The Blast Dragon

The first rays of sunlight pierced Vera Pike’s studio window. She had been up for a while, packing paper, powder, and salt into a gigantic paper cylinder. The jars of pale salts and fine white grains that lined her shelves whispered dull chemistry, but Vera knew how to paint the sky with them, how to hurl swaths of incandescent color through the dark. The Blast Dragon was her most ambitious work yet. She hoped it would dance across the sky over Lake Brandt and dazzle anyone with eyes to see; that is, if anyone actually looked up anymore. Sweat dripped from her nose and into her coffee mug.

Cole Waverly wanted to punch whoever set the motel alarm clock to go off at 7 a.m. The Rainbow Motel off of U.S. 29 didn’t scream luxury lodging, but even in the scruffiest places, there are some things you just don’t do. Cole smacked the noise box so hard that it fell to the carpet. Cole closed his eyes and tried to go back to sleep, but his heart was racing, first from the shock of being buzzed awake, then from everything he was running from—the IRS, civil contempt for non-support, and his mother. Daylight darted through the cheap motel curtains, but Cole only saw the latest garnishment papers and court filings mocking him from the wastebasket. His mother’s earnest, gravelly voice echoed in his mind too, short on grace and hypercritical.

Clara Bell’s house was quiet. Sunshine reflected off of the new valedictorian plaque on her bookshelf. The light stung her eyes and woke her. She squinted and saw temporary splotches in her vision. As her sight returned to normal, she read the spines of the worn textbooks next to her award: Campbell Biology, Calculus: Early Transcendentals, and The American Pageant. She glanced at her phone. It was 8 a.m. She tiptoed to the kitchen and saw a plate with half-eaten toast and a bowl that contained oatmeal on the table. Looking out into the empty driveway, she saw that her parents had left for church. You’re an adult now, Clara Bell. Her mother said that a lot nowadays. Clara looked over her shoulder, snuck to her father’s liquor cabinet, and opened the door holding her breath. She pulled down a fifth of Jack Daniel’s, uncapped it, and took a swig.

The Lake Brandt Marina didn’t open until 11 a.m. on Sundays. That gave Chip Day two hours to recover from what seemed like a charming idea at the time. Unlike the countless times he woke up hung over or sunburned or hung over with a sunburn, this morning’s injury marked a new low in a lifetime of stupidity. He had a sunburn on the roof of his mouth. He could talk, but it felt like his tongue was stabbing his soft palate with a hot poker. It hurt when his mouth was closed, so he just kind of sat there looking agape, gin-blossomed, and burned out. In the bathroom mirror, what he saw was worse. And yet, when he looked past the splotches and redness, and into the whites of his eyes, he remembered when he was a child and wanted to join the Merchant Marines.

Lily Bloom sat on her carpet square in the church basement. An hour of Sunday school felt like an eternity, but that seemed to be what the lady up front was talking about. “Jesus loves you,” the lady said, pointing to a cartoon picture of a man in a white robe with a red sash and a well-kept beard and long flowing hair like that guy on that show that mom likes. “Jesus is the son of God,” she said, but what Lily heard was “Jesus is the sun of God,” and all she could do was think about going to the pool later that day with her mom and her dad and her brother but the dog will have to stay home. She would splash in the water while the sun bathed her in light and loved her unconditionally. She hoped that guy with the whistle and the white nose wouldn’t scold her for running to the diving board.

By 11 a.m., Jonah Frye could feel the sweat from his armpits run down his emaciated ribs. He gagged on his own stench, which meant it would be much worse for any passerby. The shelter kicked him out again for proselytizing. He walked down Elm Street, which was empty on Sunday because no one worked on Sunday. The sun shone bright. He turned down an alley, the one between the old Lincoln Financial building and the new parking deck. He pulled out a giant, felt-tipped permanent marker and wrote on the freshly painted wall: I WATCH HOW FOOLISHLY MAN GUARDS HIS NOTHING, THEREBY KEEPING US OUT. TRULY, GOD IS HATED HERE.

Sarah Shore didn’t expect to be working at the Lake Brandt Snack Shack so late in life. Some days, the noon to six Sunday shift was six hours too long, but there she was. Today, the plastic squeeze ketchup bottle had leaked on her NC State shirt as she filled it. She only noticed the red stain on her red shirt when she stepped into the sunshine, though. In the lulls of the shift, which was looking like it would be the whole shift, she thought of the nights on Hillsborough Street just after turning 21, doing ice shots and singing Dobie Gray’s “Drift Away” on karaoke. She turned on the battery-powered radio, hoping to pass the time with the Best Rock of the 70s, 80s, 90s, and Today, when she heard an ad for UNICEF. In her pocket, she felt enough cash for a few beers on the way home.

The cars zoomed past Clark Sanderson as he changed the tire on his Toyota Camry. D.C. traffic was bad, but changing a tire on 840 wasn’t how he expected his mountain vacation to begin. Clark worked in IT, which was essentially telling whoever was panicking on the other end of the phone to turn their computer off and on and wait. He knew the jack would hold, in an academic sense, but the 1 p.m. sun baked a sense of skepticism in the real-world application of a metal crank holding its weight. An 18-wheeler swooshed past and his Camry shuddered. Clark looked up. The sun caught his eyes and the flash stung. He laughed at the thin spare tire and then felt a sense of dread when he thought of how inadequate it would be on the mountain roads. The highway billboard in the distance flashed LAKE BRANDT FIREWORKS TONIGHT.

The deer had eaten the Brandywines but not the Better Boys and Iris Green sighed. In her fifty years of summer gardening, the chicken wire never seemed to stop those dastardly hoofed vandals. Iris touched the soil and smiled at its relative moisture, given the scorching 2 p.m. sun. She pulled the beginning of a weed from the Cherokee Purples and wondered how the gospels might have been different if Jesus had ever eaten a tomato. The word made flesh but with taut skin, a seed-jelly heart, and a green star-calyx on top. Iris took a long breath in and then a long breath out as the universe expanded, unnoticed, in all directions.

By 3 p.m., the Sunday afternoon shift at the Woolworth really began to drag. Well, it used to be a Woolworth but now it was the International Civil Rights Museum. Ruthie Marsh worked at the bookstore. Over the last hour, in her head, she defended her decision to move No Right to an Honest Living by Jacqueline Jones next to Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns. She wondered if the subtle implication expressed by that particular pairing would be lost on the next tourist that walked through the door. As the afternoon sun illuminated the gift shop, a woman who parked her Lexus in the loading zone entered. She removed her oversized Chloés, and asked Ruthie for directions to the Junior League.

Luke Banner was the spitting image of Jeff Spicoli, right down to the uncombed long dirty blond hair and zinc oxide on his nose. He sat on his lifeguard perch at the Green Valley pool and twirled his whistle, not out of boredom, but just because it was what lifeguards did. Little Lily Bloom dashed across the pool deck. Luke tooted his whistle in two short bursts, which Lily knew meant NO RUNNING. She slowed to an expectant walk and shielded her eyes from the sun. Lily nearly collided with a young woman in jeans and a t-shirt who was stumbling and getting a little too close to the water. Luke blasted his whistle, which meant DON’T DO THAT. Still, she went head over heels into the deep end and sank to the bottom. Luke dove off of the lifeguard stand and into the water. He pulled her out, took her pulse, but noticed she wasn’t breathing. He plugged her nose and made three forced breaths into her lungs. She coughed a half-lung full of water up and out. “Clara?” Luke said. Clara peered into Luke’s startled eyes and her heart raced even faster.

By 5 p.m., Simon Crow had a handle on how the summer rain would break and whether the darker clouds would cause thunder. Barometers, hygrometers, and nephoscopes were good for gathering data, but predicting weather had much more to do with feel than numbers. Still, he liked watching his cup anemometer spin, which helped inform his instincts. Vera Pike sat in her pickup truck idling in the gravel lot by Lake Brandt Snack Shack. As Simon turned contemplative and searched his deepest self, he didn’t notice that Sarah Shore had left for the day. Simon made one last calculation and considered the sun’s glare. He gave Vera the thumbs up from across the gravel lot but wondered if he left the stove on at home. Vera exited her truck, walked to the bed, and untied the tarp under which the Blast Dragon slept.

No matter how many times Penny Birch welcomed the week’s group of kids at Camp Brandt, she always got nervous just before going out to make the big welcome to camp speech. It was always something. Sometimes the microphone wasn’t on. Sometimes she just forgot to unmute the wireless mic. Sometimes the mic was working fine and she just ended up shouting. Sometimes there were only ten or so kids, which made the grandeur of her script seem a bit silly. The shenanigans she heard through the door told her that it was a decent crowd this week. But what if we have another broken bone this week? What if diarrhea breaks out again? How am I going to tell my parents? Penny saw that there were only two hours or so of daylight left and felt, perhaps, that not everything was hers to manage.

Walter Cane enjoyed a glass of iced tea as he sat on his front porch, which overlooked the lake and the main access road to the marina. He saw more than you’d think from his perch. The Sunday fireworks were always nice. Sometimes cars rambled up the road to the boat slips. The walking trail by the road was close enough to his porch that he often invited walkers to come sit with him for a while. Sometimes he just watched them walk by. Just a few minutes ago, he saw Ruthie Marsh and a new girlfriend of hers, who had sunglasses that were much too big for her face, pass by. Walter liked when Ruthie stopped to talk, but today she didn’t even wave. A Toyota Camry with a skinny spare tire had cruised down the road, its driver looking like he was lost. He half wondered if Iris was going to bring him tomatoes when Cole Waverly approached and told Walter he was new in town.

As the last moments of civil twilight ended, at precisely 8:43 p.m., Vera lit the fuse on the first round of fireworks. They zing, zing, zinged into the sky. Penny Birch smiled and pointed upward as all fifty of her campers sat in awe of the first flashes. Simon washed dishes in his kitchen a few miles away but heard the first pops. Vera lit the second round, which was even more spectacular, and it lit up the Lake Brandt sky. From downtown, Jonah Frye stood, looking down the alley, and squinted at lights on the horizon. “Elijah!” he shouted. Nearby, Chip Day pressed SUBMIT on his online Merchant Marines application. And finally, Vera lit the fuse on her pièce de résistance. The Blast Dragon rocketed into the sky and began its impossible dance back and forth across the water. As Sarah Shore left Smitty’s Watering Hole, she remembered the UNICEF ad. Luke and Clara had been making out in the woods but stopped when the dragon flew overhead. Iris Green took a bite of an evening BLT at her kitchen table as the dragon bloomed beyond the window. Lily Bloom watched flashes from the lake sky cascade across her ceiling as she drifted off to sleep. She knew the sun had gone down, but the sun of God continued to shine.