Meghanology – book 1 of girldragongizzard

Day seven, and another serenade from the roof of my building, once again led by me, self proclaimed queen of the local dragons. My challenge cry is the best, after all.

I end up watching the construction workers setting up their scaffolding, while I’m perched on the edge of the roof, head hanging over and looking down at them. Claws gripping molding on either side of my neck. I’ve got my wings spread out to help soak up as much sun as possible, to assist in digestion.

Fridge food was easier to digest, apparently. Already mostly processed, or so fibrous, in the case of the vegetables, that it went right through. But I didn’t tear the seagulls up much in order to murder them, and they went down with a lot of structural integrity still intact.

It feels like the rocks are helping. My body, at least, has calmed down a lot since I’ve swallowed them.

Still, I’m starting to seriously consider Nathan’s ground chuck suggestion.

I’m not going to be spending all of my monthly money on meat. I still have a few other things I need to pay for, such as my phone bill. Or a data plan that’s compatible with this new tablet. I’ll have to work that out.

But basing my diet on ground chuck sounds like a good plan right now.

Some of the construction workers look up and wave at me. And I stick a claw out and wave back, awkwardly.

Maybe us dragons were just imagined up by humanity, to be something they feel the world needed. A timely disruption. That finally manifested now, on the precipice of a critical moment in history.

It sure does seem like the people who are objecting the loudest to us are those with some kind of power to lose, and their followers. And everyone else just kind of seems to love us.

I don’t know.

I just know what I’ve always been, and I like it.

And I like it better, especially, on mornings like this, when union workers smile up at me while they go about their jobs.

I do hope they do a good job to help keep my building from falling apart. As nice as it felt to have my own cave in the side of it, it was still a violation of my own home. 

If I had my way, I’d build this thing a big differently. Keep my apartment in the same place, but with a big, supported doorway in the wall leading to a balcony big enough for me. A landing pad. With no railing. And the rest of the building would be reinforced concrete. With iron spikes. And it might be really cool to have a PA on the roof with stacks of speakers to make any stadium jealous.

I huff.

What if I’d been someone who had a job? What would this be like?

I see Cerce walking up my favorite runway, and she’s already looking up at me and waving.

I lift and wave my tail back and forth in return. It’s a bit more like lashing, the way it moves, thumping the roof on either side of me. But, oh, that feels good, and I wonder why I haven’t tried it sooner.

It keeps going, but at a lower and more comfortable angle.

I’m sure my downstairs neighbors don’t care for it, but they’re about to experience a whole day of construction noises. And also, maybe they can be reassured that there’s a dragon on their roof that won’t put up with the kind of shit Loreena and Poink got into last night.

I have to admit, I’m not really sure I’m thinking like humans anymore. Part of me does still recognize that this line of reasoning isn’t, well, reasonable. At least not to a lot of the local humanity.

But everyone does have to adapt now. There’s just no other way about it.

I raise my head with a thought.

What is considered politeness by dragons? What are our cultural norms? Are they what we inherited from our local humans? Or do we get to have our own ways?

I remember reading something from an Autistic blogger about how what’s considered polite by most of society isn’t necessarily what’s good or even friendly for everyone. That new mores and norms should be constructed about meeting individual sensory and social needs, that accommodations for Autistic people could lead to a more considerate society all around.

But I wonder how that can be applied to a sudden population of unique and bizarre monsters that have the instinctual need to scream at each other every morning or get into bloody fights about it later.

“Meg!” Cerce calls from the street corner closest to where I’m lying.

There’s a T-intersection below and to the right of me, and that’s the street I like to fly down or take off from when there’s no traffic. That puts her just over the heads of the construction workers below me, from my line of sight.

Sure.

I get up and push myself off the lip of the roof, angling to the left so that I can spiral, flapping repeated, over the parking lot.

My controlled descent brings me to a gentle landing behind her from where I started, but she’s turned to watch me the whole time.

I do something that I think of as a dragon curtsy, and then puff out my chest and hold my head up as high as I can on all fours, which puts my nose at about her collarbone level. Leaning back onto my haunches is what gets my head above six feet, and I don’t do that to her.

“Want to have coffee with me?” she asks.

Heck, yes! I look in the direction of the front outside table and bob my head.

“OK, I’ll meet you right there,” she says. “Do you want your usual, or something different?”

I don’t really know how to answer that without pulling out my tablet, so I bow my head and then bob it again.

“I’ll get your usual.”

