An Attempt at Fantasy?

I can explain…

Before we get to the main meat, let me start by saying that this week has truly blown. For what happened in Texas and for something that happened on a friend’s Substack that I’m still trying to make sense of.

But at the end of the day, when things get hard, when I feel like there’s no way out, what I do to get through it, is write.

And I hope if things get hard for you, you will do the same.

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Now for the explanation…

The story below, I wrote for an upcoming contest. When it comes to fiction, Fantasy is not exactly my, how do you say…usual cup of tea…So what follows may really suck. Really.

The story guidelines are as follows:

-Must start with the line, “There weren’t always dragons in the valley.”

-Must be the prologue/chapter one for a fantasy that could hypothetically be called upon to be written to completion at a later time.

-Must be fewer than 5,000 words.

I’d like to enter this piece (~3,000 words) into said contest within the next couple of days. So if you have suggestions for improvement, please hurry up and give ‘em to me, pretty please with sugar on top? By like, tomorrow at the latest? [Insert grimacing emoticon.] Sorry—I know that’s a lot to ask.

Mostly I wanna know if you find it boring or confusing in a not-good way, and especially if you are finding it difficult to finish. Or if you see any typos!!!

Oh yeah, and at the time of this post, this thing still needs a title…

Which brings me to a contest?…can I call it that? Why not. If you suggest a title in the comments, which by the act of typing your suggestion in the comments, you agree that you are hereby legally allowing me permission to use typed title, and if I so happen to select and use your title, I will issue a prize of some sort to the thinker-upper of title. (Won’t be great—I ain’t rich and I ain’t famous, but I’ll do my best.)

With that, I thank you so very much for taking the time to read my work.

Until we meat again,

Maegan

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Note: to read the final version, follow this link: TALLIE’S MARK

***YOUR TITLE HERE??!***

There weren’t always dragons in the valley. There were once Tonka trucks with G.I. Joes bungee-corded to the beds, their plastic arms bent to hold beer bottles and soft-packs of Marlboro Reds as plastic wheels skid-scuttled to the bottom of the hill. There, where the tree had fallen but not yet rotted, where next to it, the grass didn’t grow, Tallie carved their initials.

T + S.

On days when the stars aligned and Tallie’s mother, that control freak who hogged all the cherries for herself and for her daughters bought only cheap, less-flavorful fruits such as apples and bananas, had to stay late for work, and Tallies’s father was off in the woods with a rifle on his shoulder and a bullet for a turkey, and Margot was at a friend’s, and Sid just so happened to be braaaaap-braaaaap-braaaaaping nearby—then, and only then, would Tallie fold over the elastic on her skirt, and with her freshly-painted toenails walk barefoot to the mailbox and, despite having already brought the mail in earlier and placed it on the kitchen counter, open the metal lid, and wait.

On that day when the stars aligned, Sid had ditched his dirt bike behind the Nazi’s double-wide, and grabbed Tallie by the hand, and taken her to the hardened spot of grassless dirt where they sat with their backs against the bark.

On that fateful day, before Sid had slipped from her sight like a popped balloon, but after he’d cracked open a Bud Light with his pocket knife and sucked foam from the mouth, he’d pulled two toy dragons from his pocket.

The purple one he’d named little Sid, and the crimson was little Tallie, and he’d hopped them onto Tallie’s foot and raced them up her shin, and finally, with both dragons atop Tallie’s knee, knocked the pink one to the floor and declared purple the winner.

And as Sid bragged about how he’d swiped them off the checkout counter while Old Hag Henry knelt mushing cans of Puppy Chow into bowls until the pitter-patter of cats came, Tallie daydreamed that it was night and Sid was outside her window throwing pebbles at the pane, and when she’d flung open the screen, he’d commanded the dragon, “Extend thy purple tail as though it t’were a velvet carpet for a famous actress or such so m’lady may climb aboard,” and after she’d twined her arms around his waist, they’d flown into the stars.

