Aging Out

“There weren’t always dragons in the Valley,” the weakened voice wavered out of the mildewed darkness. Between the bars of the basement (dungeon?) cell, Cali could barely make out the shadow of a bulky body, of crippled limbs and tail and damaged wings. “When they came over on the big ships, they brought us here. It was 1811 when we arrived. They told us we would have a better life here, in the wide open countryside and empty mountains. We upheld our end. But your mother…we should have known better. Never trust a human.”

***

Calista Andreani’s eighteenth birthday was less than three weeks away. She had been in the foster care system since she was seven years old, when her mother dropped her off at the volunteer fire station in Clover Bottom, Kentucky and disappeared from her life forever. From there, the county had sent her to Lexington to begin her new life as a ward of the state. And now that life was coming to an abrupt end.

She had no money, no job, no place to live. No hope. All she owned fit into one large black trash bag. And on the morning of her eighteenth birthday, Cali and her trash bag would be out on the street.

“It’s a rather unusual situation for someone in your position, Cali,” her social worker, an imposing woman of Black and Cherokee heritage named Wandrina Balcomb, said thoughtfully. The tired-looking woman tapped her well-manicured nails on the large envelope which filled the little open space left on her desk. Wandrina Balcomb’s caseload was twice what it had been before state budget cuts slashed the number of social workers in the Lexington Division of Protection and Permanency offices. But although moving Cali Andreani out of the foster care system and off of Wandrina's caseload would lighten her load just a little, she would be sorry to see the girl go.

Would have been. Because without warning, Wandrina found herself facilitating a fairytale ending to Cali's story.

The social worker had spent a lot of time over the past few weeks going over the letter—and the enclosed legal documents and photographs—from Sanderson, Williams, and Char, the biggest law firm in Frankfurt, KY. Calista Andreani's life was about to change in a very big way. But while Wandrina Balcomb hated seeing her charges age out of the foster care system, with no clue what to do or where to go next, this wholly unexpected windfall of Cali's still left her with a feeling like worms crawling through her innards.

It couldn’t be this easy.

It couldn’t be this good.

She drew out a large photo and slid it across the desk to Cali. “It looks like you’re going to be a princess in a castle,” Wandrina said, hiding her misgivings. “Like in those fairy books you’re always reading.”

Calista Andreani could have told her social worker that living in a fancy house wouldn’t make her a princess. Not in America. Here, it was who you knew and how you dressed and what school you went to that made you royalty, and if you could get people with cameras to follow you around all day and put your picture in magazines.

Still, Cali could see why this state employee in Nowhere, Kentucky, would think that. The house did look like a castle. From the outside. But even at the age of three-weeks-from-eighteen, Cali knew how much it would cost to keep that house running.

It took a lot more than money.

All Ms. Wandrina Balcomb saw, however, was this enormous gift that her charge had been given, and out of the blue. Nobody deserved it more, of course. Cali Andreani had always been a quiet, studious child, doing well in school and never making trouble in any of the homes she’d been placed in. If any child in foster care deserved to inherit a valuable piece of property like the Andreani-Bliss home, well, it had to be Calista Andreani. Just to think that all of this time, no one had known she came from a wealthy family, that she could have been living with that family…

Well, could have been was the important thing.

“It’s a sad thing,” Wandrina went on. “Knowing that you had relatives out there, people you could have been living with instead of being in state care, well, it just breaks my heart.”

A knock sounded on the half-open wooden door of Wandrina Balcomb’s office and a face peeked around the frame. “Ms. Balcomb? He’s here.” The receptionist pushed the door open wide and ushered a man in dark blue suit into the crowded office.

He smiled broadly, friendly-like, but with a look comprised of lawyerly seriousness and humane compassion in his eyes. The look of a good attorney, one trained to show whatever emotion the encounter called for, pivoting on a dime to reflect his clients’ state of mind. He handed Cali’s social worker a heavy business card with raised lettering.

“Martin Williams, Ms. Balcomb,” he said, "Attorney for the estate of Mrs. Philomena Andreani." He then turned to peer down at Cali, who sat expressionless in front of the desk. He sank down into the facing chair, his hands folded on his knee, and gave the girl the most compassionate expression in his repertoire. “Miss Andreani, I was your grandmother's attorney," he said in a soft voice. “It’s so nice to finally meet you. I’ve come to take you back home.”

***

“If you can’t join them, beat them, baby girl.” That had been Cali's mama's favorite expression. Andromeda Andreani loved her daughter too much to allow her to grow up in this house, so she packed a small suitcase for each of them and ran. “And we beat them by getting the hell out of this house.”

It was just after lunchtime when Mr. Williams left Cali alone in her new home, after giving her a quick tour. The silence weighed on her, the house dusty and neglected.

Cali hadn’t tell Mr. Williams that she had few good memories of living there as a child, or even why her mama had cut and run from this place. She didn’t tell him she could hardly stand being there, dark impressions swirling through her head until her blood was nearly frozen solid in her veins.

She didn’t tell him that the last thing she remembered was going down into the basement in search of her missing guinea pig Cheeky, or what she found—

Calista Andreani was a grown woman now. Well, almost. She wandered from room to room after the lawyer left her there alone, not knowing where she fit in. When she came at last to the basement door, her hand raised to grasp the knob almost of its own volition. She didn't want to go down there. But she knew she had no choice.

She had to confront her past. And then she was going to sell this hellhole and get out of Kentucky forever.

