How to be Megnificent – book 2 of girldragongizzard

I’m literally on the moon, standing on the terminator, the faded edge between light and dark.

Or, rather, I’m in the light and the sun is above the moon’s horizon, but it drops steadily and I know I’m at the terminator when it gets about halfway set. I think this is faster than it should be, at first, but then it stops there.

The shadows around me are long and stark. I can see every granule of the regolith when I look down at it, and when I lift my foot there’s a clear, beautiful dragon print there. You could make a logo from that.

Scan it. Trace it in Illustrator. Ready to print. Chapman would take care of it for you at hir print shop.

There’s no air, of course, because it’s the moon, but I can still breathe just fine, because I’m really asleep on my roof. I know that, but the thought also passes through me, because I’m on the moon and the visuals are so amazing.

There are so many stars.

For a dream this is startlingly vivid.

I don’t know the moon’s geography, so I have no idea where I am on it. But it’s a relatively flat plane covered with what looks and feels like gray sand mixed with pebbles of various size, shape, and texture. This is covered with a smattering of rocks, each marked by its own harsh shadow against the rest of the regolith. And I’m surrounded by low hills, which I suspect are the rims of craters.

If I look toward the sunset, everything is bright with the shadows appearing as if they are holes, rips in spacetime through which I can see nothing.

And if I look directly away from the sunset, it quickly becomes mostly darkness with the very peaks of hills and rocks light stark white against the night. Irregular shapes, like tiny odd clouds underneath the starry sky.

There’s a fairly decent sized boulder near me with a rough and pockmarked surface cast in vivid relief by the sunset, and it calls to me. It reminds me of pumice and looks like it would be perfect for scraping off the remnants of my dead skin.

I don’t so much go over to it as fall in its direction, as if it has a gravity I’m compelled to obey, stumbling and then bounding sideways toward it kind of like a ferret doing its war dance. I stretch my neck out, raise my right wing, and ready my shoulder and side for a good scraping, and almost complete closing my eyes before seeing something move in the shadow of the boulder.

Lunar dust billowing around me, I stop abruptly and look directly at it with both eyes, instantly throwing it into my immaculate binocular perspective, the precise distance from me of every detail instantly and intuitively known.

The shadow is so dark, and yet there is just enough ambient light thrown around by the other features of the moon that I can pick out a spikey, round silhouette within it. Something that huddles, and rearranges lanky limbs, and blinks.

It’s staring right back at me, right into my eyes, and it’s not transfixed.

My heart races, and I take a quick impossible breath.

My brain tells me this means that it is another dragon, or a monster. No other living thing should be able to withstand draconic transfixion. Or, at least, that’s what my instincts believe.

It does seem afraid to show itself, however, and I calm myself and lower my head, turning it sideways to look at it out of my right eye. It’s not my friendly eye, but it’s my closest one, and that involves less movement on my part.

I watch it relax a little.

I decide to wait, settling down into a loaf, wrapping my tail around me, to show it that I’m not a threat and not scared of it.

I don’t know if it will then see me as vulnerable food and attack, but this gesture of polite acceptance has been serving me well lately. And I’d rather make an acquaintance of this thing and learn what it is than terrify it and make enemies of it.

I wonder if my fire would work here. Do I provide the oxygen myself? Is that part of my biological napalm?

I’m pretty sure I’m not going to need to use it, considering the movements I’m seeing in the shadow.

And slowly, ever so slowly, what emerges looks like a cross between a pangolin, a chimpanzee, and a pineapple. You might say that the pangolin and pineapple are redundant descriptors, but imagine if its scales ranged from the smooth ones of a pangolin through the spiky surface of the pineapple to the pinapple’s leaves along its spine and tail, starting with a tuft of them on the back of its head.

It, however, has the mouth of the Cheshire cat. Wider than it should be for its head, with almost human teeth. And it silently chatters to itself, flashing white enamel in the sunlight as it moves out of the shadow and approaches me.

There is no sound on the moon, except the faint vibrations I feel through the regolith my feet have sunk into.

Leaving simian footprints in the moon dirt, it approaches me with a tentative arm outstretched, reaching for the shoulder of my folded wing, tilting its head. I’m almost certain that it’s going to pet me, but there is that little doubt I have to choke down still.

It does. They do. This is another dragon, a person, I think. And I relax as their gentle touch traces my scales. I feel a little picking sensation as they grab a bit of dead skin and pull it away for me.

As I watch this, with my other eye I catch movement across the rest of the night side of the moon, and more dragons emerge into the chiaroscuro of the lunar twilight.

A wild mix of kangaroo, leafy sea dragon, and dimetrodon leads and towers over me, tilting their head in curiosity.

A massive worm with hundreds of child arms for legs and the horned head of a tiger follows them.

Everything that follows is as startlingly different as the last. Though I am starting to notice, here and there, dragons that fall into the more recognizable phenotypes. Dragons that are similar to me in structure, if not detail.

It feels like the whole moon is covered in dragons, and they’ve all come forward to help me shed, eating my skin as they remove it.

Soon, I can’t see them for the crowd, and I roll over to let them get at my underside, it’s such a pleasant experience.

I’m feeling so elated and ecstatic by the whole experience, as if I am Queen and this is how my subjects support me, until one of them bites me in the side.

I wake up with a start, lying sprawled and limp on my back.

A seagull that is standing on my left outstretched wing has just pecked me where it feels like my kidneys should be.

There’s a bit of scaley dead skin in its beak now. And it takes off immediately upon seeing my head move to track it.

One of the reasons I have so little trouble catching and eating seagulls is that they aren’t used to me existing and being a thing in the first place. They do have a general instinct to avoid predation by anything and everything. But they don’t seem to recognize a dragon plummeting from above when they’re in the sky. And apparently, they don’t see me as any kind of a threat when I’m asleep and hardly moving.

There were other seagulls on the roof, who’ve also taken off as I’ve roused.

It seems to be late in the morning, and I’ve somehow slept through the Morning Roll Call, and missed my chance to start it.

How did that happen? I didn’t think I slept that deeply. I would have expected the calls of my neighbors to wake me, at least.

I check my messages and my server, to see if anything else weird happened last night.

I check the news, both the daily paper’s website and the weekly.

Nothing in particular, yet.

That dream had been so profound feeling, I expect it to be on par or to surpass the effects of the dream I had when this all started. But so far, nothing but my own feelings of rooted calm, grounded confidence, and a growing strength and energy that feels like freshly oxygenated blood in my veins.

I stretch and examine myself.

My indigo scales gleam with faint ultraviolet reflections under the overcast sky, and the blue scales surrounding them reflect tiny visions of the clouds. Here and there, scraps of dead skin and scale cling to my cracks and crevices, but I’m sure they’ll work their way loose and free with movement.

Maybe I didn’t do too terrible a job of shedding yesterday.

If I knew a Becky, I’d try to make her feel one of my legs. A Rhoda will do.

I feel the need to talk about my dream and to show off.

So I go to do that.

And when the door of the coffee shop jingles with my entrance, Kimberly looks up to say, “Ooh, shiny!” And then a squint and a jutted chin, and she adds, “You’ve got bits still on you.”

“Oh, you need a shower brush! Probably a good stiff one,” Kim exclaims.

“Oh, I have such a good idea,” Kimberly turns to her, excited. “Take a bunch of those and nail them to the inside of a big horseshoe shaped thing, and make it like one of those things for cleaning boots and shoes, but for Meg. Probably make it out of plywood and shit, and fill it with sand for weight.”

That sounds divine, actually.

“I wouldn’t know how to make that,” Kim says, blinking.

“Neither do I, but Nathan’s good at that kind of thing, and I can learn,” Kimberly says. “Also the nerds at the Maker Space would love it as a project, I bet. Especially if other dragons find it useful.”

“Fair point,” Kim concedes. Then she turns to me, “Meg. I’m going to give you the Dust Buster while you hang out today, OK. See if you can use it if you shed the last of that skin in here, please.”

Look back out the window toward my favorite outside table, then back at her.

“Oh, OK. The yooj?”

“Yes.”

“No problem! I’ll bring it out.”

“Thanks.”

“Oh, new word!”

“Yes.”

“Fantastic!”

And the rest of the week starts to proceed like that morning. Slow, comfortable, with mostly easy conversations and a growing uneasiness because no shoe is dropping, no fallout falling, and no news in particular.

I actually develop a new daily routine. Or realize that I already have one that emerges when nothing else interrupts it.

The Morning Song is followed by stretching, then coffee, then talking to whomever wants to talk to me. I take a flight around the edges of my territory, quietly. Sometimes I visit a business, not to buy anything, but to simply say, “hi,” to whomever is in there, and then move on. If a conversation happens, it happens, and it makes me happy. Then I nap most of the afternoon on my roof. And eat every other day. I get my water from the coffeeshop, two big bowls of it follow my daily coffee. And then I go back for another bowl after my nap.

I spend a lot of it thinking and talking to my people. Rhoda gives me that document of advice for activism, and I just go ahead and post it to my discord and tell the others to delegate the appropriate tasks to each other, and to volunteer.

When they don’t all step up, I surprise myself with the audacity to make requests, and then advisements, then phrases that read an awful lot like orders.

Mostly just to treat each other better, and work with our humans to find better communications accommodations and put them into place.

The Maker Space completes its dragon-sized keyboard project for the library and starts a second one.

