Home. Hmmm.
I sighed.
“OK,” I said to no one. (I hadn’t brought the donkey like Simon had asked.) I filled a satchel with some of the aerated rock, but it felt too heavy to drag back on my own, so I left it over by the shovel. One of the rocks rolled out of the bag and hit the shovel, knocking it over. When I went to stand the shovel back up again, the ground around me sunk. It was as easy as that. The ground impressed itself deeper by a few inches—not dramatically, but enough to startle me. Dust flew up. There was silence. I didn’t move. Then, with complete disregard, I fell through.
The ground had been deceitful, a brittle roof caved in. I landed painfully, ten feet below onto a new plane of earth under its crust. All the parts of what I thought had been a car shattered and rained over me in chunks of pumice and stray metal. I held my breath and waved away the dust and ash, coughing.
I had fallen inside a shallow lava tube. The ground here was smoother, less possible to break with a shovel, and black with a moonlit sheen despite the sun overhead. The tube continued into a twisting, downward slope, opening up into a larger cavern,which I entered, amazed. As the lava had cooled and hardened and the landslides settled, these deposits of empty space must have formed, sealing themselves up. The walls would have been cool to the touch, but now exposed to the sun, they were warm.
I realized I was bleeding. Not from any one place in particular, but I felt soreness and stinging pain. I had landed poorly. I wiped blood off my leg, then wiped blood off my hand onto the obsidian wall. Then I realized I was crying. I was crying because I had wanted to call for Simon, but he was miles away. I was weak. I had had so many things wrong all this time. We had survived because we were together. But now I was out here and he was back there and he was so far away. And just when I thought I could wrestle my emotions onto a sturdier plateau of reason, the ground, once again, fell out from under me.
Black obsidian shattered. Gravity pulled me gracelessly. I plunged even farther into the earth, sliding along with an uncomfortable mixture of rock, glass, metal—as close to a liquid as those solids could be. I landed with an unsettling plonk, triggering nausea and blurred vision. I braced forward in a prone position as real pain flared out from within me. Droplets of tears and blood mixed. Everything was dark and spread out wide. Sunlight only trickled into this new space like fine grains of sand dashed across a black expanse until in front of me—right there—two fiery orange eyes opened. Awakened.
Each pupil was a narrow slit as tall as me, each horn, claw, and tooth the size of a dead tree. Its mouth was ajar, half open like the folded remains of a sunken battleship—not as if to eat me but as if to pause in thoughtful repose before speech, because after I cried “Oh my god” the mouth moved. Lips closed and opened. Teeth shone. A tongue shifted. Noise emitted. Actual words.
The dragon spoke.
It said, “Now how did you end up here?”
I shrieked and cursed. Echoes of my screams bounced off the cavern walls. The dragon said “Shhhhh,” like a steam engine. Smoke poured from its pursed lips, and I broke into a flurry of hacking coughs.
“Let me see if I can guess,” said the dragon. It unfurled itself and moved closer to me. It bent its head down. It sniffed me. My clothes and hair flew upward, sucked in the air. “I would guess early 2000s. Definitely post-1950, but the smell of entropy is strong—you’ve been here a while, haven’t you? Over a year I’d say. How’ve you managed to survive for so long? How’ve you found me?”
“You can talk?” I gasped.
The dragon rolled its boulder-size eyes and leaned back. Its body was doubled over itself, rolled up in folds of craggy, armored skin, so rocky and worn it wasn’t clear where dragon ended and earth began. “These conversations are always tricky,”hesaid—his voice rumbled with a devilish, male baritone, deep and throaty. “I know I’m probably causing a certain emotional reaction right now, but please understand that this is just as novel an occurrence for me. Don’t spoil it with shallow quibbles. Yes, I can talk. You should hear me scream.” His mouth didn’t move much when he spoke. I imagined some organ the size of a house deep inside him, punctured with intricate flaps and holes, emitting such a booming voice.
“You’ve been here this whole time?” I surprised myself with the question, but it had been over a week since the dragon’s attack and I had been out here every day digging things up. I remembered how the dragon had disappeared into a void of ash and smoke—we had never seen it fly away.
“I try to get a few weeks of sleep between feedings,” he said. “And I prefer the underground, where I won’t be disturbed. When I was smaller, I used to sleep in trees. I could perch like a bird and no one would be any wiser. Now tell me, where did you come from? What’s your name?” Gone was the dragon’s ferocious violence from weeks ago, all of that energy was condensed into a leering, sniffing eagerness. Despite his size, he squirmed around the cave with ease. His tail moved like that of a cat, snaking around me inquisitively.
“My name is George,” I said. “I came from over there.” I pointed vaguely over my shoulder, disoriented and overwhelmed. “On the slope of the next hill over, a smallholding a few miles away.”
“No, no, no—your time. You time traveled. I can smell it on you.”
“What? Yes. Right. I time traveled.” Adrenaline coursed through me. I felt my forehead and it was ice-cold. My ears were hot. “I came from here.” My mind blipped for a second. “But not originally. From London before. In the future.” I struggled to find the words that would give an accurate account of my story. Breathlessly I told the dragon about the moment I had time traveled, waking up in Greenwich in 1300, spending a whole year here. He was stoic the whole time, nodding along. He was a terrifying, horned monstrosity, but he was calm and listening. It was like I was speaking to a travel agent about a holiday that had gone horribly wrong. It wasn’t clear if he had ever had an interaction like this before, but he didn’t seem shocked or surprised by anything I said.
“Spontaneous time combustion,” the dragon muttered to himself—but even his mutterings were loud enough to reverberatein my guts. “Mental torture, emotional duress, heartbreak. Any number of combining factors can create ruptures and random collapses, which unfortunately only helps prove theories about entropy. You’re just a bunch of dust mites at the end of the day, so what if one of you flies through the window.”
I noticed the dragon’s accent. It was unplaceable, but it was clear and modern, that was the most notable thing about it. There was a calm, orderly tone to his voice, almost like a customer service rep explaining a tech issue. It gave me chills.
“You can time travel too,” I said.
“I can,” said the dragon. “I can come and go as I please, though I try to move sequentially when I can. I’m five hundred and fifty-five years old and often lose track of where I’ve been. Sometimes I’ve run into myself—have you ever talked to your literal self? It’s uneventful. It gets paradoxically boring because of course it’s a conversation you’ve already had with your other literal self who said the same things before you, to you, ad nauseam. Still, it’s refreshing to have company, seeing as I’m all alone.”
“You’re the only dragon?”
“Only one there’s ever been. I’ve seen my own birth, no brothers or sisters. I’ve seen it all. But not often a human in your predicament.”
“But you have before? There have been others this has happened to?”
“Very rarely. Spontaneous time combustion can occur only once in a human, organically at least. My own father was a human, actually. I remember an egg breaking and a man’s hands. I would sleep outside his house in a tree.” The dragon paused here and exhaled a ponderous line of smoke like from a cigarette.“Hey, I can take you back if you want. To your own time period. Name the place and I’ll take you there, go on, I’m dying to know.”
My breath caught on itself. Through all the shock, I hadn’t considered this. “How does that work?” I asked. I was weak and unsure. “You can just time travel whenever you want? How does a dragon show up in the future and not cause chaos?”
“Future? There’s no such thing as the future.” He chuckled. The cave walls shook. “And I have agreements with the places I travel between, at least, with the places outside the entropic zone. My agreements are mutually beneficial, so nothing is disrupted. We’re harmonized and recyclable.”
“That rubbish you spit out, the fire and the lava—it’s all stuff from the future.”
