Notebook for Fantastical Observations (3 page)

A drawing of my room after being cleaned by a brownie:

A floor plan of my house showing locations of possible brownie activity:

“The difficulty, of course, is the poison.”

FROM
B
OOK
5: T
HE
W
RATH OF
M
ULGARATH

Sometimes my brother, Ross, and I hunt for bugs in the old woodpile behind the house. You can find huge black beetles, little pill bugs that curl up into pale gray balls, earwigs with scary pincers, and occasionally blind and twisting worms that you can cut in half to make two short ones.

We like to make the bugs fight inside a cup, but they won’t always attack one another, even if you shake them around. Once we took a bucket and gave two click beetles and a worm a place to live, but the next day the click beetles were gone and the worm was dead. Mostly, the fun part is finding and catching the bugs.

I always hoped that we would find something way cool, like a frog or a mouse, and one day
we did find something—a lizard. It was black, but when it moved, colors shifted along its back the way they do along the surface of oil. My brother slammed both hands over it fast, picked it up, and started running toward the house. Halfway there, he yelled like he got stung by a bee and dropped the little lizard in the grass. I figured it must have bit him, so I looked around for anything I could put between my hands and it. There was an old bucket, half-filled with rainwater, not too far off. Dumping out the water and splashing my sneakers in the process, I ran over to where the lizard was. The black body slithered through the grass as I dropped the bucket over it.

Ross held up his hand. Tiny tooth marks indented the pinkish skin. It didn’t look that bad, but his eyes were all watery and I thought he was going to cry.

“Get something to slide under the bucket,” I said to distract him.

He went into the house and came back a few minutes later with flattened cardboard. We pushed it under the bucket fast and then flipped the whole thing over. I scanned the grass in case it got away and Ross kicked the sides of the bucket to knock it off the ceiling or the walls. Then we pulled off the top.

The little black lizard was in there, looking small and harmless against all that white plastic.

“Cool,” I said.

We brought the bucket inside and I watched the lizard while my brother cleaned out an old fish tank from the basement. He filled the bottom with dirt from outside and taped the lighted top on tight enough so that the lizard couldn’t get out through any of the openings. We dumped the lizard in the tank and watched
it for a couple of minutes. Then Mom called us to do some chore and I didn’t think about the lizard again until that night, when Ross complained that his arm hurt.

I was already in bed, so I turned over and looked at him. His arm was hidden in the sleeve of his pajamas. “Does it hurt real bad?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said, his voice thinning to a whine.

“Where does it hurt?” I asked.

“All over,” he said.

I was unimpressed with that answer. I mean, come on. Shouldn’t he at least know where it hurts? That was the kind of answer I gave when I wanted to stay home from school, but wasn’t sick. I yawned. “See if it feels better in the morning,” I said, then turned over and went to sleep.

I woke up to see my mother sitting on Ross’s mattress. She had him out of his pajama top and I could see thin threads of red and black running up and down his arm. The forearm and hand looked small and wrinkled—shrunken. He was crying and I felt bad and also, pretty scared. I didn’t say anything to him and he didn’t tell Mom about what I’d said the night before.

After she left to take him to the hospital, I took the fish tank outside, dumped out the lizard, and stomped on it until it was mush.

—Gavin G.

ANALYSIS: Even when a dragon is small, its poison can be very potent. The efficacy of the poison increases with the size of the dragon, so it was best the creature was encountered when still small.

—H. B. & T. D.

If I caught this creature:

Here’s what else I know about it:

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Instructions for capturing a small dragon:

Instructions for releasing a small dragon:

A diagram of the terrarium in which I would keep a pet dragon: