In a small Ontario town on the shores of Lake Huron, there exists a street called Hope and on it sits a bungalow that does not look like the rest of the homes on the street—those other summer cottages with trimmed lawns, sprinkler systems, and ride-on mowers. Among these cottages, neighbours chat and ask one another about how they get their grass so green or their flowers so red and blue and purple. Whenever a strong wind takes down some branches from a maple tree, these homeowners are quick to react, and within an hour, maybe two, those branches are gone. Poof. These men wear white shorts, and the women wear flowery dresses, and they converse over lemonade or maybe a glass of white wine. Barefoot, they walk across their lawns, for they know they will never ever step on anything that may draw blood. Barefoot, they talk about the run-down bungalow and its inhabitants—unsightly splotch on the neighbourhood, an eyesore, a little piece of ghetto along their fine boulevard. They shake their heads in disappointment and discuss the values of hard work, property pricing, and family planning. Why can’t some people clean up after themselves, they wonder. In any event, the nuisance of that house, and what it represents, never fails to add an unnecessary bother to their otherwise peaceful and relaxing summer nights. If it were not for that one house, everything would be perfect.

Across the street, toys are scattered around the uncut lawn—bikes and skipping ropes and hockey sticks. There is a tire swing and a front door that always seems to slam. Children’s voices can always be heard rising from inside, as if the little ones were having a shouting match between themselves. There are always disagreements, always fits of rage. Screams and shouts. There is a single mother, who always struggles to corral her children and institute some measure of discipline and order, especially in the mornings when they must go to school and she to work. There are four children—three boys and a girl, the latter always appearing lost among the roughhousing and nose-making of her brothers. Sometimes when their hollering gets a little too much, she retreats from her room and sits in the tire swing and gently pushes herself with her feet, the branch holding the tire always looking like it’s ready to snap. Sometimes she’s playing with a cat, who may or may not be a stray, and picks it up and holds it close to her cheek so she can feel its whiskers lightly brush her skin and feel its purring reverberate through her.

During the summer months, the cottage next to the family’s is a revolving door of families, who have chosen to spend their week’s holiday here among the tall maples and the endless blue sky, just a stone’s throw from the beach, so close in fact you could walk there in your bare feet. And sometimes these families have young children, whom you can see skipping to the beach pulling a little cart full of pails and shovels and swimming noodles and floatation devices in the shapes of pigs and dolphins. The poor family never goes to the beach, at least not in the summer months, too many eyes on them, too much scrutiny, probing. So the little girl sits on her tire swing throughout June, July, and August as boys and girls in their swimming suits march to the beach, toys in tow, and shout about all the things they will do and which they will do first, their merry voices still heard long after they have disappeared from sight. Most of the time, the children and their parents pay little attention to the run-down bungalow, just quickly pass it as they would a homeless person or a person shouting about the coming apocalypse. They keep their eyes ahead, towards the beach and sun, and do not let them drift to the less savoury sights just to their right.

But one little girl, in a pink bathing suit, stops in front of the tire swing and stares at the girl swinging on it. They could be twins. Same age. Same long blonde hair. Same flamingo-like legs and petite frames. No words pass between them, though, only a silence marked by a strong curiosity. Each blinks, and stares some more. The parents up ahead call for Cecilia to come along and not to dawdle, the water awaits, but Cecilia waits a moment longer, just to stare a few more seconds, as if she were locking the girl on the swing into her memory, as if she were an answer to a test she would need to scribble down at a later point. And with no clear reason, no exact cause, she lifts her hand at waves at the girl before dashing towards her parents, without looking back to see the girl on the swing, too, raise her hand in a salute.

Over the course of the week, the girl in the tire swing watches Cecilia, through a cedar hedge, play on the grass. Sometimes she balances a hula-hoop over her hips; sometimes, she does a summersault and then another and another until she is dizzy and stumbles and falls along the grass in fits of laughter. The girl in the tire swing stares in silence, seemingly afraid that to announce her presence would spell disaster, resulting in Cecilia screaming for her mother to come rescue her from she who lurks in the bushes. But Cecilia knows she’s there, peeking through the branches, for with every activity she does and with every new toy that appears in her hands, Cecilia casts a subtle glance in her direction, to the figure in the cedar, hoping, maybe, that she will put aside her bashfulness and come join her on the grass, which feels so soft in the summer sun.

