Category: Warrior Stories

The Catalogue and the Dead H.

The Catalogue

The warrior held a catalog of dragons he had ordered from a shop down the road. Not one photograph corresponded with the dragon he knew. The blurb boasted it had the record of every existing dragon, alive or dead, including lineage, employment, published material in extract, education, esoteric orders, universities, awards, citations, bankruptcies, divorce, cemetery plot, memorial. He examined it several times looking for lacuna. Nothing. He threw it into the fire.

Before it burnt entire, he noticed something odd. He lifted it out of the fireplace and flattened it, spreading ash everywhere. He saw a line drawing, a profile rather handsomely accomplished.

He had hoped to verify suppositions regarding the dragon. Was he actually a dragon? It appeared not, for he was not listed inside the catalog. However, the fire portended something. He meant to inquire in person.

He stuffed the drawing into his pocket and strode off to the shop.

The front window was clouded over. A sign had been posted: ‘Dr. Agon.’ Was a medical doctor within?

“Nurse!” a matronly receptionist bellowed as the warrior came into view. “Another patient.”

“I haven’t introduced myself.”

She screwed her lips

The nurse, meanwhile, had opened the door at the rear of the room and gave a startled cry. “A warrior.”

“Are you a nurse?”

She nodded.

“I want to meet the directors.”

Dr Agon sat at ease amid a body of dragons. “We hoped you would arrive, warrior.”

He began the procedure by placing a scalpel on the table.

The warrior clenched his fists.

Dr Agon laughed. “We do not intend to use force. We are not so sinister as you may imagine.”

“Then why the sharp instrument?”
“We are going to dissect.”

The warrior wondered which was the cadaver among them.

Dr Agon rose heavily from his seat. He gestured toward an empty chair opposite him across the table. “Be seated. You are among friends.”

The warrior could not agree. He recognized his former wife, Nancy, and her lover, Joe among the group. He wondered at that. Were these dragons truly his friends?

Dr Agon clapped his hands and a door opened revealing a bound dragon blinking at the light.

The warrior gasped. It was his friend, the dragon.

“Guards, bring the patient before me,” the doctor ordered.

The heretofore-stolid guards, now aflame with purpose, manhandled the dragon, buffeting him, and then threw him at Dr Agon’s feet.

“Stand, John,” so the doctor named him. “You have come to trial at last. Do you have any statement to make, utterance, vague remark, invention, prophecy, or narrative?”

John shook his head, “No.”

“Speak up, man,” puffing on a cigarette. “Have you no shame?”

“I am unjustly bidden here and I demand release.”

The warrior could stand it no longer. He stood. “What is the charge laid against him?”
The body of dragons looked hard at the warrior.

Dr Agon, however, explained in a patient fatherly voice, “You supply the charge.”

The warrior sat and considered this fly in the ointment. Accusation? He had come only with questions about the dragon and the catalog. He hadn’t expected this. “I am unprepared, Doctor. Give me a moment.”

Dr Agon graciously acquiesced. “Not more than that.”

The warrior turned to look his ex-wife in the eye, but she continually gazed absently beyond him or into her lover’s face. The warrior drew away and contemplated.

“Well?” the doctor demanded.

The warrior pointed his finger at John and asked, “In divorce it is hard to find first causes. Both man and woman are to blame. Yet in this case your arrival to our house, into which we welcomed you and your wife as a long term guests, precipitated my own divorce. Was the gazing at the Ouija board, and your interpretations from other planes, and the bringing down of spirits of the dead responsible for the mayhem that ensued. I almost from overwhelming passion killed her and her lover. Did the occult intrude into our world through your clairvoyance? Weren’t you the harbinger of disaster.”

The doctor smoked down his cigarette to its last bit. He wrote rapidly on a pad of paper. The secretary read aloud, “Dismissed. John stands acquitted.”

Dr Agon took off his mask and revealed a happy face, more sensitive and youthful, delineated by good fellowship and humor, the face of a giant. He opened his palm, a signal to all the dragons to leave. Only the warrior remained rooted to the spot.

Stretched out on the table was a cadaver that looks uncannily like his recently dead father.

“Are you visiting casually?” the warrior asked.

His father worked his mouth, but no words emerged.

Dr Agon’s scalpel glinted in the afternoon sun.

The warrior cut away the dark psychological miasms that had poisoned his father’s physical matter. The labor required infinite skill and dexterity. He slew the larger demonical shapes with his sword.

At last the cadaver, now lighter than air, floated off into space.

 The Dead H.

He went out and walked toward a nearby park. Distracted by what had just ensued, he had not noticed three dragons waiting for him.

They held him at bay beneath the leafy expanse of a vast tree. They pressed spears into his chest.

“Do you think we should unman him?” one of the dragons asked his mates.

They grinned.

“Is there not a sheriff about?” the warrior asked.

One of dragons snorted, “I am the sheriff.”

“Then I am free.”

The dragons only dug the spears a bit further into his chest so that blood began to dribble down his shirt. “We suspect you have been negligent and violated codes and codes of code of conduct. “

“Your proof?”

A dragon pulled an object of childish fascination from a breast pocket. It was a tiny red plastic airplane. “Do you recognize this?”
He had always been entranced by that airplane.

