The Child Dragon

Ten. They have made a cake for the tenth time in what they believe is my entire life. I have watched ten thousand candles on ten thousand altars in languages nobody in this room has heard of. The balloon says TEN in letters the color of a wound that hasn't decided what it's doing yet. They are so certain about the number. I find this privately hilarious. Aunt Carol is crying. She does this. Something about how fast it goes. Carol: I watched Rome go fast. I watched the glaciers decide to leave. I watched every species that didn't make it to whatever comes next. Fast is a thing I know something about, Carol. They are singing now. All of them. Off-key. Unselfconscious. Leaning in over the cake over the candles over me — their faces in the warm light doing the thing faces do when they mean it. My mother's hand finds my shoulder. Stays there. I have been temperature and terror and the reason cities posted guards. I have been the last thing and the first thing and the thing the stories tried to make smaller by giving me a name. I know what I am. I know what this is — a small kitchen, a grocery store cake, people who will not live very long singing slightly wrong in my direction. I know all of this. I go to blow out the candles. My breath — that old, that deep, that capable — goes gentle. Every flame goes out clean. They cheer. Something moves in my chest that is not fire and is not nothing and does not have a name in any language I have ever learned and I have learned all of them. Make a wish, someone says. I already have everything I came here with. I did not expect to want something new. But I do.