Finally, Cecilia sets aside her toys, which looks to be a set of teacups, gets up, brushing the grass from her pink dress, and races towards her cottage and all the mysteries that the girl in the tire swing will never unlock. But before Cecilia reaches the door, she darts to the left, towards the hedge, beyond the sight of the girl in the tire swing, but then sneaks back to her, stealthily, on tiptoes, like a cat stalking a chipmunk, and just as the girl in the tire swing is about to retire to her own, less mysterious home, Cecilia jumps into to frame, between a few cedar branches, and screams “I see you,” startling to the girl to such an extent that she sprints up her driveway, past the hockey net and goalie stick, rips open the door, and disappears inside.

Cecilia shakes her head, giggling. “I am only playing,” she yells, hoping the girl can hear from somewhere in the pits of her ramshackle house. “Why don’t you come outside and play.” Just as Cecilia is about to give up, the door next door opens, slowly, squeakily, and the face of the girl in the tire swing pokes her out, ready, it would, seem for any betrayal lurking outside, as if she suspects Cecilia has something planned for her, some trick, some prank, something akin to what the girls at school subject her to. But she’s not at school now; it’s summer, and she’s at home. These long sun-filled days should be a time of peace for her, a time when she need not worry about others have planned for her. But there’s Cecilia, calling, waving, and coaxing her to come over to play. Such an invitation has never happened to the girl in the tire swing, as her movements spell mistrust. She wears her reticence like a birthmark; she’s cagey and apprehensive, sensing a trap, a forthcoming violence, like a mouse in a cage sniffing after some cheese. Who has orchestrated this experiment and for what purpose?

Cecilia, meanwhile, only encourages her further, listing all the toys she has to play and all the games that are not just suitable for one person. So the girl in the tire swing prepares her courage, steps from her door, bounds down the driveway, and crosses that sacred threshold between her lawn and another’s. She forgets for the moment all the warnings her mother had given her about trespassing onto a neighbour’s property, demanding her to remember that they are not like us. They are just tourists, her mother would say, pronouncing the “s” sounds with such vehemence that spit would fly from her mouth. They come and go as they please. But this is our home. We stay even when the snow flies. And when people can leave with no consequences, they are free to do as they please.

So when the girl in the tire swing steps upon Cecilia’s grass, she hears her mother’s words echoing through her head, but she does not head their warning because Cecilia’s beautiful smile slays her inhibitions; all her worries and doubts melt into a wonderful fire lit by Cecilia’s hospitality. Everything blurs in a stream of merriment.  Like a pleasing dream with great fluidity. The girls drift and dance across the grass inventing games and scenarios almost on a whim. “Do you believe in dragons,” Cecilia asks, as they catch their breath lying on the grass. The girl in the tire swing shakes her head. “You should,” Cecilia says. “They are dangerous.” A mischievous grin then appears on her lips. “They like to eat little girls. Like you and me.”

Cecilia jumps to her feet. “Come on. We can’t let them win. We must kill the dragons before they kill us.” The girl in the tire swing looks up at her new friend in awe, at her energy and imagination. On her feet now, the girl looks serious, ready to follow Cecilia through lava flows or avalanche-prone mountain passes. Wherever Cecilia goes, she will follow. “Yes,” the girl in the tire swing says. “We must kill them.”

