Flash Fiction: The Dragon in the Megabus Lot

It grows throughout the day, reaching out toward the rolling blue behemoths that thunder past it. Some days it’s stronger than others. Some days the light isn’t quite right and it feels faded, weak, insubstantial. It grows nonetheless, hoping one of the giant, mobile creatures will pull a little closer than usual and maybe it’ll be able to stroke the behemoth. Just run itself along the shiny blue skin and soak up some of that sparkle. That’s all it wants, just to rub itself against that shine for a moment, a second, an instant.

The monsters never pull that close. And at the very end of the day, when the dragon’s grown as much as it can, it still can’t quite reach the brilliant blue. Then the day is over, and even though the beasts keep rumbling by it curls up and disappears for the night. Resting, so that tomorrow, just maybe, it can grow a little longer, reach a little farther, and brush against the brilliance.

It knows that dragons are supposed to fly, but all it can do is float, hover, hang. Though it’s not bound to the ground it’s fixed to the point it grows from. As the year moves through its cycle the dragon grows in slightly different ways, twists, shapes. But none that lets it feel what that sparkle would be like, popping against the dragon’s form.

There are people that ride the behemoths and sometimes bits of them shine, sometime bits of them even shine blue. Usually they don’t come any closer than the rolling creatures. Once someone did. A slim stripe around his arm sparkled. He came and stood right by the dragon, so that it could wrap itself around him. And the dragon did. It twisted its whole form around this person as he leaned against the wall and waited to get inside one of the beasts. It felt the sparkle pop, shimmer, fizzle. It was only the tiniest sensation; just one spot of the dragon was tickled and teased by the shine.

Then the person left; climbed inside yet another one of the beasts that stopped moving before it came within the dragon’s reach. The dragon saw the person with the sparkling stripe run his fingers along the side of the behemoth as he went inside it, and almost, for a second, the dragon thought it could feel the chilly blue shimmer, too.