"Draco Urbanis" by Ryan Sanura Reynolds-Stickney

The thick clangorous air invaded his senses as he slammed the front door, and freed the tears he had been trying so desperately to contain. He scrubbed a fist stubbornly in his eye to wipe the last of them away, but his glasses came away with his hand and fell to the concrete. He stood shuddering with misery, looking at the symbol of his pitiful status lying there on the cracked step, and his emotions boiled over.

How could she, the embodiment of kindness and light, do this to him?

His lips formed her name, but the sound was frail and gasping, and he sobbed. Her cruelty was still beyond him. She was incapable of a deliberately hurtful act; his must have been the fault. His flame had never been more than playful in her teasing, but he had never spoken to her. He had been building his courage for days to strike up a conversation. He had never been able to imagine even approaching her crowd, being the established friendless nerd he was, and the thought of her dismissal brought a fresh torrent of humiliation to wash over him with the humid swell of air delivered by a passing car. Beyond shuddering, now, he staggered down the steps with a faltering gait, his face contorted with despair. He did not see, as he was half blind without them, the misshapen glasses which had crumpled at his heedless step.

Wracked with the shudders of his lament, he half-ran down the sidewalk, stripping his feet as he went. The horrible confinement of the socks and Nikes was too much for his aching feet to bear, and he pitched the abominable things into the dumpster behind the restaurant he lived across from. His skinny feet, now free from the trappings of loathed humanity, began to change. If only he could show her this; she would love him if she could see him as he really was. The Pink Floyd T-shirt also hit the dumpster as the familiar pain of the wing-shift in his shoulders was exacerbated by his agitated shaking. A sense of power wound like a tightly coiled spring began to form about him, and a sense of secrecy. No one must know how much he had suffered. No one. And he knew, by the end of his shift, that if he was in this form, and sometimes when he was not, no one could even notice him against his will. He could fly unheeded through his city, and be free of his tormented civilization in the joy of flight..

He began to relax in the well of his true being, safe from the abject disgrace of his puny, simian, soft-skinned form. He vehemently discarded the last of his human trappings, and spread his wings with infinite grace. He felt the force of his draconian psyche peak within him and gazed fluently at the obscure inscription on the ring he still wore. Draco Urbanis. Written in Latin with a Tolkien alphabet, he knew no one thought he (or anyone else, for that matter) could read it. He rumbled. He himself had written it, in soft silver with his own claw. He was the true dragon of this city, and probably the only true one for thousands of miles. His solitude did not bother him.

With a snap of the coiled spring inside him, limitless energy rushed through his muscles and he surged into the air. Effortlessly, he climbed to a thousand feet and circled in the torrid atmosphere, contemplating a direction. He decided to head to the freeway, and winged soundlessly northwest through the city-flushed sky. Building up speed, the metallic composition of his lithe body and the length of his silvern horns allowed him to receive whatever electromagnetic emanations he concentrated on. As he settled into a steady rhythm of glides and wingbeats, the tinny strains of Eight Miles High reached his mind. His flexible lips curled amusedly as he wondered what she would think. He stopped wondering. He knew.

Most of the distance accomplished, the radio had run on into Oye Como Va as he slipped resiliently under one of the several overpasses in the center of the city, and entered the current of the freeway. It thrilled him.

The yellow glare of the midcity lampposts was like balm to his inhuman eyes. This was his city, his alone. He experienced the sudden dizziness of a roller coaster, all his fears and desires forgotten, the girl forgiven. Nothing could be more important than this, the fierce rapture of a flight in his own territory. The radio echoed his mind, sliding smoothly from Santana into the Eagles-- Hotel California. His ecstatic race through the midcity junction took him rolling up and down through the yellow and black stripes of light at a greater speed than most of the cars below him. The elated dizziness overwhelmed him, and he swung into a heedless barrel roll, barely missing the low overhang of a bridged overpass.

His passion dimming slightly, he reluctantly came to the conclusion that too much time had passed and his mother would be worried. He had stormed out unhappy, and by example she might fear that he would stay out all night. He turned on his wingtip and headed home, apprehension menacing in the back of his mind. The song had come to its revelation and he soon became frantic, feeling himself falling back into his human mind. Dragons know no fear, but a 15-year-old human does. He began to flap furiously, frenziedly, realizing that if his mind was shifting back, his body would soon follow. The acidic lights below him no longer comforting, he lost ever more height and stamina with his frenetic exertions.

Beyond all reason now, he tried to climb higher, but as the last of the webbed wing membrane disappeared he was only human again, twenty times his own height above his own unyielding concrete yard. He could no longer hear the song, but he knew the end of it, and as the earth loomed ever more quickly near, he closed his useless, blurry eyes and curled his naked body, a million thought rushing through his mind faster than the humid air past his skin. The song stayed with him as he collided with the concrete.