Cecilia tells her how things are. They are dragon slayers, commissioned by townsfolk to rid the community of this beast who has breathed fire over its farmlands and forests. The two slayers consult and devise a plan. Cecilia takes one end of her skipping, the girl in the tire swing, the other, and the two run in opposite directs, until the rope is taut. Cecilia barks out “Here” and the two girls drop to the grass, resting on their knee and letting the rope lie loose on the ground. “Okay, okay, okay,” Cecilia says, “We’ll wait for him to approach and when he does, on my signal, we’ll lift the rope, trip him, and then tie him up.” The girl in the tire swing nods and nods, her face a great big smile. “Got it?” Cecilia shouts, and the girl shouts back “Yes, yes, yes.” So they wait a minute and then another, and just when the girl in the tire swing is about to ask where the dragon could be, Cecilia whispers, “Okay, okay. I see him coming around the house; he’s coming this way. Look how big he is. Look. Look.” The girl in the tire swing turns and her mouth widens in disbelief. “Oh my god,” she says, “Look how tall he is. I had no idea. Can we do this? Can we?” Cecilia eyes the rope and then looks back to the beast now approaching. “Of course, we can. Concentrate. Focus on the task. Do not be afraid.” The girl in the tire swing shakes her head and mumbles, “But, but, but, look at his teeth, his claws, his scales, the smoke puffing from his nose.” Cecilia slaps her hand on the ground. “Hey, look at me,” which the girl does. “We are warriors. We are fighters. We must protect the town. We must protect the people. And ourselves.” Cecilia’s eyes are big, black pebbles. Her body is friction, almost fire. “Warrior, will you protect the people” And the girl in the tire swing nods and settles herself, focusing her gaze, not on the dragon, getting closer by the second, but on the rope, the grass, her hand on the handle, concentrating, waiting for Cecilia’s word. “Wait,” Cecilia whispers. “Wait … almost … wait … wait…” But the girl on the tire swing cannot barely wait another second, the pressure visible in her little frame, which is as rough as piece of driftwood, but just when the girl appears ready to flee from her position and take refuge back in her home, among the safety of her things, she hears Cecilia scream “Now.” And the girl does not hesitate: she lifts the rope, and holds it tight, and watches the dragon trip and tumble onto the grass. “Go, go, go,” Cecilia orders, and in a flash, the two girls dart under and then over the great beast, over and under again, tying his wings and legs and body and mouth, until the dragon is helpless to move, helpless to fly, helpless to breathe its fire.

The two girls stand in front of their tied beast. Their breathing subsides, the adrenaline cools, and a sense of calm returns to their little bodies. The dragon does not struggle, barely moves, its big belly only rising and falling in the subtlest of ways. And if not for the beasts’ black, basalt eyes, the size of the great boulders the girl in the swing sometimes saw at the beach, which seemed to expand under captivity, you’d be forgiven the dragon was dead. Cecilia tosses a pink shovel to the girl and orders her to hold close to the dragon’s next. “If it moves,” Cecilia shouts, “take that sword and slit its throat.” The girl in the tire swing does as she is told and holds the sword’s point at the dragon’s neck. Cecilia stares into the beasts’ eyes, unperturbed by their ferocity, and lays out the situation: “Dragon, for your disregard of the life and property of the fine citizens of Southampton, the townsfolk have condemned you to die.” The dragon shows little emotion, only breathing in its rhythmic and hypnotic fashion, but the girl in the tire swing registers a certain discomfort in Cecilia’s sentence, as her shoulders seem to slump, her body language less sure, less resolute. “Dragon, we are dragon slayers. We have travelled and killed hundreds of your kind. We have hunted you out of your existence. Before long, the destruction and deaths you have caused will be nothing but stories, passing on to the stuff of legend and lore. Nothing but a story. Nothing more.” The dragon twitches, trying to open its mouth, but the rope keeps its jaw firmly shut and in place. “In the name of the citizens of Southampton, the great County of Bruce, I Cecilia the great dragon tormentor, pronounce the sentence of death upon you.” Cecilia glances at the girl in the tire swing. “Slit its throat,” Cecilia orders. The girl looks at the blade piercing the dragon’s reptilian skin and notices how each time it breathes, the blade enters the skin ever so slightly.

