by Laura Bickle
“Okay. Now you can look.”
She took her hands away, and I stared.
“It’s dark,” I blurted. I ran my fingers through my hair. It was soft, smelled like tea leaves, and was the color of coffee. No blue peeked through, but the darkness against my pale skin made my eyes shine almost cobalt. I looked like the dark-haired young woman from Julie’s Tarot cards: the Page of Swords.
“Do you like it?” A note of nervousness crept into Julie’s voice.
“I love it,” I whispered, fluffing my hair against my cheeks. I looked older, suddenly more sophisticated, like one of the girls in a silent movie with dark lipstick and a cigarette in a long holder.
“Wonderful. It’s a whole new you!”
And so it was.
*
I drove by the nursing home to drop the tea off for Grandpa. And I wanted to show him my hair. I kept glancing in the rearview mirror and tucking strands of it behind my ears. I looked so...serious. I thought he would like it.
I walked through the lobby to sign in at the front desk. The woman behind the counter squinted at me. “Who are you here to see, hon?”
“My granddad. John Sexton. He’s in room 128.”
“Hold on a minute.” She disappeared into the back.
I grimaced and glanced at the clock. It was still visiting hours.
She came back with a nurse, who reached forward to take my hand. “Dear, I’m sorry to tell you this, but your grandfather...”
I wrenched my hand away, shook my head until strands of bitter hair flew into my mouth. I didn’t want to hear what she was going to say:
“...he passed away a little while ago. He went in his sleep, very peaceful...”
Not possible.
I ran down the corridor to his room, skidded to a halt in front of the open door. His things were still there. But the bed was stripped, and his wheelchair was empty in the corner.
My hands shook. I sank down to my knees.
He could not be gone.
I needed him too much.
CHAPTER 16
Grandpa sat in a cardboard box on a shelf above the television.
We sat and stared at him. Mom, Jason, and I slouched on the couch, and Dad sank into his chair. The television was dark. We listened to the ice clink in the iced tea glasses and my mother’s occasional sob.
Grandpa hadn’t wanted a funeral. No service, no burial, no nothing. He’d said in a note attached to his will that: “All my friends are dead, anyway. Save the money.”
Not that there was anything left after the nursing home bills. Just his personal effects. They were boxed up in the kitchen, except for his violin. That was squirreled away in my room. I wouldn’t let anyone else touch it.
“He was an old man,” my dad rasped.
“He was a good father,” my mom said.
“I miss him,” I said.
Jason squeezed my hand.
The silence dragged.
All of our fingers twitched, moved toward the coffee table, returned to our laps. Eventually, my mother took the initiative and grabbed the remote. She switched it on to the news, and we all breathed a sigh of relief.
No one had anything left to say.
But the atmosphere was too heavy, too thick, congealing in the back of my throat. And I didn’t want to completely lose it in front of them all, for them to feel that they needed to comfort me.
I got up off the couch and fled to the kitchen, stepping around the stack of boxes. I hiccupped. Grief was inescapable.
Jason followed me. “Di, I’m sorry.”
He tried to hug me, but I couldn’t breathe. It was all just too much. I needed to get away from here, to cry and scream without an audience. I wanted to run away and be a child.
Jason held me close. I pushed him away, as gently as I could. But I still felt tangled.
“I need some time alone.”
His face crumpled. He was crestfallen. He wanted to be here for me in my time of grief, but that wasn’t what I wanted. And I couldn’t be concerned with his feelings right now. I was up to my neck, drowning in my own.
I pushed past him toward the door, snatching my keys from the kitchen counter.
“Di, wait.” He grabbed my sleeve.
I twisted away from him, darted through the screen door.
I’d flung myself inside my car by the time the screen door slammed. I stabbed the key into the ignition as Jason rushed out of the house with my mother behind him. The Chevette grunted as I backed up at top speed, down our little lane to the road and the freedom of an overcast evening.