“We stole this from your father’s coffin last night.”

The warrior laughed hysterically. “How was this possible? Might I have that airplane?”

“Only if you promise to give it back.” He handed it to the warrior who took it and studied it with waspish intensity.

“I see my father at the controls of his plane. Who made this miracle?”

The dragons shrugged their shoulders.

“I’ll demonstrate how it works myself.”

His father ignored him, as he was too engrossed with his own self.

“Father, I am your son.”.

The warrior devoted his entire intelligence to the figure sitting beside him. They flew through the sky. By what means he had entered the plane, he could not comprehend.

“Do they say you resemble me?” his father asked.

The warrior stammered. “No one mentions you. You are scarcely remembered.”

His father, H., pulled hard on the throttle, and the plane shot vertically upward.

“Dad, where are we going?” After all, H might have gone mad after his death. The warrior searched outside the window for a clue as to their whereabouts.

“Where ever you might like to go.”

The warrior nodded.

“Would you like to visit your mother?”, vaguely pointing down with his hand.

“I am not sure how we have finally met?”

H. coughed. He spoke into the microphone in an unrecognizable language.

“What was that?”

A voice from the microphone explained, “That was the language of the dead H.”

The microphone cackled, probably from some interference.

The warrior tried to grasp the uniqueness of the situation. “Dad, I have questions for you.”

“I will listen.”

The roar of the engines increased to such a high pitch the warrior could hardly hear his own voice. Nevertheless, he pushed on.

‘Were you conscious when I identified you for the last time before the attendants sealed the coffin?”
H. reached for his breast.

The warrior felt a growing numbness and a broken heart of his own. “Did you allow yourself to sicken and die? Is there a poetic correspondence between your manner of death and your way of life?”

H. sat stolidly at the controls.

Tears welled up in the warrior’s eyes, just like at the gravesite. “Does life grow more bitter as one matures?”

H. shouted something, but it was incomprehensible. He pushed the warrior against the door of the plane with astonishing strength. The warrior fell headlong out of the plane, and watched the plane disappear into a point of light. He floated down to earth, wondering if he would ever see him again.

The three dragons happened to be lounging on a verandah just where the warrior touched down.

“Did you enjoy your flight? What about the view?”

He replied, “The sky is immense.” In vain, he searched that immensity, and then returned the airplane to them.

Arrivals to the Party

The warrior planted his feet firmly on the quay and peered into a sea mist enclosing him on all sides. Was this mist the face of a pagan god? The mist had certain defining characteristics that brought this thought to mind. It obscured the sky overhead. It was opaque. It cloaked everything more than twenty feet distant from him. The invitation sent to him by post the week before suggested this, a rather queer postage stamp on the face of it, as the location for the party. He suspected, however, that he had stumbled onto an edge of the earth, a point from which there was no going onward, a mythical place where mermaids dwelt, a land of faeries. As far as he could determine no land was attached to the quay. A sacred space could abide no land, only water for its surrounds. The ancient world beheld the theatre as a place set apart and thereby sacred whether it would contain comedy or tragedy. Squeezed between tragedies was the comedy, a rather queer affair, for players with large phalli romped about the stage, exultant, for the hilarity of the spectacle. Most noteworthy about the architecture of men and women is the sexual areas, though generally covered, is actually at the center of attention. So the Greeks jubilantly made comedic gesture.

The quay was undoubtedly old. The sea in the hoary past vomited it forth. The belly of the sea offered it in bitter protest at an angry, judgmental and venomous lord, as a patroness would offer crumpets to her venomous master. The warrior who had read deeply on undersea cultures surmised that mermen had built the quay for quasi-religious gatherings intent on human sacrifice. Above all else they coveted depressed females.

Probably there was an altar to the goddess Hysteria for that very purpose. It was a thoroughly atavistic culture. The mermen and mermaids cared nothing for political structures. They merrily continued as their forefathers and foremothers had swum. The ocean is frigid, far from shore, and the sea masks shame.

Glistening droplets of fog damp, cursedly cold, dampened the warrior’s cheeks.

“The damnable unpleasantness of the sea is true. I will attest to that.”

He paced the quay’s precincts as he would pace the deck of the ship in sharp lookout for the isle whereon apart from sadness dwelt immortals. All seaman and explorers held close to the breast private beliefs. Well he remembered the treachery of the sea and the illusions born thereon. He tried in vain to cast away into the perilous waves his own dreams.

Looking outward again the warrior noted the gray lamenting sky. He considered stowing himself away in his ship’s hold to stare at a waxen candle. After death all men turn to wax. At times he achieved a level of communication with the dead H. by concentrating on the tip of the flame though this was rare. A flame’s tip is dastardly difficult to fix. The nature of fire is unstable like the heart. As he turned to go back to his ship he saw a hoop of flame suddenly appear before the mist swallowed it entire. Curious he arrested his momentum. He waited for the hoop makers to appear. What did this unexpected visitation portend? Unfortunately he could not consult the zodiacal positions of the stars. Happenstance and chance are unkind masters.

