Contact Was Mutual (Fiction)

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The town holds a ledger for the dragons. It sits behind the counter at City Hall in a drawer that sticks unless you lift it slightly before pulling. I know this because I work there three mornings a week, and because no one else likes dealing with the ledger. The pages are thick and cream colored and smell faintly like mildew. Every dragon that passes through gets an entry in the ledger: Arrival date. Direction. Size. Color, if anyone can agree on it. Damage, if there is any. Names of witnesses. Names of the dead, if it comes to that. Some entries are inconclusive: People see a shadow. Chickens go missing. Someone swears they heard wings. We write it down anyway.

We’d not had a confirmed landing in two years. Then on a Tuesday, a man came in with soot on his shirt and said a dragon had come down in the field behind the old high school. He told us like he was reporting a pothole. I asked him how big. He held his hands apart, then farther apart, then stopped and said, “Big enough.” I wrote that down.

By the time I got there, half the town had already parked along the fence line. Someone had brought folding chairs. It had the feeling of a ball game without noise.

The dragon was in the middle of the field where the grass had burned away to a clean circle of dirt. It lay with its head down, wings folded in a way that suggested it had learned how to be smaller than it was. Up close, the scales were not one color but a worn green that broke to ash along the joints. The wings, folded tight, showed thin seams where the membrane had stretched and healed. Its body extended farther than I first understood, the length of it carried in the slow curve of its tail along the edge of the burned ground. Its sides moved slowly. It was breathing. That was the first thing I noticed. The second was that it did not look at all interested in us. I stood there with my clipboard and wrote what I could. Confirmed landing. Location: field behind the old high school. Size: Large. Color: Uncertain. No immediate damage observed.

Around dusk, when people started to drift away to dinners they would not taste, I saw Mirra walking across the field. She did not hurry. We had gone to school together for a few years before she moved away. She had been quiet in the way that made teachers call on her more than they should. She crossed the charred line where the grass ended and the dirt began as if it were a threshold she had already considered long before that evening.

She walked straight to the dragon and stopped a few feet from its head. No one shouted. The dragon opened one eye. It was the color of something deep underwater. They looked at each other for a long time. Then she reached out and placed her hand on its face just below the eye where the scales were smaller and lighter. She did it like she had done it before. Not cautiously. Not bravely. Just correctly. The dragon let out a slow breath that moved the dirt in a circle around them. I wrote down: Witness approached. Physical contact made. No aggression observed. I underlined no aggression.

The next morning the dragon was still there. So was Mirra. She had brought a folding chair. She sat beside the dragon with a book open in her lap. Every so often she would read out loud. Not loudly. Just loud enough to carry.

The county sent a man out with a vest and a badge. He told everyone to stay behind the fence and not to provoke it.  He spoke with Mirra. She nodded a few times. He nodded back in a way that suggested he was agreeing to something he did not understand. People stopped by on their way to work. They stayed for a few minutes. They left. The dragon did not move much. Mirra read. Sometimes she rested her hand on its side, with the rise and fall of its breathing under her palm.

I updated the ledger each morning. Day two: No damage. Continued presence.

Day three was the same.

On day four, the dragon lifted its head. The movement was deliberate, like standing after sitting too long. Mirra closed her book. They looked at each other again. It was not the same look as before. She stood and stepped back. The dragon unfolded one wing, then the other. The air shifted. People took a step back without being told. The dragon leaned forward and touched its forehead lightly to Mirra’s shoulder. Then it turned, gathered itself, and lifted. The sound was not what I expected. Less roar, more weight. It rose over the field, over the fence, over the cars, and then it was gone in the direction of the river, without fanfare, without applause.

She walked back across the field, over the charred line, and toward the road. When she reached the fence, I asked if she needed anything. She said no. I asked if she was going to stay in town. She said not this time.

I did not write that down. There is no place for it in the ledger.

That afternoon, I filled in the last line: Departure observed. No casualties. No structural damage. I closed the drawer carefully so it would not catch. That night, I kept thinking about the way the dragon had lowered its head to Mirra, the way she had not stepped forward to meet it. Just stood there and let it come the rest of the distance.

In the morning, I added one more note in the margin where no one checks: contact was mutual.

Eric Goldfarb writes fiction, essays, and poems about the quiet reinventions that shape a life. His work appears or is forthcoming in Hippocampus Magazine, Third Wednesday, ONE ART, Haiku Journal, Midsummer Dream House, Panorama, and Defenestration. He lives in Atlanta with his wife.