Wish

I will always regret the day I wished I was a Dragon. On a mundane autumn day at High Bree primary school I had been half day-dreaming, half paying attention as the two classmates who had prepared the George and the Dragon presentation came to the front.

In their story, George was portrayed as the perfect blonde-haired and blue eyed fantasy, striding down the battle-scarred road to save humankind from the slavering beast.

It was not at all the image which my youthful mind conjured up, quite the opposite in fac t, but when Mrs Thistle looked at me inquisitively through her rather cheap-looking glasses and asked,

“So, Mark, what’s your opinion of the George and the Dragon myth?”

“Umm. It’s alright.”

“Alright? Come on Mark, you can do better than that.”

“You know, it’s a bit boring compared with some of the other ones.”

“But why, Mark? Why is it boring? What are the underlying themes?”

“I dunno.”
It was true – I didn’t know, but I wanted to be a dragon all the same, I wanted to be flying around,
burning stuff with my breath and scaring the shit out of people.
Ten years later, I was reminded of that day in the most peculiar circumstances. I was finishing the Christmas term at University. As we walked out of the examination hall, most of my Science and Logic coursemates were talking about various things, and in a moment of serendipity, what they would do if they could wish for anything they wanted. The strange thing was that it made me remember that particular day back in my childhood, and as they slowly walked towards the bar, I gave my excuses and left.

I walked out of campus, and through the park, which was still heavily dusted with the snow from the previous night. I sat down near the frozen duckpond .

“You OK?” a voice said, in a rather sombre, dulcet tone.

I looked up and glanced around. The path either side of the pond was empty, and I couldn’t see a soul in sight.

“No,” the voice continued, “My appearance is not important. When you said you wished you were a dragon, did you mean it?”

“Absolutely,” I replied, “With all my heart.”

“Then it will be so.”

With that, I felt a strangeness in the air, a tightening, and then, after that, the opposite, something appeared to leave me and I felt rested, boosted and recharged.

“What was that?” I said.

The voice had gone. I looked around, my mind glowing with energy. As I looked at the pond, some of the ice at the top seemed to start to melt, steam soaring skyward as if in reaction to the hot excess power my body was emanating.
On the way home I paid a trip to the student bar and without even thinking about it, hammered my housemates at pool, drank 7 pints of stella without even feeling it and, being somewhat afraid of where this new power would lead me, I pretended that the beer had suddenly kicked in (it hadn’t) and left for home, my mind glowing with energy. When I got home I had a shave with an old razorblade, which tore at my skin painfully, but I didn’t even notice, it, the pain seemed to boost my fired up mind even more. As I shaved, the muscles in my arm rippled bigger and bigger, my left arm more so than the right, and to my horror, the pink skin on the left arm began to dry up visibly before my very eyes. It felt as if it was withering away like a tree which had been uprooted and left in the desert sun, growing tighter and tighter, and then cracking, and beginning to peel. As it fell off, I was presented not with veins and sinew and muscle, but with a new arm, green skinned, reptilian, my fingers had turned into a set of lizard hands and claws. After that, the process suddenly stopped, and my right arm remained normal.
When I awoke the next morning, my arm was still suspiciously repilian, so I quickly threw on a long-sleeved jumper and donned a pair of thick gloves. Laura, the rather tasty hippy chick archaeology student who lived in the room below mine and who I had always quite fancied but never actually got round to asking out, winked at me as I walked through the front room.

“Mark,” she said, “Have fun last night?”

“You what?” I replied.

“Whatever you were doing up there, it certainly sounded as if you were enjoying yourself. Oh – no need for gloves, by the way, it’s pretty mild out there today.”

“I had a shave, then went straight to bed,” I replied, “Anyhow, I’m heading out to Shearsmere; want to come?”

Laura looked taken aback. This kind of spontaneous behaviour was rare for me.

“For sure,”, she said, looking at me inquisitively, “I’ll chuck my coat on and we’ll go.”

Shearsmere Peak stood an hour above our University City, grey and imposing. I had been up it once before, and had the misfortune to do so on one of the coldest and most-hail-ridden days of the year.

Today, though, despite the calendar nearing Christmas, it was absolutely azure, with the snow having fallen two days previously, and we made our way through the ancient historical streets rapidly, emboldened by the inter sun.

“Are you OK, Mark?” Laura asked me, “You’re not normally like this. Normally it’s us lot who have to drag you out of the house like an unwilling toddler, particularly on days like today.”

