Chapter Twenty – The Dragon’s Favorite Strays
Chapter Twenty
MURR
It is a book of glyphs. How fascinating. My clever Dakotah is trying to teach me more of her words by showing me some of the stylized glyphs of her people. I have vague memories of something like that from my home, but not nearly as colorful or foolish-looking as these. She seems happy with them, and points things out and pronounces the sounds so I can learn them, too.
The little creatures that I have adopted are cats. The sound is a small, hard one. Another similar sound are the cars, which are the strange metal squares I have found littered everywhere in this world. I’m not sure what they do, but she finds it important I learn this word.
She flips through the leafs of the book as I watch, frowning when she comes across certain things. After she frowns at another page, I lean over to see it for myself. It is a round object with white and black coloring.
“Izza sokkerball,” she says in that strange, babbling way of hers. “Prolly dunneeddat.”
“Dat?” I repeat, not sure what she is showing me.
Dakotah shakes her head again, flipping through more of the rustling sheaves that are bound together. She keeps passing the glyphs and deciding against them, which frustrates me. I want to learn all of her words. Why are we not teaching them? She pauses on another, putting a hand over her chest. “Hart.”
The glyph this time is a human with their insides flayed open, displaying the tasty organs inside. “Meat.”
“Hart,” she says again, and thump-thumps on her chest to emphasize the motion. Ah. The name of a specific meat, then.
I repeat it and wait for the next word. When she flips the picture-glyphs again, though, she makes a strangled sound and flicks past the next page. That makes me curious, and I grab her hand, stopping her before she can move past. I take the pages and turn them back to the one she skipped past.
It is a glyph of two humans with their lips pressed together.
She pushed her lips on Ribbit once. This is something humans do regularly, then? I point at the picture, asking for the word. “Dakotah?”
Her scent changes to one with a tinge of nervousness. “Issakiss,” she says. “Kiss.”
“Kith,” I repeat. “Kith…bad?”
She’s startled by my question and babbles off a bunch of sounds, too quick for me to follow. Normally she makes her mouth-sounds slower but she’s clearly nervous. Why are mouths pressing bad? She did it with her daughter. The humans in the glyph look quite happy.
“Kiss good,” she says finally, then shakes her head as if denying this.
I am even more confused.
She notices my confusion and puts her hand in a fist, then presses her lips to the back of her hand. She makes a loud smacking sound. “Kiss.”
But… I hold the picture up, pointing at the other person. It is people putting lips on people, not people mouthing their hands. “No?”
Her face gets red and she seems flustered. “No.”
I eye the picture again, wondering if I am misunderstanding it. Perhaps the humans are feeding one another, like a mother bird does to a baby bird.
Dakotah takes the pictures from me and flips through the pages. She finds one that makes her happy and shoves it under my nose, her tone bright. “Sun!”
I am rather suspicious of this mood, but if she will not tell me, how can I ask? I don’t have the words for it. “Sun,” I say grudgingly, and try to determine what the spiky yellow ball is.
#
DAKOTA
My heart is fluttering hard as I finish off the lesson and decide to find other things to do. I’m flustered, thoughts racing, as I get up with a burning need to suddenly rake the ash out of our fire pit. “So busy,” I say to no one at all. “So very busy.”
I can’t stop thinking about kissing.
Specifically, about kissing Murr. Like, that shouldn’t even be on the list of things in my mind, and yet my brain keeps circling back to it, over and over again, like an itch that just can’t be scratched.
I should not want to kiss a dragon. Eight years of a world-ending apocalypse has taught me that dragons are the enemy. Dragons are bad. I’ve seen people burned alive by dragonfire. I’ve seen dragons snap up people and eat them like they’re chicken nuggets. Dragons have been terrifiying creatures ever since they came through the Rift, and they’ve destroyed everything in their path.
Doesn’t matter that things have been quiet for the last six months. Doesn’t mean things won’t go back to shit again very soon.
Just because Murr has been nice and kind to us doesn’t mean he deserves to be kissed. Him being curious about kisses doesn’t mean he deserves to be kissed. The fact that his features in his human form are strikingly attractive doesn’t mean I need to put my lips on them.
I need to remember how bad things have been in the past. They’re good now, but that can change all too quickly. I need to somehow communicate to him that kisses are things that only happen between two consenting adult partners. If I kiss him, is he going to think it’s okay to kiss Rabbit next?
Because absolutely fucking not. I will put a crossbow bolt in his big dangly dick if he even tries something like that, red meat or no red meat.
It’s just best that kisses don’t happen at all, I tell myself. It’s safest for all parties.
I’m not going to think about how hard he stared at my mouth, his lips parted, as if he wanted to see what I felt like. I’m not going to think about how it’s been over seven years since I’ve had sex. I have a toy hidden in the depths of my bag if I get lonely enough, and surviving take precedence over horniness more often than not.
The apocalypse has taught me that I don’t need a man. That they just complicate things.
I sure don’t need a dragon.
