The Fire and The Flood

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. In fact, until quite recently, there weren’t any dragons at all, anywhere. They weren’t entirely unknown, of course; while the Valley willfully remained a stagnant intellectual backwater in comparison with the rest of the world, not everyone that lived in the shadow of the mountains was so ignorant as to have not heard of them, even if the notion was a bit beyond the strict edge of their imaginations. Before, there was no need for dragons or other flights of fancy to feed into the mill of muddy thoughts that ground through most of their heads on a daily basis; there was hardly enough room up there between the everyday worries about the mounting stacks of bills, the mines closing up, and recession looming on a troubled horizon. I couldn’t fault them for that, but it was a hard pill to swallow at my age; that eventually all thoughts of dragons, and the precious jewels they were said to hoard, got hammered away, year by year, until there was nothing left but black old coal dust.

While most of the Valley folk were as unaware of the possibility of its existence as they were of dragons, we did actually have a library right near the county line. A small corner of the one room brick building was home to a lean collection of beat up sword-and-sorcery novels, and it was within those tattered pages that my friends and I had first stumbled upon the tales of these winged terrors. I had pedaled my rusted, hand-me-down Huffy into the dirt parking lot of the library for the first time on an early summer’s day the year before, looking for a place to kill time before my friends were done with their chores. I had spied the air conditioning unit and heard its overworked fan, offered a silent thank you to whatever deity was listening, clicked off the walkie-talkie on my belt, and stepped into the cool hush within. I peered around warily, unsure of how to proceed. It wasn’t that I had never been in a library- the middle school had a paltry excuse for one- but this felt different in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on. There was a half-glimpsed feeling of awe, almost reverence, at those rows and rows of silent books, each containing a world far removed from that of the Valley. There was a creak and a rustle of fabric as a woman leaned into view from a chair behind the reference desk, then beckoned me over with a welcoming smile. I walked shyly toward the desk, taking in the name on the wood and metal plaque and the woman behind it. Ms. Sampson wasn’t the severe, strict disciplinarian type I had envisioned librarians to be after some old films down at the matinee, the type who could wield a shushing sound like a buck knife, but the total opposite. She was young for a librarian, I thought, and pretty in an unassuming, almost comforting way, rather like some of my friend’s mothers.

“Hi,” I had muttered, too nervous to look her in the eye, kindly smile notwithstanding.

“Good morning. You’re a new face,” she said matter-of-factly, her voice soft and somehow musical. Then, seeing my quizzical look, she said, “You might not have guessed it, but there’s not a lot of traffic that comes through this building.” She lifted an eyebrow with gentle amusement. “I can almost always spot a fresh face. What are you looking for?”

I came up short. I would have felt rude saying that I had only come in to cool off, and truthfully I had no idea what I was looking for. She must have guessed it from my blank expression, because she stood, smoothed her pale yellow blouse, mutely glowing in a shaft of dusty sunlight, and stepped out from behind the desk.

“Hmm,” she murmured, looking me up and down. “You’re what, 6th grade? 7th?”

“6th, ma’am,” I replied, feeling oddly small next to her, though I was only a few inches shorter.

She waved a hand impatiently. “Ma’am is my mother. Please, call me Marlene.”

There was no way on God’s green Earth I was going to call her by her first name, because without a doubt my own mother’s supernatural ears would hear about it and hell would follow, but I nodded in quiet acquiescence.

“6th, let’s see.” She led me over to a shelf. “They’ve probably got you reading Paulsen, Lowry, Rawls…” she murmured, trailing her slim fingers across the spines. “Come with me,” she said suddenly, and swept past several shelves into a small, darkened corner and began pulling books seemingly at random.

“Let me know if you’ve read any of these.” She showed me a handful of titles, and I hadn’t heard of a single one, but the covers looked promising; bold and grim illustrations of dragons and horses, swords and fire, flags and banners. I felt a prickling on my arms and neck that had nothing to do with the struggling air conditioning in the small room.

When she was satisfied with the stack in her arms, she made her way back to the desk and helped me fill out the form for a library card.

“Alright,” she said importantly, stamping the final card at the back of the last book. “These are due at the end of the month. If you need more time, come and see me and get them renewed.”

There was a flash of sunlight as the door swung open. Looking over, I saw the bewildered face of Jim Bennett, my oldest and best friend, blinking in the sudden gloom.

“Tom? We’ve been looking for you for ages!” He squelched his own walkie obnoxiously and gave me an aggrieved look. I realized that more time had passed than I thought and I had forgotten to turn my walkie back on. “Found your bike out here finally. What the hell are you doing in here? Apologies, ma’am,” he said quickly.

I glanced back at Ms. Sampson, who I swear gave me the slightest wink.

“Go on, enjoy,” she said, shooing me out.

