When Women Were Dragons(81)
Inside this package is the totality of my research, conducted during my, shall we say, extended sabbatical. I have become more unorthodox in my research methods, and have been more courageous and receptive in my quest to gather data. I have, in my travels, been invited on several occasions to meet with and examine members of several different dragon communes, where I was permitted to conduct extensive interviews (yes, contrary to our earlier hypotheses, speech and cognition and memory are fully intact), full medical examinations (including bloodwork, skin samples, basal temperature—we are going to need better thermometers—a full mapping of dentition, basic neurological testing, as well as a thorough analysis of cardiac and pulmonary functioning), not to mention notes on the social and emotional structures of dragon subculture. I had the great fortune to bear witness now to sixteen different dragonings, five of which were planned in advance by someone who could feel the change coming and permitted me to gather extensive data. (Photographs are included; films are available in the vault at the library. You know which one.)
All told, I have now interviewed over a thousand dragons, all around the world, and I can tell you that a good number of our early hypotheses are in error. This, of course, is exciting news. There is no greater moment for a scientist than to be proved wrong or to be alive at a time when settled science is turned on its head. It is then that the researcher realizes that the world is so much more interesting than it was even a day before. I can tell you with certainty, for example, that dragoning has nothing to do with motherhood—less than half of the dragons I interviewed were mothers. It has nothing to do with menstruation—232 of the dragons I interviewed were postmenopausal, and 109 had already undergone radical hysterectomies, and an astonishing 74 were women by choice, and by the great yearnings of their hearts, and were not labeled as such at birth, and yet are women all the same. They dragoned too, just as their sisters did. “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” Shakespeare tells us, and I am here to tell you that this is true. My friends, I have borne witness to things most wondrous strange, and I attest that still more wondrous things are on their way.
We are on the cusp, I believe, of another large-scale transformation. I can’t tell you when. But it is my belief it is coming. I have been working with dragon communities and impressing on them the damage that was done—to their homes, to their families, even to the soul of our nation—not by the shock of their transformation, but the shock of their leaving. The damage of the lies the nation told itself in their absence. I contend that it was not the loss that hurt the culture, but the pressure to ignore that loss. The pressure to forget. But what, I wonder, would happen if people weren’t allowed to forget? What would happen if the reality of their dragoned relatives became impossible to ignore?
Please, my friends, read my research. Analyze my findings. Criticize as you see fit. Tell me where I’ve failed. But do take it seriously. And get ready. Your patients will need you. So, too, will your communities, your country, and indeed the whole world. It is about to change.
Thank you for your work,
Henry Gantz
32.
After that, the number of dragons showing up in my town increased. Almost every day, someone knew someone who saw something. People whispered and muttered. Rumors started to flow.
An emerald-green dragon with long, pink eyelashes and a razor-barbed tail started appearing every Tuesday at two o’clock in the yard next to an old folks’ home. Sometimes she craned her neck to look into one particular room, but mostly, she simply sat quietly and waited. No one knew for what.
A ruby dragon started sitting outside the window of a History of the Novel course taught at the local community college. The professor tried shooing her away, but when that was unsuccessful, he handed her a stack of books and told her when the next paper was due and informed her that he didn’t allow goof-offs in his classroom. The dragon immediately got to work.
Another dragon, whose scales were the exact color and scent of a perfectly ripe peach, took it upon herself to find a comfortable place to sit right outside the window of the nursery where the local hospital housed its newborns. She didn’t even look in the window. She just sat, leaned her cheek against the building, and began to sing. There likely would have been an attempt to scare her away, but her song was so soothing to the newborns that the nurses insisted she not be moved. The babies who listened to the dragon’s lullaby gained weight faster, took a nipple more vigorously, and were generally more placid and content, making for an excellent work environment. That . . . thing, the nurses insisted (they wouldn’t say “dragon”), was going to stay. And that was that.
None of these incidents made the local paper. No television or radio stations attempted to cover it. Giant creatures descended on a small town in Wisconsin, and no one considered it news. It was dragons, after all. People got red in the face just thinking about it.
It wasn’t just my town, either. This was happening across the entire country. Due to news blackouts on the subject (not enforced by any agency or rule, but ardently adhered to by the journalists themselves—or their editors or outlet owners), no formal paper trail about what was later referred to as the Great Return exists, aside from a few local government inquiries and one congressional inquest, all heavily redacted still. However, since then, academics and researchers have been steadily collecting contemporaneous diary entries and letters, homemade films and snapshots, and thousands of hours of recorded interviews, and have carefully created a list of corroborated, verified incidents, with widespread agreement as to their veracity. In the first week alone of the Great Return, a total of 77,256 dragons either visited or fully returned to their former homes.