As we made our way through Stanbrook City’s crumbling walls, remnants of the long-gone Slav Empire of 3000 years previously which had stretched from New York to Vladivostock, she asked, “What turned you from staunch bedroom-bound scientific geek to great rugged outdoors lover?” she asked me.
“I don’t know,” I replied, “I feel changed.”

She looked somewhat quizzical then asked, ”how long do ya reckon you can make it to the peak in?”

I smiled, and I looked at Laura, considering the question for a moment.

“One hour, tops.” I replied.

“Yeah right,” she replied, “Ten hours, more like.”

Taken offence at that, I charged on ahead, stomping up the rocky path which led to Shearsmere’s plateau-like peak.

Back in 900 AD, at the peak of the Octavian Empire, Shearsmere had been a vital stronghold for revolutionary forces. Seen from our town, it looked like an unremarkable, typically southern English peak – white, dry, gradual incline, would take most elderly people two hours tops. However, the paths which lead up it are in fact an eerie labyrinth of granite that was the graveyard of many a foreign invader. That was why Stanbrook tended to think of itself as the most English city, even if that was only the Stanbrook of the past, not the present.
“Laura,” I said.
“Yeah?” she said, looking relieved that I had broken my thoughts – and the silence – to ask her a question.
“Do you really believe in that stuff? You know, Liberty, Equality and all that? You think the English revolution 1400 years ago really meant anything?”

“Yeah,” she replied, “For sure. They are the ideals our country was founded on.”
“If you say so, “ I replied – a long time ago, and still in other places, but not the stuffy elitists of Stanbrook today.”
“What on earth has happened to you, Mark?” Laura asked me, “Something’s changed. I like it – but it’s a bit strange. And why are you wearing gloves? It’s not that cold.”

She reached her hand towards me, momentarily brushing my arm for just a second longer than she normally might, and then quickly yanked off one glove and then the other. I braced myself, wondering what her reaction might be at my newly formed green, scaly hand and claws.

“You hiding something?” she asked, “Or just extremely sensitive to the cold?”

I looked at my hands. The left arm had returned to normal.

“Is something wrong?” she asked, “Do you suffer from some kind of body heat rapid depletion issues?

“No,” I replied, “Why did you say that?”

“Well, just the gloves. It isn’t that cold.”

She touched my right hand. My skin tingled as she did so. She moved her hand away sharply and then touched my left one.

“My god, Mark,” she said, “What’s wrong with your left hand?”

“I don’t know,” I replied, my own right hand brushing hers as it also felt the much more pallid skin on my left one, which felt as if all body warmth had been completely drained away, it wasn’t ice cold, but had that leathery but smooth that snakeskin boots tend to have, and my skin temperature was like a glass jar which had been left in a cellar, “This hasn’t happened before.”

“Rapid depletion,” she said, “My cousin used to suffer from it. His body temperature would plummet by 20 degrees centigrade and he was in constant danger of suffering from hypothermia, and even in the middle of summer we had to have someone standing next to him at all times with blankets and coats. That said-“

and Laura stood facing me, looking into my increasingly burning eyes with a mixture of marked concern and a bewildering admiration, taking my cold leathery left hand in her right hand, and my still-warm and soft right hand in hers, which is where I felt the tingling, exciting sensation return as her fingers drifted gently over the tips of mine.

“You’re a strange guy, Mark,” she said, “You spend all your time in your room writing up your strange historical essays and proposals, and you never tell us your problems or issues. You appear so sad and withdrawn a lot of the time, and then today, you came down, it was like a new person, it was like I had met my housemate all over again, except that now you aren’t just my housemate, are you, you’re a different person. Your hands are significantly different temperatures. That is not right, Mark, not right at all – something is up with you. It’s changing your body, changing the flow of your blood, the temperature.”

She squeezed my right hand, then the left, and I felt some of the blood on my right hand side of my body flow over to the left side and down the arm into my hand. Laura rubbed my left hand with her fingers as it did, and the hand’s leathery feel seemed to smooth out into my softer normal skin.

She leaned over and kissed me on the lips, then her hands dropped away.

“Yeah,” she said, “anyway, want to race me to the top?” She beckoned up the path, which was deserted, to the point where it split into two roughly equal paths through the granite corridors which slowly let up to the Shearsmere’s Peak’s main summit, the red path and the blue path.

“I’ll take the red, and you the blue,” she said.

