The Prevalence of Dragozemlizhil in Nature
My colleague and I are drinking beer in a strange town, which confuses him. There are too many consonants, and the gargoyles look odd. The conference we’re attending is inter-disciplinary, and this sets him on edge.
“It’s easier for you,” he says.
The town’s reflected in the amber bubbles, the river, and my colleague’s glasses. There are arched bridges over each canal and the smell of moss and swallows’ nests under every roof. I’d like my colleague to be my lover and for us to have more time here, to do what we actually came for, which is to find the dragon.
“Did you manage to photocopy that map?” I try. We talk in bursts (did you do this, really, that’s amazing, oh my god yes) or we don’t talk. Of course, he got the map and the print-out from the archive hinting at the location of the fabulous beast. He’s got his conference paper all ironed out too, and his suit is fine. If a permanent job ever opens up, they’ll pick him over me in a flash. A waitress comes over, and he hides behind the menu. I root through the vaguely familiar words to order us something like dinner.
“See, your linguistic skills are already paying off!” He says it like it’s a joke.
The waitress brings out dark slabs of meat and labyrinthine salads. He considers my knowledge of languages to be inferior to his ability to make hypotheses. Dragons, he claims, do not care for fancy words. It’s the workings of sinew and bone, the exact proportions of ground flintstone per gallon of liquid gas. It’s the hard sciences that matter in the case of dragons. Besides, he’s suspicious of languages. He is right: I want to verb him, translate him.
He’s talking now. “University politics is a mug’s game. We’ll sit still for now, play ball. And once we find him, just you wait.”
He is waving his arms, flaring his nostrils, nearly setting off in a happy flight. Once we publish on the dragon, imagine what a boost for our departments, what a feat of cross-disciplinary synergy. I like his hands. They move as if sculpting the air; they can’t hear his words, and they are all the wiser for it. I watch a flock of gargoyles flutter out from his fingers. I love his hands, but I can’t imagine them on my body. I can’t imagine my body.
We attend the afternoon sessions, mingle, network, act appropriately, then look for a tram to take us out of the town into the woods.
The tram is empty. The locals are busy queuing for ice cream. We spend too long debating whether we need to validate our tickets. Graffiti, allotments, crumbling apartment blocks, someone’s washing, drunks drying in the sun.
“Is it nice being home?” he asks.
“I am not home,” I say, but it’s pointless; we’re in Eastern Europe aren’t we, what matter which country. This language, like my neglected native tongue, slithers between the normal words. “Enjoy,” for example, I could tell him; there’s no word for “enjoy,” and longing is something different here.
He refuses to sit down, no room for his knees. Ivan the Terrible, Vlad the Impaler, aren’t they all the same thing? He dangles off the plastic hook at the top of the tram, his body jerking at every stop.
The tram stops at the entrance to the forest.
The tall trees silence my colleague. He dislikes the deciduous way they confer with each other. He grabs my hand absentmindedly, his hand becoming a timorous being in my care. I feel it pulsate as we walk towards the patch of light between the trees.
When we arrive to the lake, he gets angry before our search fails. There are no caves. No claw marks on the trees. We search near the shore. Take measurements of the soil. The wind picks up and throws sand in his eyes as he tries to write things down, to check the map. A dragon, they said, but it’s just cold water, rocks, and wispy grass.
“What did those two informants say again?”
The informants were my responsibility.
“Dragon’s lair,” I say.
But there’s just a sandbank with pine roots sticking out.
“It might have been an idiom,” I say.
I messed up, wasted his time. Before setting, the sun lights us up like a couple in a movie. The sand glows orange. The lake water is black. Wild clouds are above us. He crumples the map and throws it into the lake. He throws other things onto the sand: the antique harpoon, quality harness, pellet gun. For a second I think he will throw them all into the lake, let them rust and bend into monstrous shapes. But they’re expensive, and the department won’t pay for them now. He shoves them into his bag again.
“Let’s get out of here,” he says, setting back on the path through the woods.
He doesn’t check if I’m following.
I sit down. I imagine still holding his hand. I watch it turn blue, wriggle out of my grasp, and fast crawl through the forest.
The lake is deep at the edge. There was a lake at my mother’s place that was treacherous like that. Silt-bottom, deadly, stay well away, or you’ll slip in, so they’ll never find you. The water here is ice-cold.
That expression the informants used: dragozemlizhil. I roll it on my tongue: a dragon lair. No, wait, an earth dragon. The grass moves, and I panic.
Dark water is below me, rocks are under my hands. Big fear rushes through me. Underneath, giant claws are stretching out, dark blood is heating up, and a tail, long and fierce, strikes like lighting. Once. And again. The dragon is all around me. The earth dragon is this place. The take-off is sudden. The speed is sixty-seven thousand miles per hour. The wings beat into the dark beyond the pasty sky. The massive head blazes a trail of fire. Starlight courses through me, and a wild, black wind. Trees, grass, shadows, water fly through me and break and whirl into a sandstorm. I am here, in this beast’s claws, forevermore.
Then we land. The sand is grey now, and the lake is all ripples, floating cans, and pieces of plastic. I have to go back to the hotel. There’ll be silences and put downs in front of other colleagues. He’ll devise small punishments for wasting his time in this consonant-infested place. The dragon rests on the water, yawns, and tucks his horned head under his wing.
Roppotucha Greenberg (@Roppotucha) is the author of a flash and micro-fiction collection, Zglevians on the Move (TwistiT Press, 2019), and three silly-but-wise doodle books for humans, Creatures Give Advice (2019), Creatures Give Advice Again: (and it's warmer now) (2019), and Creatures Set Forth (2020). Links to her published stories can be found at roppotucha.blogspot.com. Her many rejections can be found on this tree. She lives in Ireland.