And then something happened. Simon looked up at me broken and terrified. “It said your name! The dragon said yourname!” he screamed. And this horror created what I can only describe as a rip or a kind of smear, like the world around Simon had boiled itself to an evaporated state and formed this millisecond injection of pure undiluted stress that I think would have killed him if it hadn’t done what it did instead.
Simon vanished.
He didn’t get up and run away. He wasn’t incinerated by the dragon or swallowed by it, he simply vanished into thin air. I saw him there, lying crumbled on the ground with tears of a thousand types of pain, and then I didn’t. His body, his blood, his presence, everything about him, completely disappeared. The ground was clean.
The most unyielding silence filled the bottom of the well. Everyone had died. Everyone was gone. Only myself and the dragon, this whale of the sky, remained, and even his breath was silent, his nostrils like the exhaust pipes of an idling car. I broke into screams.
“What did you just do?” I demanded. “What did you do?!”
“I didn’t do anything!” The dragon was humanlike in his reaction, eyes wide, mouth askew. He even skurried backward like a fool caught in a bind, shaking his head, insistent denial. “Who was that? How did he do that?”
“He just disappeared!” I felt sick. The unreality of what I had just seen didn’t register in the right place in my brain, fueling nothing but words of sharp exclamation. “Where did he go? His leg was broken, he was bleeding, he needs help, where the hell did you send him?”
“I didn’t send him anywhere. That right there was spontaneous combustion. Remarkable. Who was he?” The dragon seemed genuinely surprised. “I smelled a dash of a pheromone, something lovely and nostalgic. There was a delicious amount of fear in there too.” The dragon crawled over to where Simon had laid seconds ago and sniffed. “Completely gone, not a trace, but what a delicious smell that was. Pure combustion. In all my five hundred and fifty-five years I’ve never seen it with my own eyes before.”
“He’s my boyfriend,” I said, no doubt about it now. “Now send me to wherever he went. Eat me, eat me now.”
The dragon turned his head and smiled at me, narrowing his eyes. The corners of his mouth practically touched the corners of his eyes. “Yourboyfriend?”he said. “What a fun surprise. You’ve had a busy year out here, haven’t you?”
“Send me to him.”
The dragon shook his grinning head. “That’s not how it works, George. My handlers have set up a pathway for you and that’s where you’ll go—to your beloved twenty twenty-six. What happened just now was purely independent combustion, unattached to my pathways. Now hold on”— the dragon leaned back on his tail, crossed his arms, thinking gleefully—“if he was yourboyfriend, then why—”
“Just send me to him.”
“You wanted to leave him.”
“I thought I would be able to come back.” Tears pulsed from my eyes and instantly evaporated in the heat. “Or he could come with me.”
“You never said that.” He pointed a claw at me and leered,whip-quick. “That’s an excuse. You’re just like all the other boys—flitty little termites running from one shiny thing to the next. You’ve had your fill and now you want back. What do you want back to, George? Go home and watchtee-vee? Is that what you want? I probably have a tee-vee still in my gut if you want one, let’s see—” He drove a fist into his soft and deflated belly. He stuck a finger in his mouth and started retching.
“Stop!” I said. “Please just bring him back. Go find him.”
“You don’t want him back!” The dragon spoke in a vicious bark, reminding me of the animal he was. “He can go find me for all I care.”
“Then make me spontaneously combust! Breathe fire over me, slash me with your claws, you’re right, I’m a fool. Come and attack me!”
“HAHAHA.” The dragon’s laughter boomed out of the well like a volcano. His wings extended and he flew upward. He landed on the ground with a seismic pulse on all fours, facing me head-on. “Only you can make yourself spontaneously combust.” He snapped his teeth. “Go on, try it, George. Get more weepy, get more pathetic. Your boyfriend was able to do it. Obviously he cared enough. You’re just not heartbroken.”
“I am!” I sputtered and coughed. Thick whirls of smoke and sparks engulfed me.
“You’re not! You’re not heartbroken—I’d even go so far as to say you’re relieved. You didn’t love him, you’re not devoted to him, certainly not as much as he must be to you. I bet you don’t even want to go back to where you came from. You don’t want to stay here, you don’t want to go there, you just want to sit at the bottom of this hole with me and all my filth. That’s what youwant. You want to be me. You want to be a facilitator for filth. You’re a shitty little bird, aren’t you?”
I wailed and shook. My head pounded with blood and rage. Some warbly muscle sprained itself in the back of my neck, a pain in my stomach, but still I remained there with the dragon.
