A Very Short Story
All my posts this season are “inspired by” a letter of the alphabet!

She had always truly wanted to believe in dragons. Her grandfather had a magnificent figurine of one, in all its spiky, curving glory. It even breathed fire. She remembered, when they went to visit him in his sheltered housing, and she was only 10 years old, going straight to it, as if she was trying to seem that she wasn’t, just pulling up a chair next to it. What she wanted to believe was the benign smile of a kindly grandfather was probably a figment of her imagination as he had a tendency more to the belligerent those days than the benign. Don’t touch that, her mother would say and she would sit on her hands and stick out her tongue. Her mother would ignore her, not wanting to make a scene in front of her father, whose moods came and went.

One year later, she found herself both delighted and sad. A bittersweet sensation. Her grandfather had been barely communicative in the last year of his life, and slightly annoyed by her presence. Her vision of him as a goodly light in her life had faded. Yet she was still sad when he passed. What delighted her, though she tried not to be too happy, for her mother’s sake, was that he had left her the dragon. A message that came with it said: For my beloved granddaughter who enchants and frustrates me in equal measure. So that your eyes are not constantly somewhere else, they can always be here. Look after him, and he will look after you. P.S. Watch your fingers.

At that point, she found out it was a lighter for his pipe. You flicked one of its spines to trigger the mechanism and filled it up with gas from its horned toe. But it didn’t matter. The figurine to her young eyes was exquisite.

It became a sort of talisman. She made sure it always had gas, and would flick the spine once every day to see it breathe fire, and in this small act, she felt him with her. He who had bounced her on his knee, he who had been a constant, not he who resented her, his mind broken in his very old age.

One day, she took it to school with her; her class had to bring along something that was special to them. At breaktime, she was showing it to her friends and one of the bigger boys, known for using brawn before brain, took a fancy to it, or maybe just wanted to start a fight, and grabbed it from her. As he grasped it, his thumb triggered the toe. Fire in the face. As he dropped to it to run away squealing, everything became slow motion, and she looked, aghast, as it fell, terrified it would smash to smithereens. Miraculously, it didn’t. It bounced on the grass. And at that moment, at school, helpless against a bully, she really did believe in dragons. Aggressive, beautiful, intuitive, wise… and fiercely protective. To her mind, and it didn’t matter what anyone said, her grandfather had been one. So maybe she also had dragon blood in her… She couldn’t wait to find out…

Many, many years later as she lay clutching it, surrounded by her children and grandchildren, it fell from her hands. At the end. But she knew she was beautiful, she knew she was intuitive, she knew she had fiercely protected every one of them throughout her life. She, and her grandfather… and the dragon.

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