The Painted Dragon

What I paint comes to life.

It’s happened for as long as I can remember. Ever since I was in nursery school and my fingerprint penguin hopped up and waddled off the page, enchanting my classmates and alarming the teacher. She had called home immediately and my mother had come to collect me, but not before seeing with her own eyes the marvelous living painting.

Unsure of what to do, Mom had taken me to a doctor. On the paper spread across the examining table, I had created a brightly colored rainbow, which shimmered upward and swirled out the window into the sky.

“You must be very careful with this gift,” the doctor had cautioned my mother. “It can take her to light or to darkness, depending.”

“Depending on what?”

“On what she sees.”

As a small child, I mostly saw delightful images that charmed the imagination: dancing bears, flying elephants, butterflies, ponies. My creations could prance right off the pages of my sketchbooks, and be marvelous for a short time, but they always returned to the spot where they started. They were three-dimensional during their excursions from the book – butterflies could be held in the hand, ponies groomed and stroked on the mane. One of my elephants made my bed collapse when she came in for a landing. Oh, how I loved them.

“Be careful, dear,” my mother chided ever so gently. “I don’t want you to lose the wonder of the real world in the excitement of your game.”

“It’s not a game, Mom! It’s a gift, remember?”

“I don’t want you to lose your light in chasing fantasies.”

“My creations are my light, Mother.”

“Darling girl, they are not. Your light is what brings them to life, but they are not your light.”

Nevertheless, I felt mostly light until one day Billy Benson called me a freak. He said my paintings were no good, and then he ripped the picture I was working on. It was a picture of another girl, and I cried angry tears, for I knew she was meant to be my friend. Billy only laughed at my sorrow, and then threw my sketchbook down into the dirt.

I picked up my poor damaged book. There was a smear of dirt across the next blank page, and it wasn’t cute, or beautiful, or innocent. It was a little dark, and it sat in the pit of my stomach like a shadow that I continually chased to the corner with my rainbows and bright yellow suns.

***

The year I turned six, something awful happened. Something so scary and huge that I didn’t have words for it. My mother peeped into my room at night to find me crying over my sketchbook. None of the ponies seemed to come right anymore.

“I’m worried,” Mom told the doctor. “I’m worried this is the darkness you warned us about.”

The doctor tried to talk to me, but I simply shook my head, eyes gazing at the blank wall -- as blank as an un-smudged canvas.

“This isn’t a problem for doctors,” he told my mother solemnly. “This problem needs magic.”

“Where can I find magic?” my mother pleaded. The doctor looked forlorn. “It’s been gone from these parts for a long time. Pym is the first child I’ve seen in years who has an inkling of true magic, but the shadows may be stealing it away.”

The thought of shadows stealing my magic, of big and small bullies winning the day, was too much to bear. All day and all night I shut myself in my room, painting. I felt my life depended on what my brush strokes created.

Alas, the only creature that would appear on the page was a giant ogre, with warts on his face, a slobbery tooth, and a big club in his hand which he used to smash all the childish innocent things in my room.

My mother heard the crashing. “Won’t he go back to the page, like the penguins and dancing bears all do?”

“He won’t.” I said with dawning resignation. “This one does what he wants, not what the magic tells him to do.”

I decided to paint a knight with a sword to fight off the ogre. The knight shook his head. “This kind of ogre can only be defeated by magic. My sword is solid steel, double bladed and strong, but it is not magic.” He faded back into the image on my page.

Next, I painted a great wizard, with a robe of stars and a sparkling gem on the tip of his scepter. The wizard incanted, chanted, and alakazaooed, but alas, he couldn’t drive away the giant ogre. “My magic is the wrong kind.” He told me. “My magic is of stardust. You need magic of firelight.”

Firelight? Where was I to come by fire that wouldn’t burn the whole house down? A campfire didn’t seem strong enough to frighten a giant ogre, but a bonfire would devour the ogre and my bed, the pink curtains, and my drawing desk too. Maybe even me.

It came to me that night as I gazed at the stars, thinking that stars were fire, although the wizard only had dust from them. My mother says we all are made of stardust -- a little light inside, a little magic sparkle if we look for it. I needed fire from the biggest and brightest star, the sun.

I painted the sun. Not a happy sun from my innocent years, but a flaming, broiling, raging sun. Then I painted a dragon, flying out of the sun’s flare, breathing fire he caught from there.

The dragon soared off my pages (he had taken up two to be sure he was larger than the ogre). The ogre froze in mid-smash, club in the air. The dragon breathed a mouthful of fire that made the giant melt back onto the page of my book. There he was, just a two-dimensional paper ogre again.

I tried erasing him, but he wouldn’t go. “Why won’t he disappear?” I asked the dragon. I’d never had this problem before.

“Shadow paintings never leave,” spoke the dragon in a raspy, smoky voice. “You just turn the pages and make beauty instead.”

So I did. I painted waterfalls and wild horses, maned lions and the giant winged phoenix bird, rising from the ashes. The dragon breathed fire through each page, and they shimmered and shone with a glory that none of my drawings held before the shadows came.

The dragon went with me to school, and when Billy tried to knock me down, its wings held me up. The dragon went with me to my counselor, to talk about the awful things that happened, and the fire lit up the room and chased the shadows far away from the darkest corners of me. The dragon slept beside me at night, and in my dreams I rode him to many lands and saw many bright horizons ahead.

One day, he began to diminish. He spoke no words, but I understood, it was time for him to return to my book. “If shadow drawings never fade, what about drawings from fire?”

He smiled. “The fire was in you all along, for you made me after all. You just had to look for it and find it. Now that you have, it will always burn bright within you. Fire paintings never burn out, but you have many more pages to turn, and I am only two pages wide.”

He flapped his great wings, and he lighted on the paper, and he was the work of art I had imagined at first, only so much brighter.

***

Years passed, then decades. My art went on to win awards, my works were sold to kings and emperors, my mother lacked nothing she could ever need, and I shined like the sun.

Somewhere, in the back of an old book on the back of a dusty shelf, sits a flat ogre who cannot break me anymore, all but forgotten. For on my wall is a painted dragon, and in my heart is a fire that never fades.