NOVEL WEB Chapter 10: The weird of Chapman
By now there is a lot of speculation as to why dragons are now a visibly extant phenomenon on Earth.
We’re all so different that experts are insisting that we can’t be called a species. But there are a lot of people doing it anyway. All of us once appeared to be human, though. All of various ages, including some infants, who are now whelps or hatchlings or yearlings or whatever we’re called at that age. And a 94 year old shed his human guise and appears to be every bit as young and spry as me, by all draconic appearances. And certainly not every one of us has turned out to be trans. It’s about the same rate as with humans. At least amongst the dragons who could be interviewed.
There’ve even been some prominent politicians around the world who turned out to be dragons, including in the U.S. And a lot more people in lower levels of government in all sorts of places.
People of all walks of life, all economic statuses, and all ethnicities. All known neurotypes. Though, it seems we were all neurodivergent in some way before the mass metamorphosis. Closeted and uncloseted therians and otherkin. Alterhumans, as a lot of people want to say, though that term never sat right to me.
We’re clearly not human, in the case of dragons.
But not every dragon alterhuman/therian/otherkin went through the metamorphosis. And that whole online community is jealous.
I do feel for them. It’s not fair at all.
But all this does leave us with a bunch of clues, and people of all types are speculating.
One of the wildest theories, coming from way out of left field, with no mythological basis that either Chapman or I can discern, but that I nonetheless really like, is that dragons have always been on Earth and were one of the creatures that developed a symbiotic relationship with humans. But something made it necessary for us to hide. And somehow we did. And the suggestion that’s unsupported is that it took the act of some forgotten god to do it.
Some of the speculators are linking it to the rise of Christianity and the myths of dragon slayers that were spread around that time, especially as Western colonialism grew. But I don’t know. I feel like that has holes in it.
But, anyway, the idea is that dragons were being hunted by someone or something, maybe during that time, maybe way, way earlier, when there were a lot fewer humans. And the hunters were also endangering the villages of people who had a relationship with the dragons.
And someone prayed to the right god, and that god did a thing, and made it so that we dragons receded into myth, into imagination, literally. Meaning that we continued to live in the collective unconscious of humanity as a whole.
But now that that god has become forgotten, their power faded, and we’ve re-emerged.
This doesn’t explain why we manifested in the bodies of specific humans, including infants, but other people are running with that and coming up with all sorts of explanations for that. They’re all so wild, more so than this forgotten god thing itself, that I’m not going to entertain them myself.
What’s happened has happened, and there’s no denying it. Whether it has an explanation or not.
But I do really love the idea that we’re supposed to have a symbiotic relationship with humans. It fits with my own emotions and instincts. And it fits with some of the oldest stories I’ve read, and some of the myths from places that weren’t so colonized by the West.
But our existence is also driving a lot of other people right up the wall.
If other therians, who feel left behind, are wailing about it on Tumblr, Discord, and Tik Tok, some of the temples and churches of the world are boiling with the fury and desperate prayers of people who are confused about why their beliefs aren’t manifesting in reality. Why aren’t their gods fulfilling their promises? Or whatever.
I mean, other religious people are not just delighted by us dragons, but celebrating us. Maybe a lot of them. And there are some dragons who are being outright worshiped, and it’s only been five and a half days, going by my experience.
But there are definitely people damning us with every fiber of their souls.
And, furthermore, now there’s serious discussion that the next presidential debate, actually the first debate of this election cycle because one of the candidates has been canceling them, is only going to be about dragons. And the candidate of the openly fascist party, who has been canceling the debates, has vowed to attend this one.
And that’s the thing that makes this all feel like too much, and we all fall silent again.
But it’s during this lunchtime discussion that I get the impression that Chapman is hiding something. Sie was reacting smugly about things that didn’t warrant that reaction. And I want to ask. But before I can type out any sort of question, they have to leave to get back to work on time.
“What was that about?” I ask the others.
“What was what about?” Jill asks. She’d joined us when Chapman had become most animated.
“Chapman smug,” I reply.
“Sie didn’t seem smug to me?”
Nathan shakes his head.
Rhoda furrows her brows and purses her lips.
“I didn’t see it,” Kim responds.
I bob my head, and then say, “Maybe me.”
“No, I know what you mean,” Rhoda says. “But I don’t think it’s up to us to speculate. Chapman will tell us if sie has anything useful when sie’s ready.”
I bow my head. That’s fair. Taking all hir words at face value, sie was in accord with the rest of us. Maybe sie’s been researching something that supports our take on the world, but just isn’t academically sure of it yet. Or, maybe sie was just feeling euphoria from hypesharing and getting information from the rest of us, and that’s how sie was expressing it.
Still an absolute delight to be around, and I immediately miss hir presence.
Hir reticence to talk about what sie is feeling does remind me of our encounter in the lobby of our therapist.
Wow, it’s only been two days since then?
I really need to relax about Chapman. This is just silly.
If I were to describe how they were dressed today, though, it would be rockabilly pinball literal wizard. I’ll just let you imagine what that outfit entailed.
I look at Rhoda and she raises her eyebrows at me.
Jill slaps her thigh and asks, “So! What’s the plan?”
Nathan leans forward on the table and says, “Well, we give Meg’s property management company my address for shipping all of her stuff to someplace safe, and tell them to pack everything, even the garbage. We’ll sort it, eventually. It’s her hoard, after all. But I imagine she can’t exactly visit my space without a challenge from my local dragon.” He looks at me.
I bow my head.
“Then we all go in on a big giant keyboard for her, so she can use my old computer for blogging, because the world needs to read what it’s like to be in her sh – er – footprints,” he elaborates. Then he gestures at me and says, “And she sleeps on the roof of this building until someone objects, I imagine.”
I jerk my head up and then cat smile long and slow.
“It’s not exactly the legal solution, but it’s probably the most ethical one,” Nathan says. “But in the long term, we’re really just going to have to see how it all shakes out.”
I bob my head once.
“I agree,” Rhoda says.
I say, hitting talk every few words, “Went to cave. Whitman there. We fight. I win. I flee. 50 to 100 dragons in county. Too many. I move I fight. I stay I fight. I stay I fight at home. For home.”
Both Jill and Kim sigh.
Jill says, “That makes sense I guess.”
And Kimberly, who’s just joined us asks, “Who’s Whitman?”
Rhoda points up at my apartment through the awning, “The one that did that.”
“Oh, right! I remember now. Why are they called Whitman?”
“Yawp,” I say.
“Oh, that’s funny!”
Am I ever going to learn how to talk with my own voice again?
Human children take a couple of years to work that out with what they’ve got, and they’ve got the instincts to do it.
I’m on my sixth day of having a syrinx instead of a larynx, and I’m not reading any stories about any talking dragons yet.
There are approximately six million of us in the world. And we’re pretty disruptive and famous. If one of us could talk, it’d be all over the news.
I might imitate words and string them together intelligibly. Some day. But maybe not by the time I’m done telling this part of my story.
After hir work is done, Chapman comes back to the coffee shop to find me sitting at my outdoor table alone, watching the construction workers using a crane and a cherry picker to haul jacks up to my apartment to shore up the wall. And they’re doing this while other workers are hauling in scaffolding, and getting it ready to set up to do the real work later.
My seagulls are not agreeing with me, and I must look miserable, because Chapman asks how I’m doing.
“Indigestion,” I say.
This excites hir, and sie taps the table with hir finger.
“You need to eat rocks,” sie says.
Oh my God. It’s in my frickin’ blog url, girldragongizzard, and I hadn’t thought of it yet.
I look at hir, tilting my head slightly, and sie looks at me back with tight lips. We bob our heads lightly at the same time.
Sie taps the table again.
“Rock. Yes,” I say.
“Smooth rocks, probably,” Chapman says. “To be safe. Maybe from the sea shore or a river bed.”
“How big?” I ask.
Chapman shrugs and says, “I’m not a biologist.”
I’m going to have to go with my gut, it seems. And my gut is really unhappy right now.
“Is there shoreline in your territory?” Chapman asks.
I think about it. There’s Bayside Park, but I don’t think it has a shore with rocks I could swallow in it. So I turn my head to the side.
Chapman taps their chin for a bit, and then snaps hir fingers, “The library. I think there’s a drainage bed or sculpture installation there with some river rocks. They’d object to you taking some, but two or three of them shouldn’t really hurt their landscaping. Is that in your territory?”
It’s only a few blocks away, but it’s closer to another dragon than it is to me, so technically it isn’t. But I wager I could visit there quickly and quietly without much of a problem.
