At 4:48 on Monday, March 12, Theodosia touched the stove for the fifteenth time.
Fifteenth time in Carly’s tenure. How many times before that she couldn’t guess. Hundreds . Or maybe the previous custodians were paragons whose attention never strayed even for a millisecond and who expertly dove in to intercept any wayward small hands.
Carly had been watching, mostly, but she had pasta and sauce and vegetables on the stove because she was a grown human woman who couldn’t subsist on the drakelings’ incessant diet of chicken nuggets and sloppy joes, and there were the seeds to start and laundry to get out of the dryer, and she was just dumping the warm clothes into a hamper when she heard the squeal.
The clean laundry dropped onto the grimy floor. (Mop. She needed to do that too.) There was Theodosia, sitting on the kitchen floor next to the stool they’d pushed over to climb on, tears and snot running down their knobby face.
“’Dosia!” Carly groaned. “How many times do I…”
Theodosia sniffled.
“I look away for one second…”
Theodosia bawled.
And then Alexis was in the doorway, Alexis sweeping in to gather up Theodosia in her arms and click her tongue over the angry red swirl on their palm, burned in over layer and layer of spiral scars.
“Oh, you poor thing, here.” She hefted Theodosia’s thirty-pound bulk and ran her hand under the faucet as if it was the first time this had ever happened.
Over the stubby horns that crowned Theodosia’s head, Alexis shot Carly a reproachful look.
“It was five seconds! That little…” Carly said under her breath, then stopped herself, because you always had the sense that the drakelings might pick up what you were saying, though they’d never in all those years shown the least interest in any conversation that didn’t involve the words “treat” or “outside.”
“It’s not their fault. They’re a baby,” said Alexis.
“A six-hundred-year-old baby,” Carly muttered, and grabbed the pasta pot, which was boiling over.
Not for the first time, Carly wished for the days of the draconic monks, when a dozen robe-clad monastics scurried around after every drakeling, noting down their every meaningless grunt and gesture (this was centuries before the sign language program) and popping bits of roast partridge into their mouths at the least sign of peckishness. (No wonder they were so spoiled.) But though the abbey still stood, as cold and austere as ever under its glass ceilings, the monks had long been disbanded. There was only Carly and Alexis.
Two women for six drakelings was a lot!
It wasn’t just Theodosia, either. Philonella was hellbent on drowning themself in the bath. Ambrosius had cracked two of their spiny teeth stuffing everything they could reach into their mouth. Eusebius could find a mud puddle anywhere on the grounds in a matter of seconds. Konstantin liked breaking things. And Sophronia, well, they were never naughty, but they followed Carly around and tugged on her pant leg and signed “snack” until she gave them something, which they would promptly drop on the floor and forget about.
At least none of them had died on her watch. Her predecessors bore full responsibility for that particular failure. Granted, the Boer Wars were a pretty good excuse, but still. There were two hundred of them.
It was hard to imagine how the draconic monks had looked into their glossy black eyes and seen eternity.
The medieval illuminations were one sort of lie. The modern picture books, another. Both showed the drakes, lithe and undulating in the illuminations, muscular and dignified in the picture books, their curved swan-necks arching gracefully, their serpentine tails coiled around the great speckled eggs, like alpha wolves amid a litter of puppies, serene and wise and very, very fictional.
The latter was a point of contention between her and Alexis, but she stuck to her guns. She’d done her dissertation on the origins of the drake mythos, back when her job involved a lot more archival work and a lot less wiping scaly asses. She’d also met and fell in love with an up-and-coming expert in the near-extinct field of practical dragonology, at a time when “Yes, of course if a custodian position opens up, we’ll apply for it” had felt like a safely hypothetical promise to make.
And so she knew that every thread of the story had a known, human-caused, and generally early modern origin, all except for that solemn invocation: Care for the drakelings, for we shall return.
In her dissertation, Carly had theorized that this was nothing but the parable of the tenants as filtered through one of the many strains of esoteric Christian mysticism. Alexis, though—and she had a mind like a diamond—just saw things differently.
