Dragons

DRAGONS

By Michael Kroetch

Esmeralda waits. She’s not sitting on her hands, but could be. She could also be chewing her fingernails. She won’t look out the window. Better to do other things. Like check the food. Is it getting overdone? The meat is funny tasting if it gets too soggy.

She lifts the lid on the pot.

A puff of steam clouds her thick glasses and for a minute makes her a bit dizzy. But only for a moment. The briefest of moments -- like a curled snail of a moment between all the rest of the moments in her day. But enough. Long enough to make her think her heart is having a problem. Again.

She looks at the phone, then puts her hand on her heart. It’s beating too fast. The more she thinks about how fast it beats, the faster it beats. She feels the room spin a little and a weakness flap down over her shoulders like a big wet cardboard box. She sits in one of the kitchen chairs. Then she looks at the stove again.

Her daughter will be home soon. Any minute. She can’t let the meat get soggy. She can’t call the doctor again, she has to get up and take care of the pot with the meat in it. The pot of rice is fine, no problem, but the meat? She knows how her daughter’s face gets when tasting soggy meat.

Again Esmeralda feels her heart. She can feel it going faster and faster like it is going to explode — something in a jewelry shop wound too much and too often that now may damage all the other beautiful things nearby.

Her daughter is going away soon. Far away. So far that the country is not even on the map her daughter keeps tacked to the wall on the stairway. A job. A good one. Good pay. Good benefits. But a job so far away it isn’t even on the map? How can such a job be good? If it was on the map, yes, that would be a good job. But the job is off the edge of the planet where the dragons are.

She holds her hand again to her heart. There is so much love in there for her daughter. She wishes she could just pull it all out like some webbed thing and throw it over her daughter to keep her safe from the job and the dragons. She wants this so much. Her eyes become ringed with charcoal at the pain she feels because she can’t pull out this love like that.

No, all she can do now is pull herself up and make sure the meat is not soggy. And this is the way her love greets her daughter tonight when she finally arrives. It is hiding in the meat and Esmeralda’s painful silence when again her daughter’s words light up the whole kitchen and even the courtyard outside with excitement about the job and all its opportunities.