The dragon's den

   The dragon flew over us and then straight for the city. From our vantage point, we were able to see how the creature spew fire all over the place, making fires light up the morning landscape. The crimson color of the flames combined itself with the pink and blue hues of the morning haze, which looked beautiful but wasn’t any of the sort for the people in that place. Some had already died and others would die pretty soon, for sure. They didn’t even have the opportunity to wake up and see what was going on, as life had just caught up with them in the most awful of ways. Death was always an unwelcomed guest.

 The group overlooking the city soon split into two groups: some of them were responsible for the release of the creature and ran somewhere to try and contain it. Doing that was ridiculous and they knew it very well, but it would have been worse if they had stayed there, looking at the creature destroy the nearest center of population. They disappeared quickly and left the rest of the people there, only a handful of humans that had no real connection between themselves except the fact that they had learned of the other people’s plans and had attempted to thwart them, failing horribly in a matter of minutes.

 They had carried a bomb with them, hoping to seal the cave the creature had been sleeping in for centuries, but the device had failed and now they needed to know what to do. The destruction of their birthplace had begun and it was very possible that the creature would turn it all into ashes before they could do something to capture it or, of course, killing it. It was an obvious idea to have after seeing the creature for the first time. It was such a huge amount of flesh and bones, heavy, with fangs protruding out of its mouth and the deadly capacity of producing the deadliest fires one could ever imagine.

 The creature, to be fair, didn’t seem to have much of a mind, but it was precisely that what scared people so easily. They couldn’t know what kinds of things that beast was able to do. The only real problem was that one group of people decided to wake it up and find out, while the others only wanted to keep the creature away from the rest of the planet, sealing it away in order to protect them from a potential catastrophe, that ultimately happened. They had neglected to realized that some of nature’s creations cannot be controlled, no matter how much effort and money people could put into it. It wasn’t like that at all.

 So, the creature had awakened, as they had planned, but it had escaped in a matter of minutes and now death and more loomed over them. Several transports carrying personnel from the team that released the creature, cruised through the forest in order to get close enough to attempt some kind of trapping mission, which was obviously not the best idea to have but it certainly was one of the few things they could do, without losing the support of the people.

 But when they reached the outskirts of the city, they realized what the dragon had actually done: it wasn’t burning the city randomly, as it had seemed to them from the top of the mountain. The creature had created a perimeter of fire, burning houses, buildings and so on to create some sort of ring to protect its new home. As they couldn’t see it in the air, they sent robots and drones to check for the creature’s position, only to find out that the dragon was sleeping quietly in the center of the city, where a large square surrounded by ancient buildings enclosed a yard made with very old bricks and stones from many parts of the country.

 Apparently, the creature was exhausted and had decided to avoid looking for food, as sleeping to gain strength back was the wisest idea, or at least it felt like that. The creature did not seem dangerous at all, but the group behind its release was not going to let it go so easily. They had decided it was better to pretend there was a bigger crisis and use that to propel their own image in the face of such a strange occurrence. So, in a matter of hours, they helped evacuate the whole city by piercing a whole in the fire ring with the help of some very powerful fireman hoses that they had available for other emergencies.

 The creature did not notice the humans in the outskirts and slept all day, almost through sunset. Unexpected as they always were, a group of humans, not allies of those idiots that had liberated the creature from the cave, decided to infiltrate the city through another point that the dragon had not completely covered in fire. It was difficult and they risked their lives when doing so, but it was worth it as they believed the creature was not one to be disturbed and they needed it to understand that it was better for its well-being to fly away to some other place, instead of sleeping in the middle of a square, an easy target.

 Although many humans infiltrated the city, only three were brave enough to come closer to the creature. As soon as they got too close, the beast opened its eyes and looked straight at them. Then, two of those people ran away and only one remained. The dragon moved its formidable paws in order to get closer and the poor human shook nervously, but did not move from the position it had been when the dragon opened up its eyes. The creature grew as close as it liked and then sniffed the human for a long time. It was as if it was looking for something special, as if it knew something that no human knew anything about.

 The dragon then put his nose very close the human’s chest and started building up some fire. Of course, everyone in the vicinity thought that poor person was going to die in moments, burned alive by the fiery flames of a creature that people didn’t even thought existed. But the dragon did not kill the person, it just heated up its nose and then expanded its wings and flew away, somewhere where he wouldn’t be bothered, very far from those greedy bastards trying to make money out of it.