We have eyewitness accounts, she would say.
We have eyewitness accounts saying that weasels give birth through their ears, Carly would reply.
The relics, Alexis would say. Scales, whiskers. You’ve touched them.
We also have the head of John the Baptist, Carly would shoot back.
They’re babies, Alexis would say next. Helpless unless we care for them.
So are giant pandas, Carly would counter.
They have wings but they can’t fly.
Flightless birds.
They don’t reproduce.
We’ve never seen them reproduce. That’s not the same thing. What do we know of their wild behavior when they haven’t been there for hundreds of years?
Once they would have argued in circles for hours, each unable to grasp how such a smart woman could believe something so silly. But these days, everything that could be said had been said and a look or a tilt of the head was enough to recap the whole thing.
In the end, there was no answer, no proof that the ridged keratin discs were drake scales but no positive alternate identity either, no way to test the veracity of those 14th-century accounts, just theories and more theories.
And the drakelings, with their blunt cute-ugly faces, their flimsy vestigial wings, their squirmy short tails that they didn’t quite seem able to control. Anyone who looked at them saw babies, but that was only the warm confusion of mammalian hormones, that flood of nurturing extinct that made us want to hug bears and paint faces onto funny-shaped rocks. And that was how you ended up here, parenting six toddlers who were never, ever going to grow up.
Konstantin, Sophronia, Eusebius, Theodosia, Philonella, Ambrosius. Ancient names, timeless names, male or female as the monks had seen fit. No amount of poking, prodding, X-rays, ultrasounds, or blood tests had ever revealed anything that resembled a gonad or a sex chromosome in a drakeling, but the monks had seen sexes in the drakes (the power and solemnity of the male, they wrote, and the grace and elegance of the female), and the drakelings must follow. So they’d dubbed the larger, stockier drakelings with male monikers, and the smaller, more slender drakelings with female ones, except for Philonella, who was built like dump truck, but her scales were a bit lighter, more of a tawny taupe than an umber, and light meant female, apparently. The convention now was to refer to all the drakelings as “them,” but the names remained, because whatever else they couldn’t learn, the did know their names.
Theodosia’s accident was only the beginning of a dreadful week. On Tuesday, Philonella got diarrhea. Wednesday, Carly spent the whole day on hold for a grant opportunity, only to be greeted with a cursory “Sorry, we’ve decided to pursue other candidates.” Thursday, Alexis spent four hours on a signing session with Konstantin that ended with them biting her hand and Carly yelling at them and them hiding under their crib. And Friday, the sewer line in the cellar sprung a leak (if only they’d gotten that grant, they could keep this place fixed up, dammit), and their emergency home plumbing experiment ended with half a tube of caulk in Ambrosius’ mouth and the rest tracked all over the floor. The only bright spot was that, on Saturday morning, Carly’s seedlings came up.
“Do you ever think about how, for other people, Saturday is the weekend?” Carly said wistfully as she wrangled Eusebius towards the sink to wash his hands for dinner.
“Not parents,” Alexis laughed. “Lots of people do a nine-to-five and then come home and handle all this.”
“Not for six at once!” said Carly.
But for once it wasn’t so convincing, because the drakelings were all lined up at the table, eating their fish fingers without disaster. Even Eusebius.
Carly spent a blissfully indulgent hour in the garden interring her sprouts into the soft, damp loam and thinking about how, once, she had loved caring for tiny, helpless things.
There was something she had never told Alexis in all their years together. How she hadn’t been sure about the drakes when they’d first been together. Oh, she was sure, but you know, science-sure. Hypothesis-open-to-new-evidence sure. But the drakelings had cemented her mind. Because they were dumb as a box of scales. Because the drakes were avatars of cosmic wisdom but Konstantin couldn’t sign “I need to go potty” after twenty years of lessons. They were just animals. Animals no smarter than a box turtle.
