Paper Dragons

Paper Dragons



         I was four years old when my mother tried to kill herself for the first time, and too young to really understand what all the commotion was about.  I awoke to find our house filled with people from the nearby village, and wandered in a daze through the commotion of voices and unfamiliar faces, unnoticed and fearful.  Grandfather rescued me at last; he took my hand and soothed my fears as we walked up the mountain to wander through the familiar fields and grass slopes, away from all the noise and panic. 

         He didn’t try to explain to me that my mother had attempted to take her own life—in my mind the concept of death was still strange and muddled, an unfamiliar word that brought with it vague pictures of fever and the goat that had been eaten by a mountain lion the summer before.  Instead we talked as we usually did, walking hand in hand—although I can’t even imagine the effort it must have cost him to act so normally when his daughter’s life hung in the balance.  We discussed the world; far-away islands and shining cities and mysterious forests that I could hardly imagine.  “Tell me about the animals, Grampa!”  I begged him after a while, and he dutifully began listing off the races that populate our world. 

         “To the south and the east, beyond the great plains, there live the talking bears in their cities.” 

“Like the village, Grampa?”

“No, much bigger than our village.  Now, don’t interrupt.”  He took a deep breath and went back to his recitation.  “In the forests unicorns roam—a wild and unpredictable race—and the wise and mysterious Sea-people swim in the ocean waters.  If you travel through our mountain range you will come to a place where fire runs from the peaks and ash fills the air—a dangerous place that is the realm of the fire-lizards, of course.  And the skies are the domain of the eagles and dragons, wisest of all races—star dragons, wind dragons, paper dragons…”

         I was immediately captivated by this last image—a dragon made out of paper seemed too strange to  be real.  “Do they breathe fire too, Grampa?”  I asked, looking up into his worn and haggard face. 

         “Well…they can, but only once in their lives.  The paper dragon  can fly like any other creature of the sky, but their own fire consumes them as soon as they use it.” 

“Why?  Why do they breathe fire if they know it’s gonna burn them up?” 

An expression of deep pain crossed his face, and he stopped walking.  It was a few moments before he spoke, softly and slowly.  “Some—some people prefer to go out of this world in a blaze of glory, leaving their beauty imprinted in the minds of those left behind.  To burn themselves up may seem like just another part of the great and terrible adventure of life, not an ending at all.” 

It would be many years before I looked back on that memory and realized that he hadn’t been talking about the dragons at all.



*  *  * 



My childhood passed normally enough—I lived with my mother and grandparents in our tiny cottage on the mountain slope, close enough to the village that I could walk to school there every day during the winter.  In the summer I was cared for by my grandparents; although wandering the mountain slopes may seem an idyllic life, in reality we were all at the mercy of my mother’s unpredictable moods. 

One day laughing and taking me out to gather flowers for hours, the next she would lock herself away and cry inconsolably.  She would rage and threaten, disappear for days at a time, create beautiful works of art that she always burned later.  I heard rumors in the village of a curse passed down through the generations to her; bad magic in her blood; the ill favor of the gods…

But none of it mattered, what other people thought or why she was the way she was, because there was nothing that we could do to help her.  I learned to both fear and love my mother, smiling one day and screaming at me the next.  Without my grandparents for guidance, I would no doubt have been as lost as her, but as it was I grew up with their anxious support and learned to see beauty in the world that caused my mother so much pain. 

Until the day in the summer of my fourteenth year, when she threw herself off of a cliff.  The first that we knew of it—although she had been missing since early morning—was when a pale-faced goat-herder came to our door near nightfall and told us that he’d found her broken body at the bottom of the deepest gorge, a canyon surrounded by towering rock walls on all sides.  She was dead, and she hadn’t tripped and fallen over the edge by accident as the goat-herder thought.  She had jumped, wanting to end her life once and for all. 

I didn’t go with the rest of the mourning party to recover her body and perform the funeral rites.  To me that seemed to painful to endure, a last goodbye with everyone watching.  Instead I slipped off up the wild slopes, dark and treacherous at night.  I ran blindly until I tripped over a rock, and then lay there in the moonlight, shaking with cold and shock. 

I imagined them burning her broken body and sprinkling the ashes over the green earth, my beautiful golden-haired mother.  She was gone; she had left us forever, yet I couldn’t imagine never seeing her again.  I lay there, growing cold and stiff, and decided that perhaps I would never go back home. 

The stars wheeled slowly overhead, and I dozed, dreaming that she was standing over me and telling me something important in a low voice.  She said it over and over again, but I could never quite hear her, and she faded away as I woke with a start. 

My mother is dead, I told myself.  Slowly grey light started to seep through the sky, and I sat up, rubbing my numb fingers and toes. It was then that I head it—the great wing beats coming from the east.  Eagles often passed over the mountains where we lived—and occasionally a wind dragon, scales flashing metal-bright in the sunlight—but this was something else entirely. 

I watched, entranced, as the flock appeared in the dim light and drew closer.  They were enormous, soaring on the breeze like kites.  White and fluttering as currents of air caught them, the paper dragons sang a lilting song of pure joy as they flew.  They were so light that they didn’t even need to flap their wings, each one glowing faintly from within against the pale background of dawn…

The song wrapped around me like a blanket of subtle enchantment, and I stopped shivering to listen.  I was so wrapped up in their music that I actually jumped when the lead dragon, passing over me, lifted his head and roared.  I shrank back from the force of his earth-shaking roar, forgetting that a dragon made out of paper probably couldn’t hurt me.  The others answered his call, their song splintering for a moment, and that’s when it happened—in a burst of exaltation, the lead dragon belched forth a stream of fire.

I screamed, but I don’t think they heard my half-frozen voice that died immediately.  And anyways, it was already too late. 

The others didn’t even pause as their leader was consumed by flame, but I couldn’t look away.  He kept breathing forth the river of fire, not even pausing as tiny flames began to lick at the edges of his wings.  Soon the paper of his body blackened, curled at the edges, and with a whoosh he was a ball of flame, crumpling into the blue-tinged inferno that raged in the air. 

And then what had once been a dragon burned out, and red-hot cinders rained down on me, landing as ash in my hair.  Still looking to the sky, I realized with surprise that tears were running from my eyes.  The hard knot of pain in my chest was unraveling, slowly and even more painfully than I had ever imagined something could be.  Grandfather had been right, I thought—the most beautiful things were gone too soon, and there was nothing that the rest of us could do about it.  I didn’t want to go back and confront the rest of my life at the moment, so instead I sat on the mountain slope and sobbed as the white, paper-winged shadows flew off into the growing dawn.