A long narrow boat snaked forward out of the mist, a horrific gorgon’s head at its mast. The warrior marveled at the strange fate that had brought a monster-like gorgon to this same uncharted quay in the middle of a sea of mist. More unusual was the absence of rotting corpses to draw it here. Rumored was a gorgon’s fantastic sense of smell. What motive had driven it to this quay uninvited to the party and unwelcome, though certainly extravagantly tressed?

The warrior stood still in the gray salty air in expectation.

A dragon slapped his mate on the back and said, “I told you we’d make it first. No one has stepped onto this quay for a millennium.”

“The earth has many such places!” his companion groused. “This cannot be the place described in the maps. Is not the map flat? Where is space for the treasure?”

“But it is,” the first dragon interrupted. “Maps are flat, tortillas are flat, tires are flat if there is no air inside, and musical notes are flat.” He opened his palm. “My hand is flat.”

The second dragon buttoned his lips. “Wait,” he whispered. “I hear the noise of another ship lying nearby. We have been out guessed. The royal dragoons pursue us through the maze of clues we left behind like Hansel and Gretel, crumbs will be our undoing.”

Dragons love donuts.

“‘Nonsense.” answered his mate. “The dragoons could never have followed so intricate a trail as they have no sense of the absurd. See how our tuxedos will blend in with the other guests, we are unstoppable.”

They Enter the Precincts

The warrior stepped forward through the shrouds of mist. An inspiration had dawned on him, a present from Hortense and Heloise. The women had written the invitations and had included reference to a green door.

“My compliments, dear dragons,'” the warrior said, “on your prompt arrival. The party

starts in half an hour. A cocktail?” He noted the spats of their pointed shoes. He pointed behind him. “The spiral staircase leads down to the bar.”

He lent his arm to the dragons and pulled them up to the quay.

“What a charming place, we never imagined,” mouthed one of the dragons.

“I think it rather musty,” answered the warrior. “Providence smiled at us, though who are we to accept the beneficence of the Lord?”

The dragons murmured against organized religion and all of the senseless rituals involved.”

“To what end?” they asked.

The warrior added, “Small minds beget nonsense.”

“A blessed virgin is the queen,” said the dragons mirthfully, for they were well aware of the peccadilloes of the palace, and wished not to trespass.

They came to the great green door of the bar.

“Are we below sea level?” asked one of the dragons.

“I would have to guess at that,'” said the warrior.

The dragons shivered. “Our holy books warn dragons not to venture beneath the sea lest they have discarded this perspiring flesh and entered the afterlife.” They clearly fretted.

The warrior jocularly made a swipe at their scriptures, “Beware of fetishes. This is the sea of mists and not the sea of which your sages spoke.”

The dragons laughed and their spines pricked. “It is hard,” they thought dourly, “to know if one has met his finality or persists yet in the pre-rhapsodic reality we call the everyday.”

The warrior gleefully pressed onward, “Let us enter this green door and don the party hats.”

   At the Bar

Old party horses filled the bar to the brim while dallying overlong at the waterhole. The dragons and the warrior sidled past into the belly of the bar. Tables of fish-lipped patrons watched the snatch girl burn her panties and brassiere with a cigarette lighter. The trio navigated their way through all the heated sexual energy stoked by the combustible mix of nudity, liquor and ribald conversation. A professorial dragon his beard singed by the fire that occasionally erupted from his nostrils so enflamed was he by his subject held forth to a half-besotted companion.

The professor asked, “Are you delighted with the pageant this woman displays? Is not her bosom an invitation to lust after her?”

His companion, a religious scholar, tore his eyes from her reluctantly. “And have you another dream equally pleasant to insert into a man’s pajamas?”

The professor smiled, “Have you thought of the close similarity between the sacrifice of Isaac and the crucifixion of Jesus?”

The religious scholar grimaced in pain, “There is no such connection unless in the jumble of your mind. Pray, explain.”

“‘Never mind that the old testament is used by the Christians as a sop, to lure the ignorant to its pews. In a more startling manner they lifted whole a motif from the account of Isaac’s sacrifice by his father and fit it into its account of the sacrifice of its God’s son. Do you see the parallel; both are sons of immensely important fathers? In the case of Isaac we have Abraham the first Jew, the first Patriarch, who fathered his son when he was 100 years old by means of a miracle. Isaac his son is vastly important as he was the single link from Abraham to all the succeeding generations of Jews, yet he underwent the terror of sacrifice by the hand of his father. On the face of it this is murder, a ghastly crime, even human sacrifice.”

He glanced nervously from side to side as he was aware mermen might be present.

His friend interrupted, ‘But Isaac didn’t die, and Jesus did expire in great pain.

Furthermore, you are wildly off track as Isaac was a young boy in the sway of his powerful father and Jesus was a fully grown man perfectly aware of what he had undertaken.”

The professor blew tiny bubbles of fire from his nostrils. “Perfectly incorrect, my friend.

“Isaac was 36 years old and he willingly joined his father in this act. He even asked his father to bind his arms lest he instinctively smite him at the stroke of the knife, and by some accounts Isaac did momentarily die. God brought him back to life thereby bringing into the world the miraculous ‘techias hamasim’ or ‘bringing back to life those who are dead’. Now consider Jesus. He was bound on the cross, another kind of altar. He was resurrected within three days and proved to the world that there is a kind of immortality available to believers. Though he was persecuted and imprisoned on the cross he knew this was his destiny and he welcomed it. Jesus was also the first Christian, a vitally necessary link and starting point representing the new dispensation often cited by the Christians as justification for its departure from Judaism.”