I give her a quick cat smile, then bound over to the crosswalk to wait there for her, and for the light to turn green. I think it’d probably help people to see a dragon following the laws when it’s not strictly necessary. And, besides, it’d be what I would do if I wasn’t a dragon. I’ve just always been that way, kind of like Chapman.

Oh, I do hope things aren’t super weird between me and Chapman now. I’m worried about what sie’ll have to say to me.

On the other hand, I’m worried about what I might say to hir if I give myself the chance. What happened last night was weird. Maybe there’d been a time where sie learned the names of my dragon neighbors, but that moment just before sie’d said their names something happened. I felt it with a part of my body, like a string from my stomach to the center of my head was plucked.

I try to think about whether I’ve ever had moments like that before, especially before metamorphosis. 

But soon Cerce and I are crossing the street like a couple of weird school girls heading to class together, and I’m distracted by that moment. Not making anything of it, just feeling something I wish I could have had when I was younger, even if the actual visual of the two of us belongs more in some anime I would never have watched. Casual female companionship.

As we’re crossing the street, even though we’re not saying anything to each other, I really feel Cerce’s presence and mood, and I get the impression that she has something she wants to share with me.

On the other side, I break off with an easy head jerk, and head to my table, wondering if Cerce had been updated by the others about my decision to stay outside. I wouldn’t be surprised if the shop staff had their own chat channel somewhere, or a group SMS text session. It’d be smart, and there’ve been times when I’ve had that thought before.

Maybe, I should have my own, and I should invite all of my humans to it.

Oh, yes, definitely.

By the time Cerce comes back out, I’m already setting it up on my tablet, and considering just who to invite. I’m stuck on Chapman.

I’ll figure that out later, after we’ve talked again.

Actually, it turns out she doesn’t have anything for me and that she’s got her day off from both school and work and just wants to talk to her favorite local dragon.

Sitting down, she says, “I really want to ask you a bunch of stuff. My degree is in communication, and getting to talk to a living being that is not human is just way too cool to me. Is that OK?”

I give her my gesture of affirmative, and then make a show of adjusting my tablet and relaxing.

“I’ll try to keep it to yes or no questions, if you want, so you don’t have to use your tablet if you don’t want to?”

I don’t really care, but I hit, “Yes.” It seems like the best way to keep the conversation flowing.

But the word echos in my head when I hear it, and I feel an urge.

I look at the tablet sideways, and then hit, “Yes,” again.

Cerce smirks and watches me.

It’s such a simple sound.

“Yes,” I make the tablet say yet again. And then I hit it several times in succession, not really counting.

Then I look up at Cerce and open my mouth and my chest says, “Yes,” in a near perfect imitation of the tablet’s voice.

“Ha! Oh, that’s delightful,” Cerce exclaims.

Experimentally, I hit, “No.”

I’m pretty sure I can get that one, too. So I do a repeat of my performance for, “Yes.”

“NoNoNoNoNoNoNo,” says the tablet.

I open my mouth and say, “No.”

Then I give the biggest, longest cat smile I’ve ever given and huff. Then I tell Cerce, “Yes.”

She claps.

And then she asks, “So what’s that like?” And then, after a second, she slaps her forehead with both hands and nearly shouts, “No! I’m sorry! Did that feel cool?”

“Yes,” I say. And then I hold up a claw and look at my tablet for a moment, then type out, “It came to me. Urge. Like breathing fire. Body knew what do.”

“That’s so fascinating,” she says. “I think I know what that might feel like. Like, sometimes I just get the urge to blurt out a word, and sometimes I can’t stop myself. Usually a word I’ve just heard. It’s called echolalia. Did you ever experience that before?”

I’m finding that it’s getting harder for me to remember my life before my metamorphosis. I still have all the knowledge I had, but I never related to my body or outward identity back than, so the memories are hard to trigger.

But, I think I remember experiencing echolalia once or twice, it’s familiar. And what I just experienced felt familiar. So I say, “Yes.”

“Is it like that? LIke echolalia?”

“Yes,” I say. Then I do my typing routine, “All instinct same for me.”

“I wonder how long your subconscious has been working on the word, ‘yes’,” she muses.

“Saturday,” I say with the tablet. Until I learn more words, I’m going to keep saying “yes” and “no” with my syrinx and everything else with the tablet. It’s the same voice either way, hilariously enough.

“I think it’s kind of funny that you’ve chosen to sound like Angelina Joli when she’s playing a posh role,” Cerce says.

I think about that for a moment, then say, “Tablet misogyny. My euphoria.”

