The Champion Walks Into A Bar
And everyone falls silent. No one makes eye contact. The piano-player’s glass eye pops out and keens onto the A minor key.
He’s not human, they mutter as he pulls a stool up to the counter.
They say with each eldritch horror he decapitates, he loses more of his soul. They say no one that strong, that fast—no one whose ass looks that good—could be human.
They say it’s such a shame he was vaccinated as a child. They say it was the mercury, the aluminum, the formaldehyde. They say they never want to hear a piece of monster-slaying propaganda ever again.
Bitch, I’ll tell you what I never want to hear again: the question What makes us human? That question died along with the technophobic movies of the mid-aughts. Or it died the way the first heart transplant patient didn’t. Or it died when Plato grumbled that writing would impair people’s ability to memorize.
Literally stop. Literally just give him cat eyes and a fucking charging port, slap his consciousness into a lobster shell or a pasta box or whatever. Upgrade him to 5G, to Catalina, to Windows 10. Give him faster download speeds, increased security, better data storage, free cloud syncing.
We’ve always been afraid of our own innovations. Take Dr. Frankenstein. Take those Silicon Valley developers who don’t let their kids have smartphones. But look how far we’ve come. Look how my ulcerated intestines light up beneath the scanner after I drink two bottles of lemon-lime-flavored barium. Look how my hangover lowers its gun from my temple thirty minutes after I take an acetaminophen.
The champion orders whatever’s on tap. He doesn’t care what’s organic, what’s GMO.
The others—they’ll focus back on their buffalo chicken sliders. They’ll convince themselves they don’t need his help to exorcise the wraiths from their cellars or the kelpies from their wells. They’ll settle their tabs with Apple Pay and tell themselves how very natural, how very human they are as they summon an Uber to take them home.
My Imaginary Lover Breeds Dragons
i.
He takes me to a horseshoe of riverbank, the sand scattershot with crayfish bits. We tiptoe through them to where eggs the size of papayas gather algae in the shallows. He says they’ll have steel lungs and eyes like headlamps, and they’ll cut through pressurized ocean trenches, fetching treasure from wrecks.
He says we’ll finally fix up my old typewriter and put it by a window facing the ocean, and every night we’ll have feta cheese and white wine and I’ll never have to work in a donut shop again.
He says not to worry. He says we’ll be a beautiful family.
He lifts an egg from the water and presses it, dripping, against my stomach.
ii.
He fetches his future brood queen from her atrium, ties her to his leather falconry glove with a length of chain. Her hatchling wingspan is wider than he is tall, her bone structure batty and under-fleshed.
She flaps madly skyward, the sun slicking her black scales and blood-purple membranes. Her cries sound like peacocks being plucked alive.
“She’s quite tame,” he says, though his lean arms are iridescent with scars.
He grins like a boy with a kite, laughing when she nearly lifts him off the ground.
Slackening the line, he allows her to beat towards freedom, when abruptly he grabs a cruel fistful of chain, nearly snapping her neck. Still she fights him, her screams turned to bruises in her throat.
“Some day,” my lover says, “she’ll realize there’s nothing else out there.”
He looks at me so suddenly that I return to my body in pins and needles. For a moment there, I’d forgotten I exist.
iii.
Dawn fills the valley like a punchbowl, all the evergreens chilled with dew. From our perch on an overhang, my lover and I watch the dragons’ mating flight. The hatching sun makes their scales smolder like fire opals and milky jade. Pink chills rake my unarmored skin.
They’re a knot of seething coils, throbbing like a heart. As they lash their tails together, something inside me starts to crack. A flaming mouth opens—my lover’s tongue flicks against my neck.
He thrusts her deep into the sky. Their bodies quaking, pleasure sluicing through mine. My lover tearing my shirt like eggskin.
A silent roar shakes the dewdrops from the needles. All the tension hisses from my body. A wet yolk of light slides over the horizon.
iv.
Jarnsaxa isn’t like the other dragons. She looks me right in the eyes.
Named for a moon of Saturn named for a Norse giantess, she’s all frost and fury, her white skin striped with vitriolic orange. When she sees me, she vomits sulfur at the gate of her enclosure. She butts her skull-face against the chicken wire, tongue wagging obscenely.
I have this idea that I can tame her, but I don’t realize I’ve reached out until I hear a wet crack like a thunderclap. She would have ripped off my arm if my lover hadn’t severed her head. The dripping jaws release, but I can feel their venom pulsing in the bite-marks.
“Didn’t you see the way she was looking at you?” my lover demands.
Yes, lover, of course I did. It’s the same affectionate smile he gives me before tearing me apart.
He’s agitated, his jaws worrying an imaginary bone. Without taking his eyes off me, he strokes the blood from his sword.
v.
He names them after astronomical terms—Satellite and Betelgeuse, Azimuth and Ingress. They came from deep space, just like him. There’s a cold weightlessness about them, the way they exist both in the world and above it. The way they look right through me.
“Here,” says my lover, handing me a bowl of butchered chicken.
I take a wing, wrinkled with white fat, and wave it like a marshalling wand at Satellite. Even the sour savor of raw meat won’t turn her head.
“I loved dragons before I even knew you,” I pout.
“I’m not stopping you from loving them,” he says.
No, but he's making me choose between them. Dragons are too proud to settle for split hearts, and he has more than half of mine.
He can see I’m frustrated, so he takes the meat from me.
“Like this,” he says, cupping a breast in his palm.
vi.
My imaginary lover breeds dragons
and I am the dragon.
Give me one good reason
why I can’t be.
My turn to eat the moon.
My turn to bury great cities in ash.
I am the dragon.
You look so small to me now.
You have wasted so much of my time.
All this time spent seeking endlessness,
when all this time I was endlessness incarnate.
I am the dragon.
A ridge of ice down my spine.
Too bright, too colossal to gaze upon,
I am mostly ultraviolet.
You can’t see me
but you feel me burning.
Rita Feinstein (she/her) is the author of the poetry chapbook Life on Dodge (Brain Mill Press, 2018). Her stories and poems have appeared in Grist, Willow Springs, and Sugar House Review, among other publications, and have been nominated for Best of the Net and Best New Poets. She is a graduate of Oregon State University's MFA program. Twitter: @RitaFeinstein
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