Paper Cut
Her giant claws pierced the window panes like paper. Tendrils of smoke rose above great jaws stretched into a ravening smile. Red scales shimmered as she wrapped her long body around the college building. The tower groaned on its foundations, leaning under the weight of her crushing affection.
Stella had given herself a paper cut — just moments before a mythical creature alighted on the building. Now a dash of her blood was smudged across the book’s page, underlining Le Guin’s suddenly fateful words:
“But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.”
In that instant, on account of the paper cut — which was surprisingly painful — Stella had loosened the stays she normally kept on her mind. Now, because of her momentary lapse, the building was wrapped in the unwanted gift of a fire-breathing lizard’s attention.
She looked at the literature professor huddled under the table with the study group. In different circumstances, if he wasn’t fearing for his life, he would probably have reflected on this moment. “She is a metaphor for our ravaging consumption,” he might say, if canon-sized claws weren’t crushing the window plaster and frames weren’t falling from the walls. And, if books weren’t tumbling from the shelves like piles of firewood, he might add, “Do we interpret this moment as the threat of annihilation or as an invitation to transform?”
Suddenly it seemed ludicrous to Stella — how she had accidentally manifested a monster and opened a black hole in everyone’s certainty. Now, in a classroom built of words, utter silence was being punctuated by crushing destruction.
Unfortunately, she found it easier to create new realities than put a stop to existing ones. Now, this monstrous lapse in her self-control was clambering around the walls, causing quakes — and she couldn’t un-think it. Pausing at each window, the dragon pressed its giant red eye to peer inside, looking for someone, or something. One by one, every soul in the building shrank under its piercing scrutiny.
Only two people, Stella, and her friend Bee, knew who the dragon was looking for.
“Damn it,” hissed Bee, her arm wrapped around Stella as if she could protect her from herself. “Why do you always have to make everything so literal!”
Stella groaned.
They had been friends since grade school and, except for her mom, Bee was the only one who knew what she could do, and how real it was.
Her elementary school creations had been harmless enough: the arrival of a ‘lost’ puppy at Bee’s front door, comforting her after she had told Stella about her parent’s divorce.
Stella’s High School manifestations were edgier. In senior year, Chelsea Wright’s doctors couldn’t explain her sudden hair loss, but Bee connected the dots between Chelsea’s nasty Instagram post about Stella’s hair, and the bald vengeance that followed.
“You can’t go around crushing people like that,” Bee told Stella.
“I lost my temper,” Stella had replied lamely. “And the vision of that bitch without her precious locks just leaked out of me. Once it did, there was no taking it back.”
But a dragon. Now this was taking things to a whole new level. Stella hadn’t realized how powerful she had grown. How just one distracted moment could…
“Get a grip!” shouted Bee as the clambering dragon sent new shudders through the structure.
Reluctantly, giving Bee a squeeze, as if she was just heading to another class, Stella rose. Still under their flimsy table-top shelter, most of her classmates barely noticed that she was moving. A blond guy, whose name Stella couldn’t recall, was hissing good-byes into his phone, while two other students were frantically texting pleas for help.
A student known as V was streaming video from his iPhone: #Thisisreal. Later, V’s post would go viral and billons of eyeballs would watch Stella walk towards a giant red iris that glared back through a window. That image alone would assault everyone’s vision of reality.
Stepping forward, Stella’s heart twisted as she thought about her mother, who would find herself alone at home, not knowing whether to grieve or to hope for her daughter. Outside their two-bedroom home, the media vans would clog the street for weeks after what would become known as Stella’s ‘dragon abduction’. Swarms of journalists would press microphones into the neighbors’ faces, trying to find answers to their innermost question — how to demand more attention.
“She was so quiet,” someone would say. Those words flashing across the world’s screens, splashing newspaper pages, boiling Stella’s life down to a sound bite about her silence.
Ultimately, Stella’s life would be completely sliced and diced by a newspaper cut.
Gazing at this looming future, Stella wondered if it was too late to change the story. And seeing something glisten in the dragon’s eye, she invited a torrent of fire to flood her mind.
Finding her voice, she whispered to the dragon, “Together, we can make reality better”. And seeing its blade-shaped pupil dilate in response, she walked across the carpet of shattered windows and slipped through the opening.
