Sierra sighed, leaning her cheek against her hand and staring at the empty table before her. She should have had a four-layer cake, one layer for every year she’d been alive, and four glowing candle-sticks. Other kids from day-care had birthdays like that, so why shouldn’t she?

After all, Sierra’s mom worked just as hard as anyone else. Every morning, she’d drop Sierra off at the daycare before going to class, and in the mid-afternoon Grandpa would come pick her up and take care of her until Mom came home from work right before dinner. Then, the four of them (Mom, Grandpa, Grandma, and Sierra) would eat Mac and Cheese or chicken nuggets, and Sierra would go to bed confident that her mom was just as good as any other mom- probably better, since she was going to a big kids’ high school and working a job both at the same time.

Sierra didn’t have a dad, but Grandpa more than made up for it, taking her out of walks to show her his tractor, and giving her chocolate every time she brought a picture home from daycare for him.

Grandma was cool, too, because sometimes, when she had to work overtime at the store, she’d let Sierra color in the back room and pretend she was stocking the shelves with colorful canned vegetable and interesting-shaped pasta. Sierra usually figured she had the best family a kid could want, except on days like today.

Seeing as it was her birthday, they should’ve all gathered around to celebrate her, but they didn’t. Annoyed at the lack of attention, she rose from her seat at the table, turned, and ran outside.

Autumn’s chill nipped at the edge of each breeze, but for the time being, summer’s warmth made the cool grass feel nice against Sierra’s bare feet, and the young girl didn’t even think of slipping on a jacket. Her pink dress swirled like a princess’s and her blonde hair danced in the wind, making the girl feel particularly majestic as she ran through the endless backyard that surrounded her family’s farmhouse.

She couldn’t be entirely certain when she first noticed the sound, but Sierra recognized that the voice called her name when she reached the oak tree and first asked herself the best way to climb it. When the breeze brought the wispy, “Sierra,” to her ears, she turned and peeked back toward her house, wondering if it was her mother who called her.

No one was visible at the back door, leading Sierra to conclude that she was indeed alone, and she’d only imagined the call.

As the girl turned her attention back to the tree again, her name once more played at her ears. “Sierra,” it called. “Sierra, I’m looking for you. Help me find you, Sierra.”

Remembering the stories Grandma sometimes read her and the movies Sierra sometimes watched, the girl wondered if somehow, the tree itself was reaching out to her. Thus, she answered aloud, “Here I am.”

Despite the assertion, the voice still sought her out, calling, “I’m lost. Keep talking, Sierra, so that I can find you.”

She thought of her many Sunday-school lessons, and particularly of the story she’d heard about Solomon. Styling herself after the prophet, Sierra turned her gaze to the sky to ask, “God, is that you?”

For the first time, she saw the vibrant turquoise-blue sliver against the bleached white of the sky, and knew that it was this color that called out to her. Needlessly, it called, “I’m not God. Sierra, help me.”

“Come down here!” Sierra screamed, willing her voice to reach across the endless miles to the creature that drifted above. “I’ll help you, but I can’t get all the way up there. You need to come down to me.”

Apparently, this invitation was enough, as the creature dived to the earth and landed softly on the ground just before the girl. Up close, the creature proved to be a dragon with gleaming scales bluer than the sky had ever been. Sierra was immediately certain that the dragon was a her, and as the bird-like lizard looked toward her with knowing golden eyes, Sierra knew she was in the presence of one who wanted only the best for her. She wasn’t afraid.

What happened next would always be difficult for Sierra to explain, even to herself. She wasn’t certain how she knew, she simply did know that the dragon was hurt; it had flown off-course from its magical home, wherever that was, and was now dying in the world of reality.

Hesitantly, and all-too-aware of the razor-sharp discs that served as the dragon’s scales, Sierra approached. She placed her tiny hands against the dragon’s leathery belly, searching for the soft thud indicative of the dragon’s heart. When she found the spot, a soft yellow glow warmed her hands through the dragon’s hide.

The creature blinked, and its beak-like snout turned itself into an almost-smile. From her intensely close vantage point, Sierra could see the tiny tufts of white hair that hung from the dragon’s snout like a beard, and she noted the double-row of spikes that lined the dragon’s back from its wings all the way down to the tip of its forked tail. While she healed the dragon’s heart, the dragon wrapped a feathered bird-wing around her, protecting her from sight.

She didn’t understand the magical healing that she performed; all that Sierra knew was that by touching the dragon, she was making it better. The dragon knew she drew love from the girl, and that only a child this young could give her all she needed.

Only a child like this could give the love that had never yet been hurt, as Sierra would be hurt when her mother would walk out on her when she was ten. Only a child could give innocence, as Sierra would lose at fifteen when the boy she liked would slip something into her drink and take advantage of her. Only a child could give trust and faith, as would challenge Sierra when Grandpa would die of cancer in only two more years. Most important, only children believe in dragons, and it was this belief the dragon needed most to get home.

Finally, the warmth became heat, and Sierra ripped her hand away, cradling her smoking flesh to her chest and screaming tears. The dragon, meanwhile, had the strength it needed, and it joyfully belched a ball of fair, singing the grass that had already begun to wilt in anticipation of the first frost.

With a powerful flap of its wings, the dragon pushed itself off the ground and into the air, seeking the current that would bring it closest to its home. As the creature circled higher and higher, it communicated a final message to her, and Sierra knew the dragon would be back for her one day, and it would take her to the magical land from whence it came. There Sierra would be happy forever, and no pain and no fear would ever beleaguer her.

Long after the dragon had disappeared from visibility, Sierra heard her name again, but after the ethereal music of the dragon’s voice, this call sounded harsh and guttural. Her mother stood in the doorway, a scowl on her face as she called, “Sierra, get in here right now! You’re going to catch a cold.”

Quietly overjoyed at the small miracle she’d just experienced, Sierra turned and ran back toward the house, bursting with the anxiety to tell her mother what had just happened.

………………………………………………………………………………………………

With a swallowed gasp of a scream, Sierra sat up straight in bed. Sweat soaked through her pajamas and her sheets, drenching her as though she’d wet the bed. She blinked several times until her digital clock came into focus, and she saw that it was just after two a.m. She racked her brain to wonder why she was in bed already and not out salvaging the last few minutes before all the clubs closed, then remembered that her new job started tomorrow. Her nights of endless partying needed to end.

This small mystery solved, Sierra turned her attention back toward the nightmare that had awakened her. No, that wasn’t right. It wasn’t a nightmare, really. The dream was actually quite pleasant, and every time she dreamed it, Sierra felt safe and warm in a way she hadn’t since she was a little girl.

The nightmarish part was the real world result of the dream.

Maybe she’d dreamed the experience with the dragon the first time, or maybe the four-year-old Sierra had invented the incident and convinced herself it was real. Twenty years later, she didn’t’ know where the conviction had come from, but the dream frightened her every time it came.

As a little girl, Sierra had told Mom, Grandpa, and Grandma each about the experience when she’d magically healed a lost dragon with only the power of her love. The adults had encouraged the imagined fantasy, claiming to have spotted dragon wings flashing before the moon before she went to bed at night, and assuring her that if she ate all her vegetables the dragon would somehow know and reward her, just as would Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

The difference was that while they encouraged her in the name of stimulating her imagination, Sierra believed that what had happened was real. With time, she stopped believing in the tooth fairy, the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, and all those other sprites, but she never lost her faith in the dragon.

When she was in middle-school, Grandma was less impressed with Sierra’s story, and made her visit the school counselor once a week in the hopes that if she came to terms with her lack of parental presence, she’d release her insistence on the fantasy’s reality. After a year of counseling sessions, however, Sierra made no progress, and the counselor suggested that she see a professional.

For one horrific summer after eighth grade, Sierra lived in an asylum with anorexics, schizophrenics, and suicidal-depressants. She kept diaries of her dreams and day-dreams, and had to talk to a man in a tweed jacket and holding a clip-board every day. Usually, because she could think of nothing interesting to say, she’d make things up.

From what Grandma would later tell her, Sierra knew her case was utterly baffling to the doctors. She’d experienced no other hallucinations since that first one at the age of four, and she didn’t demonstrate any of the other symptoms of schizophrenia or any other hallucinatory mental unbalance.

That being said, Sierra’s insistence on the reality of her experience with the dragon diagnosed her with an acute inability to discern reality from fiction. Until an official diagnosis could be made, the doctors thought it would be best for her to remain under supervision, continue to see the psychiatrist daily, and take anti-depressants for no explanation that suited Sierra.