Oh—but before they flew into the stars, Tallie would first rattle a can of orange paint, and in giant uppercase letters spray on her bedroom wall, SCREW YOU GUYS!!!!! with five or six or hell, maybe even seven exclamation points to really drive it home and make sure her parents understood exactly how much they sucked balls.

And after they flew off for real this time, Tallie would ask Sid could he please fly back so she could add in parenthesis (not you, Margot!!) whom she loved infinity plus infinity more, and in fact as they flew off for the final time, Tallie would have Sid turn the dragon around just once more and extend its tail so that Margot may also climb aboard, and actually, Tallie would dismount and meet Margot halfway and hold her hand so she wouldn’t slip on her clumsy little feet and fall and impale her innocent little heart on the fence that surrounded their so-called home like barbed-wire around a maximum-security prison, and once Margot was safely sandwiched between her and Sid, then they would fly into the stars for real-for real this time and live happily ever after, THE END.

Here and now in the valley, Tallie folded the blade back into Sid’s pocket knife and stuffed it in the strap of her boot.

Here and now in the valley, in the dirt next to Tallie’s heel, only the crimson dragon remained. And the Oak where Sid had pinned her against the trunk and tongued swirls on her neck and traced his nose along her chin and sucked her bottom lip into a kiss and made his fingers into a little walking man on her knee where the champion dragon had left off and continued up her thigh to where the hem of her skirt fluttered in the summer breeze.

Here and now in the valley, she could still feel his breath behind her ear as he whispered, “Would you let me if I was your boyfriend?”

That day, that fateful day, Tallie had giggled. Squirmed out of his grasp, snapping twigs as she ran, hair whipping the skin on the back of her shoulders. Sid’s echoes of laughter had chased after, playing tag against the mossy walls behind her.

Behind her and he was there.

Behind her and he was gone.

Here and now in the valley, Tallie felt for the note in her pocket, its four corners dull from the turning and rubbing and unfolding and reading of the two words, and mulling over the two words which obviously had no other apparent meaning than what they like, literally said!, and refolding, and rubbing and turning.

Come back, it said.

Come back. Come back. Come back.

And come back she had, each and every day since that day, since that fateful day, the day the stars aligned, the best and worst day of her life, the day when Sid went poof! like a rabbit in a hat, like a rabbit down a hole, like the rabbit she’d accidentally forgotten to feed and check on to make sure coyotes didn’t get it when her sister was out of town.

Had Tallie come back to the valley on the day Sid’s parents had dressed in all black and worn sunglasses over their dry eyes and lowered an empty casket into the ground and directly after clicked Withdraw on the funding website, thereby affording them to set sail for Fiji or whatever freaking tropical island which she hoped they would find themselves stranded on with no food or drink except maybe their own brown, stinking pee after an unexpected tempest hammered its angry fist upon them for abandoning the search for their son?

She had.

Had Tallie come back on the day her mother, her own mother, that shell of a woman, who now that she thought about it, seemed more like a stepmother actually, and come to think of it Tallie had yet to view with her own two eyeballs the certificate of her birth on which her name was printed, had stood in the driveway with Tallie’s learner permit in hand, which she should have gotten a year earlier had her mother paid any attention, all, “I swear to god, if you walk out this door, I’ll tear it in half.”

To which, Tallie had mumbled, Two wrongs don’t make a right.

And though her heart had audibly scoffed at the cheesy disconnect and incorrectness of her spoken sentence, her legs had pivoted and begun to walk, and her ears tingled with excitement as they listened for the crrrruuuuut of paper ripping, because hearing that sound was all the permission her feet needed to run.

And run she had, like the wind, like a bird, like all the overused similes that could not be stopped unless the shirt on one’s back had met with an unexpectant stick that had been pointing straight out, as if to say SCREW YOU TOO, TALLIE! YOU HORRIBLE DAUGHTER! as if to say as her father had said to her earlier that year, “Please don’t come to me anymore with your mommy-daughter problems; it’s affecting your mother and my relationship.”