Blowing me a kiss, she turned and ran through the white, marble carved doorway which bordered the red path. I ran towards the blue path, heart beating, remembering the ancient local Anglo custom: if a woman wanted to notify a man that she wanted him, she would do so by challenging him to a race in this way.
I ran and ran, my blood coursing faster and faster through my body, sometimes faster than it ever had before. Had I been paying attention to something other than my forthcoming cessation of celibacy, I would have noticed that along with the faster beat, my body temperature was rising and falling with a faster speed than it ever had done before, both going down to around 15c, and then rising to around 80c as a new fiery power rushed through me. I would have realised that the wish I had made before was still, very shortly, going to come true, and that this new found love would soon be cut, viciously, brutally, cut short as quickly as it had come to fruition.

It is painful to recall the moment and to address the bitter regret my earlier wish has caused me. If I had never made that wish, it is true that Laura might never have come up the mountain with me that day, she might never have instigated our short lived relationship so swiftly, and we might not have had that moment of passion, underneath the iron oak tree which decorated the left hand chamber of the 500ad revolutionary temple which stood to the left of Shearsmere Peak’s summit. As much as I still remember that moment as a great one, what happened soon after, the sadness I felt as I looked down at my body almost as soon as she turned to get dressed, to see my skin changing colour and texture from head to toe, my body growing and growing and growing and growing until the iron temple was shattered into a billion with the most brutal simplicity as my head pierced its roof like butter, my former arms, and other new limbs breaking through its walls and nearby granite rock surface with absolute ease. I remember Laura turning towards me as she put her wooden multicoloured bead necklace back over her head, lost in love, not even noticing the screeching, searing noises which near split even my less sensitive dragon ears in two, the way she had turned towards me, amidst the chaos and noise, expecting me to still be lying there in bliss, and that look in her eyes turning into naked fear when she saw what had become of me, raised on my hind legs, wings stretched out, near blocking out the sunshine.

I looked down at her, wanting to speak, wanting to tell her how I felt, but it was already too late, my dragon voice box was incapable of human speech (although I do, to this day, still think in English, as I have no fellow creatures to actually converse with) and whatever English word I said came out simply as incoherent rumblings, which floated out into the ether accompanied by small wisps of fire and flame.

“Mark?” she said, her face wrought with disbelief

I tried to tell her that I did not know, but it was no use whatsoever.

“Mark, was this why you appeared so changed this morning? So much more confident, striding out of the house?”

Still able to nod, I did so.

“Look, you have to know, I’ve always quite liked you, but the way you were, trapped in your room, well I thought you just weren’t interested in me at all.”

I never had the chance to find out anything more about what she thought, as just then our conversation was shattered by the sound of the arrival of some fifty police helicopters, triggered by the collapse of the Temple walls, and the alarms which had been ringing around our heads for some three minutes now.

There was no attempt at finding out who or what I was, no wonderment at seeing the first Dragon to have walked this world since they were wiped out in 7000 BC, there was only blast after blast of rockets, bullets, and lazers, some of which scratched me as a thistle might scratch a human, but most of which was harmless. The only thing that I cared about was that during that barrage, the exact point of which I cannot remember, Laura was hit all over her considerably more frail human body and fell, lifeless, to the ground.

I remember feeling so numb that the confidence I had originally felt subsided, and sadness overcame anger, and rather than destroying each of the helicopters as I might, or razing the city to the ground, I simply rose into the air and flew away at a reasonable and constant speed, the helicopters first giving chase, and then, slowly fading away, when they realised I was heading over Asia, my now numb mind aghast, unable to take in what had taken place.

I did, eventually, settle down in a cave near the outskirts of the old ruined city of Tramberlan here in once-German Empire-ruled Central Asia. I cannot write, but I do have a huge pile of books, which I often ruin as I use my claws (which I have found impossible to trim or cut) to turn their pages, that I have stockpiled over the years during nightly raids on cities at times when I’ve grown bored of the early thrill of stealing buffalo and yak from the clutches of nearby nomads and farmers.

To this day, now twenty thousand years old, and physically no nearer to death, now far more well read than I was back then, when I understood our history in emotive but not really actual terms, with the rest of my old race all but extinct, the world now a place only of ruins and nature, I will always regret that day in my childhood, the blinkered, delusional belief in something that would make me stronger, instead of trying to make myself stronger, and the sure-fire knowledge, now, that had I not always been lost in my own thoughts, someone like Laura would have liked me without my having to take such drastic measures.

The invisible force or being who granted the wish to me has never returned, either. I wish he or she would one of these days, for closure, to tell me that they could turn back time or reverse the process or bring Laura back or just let me die, which also appears impossible.

My final word before I head out tonight to fly over the woods and mountains in search of food, an activity which ceased being enjoyable long, long ago, is that I hope that that being can return, some day, and put things right, one way or the other.

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