Ceiling Wax by Don Taco

 Ceiling Wax

copyright 2025 by Don Taco

  There was a book when I was a child. In the book was a stegosaurus. If the stegosaurus stood still, you couldn't see it against the mottled red sandstone cliffs of the desert country. So no one knew it was there. Best camouflage ever. The child in the book discovered the stegosaurus because the child could not stand still. He stumbled into it by accident, running wild in the summer sun. As it turned out, the stegosaurus was an herbivore, and was friendly. So was the child. They became friends. They had adventures. It was never clear how or why they could speak to each other. And, I also a child, never thought to question that when I read the book.

  I also as a child, could not stand still. It is a marvel that I read as much as I did, when I also spent so much time tearing around the desert bumping into things. Our mother, concerned that we might be too bookish, in spite of all six of us being hyperactive, would only allow us to check out seven books each on our trip to the library every Saturday. Every Saturday. Why seven? Who knows? We secretly got around that by reading each other's choices as well as our own. We were devouring books, as well as bounding around hoping to bump into a stegosaurus.

  I loved that story. I knew there were marvelous and unexplained things out there, waiting for us to demonstrate that we were friendly, polite, and could be trusted. And that's why I wasn't the least bit surprised when I met the dragon.

  The dragon wasn't fierce. Or unfriendly. Or greedy. Or any of the horrid negative traits the old tales all seem to assign to dragons. He welcomed my company. Looking back, as an adult, when I remember him, I wonder sometimes if I was just too young and insensitive to even begin to grasp how much that company, that friendship, meant to him. I also, at that age, never wondered how we could converse with each other. Did the dragon speak English? I guess so.

  He could fly, though, and so we went places. Met people. Giants. Ogres. Pirates. Had adventures. It was grand. It was even better than knowing a stegosaurus, if you can imagine that.

  And then one day, I discovered girls. Now, I know I was pre-pubescent, but there were inklings. And I began to carry their books home from school, and other frivolously pre-romantic cliches that I, like so many others of my generation, learned from the old movies that were featured every weekend evening on the television. There was one particular little red-haired girl in the neighborhood, yes, just like the comic strip, that occupied most of my attention. Her name was Sharon Blood. I'm not making this up. My life has been so consistently weird that I rarely need to make stuff up.

  And I never saw the dragon again. I blame myself.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Inspired by

 "In a land called Hana-Li."