“Such empty passion,” he said. He stuck out his forked tongue and wiggled it in my face. “You’re not a bird. You’re just a pig. That’s why you want to go back to twenty twenty-six, to be back with your pig people. You couldn’t be anything for your boyfriend here, so you want your old gobble-life back there. They’ll feed you well, there’s plenty of shit to shovel. There’s a new Sainsbury’s on the high street. You ever been to Scarborough? Trust me it looks about the same now as it does then, just more piss, meat, and mud. They’ll sing a song about a fair there. There’ll be a chippy and a vape shop and a Premier Inn and an Aldi and treacly little people complaining about the NatWest closing down and I know all that because I hear that from the people, I lie underground and listen to them bitch and moan, that’s all you’ve got to look forward to, George. Money and food and petrol—those stupid little words you say in your stupid little language. ‘Oi, did you see they changed the hours of the M&S and the car park went up a pound? Did you see they’ve gone and called a strike just in time for half-term?’ Have you missed those conversations, George? Have you missed those drip people? The junkies, nags, and tramps? The bankers, voyeurs, and holiday home whores? The gilet alcoholics and gallstoned queerdos? The greenbelt low-culture gadflies? The diabetic pod-people constipating the highways, counting chemtrails and credit card debt and missing me, flying above them—they don’t even know it—theflames that await them—you want to go back there? That’s how bad you want it?”
I nodded my head, surprising myself. Suddenly clear-eyed. Like raising my hand in class. The pulse of rage had passed and a sense of finality trickled through my brain, skinny-dipped in my cerebellum. I could have almost laughed at how easy it suddenly felt. I wore chain mail, leather, cloth, sword, boots, helmet, but I couldn’t feel lighter, lifted by grief high above my station, richer than any pain or hatred could do. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, that’s exactly where I want to go. I want to go back. And I want to go now.”
The dragon guffawed like the worst kind of man, shrugged his shoulders like the devil he was. “I can’t tell your head from your tail, diva. But fine. Dust to dust, entropy to entropy. Let’s get it over with.” He lay back down again, pressed his chin to the ground, and opened his mouth one last time. It’s true, he was a facilitator, nothing more. I walked up his tongue and shuffled between his teeth into the cavern of his mouth with its wretched smell of freshly pressed plastic, jet fuel, and printer ink. I stepped across taste buds and ducked under a uvula. “Easy, easy,” the dragon said. A hundred fleshy polyps echoed his voice. I stepped carefully down into the hallway of his throat, already feeling sensations of a future that didn’t exist, a past that was no longer mine. Memories pitter-pattered across my skin like acid rain, memories of dogs, hay fever, ranting boyfriends, rising rents, smeared bugs on white walls, but mostly just tastes and sounds, of sweat, rubbing, smoke, and sand—as I clutched the hilt of my sword. As I unsheathed it.
In one solid motion, I knelt and staked the sword through throat and into ground.
The dragon reacted instantly. He whipped his head up, but with my sword stuck through him and the ground, he caused a hole to rip right through his neck. Suddenly I was back outside of him, still kneeling but on a rug made of his throat. I looked up just in time to jump away from his claws as they came swiping at me. With his other arm, the dragon clutched his neck and screamed but a vicious damage had already been done, his scream corrupted into a gargle. Blood mixed with bile, mixed with leftover embers and debris, and while he struggled to keep these things from bubbling up, dribbling out, I grabbed my sword again and ran and leapt and stabbed into the top of his chest, ripping the tear even further, pulling it down his belly, spilling lava and all the things I never wanted to see again. The flames and embers of liquid modernity rained down over me, melting and mixing with my armor, burning my clothes, my skin, I screamed along with the dragon, along with my heart that had been broken—it was shattered! Simon! oh Simon!—my tears as proof, wiped away by fire and guts—stomach enzymes, what kind of madness? I licked at the rain, mouth open like a crazed dragon myself, lapping up his pseudoscience. “Simon!” I cried. “Bring me Simon!” as I drove sword through crocodile skin and dinosaur bone and python eye and godless, empty skull. Soot—that is all there was. Soot that coated all sound and all alive as the lizard rattled and melted and finally died.
17
2026. I can say the year without shame. When I was in the grips of my self-immolation back then, I took comfort in the clear timeline: fights with boyfriend, dishonesty at work, debauchery in mind and on beach, all these stones skipping easily, predictably to my sinking. It was simple cause and effect and while the effects were of a great magnitude (unemployment, unlovability), I never looked back on them with bewilderment. I was never really surprised. I was never shocked.
