The Bone Dragon by Alexia Casale

anything ever happened to him, but I can’t bear to. Even if he didn’t know about Fiona’s parents, he had to have known how spineless she was. And still he went racing through the fenland lanes on his motorcycle until he killed himself in a drainage ditch.
    Fiona hadn’t stopped him. Maybe she didn’t even try. Sometimes I wonder if she ever asked him not to go, told him not to go so fast. Begged him not to risk leaving us. Even though she knew exactly what would happen without him around to make sure she stayed rescued.
    Suddenly my right thumb nail slides deep into the catch in the left, opening it up, tearing the nail away down to the quick. I put my thumb in my mouth. Suck away the blood with spit already sweet and thick with it. The taste explodes on my tongue. 

     
     
    When I wake in the darkness to the feeling of being watched, I smile as I roll on to my side.
    The Dragon is stretching its wings as if it is stiff after a long day in the pot.
    ‘Should I leave you here, in my room, during the day?’ I ask, as I scramble out of bed to put on my clothes, impatient to get out into the night.
    The Dragon continues stretching, pushing its chest down and then arching its haunches up, spreading its wings wide and flicking its tail. As you wish.
    As carved bone, the Dragon is pinkish but, when fleshed out, becomes the blue-white of moonlight.
    ‘Where are we going tonight?’ I ask, as I scoop the Dragon on to my shoulder and push open the window. Tonight, I remember to pull it slightly to so that Amy and Paul won’t feel a chill in the corridor if they wake in the night. Maybe it’s silly but I can’t shake the feeling that if they catch me Dragon-dreaming that will be the end of it. And I won’t let it be over. Not yet, when we’ve only just begun. So, even though it’s all a dream and even though I know they won’t come in to check on me anyway because they know how lightly I sleep, I’ve made my bed so that it looks like I’m still there.
    I manoeuvre down the garden wall then hurry across the grass and through the woods to the river. For a moment I stop, staring up the towpath to the left. Seven miles . . .
    We go to the right , the Dragon commands.
    By the river’s edge the reeds writhe as one creature attacks another with a piping scream. Heavy cloud blocks the moonlight and in the darkness the rising mist isn’t white, but grey and green and blue. It is gathering over the fens now, coming at me in drifts, now faster, now slower: rushing at me, diving around me. Chilling my face. Caressing my hair. It pulls away and for a moment the air is clear, then it is thick once more, twisting about me in gossamer strands as if I’m being wrapped in cobwebs.
    It seethes about my waist as I wade out into the fields, fixing my eyes on the rising and falling boundary between the blanketing, swirling greyness and the wet, dark night. Anything could lie below the mist and still it teases at all the normal things of a night on the fens, tempting them down into a stranger place, where things aren’t quite what they seem: ceaselessly shifting, changing, defying all the rules.
    And somehow there is so much to feel and smell and see and hear and taste that I forget to hurt. There’s too much here and now for pain. Suddenly I am empty.
    And it’s like breathing in light.
    I am gone from myself.
    Unravelling into the mist, I become nothing. And there is respite. Finally, there is respite. As if the world has stopped turning and at last there is a space out of time where it’s not pain on pain, hurt on hurt with each breath.
    The Dragon is making a soft, breathy noise of contentment, like purring. We wander on.
    By the time we turn back to the canal, the mist is thick and heavy, boiling over from the fields, foaming down to swirl and roil above the dark, slow water. I laugh, raising my arms as I spin round and around until the wind drops and the mist dissolves, the last remnants flowing, snakelike, away to the