First Pages: The Dragon in my Shadow
The Dragon in my Shadow is a short tale of office politics and betrayal, which shows that some childhood things can mature into adulthood with us.
The Dragon in my Shadow is available as part of An Anthology of Dragons, and is also available from Smashwords, Kobo, Kindle, iTunes and Nook.
First Pages: The Dragon in my Shadow
All my life, I’ve been ordinary. I’ve
done all the ‘right’ things, made all the ‘right’ moves and failed
spectacularly to actually achieve anything more than mid-line success. All my
life. Nothing has worked.
I finally resigned myself to a life of
obscurity and lack-luster non-achievement, and settled into a steady cycle of
work, home, garden, television, sleep and back to work again. There was no
romance in my life. I’d been stung once too often and sworn off it, at least
for now. No, I was content to keep plugging away at doing my job well, and
creating a paradise in my backyard that no one would ever see. Of course, I
hadn’t included the dragon in my calculations.
As a child I had encouraged myself with
fantasies of having a dragon as a parent. I’d been adopted, I told myself, by
kind human parents who’d taken me in after I’d been transformed into a human by
an evil wizard. My dragon brother kept a watch on me. I could see him if I
turned my head quickly enough. He watched me from the shadows, keeping me safe from human predators, and encouraging
me to succeed. But in spite of my best efforts to live up to that
encouragement, I never had, and my dragon brother had faded like all the other
dreams and fantasies in my life.
I hadn’t known that a real dragon existed in my
shadow. It was small enough to slip between the cracks of light, small enough
to remain unnoticed. Cat-like in its size and cat-like in its silence, it had
clung, quiescent, for as long as I had tried to excel, not at all fazed by the
lack of results. The dragon had faith in me, even if I didn’t. My quiet
acceptance of life as I found it pissed the dragon off immensely.
END EXTRACT
The Dragon in my Shadow is available as part of An Anthology of Dragons, and is also available from Smashwords, Kobo, Kindle, iTunes and Nook.
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