“You know, that makes a lot of sense to me,” she replies. “Different question. Are you endothermic? Like a lizard? Or more like a bird?”

“Yes,” I say, and then duck my head and look at her with just my right eye. I really don’t know the full answer to that. I know I feel sluggish when it gets cold enough, and my stomach is happier digesting things in the heat. And that I don’t sweat, at all. But I don’t know what my limits and needs are, nor what they would mean. But now I want to tell her something unprompted. The longer sentence takes a moment. “Want know what seagull taste like?” I ask.

She grimaces, shakes her head, and then looks around before saying tentatively, “Yes?”

“Ocean. Oil. Shit. Blood,” I say. “The worst sushi.”

She closes her eyes, makes a sick expression, and laughs silently, her shoulders going up and down. “I don’t know why I agreed to that,” she exclaims.

Then conversation pauses for a while as we both enjoy the moment and gather our thoughts.

Then she asks, “Do you ever miss being human?”

That’s easy, “No.”

“Why not?”

“Never human,” I reply. “Not know what like.”

“Huh.”

“Yes.”

“I remember what you were like before,” she says. “You were always so quiet and kept to your favorite corner of the shop, and just stayed there all day with your refills. And I gotta admit, it did seem like you were watching over your domain, content. But, still, also unsettled.”

“Yes.”

“How do you feel about the other dragons in town?”

Oh, that’s a doozy.

We all keep coming back to this in some way, because it’s the Situation.

“Too many emotions,” I admit. “Need more space.” And then, after a couple beats I add, “Not mating season yet.”

Her eyes go wide, and I feel like I’m seeing that expression on the faces of my friends too much.

I want to do something to bring more stability to my city, but I’m at a complete loss as to how, other than to stick to my guns, be as loud as possible, and keep winning fights.

But the thing is, I’ve only fought Whitman.

And my fifty years of learning things from humans make me feel like there should be a better solution than that. I wish I could talk to and reason with the other dragons, and negotiate a peace. And convince more of the others that some of us need to move out up into the mountains and other wilderness. Spread out.

From what I figure, we all manifested from human bodies, and that means there’s more of us where there are more humans. And that’s not a natural distribution for dragons. However, those of us who’ve been around for a while have also gotten attached to our familiar haunts. Our instincts are kicking in full swing, telling us these places are our territories.

And, maybe I should be the big girl and leave and provide an example by doing so. But I know that all that would do is create a vacuum that the others would fight viciously over.

I know I’ve thought this a few different ways over the past few days. It feels like it’s long past time to act.

But it’s also only been six and a quarter days.

As we’re thinking about things again, Rhoda approaches from down the block and stands next to me to report, “They’re boxing up your stuff and piling it in the hallway now, Meg. I stood there for a while to let them know they’re being judged. I think they’re being good about it.”

Cerce looks up at her and points at me and says, “That’s a dragon!”

“She certainly is,” Rhoda says.

“Yes,” I say.

Rhoda turns and assesses me for a moment, eyes going up and down, then says, “Stop.”

I tilt my head, then turn to my tablet and program it to repeat that word several times, like I did before.

I have to make it do that two more times before the words starts to take hold of me and bubble up.

I turn back to Rhoda and say, “Stop.”

“Perfect,” she says.

The thing is, the way I’m learning to talk, to imitate my tablet, there’s no emotional inflection. I say these words the exact same way every time. No sense of urgency, if I say, “Stop.” Just a statement.

I say it again, “Stop.”

“You’re gonna need that,” Rhoda says.

“Yes,” I reply. But I’m worried it won’t be taken seriously in an actual crisis.

She studies me for a while longer and then says, “You know what to do if you want to learn how to say that forcefully, right?”

Oh, of course. I just need to find a clip of Angelina Joli shouting, “Stop!” And then play it over and over again until I can do it.

Or I could do Chris Hemsworth. Or David Tenant. Or Sigourney Weaver. Or someone with a super deep and loud voice.

I wonder if I could somehow improvise and mix my rumble in with it.

Cerce is smiling and glancing back and forth between the two of us. And then she says, “I really want you to talk to my prof, Meg!”

I decide to say, “Maybe,” using my tablet, of course.

Cerce looks confused at the tablet like she wasn’t expecting me to say that, but then she starts squinting at it harder and leans forward. “I’ve got another question for you, Meg.”

“Yes.”

“How are you keeping that thing charged?”

I look closely at it myself, because I’ve totally forgotten about doing that somehow.

The battery is at 100%.