 The creature was never really seen again. Some reports came to the ears and eyes of the people in that region, but nothing could never be really confirmed. In time, the fires where finally extinguished and people were able to go back to their homes and enjoy their city again. The ones responsible for the destruction were brought to justice after some private citizens had formed a coalition who brought up proof that they had been planning for a long time the awakening of the creature to use it in many kinds of tests and medical investigations.

 The people of the city, however, never thought of the whole things as something inherently bad. After finishing repairs in many parts of the city, the mayor decided to erect a huge statue honoring the dragon, right in the middle of the square where it had slept. Most people in town were very happy about the idea and many children, as well as adults, submitted thousands of designs for the statue. It was unveiled a full year after the events of that day, when they had been awakened by the rumbling of such a majestic and mysterious creature. It became a legend of the region and a story to pass down through the generations.

 As for the dragon itself, no one knows where it rests these days. Some say it must have looked for another cave. Other claims that it now takes advantage of its freedom and roams the world changing its home from time to time. That idea is very popular with children, as they seem to enjoy a lot the idea of a travelling dragon. But the truth is that most people just want to see it once again, just once before they each return to the ground, as we all must do.

 And maybe it will happen… Maybe it has already happened. But that’s a story for another day.

Took me long enough

   It hadn’t really been a nightmare. I mean, my body hurt and the things I saw didn’t made me jump of happiness but it actually wasn’t a good dream either. It was just a very strange dream in which I had seen people that hadn’t been close to me for a long time. In the dream, we even slept in the same bed, we spent a long time together, sharing moments that only really good friends would share. I don’t remember, but it felt as if I had been dreaming about work but we did not work once during the dream, we just moved around, not worried about anything in the world. It felt so strange.

 It was even stranger when I woke up and tried to make sense of it. My body was actually tied, as I had really been running around my room the whole evening. Those kind of dreams also made my head hurt because the involved an especially big investment of memory and all the imagination I could use. Besides that, my body tended to get very tense when I dreamt about something so tense. Once, my teeth had been grinding so hard against one another that one of them lost a tiny part that I probably swallowed or something.

 I have no idea why it is that I dreamt such a weird scenario, but I did. We were all in a bed, the biggest bed ever I believe. And then this guy that wanted to have sex with me kept insisting all night, even after I had given him a reason to stop insisting with it. I had helped him, if that is the correct expression, but he wanted more and more, touching me and trying to get closer and closer and I pushed back as strongly as I could because, after all, I didn’t wanted to wake everybody up just because that guy was been such a dick.

 But then he tried to do it without permission, almost forcing me to have him. So I pushed and directed what he was using to annoy me towards the guy that was sleeping on the other side. I have no idea what exactly happened, but the other guy almost jumped out of bed and they had some sort of argument that I couldn’t clearly hear. Surprisingly, some moments later, no sound could be heard in that room, except for my breathing and the tossing and turning of the guy that he had directed the annoying guy towards. He realized he was a friend from college.

 Maybe friend was a bit of a stretch because they had never really been friends in the traditional sense. We did study together but that’s as much we had in common. He was from another country and he tended to be always in a mood that would be more appropriate to a rich intellectual. He was always musing about poems and writers. That was in the real world though. In the artificial world, he seemed to love attracting looks to his face. He was annoying in real life; of course he had to be it too in that weird dream.

 However, in my dream, I tried to talk to him the day after what happened and he does talk but he doesn’t say anything about what happened. He really seems like a douchebag but I know the real one is not really like that. I mean, he doesn’t get that far from that description, but I always told him that he was so kind and smart; he could be whomever he wanted with all that knowledge. But that’s who he was, a guy that love to attract attention to himself and that’s fine because at least it’s real, that’s really him and that’s how people should love him.

 The rest of the characters in my weird dream are a little harder to point out. That’s because there were only two that kind of behaved like protagonists and all the rest were just filler, floating around with no real purpose. The other guy was someone I was sure to know but that I couldn’t really place anywhere. I know there is someone like that close by or at least I have met someone exactly like that but I have no idea from what world I drove him out of. All that dreaming and nightmares and so on, made me feel kind of tired.

 I stood up from my bed, and soon realized how early and dark it was. I hadn’t woken up at that time for a while, since I was in high school to be honest. The world outside same to be drenched in a storm made of the color blue. It was just my imagination, I guess. I decided to step into my shower and get cleaned and presentable in order to start the day, even if that day happened to be a Sunday. I had the whole weekend to think about what had happened in my dream. I thought I wanted to let it go, but no, I just couldn’t stop thinking about it.

