Felix Bill

RUNNER UP

Glass Dragons

The box was small enough to rest in the palm of my hand. Too small to have been made for anything but jewellery. It was fancy, too. Gold hinges and fastenings, black lacquered wood: the weight of an object made to last. In my chest, a jolt of panic. It wasn’t that I wasn’t flattered, dizzy at the idea, but we’d only been dating a few months. 

“Go on then,” said my lover, smiling. “Open it.”

When I did, my breath caught in my throat. It wasn’t a ring James had given me. It was a tiny model dragon made of glass. 

I must have told him the story in passing: 

The school trip to Disneyland Paris I’d miraculously been able to go on, courtesy of compensation money Dad got from the council for his broken wrist. The shimmering heat coming off the sculptor’s blow-torch, that summer afternoon in France. The glass dragon I’d watched take form, spike by spike. 

Standing in that crush of sticky children, I had wanted it more than I’d ever wanted anything. Watched with hungry eyes as the artist put it up on a long shelf next to seven identical copies and swept a bow to the crowd who’d watched him work. I was the first to put my hands together, entranced by the molten glass he’d wielded so easily, but when the applause faded, he saved his smiles for other children. The ones who pushed forward waving ten and twenty euro notes at the woman standing near the till, each clamouring for a dragon of their own. I hadn’t realised they were for sale, too caught up in the magic of their making, but sure enough, each model was tagged with a neat, printed label reading ‘€30’.

Ten short, all I could do was yearn as one after another, the glass dragons were nestled down in powder-blue boxes. Handed over with a smile and a warning to be careful, carrying them home. No one would have needed to warn me. The statues might as well have been made of diamonds, for the care I would have guarded one with, but at twelve, I knew better than to think that argument would move the salespeople to hand one over. Burning with the injustice of it all, I turned away, unable to shake the memory of a glass dragon taking shape beneath blue flame. 

Back home, I developed the habit of riding the DLR through Canary Wharf, picturing glass dragons nesting amid the city’s skyscrapers. At fourteen, my fixation shifted to Chihuly. Mesmerised by the scale of his sculptures, I went looking for classes on glass-blowing with no idea how much they might cost. Settled for YouTube’s finest ‘intro to soldering’, with a view to making stained glass instead. By seventeen I was in the midst of my first attempt at a novel and there too, the magic of glass crept in. The main character? An immortal mage, heir to the wild magicks of a great glass dragon.

Fast forward another four years, and there I was, staring down at the most thoughtful gift anyone’s ever given me. Even before I took it out of the box, the dragon’s little blue body caught the light, sent strange shadows twisting across the silk lining of the box. Rising towards me, a pair of delicate red wings, arched in— anger? Joy? It wasn’t obvious at first. The dragon’s fierce golden eyes stared out at the world, unblinking. Inscrutable. It’s face was neither cruel nor kind, but as I pulled it out of the box, a strange transformation took place. Cradled in my hands, its painted intensity began to look like love. 

Superstitious by choice (aren’t things more fun that way?), and something of a storyteller, I am forever assigning meaning to objects that might not deserve it. This gift wasn’t one of them. I had no idea I’d even mentioned the story to James when he gave me my glass dragon. No idea he’d been listening so intently as I rambled about my childhood. 

Putting the dragon down on the coffee table sent blue-tinted sunlight splashing across James’ face and in it, I caught a flash of something permanent. Knew that I had found someone to share my future with. 

As I write this, my glass dragon is perched in pride of place on my desk, gently gleaming in the light of my computer screen: a source of endless inspiration. It’s strange, the things we fixate on as creatives. I don’t know how often I’ve tried to put the magic of that sculpture into words. How many times I’ve told the story of the glass dragon I couldn’t afford to buy on that school trip, so very long ago. It must have been at least once, my boyfriend’s gift attests to that, but I suspect more. 

Glass dragons have captured my imagination for over a decade. They are forever sneaking into short stories where they don’t belong, lurking in otherwise sensible metaphors to do with emotion, or appearing with a sly smile in the first draft of magazine articles. Whatever I happen to be working on, at some point in the writing process, a set of sharp glass fangs will sink into the meat of the story, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. James saw to that.