Court of Common Pleas
While Sarah was out of town, my son and I had to do the grocery shopping ourselves. I was supposed to buy copious amounts of fresh vegetables because Sarah thought neither our son nor I ate enough of them. My plan had been to impress her with our vegetable consumption while she was away. Instead, I cheated on her.
In fact, I’d cheated on Sarah early in our relationship. Before we’d bought a house. Before our son. We’d never talked about it, but I was pretty sure she knew. It didn’t seem like anything I’d ever do again, so I’d eliminated it from our possible futures.
My son and I ran into Carla at the supermarket, of course. The exact place Sarah told us to go while she was away. Carla used to date a friend of mine in high school, and I’d always had a thing for her. She still had the same shaggy hair and faded clothes and downturned mouth. In the fluorescent lights of the produce section, she was like a prism refracting new possibilities. We flirted, right next to the vegetables I didn’t end up buying, in a way that I didn’t know I was capable of, while my son clutched my leg with both hands. It was kind of exhilarating. But I should have left it there. A quick adrenaline spike. I shouldn’t have accepted her offer for my son and me to come over. She claimed she had some pictures from the old days when she and I were in high school. Before mobile phones and social media. Her husband and children were out of town, so Carla let my son play her son’s PlayStation while she and I went into her room and did the thing that people do when they cheat on their spouses.
We both regretted it. We said we’d never contact each other again.
Unfortunately, I never got to see her pictures of me when I was young and perfect and not a total mess. When I hadn’t yet become someone who cheats. When I still thought I was going to turn out amazing. I would have liked to see that version of me again.
My son and I continued with our day and never talked about it. We got ice cream and went to the movies and then we ordered pizza for a late dinner, and I thought I’d buried the experience with better experiences.
Then the next day, he told Sarah all about it over the phone while I sat there listening, pretending that everything he was saying wasn’t bothering me. At one point he looked at me, and I even gave him a thumbs up. When they were done talking, Sarah asked me not to be there when she got home.
“My mom will come to the house at 11 a.m. on the day I am due to return,” Sarah said. “She will not say a word to you. She will not make eye contact. Have a bag packed and walk out. Don’t come back.” We both breathed into the void separating us.
“I’m getting a dragon.” She said it exactly the same way as the woman in the TV commercial who said she got a dragon because her husband had cheated on her, and she was pleased to discover it happened to be 20% off in honor of Valentine’s Day. That was it. Sarah wanted to keep me away from her so badly she was willing to pay an exorbitant price to have an immensely huge fire-breathing creature block me from returning to our home.
It was going to be insanely hard to win her back.
I didn’t tell my son things had gotten pretty fucked because of his choice of topic during his conversation with his mom. He was only seven, but he was so smart that it made me doubt my role in his creation. We had two more nights to spend together. I let him stay up as late as he wanted. I played any video game he suggested. We ate ice cream out of the pint. It was the most fun I’d had in years.
And then I did exactly what Sarah told me to do.
Over the next few days, I saw dragons everywhere, perched on houses wherever I went. Normally, in the course of my regular life, before I’d gone to Carla’s house, I had ignored them. They were someone else’s bad luck. They didn’t have anything to do with me. But now each one was a reminder that I had ruined not just my life, but also the lives of two people I cared for deeply.
There was even a nasty looking one outside the window of my hotel. It was huddled on top of a two-story home, its tail flicking across the fence line. It yawned once, and fire danced in its throat. I stopped opening my curtains.
I couldn’t believe that this version of me sitting in a dark hotel room crying into washcloths that smelled like ancient lube was in the same timeline as the guy who’d been okay going home with Carla. I was unable to recall how I justified it. How I went through with it. That guy in the supermarket with his son clutching his legs, desperate to pull his father out of the situation, was as indecipherable to me as a government form.
I have always thought about life in terms of timelines. Every decision you made created a new path. No matter how big or small. There are millions of versions of me extending into the cosmos. Branching and splitting over a decision whether to eat potato chips, or choosing between two movies. From my point of view, every possible outcome is played fully to the end. How was life after I decided to eat those potato chips? Did anything change after I chose the horror movie over the comedy? Decisions are easier to make when you know that every possible variation will eventually occur.
