It had taken Harlod quite a while to realize he was different from the others. The pups of a species sometimes just don’t put the evidence together even if it stacks high against them. Harlod had compiled quite the stack for his age already. At recess the kids would play dragon-throw where a small squishy ball with ribbons tied to it would be thrown back and forth in a circle. Every time you were thrown the ball, someone said, “Dragon!” followed by another word, like “Plutonium!” and the catcher had to say the two words in reverse before they caught the ball. Failure to do so meant you became a dragon and had to play the game on all fours. Harlod was always the first to become a dragon. One kid would yell something like, “Dragon! Shareholders!” and loft a tailing rainbow at Harlod, and Harlod with his advanced field of vision would certainly see the ball coming in his direction, and so he would say exactly what the kid had said, but swap the order of the two words. It sounded something like this: “QA! Jjjakii! OoooggyHH! HhhPm!” Then he’d catch the ball perfectly. Verbal attacks would then rain from all directions as Harlod was called a “dragon” and told to kneel on all fours, confused but submissive to the pressure of his peers. Some kid would then pull the ball from out of Harlod, wipe it off on their sleeve, and throw the ball to the next person with a “Dragon! Isomorphic!”

The first day of the school year, the teacher had asked the students to please find their seat which had their name on it. All the kids were rushing around in the ecstasy of youth, discovering the social hierarchy of the classroom as they hunted for their name. Harlod’s mother had got herself caught on the cooling rack (again) and so Harlod’s second mother had to drive him to school, but her appendages hadn’t dried out in time and she kept getting stuck to the steering wheel. So Harlod arrived to a class that morning, on his first day in school, with every student seated and ready to stare owl faced at him as he entered the classroom. Harlod didn’t have the pre-pubescent lottery high of guessing and checking one seat after the next for his name, his seat was the only empty one, rooted right in the center of a doughnut of bobbing kids. The teacher was a guppy with telescopes for eyes, and she smiled at Harlod like she was hungry and lost inside her mind maze. Harlod began squeezing his way down the aisles of desks like a taxi cab made of whales might navigate Manhattan. By the time he got to his desk, he had snared five children in his glutinous extremities. They were suspended like starfish in a tide-pool lollipop. The name tag on his desk read, “Harold.” The teacher hadn’t found the exit to the maze.

Harlod was off in the corner of the playground, after having recently been turned into a dragon by the other kids. He was eating a couple bird he’d caught. He’d put the eyeballs aside for the end because he enjoyed the salty flavour they left on his tongues. He was thinking about how the desperate pulse of one of the bird’s hearts was just like how his second mother looked when she marched through the door every night. That made him laugh thinking that his second mother would be so tiny like a heart and inside a dead bird. At least inside the dead bird he could watch her and keep her from running away every evening, keep her from making Harlod’s mother cry. It made him sad and angry when his mother cried and he didn’t know why. He thought about how his mother had once –

“Watcha doin?”

Harlod seized up like an electric rod had been planted on his membrane, he’d been lost in thought and not been looking at attending to his rear eye holes.

“Ewuh, is that any good?” The girl was making a puckered face at Harlod’s catch, as if she’d just seen two dead birds. It was Riley. Harlod liked Riley because she never called him a dragon when he caught the ball and said the two words in the reverse order. Riley was often a dragon also. Harlod told her that it was really tasty, but he preferred it when his second mother caught them because she knew how to keep them warmer longer: “TTTtttttuu! Jjff—fff-Lllklkkkkuu! U! U! U! Uui!” Riley stared at him and Harlod detected confusion. Maybe she hadn’t tried birds before, he thought. Imagine having never tried birds, he thought next. Harlod picked up a bird eyeball with a newly birthed appendage and offered it to Riley: “GGGGGGGGGGGGGGGgggg. Iskkkjjyy! Rik! RR!” Riley saw the eyeball coming towards her and stepped back. Then Harlod thought that maybe she needed a little help – yes! – maybe just like his mother had helped him to feed before he’d learned to form his own mouth parts. Harlod was excited because this meant Riley and him might become best friends. Something in Harlod’s movement told Riley to get away from him but her feet wouldn’t lift anymore when she tried asking them to. A green film came down over her face like a plastic bag filled with toothpaste. Harlod smiled.