Jim ducked out before me and I followed him, lines of sweat already forming where the stack of books weighed on my arms. I glanced back at Ms. Sampson, who was bent over a sheet of paper, still smiling softly. The whole experience had been so unexpected that I found myself wondering if I had fallen into some strange fever dream. Allowing myself a small grin, I stepped out into the circle of my friends atop their bikes, tipped the books carefully into my rucksack, and together we rode into the furnace of a southern summer in the Valley.

That summer was one of great change for us- Jim, David, Dale, and myself. Those first few days after I walked out into the burning sun, I didn’t think a thing about the books, except in connection with vaguely distracting thoughts of Ms. Sampson. They sat on my nightstand, nearly condemned to a month of dust gathering, when the sun shut itself resolutely behind a wall of clouds and a soft, relentless rain began to fall. We didn’t let it interfere with our business: there were stones to toss into the swelling river, increasingly sodden terrains to explore, and familiar trails, now sloppy and rutted, to pedal.

The rain didn’t stop. After a week we decided to bag it for a day, so I sat in my room, bored to tears, and blindly reached for my water glass on my nightstand. In doing so, I toppled the stack of nearly forgotten books. I cursed under my breath and went to retrieve them, then paused. The topmost book had fallen open to the frontispiece, which was a beautifully illustrated map, but it wasn’t any map that I had ever seen. Curious, I drew my legs up and sat cross-legged, studying the unfamiliar names, and I flipped the page to the prologue.

That was how my friends found me, several hours later, sitting in the same position, now with a sturdy sheaf of pages beneath my left thumb. I heard the soft wet whiffling of the cards that Dale had in his spokes, still miraculously intact but disintegrating rapidly in the damp, and the subdued chatter of the others. I got up, wincing at the pins and needles buzzing down my legs, and went to the window.

“Are you ever going to answer your walkie?” David asked grouchily, squinting upward through the rain at me.

“Sorry, I thought we were just laying low today,” I said, surprised. “I turned it off this morning.” I fought to suppress a small grin at the identical, horrified looks on their faces.

“Tom, what’s our number one rule?” Jim asked in mock exasperation.

“I know, I know,” I said. “It’s just...” I cast about for a less embarrassing reason for my needing to conserve battery life, but came up blank. “Batteries don’t grow on trees,” I finished lamely.

Dale gave me a knowing look, and I couldn’t avoid his eye. Our dads had worked together in Mine 18, which had shut abruptly earlier this spring.

“Well, what are you doing up there, anyway?” Dale said, deftly turning the conversation.

“Not much.” I said gratefully. “Just, um, reading. One of those books I got from the library that day.”

There was silence for a moment from the boys as they exchanged a glance, and the rain plinked on the metal roof above. A dull thunder sounded from behind the hills.

“So… Can we come up or what?” David asked bluntly.

A minute later, the three rain-damp kids had piled into my room, and were stationed in their usual positions: Dale on a cushion between the two windows, Jim in my grandpa’s old rocking chair in the corner, and David laying on the threadbare rug, next to the pile of books. He grabbed one at random and started leafing through it. I looked at the other boys. Dale was looking morosely out at the rain, and Jim was rocking gently in the chair, tapping his fingers on his knees and frowning slightly. It was a perfectly rare moment in which none of us had anything to say, and were comfortable enough with each other to sit in companionable silence. I tentatively retrieved my book and resumed my reading. I don’t know when it happened, but the next time I looked up, all three of them had wound up on the floor, each with a library book in hand. I remember thinking to myself that perhaps a rainy day wasn’t such a bad thing.

It rained the entire summer. That next morning when I looked out at the lashing rain outside my window, I felt a despondency growing in the pit of my stomach. This wasn’t how summer was supposed to be. My walkie remained silent as I sat on the bed and once again got lost in my story. That afternoon, the telltale sound of three soaked kids on bicycles arriving at our front porch brought me back. And so it went. From early June to late August, our county witnessed the highest recorded rainfall in its history, and the four of us witnessed spectacular deeds and breathtaking adventures recorded on paper.

The rain caused no end of problems; the river flooded the banks and caused a fair amount of damage in the Valley, and up in the mines, several roads became impassable, and a few of the shafts had to be closed down. Had we looked up from our books and games, perhaps we would have seen the dark looks that passed between the adults like swollen rainclouds. Perhaps if we had listened, we would have heard the rumors that trembled from Billy’s Bar all the way to the corner store like dimly sensed thunder: rumors that maybe there was more to the mine closures than the official story that the Company told. Had we paid any attention at all to the world outside, perhaps we would have sensed that something was looming over the Valley, a quiet tide that had swelled, building a wave that would overwhelm us. But we were eleven, and we had discovered our own secret worlds within the pages set down by other minds. As far as we were concerned, during that gloomy and rainy summer, the outside world didn’t exist.