I remember once, when I was ten, my mother sent me to the mill with a sack of grain no larger than a sleeping cat. Halfway down the lane, a pebble found its way into my boot.
A pebble.
A tiny thing. Barely the size of a fingernail clipping. Yet with every step it ground itself into my heel as though the whole wicked earth had condensed its malice into one hard point. I limped back home (naturally). Any sensible child would have done the same. I expected care and concern. At the very least, recognition that I had been impeded by forces beyond my control.
My mother took one look at me standing there, heroic and wounded in the doorway, and rolled her eyes.
Rolled her eyes.
Not dramatically, not even angrily. Just once. A small tired wheel of the eyes as if heaven itself had grown bored of my pain.
I can still hear it, that silence after. The chicken scratching in the yard. The kettle is hissing. My own breath caught in my throat like a prince in a cursed tower.
βTake off the boot,β she said.
No embrace. No gratitude that I had survived. Only this blunt, ugly practicality, as though the matter were simple.
I remember kneeling on the floorboards, unlacing the boot with trembling fingers, feeling that something vast and invisible had shifted against me. When the pebble dropped out onto the floor, she looked at it, then looked at me, and said, βSo. That was the dragon.β
I did not understand until years later that she was mocking me. Even now, I think it was unkind.
There were many dragons after that.