His friend scoffed, “Interesting.”

“Did you ever wonder where from all the people come?” the warrior asked the dragons while nodding toward the professor and his friend the scholar. He liked wild ideas, as he had some of his own.

“Our holy scriptures,” recited the dragons piously, “conclude that people sprang out of eggs like dragons.”

“Oh,” said the warrior, bemused at the quaintness of their beliefs. “Do you mean uterine eggs?”

“No,” a female dragon flirtatiously tittering who had overheard the conversation. “Silly, haven’t you heard of the smiling egg?”

“Humpty Dumpty?”offered the warrior, somewhat confused by the image. “He crashed and all the pieces couldn’t be fixed together again.”

“Exactly!” spouted the dragon. “From all the cracked pieces of the egg shell, some infinitely small and oddly shaped, came people.”

The warrior looked away from the snatch girl jiggling her breasts to see a dragoon coming swiftly upon him and his companions. The girl had drawn faces on her nipples and they were having a fight over the correct shade of pink. One nipple named Heloise, the other Hortense.

The warrior had a weakness for puppet shows. They reminded him of the smallness of men. “Was Manly in the house?” he wondered.

         Invitations Challenged

“Are you members of the royal family?” the dragoon challenged with the fixed stare of a bayonet in his eyes.

The warrionr fumbled in his pocket overfull with old notes, bills, cards, receipts, stamps, and other undigested information until he found the royal engraved invitation.

The dragons produced theirs.

The dragoon laboriously read each invitation syllable by syllable. For some the written language is a mystery.

When he finished he refolded the invitations and handed them back to the royal guests. “Enter, friends of the Crown!” he barked.

The warrior and his companions half-bowed and dove into the courtly pageantry within the secret hall.

The dragoon had stopped them at the threshold to this sacred precinct as was his royal duty. All the variegated races representing all the realm had gathered here dressed in the highest fashions direct from Parisian tailors.

The warrior overheard, “At the naval battle of ’48 an astrologer advised me to fill our cannon balls with mustard, and so we sailed to victory over the rebels,” said an admiral to his colleague who was blue about the gills from all the liquor had consumed.

The warrior thought to say something about that particular battle but bit his lip instead. “Scant reward for meddling in the conversation of an admiral,” he recalled from his naval days.

They pressed further into the din of the assemblage.

The dragons sought out others of their peculiar kind.

The warrior found himself standing alone in a veritable sea of the richly attired.

Many of the guests had drawings of the queen’s silhouette on a pin on their bosoms.

The warrior grimaced. He had forgotten his. He turned on his heel intending to return to his ship to retrieve it when the trumpets blared announcing the queen’s arrival.

All eyes turned to the door. A hush quieted the party talk.

The warrior beheld this all with a jaded eye. This reverence is trivial, mere astral luminescence, stuff and hints to the actual ladder to the immortal isle. He suspected the queen knew this above all others.

She entered grandly. She handed her wrap to standing butlers by her side to reveal her beauteous shoulders.

Everyone oohed and aahed at the marvel of her crown’s jewels dazzling in the chandelier overhead.

She looked at all of them into the quick of their beings. An instantaneous mask of despair stole over her face at the poverty within which she had assayed.

As her eyes swept over her subjects she felt the fiery gaze of the warrior intently watching her. A sparkle in her eye told the warrior to approach.

The other partygoers returned to their own mystery plays and flirtations with spirit and flesh.

The warrior walked with the queen that night on the quay to talk of the voyage to the faraway isle of the quest.

“Will Manly join us?” he asked.

Hortense was truly a magnificent queen, though he preferred her in other guises.

She blushed a deep pink, reflecting the starry light dancing on the water, and said, “Manly has slipped between my breasts. I don’t know if he will ever part.”

“No matter,” said the warrior, “the waters here are perilous for a seaman such as myself. I would like to hire Manly to steer the helm.”

Manly peered from her bodice at the warrior. He didn’t quite like him.

He took note of Manly’s vexed eyebrows. ‘Do you believe in hobgoblins?’

Manly believed in all sorts of spirits, fiends, and other dwellers of the dark. They oppressed him and he sought refuge in Hortense’s warmth. He shrank at the mere mention of an unwanted spirit.

The warrior held a flask of gin in front of Manly’s face. “Smaller men than you have drowned in this liquid.”

Manly frowned and turned away toward Hortense’s nipple.

A laughing face painted on her tit stared back at him. It so unnerved him he involuntarily lept out from her bodice and into the hand of the warrior.

“I’ve got you now, Manly.”

Manly could only dumbly nod, his mood downcast.

The warrior told him, “Lift up your chin, and behold the wide world at your fingertips. Will you captain the ship that will take us all to the isle we have described?”

Manly looked between the two lovers and saw fiery magic linking them. “When do we depart?”

“‘At this moment.” said Hortense. She stepped from the quay onto the warrior’s ship.