Ouch. That stupid stick had left a snag along the front of her button-down tank and a gash on the swell of her breast where the meat was tender in the same way the arch of a foot was tender from having never touched anything but the inside of a sock or Sid’s hands or the crimson dragon which was still here and now in the valley in the same place it had been since Sid disappeared.

A gust tornadoed a few fallen leaves and dropped them.

Tallie listened for Sid. Searched the valley walls for the fake book on a shelf—the one that when you pulled it, opened a secret passageway to somewhere else. Searched her mind for a snapshot of the laundry room shelf and whether or not next to the detergent there was half a bottle of bleach left.

“Tallie?” A voice called, and with it, at the top of the valley, a cascade of red curls.

Tallie’s throat closed. No bleach. Not for Margot, geez. How had she gotten here? How had she gotten to where she felt her fingernails clawing for an exit?

Margot dragged a stick down the hill. “Dinner’s ready.”

Tallie said nothing and did not look up until it was too late and Margot’s feet had already trampled the crimson dragon from its eternal position where it was not to be touched and when Tallie looked up again Margot was in the dirt with her arms hugging the spot where Tallie had pushed her to the ground and tears were welling in her eyes.

Tallie took a step toward Margot. “I didn’t mean to—” A larger step backwards. “I just don’t want to mess anything up. In case it happens again.”

Margot nodded. Rocked back and forth.

Tallie felt for the paper in her pocket. “He’s coming back.”

Margot stood up, brushed off her elbows, and rubbed her hands across her middle, which no longer carried the tub of baby fat Tallie used to blow zerberts on when Margot still played peek-a-boo. Oh how toddler-Margot used to hug her, used to wrap her arms and legs around her and hang like a monkey.

Tallie pulled the note from her pocket.

Margot looked away. “Tallie, I…”

Tallie stopped. She had seen that look on her sister’s face before. Last year, after Margot’s fourth-grade class took a trip to the zoo. Where’s my camera, Tallie had asked when Margot had returned empty-handed, and Margot said Stanley took it, and after a few shakes, it was Renee who stole it, and after a few pinches, there’d been an earthquake!! in these parts??!!, and finally, with her eyebrows just inches from touching toilet water, Margot had admitted to getting on the bus and belting, This is the Song That Never Ends until they were all but a block from the school parking lot before she finally noticed that no camera strap was dangling from her neck, and in her mind’s eye, she was pretty sure—ninety-six or eighty-seven percent probably—that it was actually hanging on the fence surrounding the giraffes or tigers or it could also be in the zoo bathroom.

Tallie gripped Margot’s arm. “Margot, what did you do Margot…”

Tallie dug her nails until Margot’s skin dented with half-moons. Until Margot wrestled away and screamed, “I did it. I wrote the note!”

Tallie released her sister, that traitor, who was always stealing her clothes anyway and saying she hadn’t and then shoving them under her bed to rot instead of simply washing them and putting them back before Tallie even discovered the thievery, who was ruining the very shirt on her back—the only shirt she had now and with which she was running away—with her grubby pulling mitts, Miss I Can Explain, Miss Let Her Sister Live a Lie, Miss—

The wind howled and snatched the paper from Tallie’s fingers. Beneath her feet, the ground shook itself open until Tallie was standing on one side and Margot on the other.

This, Tallie thought as she looked into the blackness below her, would be much less painful than bleach.

And jumped into the abyss.

When Tallie opened her eyes, he was there, Sid was (!), and so was the dragon (!!), the purple one, breathing flames from its nostrils (!!!), flying above her and oohhh…that must’ve been sooome fall, because now the dragon had landed next to a tree, next to a giant tree with cherries the size of oranges and as the dragon nibbled the fruit, Sid sat with his legs straddled around its neck and released the set of reins attached to the metal bit between the dragon’s teeth, and stretched out his amazingly buff and perfectly sun-kissed arm which housed his muscular hand which was holding, what was that, a freaking wizard staff??????

Was this, as they said in air quotes, Hell?

Because if it was, because had Tallie known hell was going to be this awesome she would have jumped a hell of a lot sooner, pun intended, haha!

