we remember

The little creatures cling to what they were for longer. It should be the other way around, their little bodies soaking us up, but somehow it’s like they’re able to dodge us and stay as they are for a while. But the big babies they suck us in and the changes are fast and furious and free. Remembering what once we could have been. Skywhale songs and wings that don’t belong. We scream into the wind until the dragons come. It’s the dragons you finally notice, though the signs had long been there in other ways. But the dragons, the dragons no-one can ignore. They’re nothing like your internet fantasies and disparate cultural mythologies: though your ideas of dragons are based on real things – those half-remembered histories singing in your DNA and the songs passed down and changed, passed down and changed, passed down and changed until the moment of arrival holds only the smallest kernel of what was (or might be again). But the dragons, the dragons are fur and teeth and feathers and wings, and long, deep snouts carrying memory and magic.