The Dragon: A Tiny Story

Concerning Dragons

by 

Brian McFarland

The fortune teller said I would find a mythical creature, and hear a great secret.

Here was the creature. I held it up on the tips of my fingers.

"Dragons are real," said the voice. 

There was a pause as I waited for the rest of it, then realized that was the rest of it. Apparently, the smoky little lizard's great secret was that it did, in fact, exist.

"What, that's it?" I said, a little annoyed.

"What do you mean, 'that's it?' I'm a flying, talking, firebreathing dragon! The stuff of legends, rising up from the age of mysticism!"

"You're the size of my thumb, and I have yet to see you fly or breath fire," I said.

With a huff, the tiny reptile leapt off of my hand and onto the table. "Well," it said, "you certainly could have done worse. Before, you were minus one dragon and, by extension, one connection to a world filled with magic and wonder. Besides, it's not like I'm a fairy. Regular pests, those are."

"Magic and wonder, nothing," I said. "If the rest of your 'magical world' is proportioned like you, what good is it?"

"What good...?" the little beast said, confounded.

"Yes, what good! Unless you can be converted into a hot water heater, or know a spell that'll find my keys when I lose them, what good are you?"

"But...but..."

"You're not even good for decoration. I can just see how it'd go if I told people I had a dragon. Oh really, let's see it then, they'd say. Right, here it is, I'd say. Wow, that's awfully small for a dragon, does it do anything, they'd say. Not really, I'd say. UNIMPRESSED, they'd say. So you tell me, if you're no good for dragon stuff and you're no good for anything else, what good are you?"

After I'd finished my rant I looked down, but instead of seeing a slightly mutated reptile there were only some scorch marks on my table.

Goodbye forever, they read.


Does the dragon story resonate with you? What would you do if you found this creature?

Never Show a Work in Progress

Being a literary artist is so hard . . .

 

Amos Lee on Taking Time

I love it when artists remind me not to be in such a hurry. Amos Lee, one of my favorite singer-songwriters, has some great things to say about the creative process.

Portland Center Stage: Clybourne Park

Honest. Real. Foreign. Disturbing. Embarrassing. Ironic. Opposite. Poignant. Heartbreaking.

These were the words audience members used to describe Clybourne Park, a play which extends the story of A Raisin in the Sun to show us Lena Younger's new neighborhood. At Raisin's conclusion, Lena and her family discover with trepidation they will be the first black family in an all-white neighborhood.

Clybourne Park opens with an inside look at the house Lena will move into. The current residents, Russ and Bev, have lost their only son to suicide and hope that selling this place of sad memories  will help them start over.

Bev is ditzy and clueless, thrusting a chafing dish upon her black maid in a useless show of gratitude to say goodbye.

Sharonlee Mclean creates a fabulously layered character in Bev, a wife and mom with all the fifties trappings of Leave It to Beaver. Somehow--I have no idea how she does it--Mclean gives us a character who is at once predictable yet rounded, sensitive, human and oh, so funny.

She is trying desperately to navigate her husband's depression, neighborhood tensions, her own grief, and her longings for a more humane world. And she keeps trying to give away that chafing dish.

The entire first act is peppered with hilarious moments, even as we become aware of the potential disasters awaiting the house's new residents.

I was completely in love with the first act, and with Mclean's performance as well as that of Sal Viscuso as Russ, the apathetic-angry father trying to make sense of the world. Kelley Curran's performance as Betsy, a deaf family friend, is an added delight, respectful and authentic.

The second act races fifty years into the future. Suddenly you get the eerie feeling that you could be one of the people in this meeting of neighborhood planners, realtor, and home buyers. All are trying to avoid the obvious: the fact of blacks and whites, still separate from each other, still battling issues of living in a community side by side.

A monied white couple is moving into the now black neighborhood, the home that Lena Younger strove and succeeded to make all those years ago. Brianna Horne, as Lena's niece and namesake, gives a brilliant performance as a poised, noncommittal young woman who keeps her sarcasm and anger at a low simmer. When she is challenged, though, that anger scalds.

It's a fascinating "elephant-in-the-room" experience, and as you would expect, there are fewer guffaws in the second act, and more nervous titters. Yet the humor and intelligence breaks through to a deeper level.

It's a brilliant script, well-played, and the back story of the suicidal son is breathtaking.

Afterward, we, the mostly-white audience in a mostly-white city, are still ringing with self-revelation. As an audience member said after the show, "In almost every heart, there is reservation and prejudice."

Photos by Patrick Weishampel. Tickets and info at www.pcs.org and 503-445-3700.


 

Writing Prompt: Stairs

What stairs do you encounter on your journey? What do you expect at the top of those stairs? What do you leave behind you? What surprises do you find when you reach the top?

Photo: Silver Creek Falls steps, by Christi Krug