Nest Egg

Nest Egg

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. But then, I hadn’t always voted democrat, and I hadn’t always owned a struggling B&B, either. Once solid evidence came out in the form of it flying directly over the town, there was talk of testing the dragon’s durability with a small strategic strike, which explains my most recent political leanings. A battalion was deployed to deal with the dragon, but after a tense standoff, the military retreated, and the dragon was still there. The army came to the valley two more times and abandoned the field to the dragon at least as many times. The hearings that followed for the disgraced general’s went mostly ignored, especially when one dragon became more.

The withdrawal of any military presence opened the doors to hoards of the curious and daring, which quickly proved the dragons to be harmless. Curiosity then quickly gave way to profiteering. The hotels went up soon after, and a town that had more church spires than grocery stores became a bustling tourist destination with an exploding hotel industry. I was little match for the hotel chains, so I had to have something even all the money in the world had failed to buy, a real live dragon on my property. There was always a handful of the super wealthy floating around town to drop obscene lump sums in order to lodge near one. This, I hoped, explained my nontraditional backyard: the heated grounds, the antenna, the artificial creek. The finishing touch was a pavilion large enough to shelter one legendary beast. The dragons were a kind of gold rush, and the pavilion was my sluice pan.

But raising my tent wasn’t a one-man job. My niece, Patrice, and her friends, Alba and Tabitha, were walking along the trees in the backyard. Each looked like they were dressed by an art student with a strong interest in the circus. Their blouses, socks, pants, wrist bands and hair clips were all mismatched and bright with an intentional inconsistency. Ezra exited the house even as my niece and her friends began their lazy stroll from the woods back to the house, distancing themselves from the disemboweled boxes that contained the now abandoned fabric of the pavilion tent. Ezra and his counterpart Juniper didn’t have the starving hunted expression I had come to expect from a people who almost certainly had walls of pictures connected by strings and thumbtacks. Their clothes tended be dark and cluttered with ornamental buttons and zippers, and they always smelled like the produce aisle, perhaps it was some kind of all-natural body spray.

“How’s the weather looking today?” I asked Ezra.

“Word is rain off and on today,” Ezra said as he walked down the driveway to his car.

I sucked my teeth, “Yesterday it was rain on and off, what’s the difference?”

“Well,” he said, “it all depends on if you want to end being wet or end being dry.”

“If you go on for long enough you’ll end up in the other eventually.”

“I suppose the weather is almost always on and then off and vice versa, isn’t it?’

We chuckled.

“Packages for you on the steps there,” I said pointing.

Despite only having the two bedrooms rented, my tenants had received a package reliably once a week, usually multiple boxes. The boxes that came had been getting bigger as well with every coming week, and the sounds of power tools were answering the sounds of the morning birds, lately.

“I’ll text June to carry them in,” he said, “I’m on a timer.”

“Finally broke your funk, I see,” I said. “I haven’t seen you excited to get out of the house in a bit.”

“It’s got to be new packages,” Patrice said, as she stepped to my side. “I’m guessing rolls of aluminum foil to line your beanie.”

“You’re thinking of nineties crazy. I’m 2020s crazy, much more subtle,” Ezra said. “Besides, we don’t put it on our heads, we line the walls with it.”

“It’s probably wood chips,” I said, “third week of the month is always when the rodent bedding comes in.”

“I can’t believe you let them keep a hundred rats,” Patrice said. “What kind of B&B let’s you bring pets?”

“I mean, at this point I’m just his landlord,” I said, crossing my arms. “I’m diversifying. Why limit myself to being a hotel or an apartment for rent when I can be both.”

“They’re not pets,” Ezra said as he stuffed his duffle bag in the trunk. “I’ll be back a little late. I should have this month for you when I get back, speaking of.”

“Off to harass some more dragons,” Patrice said. “Maybe they’re here to protect us from something, did you ever consider that? And your repay them by stalking them.”

“It’s not stalking. It’s monitoring. And just because you don’t see them doing anything, doesn’t mean they aren’t doing something.”

“They don’t eat anything. They probably don’t even breathe, and they’re not radioactive. What else could they possibly be doing?”