Some others had already gathered on the ship in wait for the queen and her consort to arrive.

Heloise had arranged the pink carpet on which the queen first stepped.

Some dragons including the professor and his scholarly friend continued a now heated discussion about the relevance of ‘Sir Gawain and Green Knight’ to their earlier conversation by the bar.

Hortense adored learned companions.

Manly heaved the wheel toward the brightest star in the firmament, the fish its rudder.

Of Fate

Tens of thousands of warriors lay dead on the plain of madness. The dragon, Hortense and Heloise laid a wreath at the cemetery gate.

The dragon thought he could hear a dirge and cocked his ear.

“Must they all have died?” asked Hortense.

“Mortal men must all end,” the dragon said.

“And are you a man?” asked Heloise, who always had feared to ask the dragon this question. The nearness of the warriors, though dead, lent her courage.

“A man, you say?” asked the dragon. “Still I love you and Hortense both.”

Heloise blushed. She pointed to the field of warriors. “Is there an afterlife for them?’

“Is our love stillborn?” he asked.

We are fond of you as we always believed you were fond of us,” said Hortense. “When we were girls you took us to breakfast, and ever since we have known you as our dear friend.”

“Ah,” said the dragon crestfallen. “Are you concerned that lives cut short by violence sleep forever in the ground?”

“Do the black crows carry souls toward heaven?” asked Heloise.

The dragon shook his head. “There are texts that say no one can leave the vale of shadow.”

“By any means?” asked Hortense.

The dragon pondered the problem anew. He had never thought of it before since he would live forever, if only in the imagination. “We could use fire,” he proposed.

“Bonfires? The burning ghats of Benares have fascinated me since I saw them in a book,” said Heloise. Her library had many books about India on its shelves.

The dragon narrowed his eyes, “The entire subcontinent is mired in confusion over this subject, Heloise, regarding the serpent coiled in a knot at the base of the spine, its erection between the breasts of the beloved, and their ridiculous saints. I prefer the west.”

Heloise grew silent.

“Europe cannot hold a candle to the achievements of the east,” she said. “Our only world wars started in Europe and brought such monstrosity and random destructiveness in their wake. Can you really be serious? You are mocking us.”

The dragon turned scarlet. “There is a method,” he managed to say.

Hortense and Heloise looked at him expectantly.

“‘Then let us begin without delay!” The dragon asked Heloise because sometimes she looked the loveliest, “Do you have Manly in your bosom?’

Heloise reddened slightly. Was Manly dressed? She didn’t know. “Manly, come out now.”

Manly, clearly perturbed at the interruption of his bliss, peeped his head out from between her breasts.

Hortense patted him on his head. “Now, Manly, behave!”

He stuck out his tongue like a dart.

“I can assign you a use in the world, Manly,” offered the dragon. “Are you interested”

Manly glowered, but pulled back his tongue.

Had he wanted no doubt the dragon could burn it to a crisp.

Instead the dragon lit a torch with a snort of fire and Manly’s eyes danced with the flame.

“Manly,” he instructed, “Take this torch and stand on each warrior’s grave until you have burnt away the etheric debris hovering over them that many erroneously call ghosts.”

“Is it hot enough?” asked Heloise.

“‘Hell is thick with chords, tendons, ropes, chains, blocks, balls of iron and other detritus. It is subtle and dangerous work.”

“Will Manly expire from the exertion?’ asked Hortense.

The dragon smiled revealing his brilliantly white teeth. “Manly is man enough for the job.”

Manly always rose to a challenge of his manhood. He hopped to the ground and snatched the burning faggot from the dragon. “I accept!” he shouted running off to shepherd the first warrior to Valhalla.

“Won’t the torch eventually falter before the job is complete?” asked Heloise.

“No, Heloise, the fire is quenchless and Manly is our hero.”

A light snow appeared overhead coating the land with white.

“The color of death,” said Heloise discomfited with another reminder of the dreary vale.

“Is it the end of time?” asked Hortense entranced by the beauty of the snow on the ground.

“In thought only, Hortense,” said the dragon. “The battles these warriors fought were all psychological at their root.”

Petards sprang up here and there as Manly proceeded with his work.

“Do you mean that these valiant warriors died from love?” asked Heloise alarmed at the prospect.

“Sweet Heloise,” cooed her sister, “always googoo about love.”

Heloise objected. “I am not! Isn’t pink the color of love?”

Hortense agreed, “And I am pinker than you.”

Heloise grew hotter and hotter at this insult to her pride, “Love?” she asked.

The dragon abhorred disputes about love. He held out his hands palms outward in an attempt to mollify them before the soup boiled over the lip of the pan. “Water,” he thought, “would soothe them.”

                                       The Fisherman

“Girls,” he suggested reminding them of the time when they were young, “ought we not go down to the beach?”

The idea appealed to them as a counterweight to this morbid scene. They fell behind the dragon’s giant strides.

The sea mirrored the heavens. Hortense and Heloise sat on either side of the dragon.

They all gazed meditatively at the water.

All was quiet, broken when sea monsters rose out of the waves and stalked the beachhead. The high water mark served as their boundary and none dared walk onto dry land because of fear. Soon so many monsters crowded the shore neither Hortense, Heloise nor the dragon could see beyond them.

Hortense suggested in a whisper, “As they block the view I think we should seek higher land.”

They arose quietly to avoid drawing the monsters’ wrath when the dragon tugged at

Hortense’s and Heloise’s sleeves.

“Wait. A lone figure approaches from further down the strand.”

Truly curious, Hortense and Heloise strained their eyes but could not see anyone. “Who is it?”

The figure came into view and he carried a fishing pole with a long line on his shoulder. He paid the monsters no mind and they scarcely took notice of him. He found a favorable spot from which to cast his line into the sea.

The dragon and Hortense and Heloise sat quietly nearby to watch. In sotto voice they conferred as to his name.

“I don’t know his name. There are many men who walk the earth under the stars, moon and sun.”

The fisherman cast his hook far into the sea and then stood as immobile as a tree.

When at last something tugged at his line the monsters took heed. They sneered, “We ate them all! Every last fish we could find!”

The fisherman remained steadfast and patiently pulled in his line, and it was a great long while before he had it in.

The monsters spoke amongst themselves. “It must be anything but a fish.”

At last the fisherman snared a fish in his net, and then he bared his teeth lest the monsters lunge. Warily he made his way to the dragon and the Pink sisters. They sat in a circle of three and he made a fourth.

They recognized in him the warrior.

“Would you care to eat?” he asked them.

“I will make the fire, and you, Hortense and Heloise, gather sticks and stones, and we will dine under the stars,” said the dragon.

The fisherman held the fish over the crackling fire. He forced open the mouth and Manly popped out his head. The fisherman placed the fish on the hot stones amid the gathered sticks and soon they shared a signal repast.

The next morning the fisherman awoke, he had fallen into a heavy stupor after the meal and delightful conversation and he couldn’t keep his eyes awake. The dragon and the Pink sisters had lifted him saying he’s almost as light as the air, and put him on a cot in a shack at the lip of the sea.

The dragon had commented, “You see now a warrior who has returned from the dead. By what means I cannot say.”

The fisherman sat and looked forlornly at the heaving sea. His companions had gone and even the sea monsters had swum back into the deep sea leaving him alone. Except for the sea and its plangent waves.

                                          THE COURT

At midmorning a postman arrived and delivered a parcel. The fisherman kept it on his lap for an hour still watching the sea. The parcel had been wrapped in newsprint and was wet and clammy in his hands. As no one else knew his whereabouts he suspected Hortense or Heloise had sent it to him. Perhaps they had soap they did know what else to do with.

Carefully he peeled away the wrapping paper and found not a bar of soap but a seagull asleep with a fish in its mouth. He wondered at the symbolism if any there was, when the bird awoke suddenly and lifted into the air.

He looked down at the newspaper in his lap and saw a photo of a woman in her lingerie. She motioned for him with her finger to come closer.

Was that a smile forming on her lips? He couldn’t be certain as she was half turned away. He scorned her approach and went down to the water clutching the newsprint. He wanted to see if the seagull had returned but nary a bird. He stole another glance at the woman. Now she appeared to pout.

“Who are you?” he asked.

He did and her bra fell to the floor.

She puckered her mouth wanting to be kissed but fisherman regarded her with suspicion. He didn’t know jot about her. On impulse he threw the newspaper into the sea and then he regretted his action. What if she didn’t know how to swim?

He turned away to go back to his dwelling. “The sea is murderous,”he thought, “perhaps I should try further inland.”

As he stepped onto the porch two beach police took him by the arms and hurled him face down into the sand. “Why are you trespassing?”

There was worse to come. The fisherman strove to free himself but the police proved the stronger. They lashed him to a beach tree.

“The charge?”

“Attempted murder,” they answered.

“‘The penalty?” the fisherman asked.

“The noose,” they laughed.

“Mercy?” the fisherman asked.

“Let the jury decide,” they said.

The fisherman had severe doubts. The authorities had lately packed the jury with sun worshipers.

“Your verdict?” the judge, a ponderous fellow with jowls and a furrowed forehead, asked.

“Guilty as charged,” the foreman shouted to the hoots and cries of the audience. “We throw the book at you!” he spat at the fisherman.

“The means of death is by hanging,” said mournfully the judge.

The hangman knotted the noose and prepared the gallows.

“Is guilt so easily handed out?” asked the fisherman.

They ignored him as the condemned had no right to speak.

Apprentice hangmen smoothed the sand and set up folding chairs. Dragons sat on the chairs eager to see the hanging. As the sun rose higher in the sky the heat became more oppressive and the dragons began to sweat.

A learned dragon said, “We need a fan.”

Some junior dragons ran off to do his bidding scouring the beach for a fan. They found a half buried Chinese folding fan with hand painted figurines adorning it. They delivered their find to the dragon who graciously accepted it.

‘Your last wish?’ the learned dragon asked the fisherman.

The fisherman responded, “I would like to kiss Heloise.”

“Does she love you?” asked the dragon.

“I don’t know,” said the fisherman.

“Then there is no reason to delay. Let us proceed.”

The fisherman began to feverishly sweat as the hangman threw the noose over his head.

A commotion began at the far end of the crowd as a woman charged forward elbowing everyone out of her way with wild abandon.

