author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Notes from the author:

The chronology of this story tangled me up for a bit. I was having a hard time deciding how much time should be understood to pass between the first paragraph and the last. Besides, the narrator didn’t feel like someone who could reliably report, “Then, a week later, this other thing happened,” or, “Later, in the spring, Momma said...”

Just to experiment, I tried just putting everything in the present tense, all but for a few specific flashbacks, and omitting almost every single reference to time passing. It seemed to work. It not only simplified my task, but also clarified the narrator’s voice in an unexpected way. You’ll be the ultimate judge of how well it worked, of course. But as for me, I’m just amazed at what a huge effect such a little change can have.

My sister’s an artist. She draws all the time. It’s all she ever does. She sits in her chair by the fireplace, and I bring her charcoal sticks and old bedsheets from the rag bin, and she draws things for me.

I don’t draw so good. I make shadow pictures OK though. I make a rabbit. I twitch my two fingers, and the rabbit twitches its ears. It makes my sister laugh. I can’t hear her laugh with my ears, but if I listen with my whole heart and also my skin, I can hear her laugh that way.

She draws a picture of me and my rabbit hand shadow, and then the shadow looks a lot more like a rabbit. It hops up into the air, sproing! Then it runs all around the room. I laugh out loud, and my sister laughs the laugh that I hear with my skin, and that’s how we laugh together.

I get tired of my hands not having shadows, so I ask my sister to make the rabbit come home. Momma says, “Don’t waste your breath talking to that lump. Too stupid to understand a word.” But my sister is already drawing. She draws where the rabbit shadow attaches to my hands. Then my hands have shadows again, and the shadows only move when my hands move. So that’s how I know Momma’s wrong.

Momma won’t send my sister to school. She just sends me. I go to the church with the other kids, and we sit in the pews and the school teacher tells us about the world. The teacher tells us how just a little ways north from our village there’s a glacier, which is a mountain made of ice, and inside the glacier there’s a giant lizard, the kind that used to be alive in the very old days before there were people. I want to know how the lizard got into the glacier in the first place, but when it’s time for questions the school teacher calls on other kids and not me.

So I ask Aunt Bess. Aunt Bess is Momma’s oldest sister. She’s so old, she has wrinkles everywhere, not just on her skin but on her voice too. And she knows everything about everything, so I ask her about the giant lizard in the glacier. She says it’s an old dragon that got into an argument with Jesus. Who won that argument, I want to know? Aunt Bess says, “Who do you think? Ain’t Jesus that’s stuck in the ice, is it?”

Except maybe Jesus lost that argument, too, because He got stuck on a cross. But then He got unstuck and went back to Heaven. Maybe the dragon will get unstuck someday too.

I tell my sister about the dragon in the ice, and she draws it. It’s my favorite drawing. I cut it out and put it under my bed. Now I can pull it out to look at it whenever I want. I could see it easier if it was tacked up on my wall, but then Momma might take it away and throw it on the fire. She did that one day when she got specially mad. She smacked the charcoal out of my sister’s hands and threw my sister’s drawing on the fire. I cried and cried, but my sister never said a word.

I get sad thinking about that, so I ask my sister to draw me something funny. So she does. She draws a big pointy ear sticking out from behind the firewood. She draws long fingers reaching around the ends of the logs. Then she puts down the charcoal and pats me on the shoulder and points to get me to look up. She leaves charcoal smudges on my sleeve, but I don’t care, because the goblin from my sister’s drawing is stepping out from behind the firewood and grinning at us. He starts to dance. My sister and I laugh together, watching the goblin dance.

Then Momma comes in. I’m scared she’ll see the goblin and get mad. My sister squishes the drawing up in her fist, and the goblin disappears before Momma can see him.

Momma might not have noticed him anyway. She’s busy talking to Aunt Bess. “I warned him,” she says. “You heard me. Ain’t no one can say I didn’t warn him.”

“Surley don’t care about that. Been keeping his house to his own liking for years. All he wants a wife for is to make little Surleys.”

Momma laughs. “He best not come complaining when them little Surleys turn out as useless as their ma. Come on, let’s find us a dress to cram her into.”

They pass through the sitting room back into Momma’s bedroom. From my sister, I hear a little noise, like crack! She’s broken the charcoal. Her hands are all white where they’re not smudged black, and they’re shaking. Soon as I find her a new charcoal stick in the fire, she starts a new drawing right on top of where the goblin used to be.

She doesn’t stop, not for days and days. I have to keep bringing her more sheets. She’s drawing the dragon in the glacier over and over again. Every drawing’s a little different from the one before. It’s like a flip book, but bedsheets don’t make good flip books, so all I can do is line up the drawings in order. Here’s the dragon, all frozen and stiff. Here’s the ice starting to crack. Here’s the dragon taking a step, and then another. Here’s the ice all piled up in pieces and no dragon at all.

Momma makes my sister get up and get into an old white dress she and Aunt Bess pulled out of her closet. She tells me to dress like for church, because that’s where we’re going.

We never get to the church. Instead, we get to where the church used to be. The church is in pieces all piled up, like the pile of ice in my sister’s drawing, and on top of the pile is the dragon. The dragon has huge feet with wicked sharp claws. All its claws are the color of ice, except for where it’s standing on some poor critter that’s all smooshed and moaning. The claws on that foot are all red.

Momma yells, “Surley? Surley!” She starts running toward the dragon, yelling at the men who’re all standing around, “It’s got Surley! Help him!” And my sister starts to laugh. She laughs and laughs and laughs, and for the first time I can hear her with not just my heart and my skin but my ears, too.

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