The Dragon
Their uncle settles them in the living room in front of the TV. They lay across the couch, heads at opposite ends, their legs meeting in the middle, the younger one’s legs draped across the older ones. They can hear their mom and uncle in the dining room, laughing and talking, sometimes catching their own names or their dad’s or people they’ve never heard of. The older one has the remote and presses “play next episode” each time one show ends, so they watch an endless loop of cartoon robots explaining the mysteries of the world. The light outside fades into bright pinks and then greys and then the only light in the room comes from the TV screen, so bright it almost hurts their eyes.
The doorbell rings and they race to the front door, scrambling over one another to get there first. Their uncle is grabbing pizza boxes from a delivery boy, and the entryway smells like grease and cheese and they bounce on their toes in excitement because it’s the second night in a row that they’ve had pizza for dinner and their mom hasn’t asked them to eat a vegetable all day. In the living room, their uncle pulls out two TV trays and sets them up in front of the couch and their mom lets them pick out a movie to watch while they eat. They wonder if they will get popcorn, but instead, their mom brings out two glasses of chocolate milk (the homemade kind where the chocolate syrup clings to the bottom of the cup). They eat off paper plates that soak up the pizza grease and use their shirts as napkins and when they finish their milk, they stick their fingers into the bottoms of their cups to scoop out any leftover syrup.
One of them calls out for more chocolate milk and when their mom comes in, she asks if they want leftover cake to go with their milk, and both of them nod emphatic yesses. She refills their glasses and brings them each a plate of cake with frosting so thick it falls in heaps around the sponge. The younger one eats all the frosting first, smearing it across his cheeks and nose. The older one uses a fork but gives up when the cake keeps falling into his lap, and instead eats it off his plate like a dog. When the movie is over, their mom wipes their faces and hands and helps them change into t-shirts that belong to their uncle. The shirts swallow their knees and most of their arms and when they try to run up the stairs the fabric bunches and twists around their legs making them clumsy.
Upstairs, they share a room with a bed so big they can lie across it with their arms stretched out and not touch one another. Their mom begins to tuck them in, but they remind her that they need to brush their teeth, each baring them to reveal their frosting coated gums. In the bathroom, she shows them how to use their fingers as toothbrushes: spreading a thin line of toothpaste across their pointer finger, demonstrating how to scrub their teeth in little circles. The younger one accidentally bites down on his finger and starts to cry and the older one puts his arm around him while their mom pretends to amputate his hand which makes them all smile. They ask their uncle if he will read them a bedtime story, and he finds one from when he was a little boy about a knight and a princess and a mean dragon. As he reads, he changes his voice for each character and the two of them roll around the bed with laughter.
Their mom kisses them goodnight and turns out the lights and the younger one whispers that he wishes they had a nightlight, but the older one assures him that they are brave, and there is nothing to be afraid of and that only babies need nightlights. That’s when both of them hear a noise coming from the closet and they both lie still, listening, holding their breath. When they hear the noise again, they both jump; it sounds like a low throated growl of something big and mean and ugly. The younger one asks if it could be a dinosaur, but the older one tells him, “Dinosaurs are extinct, so it must be a dragon.”
They gather pillows for shields and blankets for armor to protect them from the dragon’s flames just like the knight wore in the book. The older one grabs the pocketknife they found earlier to use as a sword. (It’s not as long or sharp as he would like, but it will do.) The younger one decides that the eyeball marble he found is magic, and he holds it out in front of him like a wand. The two of them shuffle towards the closet, each throwing out plans on the best way to defeat the beast. They know that if it starts to fly, they won’t be able to catch it, so they decide that the younger one will stun it with his magic marble and while it’s stunned and unable to move, the older one will finish it off with his sword.
At the door, the older one pulls it open just enough for the younger one to hurl his marble into the black mouth of the closet. They hear it hit something with a dull thud and hear a roar bubbling up in an ancient throat before being choked back down by the marble’s magic stunning power. They throw the door open fully and the older one jabs his sword forward until it catches on something solid and he can’t pull it back. In the dark, they both scramble backward and slam the closet door shut behind them, trapping whatever it is inside. They jump into the bed and pull the covers over their heads, both unsure if they will hear the sound again.