As weeks stretched to months, however, and Sierra grew more weary of the asylum, the doctors still were unable to diagnose her with anything. While Sierra took this as proof that the dragon truly had appeared to her, the other inmates mocked her as childish and crazy, just as her classmates had in middle school.

Eventually, the doctors suggested that Sierra be released in time to attend school in August, but still meet with a counselor on a regular basis. Sierra secretly thought they knew she was right, but were unwilling to admit that they were wrong.

Finally, she’d entered high school beaten-down enough to treat the incident as if it had all been a fantasy, although she secretly still believed it to be true. As if they knew the secrets of her heart, Sierra’s classmates teased her incessantly as the crazy girl who thought she saw dragons.

The wearying experience of high school was enough to finally even make Sierra question her sanity. She’d believed that Norris really liked her for her personality, up until that night he raped her at that party, and she’d believed that she had a real talent for creative writing, especially considering the encouragement she received from her English teacher, until rejection letter after rejection letter from every magazine she’d submitted work toward had filled her mailbox. If she could be wrong at those things, maybe she was wrong about the dragon, too.

By the time she’d dropped out of the two-year college where she’d studied journalism, Sierra had completely given up her belief in that magical encounter she’d had with the dragon. Finally, she believed the same thing everyone else had been telling her for years; she was crazy.

The next three years passed in a blur of one bad choice after another. LSD trips and heroine binges brought her realer-than-life encounters with the other dragons that lived in her mind, along with pixies and unicorns and elves. Only when the high wore off did Sierra come tumbling back to earth and into a pit of self-hatred. During long nights when she mourned a lack of money to buy more drugs, she’d despise her need to re-capture impossible childhood fantasies through the chemicals.

Finally, on her twenty-first birthday, when she’d celebrated the anniversary of the dragon’s first appearance by holding up a liquor store, the police got her. In jail, she was beaten and threatened, which was nothing new, but the state-appointed lawyer had won her a stay in a rehab clinic rather than hard time. The result was everything Sierra had ever hoped for.

When she finally got out, Sierra moved back in with Grandma, who exercised a super-human ability to forgive Sierra all her wrongs. After a penance of four months, during which Sierra was rejected from every community college and every real job she applied for because of her criminal history, Grandma finally pulled some strings and found her a job in the most demeaning, soulless place possible: the mail firm at an insurance adjustments company.

Of course, Sierra couldn’t know with any certainty that her job would be as soulless and demeaning as she supposed. After all, this was only her first day, and she had no idea what to expect. Nevertheless, after hearing a description of her daily duties, Sierra had formed a pretty accurate expectation of the true excitement of mailroom duties.

Thus, she packed herself a peanut-butter sandwich and kissed Grandma good-bye for the day, thanking her once more for the employment. After all, even a soulless job was better than none at all.

When she arrived at 8:05 after having to take a detour around a car-and-deer accident on the highway, Sierra received a lecture on the importance of punctuality in the mailroom. She then flew through a flurry of names and faces, none of which she’d soon be able to remember, and finally settled into her spot.

Every day from eight until five, Sierra would stand by the mail-slot at the back of the mail room. The mailman came five times a day, and Sierra’s duty was to sort through all his letters and put each envelope in the appropriate slot on the wall. She’d also sign for all UPS packages that came to her window and sort them. She’d have a forty-five minute lunch break every day at 11:30, after which she was expected to return promptly to her window and resume her work.

During the long hours that dragged on between mail-drop-offs, during which Sierra literally had nothing to do, she thought of wandering away to chat with her co-workers and get to know them better, but she remembered how her boss had warned her not to leave her window un-manned. Instead, she stared at the white wall across from her station, and wondered if any other job in the world was this boring.

During her lunch break, Sierra sat in the back room, fearing that if she left the monolithic building, she’d never return to her post on time, and she’d get fired. Despite Sierra’s current hatred of her position, she knew she needed this job.

Chewing her soggy peanut butter sandwich, which lacked the sweet strawberry jelly she and Grandma had run out of that morning, Sierra allowed her mind to drift back to its favorite vice- the dragon. Surely, the magical creature couldn’t be real, for if such wonders truly existed, the world couldn’t tolerate the dreary work performed by Sierra in the few short hours of that morning.

As her hours became days and the days became weeks, Sierra grew more accustomed to her job. She taught herself to become numb to the endless boredom of her every day by wasting the hours on hopeless daydreams.

