Jennifer Zhou (15)
Here Be Dragons
When he was six, the boy found an old sketchbook in the attic. It was wrapped in a torn trash bag and stuffed into a box of old mementos—baby clothes and family albums, stuffed toys now encrusted with dirt, keepsakes too nostalgic to discard. The book was in poor condition, the front cover (self-made) bearing a long tear that yawned across the title—Teddy’s Atlas of the World. When he opened it, the dust enameling its brittle pages billowed up in a yellow cloud.
On the first page were colourful crayon markings in a careless child’s scribble, uneven lines flying across the page and running over the edges, smudging, smearing, and eventually resolving themselves into misshapen blobs vaguely resembling the outlines of continents. The coast of England was ringed in giant jagged spikes so that it looked like the maw of some colossal earthen beast. The scribbled label at the top read:
“Here be dragons!”
The next page was a close-up of the maw, with more fictional structures scattered across and labelled with their mythical functions—triangles represented dragon dens, squares Viking villages, circles distant moors where, according to the attached scrawl, “darke mages gather to do their foul bidding!” It was accompanied a small, smudged sketch of a skull.
On and on the maps went—some depicted entire continents (Australia was a plantation for magical herbs, while Antarctica was a frigid wasteland traversed by ancient ice beasts) while others bore pictures of fantastical cities, wobbly dotted lines marking out coiling paths through enchanted rainforests in Peru or settlements of elves on the tip of Malaysia. The boy flipped through, engrossed. At one point the family tabby appeared in the attic—it prowled around him, hissing malevolently at the atlas, but was somewhat placated when he put the book down to scratch it behind its ears.
“Good Cat,” said the boy. Neither he nor his mother had bothered to name the tabby when it turned up on their doorstep, so it was simply referred to as Cat.
Later, at dinner, he asked his mother if she knew who the atlas belonged to.
“What atlas?” She was smiling. He handed her the book, showed her the name on the inside cover, and saw the smile wiped clean off her face.
“Did you know him?” he asked. “Teddy, I mean.”
She was still staring at the name. He thought he could see something shifting behind her eyes, a gradual coldness forming like chips of ice. Then she snapped the book shut.
“No,” she said. “I didn’t know him at all.”
She took the atlas away after that.
When he was eleven, he brought a note home from the principal. It was Father’s Day next week, it said, and all the kids in his year were encouraged to bring their dads to school for Show and Tell, but since the school was aware of the boy’s—unfortunate circumstances—would his mother like to come instead? His mother was still looking for work then, and the house was empty when he got back from school. He put the note on her bedside table and, when ten o’clock passed and she had still not come back, left it there for her to find.
The next day, he came home to find all the lights out and Cat scratching at the door and mewling piteously because no one had remembered to feed it. On the kitchen wall was tacked a list of job classifieds, every one of them now marked with an angry red X, and in the bedroom stood his mother in the dark. She was throwing open the drawers, pulling out the contents and flinging them, frantically, against the wall—her mouth was making a noise somewhere between a sob and a scream, as if she could not decide which was which. Around her bare feet shards of glass lay scattered around her discarded shoes.
“What’s wrong?” His voice sounded small.
And then: “Is this about the note?”
She opened the closet and hurled out the contents. There were piles of possessions on the ground, books and clothing and an embarrassing pile of underwear, all of it strewn haphazardly about and stained with her blood where the glass had cut her feet. She was still making the noise, and her face was dark and swollen with rage, and the boy started crying, and amongst all this—the crash of possessions being thrown about in fury, the boy’s whimpered sobs, the yowling of the cat, the half-sob half-scream jerking its way out of her chest—she wrenched the last drawer out of its socket and a sketchbook fell with a heavy thud onto the ground.
It was the atlas. But someone had slashed sharp scissors across the pages, someone had gouged out the title and cut the maps into ribbons and stabbed again and again into the name written on the inside cover. He picked it up and the pages came to pieces inside his trembling hands, the paper shredded, all the words and pictures and the stenciled cover pulverized, and his mother ran to him and wrenched the book away and grabbed his face in her hands and screamed at him to stop crying, the maps were fake, there were no dragons or elves or fantasy, no fairy tales, there was no one else. There was just them. Just them.
When he was fourteen, the Cat died.
The boy was already in middle school, but his time was rarely spent doing homework and even more rarely entertaining guests. He was not what would commonly be defined as sociable—since he was six he had grown tall and lanky, with wide, accusing eyes like a child’s and a mouth on which a smile could not have physically fit.
By that time, Cat was a geriatric old animal who could no longer muster up the energy to hunt for its own food. As well as his homework and usual chores, the boy was now responsible for buying a bag of tuna-flavoured kibble from the corner deli every night and mashing it into Cat’s bowl. Cat would totter over on its arthritic legs; the boy sat beside the bowl for hours on end, stroking its fur as it ate, chewing and swallowing with visibly painful effort.
On the last day of the term, the day the boy was dismissed late from school, it wandered into the middle of the road and did not quite manage to dodge an oncoming car.
When the boy came home the Cat was not so much a Cat as a bag of blood-matted fur, its legs jerked back at an odd angle, its chest jerking up and down as its pulverized lungs struggled for air. It was already night and the road was dark and deserted; the boy sat with Cat’s head in his lap for a long time. He could not summon up the energy to feel sad; instead, he cradled Cat’s small, soft head in his elbow and pressed his cheek to its scalp. Its mouth, still wheezing with breath, gaped open. Its laboured breath tickled warm against his cheek. The mass of its jagged teeth were speckled with blood, like the maw of some savage beast.
Here be dragons, he thought suddenly.
Then, without thinking at all, he jerked his arm back and snapped Cat’s neck cleanly in half.
He never said anything about the matter to his mother; when she noticed that he had stopped buying kibble, he told her that Cat had run away.
When the boy was eighteen, he got into his first fistfight. He had been losing a lot of sleep lately, lying awake at night thinking about the upcoming final exams he already knew he was going to fail. Frequently, he dreamt that he was rushing at breakneck speed toward some dark and unassailable doorway, waking up in a cold sweat just before he reached it—he didn’t know which was worse, crashing into it or passing through into some great mysterious unknown.
That was what he told the University Counsellor who came to speak to him. He didn’t know why she had even bothered to schedule an appointment—surely she’d been spoken to about him beforehand, warned that he was one of the problem kids—but every Wednesday he found himself returning to her stifling hot office to listen to her deliver the same depressing monologue about his future. She liked to tell him who he was—a “troubled child” from a “turbulent home” (he noticed that she gingerly tiptoed around the subject of his mother)—as if by slapping tags on his problems she could make them go away.
In this particular meeting, she wanted to talk about jobs. Back he came to her airless little office, where she was sat in her chair, armed with a clipboard, like an interrogator waiting for his final testament.
“What are you planning on doing?” she asked, making a note on her clipboard.
He stayed silent. In the background sounded the ticking of the clock on the wall and the low drone of a solitary fan.
“I don’t know,” he replied finally. The collar of his starchy uniform shirt was beginning to stick to his neck with sweat.
“You don’t know.” She raised an eyebrow, clearly trying not to lose her temper. His shirt was suffocating him—he wondered if he might be able to surreptitiously loosen his tie while she was busy jotting away on her irritating little clipboard—but she had looked up again.
“What do you want to do?”
Again the silence festered between them. But this time he was at a loss for what to answer. What did he want to do? He had not the faintest idea of what he should say or think or want (and, indeed, the word “want” seemed very foreign to him), but he had to answer something, because she was raising her eyebrows again, and bending down to scribble on her clipboard, and he was probably going to get detention if he didn’t say something soon.
“Whatever the hell I feel like.”
She inhaled sharply, pretending not to be mortified. It was really unbearably hot, he thought. He had no idea why he had to be subjected to this extended torture week after week. She wrote something down on her clipboard. He thought it probably looked like basket case.
“Well, your father was an artist, right?” she said.
There was a long, ugly pause.
“I have no idea who my father was.”
“Well, that’s what your teacher told me, anyway.” She shuffled her notes uncomfortably. Her pen scratch, scratch, scratched on her clipboard. Had it grown hotter somehow? He reached up to loosen his tie but before his fumbling fingers had even approached the knot she put down her board and said:
“Right, Theodore, the artist. Does that ring a bell? What about—”
A frisson of electricity surged between them. There was something, he thought, something huge that he was missing, because he didn’t know why his heart was suddenly pounding in his chest, and he didn’t know why his tie felt like a noose or why his lungs had shrunk to the size of straws or why he desperately did not want her to finish her sentence.
“—Teddy?”
His mouth opened without noise. For a split second—so quickly that you might have missed it if you blinked—some dark emotion seemed to gape from behind his shocked-white face.
Then he set his mouth into a tight line.
“No,” he said. “I don’t know who that is at all.”
That night, he didn’t sleep a minute. The house was excruciatingly quiet—even his mother had turned off the TV and fallen asleep on the couch, and in the awful silence every noise he made sounded like an explosion.
The next day, a boy in his class made a snide comment about the dark circles under his eyes and, without blinking, the boy punched him as hard as he could in the face.
There was a violent ringing in his ears and he did not hear the other boy cry out in shock, did not see the blood already gushing from his nose, did not feel the retaliating fist connecting with his own cheek. A teacher was sprinting towards them and it was funny how time could slow down, stretch out like some viscous substance, so that the boy stood there for what seemed like an eternity with his cheek smarting and his mouth pulled back into a snarl. It was funny how he already knew he was the one who’d get in trouble, that it was his fault, that no one would ever look sympathetically on the boy with no friends and no father. And it was funny how for some inexplicable reason he thought about home, about the unwashed dishes and the unmade bed, about his mother probably still curled upon the couch watching television, about Cat’s old kibble bowl that no one had bothered to throw out sitting in the corner gathering dust, and finally about the atlas, lying hidden in his mother’s bedroom, a memory too painful to discard. He thought about the cluttered pages, the clumsy scribbles of all the magic and the adventure and the dragons, the clumsy looping handwriting—his father’s handwriting—making everything into something more magical than it really was, and how he had held it in his hands when he was six, utterly engrossed, sitting in the warm attic flipping through the worn pages with his eyes full of wonder.
He’d never finished reading the atlas, he realized. He wondered if among the pages, among the yellowing paper and fading illustrations of faraway lands, he might’ve found a map back to who he was. Who he had been.
Jennifer Zhou is a sophomore currently attending high school in Beijing, although she has previously lived in Australia. She speaks two languages fluently and is learning a third.
Here Be Dragons
When he was six, the boy found an old sketchbook in the attic. It was wrapped in a torn trash bag and stuffed into a box of old mementos—baby clothes and family albums, stuffed toys now encrusted with dirt, keepsakes too nostalgic to discard. The book was in poor condition, the front cover (self-made) bearing a long tear that yawned across the title—Teddy’s Atlas of the World. When he opened it, the dust enameling its brittle pages billowed up in a yellow cloud.
On the first page were colourful crayon markings in a careless child’s scribble, uneven lines flying across the page and running over the edges, smudging, smearing, and eventually resolving themselves into misshapen blobs vaguely resembling the outlines of continents. The coast of England was ringed in giant jagged spikes so that it looked like the maw of some colossal earthen beast. The scribbled label at the top read:
“Here be dragons!”
The next page was a close-up of the maw, with more fictional structures scattered across and labelled with their mythical functions—triangles represented dragon dens, squares Viking villages, circles distant moors where, according to the attached scrawl, “darke mages gather to do their foul bidding!” It was accompanied a small, smudged sketch of a skull.
On and on the maps went—some depicted entire continents (Australia was a plantation for magical herbs, while Antarctica was a frigid wasteland traversed by ancient ice beasts) while others bore pictures of fantastical cities, wobbly dotted lines marking out coiling paths through enchanted rainforests in Peru or settlements of elves on the tip of Malaysia. The boy flipped through, engrossed. At one point the family tabby appeared in the attic—it prowled around him, hissing malevolently at the atlas, but was somewhat placated when he put the book down to scratch it behind its ears.
“Good Cat,” said the boy. Neither he nor his mother had bothered to name the tabby when it turned up on their doorstep, so it was simply referred to as Cat.
Later, at dinner, he asked his mother if she knew who the atlas belonged to.
“What atlas?” She was smiling. He handed her the book, showed her the name on the inside cover, and saw the smile wiped clean off her face.
“Did you know him?” he asked. “Teddy, I mean.”
She was still staring at the name. He thought he could see something shifting behind her eyes, a gradual coldness forming like chips of ice. Then she snapped the book shut.