***

“There weren’t always dragons in the valley,” the weakened voice wavered out of the mildewed darkness. Between the bars of the basement (dungeon?) cell, Cali could barely make out the shadow of a bulky body, of crippled limbs and tail and damaged wings. “When they came over on the big ships, they brought us here. It was 1811 when we arrived. They told us we would have a better life here, in the wide open countryside and empty mountains. We upheld our end. But your mother…we should have known better. Never trust a human.”

“And because you were captured and locked up here, I should forgive you?” Cali’s normally soft-spoken demeanor had hardened. “You fucking ate Cheeky. My mama wasn't about to let you eat me.”

One brittle, cracked claw curled around a bar as the dragon crept closer. Cali edged back, just out of reach. “An appetizer it was. That was all. You would have been much tastier.”

“Mama told me,” she went on. “She told me about The Bargain.”

The horrific, horrendous bargain the Andreani family’s forebears had made with the dragons of the Puez-Odle massif, in the Italian Alps.

The massive head came forward into the light cast by Cali’s battery-powered lantern. One eye peered between the bars, blinking slowly. The girl gasped at the look of longing in the dimly-glowing orb.

“The Barrrrrgaiin,” the dragon repeated. “That was all a misunderstanding.”

Cali snorted. “Are you going to tell me you didn’t eat my uncle? And you just admitted you were going to eat me!”

“We were starvvviing. They wouldn’t feed us. What choice did we haavvvve?”

When the Andreani family left the Italian Alps for the newly-formed United States in the early 1800s, a fortuneteller had told them they would never thrive in the New World. Not unless they brought their family’s ancient source of power and wealth with them, leaving the cursed Alps behind. But how to safely move the source of their power?

The dragon which a long-ago ancestor had subdued, had captured and imprisoned in their mountain castle.

That dragon—this dragon—had wanted nothing more than his freedom, after centuries imprisoned in the deepest dungeon. He tried to twist the terms in his favor. He’d lost to the wilier humans. The method of bargaining had been lost with the centuries, but the outcome had been reluctantly adhered to.

The firstborn of every generation must be given to the dragon in the dungeon. That was the only way to ensure that the mystical good fortune be maintained within the family. And so it had been, generation after generation. Until Andromeda Andreani had said “No!”

“Mama ran away so that you wouldn’t eat me,” Cali said, teeth gritted against the words. “And now I have to fucking deal with you myself. An Andreani never escapes their fate, right? Well, what the hell am I going to do with you now? I can’t sell this house and move on with my life, not with a fucking dragon lurking in the basement!”

“Truuue,” the word was delivered with a hint of a sigh.

“Aren’t you tired of all this?” Cali asked. “Living on somebody else’s terms? Working for The Man? Never knowing where your next meal is coming from…”

Maybe that last wasn’t such a good thing to remind the dragon of, considering that she had been supposed to be his next meal. Luckily, dragons only feasted every fifteen or twenty years, subsisting on small prey in between their feast days.

“In all the stories I’ve read,” she went on, “the dragons raid cattle herds or snatch sheep. Why do you have to eat a child?”

The dragon snorted. “I don’t haavvvve to eat a child. I can eat any fresh meat. It was your ancestors who came up with that twist, the greedy bastards. If I was on my own, just my own needs to support, then a cow or pig would be fine every few years. It was all that ‘fill my coffers/add to my pile of gold/make my fortune’ greed that gave me the upper hand with the Andreani family. They were all about the old ‘sacrifice the virgin’ myth.”

“Cows and sheep aren’t just roaming around the Kentucky hills, are they?” But driving through a variety of all-too-similar small towns on the way here in Mr. Williams car, she was sure she’d spotted a butcher shop. “What if I got you fresh-cut meat to eat? Would that work for you?”

The dragon tilted its head to one side. Now Cali could see both of its eyes full-on. The lizard-slits of its pupils made her shudder.

“Instead of yooouuu?” it asked. Hesitated. Then said, “And what about the treassssuure?”

Cali leaned back against the basement wall and crossed her arms over her chest.

The fairy tales had it all wrong.

You actually could negotiate with a dragon. You just couldn’t get greedy.

***

Two days later the butcher in Berea started delivering a haunch of beef or mutton or pork loin twice a week. The dragon soon began to put on weight. Before it got too big to move in the confines of the basement cell, Cali ordered in workmen, who opened an entryway into the basement from the backyard, wide enough to drive a truck through. Wide enough for a dragon to come and go at its leisure.

Cali had no worries about freeing the Andreani dragon, not once their bargain was struck. This dragon was very, very old, well past its prime. It just wanted to lie in the sun and gnaw on a bone or two. And though she never asked, Cali often found gold coins lying around the yard. It was enough to pay the butcher and pay her property taxes and keep the lights on.

The parttime job she got answering the phones and taking orders at the asphalt plant a couple of towns over provided for her personal needs. She opened her first bank account. Her own little hoard.

Her own little family, in her own little corner of Kentucky. There was no need to sacrifice a virgin to the dragon, and never had been. Which, after all, was a good thing.

Because Cali's girlfriend aged out of the foster care system four months later, and joined Cali and the dragon in the castle. And they all lived happily ever after.

Thank you for reading! Likes, comments, shares, follows, tips, and pledges are always cherished.

Author's Note: I have challenged myself to write twenty-seven dragon prologues/stories for the Vocal.media Fantasy Prologue Challenge, one for each day the challenge runs. Here's a link to my next entry: