Sample from my upcoming...

 This is the first part of the first short story from a collection I'll be publishing soon.  I'm in the final stages of editing, now.  Hope you enjoy it!

A Friend, Indeed

 “Momma, there’s a dragon in my wagon.” 

Zoe blinked awake, rubbed her eyes, and blinked some more. “What did you say, baby?” she murmured, voice rough and scratchy with the nap she hadn’t intended to take when she’d laid down.

Zoe hadn’t been sleeping well. Neither had Tish, her daughter. Since Duane had deployed, she’d been waking up with nightmares every few hours. Zoe don’t know what he did tucking the little four-year-old girl in that was different from what she was doing, but she’d never had so many.

“I said there’s a dragon in my wagon. In the back yard. I was gonna go out and play, but it’s there.”  She popped a thumb in her mouth, frowning worriedly.

The exhausted woman closed her eyes and sighed. A dragon. In her wagon. Zoe supposed her daughter simply wanted her momma out in the back yard with her, since she was feeling her daddy’s absence. “Is it a friendly dragon, or an unfriendly one?” she asked, humoring her little girl. Her daughter was only four, and this was the first time her daddy had been gone longer than his two weeks a year training. She wasn’t taking it well.

Hell, neither was Zoe. Even without counting Tish’s nightmares, she had trouble falling and staying asleep without the warm, breathing hulk of her husband next to her. Her eyes were drifting closed again, against her will while Tish considered her question.

“I don’t know, Momma, it’s sleeping. I didn’t go near it. I didn’t even open the outside door—I saw it through the glass when I opened the inside door to go into the back yard. It looks like it’s only about the size of my floppy dog.” She blinked big brown eyes at her mother, while Zoe tried desperately to keep her own eyes from falling shut.

“Tish, can you hand me my shoes?” Zoe forced her eyes open wide, trying to wake up enough. “We can go investigate.” 

“I have them already, Momma,” she said, holding out the canvas slip-on shoes Zoe kicked into for grabbing the mail from the box down by the street.

She sighed and sat up, shoving her thick, black hair that had escaped from her braid out of her eyes with one hand, taking the shoes with the other to set on the floor so she could shove her bare feet into them. “You said it was in the back, right?  What color was the dragon?”

“It was the same green as my juice,” she replied, reaching up and wrapping her small hand around Zoe’s index and middle fingers. “It was really pretty in the yellow wagon, on the red leaves.”

Zoe smiled down at her. “I bet it was,” she said, thinking of that yellow Little People/Duplos plastic thing Tish insisted had to go into the back yard. Duane really would have preferred her to have a little red, metal wagon, like the one he’d grown up playing with, but this one was what they’d found, and what she’d loved.

Since it was November, it was full of dead leaves that she’d been using it to transport from one leaf pile to another around the yard. “I wonder if the dragon is in your wagon because it wants to sleep in your leaves,” Zoe mused.

She looked up at her mother, brow scrunched and brown eyes thoughtful. “I dunno,” she said. “Could be, if it doesn’t mind how scratchy leaves are. They are soft.”

The back yard had a really high privacy fence surrounding it. It was one of the things Zoe and Duane had liked about the house when they’d moved in: with the gate closed and locked, it was safe for a little girl to go out and play by herself. Usually. And their little girl was very independent. Usually.

Zoe opened the back door and looked out. And blinked.

Tish hadn’t been making things up to get her mother to go outside with her. There actually was a dragon in her wagon. It was about the size of a basset hound. Same general shape, too, with a long body. Just…there were also wings.

And it was looking at them, with golden eyes about as mournful as a basset’s.

“Momma…the dragon looks sad,” Tish observed.

“I noticed,” Zoe said absently. “Stay here.” 

“Okay,” she said softly.

She opened the back storm door and stepped out on the top step, closing the door carefully behind her. And really looked at the dragon, her arms crossed. She didn’t go any closer. It dropped its head and whined, wiggling in the wagon. The dragon was heavy enough to rock it on its wheels, plastic creaking ominously.

It sounded like the bassets Zoe had known—both the one she’d grown up with, and the one that they’d had until Tish had turned two—used to when they wanted scritches. That had to be why she went down and sat on the bottom step, about six feet from her daughter’s little plastic wagon full of dead maple leaves.

The dragon…the dragon hopped out of the wagon, and slunk over to her, creeping close to the ground even considering its short legs, and kind of sidling a little. As soon as it got close enough, it went belly down and crept the rest of the way before sitting up and laying its head on her knee. It looked up at her mournfully, then up at where Tish was standing, hands and face pressed to the glass of the door. And it whined again, and then nudged its head under her hand, just like a dog would, when it wanted to be stroked.

