A Few Words About Transmogrification - Part 1 - The Confusing Thing About Chard

Urban Fantasy, Humor

Mrs. Maple stood in the middle of the building lobby with a hand on each hip, almost like she had a premonition that I would be walking through the front door that very second.

“Mr. Whitmore, you need to get your dragon under control.”

Now, let me set the record straight. First off, he’s not my dragon; he’s my roommate. And second, I had a better chance of controlling the weather. But I wasn’t about to argue with the world’s most curmudgeonly landlady about the finer points of rooming with the world’s dumbest transmogrifying dragon.

“What’s he done now?” I asked. I hated that part of me was actually curious. “On second thought, Mrs. Maple, I don’t want to know. He pays his own way, he’s not my problem.”

“He tried to help Wanda from 3B with her outfit this morning, and poof, next thing you know, the poor girl’s blouse vanished right as she was stepping onto the bus. I had to send one of the other tenants out to rescue her from the hoots and hollers of a few of the more classless men. Which is to say, all of them.”

Ah, not Wanda. Why did he have to mess with Wanda? I’d been working up the courage to ask her out for weeks (well, more like months). She was fantastic: dark hair, dark eyes, and sure, she was a witch who dabbled in some slightly dark arts, but the tonic she brewed for my hangover last New Year’s Eve was a lifesaver. My roommate, on the other hand, seemed to dabble solely in the idiotic arts.

“I’ll talk to him, you have my word.”

“What I’ll have is you and your dragon out on your rumps if I have any more girls weeping in my lobby.” She turned away towards her office on the main floor.

“He’s not my dragon,” I called after her as she stalked away. “He actually came with the apartment.”

Her office door slammed behind her in answer.

I took the elevator, but when it started to shudder, I decided to jump out with Mr. Twick on the fourth and risk the stairs. I’d been trapped on the mechanical wonder between floors twice before.

It was only three flights; surely I could make it without becoming part of this week’s magical mishap statistic. But I wasn’t home free yet. When I made it to the apartment, my key got stuck in the deadbolt, and the dragon didn’t answer.

“A little help here?” I shouted through the door.

Every second I stood out in the hall increased my odds of succumbing to whatever one of the wizards on our floor was brewing. The air was taking on a green tinge. I really didn’t want to find out what super keen magical catastrophe awaited me.

I pounded with my fist. “Anytime soon would be great.”

A sane person might wonder why I would choose to live in an apartment building for the magically gifted. And by gifted, I mean challenged. I only agreed to assume the lease from my cousin because she assured me that her shape-shifting roommate was always good for half the rent. This alone hoisted him above some of my past roommate greats like Drug-Dealer-Dan and Girlfriend-Stealing-Sid.

As it turns out, there were additional incentives to living with a dragon: he ate intruders, the rats kept a respectful distance, and he had a fragile armistice with the cockroaches that ensured a bug-free dining experience. But apparently answering the door was not on his list of services rendered.

When it became clear he wasn’t coming to my rescue, I went with Plan B and hoofed the door with my boot while twisting the key. The deadbolt finally snapped open, and my key lived to turn (or not turn) another day.

“Hey, thanks for the help,” I called out.

There was no answer.

“We need to talk about Wanda. Mrs. Maple is pretty pissed.”

I peered past the kitchenette and into the glorified broom closet that was our living room. I didn’t see the dragon anywhere.

I slid off my jacket and poked my head into each bedroom, but still no dragon.

He wasn’t nestled anywhere on the bookcase, and three days’ worth of dirty dishes kept him off the counter. Maybe he’d turned himself into a squirrel and gotten trounced by Mrs. Maple’s cat again. The last bout had left him with a tattered tail, a bruised ego, and a blood oath claiming right of vengeance. I looked forward to the inevitable rematch.

A sigh came from the floor in front of the couch.

“What the hell?” I said.

“Don’t ask,” the dragon moaned. “How bad is it?”

I picked him up off the carpet. “Well, you’re leafy green with reddish stalks. Did you try to turn yourself into rhubarb?”

I rolled him over until I found his face on the underside of the largest leaf.

“That’s better,” he said. “I’ve been staring at the rug since lunch. It’s a good thing that you never clean; I only survived by licking up that spot of salsa from last night.”

“Glad I could help.”

I took him to the kitchenette and cleared a spot for him on the counter amid the clutter. “Now, how did you turn yourself into rhubarb?”

He sniffed. “Well, I wasn’t trying for a vegetable at all, you understand, so I don’t know what could have gone wrong.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I was feeling a little emasculated after last week’s row with the cat—”

“I don’t know if you can be emasculated, can you? Perhaps you felt de-scaled?”

He hates dragon puns.

“Do they enjoy your delightfully witty rapport at the office while you saunter past the cubicles pushing your mail cart?” He didn’t wait for my reply. “I was feeling emasculated after the cat—”

“Fluffy,” I offered.

He pointed a wilted stalk at me. “Do you want to hear how I became a rhubarb or not?” Normally, this is where a little gout of flame would shoot from his nostril and set off the smoke alarm, but apparently being a vegetable had its limitations.

He glared at me, but continued. “I thought I’d transmogrify back into my natural form, but with a little extra panache.”

Now, I don’t understand much about the arcane abilities of dragons, but it seems to revolve around a single word, followed by a lot of lip pulling and inquisitive stares. The word acts as the focal point. He would write it down, or, depending on his current state, I would write it down for him. Then he would read it out loud or mumble it under his breath like a thespian trying to find an emotional connection with his subject. I am pretty sure that most of it was theatrical dragon baloney.

“So, what was the word?”

“Charred,” he said. “Like a charred steak, or burnt meat—that kind of thing. A scentual ode to dragons.”

“Scentual is not a word.”

“It should be,” he said.

“Anyway, what went wrong? Did you get distracted by a salad or something at the last second?”

“Don’t be daft, you jackass.”

I threw my hands up in surrender. “No need to get bent out of shape. Where did you write it down?”

“On the coffee table.”

I carried him all of four steps back into the living room and plunked him down.

“There, by the corner.”

I examined his scribbling in the dust and then dug my phone out of my pocket.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Just a sec...”

He rustled his leaves at me. “Come on now, what is it?”

“Well, you wanted to be a charred dragon, and you are.”

He cocked his leafy face to the side. “I don’t understand,” he said.

“The word you wanted is c-h-a-r-r-e-d, not c-h-a-r-d.”

“Well, what’s a chard then?”

“Here,” I said. “I think I found your cousin.” I turned my phone to him and showed him a picture of some chard, the vegetable, with its reddish stalks and green leaves. “But at least you got part of it right, you do seem to be a little singed around the edges.”

“Oh, for Pete’s—”

“Pete’s Dragon?” I couldn’t resist.

I think he tried to leap at me. But instead, he wobbled a little, fell forward, and screamed something about murder into the tabletop while I laughed uncontrollably from the couch.

“Are you about done?” he finally asked when he was able to roll himself over. “Go get a pen and paper so I can undo this.”

It didn’t take long to get him sorted back out into his usual scaly form, but it was minus the intended panache. The word for this, in case you are wondering, is: dragon. Nothing fancy. You would think it would be something to inspire terror, like Dragon the Mighty, Lord of Flames, or even his own name (which he refuses to use). Back home, every dragon’s name is unique, but apparently, here his name is quite common, and according to him, it would be demeaning to be lumped in with common humans. I figure him for a Carl, or maybe even a Herb.

So, in the end, I wrote ‘dragon’ on the notepad on the fridge and propped him up on the floor. He mouthed the word, and even though he’d done it a hundred times before, it still required flailing his leaves about like a head of cabbage gone mad.

“Get on with it already,” I said, but it was nearly over.

The slender stalks of chard lengthened into limbs and a tail, and the singed leaves multiplied and spread, becoming hard green scales. When he was finished, he stood around the same height as me, give or take a foot, depending on how he chose to coil his neck. He claimed he liked to slouch down to fit in with us humans, but I suspected it was because he kept banging his head on the doorway.

He shook out his scales. “What’s for dinner?”

“Not salad,” I said. “And we’ll have to eat later. I need to get cleaned up before we go and fix your other mess.”

I don’t think he heard me. His head was already buried in the fridge.

READ PART 2 - The Problem with Petticoats