BY Mileva Anastasiadou
People talk and talk about a dragon that jumped out of a melting iceberg and into our town to cast a
spell of reason, awakening and despair. The dragon hangs around at places we hang around, and
eats our burgers, and drinks our beers, and smokes our cigarettes, and steals our hope. He spits fire,
like dragons do, and when he breathes, hot winds blow over our town, and raging wildfires
approach our homes, when he breathes, we can’t breathe, we run, evacuate, dive into lakes and
rivers to cool down, and when he talks, he claims innocent, he blames us, be blames greed, but we
know better, we know us, and we still do what we did, we do no more, no less, and we are firm
when we say it’s not us, we’ve been here forever and we swear that we love our land, it’s the
dragon, the newcomer, the enemy, the destroyer of our life as we knew it.
The dragon is huge and scary and rational, but we have caged him, because we know how to fight
dragons and monsters and logic and truth, we have weapons and superpowers and magical thinking.
The dragon is powerful and greedy and logical, and wants to take everything from us, enlighten us,
infest us, infect us, blight our lives and deprive us of magic, but we have him caged inside a bottle
now while he still fights us and won’t give up, and when the dragon sings an ode to reasoning, we
close our ears, and only rarely does he stop to rest, and everything makes sense again.
We are tired, sad and overwhelmed, and we have placed the bottle inside a church, but he fears not,
not even the saints, the godliness, the dragon is strong and fearless and wants to drag us out of our
dungeon and into the light, but we resist this madness, the logic, the truth, and we put the bottle in
the fridge to freeze him, put it in the stove to roast him, but he’s resilient, heatproof, like mythical
creatures and ideas. We are tired, afraid and thirsty, and we drink the dragon to save ourselves,
although we’d much rather drink beer, and eat our burgers, and smoke our cigarettes, and play
around, and fuck each other. But the curse of reason falls upon us, again, and history repeats itself,
and the dragon survives and travels inside us, he rests in our brains, spreads doubt and disbelief and
reasoning, and eats magic from the inside.
The dragon sleeps and we are back to our old ways, we wipe the sweat from our foreheads and we
pretend everything is normal again, and we believe it, because that is our trait, we’re experts at
make-believe and blind man’s bluff and dark ages and ‘not coming of age’ plots, but when he
awakens, he throws us out of Eden, out of heaven and ignorance and bliss, to where heatwaves and
logic reign and we are powerless, hopeless, doomed to die, like we are made of flesh and dust and
into dust we will return, and we don’t matter and nothing matters and all is in vain. We vomit the
dragon, we follow instructions, do what our leaders say, and we comfort our children, teach me to
ignore the dragon, and we buy the sharpest knives, we cut him into little pieces, cage him inside
tattoos on our arms, but a dragon divided is a dragon multiplied, and while we claim our innocence,
hold on to our past, he gets bigger and bigger, demands change, and we get smaller and smaller, and
the world moves forward, then slightly backwards, like the world is a pendulum, and we are the
forces that make movement possible, back and forth, back and forth, us against the dragon who
plays angel, who plays messenger of doom, like there’s no end, and history builds up on our blood,
like this battle will last forever and the debris will keep growing, only now we are slightly ahead in
time, we have electricity and airplanes and internet and new old beliefs and superstitions, and a
dragon who claims that there will be an end after all, and it is near.
In an absurd, pitiful, ridiculous realm, we have a caged dragon, a sad reminder of how absurd and
pitiful this place has become, but we won’t change, for our truth is proof resistant, and truth lies in
the mind of the beholder, and we are safe in darkness, reason cannot destroy us, and everything
makes perfect sense when we combine powers, the poor stand with the rich, the oppressed believe
in the oppressors, against a common enemy, and we fight the dragon that lives and breathes to burn
our made-up heaven inside this freaking, unfixable hell.
Mileva Anastasiadou is a neurologist, from Athens, Greece and the author of "We Fade With Time" by Alien Buddha Press. A Pushcart, Best of the Net, Best Microfiction and Best Small Fictions nominated writer, her work can be found in many journals, such as the Chestnut Review, New World Writing, trampset, the Bureau Dispatch, and others.