The fly took off.
Suzy squealed and jumped back. Jeff tried to swat it with his hand. He lost it for a moment. Then he saw it again, walking up the window. In one fluid movement, Suzy lifted the cup, stepped forward, and slapped it against the window.
“Did you get it!? Did it get away?” Jeff was dancing.
“Calm down. Yeah, I got it. Can you see it through the cup at all?”
“No. Why did you use a paper cup? Now we can’t even see it.”
Suzy pursed her lips. “Here. Get a piece of paper. We’ll slide it up,” she waved one-handed at the cup and window, “and then you can put it in a glass cup.”
Jeff leapt over to his backpack, still sitting with his shoes by the front door. He whipped out a notebook, ripped out a page and thrust it out to Suzy. She held it flat against the window under the cup, then began to slide it up.
“This feels—” Suzy began, then yelped.
The cup had caught on fire.
Suzy yanked her hand back, sending the flaming cup tumbling through the air. Jeff’s eyes bugged out as it landed on the carpet.
“Put it out!” Suzy screamed.
“With what?!” Jeff spun frantically, looking for an extinguisher.
“Just stamp it with your foot!”
“YOU stamp it!” He yelled back. He picked up a couch cushion. It was creamy white. “Ahhhh!” he war-cried.
He stamped it out with his foot.
A few minutes later, as Jeff vacuumed up debris, his mind was churning: It was green. It had wings and a tail. It breathed FIRE – how else to explain the cup?
What else could it be… but a dragon?
Some small part of him thought there had to be a more logical explanation, but he pushed that down as he pictured himself catching the dragon, raising it, showing it off, now puppy-sized, now horse-sized, now HUGE, to the kids at school. No one, he thought as he pulled the rug over to cover the burn mark, No one could pretend owning a dragon wasn’t awesome.
Jeff straightened up and looked around the room.
He was going to catch that fly.
“Hey, are you going over to Nacho’s house tonight?” Suzy called from the kitchen. “‘Cause Jenny and Karen are coming over, so you need to go somewhere else.”
“Yeah, maybe I’ll do something with Nacho…” Jeff said. His mind was racing. He needed to catch the fly, but in some way where he would come off manly and impressive in front of Suzy’s friends.
If only it were a big dragon.
Was there any plausible chain of events that would end with him striding through the door, shirtless, a sheen of sweat on his manly chest, maybe a trickle of blood running down his cheek from an artful cut on his forehead, maybe trailing Nacho, who’d be laughing at something he had just said? He’d see his sister’s friends sitting there, and a look of surprise would cross his face – a confident, masculine look of surprise – and Jenny would blush prettily at the sight of him and look away. But then she’d glance back with a coy little smile...
“Yeah,” he sighed dreamily. “Nacho and uh, we’ll do something.”
Suzy poked her head into the room to scowl at him. “At HIS house. You’ll do something at his house.”
“Well, Suz, I’ve gotta catch that fly first before I go anywhere. What if that little dragon got stuck somewhere in the house and decided to burn its way out again? It could burn the whole house down! Plus, I just really want to show it to everyone.”
“Yeah,” Suzy said, “The DRAGON? I don’t know...”
“What don’t you know?”
“Was it really THAT different from a normal fly?”
“It had a tail! And talons! And it breathed fire!”
“Well, what if it was just, like, the window made a glare or something, like the magnifying glass, and that was what burned the cup.”
“Windows don’t do that! If windows made glares that set things on fire, every house in America would have burned down by now.” Jeff had gotten loud.
“Why every house in America?”
“‘Cause every house in America has windows!”
“Well yes, but so do all the houses in other countries.”
“Not in Africa. Or in other poor countries.”
They argued this point until Suzy lost interest and walked to her room with a “Whatever,” and Jeff walked back into the living room to look for the fly.
To his dismay, he found it.
The fly was dead, lying in a fold of the curtain on the windowsill.
He scrambled for the magnifying glass, which he had dropped on the couch, and peered through it. The fly looked smaller and drier than it had a few minutes ago, and the color was less vibrant. But the shape, the spikiness, and the tail still seemed very dragonish.
“Dang it,” Jeff muttered. He stared for a long moment. Suzy came back down from her room, saw him staring, and joined him.
“So weird,” she breathed, squinting into the magnifying glass.
“You know, we can’t show it breathing fire now,” Jeff mused. “But it’s still pretty cool, right? We could still show it to people. I wish it weren’t all curled up like that…” He pulled a pen out of his backpack and inched it toward the little corpse. Suzy squirmed and made a half-hearted protest as Jeff’s pen tip went under one wing and gently rolled the creature over.
“Hmm,” Jeff said, “I was trying to open up its wings, but it’s all clenched together. Let’s get some pins.” Suzy hissed in revulsion and hurried out of the room.
“What?” Jeff said. “It’s just like a bug collection. You pin down the wings so you can see it