So, Zoe obliged, stroked its bright green snout, up to its brow ridges. The dragon’s jaw fell open, a bright red, forked tongue falling sideways out its mouth. Like a dog’s, just…forked. Its breath was hotter than she expected, considering she was currently petting and scratching a four-footed creature with scales. Not hot, like threatening fire, just hot like a mammal’s.

Even though it was clearly reptile-like, it was definitely not a reptile. Really lizard-like, low-slung with scales, just…warm-blooded. Maybe more like a bird?  But…birds had two legs and wings, not four. And feathers.

Zoe shook her head, trying to think past the exhausted fog as she looked at the creature begging for affection, and eyeing her daughter with longing. Not a bird. Not a lizard, either, despite the four legs and scales. And wings? So, six limbs, and warm blooded, but otherwise looking like a lizard. She really didn’t know what to make of it, but could tell it was happy with the attention.

“You like that, huh?” she said, rubbing around a weird, ragged-looking ear. Not like a dog’s, but not the exposed membrane of a reptile, nor the feather-covered membrane of a bird. Just…weird. Scaly and floppy. It leaned hard into the rubbing and…grumbled wasn’t quite the right word. One hind leg started thumping.

Zoe couldn’t help but smile. She glanced up to where Tish was dancing in impatience, but staying in the house like a good girl. “Come on out, honey, but go slow,” she said.

The dragon, after all, had very, very sharp predator’s teeth. And even if it was acting like a dog, it wasn’t one.

It whined again as the door came open, and closed very quietly. Trembled as she came slowly down the steps on the other side of Zoe from the dragon. And then, the dragon crawled across her lap to shove its head into her daughter’s arms, and try to cuddle with both of them at once.

And Zoe could tell why the plastic wagon had been creaking: the dragon weighed around half again more than her four year old.

Tish’s delighted giggle had the dragon jerking away to gallop around the back yard in sheer joy, which let Zoe get a better look at it. It was long and low, with short legs like a basset. It stretched its stubby wings out to help it keep its balance in the turns.

She wondered where it came from, and if it could fly.

It wound up crawling up under Tish’s arm and draping its front half over her lap, nudging against her cheek and chin with that smooth snout. And she cuddled the dragon, cooing happily as it blinked and smiled at her, bright red, forked tongue hanging from one side of its mouth. Zoe couldn’t help but smile, and reach down to scratch behind the dragon’s ear again. It grunted and started thumping the step with a hind leg, disarming Zoe further, the more it acted like a dog.

Tish smiled up at her, brown eyes bright, and dimples showing. “Momma, can we keep it?”

She hesitated. The dragon whined, climbing half over Tish’s lap to nuzzle Zoe’s arm and add hopeful eyes to Tish’s request. Zoe sighed. “I suppose,” she said hesitantly. “We can keep the dragon for as long as it will stay.” 

It licked her face. With raw meat-smelling breath. She sighed, wiping the rather slimy slobber off—there honestly wasn’t much—and pushed up to her feet. “I’m going to get a chair,” she said, “and a bowl for water.”

Both were just inside the back door. If either had been much further away, she’d not have gone for them. Because she’d been raised knowing you didn’t leave a child unsupervised with any animal for long at all.

They had the supplies to get a dog—they’d had a dog for a while, and then she’d passed. She’d been a great dog. Zoe wished, in a way, that Tish had been old enough to remember her, but in another, she was glad that Tish didn’t miss her dog for long. They’d either thrown away or donated most of the things they’d had for the dog, but not all of them. The things they still had would be about the right size for a basset-hound-sized dragon…she thought.

Zoe still wasn’t convinced she wasn’t hallucinating. Dragons weren’t real. Couldn’t be real. Because it was scaled like a lizard, but warm-blooded like a mammal. Or bird. Just with four legs. And a pair of wings, so six limbs, total. It acted like a dog, but she couldn’t quite get past the differences. The critter was strange.

The phone rang, while she was getting the bowl and the umbrella chair next to the back door. There was a handset and charger base just inside the kitchen, next to the stove, and she ducked in to grab it and answer. “Coffman’s residence, Zoe speaking,” she said, pinning the handset between her shoulder and ear.

“Zoe, it’s Mom.”  She hesitated. “I hate to ask you this, but has there been anything…strange…going on?”

She thought wryly of the dragon in the back yard. “Not much, no,” she said. “I do have a four-year-old with a vivid imagination who’s upset that her daddy’s been gone for a month, and has no idea when he’ll be back, and a bad case of prego-mush-brain, but other than that?  Nothing terribly strange.”

Just the dragon in the back yard that shouldn’t exist, she thought.

Her mom hummed. Then realized what Zoe had said. “Prego-mush-brain?  Are you pregnant?  Again?”

“You make it sound like I’m pregnant so often,” Zoe said drily. “This is only the second time.”

“But…but Duane isn’t there,” she said.

“He’s not been gone that long,” Zoe replied tartly, offended.