In its eyes, the girl again sees those boulders and the waves crashing upon them, and she remembers when she too felt like a dragon. Not far from shore, a rocky sandbar stretches a few hundred metres from shore, and in May or September, before and after the tourists came, the girl in the tire would wade out along the water, swimming and stepping over the rocks and pebbles, until she came to the spot she herself had found—a massive boulder hiding just below the water’s surface. She would put her hands on its slimy and slipper surface, lift herself atop the boulder, and slowly and delicately rise to her feet. And any passerby who was happening to walk the beach at that particular time could gaze out across the lake and see a body seemingly standing on the water, hovering just above the waves, like a dragon might, or any creature for which a lot was thought but little was actually known.                       

The girl too had felt the derision she now directed at the dragon—that is, the absolute antipathy of strangers on the street, with their glancing, blackish eyes that said more than their words ever could, people who thought they stayed innocent because they never said what they actually felt in their heart. Like the dragon, she had been labelled a danger, an outsider, and a threat based on pure innuendo, those little whispers spread from men who live in attics with all the shades drawn, in complete darkness, yet have the gall to tell anyone who listens about how the world works, about how a quiet little road in Southern Ontario should look like. Like the dragon, she had been labelled a blight on the community, a nuisance in need of an eraser or a shovel pretending to be a sword.

“Kill the dragon,” Cecilia commands again, pointing her little finger at the girl at the tire swing, who still holds the blade to the animal’s neck, but the thought suddenly repulses her, suddenly makes her choke and cough and spit and actually hold the dragon for support as she gags and then regains her composure. But the touch, too, had resurrected something in her, a memory she had long drowned in her need to look across the cedar hedges to see a shining, smiling face, beckoning for her to come over and play. The memory was of her cat, Betsy, a slightly chubby feline who liked to saunter through the neighbourhood and collapse and roll wherever suited her. But Betsy was no stray; she was family.

One afternoon, the girl in the tire swing was lying on her bed, reading a story about faraway places with strange languages and unfamiliar histories, when she heard a car approach but then suddenly stop near her house. She heard a door slam and a woman’s voice begin to make animal calls, the soft, gentle kind you make when you wish for animal to surrender all of its survival instincts and come when called. Curious, the girl leapt from her bed and ran to the kitchen window, which looked out upon the road. She saw an older woman with greying hair kneeling on the road waving and beckoning Betsy to approach, and much to the girl’s distress, the cat was slowly strolling towards the stranger. The girl thought she recognized the woman, thought she had seen her around the neighbourhood, maybe the next street over, but couldn’t be sure. The girl had always been reserved, never one to shout or make a commotion, but when she saw Betsy sashaying towards the woman, in the cat’s typical nonchalant manner, she sensed danger where the cat obviously didn’t and banged on the window and screamed “Betsy, don’t.” The cat looked towards the noise, and in that momentary distraction, that split second of confusion, the woman struck, quickly reaching for the cat, grabbing it by the scruff its neck, and holding it up high for the girl in the tire swing to see. “Put her down” Betsy roared in a violent, deranged voice that surprised even her. “Put her down,” she screamed again, racing through the kitchen and out the door, but in those long seconds, the woman had thrown Betsy into the backseat of her car, started the engine, and had begun to drive away.

The girl in the tire swing knew Betsy had been taken from her because she and her family existed just beyond the borders of empathy. Things were allowed to happen to her and her brothers and her mother because they could not afford the best care or food for Betsy, because sometimes they left things on their lawns that their neighbours didn’t, because sometimes they put their garbage out too late, and because their lawns were uncut and their windows unwashed. She knew she lost Betsy because she could not chase after the car, even though she tried, even though she ran until her lungs burned and her legs filled with acid, until that car finally faded from view, disappearing down a side street. She lost Betsy because she couldn’t, or maybe wasn’t allowed to, move as fast as the neighbours around her, the way they come and go with ease, as if the world for them was one big highway, in which they could travel with such ease and comfort and fly by those houses that looked a lot like hers, stopping only to steal the very things that gave the girl in the tire swing a sense of herself.

Cecilia is shouting at her, telling her to deliver the sentence—to execute the dragon. But something stoops the girl in the tire swing from draining the beast’s blood. Maybe it is the memory of her standing on her boulder or her chasing after Betsy with all her might; whatever it is, she just cannot not see herself slitting the dragon’s throat, the burden of it all, the guilt and shame; instead, she sees herself in its eyes, holding the blade, about to obey the orders of a tourist, Cecilia, the type of girl who comes and goes as she please, who thinks she can just destroy whatever displeases here, the type of girls whose mother would steal a cat from a less fortunate child.

“I will not kill the dragon, Cecilia,” the girl in the tire swing says, surprised by the vehemence in her voice, the sound of resoluteness, so different from how she is customed to speaking: mousy, deferential. The girl then places her shovel underneath the rope holding the dragon in place and begins to cut. “What are you doing,” Cecilia screams, but the girl ignores her question and her increasing anger and just focuses the rope over the dragon’s wing, across his back, under his belly, over his mouth. All of Cecilia’s strong words simply feal apart, like a sandcastle after a strong breeze, nothing but empty sounds, a vicious wind that soon loses strength and fades away. And soon there is nothing Cecilia could do but watch the dragon rise and stand in all its strength and glory, watch it flap its wings and take flight over Southampton, over Ontario, over Canada.

The girl in the tire swing smiles as she watches the dragon become smaller and smaller in the horizon until it is about the size of herself, looking like she did atop her boulder with her hands pointed skywards in utter defiance of all traditions, of both men and god, that had tried to fasten her to the ground. Once the dragon disappears from her sight, gone to seek beauty and adventures as is its right, the girl in the tire swing drops her shovel and approaches Cecilia, who still cannot not entirely understand what just happened, why the girl could do not do as she was told, why she had to spoil their fun and make everything so serious. Cecilia studies the girl as she walks back to the cedar hedge, the boundary between cottages, towards her beat-up house full of used and broken things, but before she vanishes completely within her own territory, Cecila asks,  “Why did you let it go?” And without turning to look at Cecilia, the girl in the tire swing, with her head held high, says, “Because dragons are magnificent. And magnificent beings should never be caged.”

The girl in the tire swing knows she has done the right things, even if it meant sacrificing the one friend she had made in a long time. Cecilia will be gone tomorrow or the next day, returning to her real life in her real home wherever that was, hours away, somewhere with tall buildings and lots of people and countless cars, somewhere the pace of life is so unrelenting that people needed to retreat to the shorelines to unwind, to swim, to play in the sun, to kill dragons. The girl, though, has to stay and carve a life out for herself among the wreckage of her home life, the struggles that undoubtedly worry her and sometimes keep her up at night, but it is hers, and that’s the rub, something Cecilia could never understand. She just passes through the lives of others without consequence, as the girl’s mother had said. Cecilia is just a tourist. She could kill a dragon and then go home, but the girl would have to live with that knowledge. The memory of her slaughtered dragon would take up residence in her memory. Every time she passed that house, she would see the blood she had spilled all over the nice green lawn, the beautiful dragon lying dead. She had done that. And why? To make friends with a tourist. To make herself appear worthy in the eyes of Cecilia, who had a pink bathing suit and all the toys she wants, who came and went as she pleased, who could have her own dragon as a pet if she only asked.

So when Cecilia does leave a few days, the girl watches their car pass her home from her tire swing and does not wave when she catches Cecilia’s eyes on her from the backseat. She just keeps swinging and swinging because she likes to, it makes her feel good, and because she knows that Cecilias come and go. They come and go. But dragons are forever. And that’s something else Cecilia would never see and would never know. It is the girl’s little secret. Beside her, right next to the swing, sits the dragon she released. His name is Sebastian, and he is magnificent. Everyday, he comes to visit Cecilia, and together they plan, among the hockey sticks and recycling bins filled to the brim, how they will rescue the world’s remaining dragons, how they will free them from prisons in countries where people trap and kill dragons for no other reason that they are afraid of magnificent and different beings whose only fault is not recognizing the supremacy of their captors.