Als ich ein Kind war...

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; for a child I was, and set free to live so. Now I am a man, and though I have left much that is childish to my past, still that child lives, and he remains my inner self. For my self has not changed, or abandoned that which it is, but most naturally clung to its substance, willing not to venture, to endeavor, fearing to be less than it has always been, even at the cusp of being more.

So it is that I still think of whales as dragons, rather than thinking of dragons as mythical creations invented after some Chinese fisherman had seen a whale. I still believe the dragons came first. They are the older brother. That they are gone now is only proof that they were the earlier species, the progenitor. It is from dragons that all huge things come - elephants, serpents, sharks, horses, whales. The dragon is the father of them all. they slipped through his teeth like alligator children when he first plunged into the water to swim for the pleasure of it. 

Imagine the sight - a huge plumed shape trailing fire, rocketing into the water that explodes with a volcano of steam. The beast goes down but still the surface roils, a battle of shattering heat and incarnated impenetrable damp swimming and gushing its way out in circles. For a moment there is boiling and then, when the circles of steam have spread a carcass crowns, its newborn head licking the air. It would be a wooly head, the lion would come first. Swimming a cat swim he would soon be followed by a bobbing boar or bear, then a mammoth that would shoot up and knock them all aside. Soon the water would be a mass of kicking animals too young to have their full strength all snorting and braying, trying to pull nostrils free from the water. All the biggest would drown, of course. The only truly huge creatures to survive would be those that could live in the water - the whales, giant squids, and rays the size of corporate jets. The mammoths would be the last of the huge mammals to sink, but the small animals would escape flailing reptilian tails and flailing trunks as terrible lizards sank. They would dot the water, swimming out in circles until they were a staggered cast of confetti. They make it to land of course, on all the sides.

Other creatures, the rodents, insects, they were here already, but the beasts born from dragons, they would come to rule. They are the beasts that, when you approach, frighten you without turning their heads. They still breathe the dragon air. Their flanks disperse the dragon power like an amphibian's expiration. They are the rhinoceroses and snow leopards. They are the animals that are still waiting for their father to come back. 

I think one day he will. He'll swim up from the ocean trenches, the dark cracks into the underworld, where he has spent millenia in play. He'll gather the smaller dragons from the waves, his great face swollen, waterlogged into horrible magnitude, and he'll rise into the air before plunging back to earth to reclaim his own.