Storytime: The Daily Drain.

January 12th, 2011

Emma was six years old when she started noticing something was wrong with her father.  Before that (as was no fault of her own), she was too young, too prone to thinking of the universe as binary: Emma and those other things that should give Emma ice cream.  Now she saw the subtle distinctions.  For instance, Mom was a girl, and she was at work all night.  Dad was a boy, and he worked all day, and came home with lines on his face and bags under his eyes and a stare that wasn’t there at all.  He looked like one of the zombies that cousin Connor spent all his time shooting.  Emma had tried it once, but the controller was too big for her hands.
“Do you want ice cream?” asked Emma, sensitive to the complex needs of the working man.
“No thanks, flower,” Dad said without looking at her.  “Just some rest.”  He went straight through the kitchen (snagging a bottle of That Damned Stuff from the fridge), from there to the coach, and turned on the TV.
Emma was a little glad.  Who knew how much ice cream Dad could eat if he put his mind to it?  Maybe he’d start on it instead of That Damned Stuff and she’d never get any of it again unless she snuck it when he was at work.  But then maybe he’d shout at her.  He’d never done it before, but he and Mom had started shouting the one time he’d come home from work and they’d been completely out of That Damned Stuff.
Just like they were out of ice cream right now.  The freezer was empty.
Emma flounced into the living room (she’d learned that from her grandmother) and glared at the back of Dad’s head.  “Daaaaad,” she intoned in her most armour-piercing tones, “we’re out of –” and the sentence ended there because she’d just noticed something rather important.
Dad heaved himself over on the coach, displacing The Dog, which was their dog.  He looked like one of the pictures of beached whales their teacher had shown them in Science, but smaller and even sadder.  “What is it, kitty?”
Emma tried to stop staring and failed.  “Never mind.”
Dad was too tired to notice, and flipped himself back over without so much as another word.  It brought the big round hole in the back of his head back into clear view.  Emma was quite puzzled; she thought the inside of people’s heads was supposed to be read and sticky.  But there was nothing inside Dad’s head at all but black emptiness.

“There’s a hole in Dad’s head,” Emma told Mom as she tucked her into bed an hour later, very formal in her work suit.  Dad called her the Queen of the Night Shift.  Mom called him The Hippy That Went To Law School.  Emma thought Mom’s names for things were better than Dad’s.
Mom sighed.  “More like his foot, dear.  Good night, and sleep loose.”  Mom always said that.  She said that if children didn’t sleep loose, they grew up all cramped and gnomey, and Emma’d look like Grandma by the time she was twelve.  Emma always slept as loose as she could, sometimes to the breaking point.

The next morning, she was eating breakfast (bland, tepid, healthy cereal) when Dad came down the stairs.  His face was thinner than the milk he poured into his coffee.
“Dad?”
“Mmm?”
“Why do you have a hole in the back of your head?”
He laughed.  “Now where did that come from?”
“Why?”
Dad turned around and rubbed his skull.  “See?  Nothing there.  You worry too much, kitty.  What made you think that?”
“TV,” said Emma automatically.  She’d discovered through careful trial and error that blaming things on television worked maybe half the time.
Dad shook his head.  “Lord knows what you’re watching all day.  Read a book or go outside or something, petal.  And you should be off to school now.  Are you packed?”
“Yes.”  Every day he asked that, every morning she answered that, every time it turned out she’d forgotten something new.  Her hat, her water bottle, the horrible old metal lunchbox that everyone at school made fun of her for owning (it had been grandpa’s, then Dad’s, then hers).  This time, it was her water bottle.
School was… school.  Emma did the things she liked (math, mostly) and the things she didn’t like (spelling, mostly), and she came home before Mom woke up, as usual.  She made herself a bad peanut butter sandwich and ate it.
Dad came home, heralded as usual by the haphazard, lazy woofs of The Dog.  As he bent over to pull off his shoes, Emma saw the hole in his head again.
“Dad?”
He sighed as he pulled himself upright.  Emma could tell it wasn’t aimed at her specifically, just everything around him.  “Yes?”
Emma was suddenly sure that asking the question again wouldn’t help.  “Never mind.”
“Right.”  He went and got another bottle of That Damned Stuff.
Emma stayed up later than usual that night, and not just because she was finding it very hard to sleep loose.  She was planning.