I drove aimlessly, trying to think of a place where I wouldn’t run into anyone I knew. I couldn’t bear the tea and sympathy that Julie would offer me—that would just make me cry harder, no matter how well-intentioned she was. I considered tracking Will down for about half a second. I knew the old canoe livery he was staying at, but also knew better than to go to him in my vulnerable state. He’d have me signed up for a tour of duty with the Peace Corps before I knew what had hit me.
And I couldn’t go to the nursing home to talk to Grandpa. Not anymore. A wet lump rose in my throat.
I wasn’t fit for human company right now. I glanced at the floor beneath the passenger’s seat, at a package wrapped in purple tissue paper with silver ribbon.
Perhaps I could find Afakos.
Perhaps he would speak to me of magic, and I would forget. Forget loss. Forget being trapped in this world that grew smaller each day, collapsing in on itself, and on me.
I drove to work. The gate was unmanned after hours, and I used my keycard to open it. The arm lifted, letting me into the parking lot, and fell behind me.
I didn’t want to be found if Jason or my mom came looking for me. And I’d learned my lesson on covering my tracks from the bust at the park. I idled through the parking lot and found one of the dirt forest roads that led up the side of the mountain, meant to allow access to heavy equipment. I parked well out of sight, in the shade of a sweetgum tree. The car’s dark paint blended with the gathering shade.
As I shut the engine off, a fat raindrop splattered on the windshield.
I gathered only what I needed: my jacket and the purple-swathed offering. I left my purse behind.
As I climbed the mountain, it began to rain. At first, it was a soft, pleasant rain that tapped the leaves of the shrubs and trees. Thunder rumbled, and the darkness thickened. My progress slowed as the rocks became slippery. Water trickled down the back of my jacket, sticking my jeans to my skin. I scrambled up to the flat rock.
The unicorn was still there, and I despaired. Wind whipped the trees, spewing loose leaves to scuttle against the ground.
“Afakos!” I shouted into the gloom. I had no hope of being heard above the storm. Trees swayed in strange circular patterns, and rain swept through the mountain in sheets. Lightning shimmered above, and I smelled ozone.
I scooped up the unicorn, jammed it inside my jacket with the conch shell.
“I know you’re here!”
He didn’t answer me. And I felt fury at that. It blistered behind my eyelids hotter than the after-spark of the lightning.
I struck off into the darkness of the forest, determined to find him. I had no idea why I thought a dragon owed me answers, or even the favor of an appearance. I did know I was adhering to the rules of the game outlined in a paperback book, and he wasn’t playing.
But in the back of my mind, I feared that something had happened to him.
I stumbled through brush that lashed my hands and face, invisible in the dark until after they’d scraped past me. The landscape was illuminated only in lightning flashes. I could make out the silhouette of a tree, the shadow of a deer as it bounded away. I tripped and fell hard, landing in the mud and swearing. Something shattered at my ribs. I sat up, cradling my chest, and sobbed.
“You shouldn’t be here.” A sepulchral voice rattled from the darkness.
“Afakos?” I whispered.
A great shado
w loomed over me. I could hear him breathing, hear the hiss of the wind around his body. I could make out the shine of his slitted eyes. He opened his mouth, and his teeth glistened. His breath smelled like raw meat. In the storm, he seemed to seethe in his dark element, powerful beyond imagining, terrible and limitless.
I closed my eyes. For the first time, I was truly afraid of him.
“Stupid girl,” he muttered.
His teeth scraped over the back of my skull, through my hair, snagging on my jacket. His tongue brushed against the nape of my neck. I shuddered, knowing I couldn’t run. I remembered the deer torn in half in the field. No matter the music I played for him, I was just meat. Talented meat, but meat nonetheless.
We both knew it.
His teeth grasped the collar of my jacket. He lifted me from the mud as effortlessly as a child with a lunch sack. My feet dangled in the darkness, and I cried out.
I expected him to devour me whole, like a heron with a fish. But Afakos began to walk. I swayed in his grip in counterpoint to his heavy step. The brush and rain-spangled darkness hissed past us as he carried me like a kitten into the deep shadow of the mountain.
