At first we laughed when you said that science would slay the dragons. We thought the earth herself would bury you in the folds of her mossy robe when you began to go against her champions. That was back when the earth was still a she, and the stars her handmaidens, and the wind her speech. Even when you beat the stars long and thin enough to pierce through scales, we still thought you were only fools.
When the first dragon fell to your weapons, we assumed the fault lay with the monster. The guardian had fallen asleep at his post. Survival of the fittest you cried. We didn’t know yet that the fittest meant you, that dragons were the first to go in a culling that would silence first the wind and finally the poets.
You calculated the cost of each weapon, but not the cost of the calculations. You melted the stars that fell near our huts. When we ran out, you started making your own stars so you wouldn’t have to wait for the heavens to present us with them. The fairies tried stealing our children, but we didn’t understand the wind in their teeth, didn’t understand that rust from the melting stars was corroding the doors between the worlds. We wanted protection more than we wanted prophecies. At first we hung your false stars over the cribs to keep the fairies away, bits of heat-curled metal swinging in a dying wind. But while you snuck the stars from over our cribs into the forges, we were away at the empty dragon caves, gathering their gold in the shadows of a tumbling palace. Golden whispers grew in our ears and deafened us to the protests of the fairies.
We still weren’t nervous even when the last dragon died, their bones a seal over the rust-locked doors between the worlds. But you sealed the doors between our worlds tighter than any star could when you helped us believe more in our loneliness than their loveliness. We found ourselves alone on spaceship earth. The wind was a cold front, and the thunder a byproduct of the change in temperature.
With the monsters we had feared first safely buried, and our windows shut to the muffled wind, the poets were starving. The prophets became our historians, but we didn’t want to remember what we had lost. So we regifted them to our children. The histories were spooned into the children with their applesauce at lunch: once upon a time.
When dragons had almost become synonymous with applesauce, you began parading their bones through the streets under new names we couldn’t pronounce. You told us the names meant things like, “Terribly Big Scary Lizard,” and “Monster Larger Than a Chicken.” But with nothing but applesauce scented stories, what could we expect? Every city was provided with a bleached temple, a natural history of yourselves, triumphant through the ages. The martyred monsters were displayed in the temple halls, but just to remind everyone who they belonged to, you taped plastic signs to every glass case. “Do NOT Touch!” There would be no superstitious nonsense about the bones of saints in this new age. These martyrs belonged to you. Every bone was numbered, named and catalogued, every scratch explained. We believed you; we believed in you. While we measured our gold, a cold front blew the shingles off our parallel roofs. Without fairies, we were desperate to believe in anything.
The poets had been shot down one by one. Everyone demanded gold, and the old prophets weren’t allowed to have it. Soon there were only a few poets left, clinking out prophecies in basements and attics around the world, huddled in sackcloth, their eyes to their telescopes, watching the undead stars tip-toe on the roofs above our heads. The poets began tapping Morse code prophecies on each others shingles, on the floors above their heads. Dit-dit-dit da-da-da dit-dit-dit. If the wind refused to speak to them, they would begin speaking to each other.
At first they went unnoticed: poems painted on the bellies of bridges, prophecies put on the wind-torn water-towers. But soon, the poets grew dangerous. They began sneaking into the museums at night, stroking the colossal skeletons of the martyrs, loosening the pins that held them together. They began erasing numbers and replacing them with words: “Listen to the wind.”
Annoyed, you peppered us with propaganda. You showed us films of the unpronounceable dragons chasing children around kitchens. You shook your head knowingly, “It’s a good thing those monsters are dead.” You tried to smile mockingly at your own martyrs. You even tried bleaching the prophecies from our walls, but poetry is harder to destroy than palaces. When our social security numbers started disappearing, and our houses stopped leaning at right angles, we began to wonder if the wind was still as silent as we suspected.
When the dragons had begun dying, the fairies had the right idea in trying to steal the children. But it was the prophets who finally succeeded. Turns out that the applesauce we’d been letting the poets handle had made changelings of our children. One night the prophets marched under our star beams and cradle charms while we were downstairs in the living room balancing the taxes. While we measured the price of potatoes, and ignored the price we had already paid, the poets told the babies what they heard in the wind.
You thought they were too young to understand, but you were wrong. They were just young enough. While we bent beneath bulbs of lightning and laundered breezes, they led the children into the street. The babies crawled in your museum windows while the poets battered down the doors with No Parking signs. Our children, reading fairy-tales by flashlight under bunk bed blankets heard the noise. They slipped out the windows and down the drainpipes, hungry for the bones of the saints.
They helped the poets tear down the walls of your museums, toppling the glass display cases. With shouts of gladness, they piled the “Do NOT Touch!” cards into their altar bonfire that writhed with melting laminations. One pig-tailed girl fitted the skull of a dragon against her own and ran through the tumbling temple, roaring. One shirtless boy climbed vertebrae three stories before perching at the top and reciting poetry as loud as the wind rushing through his lungs would let him.
Stars, in their joy to hear the wind speak again from the comatose face of earth, began to fling themselves down from the sky, smashing telephone poles and generators in their wild abandon. You clutched your test tubes in your suddenly dark laboratories, terrified at the sound of the wild skies roaring into speech with blazing cries of, “Glory!” at every new meteor crater. You had grown too used to your manufactured stars to remember how to deal with the old, raw, unmelted ones, the ones that didn’t follow your rules.
We started coming out of our crooked houses as we heard our children’s voices sing with the wind. As fire rained down, we danced through the streets for the first time in a hundred years. The little girls carried the bones of the guardians as we disassembled your martyrs piece by piece. Under a fiery sky, we rebuilt the fairy palace out of the sacred bones. Moss began to creep across the ruins of your temples, a new praise to natural history. We cleared the rust from our world’s doors while all the stars sang for joy.