Ezra glanced at us from over the roof of the red sedan. “I don’t know, but I’m going to find out. If a flying saucer landed and aliens had a decade’s long barbeque, the military wouldn’t have just come and gone. There would be emissaries, fences, watchtowers. Something. We have a flock of dragons circling the town and there isn’t so much as one more cop on the street than there was before. Don’t be stupid,” he said and looked abashed when I gave him a warning look. “Sorry, all I’m saying is something else is up. We can’t learn anything about them because they don’t do anything. At first, I thought it might be because they’re just on such a different level, but they have the same stuff we got. They have eyes and ears, so they must have a reason to see and hear, and they must have a reason they multiply and grow.”

“Maybe they don’t react because they’re just good, and they don’t need to hurt to live.”

“You’re romanticizing. They haven’t reacted because they don’t have to, we’re not in their way, somehow. Five years and not one person has managed to shoot one, and not one person has been killed.”

“How can you be upset that no one has been killed?”

“There are people who have died drinking too much water, but not one person has been killed by bus-sized monsters. You’re telling me there isn’t someone in the world with an interest in dragons and a death wish? Something should have happened by now, there should be a video somewhere of a person trying to turn a dragon into a trophy or trying to lasso themselves a dragon only to be hurled into the fricking stratosphere, but there’s nothing, and that’s why I need to know, and that’s why I won’t go near one.”

The whole reason Ezra and Juniper had taken up a room with me was to observe the dragons. The information he gathered about them was essential, or maybe one day it would be. I could tolerate his occasional delinquent payments in the hopes that they discovered some gem, some tip for attracting my very own dragon. Even the hotels seemed to figure something out as they reliably caught one’s attention every year, though Ezra insisted they were animatronic.

Trunk packed, Ezra slid into the red sedan and peeled off with a wave and a honk, the sudden sound of his radio’s bass echoing amongst the pine trees and receding like a receding storm. I checked the controls for the heated grounds and flicked it off so as not to waste energy. When the sun was directly on the blacktop pad, it was at least as warm as with the artificial heat I was offering.

“It’s a holographic space dragon,” my niece pointed out as she watched this, “not a reptile.”

That came straight from one of the most shared online documentaries about the dragons. It claimed to have declassified studies suggesting that the first dragon was materially different from its progeny. After dumping a truck load of jargon on its audience, the documentary explained that the first dragon was constructed of material that was demonstrably entangled on a quantum level with material from another part of the universe. From where, no one knew. The running theory was that, somewhere in existence, the entangled atoms were on a planet that had dragons, and its arrangement into a dragon there had caused the atoms on Earth to spontaneously manifest what was essentially a dragon egg that became the beast we saw before us.

“Basically,” one expert had claimed, “it started as a hologram of data from another piece of existence, and that hologram then had real babies.”

Patrice crossed her arms waiting for my rebuttal.

“Dragons are lizards with wings,” I said, “and I don’t know what they’re teaching you in school, but lizards are reptiles.”

Patrice’s friend Tabitha nodded and says, “Makes sense to me, but don’t you have friends of your own to help you?”

“Friends would expect pizza at the end,” I explained. “Kids I can just make empty promises of getting to ride my dragon when I finally get one.”

“Luring a bunch of kids to your house to ride your dragon,” Alba laughed, “wait until my parents hear about that one.”

“No,” I said hurriedly, “don’t even joke like that. You have no idea how fast a rumor can spread in a small town like this.”

“Suddenly it sounds like we’ll be owed pizza after all,” Patrice said to the cheers of her friends.

“Is that what kids joke about now?”

“At least we don’t think weather is funny,” Tabitha said imitating my voice to say, “What does on and off mean?”

“God forbid a joke doesn’t hurt anyone,” I muttered.

The pavilion went up lopsided on our first attempt, and it took a morning of bellyaching to convince them to start over and let me remeasure. My heart pounded as we stood at each corner for the second time, ready to lift the poles together. I imagined this was my last shot at getting this down today. It went up, the wind tried to take it, but finally after some tugging on all sides, we got it taut and the poles placed. By then, a pizza had arrived and I was left to secure the ropes as the kids retreated to t the deck. I gave one of the poles a gentle shove to ensure it was sturdy and found a lawn chair to sit down and appreciate my day’s work. Patrice approached, wiping her greasy fingers along the grass. She plopped down in the lawn chair next to mine as we surveyed the vacant nest. When I looked at her, she was setting her cellphone on a stand on the table between us.

“What?” Patrice asked going bug eyed. “Do you know how good it looks to a college having a portfolio already?”

“I didn’t say anything,” I said with a hand waving her on.

Patrice switched to practicing her news reporter voice, a low clipped drawl full of inhuman seriousness and scrutiny, “Entry 14 in Coming Home to Roost, a deep dive into the failing Dragon tourism industry.”

I grunted.

She smiled.

“You must be proud,” Patrice said. “The saga to transform your yard has finally come to a head. Enough drama and shed tears to make a soap opera sick, the permits, the court cases, that time you almost lost the house to foreclosure when you were saved at the last minute by mom selling her car.”

“Let’s not leave out how I helped her buy a new car either.”

“And all of this work, years of close calls, burned bridges, fights, all for what? To get one of these roaming dragons to land in your backyard? Let’s explore why you want a dragon. What was your first experience with a dragon?”

“How many times do we have to go through that?”

“Until you find a way to be interesting. I can’t sell the whole truth if you don’t spice it up and make it entertaining. Now, please, try.”

“Okay,” I said, taking a breath. Nothing like a near death experience to spice things up. “So I was like everyone else, packed up and ready to flee the growing flocks of dragons poised to take over the town. But then, I was also glued to my phone as I watched ordinary people walk among them as if it was the most natural and wonderful thing in the world. To be honest, I stayed because I wanted them to be good, I didn’t want them to be Reign of Fire dragons, but more like…”

“Anne McCaffrey dragons.”

“Sure. But I didn’t go, I just talked. Everyone was arguing over what they were doing here. A lot of people said they came from God come to judge mankind, and others considered them to be essentially drones for some higher race of life that was observing us. Another sliver of the population insisted they heralded the end of the world, and they felt a great sense of betrayal and disappointment when it didn’t end, which will never cease to amaze me. The people that went to see them in person said they changed their lives and changed who they were. It was almost like how people talked about ayahuasca changing them chemically. I even heard they were curing mental illness.”

“Ayahuasca?”

“Never mind.”

“I’m just going to look it up later.”

“We should do this another time, maybe.”

“No, please, I’ll shut up. Promise.”

“So I was driving down the thirty, that stretch that follows the ravine into the Valley,” I said, patting my knee. “It was raining hard, and I lost control, hydroplaned a little towards the side of the road. I tried to go with it a little, you know. They always say don’t fight it when you lose control of your vehicle. Remember that when you’re driving in snow, you can’t just veer out of it when you lose traction, and don’t slam on the breaks.”

“You don’t say.”

“Anyway, I went off the road, the car slid sideways as I hit dirt. The car rattled so hard over the gravel that I bit my tongue. I panicked and slammed on the breaks, bracing myself, holding my breath. I tried to open the door, but the car was spinning, and the door closed as I opened it. Best case scenario is it ends quickly, I thought, worst case is my car tumbles and smashes into every rock and tree on the way down. And then I can saw the river out the windshield a hundred feet below, and I sucked in a breath. Everything froze, I thought, but I realized I felt the car swaying. I couldn’t get myself to move, only hold on as the car drifted back over to the shoulder of the road and dropped to the ground. The dragon landed directly ahead. It was two stories tall, its wings probably as wide. Its neck and tail curled majestically as it turned to face me, as if posing for a magazine. And its eyes.” I paused as I felt a chill. “They were normal at first, but the round pupils changed like the goo in a lava lamp, separating. Uniting. And then disappearing so only silver remained, still staring at me.”

It stared, but its eyes weren’t tracking me as I exited the car. It had already dismissed my presence. I realized suddenly it had intervened on its own behalf and no more. I was an annoyance, a spill prevented before it could make a mess. Couldn’t a dragon sense it, my deep fascination with it? Wasn’t I worthy of the change that people went on an on about? The world was no brighter or better than it had been before. I suppose I should have been simply grateful, but I wasn’t.

She sighed, “Better, but there’s no way my mic heard that, you tapered off at the end. Someday I’m going to have to get mom to buy me a real professional mic.”

“Does it makes sense to say they almost seemed too perfect?” I said. “Almost flawless. Their shape, their coloration.”

She leaned forward, her faced pinched briefly, “What would you even do if you did attract one?”

“That’s just it,” I said. “I don’t have to do anything. They only take up space, no upkeep, and with just one in my yard I could charge people fifty grand a night to stay here.”

“Just as long as you don’t give up my room here just to make a quick dollar.”

The three furnished rooms were rarely filled, despite the tourists. Fact of the matter was my house was not exactly close to where dragons tended to be. They were unpredictable, really, except that they were somehow very good about never going beyond the county lines, which sprouted a whole other crop of conspiracy theories.

“That quick dollar could be tuition,” I said. “And it’s only your room until I find someone who actually wants to stay here.”

“It’s all about the money, though.”

I shook my head and then grinned with warming cheeks, “No, I’ve always wanted to fly on a dragon.”

She laughed. “Like it would let you. No one’s ever even actually touched one as far as I know. Besides, what would you hold onto the horns on their back? No way.” Her friends were approaching, cellphones were coming out, rides were surely on their way. “Well, here’s to the world’s first dragon B&B.”

“A B&B that has dragons or a B&B for dragons?”

“What don’t’ you get? No one thinks you’re funny.”

My sister picked up the kids soon after, leaving me alone with the sounds of lawn mowers and the occasional sounds of hunting rifles popping in the hills. I couldn’t help but feel every second my investment wasn’t giving me a return. The vacant nest weighed on me. Even if the dragons didn’t come, I could always sell the property. I forced myself to remember that. Even though I was walking a high beam, I was also wearing a tether. I found myself going over the numbers in my head, what I expected to make, what I expected to need, always coming up short, still hopeful I could make this work. I rubbed my forehead. I didn’t realize how badly I needed Ezra to make his payment today. I reviewed old texts from Ezra to see if there was anything I missed.

In the text chain, I found a picture with a dragon hovering its head over some flowers. “Try clovers,” E had texted, and I glanced over my flowerbed along the house’s side. It never stopped being surreal, receiving casual pictures of what ought to have been a figment of our collective imaginations.

“This is proof the anthropic principle,” a physics professor turned influencer had said on a lesser-known podcast. “They spring forth from our collective imagination. It’s proof of concept, consciousness molds the quantum realm, and together, we can make anything, be anything.”

You were hearing that a lot, now a days. Existence can be anything, at any time, and now here was proof. Dragons appearing out of thin air, or projected across the universe, or perhaps from another dimension or perhaps from our imagination. Who knew what could come next?

I gave up watching the nest and resorted to rummaging through the fridge to coordinate a slap dash meal when I heard gravel crunching under the tread of an approaching car. I could tell by the frequency of stones popping that it was a red sedan. I smirked to myself and almost before I could turn around, Ezra was there in the open door, standing with his duffel bag clutched to his chest, looking like a man that just robbed a bank and couldn’t believe he wasn’t in cuffs. He kept staring over his shoulder, into the yard.

“What?” I asked.

“You’re not going to need that tent, after all,” he said, and laughed to himself.

My mind was slow to the conclusion, but my heart was already sinking as he scuttled away. The windowpanes rattled like a truck just went by and a shadow briefly darkened the light from outside. I jumped to the open door to look out. I was somehow both startled and not surprised in the least to witness the dragon swoop from the pale sky toward the house. It slowed to a near stop just over the blacktop, touching down delicately as if stepping down from some invisible platform. Shards of the setting sun splattered across aquamarine scales as its slender form flowed like a ribbon following the stick it was bound to. The dragon’s chest tapered absurdly thin to a sinuous tail snaking behind it, and its back had rows of feather tufts along either side of its spine that flared as it stopped stock still. The wings spread wide in mockery of the pavilion beside it, its veins dark along the pale membranes. I barely caught myself from collapsing in the doorway as its eyes fixed on me. It had circular pupils at first, definitely not dismissing me out of hand this time. Absurdly, I was afraid to scare it off, part of me already forgetting why it was here. Its silver eyes embedded under deep brows suddenly lost their pupil, and its jaws parted to allow a soft radiance to emit from them. Torn, I desperately wanted to see it release a surging pillar of flame, to see a real dragon breathe real fire, but then, I also wanted to live. It stepped over the blacktop basking spot, in fact, it seemed to deliberately avoid it. With a twist of its tail, it pressed up into the pavilion tent from inside until it was dislodged and went tumbling away with the wind.

Having rejected my offerings, it merely stared.

I only two questions: What was in that bag; and, was I about to be first recorded person killed by a dragon?