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Prolific Writer
Join Date: Mar 2006
Posts: 226
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Feeding the Dragons
This is very, very different from my usual style, so I would appreciate any advice as to whether the tone works, and whether the ending makes any sense at all.
Jessi slept fitfully Tuesday night, and when she woke up, she found that she had decided not to feed the dragons today. It was just about the only chance that she would ever have to do it, since they’d been short-staffed since Celia had gone off and gotten married and Yolanda was out with a sprained back, so that left only Nelly and Lizabeth on duty with her, and they were tired enough not to go with her to the feeding, even though the rules said very clearly that there always had to be two people present, just to make sure that nothing went wrong, like if one of the girls broke her leg or had a heart attack on the way, the other one could still make the feeding on time. And then go help her unconscious friend, if she liked. Just so long as the dragons got fed on time.
The rules were very, very solemn about all that sort of thing, and sometimes the girls would make up scenarios with one girl keeling over just as the other fell victim to an attack of hives, and they would earnestly discuss how you could actually roll yourself uphill with two broken legs, until Yolanda yelled at them for not taking their responsibilities seriously, as if the boredom of hanging around waiting to feed the dragons wasn’t enough to make anyone just a little bit crazy after a while.
She had no idea why she had reached this decision. It wasn’t that she had anything against the dragons. They were reasonably quiet and well-behaved, not that they ever did much but sit there waiting for someone to come along and feed them every three hours, on the hour. Or actually, a bit before the hour, just so that you never ran the risk of being late. Never, ever, ever. Which is why the city council always gave the job to the good, responsible girls who applied for it, girls who could be trusted not to oversleep or skip their turn or forget, and certainly not to even imagine purposely not feeding the dragons just to see what would happen. But Jessi guessed that even the most super responsible, never-miss-a-day people still had some spark of something that wanted to know what exactly the whole big deal was that kept you getting in the middle of the night for five years or waking up sweating sometimes, thinking that you had missed a feeding, or always having to make sure that there would be three people on call at all times, even if it meant missing holidays or having no days off for weeks and weeks at a time when someone was sick or away. She bet even prune-faced old Yolanda had been tempted to try it once or twice when she was young, which she probably had been once, even though now she looked like she’d never had any imagination at all or any life outside of feeding the dragons. Which just went to show what happened when you were all super-responsible.
She left the common cabin on time so that Nelly wouldn’t suspect that anything was up, and anyway, she wanted to be right up there with the dragons when the time was up, so that she wouldn’t miss whatever happened. Which sounded, perhaps, just a bit suicidal, but the way she saw it, if anything too awful happened, they would have told all of the girls about it just to keep them on their toes. Not that they weren’t plenty paranoid enough now, with no one ever having told them anything at all about it. It was just there, like a fact of life. The sun had to go up in the morning, things in the air had to fall down, the dragons had to be fed every three hours.
And so there were lots of rules for making sure that nobody overslept and plenty of rules to make sure that the dragons would be fed even if someone suddenly died, but none for making sure that no one would ever purposely not feed the dragons. Apparently, it had never entered anyone’s mind until it had brewed up in Jessi’s the night before.
By this time, she had gotten almost all the way to the dragons’ cave, so she put down the buckets and walked the rest of the way to the big hourglass that was next to the entrance. It was just a quarter to six now, and then the sand level dipped below the red mark on the top bulb that meant that you were getting close and it gave her a sort of goose-bumpy feeling knowing that she was already doing something wrong on purpose.
The way she saw it, if feeding the dragons was really so important, you wouldn’t just have the city council hire a bunch of responsible girls to make sure it got done. The way she would’ve done it (and she’d given the matter a lot of consideration) was to have made it something religious, like some sort of pagan priestess cult, and given all of the Keepers (Keepresses?) of the Dragons tons of power and so forth, so that they could raise dozens of acolytes in their own special sort of walled city. And they’d believe that the gods said you had to feed the dragons and if you didn’t, you’d be angering the gods and who knows what would happen. And everyone in the religion would be fanatically loyal and zealous and crazy like that. And only the high priestess or maybe a couple of other high ranking people would allowed to do the actual feeding, but it’d be some big ceremony so that everyone would always make sure it got done. Of course, that could be pretty expensive and stuff, especially if the priestesses started getting their own power rushes and demanding that people do things, but if something really bad happened for not feeding the dragons, it seemed to her that it ought to be worth it.
Or if they didn’t want to do that, they should at least make up some big scary story of what happened if you didn’t feed the dragons, like the world being destroyed or the dragons getting angry and eating all the children or sucking out the mayor’s soul and setting the town on fire, or something awful like that, so that no one would ever dare to forget to do the feedings and also no one would have to hang around being curious about what would happen if you skipped one just because nobody ever went to the trouble of making up some semi-plausible lie.
Now there were only seven minutes left, which meant that it was later than it had ever been before in the five years she had been there, and from what Yolanda said, in all of the forty-three years she had been there either. Jessi could feel her palms getting all sweaty, but she was determined to just sit there and watch the hourglass and find out what it was that happened. In fact, how did people even know that you had to, if something really bad hadn’t happened once when you didn’t? And if something had, then why wasn’t there some kind of story or fable or something that got passed down among the girls who had to do the feeding? Unless it was something so horrible that everyone it happened to just dropped dead. But then how would they know it had anything to do with feeding the dragons? Why, she wouldn’t be at all surprised if nothing happened at all, someone just took it into their head one day that this was what had to be done and then everyone else just took their word for it. Except that it seemed like an awful lot of trouble to go to without somebody asking that person just where exactly they got the idea.
By then, there were five minutes left. and the dragons were starting to make snuffling noises and crawling to the front of the cave, which made Jessi shiver a little and scoot back all the way back on her rock. Because not even the girls who fed the dragons ever saw them much, they just left the food in front of the cave every three hours and then went away. The whole attitude of the town towards dragons was a bit of a weird one. It wasn’t like they were feared, exactly, or revered or liked or hated or even noticed. They were just fed, and that seemed to be about all that anyone had to do with them. Even the girls, whose whole lives basically revolved around feeding the stupid dragons, didn’t think about them much. They thought a lot about the feeding, and the schedule, and sometimes about the food supplies, and they thought often about other things entirely, but they never really paid much thought to the dragons themselves.
It was just their job to make sure that the two buckets were where they had to be when they had to be, and for this job they were given room and board and a decent salary, though nothing like the sort of thing that you’d expect the city to pay people if the whole world would fall apart if they made a mistake. She guessed it was because just about anybody could do the job, so long as there were enough of them and they followed the rules, so it wasn‘t like they were doing anything hard or special. Unless the reason was because the city didn’t really mind if the dragons didn’t get fed at all.
Except that they made such a fuss with rules and regulations and surprise inspections that it seemed as if it mattered to them a lot. She bet that none of them knew why you had to feed to the dragons either. She knew that Yolanda didn’t know, because she had asked her once and Yolanda had just given her that look, and if Yolanda didn‘t know, being as old and devout as she was, that probably meant that no one on earth knew and so if she didn‘t not feed them then nobody would ever know what happened.
Of course, that seemed like a pretty silly reason for risking whatever it was that might happen. If Yolanda had been able to feed the dragons for forty-something years without knowing why, then she guessed she should be able to stand it too. Of course, it was easier for Yolanda, because she didn’t have any imagination. Which also meant that she also couldn’t imagine all of the awful things that might happen.
But anyway, Jessi didn’t care what happened. She was sick and tired of feeding them every day for no reason and just because prune-mouthed Yolanda could handle it didn’t mean that she was going to. She checked the time again and her heart almost stopped when she thought that time had run out, but there were another three minutes left.
She bet the reason nobody ever made up some lie is that most of them were probably just like Yolanda, so they never wondered why they kept feeding the dragons. For them, feeding the dragons didn’t need any more justification than why you had to fall down if you jumped in the air. And probably they all blindly assumed that if everyone before them had been certain that it had to be done, then they must have had some really good reason, because something so crazy couldn’t have started from nothing. And maybe they’d all thought that the reason nobody ever told them a story about why it had to be done was that nobody would believe the story and they’d just think that it was a stupid story that people had made up to scare them into behaving, so instead whoever started everything just made sure that they had a system where they didn’t take any risks at all or have to rely on people being good. And then maybe everyone else figured that if that was the case, then they shouldn’t make up any silly lies either, but just make sure that the girls knew that the job had to be done and not have them think about what might happen if they didn’t, which must be pretty awful if everybody thought that nobody could possibly believe it. And maybe they thought that if they never talked about the reason, nobody would ever think about it and then they’d never run the risk of some stupid girl being curious enough to try it and make it happen.
Jessi scraped her knees jumping off the rock, but she didn’t even feel it. She grabbed the buckets and ran over to the cave entrance and she was scared that she wouldn’t make it in time and almost crying as she slammed the buckets down and backed away. And then she really was crying, because the dragons just sauntered over and started to eat and nothing horrible happened and she was so relieved and glad that she had been fast enough that she couldn‘t help but stand there sobbing.
When she turned around to see how close she had cut it, the clock read 6:01. Which probably just meant that she hadn‘t turned around soon enough.
Last edited by voicesinmyhead : 04-04-2006 at 01:52 PM.
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