Another start

Given the choice, given the chance, Haraan would have remained asleep. There could be no escaping them, his memories, either waking or dreaming, but his mind in the latter state wouldn't object to the contradicting evidence of who he was.

His first memory, so it contended, was of sand, of flapping and pouncing along some secluded, sable shore before his mother's jaws reined him into deeper waters. His first memory, argued another: clashing a pair of forks together to music while wrapped in his mother's arms.

We may rest easy at night despite whatever turmoil life brings into our lives, whether we lose our possessions in a fire, accident or arson, or if the loss is felt on an emotional level, such as the departure of a loved one, on the basis, the simple refuge, of acknowledging ourselves as human beings -- when we can't count on anything else, at least we may count on that, irrelevant to circumstances as that fact may be. Excuse the pedant, the contrarian, the fantasist: we go to sleep human, we wake up human, such it is that we may rely on (or resign ourselves to) it as certainty.

Such is not the case for Haraan Akema Siarke, who despises sleeping in a dragon's body, for he wakes up convinced he wears the wrong shape.

***

Let us be fair. Haraan has certainties to his life as well -- what a punishment it would be to live a life without certainty, a cruel hoax devised by something beyond God, for God creates life with the guarantee that whatever has life does not merely exist as does a rock, or the sky, or fire; it lives. Juxtaposition is a beautiful instrument for deriving certainties.

If he were the optimistic type, Haraan would admit he was living, and not living dumbly as a bacillus, or a stalk of kelp, but as a creature capable of reasoning and recollection, and not only that, but of abstraction, too. His human memories inform him two times five gives him ten and he can believe that without an array of pebbles spread before him to illustrate the point.

Why two times five equals ten is useful to know as a dragon, he couldn't say. The most important knowledge his dragon-self possessed tied intimately with his senses: the stench of oil signaled the presence of what his human-self called a boat, or a ship, it really depended on how big it was, but his dragon-self only cared that it had dragged his mother into the sky with giant hooks when he had been eight grand tides from the egg. The hooks had ripped through blubber into her arteries, so the oil mixed with blood.

Every time he had come close to a boat in the ocean, so his dragon-memories told him, every time he smelled their oil in their frothy wakes, he also smelled a little of his mother's blood, too.

Haraan is certain about hating boats. And as the first bars of dawn light begin to filter through the water, he is not at all optimistic about the coming day.

***

Why these contradictions? he wondered. When the contradictions overlapped in time, such as the matter of his first memory, they left holes in other places: entire seasons, tides, other spans of human and dragon measure both obliterated, leaving behind faint, smeared hazes of intuition best viewed as through the corner of an eye, if these ex-memories could even be seen with eyes.

On a very cold, very analytical level, it would be better to dismiss his blasted, carved-up past and focus on living out the rest of his days as a dragon. But no sooner did that idea come to him that other voices cried foul, most of them his, some of them imagined, conflated, or redacted from his recollecting, the rest, from her.

Especially from her. Hers was the only voice that didn't object as an echo in his brain.

"Not now, Kaela," he moans, rolling over. He knows she floats just a foot above him; he can scent her. She smells of strawberries today, tangy and light on his tongue, slowly, inexorably drawing him back to the waking world. Stop making me think about everything.

"Something came back to you yesterday morning."

"And it's only confusing me more. Let me sleep." Something blunt digs between his back and the sand, trying to nudge him up. He hears her voice bubble up from under him.

"I think we're going to find lots of memories today."

Lady, she is insistent -- and until yesterday, religion hadn't played any part of his life. He'd woken up with visions of temples, their inward-curving columns and somber, candle-lit statues of humans garbed in fabrics ruffled by impossible winds, the name of the goddess he invoked just now. Chants of worship resonate through his head before he realized what they were doing -- making him remember -- and quashed them. He brushes his companion away. "Not today."

He feels her wake pass over him, getting a whiff of strawberries again. He hears a sigh as she drifts into the curve of his chest and settles there, her dorsal frill tickling his skin. The sigh is his; he cannot decide whether it was a sigh of frustration, or a sigh of relief. The first night she had done this to him, snuggle up with him, that is, he had been asleep, only to bolt awake in fear. Despite one part of him having lived life quite happily in nakedness, the other, blurred, fragmented part of him screamed in an awkward terror groomed by a half-remembered, air-breathing, clothes-wearing society. He realized a week later that that society was nowhere nearby to judge him, and the warmth, the deep-seated whisper of her pulse, was nicer to have close by at night than a cold boulder.

"Are you still sleepy?"

"Very sleepy," was his reply.

She shifts, thinking to herself, probably. "Am I still waking you up too early?"

"Yeah."

"I'm sorry."

"It's okay."

"I'll wait more next time."

"Until you can tell what color your flipper is in the light."

"Okay."

She would get better. At first, she woke him with several hours to go before sunrise.