Coming Out Day

“There weren’t always dragons in the Valley,” my boyfriend, Balmethestus, said. “But I really don’t think people would be scared that I’m living here. I think it’s time that I came out to the world.”

I looked across the width of the lantern-lit cavern at him. “Seriously?”

“Yes,” he said. “I think it would give my art an extra…edge. As it were.” Balmethestus—my boyfriend—was indeed serious. I could tell by the way he was squinting in the low light. The way his eyes crinkled up at the corners when he did that—

It blew me away.

Before you get the wrong idea, let me just say that while we were very romantic, we weren’t exactly physical, if you get my drift. It just wasn’t possible. My boyfriend, the dragon, and I weren’t the same species. No doing the nasty. Neither of us were into bestiality. Our relationship was more of a love-you-from-afar-while-in-the-same-place kind of thing.

I crossed the uneven floor of the cavern and perched in the crook of his curled tail, snuggled up against his left front leg. My laptop was on the low boulder in front of him, open to his website. I’d helped him set it up several months ago, so that he could have a presence in the wider world, beyond the confines of the cavern he’d claimed for his home. But I had convinced him that revealing his identity as a dragon probably wasn’t the best option.

Knights and swords might be a thing of the far distant past, but these days there were automatic weapons stuck behind the seat of every pickup truck and SUV in the southern United States. Some redneck yahoo could come gunning for Balmethestus, thinking he’d be the ultimate trophy to have stuffed and hanging on the wall of his single-wide.

So, while my boyfriend’s website featured the art he’d been making—both digital and physical paintings—he’d refrained from revealing that the artist, himself, was of the reptilian persuasion.

“Why now?” I asked. “What makes you think—”

“Look at this,” he said, clicking on another window and opening a YouTube video. “Just watch.”

The video was a compilation of animals painting. Apparently, this fad started with dogs and cats, then moved on to turtles, horses, dolphins, and monkeys. There were even sea lions and rhinos painting, with brushes held in their mouths. The paintings weren’t art, just random swipes of a paint-laden brush on a pad or canvas, sometimes with paw prints thrown in for good measure.

Balmethestus’ paintings were a lot better. Still what you’d call Impressionistic, but he had good control of his tools. He loved color, combining the paints in surprising ways. He was amazingly talented for a dragon, IMHO.

When the video ended, he craned his neck down and around to look me full in the face. “I’m much better than them.”

“Yes,” I replied. “Yes, you are. But—”

“But I can’t sell my paintings for love or money!”

For love…I had a couple hanging in my apartment. But I got what he meant.

“The art world is tough,” I said. “It takes time to build a following, to get noticed.”

Balmethestus sighed, a tiny puff of smoke emerging to float slowly from his enormous nostrils to hover somewhere near the ceiling.

“What if I’m not willing to wait?” he asked. “What if I’ve been freeloading long enough? Off you? Off the world?”

We’d never really talked about how he survived before we met. He had a treasure horde, of course, but I knew from random comments he’d made that it was nothing near what he’d had when he was living back in the Italian Alps. And he’d told me that here in North Carolina he’d had a difficult time keeping himself fed. There just weren’t the herds of goats and cows and sheep he was used to. Here he’d been hunting deer when he could and subsisting on raccoons and other smaller mammals when times got rough.

“Even with you bringing home groceries,” he said. “Well, it makes me feel like a loser. Not contributing.”

I thought about this for a moment. In a relationship, each person—or dragon—should be an equal partner. He had a point. There were just so many variables to think about.

“How would you do it?” I asked. “Come out?”

Balmethestus smiled widely, showing both rows of sharply pointed teeth.

“I’ve got a perfect idea—”

***

Granted, the county animal shelter’s yearly art show was a small venue, but when they accepted the application to show the paintings my “pet” did and donate half of whatever sold back to support the shelter’s spay/neuter program, Balmethestus and I were thrilled.

I went to set up our display the evening before, in a nice quiet spot beneath three spreading oak trees at the edge of the park. The show opened at 8 am Saturday morning, so Balmethestus flew above my car as I drove through town, around 5:30 am. We didn’t want to take a chance on anyone seeing him before we could “unveil” him, so to speak.

In addition to the painted canvases propped up on our table, I’d hung a clothesline between the three trees and hung opaque shower curtains on rings, so that at the right moment I could fling the curtains back and—

Ta da!

There sat my dragon boyfriend, the artist, with a fresh canvas on his easel and a paint-laden palette held in one clawed hand. He handled his brushes well, grasping them in his claws and delicately layering on the pigments to create his signature pieces. He drew quite a crowd that day, everybody lining up to see him painting.

A dragon painting!

Okay, so the people who worked at the animal shelter were a little shocked. Maybe it was when I explained to them that Balti wasn’t exactly a pet, but more of a friend (I kept the “boyfriend” bit to myself – people have such dirty minds!). And when the local news anchor came to cover the art show, she spent way too much time on us, but the coverage ran throughout the day, so it drew a ton of people to the show. At $5 admission, the shelter really raked it in that day. They said later that it was their best fundraiser to date, and asked us to come back again next year.

And we sold every one of Balmethestus’s paintings. The news station let us use their coverage as a video on the website. And with my dragon boyfriend coming out to the world, his career finally took off. I became his manager, arranging for personal appearances around the country. And his paintings now sell in the high three figures.

So, my dragon boyfriend came out to the world. But he still hasn’t left his cave. He’s the same down-to-earth dragon he always was. And that’s fine by me.

Thank you for reading! Likes, comments, shares, follows, and pledges are always cherished, like a dragon treasures a cavern filled with gold. And books.

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 the prequel to this story about my dragon boyfriend: