The Dragon's Crest

Time is giving birth constantly. Scholars of mythology often speak of a mother of monsters. It is a trope that is quite literally as old as people are old. The mother is an individual, almost always a woman, who somehow births the evils that infect the world. Pandora was one. Tiamat was another. Yet, never do they mention Time as any such monster. Yes. Time, with the capital ‘T’. In fact, let us all enjoy a fun thought exercise together. Picture Time right now. What do you see? I’ll wait for you to get there. Don’t feel rushed. I’m frozen in this moment eternally by sheer terror.

 Before now, when I pictured Time, I saw an old man surrounded by clocks. God knows why. Perhaps he has a fetish for clocks? Now though, I see only the Dragon, the great serpent of Time. She is laid out against the skyline, her body a steel ribbon. It winds in loops which beckon and promise thrills. A calliope heralds her, accompanied by the laughter of sticky-fingered children. She dares the foolhardy and the brave to ride her. She has hidden herself in plain sight. “There’s no danger,” she says, ‘Only good moments to be had here!”

The smell of cotton candy and popcorn may fool everyone else. Not me though. I have met her before when my brothers dared me to ride her alone. Now she has trapped me again. Underhanded bitch. 

She has long ensorcelled my girlfriend Tina. Never have I enjoyed being thrown about against my will. The sensation of losing all control is not one that sends me into fits of ecstasy. The dread dilation of each second is not euphoria. Oh, Tina loves the Dragon though. In all its forms, she is its devout follower. She can’t wait to see the Dragon when it manifests as the shadow of the killer on screen, waiting just behind the shower curtain, knife in hand. She especially loves when the Dragon doesn’t show itself at all and instead draws out each second for the audience, seeding the very idea that it could be lurking anywhere for minutes at a time. The mind will eventually beg for the jump scare to happen so that horrible tension will finally resolve. 

The Dragon loves to gorge itself on the growing fear and Tina loves to ride it as it feeds. Tina would ride the Dragon everyday if she could. In immobile seconds like these, I wonder why I love Tina as much as I do. I didn’t before but dammit I do now, and just like the Dragon, I am strapped in. There is no way off. That clever girl has me. I am trapped in an existential nightmare of anticipation thanks to my own traitorous biology.

 Tina sits next to me and is having the time of her life. She doesn’t know the truth. She is squeezing my hand in excitement and it shoves my terror from my stomach deep into my bones. The climb to the top of the Dragon is the worst. In only the most posterior aspect of my mind do I begin to suspect that Tina and the Dragon are in league with each other.

She had made me take off my glasses a minute ago before we mounted this beast. She had been smiling when she had done it. She said I was handsome without them. They are sitting in her purse somewhere now. Where? Who knows? I can’t remember and it isn’t important. I have no doubt they are safer than me. 

 The monstrous mother in mythology is always a single event. She is a pinprick of light from which explodes the infinity of horrors in the universe. This seems so definite. It seems so sure. Here there were none, and now there are many. Simple. Quick. Like the Big Bang, but for nightmares. Completely unrealistic. Life is a paper-cut in slow motion. 

 It has always amazed me the sheer variety of the places in which revelation may strike. I would not have even begun to predict that a speck of pure clarity of this nature might seize upon my brain when I had agreed to come here with Tina. 

 As we reach the top of the Dragon’s back, I am forming the basis of my thesis. My revelation is almost entirely complete. I would propose that Time itself isn’t some old man in robes, sitting on a grandfather clock throne. I might propose that the Time is that horrid Tiamat and that she is sitting upon a swollen nest, brooding over each moment, waiting for it to hatch into the next and unleash new atrocities on an unsuspecting universe.

As I rise along her great steel frame, the Dragon is with me now. I’m no longer riding her. I’m her accomplice. She has made her dreadful labor my own. I can feel each second slide from me in torturous contraction.   

Now we crest the hill and the world is plain to see at my feet. Are those clouds to my left and right? Fog? Isn’t fog just ground-clouds? Or are clouds sky-fog? In this single instant all is calm and I gain a new perspective. I am now in the eye of the storm with a view ten thousand feet in the air. Everything is so insignificant here. I can barely hear the calliope now. The hot dog vendors below are silent. Does the Dragon hear them? I find myself wondering if the Dragon even knows that she is the reason that everyone has come here. Is this frozen spectacle before me a trick? Is this the one infant moment of calm before the Dragon decides to breed a new set of horrors, all with spindly legs and grasping mouth-parts? Or, dare I even consider, that the Dragon is not a mother of monsters at all?

I will never know the answer. I am on my flat back and Tina is shaking me. We are firmly on the ground now. I don’t know how I could have thought Tina and the Dragon were in league now. She’s tearing up and it isn’t from the laughter I hear. No, that is coming from the adolescent boy collecting tickets. In but a septuplet of moments whole universes can end and for a brief instant mine did. It seems my moment of perspective atop the crest of the coaster was not a shield against the unforgiving nature of physics. 

Tina is here now though and she is mine and she is not in league with the Dragon. My whole world is right again. My glasses are back on my face as I rise to my feet and she shoots nasty looks at the Dragon’s attendant while she gathers her things, me included. He has gone back to collecting tickets and does not notice. The Dragon takes no prisoners it seems and is hungry for more smiling victims judging from the line. I suppose they are like me, all slaves to their biology. I think I will ask Tina to marry me tonight.