“You’re not real! You’re not real!” Gabriel kept repeating through his tears. The little dragon playfully blew a few smoke rings on his nose.
“Look at this! So, these don’t exist either, do they?”
“No!” the little boy sniffed grumpily. Raul puffed a tiny flame out.
“And this?”
“No, that doesn’t exist either! There is no such thing as dragons!”
“But you can see me and talk to me. The teacher talked to me and most of the children talked to me as well. How could they do that if I don’t exist?”
“I don’t know…” Gabriel’s fear seemed to have subsided a little. “But if you do exist, you won’t eat me, will you?”
“Perish the thought! I would never eat you. Come on, I’ll take you back to school. The others must be very worried by now.”
The little boy hesitantly stepped out of the door of the house and stood facing the dragon. Raul lay down on the ground and waved his head towards his back.
“Fancy flying around a bit?”
Gabriel’s eyes lit up. Obviously, he wanted to fly! He sat on Raul’s back between the two giant wings and held on to the dragon’s neck.
“We’ll go slow, so that you don’t fall!”” “The city was beautiful from up there. The cars really did look like tiny beetles, and the people resembled tiny scuttling ants from above. Raul descended between the buildings so that Gabriel could see better. But then children and adults walking in the street started screaming.
“A boy… flying!”
“Look, there’s a little boy in the air!”
“Look Mum, that little boy is riding a dragon!” A little girl tugged at her mum’s sweater, but the adults could not see Raul at all. To them, it seemed as if Gabriel was just flying around on his own.
There was a huge commotion. Soon the sound of a siren pierced the air.
“What’s that? Oh no! Raul! That’s a fire truck. It must have come for us!” Gabriel shouted in the confusion. The dragon took a sharp turn, but the driver of the fire truck skilfully followed the manoeuvre.
They were almost back at the school, but the truck with its siren blaring trailed close behind.
“Slow down, boy! We’ll get you down, don’t worry!” Shouted one of the firefighters, who had climbed out onto the roof of the fire engine. ” ““I’m fine, Thank you!” Gabriel called back laughing and held on even tighter to the dragon’s neck. The school building was already in sight, and in front of it stood the whole class, with the teacher at the front.
Raul landed just as the firefighters came around the corner. Gabriel jumped off the little dragon’s back.
“That was awesome, Miss! We flew around the neighbourhood, and then a fire truck started chasing us, but eventually we managed to ditch them, and then Raul slowed down and…”
He couldn’t finish his sentence because the fire truck, from which three firefighters in full gear jumped out, had stopped next to them with a loud screeching of breaks. They looked left and right in confusion, then one of them turned to the teacher and after a pause said:
“Excuse me, ma’am, but have you seen a little boy flying around here? Ten minutes ago, we received a report of a child in the air, and we followed him for a while, but by the time we arrived he had vanished.”
“I saw something similar, but I thought it was just my imagination running away with me,” responded the teacher with a wink. Meanwhile, the little dragon got close enough to the firefighters to even sniff their helmets, but they didn’t notice him.” “Laughing, Emma wriggled her way forward through the crowd of children and looked straight at the firefighters and proclaimed:
“You must have been imagining things! There are no such things as flying children!”
“But we saw…”
“So how could a small child fly? On the back of a dragon, or what?”
Laughter erupted. The firefighters scratched their heads and climbed back into their fire engine. Meanwhile, the driver had turned off the siren.
“Well, then, it’s a false alarm,” they said and drove off. The teacher looked at the children.
“Now let’s get back to the classroom… Gabriel, I have to call your parents to tell them not to come here because you’ve been found. What an adventure!”
In the safety of the classroom, one of the little boys, who could not see Raul in the morning, asked:
“Miss, does Raul have green and blue scales? And does he have a double tail?”
“Yes!”
“Then I think I can also see him now!”
“Me too!”
“And me, too!” Shouted all the other children, who hadn’t been able to see the dragon in the morning.
“That’s great!” Laughed the teacher. “Now I can show everyone what prehistoric creatures looked like! And, of course, Raul doesn’t have to be afraid of not existing!”” “Raul really enjoyed all the attention from the children. More exciting things had happened to him in one morning than in his whole life up until that point. After all, there really wasn’t anything at the Glass Peak of the Rocky Mountains. But here…
After class, Emma got back into the rolling beetle with her mother, and the little dragon accompanied them all the way home. Emma did not stop talking for the entire journey, as she explained the whole story: the disappearance of Gabriel, the firefighters, the exciting palaeontology lesson. Her mother listened in disbelief.
Before going to bed, Emma ran out into the garden to wish Raul goodnight, who had again settled down for the night in the little wooden cabin in the garden.
“Raul, you’ll stay with us for a while, won’t you? You can sleep here in the garden, and you can come with me everywhere I go, I’ll show you the whole city. I could even fly on your back…”
“Of course, I’m staying. Finally, something is happening to me. And now I know that I really do exist!” replied Raul with a smile.
Emma’s Mum watched her daughter from the kitchen window, standing by the cabin in the garden, talking to someone. Then, suddenly, she saw what looked like greenish blue scales glistening in the sunset.