‘Western Ohio’ by Daniel William Lawrence

The first dragon to arrive in Western Ohio was mostly unexpected. It may have surfaced from the morasses of the Kildeer Plains, or simply walked out of a storage unit in Rushsylvania.

Owen had just lost his job at the Western Ohio Tool Company, where he was making fifteen dollars an hour. He actually quit, but he told John Carpenter, and Sandy, and everyone else, that he lost his job. He and Sandy parted ways yesterday after he caught her spitting a long, thick, gnarly loogie into his glass of water on the bedside nightstand, all illuminated by the sterile wash of a hundred-watt light bulb from a heavy silver lamp that would have belonged better in a Best Western hotel suite than a Midwesterner couple’s bedroom.

Sandy certainly had other prospects. A registered nurse cranking out seventy thousand dollars a year in grisly compassion is a force of nature not lightly to be reckoned with. She had already paid off the sixty-two thousand dollar three bedroom, two bathroom, half basement home on Williams Avenue four years ago, and was planning an early retirement in her forties filled with floating down rivers in a big black tube and drinking hot brandy with coffee from her thermos in a string of endless mornings.

Owen, on the other hand, had a couple of twenty dollar bills in his wallet and a red Jeep Cherokee 2003, diagnosed with the catastrophic rust damage characteristic of the Miami River Valley. To the uninitiated, the prevalence of the great name Miami throughout Ohio always seems like wishful thinking, stirring up daydreams of hot, red sun and Floridian adventure. But Owen remembered, some days, a grade school lesson about the Myaamiaki and a long trail of death.

The red Jeep Cherokee sped backward out of the driveway on Williams Avenue the same day the dragon arrived in Greenville.        

Owen turned the cracked, plastic black knob on the Cherokee radio, turning it on. Then he pushed in the button and let it scan through the stations as he scanned through the last few days in his mind. He was most bothered, truth be told, by the spit in the glass.

‘What was that all about, anyhow? It’s just not civilised. Think of the calculation it must have taken. She must have been watching me for months to plan that.’ He started to himself, working himself up a little, in just the sort of way that feels good to work one’s self up.

‘Or maybe she’s been doing it this whole time. How long has she been spitting in that damn glass? How many years has that been going on? How long have I been drinking her spit?’ He wondered. ‘There’s always someone trying to spit in your glass these days. I’ll spit you a new one. I’ll spit in the biggest glass you’ve ever seen, just you watch. They’ll see me spit it up! They’ll know when it’s spitting time!’

And he wasn’t entirely wrong. Sandy had been watching his nightly routine for several weeks, starting midway through March, which is usually when these sorts of things start to happen. March is a fine time for a foul idea to bubble up past the realm of imagination and reify itself as warm, thick spit in a cool glass of water. But how many times? Once, ten, a hundred? 

She noticed him fill up the big, clear, crystal bottomed glass with tap water every night. He would place it on the nightstand after his shower, then go back to the bathroom, down the hall, to brush his teeth. She hated that. Why did he come to drop the glass off on the nightstand, and then go back to the bathroom? Why didn’t he just brush his teeth immediately after the shower, fill up the glass of water, and then come to the bedroom? What a big sack of shit, she always thought. What a dumb shit, only a demonstrable and unequivocal shitstain would do something so stupid with a glass of water.

That’s what Sandy thought, and she wasn’t entirely wrong. Owen was a dumb shit, and he should have thought more about the glass of water.

He was so caught up in his scanning backward through the last few days, weeks, years, that he almost missed the unusual, almost cryptically subdued radio report by Ohio Public Radio broadcaster Michael Hallworth:

‘Aurelius. A name more commonly reserved for the college classics classroom or history buff dinner party banter, Marcus Aurelius was the Stoic, philosopher-emperor of Ancient Rome in the late second Century Common Era. But Aurelius the Irascible—the first dragon to appear in Western Ohio on record—is the name that’s catching on for the newfound fiery fury of the Valley. Keep an eye in the sky and an ear to the ground, folks. They say his screech can literally pop an eardrum. In sports, Desmond Armstrong of the Platteville Big Bucks brought the team to victory over the Copper Lake Cougars in a neck-and-neck bout, scoring the final seven points of the match in quick succession last night at Hunt’s Arena. Jane Dawson on the top of the list for…’

He changed the station to Big Bear 97.1, Classic Rock All Day, All Night, All the Time. Jim Croce’s ‘Bad Bad Leroy Brown’ was one of the more tolerable songs a person might hear on 97.1: ‘Baddest man in the whole damn town.’ He started tapping his fingers on the steering wheel as good, bright sun bathed the open road and blue skies stretched up and onward.

He wasn’t too angry anymore. Funny how it always boils over like that. Still, he hadn’t really been paying attention.

‘Dragon? Must be one of those monitor lizards or something. Where was that new zoo they just built? Was that Toledo?’

And for the remainder of the day, Owen didn’t think anything else about dragons. He did not remember the name Aurelius, for that name had no special meaning for Owen yet in his life, as he had not read the Meditations.

But not being a man of no learning or taste, he did happen to have a Stan Rogers cassette that started with ‘Northwest Passage,’ a gift from his brother Steve, who he was bound to see for a place to stay while things cooled off with Sandy. He popped in the cassette as Jim Croce died down.      ‘Remember what they did to the Myaamiaki?’ He muttered to himself as he hit the interstate, eastbound, and fast.