“That wasn’t what I meant,” she lamented. “Does he know?”

Zoe carried the bowl and chair and phone out in the back yard. Set the bowl down, and filled it with water. “Mom. He’s been gone a month. I just started the second trimester. He was with me for the first appointment, and saw and heard the bean’s heartbeat, and saw it jumping around on the portable ultrasound screen they brought in when they couldn’t find it with the Doppler. I am not scheduled for the big sonogram for another two weeks.” 

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” she demanded.

Zoe sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. “When did I tell you about my pregnancy with Tish?” Tish was bouncing around the back yard, giggling, and jumping into the piles of leaves she’d gathered. The green dragon bounced around behind her, moving like an extra-large ferret, and piling into the leaves after her, shoving its head down and flipping leaves into the air.

It was so cute it damn near gave her cavities. And it was one of the first times in the past two weeks Tish had played so happily and enthusiastically.

“Halfway through your second trimester, when you had started showing and couldn’t hide it anymore,” she replied acidly.

“No, Mom. Halfway through my second trimester, when the dangers of miscarriage dropped to nearly nothing,” Zoe pointed out. “You know. When you wouldn’t have your heart broken by losing another grandchild, like you did with Steve’s wife’s baby they lost right after they told you?”

She went silent for a moment. Then, “Oh. I see. Well. I guess that teaches me to make assumptions.”  Her voice was apologetic—Zoe knew that was probably all she’d get, since she wasn’t her mother’s darling youngest son who was perfect in every way. In her mother’s sight.

But only there. Everywhere else, Zoe’s little brother was a flaky twit, who should thank God every day he’d managed to marry so far above his worth.

“What kind of strangeness were you calling about, anyway?” she asked, after she’d let her mother brood a bit.

“Oh. Not much, really,” she said hesitantly. “Only…your brother called, and swore up, down, and sideways, he’d seen horse with a horn, running around with a herd of deer. I was wondering if he was on something, or if he’d actually seen something…unusual.”

“You mean mythological,” Zoe said flatly. “I’d say it was safer to assume he was on something until you get verification otherwise.”

“It’s one of the reasons I called you,” she explained, matter of fact. “You always have your head on straight, and you’d be more likely to know one way or the other.”

Zoe sighed. “Mom, Tish is in the back yard. I really need to go.” 

“Call me later, and tell me how you’re doing,” she demanded.

“Tired as hell, but the queasy is fading,” she said. “I’ll call sometime soon, when she’s gone down for a nap.”

Zoe found herself holding a phone giving her a fast beep as her mother hung up without saying goodbye, like she always did. She had this superstition that actually saying goodbye was bad luck, and would end with someone’s death.

She rolled her eyes, and leaned the umbrella chair against the house, thinking about what else they still had for a dog that might work for a dragon. Or what it might need. Shelter. A food dish. A collar?  Probably not that. Beds, bedding. Probably not a kennel for the house, either.

Shelter first. Zoe frowned, scratched her head while she tried to think, and then remembered where the dog house was: in someone else’s yard after they’d set it on the curb. She would have to either build or buy a new one, if the dragon decided to stay with them for long. And if the dragon spent much time outside.

The pillow, bedding, and toys would need to be replaced. They’d tossed the old stuff since it’d been old and worn when the dog had passed away. So Zoe would need to buy everything new.

The dragon galloped along after Tish, using its wings, now and then, to help it make a turn, or to keep it on its feet after a jump over a toy. Tongue hanging out of the side of its mouth, just like a dog.

Tish finally got tired, and went over to her favorite spot to sit, over in a small hollow beneath the spindly little maple tree, and flopped down. The dragon followed, curling around behind her with its head under her hand, and sighed as she started petting it. She scooched down to lay against the dragon, twisting over onto her side, murmuring to it. Zoe couldn’t hear what she was saying, but the dragon seemed to be listening intently.

Zoe got up, then paused and squinted toward the sun, thinking about the time. “Tish, it’s time to go in for a while,” she called.

“Can I bring Buddy?” she called back, climbing to her feet.

“Why did you call it Buddy?”

“Buddy isn’t an it,” she said firmly. “Buddy’s a boy. And it’s his name.”

Zoe looked down at the dragon. There wasn’t any visible cue of sex, so she had to ask. “How do you know that?”

“He told me. In my head.”

“Of course,” Zoe murmured to herself. “How stupid of me.” She eyed the dragon’s feet. The talons were blunt, and didn’t look like they’d damage the floors any more than the dog’s had, so she shrugged. “Why not. We’ll see if Buddy can be a house-friend.”

She squealed, hugged the dragon (apparently named Buddy, now) around its long, scaly neck, and scampered for the house, the dragon happily gallumphing behind her, pausing to look up at Zoe as she held open the door. “It’s okay,” she said, nodding toward the interior of the house. “You can go in. Just no crapping on the floor.”