But in all seriousness, where was this place in which she laid, lay? lie? This place in which she was sprawled upon the ground with her body facing upward. It had to be hell, didn’t it? Seeing how she had plunged herself into what had to be her certain death, because how would anyone in their right minds have survived a fall like that?

But if this was hell and Sid was here, looking all fine with his shirtless torso and his loin-cloth covered whatever-the-lower-half-of-the-body-was-called (she should totally get a pass on thinking after taking a fall like that), then hellooooo Hell!

Tallie rolled onto her stomach and limped to her knees where sticky grass clung to her skin, and with an outstretched hand, reached to steady herself on a nearby branch. And as her fingertips brushed the tip of the twig, it went all limp-stiff-limp-stiff like that pencil trick the boys always do in school, then it roped around her wrist and yanked her back against its trunk, sliming across her stomach as it bound her wrists above her head and made loops around each knee, pulling her legs back into quite the compromising position seeing how she was wearing the same skirt she had worn the last time she’d seen Sid. And before her brain could stop her lips, she had screamed, “Help!”

Sid’s head turned. He tapped the dragon with his staff and the dragon kneeled and Sid dropped the reins and climbed down the purple wing and over to where Tallie hung physically helpless, but with an aching that had shifted from her heart to between her thighs.

Into Tallie’s boot, Sid slid his hand and pulled out his pocket knife and flipped it open, and held the tip to the row of buttons where her shirt was snagged. And Tallie found herself arching her back, pushing out her chest as though it were an invitation to gut the cloth like a deer, to flick the blade beneath the band of her bra and take that too if he so wished, and she watched as Sid’s eyes wandered the length of her body and made their way back up to her own eyes, which had been longing for this very moment all these days, weeks, months, the moment where, with his eyes, he would say, you came back—

Sid retracted the knife and turned on his heels and stomped his staff atop the ground.

The branches recoiled from Tallie’s limbs and dropped her to the earth.

Sid retreated to the dragon. Behind him, Sid reached out his hand and in it took another, not the hand attached to her arm, to Tallie’s, but to the arm of a woman who for a shirt wore only tassels like on a graduation cap, which for god sake, barely covered the areola part of her nipples, and on her lower half, a fringy collection of strings, not even half as elegant as the party streamers for a doorway one bought at the dollar store, that skank! That Betty, that Two-Cent Ho!

That imposter followed Sid onto the dragon’s wing and wrapped her legs around Sid’s seated body, smoothed her hand over his groin, then up to his chin, which she tilted towards her own and, with her eyes locked on Tallie’s, and a little glint sparkling from her iris, as if to say, Look Virgin, I’ve done some real damage with this, slid her tongue—ahem tongues??!!—a smaller one on top of a normal one—into his mouth.

Sid jogged the reins and the dragon spread its wings, and Oh Yes—Tallie thought as Sid and the mystery-woman flew into the sky, leaving Tallie on her knees, stomach lurching with bile.

Oh Yes—this must be Hell indeed.

Tallie stumbled to her feet and made her way around the tree, still snapping at her like the turtle she had once tried to help cross the road—and didn’t that count for something, God? Didn’t that at least put her somewhere in the middle? Some type of purgatory or limbo or whatever the hell the church-goers called it?

Past the snapping tree, past a car-sized rock the color of a peach, a stretch of pond shimmered beneath three crescent moons, with water so clear she could see to the bottom, where miniature trucks, yellow dumpers manned by men in fatigues, carried shining stars, arranging themselves into a shape or symbol or a number.

Into a T + S.

Tallie sat back on her knees and watched, her heart dancing at first and then delaminating, like plastic rhinestones that had melted in the dryer, as the T rearranged into a Z.

Tallie returned to her feet, no longer certain of how even to walk, except but to place one foot in front of the other and repeat.

And as she stepped toward the gargantuan rock, which before her very eyes was changing like a hypercolor sweatshirt from pink to crimson, and unfolding its wings, and unfurling its tail, she noticed behind it, bouncing in the breeze, a tuft of red curls.