“No,” she said. “I didn’t know him at all.”
She took the atlas away after that.
When he was eleven, he brought a note home from the principal. It was Father’s Day next week, it said, and all the kids in his year were encouraged to bring their dads to school for Show and Tell, but since the school was aware of the boy’s—unfortunate circumstances—would his mother like to come instead? His mother was still looking for work then, and the house was empty when he got back from school. He put the note on her bedside table and, when ten o’clock passed and she had still not come back, left it there for her to find.
The next day, he came home to find all the lights out and Cat scratching at the door and mewling piteously because no one had remembered to feed it. On the kitchen wall was tacked a list of job classifieds, every one of them now marked with an angry red X, and in the bedroom stood his mother in the dark. She was throwing open the drawers, pulling out the contents and flinging them, frantically, against the wall—her mouth was making a noise somewhere between a sob and a scream, as if she could not decide which was which. Around her bare feet shards of glass lay scattered around her discarded shoes.
“What’s wrong?” His voice sounded small.
And then: “Is this about the note?”
She opened the closet and hurled out the contents. There were piles of possessions on the ground, books and clothing and an embarrassing pile of underwear, all of it strewn haphazardly about and stained with her blood where the glass had cut her feet. She was still making the noise, and her face was dark and swollen with rage, and the boy started crying, and amongst all this—the crash of possessions being thrown about in fury, the boy’s whimpered sobs, the yowling of the cat, the half-sob half-scream jerking its way out of her chest—she wrenched the last drawer out of its socket and a sketchbook fell with a heavy thud onto the ground.
It was the atlas. But someone had slashed sharp scissors across the pages, someone had gouged out the title and cut the maps into ribbons and stabbed again and again into the name written on the inside cover. He picked it up and the pages came to pieces inside his trembling hands, the paper shredded, all the words and pictures and the stenciled cover pulverized, and his mother ran to him and wrenched the book away and grabbed his face in her hands and screamed at him to stop crying, the maps were fake, there were no dragons or elves or fantasy, no fairy tales, there was no one else. There was just them. Just them.
When he was fourteen, the Cat died.
The boy was already in middle school, but his time was rarely spent doing homework and even more rarely entertaining guests. He was not what would commonly be defined as sociable—since he was six he had grown tall and lanky, with wide, accusing eyes like a child’s and a mouth on which a smile could not have physically fit.
By that time, Cat was a geriatric old animal who could no longer muster up the energy to hunt for its own food. As well as his homework and usual chores, the boy was now responsible for buying a bag of tuna-flavoured kibble from the corner deli every night and mashing it into Cat’s bowl. Cat would totter over on its arthritic legs; the boy sat beside the bowl for hours on end, stroking its fur as it ate, chewing and swallowing with visibly painful effort.
On the last day of the term, the day the boy was dismissed late from school, it wandered into the middle of the road and did not quite manage to dodge an oncoming car.
When the boy came home the Cat was not so much a Cat as a bag of blood-matted fur, its legs jerked back at an odd angle, its chest jerking up and down as its pulverized lungs struggled for air. It was already night and the road was dark and deserted; the boy sat with Cat’s head in his lap for a long time. He could not summon up the energy to feel sad; instead, he cradled Cat’s small, soft head in his elbow and pressed his cheek to its scalp. Its mouth, still wheezing with breath, gaped open. Its laboured breath tickled warm against his cheek. The mass of its jagged teeth were speckled with blood, like the maw of some savage beast.
Here be dragons, he thought suddenly.
Then, without thinking at all, he jerked his arm back and snapped Cat’s neck cleanly in half.
He never said anything about the matter to his mother; when she noticed that he had stopped buying kibble, he told her that Cat had run away.
When the boy was eighteen, he got into his first fistfight. He had been losing a lot of sleep lately, lying awake at night thinking about the upcoming final exams he already knew he was going to fail. Frequently, he dreamt that he was rushing at breakneck speed toward some dark and unassailable doorway, waking up in a cold sweat just before he reached it—he didn’t know which was worse, crashing into it or passing through into some great mysterious unknown.
