by Mary E. Lowd
Originally published in Hot Chocolate for the Unicorn and Other Flights of Fancy
A tiny dragon burrowed into the big toe on my right foot, curled up around the joint, and lives in there now. Well, sleeps there. It seems to sleep all day long, like a cat in a sunbeam. Except, a dragon. In my toe.
Most of the time, I don’t notice it at all. But sometimes, the dragon shifts in its sleep, writhing and rearranging, and I feel all the spines along its back and long, coiling tail scrape and screech against my bones, brightening my foot with pain like lightning forks across the sky.
Surely, the sky would be a better place for a dragon than my toe? Even if it is a very tiny dragon.
I went to the doctor. To see if anything could be done. About the dragon, you know? I waited in the office with all the other tired-looking, patiently impatient people, and when my turn came, I wore the gauze slipper on my foot, got it X-rayed, and then waited in a different room for the doctor to come to me with news.
“It’s a dragon all right,” the doctor says as she shows me the black-and-white picture of the inside of my foot. The bones are white. The spaces between them black. And the dragon? A beautiful charcoal gray, coiled up around my toe like one of those earring cuffs girls wear when they want to feel like fairies.
I’d so much rather wear a fake dragon on my ear than have a real one hiding out in my toe. At least, when earring cuffs start to hurt and chafe, you can take them off.
“Is there anything I can do?” I ask to the doctor. “To make it go away? Like I could make a nice little nest for it in one of my shoes with some sparkly rocks like the ones they use to decorate aquariums… Maybe it would rather live there?”
The doctor stares at me like I’m some kind of blithering fool. “You’ve been chosen as the beloved treasure of a dragon,” she says, “and you want to make it go away?”
“It hurts,” I complain, pathetically.
The doctor frowns at me, shakes her head, and prescribes a special lotion. I pick it up from the pharmacy on my way home.
Later that night, I search the internet — desperately looking for alternatives. But there aren’t any. When a dragon picks you, that’s it. You’re a dragon’s home now, and there’s not really anything anyone can do. Except, I guess, spread some lotion on it.
So, I settle down on my bed, one leg bent and the leg with the dragon-toe stretched out in front of me. I read the instructions on the lotion bottle — they’re in a tiny font and full of scary warnings about overuse or accidental swallowing. I definitely shouldn’t get the lotion in my eyes. Anything strong enough to lull a dragon into a deeper, sounder sleep could do real damage to a delicate retina.
I sit there, holding the bottle of lotion, and stare at my toe. I imagine taking a knife to it — digging the sharp point of a kitchen knife into my toe, rooting around in my own flesh, trying to slice the offending creature out. It would hurt, and based on everything I’ve read — everything the doctor said, and the internet, and even the AI chat program I asked for advice — it wouldn’t work anyway. At best, I’d leave my toe impossibly mangled by the time the dragon gave up and flew away. Then I’d have pain anyway, but no dragon. Is that better?
At worst — and as I understand it, this is much more likely — the dragon would crawl higher in my leg, perhaps wrapping around my ankle or slithering its way all the way up into my knee. Up there, it would have more room to grow. It would get bigger. There’d be more pain.
Right now, the dragon is small, and if I lull it into a deeper sleep with daily applications of lotion, it’ll stay that way. It’ll dream its way through my life.
I wonder what it’s dreaming about.
Visions of butcher knives and amputations drift away as my mind fills with ponderings — do dragons dream about piles of gold? Soaring through the sky? Growing big enough to breathe fire and terrorize villages instead of just one person with a painful toe?
I unscrew the lid on the lotion bottle, squeeze some of the glistening paste onto my toe, and then rub it in, letting it soak through my skin to the sleeping dragon beneath. The lotion smells strongly of chemicals, a smell I’ll probably get very used to over the years.
I can’t see the dragon, but I keep thinking about how pretty it looked in the X-ray in black and white. What color are its scales for real — emerald green? As blood red as rubies? I’ll never know.
There’s something beautiful inside my toe.
And yes, sometimes, I’ll jostle the dragon too much, and it will shift positions in its sleep, and my toe will scream with pain. That’s part of my life now, for the rest of my life.
I hate pain.
But I hope…
I hope the dragon is having sweet dreams.
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