A dragon! A dragon! I swear I saw a dragon!

[In this excerpt from a recently shelved novel-in-progress, the narrator, who recently lost pretty much his entire family in a car accident and who has trouble telling reality from fantasy, is cowering in the back of a bodega, convinced that his nightmarish pursuers, the Gogans, are also in the store and are creeping down the aisles toward him. The idea here, I've said part jokingly, is to do for Pete's Dragon what James Joyce did for Homer's Odyssey. Anyway, I like what I've done here and am not quite sure what to do with it other than to waste it on the internet. I mean, what reputable journal wants to publish what is essentially Disney fan fiction?]

With the Gogans drawing nearer, I began to see that I had made a mistake. In fact, I had made the classic black-and-white horror-movie mistake that you think no real person would ever be dumb enough to make: fleeing some terrible enemy, I had found a corner to back myself into. I began desperately to search for some other exit. I hoped the refrigerator was one of those that was loaded from the back, but it was not—and besides, what was I going to do, tear out all the shelves? Maybe I was. Who knew what the Gogans would do to me?

They did—they knew—and they were talking about it, whispering to each other in between creepy–friendly calls.

"Dav-vy..."

"Gonna hang him upside-down by his heels, beat him with a seatbelt."

"Stuff his mouth with steel wool, pull his hair by fistsful, throw him down on broken glass... Yeehaw!"

"Dav-vy..."

"Make him beg for his dead mama, beg for his dead papa, beg to die, for us to kill him, hee!—but we ain't gonna kill him, uh-uh, he ain't going nowheres..."

"DavvyDavvyDavvy?"

I was an object. I wasn't human. Or was my humanity part of the fun? How does a brain like that work, a sick sadistic brain like a Gogan's? What do they get from hurting me? What do they get from my suffering, from my screams of pain and of protest? Is it funny to them? Is it exciting? Is it that they feel it, too, just like regularly healthy empathetic human beings, but that they hate themselves as much as it is possible to hate anything in this world, and that in hurting me they can punish themselves?—secretly, indirectly, not even knowing it's what they're doing? Does the pleasure they derive from slamming my hand in a car door really come down to the annihilation they wish upon their own hands and fingers?

Let me never wind up in the hands of a Gogan. Anything, anything, anything but that.

Could I simply run through them? Surprise them and slip by, or knock one over? They were only human, no reason to assume that any one of them could necessarily stop me, when I had adrenaline for blood and my heartbeat was the beat of the universe itself. I felt I could practically smash through walls; I ought to be able to bowl through the Gogans. But then I had a horrible vision of the narrow aisle packed with them: five, ten, fifteen Gogans crowded together, all hunched over in lurking mode, clothes soiled and ratty, hair hanging in greasy clumps, fingernails browned and broken—gritty, clayey, stinking flesh as though they'd risen from the mud and then baked in the sun—all of them grinning through dustbunny beards or cartoon cathouse make-up, the odd Goganess, with cracked orange teeth and watery eyes all circled red and black...

I exaggerate, of course. But your average Gogan is not a pretty portrait; that part is black-and-white true. And if they're coming to drag you off into the hills, and if there's 20 of them all in a tiny corner store moving in slowly and cackling about what indignities they intend to visit upon your body... Well, it's to be expected that you'd feel your body begin to tighten up like Shrinky-Dinks. And I did: I wanted to smash through the wall, dig through the floor with my fingernails, roll under the fridge, down with the wet black filth and slick black bugs...my only thought was of escape, and yet I was paralyzed, petrified—turned to stone.

And now I saw one of their shoes poking into view down the nearest aisle.

The tip of an old leather shoe, brown so dirty it looked off-white, and split at the toe with a sodden white sock and a skinny grey toe like a corpse's toe jutting out, the nail like rock all twisted and biting into the flaking flesh like a vampire's fang. I stared at that fang, then looked up—and most of my organs bunched up together in a messy clump or knot somewhere near the bottom of my throat.

A head, a mad grinning Gogan head, had peeked around that corner, above the shoe, the crazy bastard leaning in, leering—an old one, an old man with a toothless mouth that seemed to swim across his nasty scrotum of a stubbly old twisted face—and he looked me in the eye, and he said, "Well, if it isn't our Davvy!"

"I'm not your Davvy," I said to him, in a quiet voice that creaked and whistled.

"C'mere, boys," said Pa Gogan, not taking his eyes off of me. "Guess what I found."'

The first thing they would do would be to throw me in a bag, like a laundry bag, made of canvas. Then they would take me back to the farm. They might dump me in the basement, still in the bag, while they had dinner upstairs—and I'd be insane with claustrophobia, frantic to get out, but of course when they let me out was when things would really start to get bad. Eventually, when they had taken out their frustration on me, things would settle down some, level out, and I could count on a relatively peaceful life of manual labor, harsh words, slaps and kicks, undernourishment, occasional light electrocution, and a general absence of human dignity, sleeping in a corner of the floor, woken up in the middle of the night with outrageous demands—like to clean spattered shit from the bathroom wall, or to try my hand, my body, at breakdancing for a cadre of impassioned drinkers at five in the morning, or to play baby for the lonely Ma: probably the worst of my responsibilities, not because it invariably ended in violence (which it did) but because of the affection itself, the sick and empty love she leaked all over me, and me like a human doll, an object, no worse kind of objectification than the kind in which your humanity stands in for humanity, but somebody else's humanity (like Woody Allen's mythical beast with the body of a lion and the head of a lion, but a different lion), no worse indignity than to feel your personhood simply stands in the way of your being somebody else's person.

Or, I don't know, maybe that's not so bad. Worse things have been done. Worse things will be done. Worse things will be done to me.

By the Gogans.

"You're done running away?" said Pa Gogan, beady eyes shining like Christmas lights. "You ready to come on home, Davvy boy?"

"I'm not going with you," I said. "That's not my home."

"Sure it is," said Pa Gogan, "sure it is." And he called over his shoulder again: "Get the sack, boys, I found him."

Now he shuffled toward me—I picture him in a cloud of dirt like Charles Schultz's Pig Pen, but that can't be right—and I smelled him then, a relatively subdued blend of mold, jerky, ammonia, and human waste, and I watched speechless as a millipede did the conga from around the inside of his lapel and into a torn jacket pocket and as Pa's grin melted into a hungry grimace and as his long dandruffy fingers moved through the air between us like something in a nightmare; and the instant those old claws brushed the shirt on my shoulder (gently, like an old woman), the refrigerator with its sliding glass doors exploded outwards, bottles and cans and metal shelves carrying Pa Gogan into the opposite wall like oversized shrapnel and a rainbow arcing through the mist of beerspray, the entire bodega rocking as if we were on TV and the camera were shaking around as we braced ourselves on the set—because there in front of me, between us, huge and panting (chest and shoulders heaving) and hulking and growling and green and beautiful was—

Do you want to guess?

It was my dragon—naturally. When I say he was green, I'm maybe getting a little carried away: he was of course more or less invisible, or at least very difficult to describe, for reasons that are themselves difficult to explain. I tried about ten different ways here to sketch out his appearance, and every one was wronger than the next. But although they were getting better and better,* I could tell it was asymptotic: we were never going to get there. He looks like a...camel! O-or a crocodile! He has ears like a cow... I don't know, it's all true and none of it true. Invisible isn't quite right, either, but it might be as close as we come.

The most important thing, the essential information, is that he had come to save me from the Gogans. I knew it, and they knew it. I could see it in Pa Gogan's little eyes, in the shape of his ghoulish mouth, in the growing dark Rorschach blot on the crotch of his trousers. He stared up at that dragon like he was staring up at the black center of his own soul, the horror inside him that drove him forever in vain away from himself. And to me. The dragon threw it all back at him, and he stiffened like a corpse, and his hat fell off, and he pissed himself, and he moaned. I almost felt bad for him—almost—and in a funny way the reason I didn't had less to do with a sense of justice or deserts than it did with a feeling that this was the order of things, the way things worked, like finding a dead rat in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on the sidewalk, with its mouth open and its eyes closed and its little feet all curled up with a damp spot by its head as if it had drooled out its lifestuff in the final moments, pure filth and death—it's like, who cares how many infants' eyes that rat ate out in their cribs: it's dead, now, done—it's over and gone—and the rest, as they say, is...taphonomy?

But forget the Gogans. It didn't matter how many there were, what throngs had clogged the bodega's musty aisles. I had my dragon, now, and he would never leave my side, and orphaned was suddenly a pretty swell thing to be!!

* I probably would have taken this joke out because no one would get it. Do you get it?