Rain drummed on my head, ran down my chin. I was too terrified to wipe it away. I couldn’t say how far he carried me, or how much time had passed before he eventually found a place in the wall of the mountain where the dark was denser than anywhere else. He lowered his head and shouldered past a stand of trees.
And then the rain was cut off. I could still hear it behind us, but the air was suddenly cold, and close, and muffled. Afakos crawled on his belly through a passage that smelled of earth and tree roots. My feet dragged the ground, scraping along gravel and stone.
My heart hammered as he turned left and right through narrow tunnels. He was like a mole underground, sensing his way without sight. No light could penetrate this place, deep in the mountain. His head lifted with a jerk, and my stomach pitched. I whimpered. His claws echoing in a larger space. He set me down. I stumbled, unable to see my feet, and landed on my elbows and knees.
I sensed that he moved away from me: I could hear his scales moving against the dirt.
“Where are we?” I gasped. My voice echoed, as if I were in a cave. I shrank from that echo. It could be my grave.
He sighed, a sound like wind hissing through trees. “Home.”
I heard scraping, like something heavy being dragged across a floor. Then a fwoosh. I shielded my eyes from a brilliant plume of light. Fire grasped and caught on an oddly-shaped pile of wood near me. As my vision adjusted, I realized it was a heap of wooden furniture: a table with turned legs, a headboard, and a baby cradle. The flames crackled, peeling paint and worming smoke through the spaces between the slats of the cradle and the headboard.
I gathered myself enough to decide that I was in a cave. A big one—so large I couldn’t make out the ceiling in the firelight. The black sheen of coal laced through the rock walls.
And it was full of junk: wheel rims, shards of mirror, pieces of engines. My eye roved over a car fender, pitchforks, bits of taillights from cars. I saw glass mason jars full of marbles, the front grill from what looked like a truck from the 1920s. A filthy porcelain doll perched on top of the hood of a tractor, watching me with one glass eye. A wire dressmaker’s dummy was wound through with ribbons and bits of copper wire, crowned with deer antlers. A clawfoot bathtub. A filthy tea set was clumsily arranged on top of the seat from a school bus. I spied a pile of bones resting in a red car fender. They were large bones…sucked clean and broken open for the marrow.
My breath caught in my throat.
This was the dragon’s treasure trove.
Afakos paced in a grazioso sine wave around the edge of the fire. His eyes reflected the orange flames, inhuman and predatory. The firelight glinted amber on his black scales. As he paced, his tail lashed with sinewy grace, like the trail of a snake swimming in a river. He seemed to be in an agitated state, thinking.
My gaze was fixed on the pile of bones. “Are you going to eat me?” I squeaked.
He stopped pacing and stared at me. His third eyelid flipped over his pale eyes. “No. There’s not enough meat on you to make it worth it.”
That was reassuring. Sort of.
“How long…have you lived here?” My gaze caught on the caged form of a hoop skirt. The cloth had disintegrated from it, leaving only a birdcage of metal.
“Longer than any of you would remember. Long before white men came here. The copper men left me alone.”
“Did they know you were here?”
“Yes. They brought me gifts, sometimes.” He glanced at a corner of the cave. In the dancing light, I could make out a spear decorated with black feathers, and a painted deer skull with a snake tail attached to it. The dark paint was faded and the bones cracked, but it was still clearly a representation of a dragon. “I left them alone.”
“I brought you some gifts,” I blurted. I unzipped my jacket.
Something was wrong. White shards tumbled onto the cave floor. I fell to the ground after them, my fingers scrabbling in the pieces. I recognized the glossy porcelain and gold paint.
The unicorn. It was crushed in pieces. I saw bits of rusty blood on it, ran my hands over my t-shirt. Dark red had seeped into the light blue fabric. My stomach lurched, and dizziness surged up my spine.
“I’m sorry…” I whispered, staring at the fragments of the broken offering.
Darkness crept in at the margins of my vision, and I surrendered to it.
*
I heard music playing.
