Paper Dragons

Photography: Edmundcjx

For Outpost Mavarin’s Weekend Assignment #205: Those “Other” Pets.

Anything that involves looking back farther than a couple years ago is difficult for me. They say that you can be sad but in a brave kind of way; but I say, you’re still sad.

When I was a little kid, I was gullible. I believed in many things; was taught to believe first, question second—or, oftentimes, not at all.

I believed what people told me. I believed in TV and books and unicorns.

I believed my father when he said I was retarded.

I believed my mother when she told me that good girls never questioned their fathers. This she said through bleeding lips.

We had fish, but they were father’s fishes. He was always kind to them, or at least as kind as he ever was to any living thing. He gave me grasshoppers and cicadas for pets. They were not the same.

I wanted a kitten once upon a time, but given my father’s propensity for destroying things, living or not, I never asked him for one. (I said I was gullible. It’s not quite the same thing as stupid.)

I’m not sure where I got this idea. I blame reading. There was a story about an invisible dragon that some little kid believed in, even though no one else did. And in the end the dragon was real and saved the town. Or possibly the world, or maybe just the kid; the magnitude didn’t matter to me at that age. I just wanted something that would work.

And, you know, I was gullible.

It was a playground exercise, or maybe experiment. I reasoned that dragons needed plenty of room, so you had to grow them outside. I wasn’t sure how you attracted invisible dragons in the first place, or made friends with them, or what they ate. Such concerns didn’t really surface in the invisible dragon story.

When you’re a kid, you know that wishing works.

So every afternoon, on the playground, I would walk around by myself and wish, really hard. I’d hope that the breeze that touched my face was caused by a dragon walking by. Or that the branches moving high above were caused by my dragon (and yes, I was a little kid and thus a bit greedy) brushing its head through the trees. I’d look for tell-tale footprints in the grass. Those days I remember as being sunny, and the grass some kind of kelly neon green, and the sky an electric blue, and clouds puffy white.

You know? Storybook material! Surely dragons had to come, right? Like knights in shining armor, only much bigger and not crushable like kittens or puppies or grasshoppers or cicadas.

Eventually I stopped looking, but every once in a while I would visit my dragon calling grounds to see if anything had happened.

Ah, stupid stupid stupid kid.

One night, my father knocked my mother. This was nothing new. But he hit her, and hit her, and threw her, and hit her, and finally hit her so hard that her head went through the wall. He did stop for the night after that. Maybe even for a full week.

That was the first night my mother told me that she hated my father. And her mind was ever so slightly unglued afterwards.

And that wasn’t the worst night I ever had in my childhood.

I didn’t stop believing in things all at once. And for some of the worst things, I believed in them for a very long time.

Somewhere in me is a gullible little kid who really hates the dragon who never showed up.

But, you know, all the people who never helped… they were about as useful.

I did get out, one day.

Some dragons come in the strangest forms.

To Warren Ellis, the man who taught me to get mad, not sad.