That was what he told the University Counsellor who came to speak to him. He didn’t know why she had even bothered to schedule an appointment—surely she’d been spoken to about him beforehand, warned that he was one of the problem kids—but every Wednesday he found himself returning to her stifling hot office to listen to her deliver the same depressing monologue about his future. She liked to tell him who he was—a “troubled child” from a “turbulent home” (he noticed that she gingerly tiptoed around the subject of his mother)—as if by slapping tags on his problems she could make them go away.
In this particular meeting, she wanted to talk about jobs. Back he came to her airless little office, where she was sat in her chair, armed with a clipboard, like an interrogator waiting for his final testament.
“What are you planning on doing?” she asked, making a note on her clipboard.
He stayed silent. In the background sounded the ticking of the clock on the wall and the low drone of a solitary fan.
“I don’t know,” he replied finally. The collar of his starchy uniform shirt was beginning to stick to his neck with sweat.
“You don’t know.” She raised an eyebrow, clearly trying not to lose her temper. His shirt was suffocating him—he wondered if he might be able to surreptitiously loosen his tie while she was busy jotting away on her irritating little clipboard—but she had looked up again.
“What do you want to do?”
Again the silence festered between them. But this time he was at a loss for what to answer. What did he want to do? He had not the faintest idea of what he should say or think or want (and, indeed, the word “want” seemed very foreign to him), but he had to answer something, because she was raising her eyebrows again, and bending down to scribble on her clipboard, and he was probably going to get detention if he didn’t say something soon.
“Whatever the hell I feel like.”
She inhaled sharply, pretending not to be mortified. It was really unbearably hot, he thought. He had no idea why he had to be subjected to this extended torture week after week. She wrote something down on her clipboard. He thought it probably looked like basket case.
“Well, your father was an artist, right?” she said.
There was a long, ugly pause.
“I have no idea who my father was.”
“Well, that’s what your teacher told me, anyway.” She shuffled her notes uncomfortably. Her pen scratch, scratch, scratched on her clipboard. Had it grown hotter somehow? He reached up to loosen his tie but before his fumbling fingers had even approached the knot she put down her board and said:
“Right, Theodore, the artist. Does that ring a bell? What about—”
A frisson of electricity surged between them. There was something, he thought, something huge that he was missing, because he didn’t know why his heart was suddenly pounding in his chest, and he didn’t know why his tie felt like a noose or why his lungs had shrunk to the size of straws or why he desperately did not want her to finish her sentence.
“—Teddy?”
His mouth opened without noise. For a split second—so quickly that you might have missed it if you blinked—some dark emotion seemed to gape from behind his shocked-white face.
Then he set his mouth into a tight line.
“No,” he said. “I don’t know who that is at all.”
That night, he didn’t sleep a minute. The house was excruciatingly quiet—even his mother had turned off the TV and fallen asleep on the couch, and in the awful silence every noise he made sounded like an explosion.
The next day, a boy in his class made a snide comment about the dark circles under his eyes and, without blinking, the boy punched him as hard as he could in the face.
There was a violent ringing in his ears and he did not hear the other boy cry out in shock, did not see the blood already gushing from his nose, did not feel the retaliating fist connecting with his own cheek. A teacher was sprinting towards them and it was funny how time could slow down, stretch out like some viscous substance, so that the boy stood there for what seemed like an eternity with his cheek smarting and his mouth pulled back into a snarl. It was funny how he already knew he was the one who’d get in trouble, that it was his fault, that no one would ever look sympathetically on the boy with no friends and no father. And it was funny how for some inexplicable reason he thought about home, about the unwashed dishes and the unmade bed, about his mother probably still curled upon the couch watching television, about Cat’s old kibble bowl that no one had bothered to throw out sitting in the corner gathering dust, and finally about the atlas, lying hidden in his mother’s bedroom, a memory too painful to discard. He thought about the cluttered pages, the clumsy scribbles of all the magic and the adventure and the dragons, the clumsy looping handwriting—his father’s handwriting—making everything into something more magical than it really was, and how he had held it in his hands when he was six, utterly engrossed, sitting in the warm attic flipping through the worn pages with his eyes full of wonder.
He’d never finished reading the atlas, he realized. He wondered if among the pages, among the yellowing paper and fading illustrations of faraway lands, he might’ve found a map back to who he was. Who he had been.
Jennifer Zhou is a sophomore currently attending high school in Beijing, although she has previously lived in Australia. She speaks two languages fluently and is learning a third.