|
As everybody knows, you shouldn't feed brownies to baby dragons.
They'll grow like weeds - well, no, not like weeds, exactly, more like elephants, maybe. One
day they weigh a pound. The next day they're two pounds. Before you know it, they're the
size
of a semi-truck with wide, bony wings, a spiked tail and four
claws on each giant foot.
They'll be snorting smoke, or if they
get really mad, they'll snort flames that are hot enough to melt
the butter in a refrigerator three blocks away.
So, the brownies were Melissa's first mistake. The thing is, that as everybody knows, brownies are the second-best treat in the world, well, really the third-best treat if you count Rebecca's gooey raisin cake, but only Rebecca can make her gooey raisin cake, so that shouldn't really count. Of course, the very best treat in the world is a secret kept in code in an Italian castle. It's made of all secret ingredients and nobody's allowed to eat it. Until Bud learned about brownies, he thought that the best treat was applesauce-on-a-stick. It has caramel and cinnamon and cheese with a big glob of applesauce around a Popsicle stick - delicious! but not nearly as good as brownies. That's why Melissa, his little sister, baked brownies, a double batch! They were to bribe her brother so he'd go with her into Gray Otis forest. Gray otis had always seemed to her to be a spooky kind of place and probably dangerous, too. She'd only been there twice, once with her brother and his friends to look at the waterfall. Then she was there again just a few days ago. She wasn't exactly sure how she'd gotten there that time. She though she'd been swept there by a tornado. This time she was on a mission. She wanted to see if she could find any more of the tiny red lizards like the one she'd found the other day. That one had mysteriously disappeared from her backyard. It seemed like a bad smelling tornado had gobbled it up. Are there really that many tornadoes around? Melissa had meant to go sooner, but Bud, her brother, had lied. First he said he'd go. Then he wouldn't. Melissa knew that he was afraid even if boys like to pretend that nothing scares them. She baked the brownies. Men will do anything for brownies. They crept into the back of the forest, the part that was called Gray Otis, the part where almost nobody went. Bud carried his brownies with him in a paper bag. Melissa had brought along other things, things she though she might need to catch miniature lizards. On a hunch (because, like lots of girls, Melissa was pretty good with hunches) she also took a bag of flour like the kind for cooking. A seldom-used path slithers into Gray Otis. It was narrow and overgrown, hard to follow. When they got almost to the waterfall there was a big tree. Some time, a long time ago, some bold boys had built a tree house in the sycamore. Then they got old and grew up (boys will do that if you don't watch out). Now they never came to their tree house or even came into the forest. Melissa thought that one might be a lawyer. Lawyers are not a good kind of people. It's a good rule to avoid them. As everybody knows, the sycamore has a fruit almost like a fig - well something like a fig, a kind of ball-like thing, at least the foreign kind has a fruit, maybe not the American kind. The point is that the fruit's supposed to be sweet. That's what matters. Even though it was almost fall and long after fruit is on most trees, Bud insisted in crawling up into the tree house to look for some. He wasn't fooling her, he was scared. The ladder up the tree, held them all the way to the tree house. It was pretty big, but a mess. Boys are known to leave things a mess. Even Melissa's biggest brother, Daniel, who worked selling houses, left his room a mess. Mother wished he'd get married. Off toward the waterfall there was a strange sight. As everybody knows, dragons are invisible - well, not exactly completely invisible. You know how, on a really hot day you can see waves of the heat shimmering up from the street or a car hood? Well that's how a dragon is. If you find one sitting quietly, you can't see it, but you can just make out the waves of heat rising from its body. Dragons are very hot animals both inside and out. It's eerie. In front of the waterfall there were heat waves like that. In the waterfall the water was all disturbed. It wasn't falling straight down as it should. It was splashing around something; something they couldn't see - something that was big - something that was moving - something that was making noises like a screen door screeching - something that was invisible! If the children had known that the something was a dragon, they surely wouldn't have tried to creep closer to get a better look. They agreed to skulk closer, but just up to the edge of the trees near the pool. They agreed to go that far and no further. Leaving their supplies in the tree house, the siblings went forward as quietly as they could. As everybody knows, Dragons don't hear very well - actually, they hear very poorly. If you had wind whistling in your little ears every time you flew anyplace, your hearing would be shot, too. Even with her heavy, clumsy feet Melissa got close without the dragons hearing a thing. The pounding of the waterfall helped, of course. At first, the children didn't realize that there were two invisible things. They were actually looking right through the father qragon. They could see the strange behavior of the water where the mother dragon was showering. It was one of her favorite things to do. Perhaps you've noticed how males don't seem to like showering as much females do. Then there were some others, like Bud, who showered so often that they hog the bathroom. Then, the father dragon (Melissa would later name him Chopin-Joe) which was very much closer to them, made a loud grunt like a snore. Suddenly they realized that there were heat wave rising from an invisible form just in front of them. The waves sort of outlined his body. It was big! It looked strangely line a dragon. At that instant Melissa spotter a brilliant red something squirming around on the side of a mound quite close to her. She didn't realize that it was the same baby dragon she'd caught last Sunday. It had grown quite a bit in just a few days. It seemed to have little bat-like wings, too. She did realize that it was a lizard like the one she'd had before. Without thinking, she hurried to the mound and grabbed it! Chopin-Joe didn't notice anything. His back was turned, but Roberta, the mother dragon, saw what happened. Like a flash, she yelled a booming Dragon scream and shot toward Melissa. The commotion woke up the father dragon. He joined in in the chorus of screams. Brother and sister raced off into the trees with the dragon parents as close behind them as they could get thrashing through the forest. Bud led the way up the ladder into the tree house. Melissa followed. That was her second mistake - well, her third mistake if you count picking up the baby. You really should count that because the rule is that you never touch a wild animal. Up in the tree house, the furious dragon parents could get at the children. The father perched on the roof and pushed his beak in through the window. He would have munched Bud right in half as easy as scissors snipping string, but Melissa threw flour in his face. He sneezed so hard that he tumbled off the roof and plummeted to the ground with a crash and squeal. Mrs. Commo, that's what Melissa would later name the mother dragon, was clinging to the trunk of the sycamore, forcing her head in the tree house door. She was making a noise like a coyote howling with desperation. Melissa hit her in the face with a handful of flour, too. If anything or anyone ever attacks you, the rule is always to make the biggest fuss you can. Fight back loud and hard. Animals, even bears and lions, scare easier than you do. Of course, the flour stuck to the dragons - at least to their ugly lizardy faces. What an alarming sight! The children had been screaming and wildly waving their arms, trying to ward off the attack. They fell silent. What an unreal sight, giant dragon faces floating around on invisible bodies. For a second, there was silence as humans gawked and dragons gawked. Platypus, that's what Melissa would name the baby dragon, didn't care about the boisterous ado. She had smelled Bud's brownies. With her sharp dragon beak, she split open the paper bag and promptly chewed up a whole brownie. As it turns out, baby dragons don't eat just raspberry leaves and cookies. Best of all, they like brownies, and not just baby dragons, either. Father dragons happen to like brownies better even than goats. Mother dragons, who, as we all know, are always more finicky, happen to like brownies too. They prefer the peanut butter ones with nuts, but plain are dandy, too. Mrs. Commo calmed down as soon as she saw that her baby wasn't in danger. Chopin-Joe had gotten a whiff of the delectable sweets. He was craning his fleshy neck trying to see what smelled so good. It took Bud only a second to grasp the situation. It just goes to prove how quick and clever boys can be. He threw some of his precious brownies down to where he thought the father dragon was sprawled. The rest he threw as far into the forest as he could fling them. It was exactly the right thing to do. Platypus fluttered after the brownies, her little wings beating like a moth's. The mother dragon followed her baby and the brownies. Melissa and her brother didn't need an invitation. They were down the ladder, out of the house in Gray Otis and home in their locked kitchen before the last brownie was devoured. The children were frantically trying to explain to their parents about invisible dragons and brownies and the house in Gray Otis when there were groaning sounds in the backyard. Their father didn't see anything, so he ignored it. Melissa tried to explain that it sounded a lot like hungry dragons. As everyone knows, dragons aren't dumb - well, they may not be dumber than say a pig or a dolphin or a dog like Tigger, but they're smart enough to know where Melissa lived and where the brownies would be. All three dragons sat in the backyard waiting. If a brownie came out the door, they'd pounce. Most of the flour had blown off so the parents were hard to see, but bright-red Platypus was like a glowing tail light sitting on her father's warty nose. She sniffed at the air for any trace of brownie aroma. That's where baby dragons usually ride, you know, on their father's snoot unless he went off chasing airplanes. Then they usually clime on their mom's snoot. Like people, dragons take very good care of their children. They sometimes look after them for years unless the kid's a real brat and has to go to military school or join the marines. That's for people, of course. Most dragons don't enter the marines no matter how bratty they are. With dragons its a worse problem because the bigger the young dragon gets, the more ridiculous it is for her to sit on dad's nose. By the time she's ten or twelve and weighs almost as much as Pop, flying around with her on his snout is a real struggle. It would block his view if she wasn't invisible by that age. When,Melissa peeked out, she saw Platypus right away. She hollered and pointed out the baby dragon to her father, but it was too late. Mrs. Commo had seen Melissa. She came to the back door and almost knocked it in bumping it with her nose. Then dad believed the story. Bud knew what they wanted. It's what he'd be wanting too if he weren't so excited, brownies. Melissa wanted to bake a batch. Their mother had a different idea. "It's just like with stray kittens," she explained. "If you feed them, they just keep coming back. We can't have the backyard full of dragons, invisible or not. Besides, they're very dangerous!" Melissa didn't see anything much alike between kittens and dragons so there was a very long and mostly loud conversation while the dragons wondered if they were ever going to taste brownies again. For her parents one of the worst parts was that the dragons were invisible. Nobody could see what they were up to or what was on their minds. Mother and father also weren't keen on the fact that dragons dined at least once a day on things like goats, neighborhood dogs or even unsuspecting pedestrians. Bud's first idea was to shoot them with the shotgun, but one of the cardinal rules is don't ever kill anything if there's anything else you can do. Besides, a dragon must be a rare and endangered species like an eagle - well, maybe not exactly like an eagle because dragons are quite a bit larger and don't snack on the mailman. Still, the government probably protects them. They couldn't very well tell people about the dragons. They would hunt them down. As everybody knows, people are afraid of dragons - well they're afraid if they think the dragons are real, but, mostly they don't think they are, real, that is, so they're not afraid, but they would be if they were real. Do you see what I mean? But, at last, it was all worked out. Melissa baked more brownies, another double batch. The plan was to take the sweets back to Gray Otis. Hopefully the dragons would follow the brownies. The bicycle ride took only a few minutes. Melissa was sure the dragons were following her. She could spot Platypus bobbing along overhead. She climbed up into the tree house and left the brownies on the floor. They were still warm. She didn't stick around to see if the dragons showed up, but she got the uneasy feeling that something was trying to peek up her skirt as she hurried down the ladder. She always tried to wear skirts. No matter what they say, boys like them best. About once a week, usually on Saturday, even in the snow, the dragon family would settle down in Melissa's backyard. That meant that they wanted a treat. It was all okay until some rich guy decided he was going to turn Gray Otis into an airport. As everybody knows, like dogs chasing balls, father dragons like to chase airplanes. But that's another story.
"Indeed, unless the billboards fall, You are welcome to use or republish
any of our material.
|