While she slipped identical white envelopes into the slots that belonged to identical men in identical black suits, Sierra remembered the delight she would have experienced had she ever really seen a true apparition of the dragon. While she waited for the mail-man to make his next drop-off, Sierra imagined what she would do should she ever see the dragon again. And, when the woman who worked the next window once more began telling the same story about her nephew’s fifth-grade woes, Sierra re-created the exact details of the dragon in her mind, tracing the exact width of her sharp claws, and remembering the exact shade of her glowing yellow eyes.

All along, she knew she played a dangerous game. During her final sessions with her therapist, the man had warned Sierra time and again that while she now accepted her hallucinations as fiction, if she dwelt too long on her false memories, she might lose touch with reality again. Better to treat them as if they’d never existed.

She couldn’t, though. Although Sierra finally accepted the truth about the dragon’s unreality, she needed something to distract her mind to keep herself from going even more crazy in the monotony of the mailroom. She risked a relapse of whatever it was she had in order to save herself from losing her soul at work.

And, oddly, for the first time in years, the memory made Sierra happy.

All was ruined one evening, when Sierra waited for Grandma to finish making dinner. She sat with a piece of notebook paper and an old box of colored pencils drawing that thing that had been on her mind for almost two whole months. She’d just added a sparkled to the end of each claw to represent its gleaming sharpness when her paper was snatched out of her hands.

“What’s this?” Grandma demanded, waving the drawing in front of Sierra’s nose.

“It’s nothing!” Sierra insisted, reaching for the paper Grandma was unwilling to acquiesce. “I was bored; I was just drawing.”

“You were just drawing a dragon,” Grandma argued. “Now, don’t lie to me young lady. Have you been hallucinating about it more? Tell me the truth.”

“No,” Sierra insisted. “I haven’t dreamed anything new about it. I’ve been bored at work a lot, and I’ve been day-dreaming about it and thinking about it, but I know those things aren’t real. It’s just a bit of harmless imagination.”

“We both know that imagination of yours is anything but harmless,” Grandma countered. Taking a seat across the table from Sierra, she added, “I’m worried about you, honey.”

When she spoke, Grandma looked so old and so worried, Sierra had to speak up and reassure the old woman. “I’ll forget about the dragon,” she announced. “Look, if I get bored and need to daydream, I’ll think about boys or school or something, but definitely not dragons.”

In all actuality, Sierra didn’t care about boys or school, or much of anything else. When she’d been young, she’d thought that had been a side-effect of her encounter, as if she’d somehow evolved beyond the need for dating or a social life or good grades or money. When she’d grown older and still hadn’t cared, Sierra had figured it was a symptom of her mental disorders or the drug addiction, that she was unable to care about those things everyone else clearly thought were important.

Sierra knew one thing that was very important to her, however, and that was Grandma’s health, happiness, and well-being. Seeing that the elderly woman was still concerned despite her assurances, Sierra decided upon a very symbolic gesture.

Taking the dragon drawing from Grandma’s hands, Sierra made a quick move and ripped the paper in half. “See?” she asked, handing the pieces back to Grandma. “It’s nothing.”

The next day, however, when the monotony began to beat her again, Sierra realized that her ability to escape into her imagination was very important again. Fighting a headache and tears and the need to scream all at once, Sierra skipped her packed tuna sandwich during lunch, and found herself up on a rooftop with a cigarette in hand.

Sierra didn’t actually smoke, and hadn’t since high school, and even then it had been weed, not cigarettes. She’d kept the milder drug with her after she’d turned eighteen, however, thinking she could wean herself off the harder drugs and onto the cheaper tobacco if she tried hard enough. Of course, she’d been unsuccessful, but she’d always kept the cigarettes with her as a reminder of and an homage to those unsuccessful days.

Thus, she stood on the chilly roof, huddled into her jacket while the wind whipped her hair around. The wind hadn’t been nearly so strong on the street, but something about being twenty stories up seemed to always make the weather worse than it was below. Sierra had never understood why that was.

The wind was strong enough that Sierra struggled to get her cigarette lit. Once the tiny stick had a burning red tip, she inhaled deeply, remembering once more how nice a rush felt when stimulants released into her bloodstream. When she exhaled, Sierra noted that she was almost a dragon herself, blowing her small puff of smoke into the wind.