DeBussy, I thought.
I awoke in a soft darkness, smelling fire and smoke. I was warm, but I felt a hot sticky pain in my side.
I opened my eyes.
I was lying in an odd nest that smelled like dust. It was part of an upholstered carnival ride—the seat from a Ferris wheel, it seemed. I was covered in a brightly colored woolen blanket that smelled like damp earth. I fingered it, wondering if it was one of the blankets the Native Americans had brought him, once upon a time.
The music was faint and staticky, from the radio I’d given Afakos. I marveled that he could even get reception down here.
Or was it up here? I couldn’t tell if we were belowground or tucked away in the mountainside.
I struggled to sit upright, feeling a sharp twinge in my side. I pulled down the blanket and peeled up my shirt. A purpling bruise and scrapes spread over my skin, but nothing felt broken. A couple of the cuts could’ve probably stood some stitches, but they’d stopped bleeding.
A deep scraping sound echoed, like metal against rock. I peered over the edge of the carnival buggy.
Afakos was pushing a ceramic bowl across the floor of the cave with his nose. He was doing so very delicately, his eyes crossing as they followed the blue and white vessel in its journey across the floor. It came to rest against the edge of my little nest, and water sloshed over its side.
“For you,” he said.
He retreated to the other side of the fire and sat like a cat, with all his feet tucked under him, watching me.
“Thank you.”
I reached down for the bowl. The water was cold and tasted like iron. I assumed he’d collected it from somewhere in the cave system. I drank my fill and washed the grit off my face. I patted a bit on my wounds, but didn’t scrub. I wanted to rinse the dirt away, but not reopen the cuts.
I gingerly climbed out of the carnival buggy, wobbly on my feet.
“I, uh…I’m sorry about passing out on you.” I sat close to the fire. “I’m not really good with blood. Well, I’m okay with blood. Just not mine. When I get flu shots at school, I get really queasy.” My words tumbled over each other.
“I smelled blood on you. I thought you were something good to eat. Something wounded and slow.” Afakos grunted, and I couldn’t tell if he was disappointed or just saving me for later.
I glanced across the floor at the broken unicorn. “And I’m sorry about your present. But…I think you d
idn’t like it, anyway.”
Afakos made a squeaking, cackling sound like a crow. I wasn’t sure at first what he was doing, until I understood the expression in his half-closed eyes: he was chuckling.
“As you can see, I love things. Things of all kinds. But I am resolved not to gather any more. Because all this will be gone, soon. There is no point.”
I felt a bit of relief trickle over me. “I thought you were avoiding me.”
“I was.” He looked at me with an eye as milky as an opal. “It doesn’t serve me well to get too involved with people. You are a fickle species. You usually want something. And you don’t live long.”
I swallowed. I couldn’t speak to the long life part of the equation. I struggled to articulate what I felt, to be honest and still respectful: “I just…want to get to know you. To be in the orbit of something…magical.”
Afakos snorted. “It always begins like this. The wonder. And then the desire to exploit.” He huffed and put his head down between his paws.
“You’ve never had friends?”
“I’ve had friends of my own kind, long before they scattered. And a few humans. That rarely ended well.” He closed his eyes, and I wondered if he was pretending to sleep.
I wouldn’t let him. “It didn’t always end badly, though, did it?”
He opened one eye. “There was one time that wasn’t a total disaster. A medicine woman. She would sit at the bottom of a walnut tree and sing to me. You remind me a bit of her. Especially now with the dark hair.”
I fingered the fringe of my hair self-consciously.
“She would bring me roasted walnuts in the fall.” His lips pulled back across his teeth, the ghost, maybe, of remembered joy. “She showed me her children when they were born, asked me to bless them. I did…and whispered a few tricks of magic to her in return.”
My head lifted. I was curious about the magic, but too timid to ask.
“She was heavy with child one winter when she came to see me. Her steps were deep in the snow. It seemed different, that time, than it had been with the other children. I pressed my nose to her belly and knew that her child smelled like death, like a stone.