“Nevermind, I’ll get them,” sie says. “I think you should start conservative and try three rocks about this big each.” Sie makes a circle with hir index finger and thumb. “That’ll be easy for me to carry, and I don’t think they’ll hurt you.”
I incline my head in agreement, and then bob it.
“Yes,” I say.
“I’ll be right back,” sie says.
And almost immediately after sie’s gone, I hear Loreena and Poink squabbling with each other to the East of me. And that’s in the middle of a residential area, if I’m visualizing it right.
That’s not going to go over well with the humans.
But I do nothing. I just sit and listen to them work it out while I wait for Chapman to come back.
And then I hear sirens headed that way, and still do nothing.
It’s not in my territory. I can’t be moved. But I do wonder how that’s going to turn out now. Who’s going to be hurt the most.
I momentarily feel the urge to make my challenge cry, but I swallow it and it goes away.
Drawing attention to myself is not protecting myself right now, and I’m able to convince my body of that.
It reminds me of making some progress on managing my C-PTSD by consciously choosing which trigger reaction to roll with.
It occurs to me that I’ve been avoiding the news myself, and getting it all through Chapman and Rhoda. And I would expect that there’ve been some dragon related deaths by now, with the way the world is, but I’m not hearing about them. Either dragons killing people, each other, or getting killed by people.
Sure, it’s only been six days, but with the way my last two days have gone, I find it hard to imagine that tragedy hasn’t struck somewhere in the world. Especially with some high profile people turning out to be dragons.
Are my friends filtering the news for me, or are things going better than I can imagine?
It takes a while for Chapman to return, and in that time the sirens have stopped, at which point Loreena and Poink got even louder and more desperate sounding. And then there are a series of pops from the same direction. And then more sirens and a bunch of challenge cries from the surrounding dragons. Neither Loreena nor Poink fall silent, even after the repeated pops.
It sounds like a complete disaster.
And Chapman looks scared and concerned when sie returns around the corner of the front of the shop, rocks in one hand, shoulders hunched.
“Here. You should swallow these, maybe one by one, and then rest while they do their work,” sie says, placing the rocks on the table. “I don’t know what it should feel like, or if you should do anything to make them go to the right place. But I bet they’ll help.”
I go ahead and pick them up with my mouth, one by one, and swallow them. I feel like I’m taking medicine.
“What is going on over there?” Chapman looks back Eastward. “It sounds like they’re killing each other. All of them. Those were gunshots.”
“Yes,” I say.
Sie looks back at me and asks, “Was that Loreena and Poink that started it?”
I freeze. I don’t move. I don’t answer. I just look at Chapman until sie says something else.
I hadn’t told them the names of my neighbors yet, and I don’t think Rhoda nor Nathan relayed that information.
I don’t know what to think. I’m not exactly scared or wary. But I am definitely confused. I feel like I’ve slid into another reality. More so than when I woke up as a dragon.
That maybe sounds dramatic, but my reactions have all been dramatic lately. And some of my senses heightened, or simply present when I didn’t have them before. And I feel like I just sensed something shift, right before Chapman said that.
Sie tilts hir head like I usually do, like a curious pug.
I look down at my tablet long enough to type, “What are you?” And then I look back up at hir.
Sie frowns, “What do you mean?”
“What are you?” I repeat.
“I don’t think I like that question,” sie says, scooting hir chair back.
I take a deep breath in through my nose, and then let it out the same way, and decide to try a different question. I maybe could have worded it better, but I’m frustrated by my AAC, honestly.
“What can you do?” I ask.
“A lot of things,” sie says, and gets up. “But I think I’m going to go eat dinner right now. You should digest things, I think. I’ll be back tomorrow.” Sie turns and walks to the corner to wait for the light, even though there’s no traffic at the moment. Then sie turns back toward me and adds, “I think I maybe made a mistake. But I need to think about it. I’ll fill you in later. This is me being weird. Not you.”
I realize I still don’t know if Chapman is hir first name, last name, or only name.
The construction workers wrap up what they’re doing and leave the site about fifteen minutes later, heading home or out to have their own dinners and relax and go to bed. And other union protected behaviors.
I don’t need dinner.
I’ve got two seagulls, three rocks, a handful of thoughts, and a maelstrom of emotions.
Eventually, the war happening two neighborhoods over calms down. But I don’t think the full consequences of it have been felt yet.