 Especially about that guy that was basically harassing me. He was really coming forward to me as if we had met before. I was sure we had but I couldn’t remember when and that had really happen or at least I was almost certain it had. The warm water in the shower helped me realize that I did know that guy but only by sight. He was one of my followers on the social network. We hadn’t met or anything but we wrote one another very frequently or at least that was some months ago. I had no idea what had happened to him.

 Maybe he was so very well inscribed in my subconscious that my brain decided to be turned into that villain that we see throughout the movie. Or maybe I actually knew how much I liked him and just wanted him so much that I decided, in my dream, to try and have something with me. Of course, that would make me the one to blame for whatever happened during that whole strange experience. I was fine with that. I just wanted to understand it all.

 I think I wanted that to happen. I mean, not what happened with my college friend in the dream but rather what the other guy was asking from me. After all, it wasn’t everyday that I found someone that wanted me so badly. It had a very bad side to it, of course, but somehow, in a very very sick way, it was a very attractive thing to happen. That’s why in the dream, even there, I was willing to have sex with him once, just to enjoy the feeling of how I would love to have someone that actually wanted me and no one else, even if I was only for sex.

 I got out of the shower and dried myself up pretty slowly. It was a strange dream, just a very weird dream that I should leave behind but I just couldn’t because it was so vivid in my head. I went back to my room and let myself fall into my bed. I was in a towel and kind of wet and even so I didn’t really care about anything else than that feeling that I really was in conflict over something that shouldn’t entail any kind of conflict. It was just a dream and that’s that. I had to learn to let go of things that weren’t’ there to help me but to disturb me.

 I actually fell asleep for an hour or so. When I woke up, I was bit shaken because it was very cold and the towel had fallen to the ground. I was almost freezing so I put some clothes on and decided to go out for a bite, in order to remove his face and presence from my head, from both the good and the bad part of the dream. I couldn’t keep trying to make head or tails of it, so I just wanted to have some peace, at least for a little while. Going out was a good idea.

 I first went to a fast food place and I thought I had seen him there. And then I thought I had seen him in a bookstore and so on. He was everywhere and my mind was obsessed about a person that I didn’t even know who it was. I decided to go back home and just try to relax and distract myself. That worked just fine because I decided to simply not think about it any of it, not what happened or how it had felt. It was all out of me for the time being and I truly hoped to be able to have a normal sleep know that I had gotten over it.

 But then, when I fell asleep again, he came back and he was clearer this time. What I mean was that I could see his face in something very similar to high definition. Thank to that, I realized I had never really met that person. But then I realized something else: as I got closer to him and raised my hand, he grabbed it and caressed his cheek with it, and then he kissed my fingers and looked at me straight in the eye. What happened was that I had fallen in love with someone I didn’t know. How was that possible? Was he real, somewhere or was he just an illusion I had built for myself?

He was just here

   Raymond felt he sand between his toes and just kept on walking, not even realizing he was walking towards the ocean. To him, it didn’t matter anymore. His life was stuck on a loop and he had lived what he needed to live. He felt there was nothing more he could do or that he could get out of life on Earth. He had decided to think things by taking a walk and, unknowingly, his subconscious had already decided that it was time to end it all. The water reached his pants fast, and then his underwear. Then his belt, his shirt and finally his glasses. The current and the sheer strength of the ocean did the rest, taking his body from that cold, windy beach to the bottom of the ocean, from where no one would be able to take it for some time.

 He wasn’t someone people would miss and, although the ocean released the body, the police didn’t identify him for several months, as no one would ask for him. When they finally did identify the body as Raymond Bloom, it happened just because of a casual matter and not because someone was looking for him. The truth was he had no wife, no children, no parents and no friends. According to the information an officer was able to gather, he had lived alone for at least twenty years in a small attic on a very old building. The place smelled awful, as no one even knew the owner was dead. The officer found there some leads on who the man was and, maybe, on why he had done what he had done.

 Officer Jenny Marshall was one of those people who believe the best of every single person. It was strange for a cop to have such an attitude towards life but there she was, trying to cheer people up and making the best of her day every single day. She had been transferred recently and it was only the second post she had held ever so she wasn’t really assigned to the streets or to some interesting investigations. Jenny normally did the paperwork for every case and was in charge of keeping the archives in order, something she took very seriously. Deep down, she knew that her male counterparts loved to see her tie down to a job that didn’t lead anywhere but she ignored that fact and just did her work.

 Investigating the death of Raymond was assigned to her because she requested it. She told her boss she wanted to change her work a little and such a case would be perfect for her. After all, it seemed pretty straightforward and she could even do all the paperwork herself. So she convinced her boss and there she was on Raymond’s apartment, pinching her nose to avoid the foul smell of rotten food and trying to uncover the reason why he had committed suicide. To Penny, personally, it was not clear how a person could do such a thing. For her, life was sacred and no one had the right to take their own, even if they felt helpless and desperate. She knew there were always better options.

 She went through Raymond’s things and discovered that he had been published. The books did not look very nice on the outside but then she decided to sit down on the bed and just read one of the many stories the man had written in them. One was particularly moving; dealing with a ghost that saw how his childhood home was tore down to build an apartment building. She found very interesting but very sad too. She kept on looking for clues on Raymond’s house but she realize the only thing worth looking in there was his books so she put them all in boxes and took them to the station. She would try to find something in them and get to the bottom of the case, that way making everyone realize she could be a great agent and even a decent detective.

 Jenny started ready every single one of Raymond’s stories at work. No one really said anything to her because she wasn’t annoying anyone and she was doing her main job, which was taking care of the all the data. As she did that and on her free time, she would only read and read everything. Months passed until she had read every single piece of writing in Raymond’s apartment.  It was winter now and the last words she read from him where strangely appropriate for the climate: “I feel the cool breeze coming and telling me it’s time to go”. That was a short story about a man radically different from Raymond, with family and love all around him.

 The officer decided to let the case go for a while, so she went home and spent the holidays with her parents and her boyfriend and every other family member that had decided to come to the city for Christmas. She had a wonderful time eating and talking and dancing. She laughed a lot and wished for life only to be like that, full of joy and people whom you loved and who loved you. She realized Raymond’s writing had begun to depress her a bit but her family and all the love and special mood of the season brought back to her the best feelings and that nice warmth that only love can take to someone’s heart. And then, right in the Christmas dinner, she understood what had happened to Raymond.

 He had killed himself, not because he was weak or suffering in a too awful way. He died because he was alone; he had no one to take care of him or to even listen to what he had to say. And that was obvious just by reading what he wrote, as he said everything about anything he had ever thought about in life. It was amazing to read about so many things, but funny and serious, happy and sad, short and extremely long. His writing had been the way for him to externalize every single thing he had bottled up inside, as he ad never had anyone to properly talk and share his thoughts with. He had been trapped by his own life or, at least that’s what Jenny thought. Even if he was to blame, he had no choice.

 When the holidays ended, she wrote her report on the death of Raymond Bloom and decided to properly request her transference to the detective’s unit. She knew she could do more there and when her demand wasn’t accepted, she resigned the police. Jenny had learned from investigating Raymond that she needed to do with her life as she wanted, she couldn’t afford not living and not doing what her heart demanded of her. She didn’t want to end up like Raymond, all alone and talking to the books because there’s no one there. Unappreciated by the world and ignored to the point when, at her death, no one would ever think of grieving her. She wanted more from life and, eventually, she got it.

 Raymond’s books were donated to a public library and it was almost two years later when Jenny saw Ray’s name on the news. She was working with the FBI and now had a partner and was properly working the field. But during the investigation of a case, she saw the headline and bought the newspaper to find out what it was all about. Apparently, a book expert had been investigating the libraries of the cities looking for antiquities and particular books and so on. He had discovered Raymond, who had been an unknown author all his life, and declared he was one of the best storywriter he had ever found. He didn’t know that Ray was dead but he did know something else that Jenny didn’t: Ray hadn’t been as alone as she had thought.

 According to the article, the man had found several letters in the apartment Raymond had lived in, now turned into a posh flat. During the reforms on the place, they had found several letters and the expert had read them, discovering he had owned a dog for a long time and that he had died just about the time the author had stopped writing. Besides the dog, he had been in love with someone he described thoroughly in his letters, every physical aspect and some traits of characters. The letters, with such richness and passion, ended up being edited into a book that sold millions of copies, making the expert a rich man.

 Jenny was sad that Raymond had not been there to enjoy his fame and fortune. They eventually discovered he had committed suicide and that made his letters and all his books even more popular. Eventually, there was no one that didn’t know the name of the author and his tragic story. Jenny had thought, for a moment, that she had known the author but she realized she never did. She realized that no one had ever known him properly. He had been in love, that man who felt so alone and so sad. He had experienced life and life had not experienced him and Jenny felt that he finally understood why he had done what he had done. It was clear as water and she wouldn’t argue with it.

 Raymond became famous, as well as his views on life and his pain, which was painted all over his letters. But no one would ever know him as he was already gone and everyone had lost the chance to tell him “I’m here”.