The Princess of the Dragon King's Palace

I was born a thousand years ago, she said. He laughed, liar.

She said, I am the daughter of the man who travelled to the Dragon King’s Palace. I was born there beneath the ocean, the child of one of the Dragon King’s daughters, and I have seen a thousand years’ worth of the world.

He held her and laughed, kissing her and chiding her for teasing him. He looked into her eyes and felt himself pulled into them, dark and black, the depths of a faraway ocean.

–

I miss the ocean, she said. Today, we should go to the beach.

The coast was too far, so he took her to the aquarium instead. They walked through a glass tunnel beneath the tanks, staring up at the water casting blue and green waves across their faces. She stopped to watch the sea turtles swim by, pressing her hands against the cool glass, and he thought that her hair looked like kelp in the light of the tunnel.

When I was a little girl, she said, my first best friend was a sea turtle.

Oh? he said. And bet your first boyfriend was a dolphin.

She replied with a laugh. Don’t be silly, of course not. My first boyfriend was a seahorse.

–

One day she showed him the jewel box in which she kept her thousand years of life. It looked as old as the tides themselves, carved from dark and sturdy oak, with grooves like fjords. If anyone opened it, she said, time would start again for her as it had her human father, and her soul would return to the ocean and her body would turn to sea foam.

He shook his head. Something like that would never happen, he promised. But every time he went up to her room his eyes would always wander to the wooden box sitting upon her desk.

–

They lay on their backs on a grassy riverbank and she told him about her grandfather, the Dragon King. She told him about how they would fly high through the sky, her on his back, and how she would shake the clouds as they flew past them, making the rain fall and flooding the fields.

He watched the clouds drift through the sky, flowing from one shape to the next. And what made the thunder and lightning? he asked.

Grandfather loved the sound of rain falling from the clouds, she said, and the sound of each drop hitting the leaves of trees made his laugh boom across the sky, and sparks flew from his wide mouth onto the plains.

–

During the summer she grew listless and dry. She stayed in her house with the windows thrown open in the hopes of a sea-salt breeze.

He stayed in her house with her. He sat on the end of her bed and read books, and she stretched herself out on the floor. Her white dress fanned outward, cupping her in a soft seashell. Every time he turned a page she would move slightly, like sand carved by a change in the current on the ocean floor.

When she slept she slept fully, and nothing pulled her from the depths of sleep. The air that fluttered in through the window lifted her soft golden hair and brushed the skin of her cheeks.

One evening, she awoke at the cry of a gull. She stood at the open window, her black pearl eyes gazing far past the horizon.

I want to go home, she said.

He stood and wrapped his arms around her waist, burying his face in her hair; she smelled of warm sand and sharp salt air.

–

The heat of summer broke: the first deluge of the rainy season snapped open the sky and poured cool rain to fill the cracks of parched earth.

Her house was dark; the light from outside cast watery shadows on the walls. He called her name as he entered, but she did not answer. The rain murmured on the roof.

In her room on her desk he found the jewel box open and empty. A small puddle soaked the floor beneath the open window.