October 30, 2008
Occoquan.
The winds die down as you step outside.
The sky should be gray, but the clouds are bitter orange/burnt umber/something smoky like paprika.
It is strangely warm. (It was cold on the ride down, cold enough for your jacket – jewel-toned like a hummingbird – but now outside on an empty street with no real lights to speak of, it is oppressive, so you slip it off.)
You only catch glimpses of the river from here; there are other buildings – houses, a few, and shops – standing in your way. Watching like moai.
Surprisingly, you can’t see the bridge.
There are people nearby, people outside with you, but the road is cold (except strangely not for you) and dark (save for that eldritch glow of mundane houselights) and empty.
And the paprika sky still drags your eyes out towards the other shore.
And down the other side of the street, a streetlight that you could have sworn wasn’t there before is on, brilliant and bright, the clearest thing around -
- And as you stare at it, mesmerized like a rodent before a snake, the wind whips down the street like a long, long sigh,
and you see the head, resting not sixty feet up the road, with its open mouth swallowing the street and its streetlight-bright eye, and its long back curving away in forested hills across the river.
January 26, 2008
The Firebird.
An adult dragon is one of the largest creatures on the planet. At the shoulder, they stand about five stories high. From snout to tail, they are about a quarter mile long.
That’s about three and two-third football fields, for those having some trouble visualizing.
Their scales are the size of dinner plates, and as thick as two of your fingers. Their talons are about as long as a car. Their teeth are the length of an adult human. One of their eyes is bigger than your front door.
Yeah. Dragons are massive. We are rodents, compared to them.
But they are not the largest creatures on Earth. There is one larger.
The firebird.
From beak to tail, the firebird is about 300 miles long. Its wingspan is nearly twice that. Its beak is about twice the size of Manhattan. Its longest feathers would easily span Washington DC.
Yeah, I said “its”. There’s only ever one at a time.
Which is probably a good thing. The firebird eats energy – lightning, sunlight, heat, radiation, et cetera. But there’s only so much energy to be found on Earth, and the rest of us lowly creatures need some too.
The firebird is almost incomprehensible. Compared to it, we are fleas.
Fortunately, it seems to like us.
