A small girl Who Wanted to Be a Big

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. That’s why Emmie thought they could risk it, just for today. They had to risk it. There was nowhere else for them to practice, Vannah and her. This was because they were smalls.

When you were small, they said, then everything was small. Your fingers were small. Your ears were small. Your heart and your art: also small.

To be big was best, and big was something she couldn’t seem to grow or stretch herself to be. So, her art-magic was small, too.

But inside, Emmie thought they were wrong.

She could feel her heart in there, stretched with art and beating bigger, bigger by the moment. She was meant to be a Big, she was sure of it. It didn’t matter that when people looked at her, all they saw was small, small, small.

Practice was the thing, Emmie knew that was true. Practice was the only thing that could make her art bigger. Big enough no one could see past it to her small self.

She took Vannah’s hand, both so tiny that they folded into each other like matched halves of a seashell. “Come on,” Emmie said. “It’ll be perfectly safe. You know the dragons only come to the valley some days.”

Vannah pulled back, her shoulders hunching, though her hand didn’t let go of Emmie’s. No, she shook her head. No, no, no. Vannah hadn’t spoken in out-loud words since their practice day last week. They’d worked in an alley behind a Dumpster that held the tossed-away scraps from others’ art projects. The Un-Art.

“That’s what they should call us,” Vannah had giggled, her art starting to come to life under her fingertips as she peeked up at Emmie. “The Un-Art.”

“But look…” Emmie had breathed, nodding down at her project. Vannah had looked down and gasped at what she’d pulled out without realizing. That’s when the Bigs showed up.

They hadn’t scoffed, this time. They hadn’t stood high and listed all the things wrong and shrunken and undeveloped about Emmie and Vannah’s pieces. No. It had been much worse.

They simply laughed.

After, when the small girls were huddled on the ground, battered by the sound, the Bigs had made Vannah rub her face on the bottom of their shoes. And in the soft stuff they’d stepped in while walking through the alley on the way there. Not Emmie this time, just Vannah, as if this unshared humiliation could be the thing that finally cracked their seashell-hands down the middle so they couldn’t clasp right again.

Her heart felt very small that day.

But today was a whole week later and this morning, her heart felt huge with unspooled art. She was ready to risk dragons, if it meant hearing Vannah giggle again.

“No one will be there,” she coaxed. “Even the Bigs are afraid of dragons.”

Vannah shook her head, but her no was smaller now. No, no, no.

They never talked about it. And Emmie knew that only unspoken words could hold poison. So she said, “What’s the worst that could happen? Dragons don’t wear shoes.”

When they reached the tipped-downward edge of the valley, the green spread out like a carpet. Thigh-deep on a Big and thick enough to swallow the girls up to their elbows.

Once, it had been a blanket of opium poppies, for export. Nobody needed those anymore, now that they’d laid down money in favor of art. So those had long since gone to seed, to weeds, and then eventually had been swallowed up by a thick grass so green it seemed to leach chlorophyll out of the air itself. Dragons loved it. Ate it, rolled it in, toasted it with puffs of flame before ripping it out in child-sized mouthfuls.

The smalls stopped at the cusp of the valley and scanned for them. There were no spiked tails, no glimmering roll of scales over muscle. No lazily blinking eyes with their vertical pupils opening to fasten on a tasty girl.

Emmie could feel them, though, perhaps hidden beneath the grass. Dragons. Goosebumps nibbled across the back of her wrist.

They were near. No matter what she’d told her art-sister, this would not be a day without dragons. The valley was not a safe hammock but a dinner bowl, offering them up as a snack to nourish larger creatures.

Vannah was sensing them, too. Emmie could tell by the bloodless pale of her face, the tremble within their twinned hands. The truest dragons could not always be spotted with eyes.

Emmie tugged her forward, her heart huge with a week’s worth of unspent art. “Just for a little while. We’ll hear the wings, if they return.”

Vannah tried to hang back but she was art-hungry, too, Emmie could tell, and her feet broke rank and tripped forward to keep pace with Emmie, one and then the other so her body had to follow.

“Yes…”

It was so little Emmie wasn’t sure at first if she’d sensed it, or if it had been an out-loud whisper. But she smiled anyway, and dashed forward, the grass parting for their knees.

Emmie hadn’t brought supplies today, because when her heart felt this big, she could make art out of anything. Vannah was the same, though she’d brought a single blown-glass brush, clutched in one hand. It was less than she usually worked with, but she’d done even more with even less, last week behind a Dumpster before the Bigs had come.

They made it to the center of the valley, the farthest from the edges where they could see everything coming. The scent of the grass was so deep green she felt like springtime was swelling inside her with every breath.

They’d found this place just in time, because tomorrow was the for-real.

Practice no longer, art would be spun throughout the town square from dawn until the last drop was spent. In the square, her art would grow bigger with every set of eyes it drew, and she would grow bigger, too. If she could practice the pull and weave of her magic enough today, then perhaps tomorrow… Tomorrow she could be anything. No longer would she be looked down upon by the Bigs. Her art-sister would never taste a shoe again.

She began.

The best art was the kind you could feel and see. People did like to see them. Emmie started with the other senses, though, not the visual layer, because she liked to feel her way into it before there was anything to see. It helped her follow the whisper of the art.

The emotions came last, called by the shapes of the rest.

Today’s art began with the warmth of a blueberry pie, lifting from its golden-brown crust. She cupped the small heat in her hands and spread it over a flowing texture. Like water, but more velvet. Inhaling, she then breathed out a song. A little sadness in it for spice, but mostly beauty. Her heart ached as the song spun out into her art.

Beside her, Vannah had begun to paint with sounds, her glass brush dancing.

The grass hissed, tickling Emmie’s skin and she whirled, looking for dragons. Her art faltered, the warmth scorching for a second, then going cool. Perhaps blueberry pie hadn’t been the best note anyway. She should have done sunlight on cotton, or perhaps chocolate-herbed tea. The grass seethed as if a giant back was about to heave forth and Emmie froze, thinking of the square and how small her art had been last year. How few had looked.

Her song warbled and fell out of the piece. Vannah pressed into her side, skin cold like she was watching for the dragon, too. Emmie closed her eyes and drew in the scent of her sister, then spun that into the center of her revised piece. It stood up strong, so fast that the visual coalesced without her calling. It was a woman thirty feet high, with skirts that blew back from her ankles in the wind from a dragon’s wings. She had Dumpsters for feet, growing up tall out of that dank moment.

Emmie knew she would win. Her heart thundered, so big now the whole city-state must hear it. She would show them all. They would see how big she could be, with her tall art imbued with precisely the right note of warmth. Kitten’s purring chin, she could feel it now, it was just the one.

“You!” The shout burst across the valley.

Of course it was the Bigs.

“Idiot little girls, you can’t practice here. This is no place for art, or even for people. This is for dragons. No one is crazy enough to come here”

The one in front stalked forward, his face pinched red. “No one. Not even us.” He made a sound. It should have been derision but it choked off funny.

Vannah cocked her head. She’d heard it, too.

Emmie looked over. Vannah’s piece hadn’t collapsed when they came. It sharpened now, and Emmie heard wings.

It was too far to run back to the safety of the city, the valley too wide. The Bigs must be able to see the dragons even better from their vantage point because she could see their teeth, reflected in the boys’ eyes. The Bigs fell upon the smalls, pounding, and Emmie wanted to shriek.

We’re not the dragons!

But the boys hit twice as hard as they ever had, fists thumping down like fleeing feet, and Emmie had an idea.

It hurt, of course it hurt, but it wasn’t the first time they’d tried to beat her down into a smaller shape. She stretched her bruised body closer and reached inside one’s coat. Crying out as if in fear, so he wouldn’t notice.

But fear wasn’t what she was, anymore.

When the Bigs withdrew, there was blood on the grass. Emmie’s cheek lay above a wad of broken grass stalks, one shivering as it caught on her exhale. She memorized the feeling so she could weave it into her statue of a woman. It was forty feet high, now, and tomorrow had never been closer.

Their footsteps hissed away through the grass. A little too quick for deniability, even now, as if the Bigs could still hear the dragons coming.

She reached for her sister, but Vannah pushed her away and sat up.

“We have to stop, Emmie. If we stop practicing our art, we won’t have to go outside and we can stay in and be safe from the Bigs. We can’t—” Her voice cracked and she threw away the broken fragments of her glass brush. “We can’t keep this up. They’re always going to be Big. And we’re always going to be small. No amount of art can change that.”

Emmie shook her head. “Art can change anything.”

Art was the Biggest thing there was, the one thing that could make you brave enough to face down even dragons. What she’d stolen from the boy was a kind of art, too, because its power was that it could make you believe.

Emmie stood up and held out her hand. It was a fist, until she flipped it over to show Vannah what was inside.

“Everything will be different, now that we have this,” she said, and she opened her hand.