seals could have talked they would have told you the surface was rather scratchy, the smell was somewhat sulphurous and oh, it was much too warm for a regular sort of egg. They probably didn't notice that the egg was a splotchy light brown to rusty red and all the shades in between.
   And there was a sound deep inside this rather unusual egg that promised this was not a dead egg. Something lived in its warm, odiferous depths. Something old. Something much, much older than any of the furry witnesses watching its progress as it journeyed from its ancient hiding place to the world that had moved from ice to warmth so many times in so many millennia since this oh-so-unusual egg had been secreted inside a frozen mountain of water.
   The seals could hear the sound. They called to it, recognizing it as something or someone they should know. They barked among themselves, asking if anyone could name that sound, or that animal. None could but all felt something familiar when they heard the sound. After a few hours of playing with the egg and calling to the egg, on the chance whatever was in it could come out and play, the seals let the egg float on its way, tossed by the current like it had been tossed by the seals.
   Days passed as the egg bobbed up and down on the waves. Large fish nosed the egg, hoping for a meal. Orcas pushed the egg here and there, trying to decide if it was edible. All of them -- fish, sharks, and other sea mammals -- smelled the egg and decided this was something not worth the trouble. It wasn't that they thought there was nothing in the egg; they sensed the thing inside and made the decision to leave it alone.
   You see, somewhere in the back of their brains they remembered the smell and the feel of this egg. Buried deep, deep in their hindbrains was this smell and feel. And the smell and feel said, "Leave it alone!" in no uncertain terms. If you could have asked the sharks why, of course they couldn't have said anything beyond, "Here is an old, old power that everything in my ancient body says is pure danger to the likes of me."
   So the egg floated on. And the baby inside continued her dreams of fire and warm scales and flying.
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