No, she wasn’t a dragon. That sort of thinking only led to madness.

Then again, what was so bad about madness? Sierra had managed to get herself into a lot of trouble these past few years, but she’d also never been so happy as when she’d really, genuinely believed the dragon existed. So, maybe she should stop fighting what fate apparently intended for her, and just descend into the insanity that seemed to wait at the edge of every thought.

She threw her cigarette to the ground and crushed it out with her shoe. Next, Sierra tried as hard as she could to pretend she was only four years old, and tried to guess what she would do. Obviously, she’d try to reach out to the dragon. She felt a bit odd speaking aloud, though, so instead, she tried to think very hard of her words.

“Hey, you dragon,” she thought. “It’s me, Sierra. It’s been a long time since we talked, but I helped you a long time ago, and back then, you promised you’d come back. Well, here I am, waiting.”

The speech broke off with a chuckle. She felt ridiculous thinking those thoughts, and couldn’t imagine how she’d feel had she actually said them aloud. Feeling a strange need to redeem herself from the momentary flight of fantasy, she breathed, “At least it was cathartic.”

Shivering as she turned around to head back downstairs, Sierra froze when the breeze brought her a name floating back, just as it had all those years ago. “Sierra.”

For a moment, panic threatened to overwhelm her, and she began to hyperventilate. Even when she’d known she was crazy, Sierra had never really actually been crazy. Sure, she’d believed a ridiculous fantasy, but the fantasy was more a memory than anything else. Besides that one strange day, she’d never heard voices or seeing visions, but here one was, saying her name.

Forcing herself to be rational, Sierra reached for a better answer, scanning the rooftop to see if anyone hid on it, playing a trick on her. “Hello?” she called. “Is anyone there?”

“It’s me,” the dragon answered in her mind. “I have returned to the shores of endless morning, and after healing and rest, I am back to bring you to my home. I’m coming for you, Sierra.”

She wanted to scream, but nobody would hear, and little would serve to convince anyone of her insanity so much as hysterics in response to a voice no one else could hear. Forcing herself to be rational in the sight of the terror and to banish it, Sierra spoke aloud. “You’re not real,” she said.

“You don’t believe that,” the dragon responded. “The very fact that you can hear me- and that you answer me – reveals that you still believe. Your faith has healed me for many seasons, Sierra, and now you will be rewarded with an invitation to spend the rest of your life in a world of joy.”

With these words, the blue behemoth descended from the sky, alighting on the roof with delicacy Sierra had never seen before in a creature so large.

The dragon looked just as she always had, with her polished gleaming scales and her horrible sharp claws, and even the feathered wings that defied nature when they lifted the monster into the air. Even as she thought this, though, Sierra realized the dragon wasn’t a monster at all.

All of Sierra’s pain, the mockery, the diagnoses, the self-torture to prevent further hallucinations, had all been because of the dragon, but they were not the dragon’s fault. Sierra had been lucky enough to touch magic when she’d been four, and unlucky enough to be left behind in a world that was unable to accept that fantasy and imagination were just as real as anything else. The dragon wasn’t to blame; the world was.

She also in that moment realized that time passed differently for the dragon, and that while she had grown up in pain and fear, only a few short months had passed for the creature, during which it had healed and gathered its strength, thinking only to return to her.

Even as Sierra realized this, the dragon did as well. “I’m sorry,” she sighed into Sierra’s mind. “I came as soon as I could.”

“I know,” Sierra reapplied. “It’s all right. I understand, and now that you’re here, everything is good again.”

The dragon lowered a wing, forming an impromptu ramp up onto her back, and urged, “Come with me. We’ll go away to my world together.”

Accepting the invitation, Sierra climbed up onto the dragon’s wings, careful not to cut herself on the sharp spikes that ran down her back to the tip of her tail. At the dragon’s urging, Sierra clung to the creature’s neck so that she wouldn’t slip off during their flight, then she held her breath in anticipation.

As soon as the dragon began to flap her powerful wings and take off, the door to the roof swung open, and Sierra’s boss emerged, apparently looking for her. His jaw dropped as Sierra and the dragon together rocketed into the sky, escaping the drudgery and chill of the life below.

Soon, the city itself had disappeared from sight as the pair soared higher and higher. No longer cold or frightened, Sierra laughed aloud as they soared away from everything below, and toward freedom.