While Alexis cleaned the drakelings up after dinner (“without disaster” very much did not mean “without mess”), Carly did their finances, something that always required a little bracing. Somehow this month was worse than usual. Their next grocery run was going to wipe them out unless another grant came through. She set her teeth and typed out an email to the committee, explaining once again how much meat six thirty-pound warm-blooded reptiles could consume and how she was not a miracle worker.
She cringed as she hit Send. Begging had not been on the skills list when she applied for this job. But then, it had left out a lot of things. Like how the committee had spent down the entire endowment. Like how the lavish enrichment programs that had been so in vogue in the 70s had been marked as failures and discontinued one by one: the field trips, the behavioral flight therapy, the sign language training. She and Alexis had made an attempt to resurrect that last one on their own, but as neither of them knew sign language themselves, the only reason she wasn’t concerned that they were doing more harm than good was because the drakelings had never picked up on a damn thing they had tried to teach.
Fresh vegetables, she told herself. Carrots and cucumbers, tomatoes fresh from the vine. Just four months away.
She shut down the computer and decided to allow herself one more peek at the sprouts before she took over for Alexis.
Carnage.
Every bed was overturned. Dirt flung out in great heaps onto the paths. Her poor little seedlings, thin fragile threads of green and white, strewn here and there, already wilting in the sun. And in the middle of it all, Konstantin, fat and happy and covered in mud, grinning up at her, a basil seedling still plastered to their dirt-smeared muzzle.
“Konstantin!” she screamed. “Konstantin, what did you do?” And she grabbed him by the arm and shook him like a rag doll. “Konstantin, you horrid little brat! They were living things! They were alive and now they’re dead and it’s all because of you!”
Alexis came rushing out of the house and, of course, she immediately ran to Konstantin, not Carly. Konstantin was looking up at her in confusion, unable to comprehend why he was being scolded.
“I’m going to kill them,” said Carly. “I’m going to literally, non-hyperbolically kill these little shits.”
“Carly, they can hear you,” Alexis protested, clinging Konstantin against her chest and covering his ear holes.
“They don’t understand shit! They don’t know anything except how to destroy stuff. They’re never going to learn! How did I let you talk me into this?”
“You told me it was what you wanted! You said you wanted it more than anything!”
“Because you wanted it! I told you what you wanted to hear!”
“So you lied to me? You’ve been lying to me this whole time?”
A tug at the hem of Carly’s pants, first hesitant, then insistent. She looked down. Konstantin. They were doing something with their hands. Raising their left hand and pressing it down onto their right palm. It took Carly a moment to figure out what they were doing because they had it backwards. Then she gasped.
“Stop!” she said. “Alexis, they’re signing ‘stop’!”
And then Alexis’ eyes were popping out of her head. “They know we’re fighting!”
“They know we’re fighting, and they’re telling us to stop!” Carly picked up the drakeling and twirled him over her head. Her voice rose into a little-girl squeal. “Konstantin, holy shit!”
“Language!” Alexis laughed in the same tone.
Konstantin giggled and wriggled in her gasp, basking in the attention he had no idea how he’d earned.
“I can do a paper on this,” said Carly. “Situational awareness! Emotional intelligence!”
“Forget papers,” said Alexis. “They learned something! They can learn!”
But it would all have to wait for tomorrow, because it was getting dark and the drakelings needed to be put to bed. Konstantin was all wound up. It took three bedtime stories before he eventually settled.
That night Philonella got out of her crib and crawled into bed with Carly and Alexis, which wasn’t nearly as cozy as it sounded, because Philonella didn’t have a single soft spot on her and her back ridge was digging into Carly’s leg, but Carly didn’t even think of kicking her out. She stroked Philonella’s scales and gazed out the abbey’s clear glass ceiling at the stars, thinking about the drakes that were coming back tomorrow or in a hundred years or never or else weren’t out there at all.
Gwen C. Katz is an author, artist, and game designer currently working to rebuild her life after losing everything in the Eaton Fire in Altadena, California. Her upcoming detective game “Deductopia” is about sorting out chaos in a cozy small-town setting. It comes out on Steam in November.
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