Waits steps into the library and accepts the invite to my server.

rivertroll57 introduces himself as Anurak (he/him), and he has opinions on food that he misses eating.

I apologize for the night I harassed him, and he tells me to not do it again. But he has no trouble with me attending court so long as I don’t bother him. He’s somewhat bewildered about the idea of territories, actually.

And if anyone can get doordash to deliver several pounds of something decently spicy to his bridge, he’ll be thankful. He can’t afford it.

When we talk over the internet, we’re all amazingly reasonable. We even joke about our draconic urges and instincts, our feelings. And we learn that we’re not only all different in physiology, but also personality and psychology. We all exhibit one stereotype or another of dragons, but no one has all of them, and we’re all each a different grab bag of foibles.

It reminds me of any human forum I’ve participated in, especially the queer and autistic ones.

Wentin’s Arboretum Anxiety Klatch doesn’t meet again, yet. And I wonder if they all might be waiting for me to give the signal. As if I’m the most connected dragon in town, and therefore an authority.

I do know two Artists, but I don’t think anybody else knows that or the significance of it. If they do, it’s subconscious and not well understood.

Ptarmigan has been more inconspicuous and discrete than she implied she’d be.

And it seems that everyone knows Chapman but not what sie is. Or they aren’t admitting to it.

But I imagine that if they know Chapman, they know how competent, knowledgeable, and connected sie seems. And I imagine between Chapman, Rhoda, and my coffee shop, I might have a reputation that’s also announced by my insistence on starting the Morning Song every day that I can.

But maybe I’m getting a little full of myself.

I have one more counseling appointment before anything interesting happens, during which we talk about my dreams. I feel like my counselor thinks she’s at a loss for how to serve a dragon, honestly. She’s floundering. Her interpretations aren’t particularly relevant.

I don’t know what to do about that, but it’s really her job, her responsibility. In the meantime, having one more person to talk to, even if it’s stymied by my partial mutism and the need to use AAC, is something I do value.  

And nearly every night, I finish off my day by having tea with Rhoda in her apartment.

Oh, and it rains, a lot. And I haven’t decided if I like sleeping in it out in the open on a roof or not. It’s both soothing and relentless.

“Ptarmigan and Chapman still don’t think my moon dream did anything,” I tell Rhoda the night of Monday, the 16th of September. 

A big part of our nightly tea sessions is that we give each other plenty of time to compose our thoughts and sentences. We’re not going for long, in depth discussions to get things done. We’re enjoying each other’s company and occasionally punctuating it with well thought out observations and concise reports about how our days are going.

It’s nice.

I like it.

“I think maybe it did, though,” Rhoda says, but doesn’t elaborate.

I bathe my tongue in delicious tea steam and then laconically ask, “How?”

“Mm,” she grunts. And then she gestures with a lazy wave of her fingers and says, “This.”

I smile and wait.

I like the idea that if I dream of something peaceful and good, that some kind of peace and goodness follows in my life.

It still mostly feels like coincidence to me.

But here I am, a dragon, sitting in the living room of a middle aged sad hearted woman, sharing tea and sentiments with her.

I can imagine just what style of artwork would be used on that greeting card.

“Truthfully,” Rhoda says. “I think too many people were trying to do too many things at once right away, including you dragons, and y’all had to figure everything out. I think that dream was really just your subconscious mind telling you you’ve reached the next stage, yourself. And an equilibrium between everyone else was being reached that your brain noticed. But I like to think it presaged these evenings we’re having.”

Ah. Hmm.

I allow myself to enjoy composing my next sentence, however long it takes.

“Is there another idiom for ‘waiting for the other shoe to drop’?”

“Ah, yeah. I get you,” she says. “Some people are probably gathering their forces and not enjoying their tea.”

“How learn magic?” I ask, more abruptly.

“You want to get down to business before bed?” she puts her tea down.

“Yes.”

“OK, I’m in,” she straightens her back and looks down at the low table between us that is covered in crochet magazines and her tea set. Then she looks up at me through her brows, “I don’t know, specifically. But most people go about it by reading books from authors who they think have special knowledge. There are rituals and shit, right? And most magic that people do probably doesn’t work. At least, not in the way that pendant of yours that Chapman made works. But I’ve got a question.”

“Yes.”

“When you use that pendant, do you feel that shift you’ve mentioned? Do you sense it?”

I try to remember the few times I’ve used it and I think my answer is, “No.”

“Then,” she says. “I think that’s where you start. That tells you that what you sense is when an Artist is actively altering the world. Not when the alteration they’ve made does something weird or amazing. I think that is a big huge clue, and it can tell you all sorts of things.”

I make a quiet knocking noise three times as sort of my own version of humming in response.

“You’ve got a sense no one else has. Use it.”