All The Stars That Shine

There weren't always dragons in the Valley.

Billy had lived in the Valley all his life. It was a normal sort of valley. Traffic jams, smog. You could get mugged going to the bodega for a loaf of bread.

Normal.

And then the little girl showed up and started turning people into dragons, and everything changed.

People didn't like to use the word "magic." Too woo-woo. Too New Age. Too hippie for the upper-crust elite who ran everything.

But how could you explain a dragon wearing a necktie trying to squeeze through the subway turnstiles without a token?

These were accountants and financial planners and mid-level managers just trying to go on with their lives, even though now, instead of paunchy, middle-aged men, they were dragons.

They gripped the handles of their briefcases in their scaley, horrific claws and looked at you with terror and frustration, unable to communicate in anything but hisses and wisps of steam.

It was sad, really.

The person behind the counter at the coffee shop would ask, “Name?”, and they’d just shrug their leathery wings. The barista would write DRAGON on the cup and move on to the next customer.

Some people had it worse.

The little girl liked ponies. A lot. The problem with being a pony was that you didn’t have much control over where or when you went to the bathroom. Things were happening too fast for anyone to come up with horse diapers that were utilitarian and yet fashionable.

You learned to watch where you were walking.

A family had taken the little girl in, of course. She couldn’t just be left on her own, roaming the streets and turning random passersby into kittens.

She seemed harmless, just to look at her. Chestnut curls cascading down her back. Cute, upturned jellybean of a nose. Big blue eyes, behind which lay...what? Something.

Something not quite normal.

The greatest scientific minds of the world interrogated the little girl—gently, of course—trying to find out where she came from, if she had parents, if she had (God forbid) siblings.

The little girl talked about her father, a tall man who was busy and never played with her.

She frowned when she said this and the scientists stepped back nervously. She said he had brought her to the Valley, pushed her from the car and told her he would be back momentarily.

And then he drove away.

She didn’t cry when she said this, apparently believing that he would yet return at any moment.

Her name was Polyhymnia (it was sewn into her underwear), but she went by Polly.

When asked where she lived, Polly waved vaguely towards the mountains and then turned back to whatever game had been placed before her to keep her occupied.

It was very, very, very important that she remain occupied.

It was decided that a lottery would be held to form a team that would escort the little girl back to her father, using whatever clues she could provide as to her origins.

What they would do after they found the father of a possibly magical child was unclear, but it was a start.

For lack of a better idea, they would head first towards the mountains, which no one had really given much thought to for hundreds of years.

It was easy to forget about the outside world in the Valley.

Everyone who had a driver’s license went into the pool of potential candidates for the expedition.

The old and infirm were of course excused. Those with families to provide for were giving the option of begging off (which they all did without exception).

Billy didn't pay a lot of attention to any of this. He had bigger concerns. Like how to tell his mother that his best friend, Henaro, was more than a "best friend." And how to help her through her grief over his sister's death.

Billy missed Grace more than he could express. More even sometimes than he had the capacity to feel. As if missing her was a thing as big as the sky, a thing with no edges and no end.

Grace had known him better than anyone else. She had known the real him. They had no secrets from each other.

He wondered what she would've thought about Polly and the dragons.

She probably would've thought it was cool. She probably would've wanted to be one.

Billy's phone rang just as he was about to bite into a sandwich at the coffee shop around the corner from the apartment where he and his mother lived.

He had gotten his driver's license three weeks ago, but he didn't have a car. His mother needed hers to go to work at the hospital on the other side of the Valley. So despite the shiny square of plastic in his back pocket, he was still walking everywhere he needed to go.

Which wasn't very far since he didn't have a job.

Still, he was looking forward to this sandwich. It was a particularly good sandwich—pastrami and ham and salami and every other processed meat he could think of. He figured he was young. He’d worry about his cholesterol levels later.

He wondered if dragons had cholesterol problems. Probably not.

The number on his phone said RESTRICTED. Normally, he wouldn’t have answered. But his stomach had suddenly shriveled to the size of a raisin and his mouth was too dry to swallow.

He thought about ignoring the call, but they'd just try again later. If Grace's death had taught him anything, it was that there was no point in avoiding the inevitable.

He might as well answer it.