The next morning she packed for school extra-carefully: sandwich, water bottle, books, notebook, pencils, and jacket.  She didn’t forget one thing, and was out the bus stop almost before Dad was done his coffee, something that surprised him even through the sleepy face he always wore right up until the moment he left.
She was back inside two minutes later.
“What is it this time, pumpkin?”
“I forgot my hat,” she said.
“It’s in the closet.”
“I can’t fiiiind it,” she said.  “And it’s raaaaaining ouuuttt…”
Dad sighed and got up to look for it.  While he was doing that, Emma snuck his car keys back into his coat pocket.  Then she took her hat (in plain sight, naturally), said her goodbyes, walked out the door, and got inside her dad’s car, where she locked the doors again and hid in the back under the old blanket that they used whenever The Dog had to come with them on a trip.  It was a good thick blanket, and Emma was small and thin, but still the big reason Dad didn’t see her was that he never bothered to look, which made her feel a little disappointed inside.
Emma had been to Dad’s Work once before last year, for some reason or another that hadn’t mattered at the time.  She’d forgotten everything, and especially how long the drive was.  At least four times she had to sneeze so hard that her face nearly fell of with its quivering, but she held it in and in all the way to the parking lot, where Dad locked the car and left her.
Emma unlocked it and stepped out after him, then stopped to look up and up and up at the building that was Dad’s Work.  It ran all the way up to the tops of the sky where the clouds lived, covered in flat squares of glass that gleamed dully against the grey horizon.  It wasn’t quite pretty.  But it also wasn’t what was drawing her attention.  That was the dragon.
It blended in quite nicely, but it wasn’t that hard to see – like those disappointing chameleons she’d seen at the Zoo on her birthday.  It lay flat against the front of the building, arching up and around its sides, sinuous as a serpent and a hundred hundred times bigger from tip to tip.  Pane for pane its scales were the same as the glass it was hugging, from its pale eyes to its see-through wings.
It was watching her.
“Hello,” said Emma.
The dragon made no comment.
“Don’t be rude,” said Emma.
“It is rude,” said the dragon, “not to speak when spoken to.  On the other hand, it is rude to disobey your parents.  Should you not be at school?”
“It’s boring.  Aren’t dragons supposed to have lots of treasure?”
“I do.”
“Well, where is it?”
“I am brooding on it.”
Emma thought for a moment.
“Sleeping.”
“I know that.  Where is it?”
“I just told you.”
“Treasure is money and stuff.  That’s a building.”
“Times change,” said the dragon.  “Why are you here?”  Its expression didn’t change at all, no matter what it was saying.
“School is boring,” repeated Emma.  She felt something in her stomach move, and decided to change topics. “And Dad has a hole in his head.  Do you know why?”
“Dad,” said the dragon, flatly.  “Dad… many of my employees are parents.  Many of those have girls.  A few have girls your age.  One or two with your hair colour.  None with that coat.  Yes, I know your father. I do indeed.  And I do know the answer to your question.”
“What is it?”
“A secret.  Part of my treasure.  You may not have it.”
“But it’s okay to look at it, right?”
“You may not.”
“But I’m looking at your treasure right now.”
The dragon considered this.  “All right,” it said at last.  “You may enter.  But you may take nothing.”
“Thank you very much,” said Emma as politely as she could.  The handles on the big doors at the base of the building groaned as she heaved their ponderous weight open, tugging with her whole body.  She squeezed through the crack as quickly as she could; it was impossible to feel comfy with those eyes on you.
Inside the building was a man behind a desk.  He stared straight forwards at her as she padded towards him, lunchbox in hand backpack on back; alert, businesslike, and really bored.  Emma had felt that way enough to recognize it, even in grownups.
“I’m looking for Dad,” she told him.
He stared over her head at the door.
“Try the fifth floor,” whispered a voice from above.  The dragon’s head was hovering near the ceiling, its long, thin neck stretching all the way through the doors, which didn’t seem to have opened.
“They cannot see you.  They would make you leave, and that would be counter to our agreement.”  The dragon eased its way back outside, passing through the glass without a ripple or bend.
Emma walked back to the doors and poked them.  She shrugged, which didn’t make her feel better.  The prospect of an elevator ride, however, did.  The doors of the cage slid soundlessly open, and the rows and rows of polished buttons were warm and dimly-lit under her fingers as she hunted for “five.”
“Have some music,” said the dragon from the polished steel walls of the elevator.  Music happened.  It was fuzzy and airy, more like sounds strung together by fairies than the stuff Mom and Dad listened to, and Emma didn’t want to have it.
“Are there lots of dragons left?” she asked, as politely as she could.
“No.  Knights killed most of us.”
“Mom has music that a knight wrote,” said Emma proudly.  “He sang it too.”
“Properly prepared knights.  Knighted by royalty, yes, but with ancient weapons and the aid of great magicians.  None of those things live today.”
The music wasn’t going away, no matter how much Emma ignored it.  “Turn it off,” she said.  The dragon turned it off and its face vanished from the walls.  Still, she couldn’t quite relax until the floor bell dinged and she was outside the elevator again.  The walls kept trying to stare at her.
The floor Dad worked on was grey. Grey carpets, grey ceilings, grey walls, and even the strange fuzzy boxes that the workers were put in were grey.  The glass windows that took up the building’s outer walls looked out on the grey sky.  Emma shivered.
“The fourth cubicle on your right,” the dragon whispered to her.  It was hovering outside again, peering in at her.  Its eyes felt like caterpillars on her skin.
“What’s a cubicle?”
“The boxes my employees work in.”
Emma didn’t like the idea of Dad being in a box.  Things that she had outgrown got put in boxes, and she never saw them again.  She didn’t think she’d outgrown Dad.  He was still a lot bigger than she was.
She looked into the bo – the cubicles as she passed them.  The first one had a thin young man who kept running his hands through his hair.  The second had a woman older than Mom, who was typing faster than anything.  The third was a fat man with a grey beard who was staring at his computer screen and not blinking.  Each and every one of them had a neat black hole in the back of their heads.
The fourth one was Dad.  He was reading something on his screen and looking at papers, first one, then the other, then the other, then back again, just like the metronome they had on their piano that Mom never played.
“Hi Dad,” said Emma.  He didn’t look at her.
“Your father is busy,” said the dragon.  “He works for money, to feed you.  You should leave him alone.”
“I don’t see a hole in his head,” said Emma.
“It is a sort of medical procedure.  Nothing to worry about.  It keeps them working properly.”
“Okay,” said Emma.  “Sure.”
“Are you ready to leave now?  Your father must not be interrupted.  He is doing important work here.  You are a distraction.  Go back to school, where you belong.”
Emma looked at her shoes.  “Okay.”  She kept looking at them all the way back to the elevator, feeling the dragon’s eyes on her back.  Only when she stepped inside the cage again did they turn away, and that moment was when she hopped back outside again, letting the doors shut behind her.
“Liar, liar, liar, liar,” she hum-whispered under her breath as she ran back towards Dad’s bo – cubi – box.  “Pants on fire, fire, fire, fire.”  But dragons didn’t have pants, so she’d have to see if it was lying another way.
Dad hadn’t moved, sitting in his box.  But he wasn’t looking at his papers anymore.  He was sitting straight up in his chair, looking ahead without looking.  A thin, perfectly flat glass claw, hanging from the ceiling, was stirring at the back of his head, as carefully as Mom made spaghetti.  Cool, breathy strands of something that wasn’t quite silver were unravelling and fraying loose, dropping into the glass and disappearing.
Emma had two things, one of which she was proud of and one of which she was embarrassed.  First, she could scream louder than any other girl in her class, and all the boys, and Mrs. Campbell too, unless she was in a really bad mood.  Second, she was still the only girl in the class with a metal lunchbox.
She swung both of those things at the same time, and aimed well.  The claw jumped like a cat with The Dog after it, and in the middle of its retreat it was struck squarely and fairly amidships by the lunchbox.  There was a crash and a clatter, and something cold and sharp slid by Emma’s face with a hiss.
Dad blinked a bit and looked down at her.  Strands of the silvery stuff were still wavering from the hole in the back of his head.  “Hello there kitty,” he said feebly.  There were bags under his eyes, she saw.  “Did you break something?”
“I saw it on TV,” said Emma.  She tugged hard on his arm.  “Come on.  Cooome oooonnn.  We’ve gotta go.”
“Don’t try that sort of thing at home,” said Dad.  He followed her guiding hand, even more slowly than he usually did.  “Feels like I just got here.  How was school?”
“Good,” lied Emma, trying to tow him faster.  “Now c’mon.”
She’d just mashed the elevator button with her palm when the dragon flowed through the building wall, glass slipping away from its sides like oil from water in that silly old knick-knack of Dad’s he kept on his desk at home.  There was a toy boat floating in it, Emma recalled faintly.  It was strange, the things you thought about when a dragon was trying to eat you.  It was hissing, like a garden hose left unattended.
“Stairs,” she squeaked, and yanked the door open.  The dragon’s head jammed in the doorframe centimetres (maybe it was metres, she couldn’t remember) behind Dad’s shoes; big, silvery mirror-teeth gnashing quietly on nothing.
“The exercise is good for you,” said Dad.  The silvery stuff had sucked back inside, Emma saw, and he seemed a little quicker on his toes.  “I should take the stairs more often.  You’ve got to keep fit, especially at my age, petal.”
“Okay,” said Emma.  There were too many steps, and they were all too big.  Buildings shouldn’t be built for people so big.
“You have broken our agreement,” said the dragon in her ear.  She jumped, but saw no sign of it.
“Did not,” she said.
“You have taken my employee with you.”
“That’s Dad, and he’s mine.”
“He was mine first and is still.  You are remarkably inconvenient. All I ask for is a few moments of his time.  Why, you steal more of it each day than I do all year.”
“You’re a liar,” said Emma, trying not to listen.  “Liar, liar, liar, fire, fire fire.  All you care about is money.  Go away”
“Time is money, girl.  And I hoard it.”  The dragon’s voice never wavered, never broke its monotone.  It sounded almost as bland as Mrs. Campbell on her worst day.  “You are stealing the time that is rightfully his and therefore mine, as dictated by my terms of employment, and I will not tolerate this breach of contract.  You will be persecuted past the full extent of the law.”
Emma shoved open the door to the stairwell and dragged Dad through.  Her legs ached and tingled.  “That’s for grownups.  Go away.”
“Time waits for no one,” said the dragon, its face centimetres away from hers (yes, that was right, she remembered).  It filled most of the lobby.  “And you have much of it on your hands.  I claim it as settlement of your transgression.”  Quick as a blink its coils were around her (clang clatter bang went the lunchbox on the floor), hoisting her into the air regardless of kicks, punches, and even bites.  It tasted like soap and chemicals.
The dragon’s head came down to face her again, mouth opening wider and wider.  Its gullet was stainless, polished steel, and all the glass inside did nothing to reflect its sparkle in the dimness.
“Are you off to school again already?” asked Dad, bemused.  “Are you packed?”
Everything seemed to slow down for a second as Emma thought about what to say next.
“I forgot my lunchbox!” she screamed.
“Here you go, pumpkin,” said Dad, and he placed it gently in her hands.  Emma clenched it tight inside them and swung up and up and up, right into that flat, blank, mirror-eye, as hard as she could.
For one moment, there was nothing in the world but CRACK.  The ground was CRACK.  The sky was CRACK.  The seas (she’d been to the seaside once, and gotten her toes wet) were probably CRACK too.  Then it was over and it was all normal again, all but the dragon, which was still made of CRACK, except it was smaller, thousands of little cracks splintering and shooting along its body like solid lightning.
“I was to be killed by a knight,” said the dragon in small, shocked surprise.  It was the first thing she’d heard it express any sort of emotion over at all.  “A true knight.  With an ancient blade, and a magician’s blessing, and the favour of the queen.  There was gong to be tumult, and battle.”
Emma sat up from the floor.  She couldn’t remember how she’d got there, but her aching back gave her a guess.  “Mom is a queen, and I know that because Dad said so.  That lunchbox is grandpa’s, and he’s the oldest boy ever.  And Dad is a magician, because Mom said that it must’ve taken magic to get a hippy like him into law school.  So THERE.”
“Ah,” said the dragon.  It fell apart like a paperback in heavy rain, glass and steel flying everywhere – but not so much, and not a whole lot.  It had only been hollow inside after all, right to the core.
Flooding out of the mess came a whole tangle of flying, swirling bits of silvery stuff  that coiled around Emma’s feet like playing kittens.  They spun round three times and fled up the stairs, all but one.
That one spun up to Dad’s head and popped into the hole, which vanished.
He blinked.
“Petal?  What are you doing here?”  He looked at his watch.  “God, it isn’t even lunch yet.  What’s going on?”
“You got fired,” said Emma.
Dad stared into the middle distance.  “Hmmm.  I did?  Yes, you’re right.  I did.  I must have.  Well, at least I’ll get severance.  And I’ll have a chance to cook for a while.  Your mother’ll like that.”  He brightened up.  “Come on.  I’ll drive us home.  You’ve missed half your schoolday already, you might as well miss the rest.”
Pushing from the inside, the doors felt light as a feather.

 

“The Daily Drain,” storytime 2011, Jamie Proctor.

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