There’s a timeline where my son and I didn’t go to Carla’s house. The two of us probably bought vegetables and attempted to eat them all. Then, when Sarah returned home, we all cuddled together on the couch and let Sarah choose the movie. But in the timeline where I now found myself, I’d been outcast. I had to figure out if there was a way to jump from where I was, to where I wanted to be. In a quantum sense. Could I leave this timeline and return to another?
The answer, of course, was: not a damn chance. The only way forward was through a dragon.
There were many tales of people who had made their way past a dragon to be reunited with the person they had wronged. They probably lived happily ever after. The rest were piles of ash on the sidewalk. You could sometimes see a dragon taking to the sky after successfully dispatching the object of his very expensive ire. Hiring a dragon could sometimes signify finality. In this case, when a dragon was hired, the one being targeted went about his sad little existence and never came back. But in other cases, the dragon could signify that there was still a chance. That all you had to do with your balding, doughy, middle-aged body was get past a fire-breathing dragon and, maybe, you would be forgiven.
Otherwise, it was the ash on the sidewalk option.
I decided in my completely dark hotel room that the quiet little life we’d built was worth fighting for. I put on the shirt Sarah had bought me for Christmas that seemed a little out of season with its red-and-green palette, along with the necklace my son had made for me out of shell-shaped pasta noodles, and I returned to our home. I still thought of it as our home. A home we could continue to make together. A home where I had changed the timbre and the resonance, but I was going to set it right.
But holy shit, the dragon Sarah rented was intimidating even from the freeway. And it was the only one in our whole neighborhood. He cradled our house like an egg, his wings settled on the ground but still bristling with energy. His mean little eyes scanned the street, and smoke puffed from his nose.
I parked at the end of the block, hoping that the walk would give me a little more time to feel brave. I’d heard the trick to getting past a dragon was to hide your fear. But he recognized me before I got to our driveway.
“Halt,” the dragon said in a booming voice. His claws gripped the roof in the exact spot where Sarah and I had sat drinking wine on the night we’d moved in. We’d climbed out of our bedroom window and lay there watching the stars and the occasional dragon soaring past. We hadn’t talked or congratulated ourselves on buying a house or anything. We’d just sat there, experiencing it together. It was sort of wonderful.
The green dragon craned his reptilian head down to me and sniffed the air. Then something that sounded like a laugh belched out of him with a plume of smoke.
“Oh wow, peasant,” he said finally. “Mistress Sarah thought you might show up, but I didn’t believe it. Did you not see me up here?”
“I saw you,” I said, but my words were nothing compared to the weight of the dragon.
“My orders are to turn you into a pitiful pile of ash the moment you step into the yard. Then Mistress Sarah wants to sweep you up and mail you to Mistress Carla with a note that says: ‘He's all yours.’”
I knew this was the way it worked, but it hurt to hear aloud. That Sarah had chosen the burning death option for me. But I was already burning on the inside with remorse and self-hatred and, actually, who fucking cares? No one was going to feel sorry for me after what I did. No one was going to take pity. Maybe I wouldn’t even feel the dragon’s fire.
“We have a son,” I said. “We have a history.” I stepped onto the curb.
“From what I gather, peasant, you forgot both of those things in the moment, didn’t you? And I wouldn’t come any closer if I were you.”
“Yes,” I said. “I sometimes only think about myself. It’s true. I see myself as a good person, but I’m not actually always a good person. And I ignore those things about me. But I don’t want to do that anymore.”
“Lucky you! Because those things are hard to do when you are dead.” The dragon laughed again.
Tears had bivouacked behind my eyeballs. I wanted to cry so badly like I’d done all those days and nights alone in the hotel room. But I wasn’t here to get sympathy. This time, right here on the curb in front of my house, I wanted to cry with anger. I was shaking with it. I wanted to cry for Sarah and my son and everything we’d lost that we’d never get back.
“Can you pass along a message for me?” I said.
“Fuck no. I’m not your steward. This is the Court of Common Pleas. I will hear you out, but I will not let you pass.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“Leave. Don’t come back. It’s incredibly easy, peasant.”
“It doesn’t feel right,” I said. “To go forward without my family.”
“Doesn’t feel right, does it?” Fire jumped from his nostrils. “You don’t get to decide what feels right anymore.”
Then the door opened and there was my son. A huge grin on his face.
“Dad! How cool is Tony?”
