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No Dragons In The Fireplace
by
John Logan
There is no mantle on my fireplace.I can’t put pictures, or even stockings up at Christmas. Yes, I do celebrate Christmas. I like to make jokes, saying it was a good thing that I had no mantle – nothing for Santa to whack his head on his way out of the fireplace.
Yes, I believe in Santa. I may be 35 years old, but I like to act and think like a child. Someday, I even hope to return to being a child. I so want to leave this adulthood I find myself within, certainly through no consent of my own.
Yes, I do believe I can be a real child again. Pop wouldn’t approve of this thinking, of course, but he’s been gone a good while now and I’ve learned over the years not to listen to his voice in my head.
Fireplaces should have mantles; they don’t look quite right without it, especially if you used to have one. Take my fireplace: it will never look right in my mind without the old mantle.
It was a big oak unibrow overtop the flames. The fireplace is the focal point of a good living room and without it, the fireplace is just a big gaping maw spewing flames like a dragon.
No… I don’t believe in dragons, but I did when I was a kid. I was fascinated by them, loved them, and thought the world was just full of them, only they always hid too well, thought too quick. They were all around us, covering themselves in the everyday. Baby dragons hid atop burning candles, matches, and lanterns. Older dragons took residence in grills, bonfires, and… fireplaces.
The really big, nasty dragons, the ones that swallowed whole kingdoms back in the day… they just crammed themselves into a mountain and every bunch of years or so they fart and the mountain blows its top. You’d have called them volcanoes, at the time I just called them Dragon Farts.
I stopped believing in dragons when dad took the mantle down, all drunk and angry and he burned it in the fireplace. He had it going good and hot and he grabbed me by the back of my hair, back when I had hair, and held me very close to the fire, so close I remember smelling my eyebrows smoking. He told me there were no dragons.
But I looked hard, strained my eyes, pulled away from my father and looked closer; searching, catching every detail and trying to make them fit into a real, live dragon. I wanted to believe so much I would have gladly offered my body to the dragon as a tasty tidbit if only he would make himself visible to me and my unbelieving father. Which made me wonder, at the time, could a dragon ever eat anything raw?
But I never came up with an answer because it didn’t matter: I never saw a dragon, because it wasn’t there, and it turned out to be the last thing I ever saw.
But so I can’t see, so what? I don’t need to see, I have only to believe, and right now, I believe in Santa Claus because there are no dragons in the fireplaces to eat him up… even if he would make a big dinner for a hungry dragon.
So I sit here by my relic of a monster and wait for Santa to come and take me to the cool, crisp North Pole where there are no fires or fathers. Only there can he turn me into an elf and I would live forever as the child I know I still am.
© Logan,2010