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By the time he arrived at Steve’s house, the oppressive weight of the changes of the universe were already chewing a sharp-toothed jagged hole in Owen’s chest and stomach. Some of that was lifted after he knocked at the door and Steve yelled ‘Come in, I’m in the kitchen!’

Steve was in his early thirties, too. Long-haired and bed-robed, hangover sunglasses on, he was making French toast and there was cloying sweet folk music playing from a yellow record player.

‘What is this, are you living in a Wes Anderson movie now?’ Owen looked around at the dusty rugs, half-dead plants, and crowded, sprawling bookshelves. The light coming in from the afternoon caught all the motes of dust in a sort of pretty, stupid way that made him think for a second of Carl Sagan and the infinite smallness of it all, made him uncomfortable, and he coughed. He coughed again, a little louder, and swatted around at the dust cloud in the sunbeam.

‘I’d wear a sharp, blue suit if I was in a film. No, I’m making French toast, get in here. I just got this Vashti Bunyan album, do you hear this? There’s a little bit of Shakespeare in the lyrics, the wind and the rain, hey ho. Feste’s song. Twelve nights and all that. Did you even read Shakespeare? Sit down, I haven’t seen you in half a year.’

‘Jesus, fine, I know. What’re you making? It smells good.’ Owen sat down at the kitchen table and shoved a pile of tape and mail and papers and bags and plastic garbage to the side. Something broken and useless fell on the floor and shot under the oven.

‘It’s French toast. Where’s Sandy?’ Steve swung around with his greasy, shining long hair, flinging French toast onto paper plates. ‘There’s syrup there.’

‘Yeah I see it, dumbass. Give me a couple more.’ Owen looked around. ‘Do you have any forks?’

‘No, they’re in the sink, use your hands like a man.’

‘Jesus, Steve, what kind of asshole doesn’t have clean forks? Are you some kind of animal? What’s all this elaborate dysfunctional fantasy for, anyway? You have money, get some goddamn forks. Or a sponge, for Christ’s sake.’

‘I’m the only animal, I’m the best kind of animal.’ Steve was pushing two hundred and fifty pounds and could hit six foot two on a good day with his boots on, but he was just wearing his slippers that afternoon. He was fast and massive and the table bounced as he dropped hard into his chair and drove his elbows into the table.

‘Fucking hell, Steve. It’s all an act, isn’t it?’

‘No, it’s French toast, and you like it.’

Steve stretched a big arm over to the countertop and snatched a carafe full of coffee and filled up two dirty cups already on the table. He handed one to Owen and took one for himself. They both took a nice sip and enjoyed it and breathed a little bit for a moment. It’s always good to take a deep breath for a moment when things are bad, or good, or neither.

‘What’s going on, anyway?’

‘Sandy left me.’ He let that sit for a moment in the air, just sort of hang there, like you might do if you’re deliberately adding some dramatic element to your oratory. Just give it a moment to suspend there in the air as it dies away. ‘And I lost my job.’

 ‘Well. Those are two bad things.’

‘Yes they are, Steve, thank you. Two very bad things. Do you have anything to drink?’

‘That’s all I do. Do you want some gin?’ Steve shot up like a hot, heavy bull. Nothing gets in the way of that. 

‘God, no. That’s so damn depressing. I don’t want to end up like some London orphan passed out in a storm drain covered in shit. Who drinks gin, anyway? Are you depressed, Steve? Jesus.’

‘Christ, have some rum, then.’ Steve poured out a recklessly calculated three fingers of rum into two crusty, glass Irish coffee mugs and topped them off with a flat warm budget cherry cola from a two-litre bottle by the stove.

Owen took a drink. Steve took a gulp.

‘Absolutely horrible. Sickening. Thank you.’ Owen felt the hot shiver up his whole back and he shook his head like a wet dog. It was big and powerful. He did smile in that moment after the first drink, and then took another.

You know, the first drink is the waving away you do to your hometown as the train pulls away from the station. A hearty waving of the hand, a wholesome fuck-all. It’s the saying goodbye forever to the dull strain of monotony that bears all its weight on the back, ten hundred days long. Hop on the ride, get on, get on the ride. It really says that to you. The first drink is the daydream of the bridge you might jump off later that day. Just the right taste of the thousand-foot waves of black water, smoke, and ancient chamomile. I can think of a monstrous black wave in space, a hundred million miles or more of heavy gas billowing toward you, so big it births a star, a hundred stars, and you rise up on that wave, every bit a part of it. It doesn’t swallow you up in the infinite void of death, but you just ride it, a big glass of rum in your hand and the whole day ahead of you. That’s the first drink.

‘It’s your favourite.’

‘It is, actually. You’re right.’

After a few drinks, Owen and Steve were out on the back deck and they saw the dragon, heading southerly and it had big wings and a big fat black body and they thought it looked a little too heavy in the middle to be flying that way, but there it went, just like that.

‘Isn’t that something?’ Owen said. ‘That’s really something. I’ve never seen a dragon before.’

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Daniel William Lawrence, PhD is Associate Professor of Writing at the University of Wisconsin – Superior, and author of Digital Writing: A Guide to Writing for Social Media and the Web (Broadview Press 2022)and Disinformed: The History of Humanity’s Search for Truth (Urano Publishing 2023). His work has appeared in Harlot, Rupkatha, Digital Ethos, and many other places.