I didn’t think Tony was cool at all.
“Not as cool as you,” the dragon said to my son.
My son had a magical way of bringing people, and I guess murderous lizards, together.
“Mom said he was all your fault.”
“Are you thanking me?” I said. I looked up at the dragon and tried to see him as my son saw him. He was quite majestic. I’d never been this close to one before.
I grinned at my son, and he grinned back at me. Then he ran across the yard to give me a hug. It felt so good to have him in my arms. We had always spent a lot of time together, but we rarely embraced like that. I vowed to do it more in whatever time I had left.
The dragon stared at us with his dark eyes, and I thought I saw my son and me reflected in there. With my son in my arms, I realized maybe this would be all the time I had left. That this was the last hug. Which was why I didn’t want to let go.
“I miss you,” I said.
“Why don’t you come home?”
“Tony is going to kill me if I come one step closer.”
My son pulled away from me and shook his head. “No, he isn’t.”
“I’m afraid I will, my little knight,” breathed the dragon. But I sensed something I hadn’t noticed before. A small hesitation. Like maybe there was a chance.
“I’ll talk to him,” my son said. “I don’t think Tony could actually kill someone.”
“I’ve killed a lot of people,” the dragon said. “Sorry to disappoint you, but I quite enjoy it.”
“Let’s not push our luck,” I said. “Did your mom say anything?”
My son nodded. “Oh, right. She said she still loves you, but she never wants to see you again.”
“Even if I get past the dragon?”
“Dad. You can’t get past the dragon.”
It stung somewhere deep inside me that he didn’t believe I could do it. But then he took my hand in both of his and said, “Not without our help.”
I liked the sound of that.
My son turned and ran back into the house.
“You’re a decent dad,” the dragon said. “Not the best or anything. I wouldn’t get it on a mug. But decent. It’s too bad you’re going to be dead soon.”
“Sarah still loves me.”
“Of course she does.” The dragon shook his head. “If she didn’t, she wouldn’t bother hiring me and she wouldn’t spend any time wishing ill upon you.”
“That makes sense,” I said.
I thought about dying. How the only thing tethering me to this world were the things I felt were unfinished. Perhaps when I was younger, it didn’t seem so bad to die one day in the future. It was abstract. And there was a lot of shit to do before then. But now, dying felt like abandonment. I’d be leaving my son behind without a dad. I’d be leaving Sarah with no answers. No closure. The pointlessness of it all overwhelmed me. Did it matter if I cheated? I believed, very strongly, that it did. But why? Why did it matter? It wasn’t the meaning of life I was after. It was the why. Because after I died, there would be no answer to the question of why I had been here at all. The universe would swallow me up, and then in the blink of an eye, everyone else would be swallowed up too. And then the world would end for me. And I would be inconsequential in all that had come to pass.
The dragon studied me, its massive wings shuttering. “I see a look in your eye. Like you’re planning to take a step forward. If you think I’m not going to incinerate you because you’re brave or something, think again. This I can promise you.”
“There’s a chance you won’t?”
“Let’s say there was. So what? You’re the vassal here. You’re subservient to me. You can’t change my mind. So nothing you do or say will have any bearing on what I do.”
“But it’s possible you won’t incinerate me?”
“It’s really damn small. I’d say less than one percent chance.”
I thought of all the multiple versions of me that had split over and over and over again with all of the decisions of my life. Millions of them never reached the point where I was standing now. But millions of them had. There was an army standing behind me. And we would all probably be vanquished in a moment. But was it possible that there was one? Just one version of me that got to walk into our house and sit down with Sarah and tell her how sorry I was. That I would stop ignoring the ugly side of myself. That I would share everything with her. That we could still be the couple who climbed onto the roof together and watched the sky.
Any of the millions of me could be the one to make it past the dragon, to make amends. We only needed one.
I wished that one me the best of all possible luck. Then I took a step forward.
Josh Denslow is the author of the collection Not Everyone Is Special (7.13 Books), the novel Super Normal (Stillhouse Press), and the upcoming collection Magic Can't Save Us (UNO Press). His most recent short stories have appeared in Electric Literature's The Commuter, The Rumpus, and Short Story, Long, among others. He is the Email Marketing Manager for Bookshop.org, and he has read and edited for SmokeLong Quarterly for over a decade. He currently lives in Barcelona.