Drag On
 Jack Caseros
​

When the fans cut out during the rolling power black-outs Matilda can hear a truck coming from a mile away. Headlights bounce through the kitchen window of the cabin, momentarily bleaching the candle light. The engine rumbles closer. Then the quiet. Then the door slam.
 
“You’ll never guess what I saw,” Léo says before he’s inside.
 
“Catch anything besides a buzz?”
 
“Two pickerel,” he says, slapping fish onto the kitchen counter. The candle flames that light the kitchen bend and jump in the waft.
 
There's a wobble in Léo’s eyes that say so much more than he will. They’re unsettled like his lips holding back breath mints.
 
“Do you need some tea? There's still some boiled water in the thermos.”
 
Matilda has figured out how to flush the septic lines and clear creosote from the wood stove, but Léo is more recalcitrant.
 
“Come sit down with me,” he says.
 
“I’m washing dishes.”
 
“You have to listen to me."
 
He's standing close. He smells like lake rot and motor oil.
 
“You won’t believe what I saw, Tilly.”
 
“Uh huh.”
 
“Don’t you want to know?”
 
Matilda doesn’t need to hear his excuses to drink in the bush. She tells him this, and Léo sweeps her response away with a floppy hand.
 
“I’ll tell you. I saw a dragon.”
 
“A dragon,” Matilda repeats without thinking about it.
 
“A real fucking dragon. Ten feet long and a foot wide. Sid and Emile left early, they had some dance—”
 
“The solstice fair.”
 
“Well, I told them they were missing good fishing for bad dancing—”
 
“Of course…” Matilda rolls her eyes, straining as much as he had through their wedding dance.
 
“—But they left anyway,” Léo ignores Matilda. “And I caught eleven pickerel in under an hour. It was incredible.”
 
“Eleven pickerel,” Matilda nods towards the two fish now in a freezer bag.
 
“The sun set, so I started packing up,” Léo says, gripping the counter before continuing. “I see this grey flash in the bush. I’m thinking it’s the wolves. So I hurry. But I see the flash again. It’s behind me. This thing comes at me along the river, and I just freeze. It was…it was, I don’t know, beautiful. It stops just a few feet away, no more than you and I right now, and just sits.”
 
Léo pauses, his eyes wandering into the slippery shadows left by the candle.
 
“It wasn’t like any wolf I ever seen before.”
 
“Seems like the wrong time of year for scaled critters,” Matilda says, scrubbing the rim left in the soup pot after Léo didn’t come home for lunch.
 
“It had hair…” Léo says. "Coloured like that sculpture we bought in Mexico, the one that’s black but sparkles gold in the light?”
 
“Obsidian.”
 
“That’s it. It was an obsidian dragon. Big eyes. Plates along its spine. It looked at me, then at the cooler. It was begging. I felt bad for the thing. I gave it a whole fish. Gobbled it up in one gulp. Then it helped itself to seconds. Then thirds. The damn thing ate everything but those two. I was able to snatch away the cooler.”
 
“Usually dragons blow fire,” Matilda says, her chin landing in her palm. She wishes these surreal conversations could be saved for their children.
 
“Usually,” Léo nods. “Maybe it did. I don’t know. Maybe it likes sushi.”
 
“All the way from Japan…”
 
“Don't know about that. But I know it found my empty travel mug and pissed in it. Filled it right up. Then it just floats off into the bush. Just floats. So I pick up my cup. And it smelled…fantastic. Kind of flowery and kind of tart…”
 
“Naturally.”
 
“I had to. Knocked back the whole thing. It was de-fucking-licious, Tilly. Then I felt dizzy.”
 
Matilda’s head weighs on her hand so heavily her jaw slips from side to side. She wishes for something else to clean, something to scrub that won’t try to talk her out of it, but everything is done.
 
“It got me damn well high,” Léo continues. “I don’t know how long I was out there. But I lived through a whole year in that forest, from summer through fall, then a long winter and a wet spring. Bang, bang, bang. It was…a lightning. A goddamn lightning, like Buddha.”
 
Enlightenment? Usually he can barely manage to explain his itinerary over an evening. Now he's proselytizing about dragon piss epiphanies. Matilda watches his eyes but they’re vacant, no longer wobbling but consumed by the eyelids, close and puffy around his pupils.
 
“You should go to bed,” Matilda says.
 
“Bed? I’ve already lived through a year today.”
 
But he needs to take the edge off. He's already reaching for the whiskey, already pouring the tumbler. Just a dram to calm the damned, he would say, back when he wanted to be in the sunshine and hold hands and take Matilda out on dates that didn’t involve fried food and hockey games on screens hung over her head.
 
“I can wait out an eternity,” Léo says.
 
Matilda isn’t so sure whether she can.
 
She didn’t have the privilege of his dragon and its elixir. She has never seen the seasons pass by in blurs. They happen slowly and jaggedly, each hour plucked from under her skin like the one curly hair that grows on her neck. Léo's steps are slow and jagged too. He backs out of the kitchen and into the den, the floorboards gasping under his steps. His silhouette bobs across the window. The tumbler is held tightly against his chest.
 
He might pace through an eternity tonight, bumbling around the house instead of slumping into his armchair. His steps crash on even when Matilda is in bed, turned away from the door, watching for dragons out their undressed window and counting the whiskey bottle’s hollow pops and wondering how long, how far, how quietly can this drag on for?
 



 

About the Author: 
Jack Caseros is an Argentine-Canadian writer and environmental scientist whose creative work has appeared in cool places like Every Day Fiction, Syntax & Salt, and Anti-Heroin Chic. His uncreative work has appeared in drearier places, like boardrooms and government databases. He reads fiction for Pithead Chapel and studies novel writing online at Stanford. You can read more about how exhausted Jack is at www.jackcaseros.wordpress.com.  

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