She wore only a bikini, and the dragons could not remove their eyes from her breasts. She climbed onto the gallows and untied the noose. “You are free,” she said.

Then she kissed him full on the mouth. Heloise did.

“Could you unclasp my bra?”

The noose fell away. A cry of dismay at this unwanted interruption rose from the throng.

“Is he dead?” a child asked

‘What is the meaning of this?’ croaked a dragon white with beard rudely awakened from a doze in the hot sun.

Heloise turned toward this questioner. A hush fell over the crowd. It was her breasts. She did not say a word. She need not to say anything.

“You have performed magic,” the warrior told her.

“No such thing,” she said, “I have only broken the fragile string of their consciousness. The bubble could have burst at any time under any duress.”

The dragons’ attention did not waver.

The warrior perceived a longing for Heloisc emanating from the onlookers. “Do they love you?” searching for a precise definition of their captivation.

“They are childishly beguiled by my form, and were I to sway gently from side to side I could rock them to sleep.”

Already some of them had nodded off to dream.

“There are sexual strands that tie this universe together,” she explained.

Consider how a rocket shooting up toward the moon holds an entire nation in its thrall.

The warrior took her arm and proceeded down from the gallows.

                                    A GOODBYE TO THE DEAD H.

They walked to the ocean.

“The warm sea breeze pleases me,” she said. “I would bathe here and now, gentle warrior, will you come with me?”

“Already the water laps at our toes,” he thought. “This day has brought wondrous events.”

He slipped from his clothing as did she, and they dove into the sea.

They swam away from the shore deeper and deeper into the lulling sadness. The ocean was calm and flat as they swam. Two mermaids sensing their near exhaustion carried them on their backs to a shallow estuary of a nameless island. This small island rising only a few feet above the water line was a mere prick in the water’s mind.

“Do you know where we are?'” she asked him.

“‘I cannot tell. Yet this place resembles the burial ground of the dead H.”

They saw a dragon toiling with a pickaxe and shovel. Sweat pouring down his back mottled his skin.

“Is this dragon exhuming the dead?” the warrior asked.

The dragon hadn’t noticed the warrior and Heloise standing in the shallow water right against the lip of the land.

In a loud voice the warrior shouted, “I say, dragon! What are you doing?”

The dragon lifted two fiery eyes and then returned with rather more exertion to his labor. After a few more strokes he tore away the layers of dirt covering the coffin. With a prodigious heave he pulled the box onto the surface. Then he sat with a grunt on the shore and wept bitterly washing away some of the gloom.

The warrior greatly curious climbed onto the sand and peered down into the grave. Water poured into the gaping hole. Nature abhors a vacuum.

Manly rode up to the island on the back of a fish and gave the warrior a hearty hello. Then he muttered under his breath and frowned, “The dead H.?”

His face brightened when he saw Heloise sunning herself on the beach. “Heloise!” He ran over to her ear and whispered his deepest wish.

She nodded and turned over on her side allowing Manly to kiss her bosoms. He jumped ecstatically and somersaulted.

“Heave ho, fish”‘ he commanded. Then the fish pulled and Manly pushed the coffin into the water. With a terrific leap he established his captaincy of the boat and with the fish as engine and rudder they sailed the dead H. out over the horizon.

The warrior grieved, “My father has passed away never to be seen again.”

The dragon had meanwhile regained his usual sobriety. With little dispatch he built a fire and began to cook a soup.

The warrior went over to sit beside him on a log.

“What does this soup signify?’ he asked the dragon.

The dragon dipped his spoon into the pot. “Why ought it signify anything? Ask her.”

The warrior walked over to Heloise. “Do you know?”

“I see that at last you are done with your father. I think the soup acts as a chalice for the collected tears for the dead H.”‘

She spread her hands and directed his vision toward the broad sea. The color of the ocean had changed from the gray of lulling sadness to the crystalline blue of adventure.

“Will you join us for soup?’ she asked him.

She took his hand and the three of them drank the soup from sea shells collected by the mermaids, and they conversed on subjects deep, ponderous, sad, happy, and exultant, until long after sunset.

                                           THE DRAGON AWAKES

The farce of the everyday pain of existence nipped and tugged at the Dragon’s feet all night long. Mutton and sheep’s faces crazily engraved on stamps from Egypt sailed past entering the mish and mash of higgle and piggle.

He jerked awake. On a side table were the books he read a page or two at night. He chose to thumb through a pamphlet of jokes worn thin about a porker. Looking up he saw shadows on his wall swaying to and thro.

“I have something to say,” said the clock.

“Eh?’” grunted the dragon, scarcely interested.

“It’s playtime!” the clock intoned.

The Dragon cocked an ear, and from outside his window he heard someone calling his name. Looking out he lifted his own fire as homage to the glory of the sun’s genius.

“How wonderful!” cried Heloise to her sister Hortense. “He’s awake.”

“Mr Dragon,” their voices rang.

He heard, and saw the pinkish glow surrounding them. “What do you girls want?”

They beamed. “Would you like to play with us, Mr Dragon?”

“Now?”
“Yes and yes.”

He roared. “I will join you in a second.”
The Pink sisters waited patiently. “Do you think he’ll invite us to breakfast?”

He raced out of his door. “Would you like to walk?”

“But where to?”

“To a café for eggs and coffee.”

                                              THE CAFE

Heloise and Hortense joined hands and fell beside the Dragon’s long pace.

The Fat Chance café was jammed to the gills. If a bill reached $25, jelly pie was free.

The waitress led the Dragon and Pink sisters to a flimsy table in the rear. She handed them menus, but the Dragon had difficulty prying it open.

One of the girls offered to help. “I have long fingernails.”

The Dragon tipped his head, and looked over to his left.

A mother began to upbraid her son. He refused to eat another mouthful. “How do you expect to grow and be like the rest of the boys?” She raised an eyebrow.

The boy shrugged his narrow shoulders. “I don’t want to eat. Don’t make me feel guilty.”

She shrieked. “That’s not a good reason!”

The Dragon and the two girls could not help but to intervene. Hortense tapped the mother on the shoulder.

She spun around like a snake uncoiled.

Hortense explained. “Your son might have another destiny.”

“Are you meddling?”

Hortense reached into her cleavage to bring forth Manly. She held the little soul in the palm of her hand.

The mother reacted with horror.

Manly spoke. “Maybe your son will grow up to be like me.”

She peered at his tiny features. “Is this your son?”

“Madam?” said the Dragon. “I have never met him or his like before this moment.”

A pall fell over the manger. The mother clung to her child.

Manly eyed her heaving bosom. “That’ll do no good. For your son will be whatever he wants to be.”

She cringed and prayed. She was thankful, at least, that he was of normal size.

                                              BREAKFAST

The waitress brought eggs and mugs of steaming coffee.

“Sweet rolls?” asked Heloise.

“Right here,” offering the basket in her hand.

“How did you know?” asked the Dragon. He had not even read the menu.

“We have a clairvoyant who sits in the corner near the kitchen.”

A cloaked figure sat in silence and in gloom.

The Dragon gave him a hurried glance.

“I’ll write up your order in a moment.”

Hortense meanwhile had cut tiny bites for Manly. He sat on the edge of the plate. He squeezed his eyes tight with every morsel.

“He’s so well behaved,” complemented the Dragon.

Hortense reddened. “I was nervous about revealing him. He can be so perky.”

Heloise smiled.

“Did you roll your eyes, Heloise? You also have men locked up in your bosom.”

Heloise pouted.

The Dragon asked, “Where did you and Manly meet?”

“I found him swimming in a glass of water. We’ve been inseparable ever since.”

He addressed Manly. “Where on earth did you learn to speak the King’s English?”

Manly muttered something incomprehensible.

“Speak up, little man. We can’t hear you over this din.”

Manly seethed with resentment. “I am called Manly, and that is for a reason.”

“He can be a prick,” added Hortense.

“Though your arms are short, you are far reaching?” asked the Dragon.

“Far be it for you to know the regions I visit.”

Heloise pinched Manly on the head. “Pipsqueak.” She put him under an overturned glass.

“He might suffocate,” observed the Dragon.

Heloise grew a tad pinker. “I wouldn’t let him. He can turn devilish if you let him out of hand.”

“After a time Manly may choose to act with more manners.” Hortense turned to the Dragon. “Can you light this cigarette for me?”

The Dragon inhaled, and then deftly lit it with a flame shooting out of his left nostril.

Heloise grew serious. “Mr Dragon, you are a gifted writer. Why haven’t you published?”
“Well.” He was at a loss. “The written word is rubbish. Conversation is the font from which I drink.”

She frowned. “More words signifying nothing.”

He shrugged. “I haven’t chosen to publish for the simple reason that no one is interested. Perhaps posthumously. Meanwhile I have a cosmic readership.”

Hortense puffed nervously. “Cosmic?”

The Dragon inscribed a circle with his finger in the air. “Look through his gate into another world.”

The girls beheld vast seas, swirling mists, and the warrior walking toward a rising sun.

“Who’s he?” Heloise asked.

The Dragon abruptly snapped shut the aperture. “There are others besides him who enjoy my stories.”

They began to worry over the Dragon’s sanity.

Manly beat against the glass.

“He’s frantic,” remarked the Dragon.

“I’ll let you out, Manly,” said Heloise, “But be good and still.”

Manly glowered at the Dragon while sitting on a packet of sugar.

The waitress brought the bill, and Heloise grabbed it.

“What is the amount?” asked the Dragon.

She studied the bill.

“Is there a problem?” asked the Dragon.

“Forgive me. As I interpret it, the gentleman standing over by the swinging doors to the kitchen has already paid it.”

Their eyes swept over to their benefactor.

“Someone from your past?” the girls guessed.

The Dragon squinted. “I cannot be sure.”

Hortense scooped up Manly. They went to thank their friend.

By the time they had picked their way through the room filled to the brim with patrons wolfing down jelly pies, he had vanished.

The Dragon blinked to stem the tears. “It may have been the fish or the warrior.”

The sisters grabbed the Dragon, each by an arm, and promenaded down the road to his home. They left him, before he could kiss them goodbye. He went inside to his study where he opened a book and read poetry until the afternoon was spent far past twilight.