Tags
Daiyuverse, Dragonverse, No copyrights were harmed in the making of this work, Oh my gosh I'm trash, this is just fanfic for a fanfic
As he flicked through the mail, a small handwritten envelope caught his attention. The boy couldn’t read much, nor well, but he could sound out his family name, tracing a finger as brown as wet dirt over the “W” in Wilkes.
“The pleasure of your company is requested,” Father Oreste read out, when Jedidiah enlisted his help, but would read no more, and the boy left the lodger’s room as silently as he had come and with no more answers than he had had.
Dragon, he whispered to himself, the one word he had understood. Dragon was a big word – not a long one, but an important one. Satan was a Dragon, hovering over the saloon and hiding in the tailor’s shop where Ida Marie bought her laces and other, more secret, things. Company, he thought, and wondered whose. Keeping company was a phrase he knew, Momma’s voice full of acid as she talked about Miss Clara and her callers. But company was strange to him, a word for soldiers or parlors. Tombstone had neither, to speak of, although some of the residents would have insisted otherwise.
It might have gone no further than curiosity, but Jedidiah was chosen by God. His Momma had said so and Father Oreste had confirmed it with his presence. The Father honored them by lodging there, Momma said, and Jedidiah had nodded. Honor was a word he did not know in his guts the way he knew dirty and Dragon. And because he did not know honor he did not know it was a sin to go among Brother Oreste’s things when he was not there, to make himself vague so that Momma and her man Wilkes didn’t see him go. Jedidiah had always been cleverer with numbers than with letters.
The pleasure of your company is requested, he traced, remembering how the words had felt pushing at him with the air from Oreste’s mouth. Not holy, like thou shalt not kill, nor profane, like what Joe Sr. said in church of a Sunday. If he had known the word secular he might have used it, but he did not. The words felt like earth, like air. He could see through them to the pen, gripped in slim fingers too tightly. Does it matter? Someone was saying to her-the-writer. It’s a formality.
Formality or no, Jedidiah could read the time on the invitation and he meant to see the Dragon. So he made himself vague again one morning, bare feet cold in the dry dust, and followed Father Oreste to the edge of town. He did not think the Father was meant to come either- his walking smelled like oil and cedar and he went quiet as any coyote.
Hidden behind the stone he heard the Dragon roar, and he saw it rise, and the sun came up and turned the desert to water beneath it. From the gondola beneath its belly, a woman waved; below her, a coil of rope slunk away. Her companion looked out over the waste and for a moment her eyes held Jedidiah’s and he could not remember how to pray.