Jason Bartlett - Wild West Keyframe 1 Rough
I will always remember the night Wilburn burnt my childhood home to the ground.
I met Wilburn almost twenty years ago, when I was barely a ten year old boy.
That summer afternoon was a particularly hot one. My sweat was dripping from my body onto the pavement, sizzling as it evaporated, and my skin stung quite a bit. I should have been in my room, bumping up the AC and playing Zelda, but I had no desire to be home at the time. That day I was just wandering around, blinded by a scorching white horizon. It must have been the heat and the thirst, I think, that guided my steps towards the shade of an old bungalow.
Busted windows and yellowed white paint cracking. How inviting, right? Thankfully I hadn’t stumbled upon a crack house, just an abandoned home I could rest in for a while. I got in through one of the windows, and rested for a while until I heard a noise coming from the kitchen. Following the faulty logic of insolation, I went into the kitchen and finally found Wilburn’s egg.
Yes, he came from an egg. No he wasn’t a bird.
The egg looked like a raggedy rugby-like football sitting atop the kitchen countertop. Nothing special to tell the truth, if I took it home was just on a serendipitous whim. I grabbed it, noting the hardness. I would have never imagined the thing I was taking home at the time was anything more than some toy I would forget the moment I left it on my bed and turned my Nintendo on.
A few hours later, I was cleaning the sole of my shoes on my porch. I went straight to my bedroom, dropped the rugby thingy on my bed, threw my sweaty pants and T-shirt over it, then went back to the kitchen to get hydrated and grab a slice of pizza before I passed out. It just took a few minutes, but as I walked back to my room holding a slice of liquefied cheese I noticed that the brownish ball was now golden and glowing.
Must have been the dry heat, the Miami sun, my sweaty underarm and ribs or my hot and damp clothes, but the ball started to hatch. The creature that came out of that cracking spheroid would come to be my only real friend, even if later in my life, no one would ever believe he existed.
Wilburn was born that hot August day, a beautiful baby dragon.
My first instinct when it dawned on me that I had hit the jackpot in the cool pet department was to keep quiet. I can pat myself in the back for that. Even if I was just a kid, I wasn’t so careless or naïve to trust such a thing to anyone but me, especially not mom. That is why, when she came back from another one of her long business trips, I just welcomed her back with a nice Cuban sandwich and kept the new arrival hidden.
Even though Wilburn was barely a dragon cub, keeping him from mom was not very complicated. I guess most of it stemmed from Wilburn’s innate collectedness. He was always an eerily cool and calmed creature, far from what anyone would expect from a puppy or a kitty. He knew when to approach me and when to disappear, and he was an expert at making no sound at all, even when mom was too close.
However wonderfully quiet and ninja-like Wilburn could be nonetheless, the other element in the “hide the dragon equation” that work extremely well was just mom.
You see, Urania --or mom as I called her--, at the time was a beautiful but financially troubled young lady with a son to keep fed, clean and in school, and the ambition to save up to go back to school herself. It was understandable that she would be absent a lot of the time while going on the road selling all kinds of trinkets and knickknacks to hustle our kind out of poverty and into something better.
A lot of people blame her now, and God knows she blames herself as well, but, in my opinion, she was a really good mom. She would often sit down with and talked at length about why she wasn’t around as much. I didn’t need any explanations, I knew we both needed her to work. But she would always make sure I knew it was for lofty goals that she would then explain in minute detail. It was a wonderful story skeleton of how the both of us would grow.
Growing took us a lifetime, but it took Wilburn a year.
As a kid, I never wanted a pet. I thought dogs were slobbery and needy, and cats were boring and not useful. Wilburn was the antithesis to all of that. He liked watching me play games, and even though he wasn’t gifted with human language or deft phalanxes, he was with deep and acute intelligence. He even managed to clue me into solving puzzles or finding useful things sometimes.
I would also pet him if mom would need extra days on the road. It was good.
The only complicated thing was that I had to go buy Cuban sandwiches way too often. It was the only thing he would eat with joy.
I managed this harmonious coexistence with a beast of legend in sunny Miami for a year, for a very good year.
But then came Gary.
As I mentioned earlier, mom was a beautiful girl. Sometimes the tragic consequence of being a beautiful girl is a Gary.
They met at a company event, I guess. And he was fine the way many things are if you don’t bother to take a good look at them. He had a good hair of hair that many men his age didn’t, he always smelled of strong but nice perfume, he was nicely clean-shaven, well-mannered, friendly and blue eyed.
What mom did not see was the glint in those blue eyes the first time he entered the house and saw an eleven-year-old boy sweating in his tighty-whities. To be fair, I didn’t notice either, but Wilburn did.
Wilburn was too big at that time, so I kept him hidden in the unkempt bushes of our backyard. But the first time that dude came in I noticed my dragon became jittery. He made so many noises that night that my mother though we had raccoons in our backyard. She even went outside, broom in hand, but Gary just laughed it off and pleaded to go back inside to finish dinner.
Years later I would come to understand that he knew what would happen, and I tried so many times to tell my first psychologist this that she thought I had something way worse than just trauma.
Gary kept visiting mom, and they grew close. So close in fact that one day he said they should move in together and she agreed. It was unceremonious, as many things were in our household, but the tenderness was there, at least on her side.
Gary and I weren’t that close, but we were amicable, and he didn’t criticize my tastes. He even bought me a game once. I wanted mom to be happy, and she was when in his company, so I did my best to welcome him. But Wilburn wasn’t having it.
He became erratic, and the problem peaked around the time Gary got the third set of keys to our home. By that time I was twelve and he didn’t fit inside the house anymore. Thankfully, with size came optical camouflage. So I would go outside and talk to the wind and Gary would watch.
And then one night he sat out there with me.
“Have you got a friend out here I don’t know about.’’
I froze as I observed Gary grab a plastic chair and whip it in front of me, sitting just below the jaws of an angry dragon that was ready to bit his head off.
“Nah, I… I just come here to think.”
“I thought you came out here to speak to the raccoons.’’
He smiled with a set of long and thin teeth and handed me a Dr.Pepper, which was my favorite, I must say.
Our conversation was awkward at first, but he soon reeled me in with video game talk. At the time, I thought it was nice.
My mom has always been a really busy woman, so from a very young age I became accustomed to solitude. I even craved it, avoiding anyone who wanted to get to know me or get close. This is the reason my second psychiatrist gave me to justify the existence of a dragon in my backyard, and to “help me rationalize” why I was so vulnerable at that time.
Gary’s talks became more frequent with time, which meant less time for me to tend to the dragon in my backyard.
Wilburn became frustrated with me. He couldn’t get to me, he couldn’t be with me. He was a Kassandra with no voice, just waiting for me to figure out his message before it was too late.
And one night it was and I came to see Gary the way Wilburn did: as a predator.
This part… this part is still infuriating to me. That night I didn’t go outside to Wilburn. I just saw him through the glass of the backdoor as Gary held a hot and humid hand on my shoulder.
Another year passed.
Miami can become really hot around summer, and unkempt bushes and dead weeds are the perfect ingredients for a bit of spontaneous combustion. That was the coroner’s best bet, but the truth is no science was able to explain how our house caught fire that August night.
There was no gas leak, no dead bushes, no kerosene, no spontaneous combustion, no unattended candle.
There was a dragon in my backyard, to whom I bonded closely, and who had had to watch me bear a man who wouldn’t be told no to the whims of his flesh.
He burnt.
Wilburn burnt him.
The night my childhood home caught fire was the night I let Wilburn do as he should have done a year before.
I opened the back door after Gary had had his fill for the night. I didn’t expect something so swift.
My dragon roared and spit a violent wind of fire that melted the glass of the back door and set every flammable thing inside the house ablaze. The walls came tumbling down, the windows were busted by the heat.
Gary caught the whole of that. I can still conjure his screams in my head, the way they must have hurt his throat. I guess seeing lumps of your own charred black flesh falling off of you must have been distressing.
He burnt to ashes. He and the house.
This is what I told everyone. The firemen, the paramedics, the police, the social worker, the psychologist, my mother, the other psychologists, the lawyers, the psychiatrist.
None of them believed the word of a thirteen-year-old boy who had, through some kind of cruel serendipity, finally gotten rid of his rapist.
What they believed was that I had become mentally unstable. My last psychiatrist called this my cornerstone, the moment I became fixated with fire.
Yes, I killed those men. I used kerosene, napalm, gasoline. I lit them on fire for raping boys and girls out of kindergarten. Most people were happy about those deaths. Most people are, until one of them is a priest. After that, they had to catch me.
Those guys, they were all me.
But that man, that was all Wilburn.
I know and he knows.
He is still with me, as big as the building they are holding me in. I see his eye watching me at night, sad but soothing, through the bars on the windows.
I always tell him it wasn’t his fault, always looking him in the eye. He knows I mean it the same way as when I tell that to mom every time that she comes to visit, bringing Cuban sandwiches.
This short story participated in the 24-Hour Story Contest Short Story by @mctiller featured here.