Who sent you to coil and clamber in my branches? To lilt among my leaves? To drowse, untroubled, in my shade? Surely not the gods. They bellowed big, dreamed small. Their tiny imaginations, busy with war, could never have birthed you, each so glorious whether you crept or soared. It seemed that you had always been with me, already bearing names that rolled joyously in the mind and the muck: wombat, walrus, wallaby… Not named by them, though: “strike” “win”: the gods had few words.

Sometimes, I wished that I were less burdened. I groaned under your weight, but still I held you, fearful of the future that would own you. In colors that sang and bled, I’d seen it: a ragged weaving of fire and moonstones, poetry and weeping. Yet I had a duty: I knew that the beings who would come would feel an ache to tell their dreams; to anchor them in words of earth, unmoor them in syllables of sky. So I sent you into the world to haunt the caves, nest in the thatch, out-gobble the gabbling goblins of night. You went as I bid you, neither joyful nor sorrowful–complete, wanting nothing. You didn’t look back. Your eyes were on tomorrow. You trusted it. You trusted me.

In you, the people found their stories. Monkeys, lions, bulge-bellied penguins: you were the cloth of tricksters, kings, clowns and clerics. Stray dogs were beggars, rats were villains–skulking, ruby-eyed. In the galleries of the deep, the minstrel whales sang of longing and home.

My beloved dragons. I didn’t deck you in come-hither gold and spiteful flame. You were small and shy. You curled at my foot and purred sweetly if I tickled you behind the ears. But there were rooms in once upon a time that howled for long-snouted, glinty-scaled terror. People

shaped you to dwell in them. I still hear you, bewildered and lost, a roaring that fills the earth but leaves me hollowed.

Were you, all of you, betrayed by the stories you became? The ones that made you less? Fit only to be caged? Tethered? Impaled on the fisher’s harpoon, the toreador’s sword? Eaten? I wonder if I did right to let you go (though it’s peaceful without the monkeys and parrots, I’ll admit.) Do you see the barren boughs of Yggdrasil in your dreams? Do you forgive me?

What I suffered without you, no one knew except the gods, and if they cared, they never showed it. I confess: I kept one to comfort me. Just one. The storytellers have glimpsed its horn, silver, in the crescent moon; heard its hoofbeats clattering through the stars. Chaste-fingered ladies have cloistered it in threads of milky silk; chanced upon its shadow in gilded mirrors; called to it with offerings of sweetmeats and pomegranates. They want to believe it is real. They are afraid that it is not. One day, perhaps, I will give it to the world.

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Donna Shanley lives in Vancouver, Canada, where she can see mountains when it isn’t raining. Her flash and microfiction appear in numerous journals, including Vestal Review, Flash Frontier, Ekphrastic Review, Milk Candy Review, Crow & Cross Keys, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Club Plum, Identity Theory, Flash Boulevard, Centaur, and Best Microfiction 2024. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.