The Origami Dragon And Other Tales

by C. H. Aalberry

The Origami Dragon

  This story begins with my brother spending my life savings on a remote control helicopter. Don’t ask me how he got his hands on my money, or why I couldn’t get it back, because that’s a story for another day. Let’s just say he bought this helicopter, and take the story from there.

  My brother goes through many phases of passion in his life, some more successful than others. He loved that helicopter from the moment he saw it in the store, and there was no power on this earth to stop him buying it- not even common sense. He wasn’t a skilled pilot. He crashed that poor helicopter into every tree in the park, into the ground, into a rubbish bin and once even into my face. Here, look, I have the scar to prove it. He spent his every free moment either flying that thing or repairing it, and it was lucky for that he was a better mechanic than he was a pilot.

  He loved that helicopter for a week, but after he saw the dragon he never even looked at a helicopter again.

  The thing about my brother is that he either obsesses over things or ignores them entirely. Like the time when he was five, and I bought him a book about dinosaurs for his birthday. He learnt everything there was to know about those creatures in two weeks, and I do mean everything: types, diets, colours and scientific names. I thought I was on to a good thing with the animal theme, so for Christmas, I bought him a book about the African animals: elephants, leopards and the like. He opened the book, paged through it quickly and put it away, more interested in lunch than lions.

  Two months later I asked him if he had liked the book. I had seen the way he had looked at it, so I was expecting him to say he hadn’t opened it more than once. He surprised me by telling me that he had enjoyed it immensely, and grabbed it off his shelf to show me what he had done with it. He gave me the book, and I opened it curiously, unsure of what I would see. I laughed when I saw what was on the pages: my brother had drawn dinosaurs on every single page, artfully working them into the existing pictures so that they were eating elephants, chasing lions or grazing alongside zebra. I asked him why he had drawn in the book, he shrugged and said he had run out of scrap paper. To this day, he can tell you how many bones an allosaurus had in its neck, but he can’t tell the difference between a lion and a leopard. True story.

  So you can see how buying presents for my brother is pretty hit-or-miss. He ignored the ant farm, but fell in love with the chemistry kit. He adores the juggling set but hates steam engines and painting. He enjoys board games, but only when we make the rules up as we go along. Three years ago I bought him an origami calendar, the type with a small animal that could be made every day. I bought it because it was cheap and I had no better ideas, but it was a real hit. He finished the whole thing in a week and then we both forgot all about it. Neither he nor I ever thought it would completely change his life.

  This story took place in the old-fashioned house just down the road from you, where the spry old lady lived alone but for her ancient dog. The old lady –you must have seen her once or twice- was a hundred and three, but cheerful and fit for her age, passing the time gardening and pottering around in her house. The lady’s husband had died a year before this story, and her world had gradually shrunk until the garden walls became the borders of her life. She lived, as far as anyone on the street knew, on the charity of meals-on-wheels and groceries brought round by her niece every fortnight. Her niece was the only relative who made a habit of visiting her, as the old lady had no children and only a small family.

  The old lady and her pet lived small, quiet lives of classical music, dusty books and decades of treasured memories. They always look quite happy working in the garden, growing herbs and tiny red flowers and large white roses. It was a peaceful life, but their peace was rudely disrupted when my brother’s helicopter flew wildly over the wall and landed in a rose bush, sending petals everywhere.

  To this day my brother still claims that the helicopter was caught up in the insubstantial but whirling hands of a passing air elemental and thrown over the wall. I’ll bet you a dollar that he simply flew it too high into the air, lost control, and sent it wheeling across the sky into the old lady’s garden. Regardless of the cause, my brother was hardly going to lose his new pride and joy, so he chased it across the road and climbed the small wall into the garden after it. He dropped down into the garden and was greeted by the old lady, who was as astonished to see him as you might expect. She was holding his downed chopper by its tail and wearing a bemused expression.

  It was lucky for my brother that the old lady didn’t get a lot of visitors, and she was happy to see a new face. My brother apologised at length for the interruption, but the old woman said to forget about it. Her husband had planted the roses during one of his rare moments of gardening fervour, but she had been pruning them anyway. Then she invited my brother in for a cup of tea.

  He said yes, of course, because he can be quite charming when the occasion calls for it.

  They walked into the house, and it immediately occurred to my brother that the living room alone was wider than the whole house. The roof was also higher than should have been possible, with ceilings five metres above his head. The room was decorated with bright flowers and pictures of the woman’s family and friends. My brother couldn’t help but notice that some of the friends had three heads, or five eyes, or were blue with long white wings.

  He was about to comment on this when he saw a creature run from under a chair and behind a table. He recognised it at once: a paper Tyrannosaurus rex, and saw that it was playfully chasing a paper unicorn. The pair noticed his gaze and froze in fear. He reached down towards them, and they took off to hide behind a bookcase. Curious, my brother began to look around for more animals and found them hiding behind the pictures, under the furniture and cowering next to vases. My brother stood dead still, and a few of the braver animals peeked out at him.

  The old lady noticed my brother staring at the little creatures, and smiled.

  “Them? So you can see them, can you dear? Only those of a magical persuasion can see such things. My niece can’t, poor thing. My husband made them, years ago. Most of them, anyway.”

  She poured out three cups of tea, one of which she put on the floor for the dog. The cups were solid gold. Each cup was in a saucer carved from a single enormous pearl. The old lady put a packet of biscuits on the table, and my brother took one. He was too distracted by the living origami to notice that he was drinking out of a thousand dollars’ worth of teacup.

  “The meals on wheels people are so good, they always bring me biscuits when they drop the food off. They always say how my husband was good to them, so…” she carried on, but my brother was too distracted to listen.

  You see, the woman’s husband had been a magician of some talent in his time, and had taken an occasional interest in origami over the years. When he retired he had begun to mix his hobby with his profession, experimenting with paper enchantments of all kinds. Over the years, he had made the horde of paper swans, lions, horses, gorillas and dinosaurs which now lived and played around the living room furniture. The lady called to the animals, and a couple came and wandered around her ankles as if looking for food.

  My brother reached down again, and the animals scrambled to get away from him. One of the smaller dinosaurs tripped over, falling on to its side. My brother picked it up gently and placed it on the long table at the centre of the room. The small creature panicked and ran away along the table. My brother reached out to catch it, but a screech from above him made him look up.

  “That’s not one of my husband’s animals,” the old lady said unhappily.

  Her husband had only shown one person, his nephew, how to make living origami. It had ended so badly that the elderly magician had hidden his notebooks away and stolen an hour of his nephew’s memories to stop the knowledge being spread around. The only remaining evidence from that day was a colossal, mean red dragon that still haunted the house. It was this dragon that my brother had heard, and he ducked as he saw it flying straight at his head,
paper fire in its mouth and madness in its eyes. My brother threw his hands above his head to protect himself as it roared past.

  The dragon’s body was made from thick red paper patterned with jagged swirls of silver. Its head and talons were bright and golden paper, and its eyes were glowing and angry green. It was as long as a man’s arm, but agile in the air. The dragon descended with a loud screech and swooped on to the small dinosaur, knocking it off its balance and on to its side. The dinosaur didn’t stand a chance; the dragon tore its prey into tiny ribbons of coloured paper, ripping and tearing with obvious delight. My brother raced to stop the attack, but he was too slow and too late to save the little dinosaur.

  The dragon burst into the air with a roar and clap of wings, circling above my brother’s head and taunting him as he jumped up to grab at it. It teased my brother until he stopped jumping and started looking for something to throw.

  “It can’t be caught, dear,” said the old woman, concerned at my brother’s antics.

  The old dog waddled up and sat watching my brother fume. It shared his hatred of the red dragon, which made a habit of biting the poor dog’s tail. The dog sat down, wagged its tail and watched my brother with interest.

  “I’m not planning on catching it,” he said angrily.

  He pulled his remote controlled chopper out of his jacket pocket and readied it for flight. The red dragon was circling above his head, screaming down taunts at him and doing loops of victory. It squawked in surprise as the chopper raced into the air, keen for aerial combat. The chopper swept towards the red paper dragon, but the beast was faster than the machine. The dragon dropped into an elegant spiral, brushing past my brother’s head and then back into the air. My brother spun the chopper back towards the dragon and prepared to charge it, but when the dragon saw what the machine was doing, it opened its golden mouth and blew out a perfect paper fireball that hit the chopper and exploded into real flames.

  My brother watched in disbelief as his chopper fell to the ground with a sad crash of molten plastic and broken pieces.

  “I can still fix-” he began.

  He was interrupted when the remains of the chopper exploded into a puff of orange smoke. It was clear that there was nothing that even he could do, except maybe give the poor thing a decent burial.

  Another thing about my brother is that he doesn’t take well to defeat. He plays every video game on its hardest setting, and finishes every level and bonus level regardless of how long it takes him. This means that he has only finished about five games in his whole life, but he had played them to death. My brother narrowed his eyes; the red origami dragon was a challenge that could not be ignored.

  So he gathered up the larger bits of his chopper and placed them in his pocket, and then he sat down on the couch.

  “Right,” he said.

  My brother had found himself in a house beset with magic, fighting an enemy made from coloured paper for the peace of mind of an old woman and her dog. What does a normal person do when faced with such an unusual situation? What would you do? Call a friend, a priest, a scientist? Film it for YouTube? Run, and don’t stop until you are safely at home under your bedcovers? You won’t be astounded that my brother did none of these.

  “I can make an origami dragon of my own,” he said to the old lady.

  She tutted to herself and wandered off to find a plastic bag for what was left of the paper dinosaur.

  “I can do it,” he said to the dog, which seemed to believe him and barked encouragement.

  My brother spent the rest of the day listening to the old lady tell stories about her husband. Eventually she thanked him for listening, and told him that she was going to take a nap. My brother said he would show himself out, but left the door unlocked and walked back into the house as soon as he knew the old lady was asleep. He walked into the living room and found the dog waiting for him.

  “Lead on, good hound!” he said, and the dog lead him to a pile of dusty books lying on a low shelf.

  It pointed at the books with its nose, sneezing to emphasise its point. My brother looked though the books until he found a couple that looked right, thanked the dog and walked home to study.

  You might ask how origami can be magic, but I say that even ordinary origami is magic. You take an unassuming piece of paper, fold it like this and that and then again and squash this and pull that, fold a beak into the neck and, look, you have a swan. Or you keep going, cutting and folding and folding and pulling until you have a dragon: amazing! It’s a dragon! How did that happen? A dragon, made from folding a piece of paper! How is that even possible? My brother says that bringing the thing to life is pretty easy compared to folding it properly. You take the model, singing gently to it, and fold it through itself and into a tiny ball of blue energy and then pull it apart again. Voila, the animal lives!

  It isn’t quite that simple, of course. The trick is in what paper you use, and what is written on the paper. My brother started with some easy incarnations, written in blue ink on white paper. His first attempt was a swan that flew out the window and disappeared forever. After that, he was a lot more careful. He worked for a month before he was ready, writing and folding every day and late into the night. One day he went down to the shops, bought a thin sheet of green paper, a thick sheet of blue paper, a sheet of sharp silver paper and a whole bunch of calligraphy pens. Then he locked himself in his room and went to work.

  It took him three long days just for the writing. He showed it to me when he was done. The patterns were beautiful, long strings of words written in a long-dead language that branched chaotically across the paper. The words made sentences, and the sentences made a story, but to this day my brother won’t tell me what the story was about. I can tell you that the words and patterns changed each time I blinked. It took him seven straight hours to fold the origami model, using knives and scissors, rulers and a glass of water. He gave the dragon silver claws and silver teeth to fight with, and a silver tail to be proud of. It was a beautiful creature, but it wasn’t the only thing he made that night.

  You see, the thing about my brother is that he is cunning. Once I gave him a hug, and at the same time stuck a ‘kick me!’ sign on his back. He was young and gullible then, so the sign stayed on his back for a whole hour before he noticed it. I knew he would try for revenge, so I waited to see what he would do. Sure enough, the next day I checked my back in the mirror and saw a sign that said ‘kick me quick!’. I laughed at my brother’s simple strategy, pulled the sign off and put my jacket on. But, like I said, my brother is cunning. The first sign was a diversion: there was a second sign hidden on the inside of my jacket and prepared with double-sided tape so that it would stick to my shirt inside the jacket. I went to school and told all my friends about my silly young brother who tried to stick a sign on my back, oblivious to the sign in my jacket. The day warmed up, and I took the jacket off to reveal the sign that was now stuck to my shirt. I spent the rest of the day wondering what my friends were laughing at. True story.

  A paper dragon has no chance against such a mind as that.

  The next time my brother visited the old lady he took his origami creatures with him. The old lady was happy to see him, as always, and the dog barked in greeting.

  “Look what I made,” he said, showing the old woman.

  “Very pretty,” the old lady said, and went off to make tea.

  My brother put the origami dragon on the table and spoke softly to it. It flapped its wings slowly, eager for battle. The remaining paper animals peered cautiously out from behind the furniture, wondering what the fuss was about. My brother’s dragon breathed blue flames into the air, and the dinosaurs disappeared again.

  The blue dragon roared a challenge, shaking the old lady’s pictures in their glass frames and echoing around the house. The blue dragon took to the air, roaring again, calling out for its red adversary, keen for a fight. It circled above my brother’s head, a deadly paper predator with silver claws and cold blue eyes.
r />   The red dragon refused to come out of hiding.

  “He knows you want to fight him dear, and he won’t come out. My husband tried something similar once, but the red dragon is a coward and knows every good hiding place in this house.”

  My brother shook his head patiently. He had planned for this. He pulled a second model out of his pocket and sat it in the palm of his hand. It was a tiny green mockingbird the size of his thumb, with ruby red eyes and a tiny yellow beak. He breathed gently on to it, and its wings opened. He smiled down at his creation, and it pecked his finger rudely. It took off into the air, circled around his head and landed in the old woman’s hair. She smiled as it nested in her hair and brushed it gently aside.

  “You know what to do!” my brother whispered to it, and it took off at speed through the house, taunting and calling out to the red dragon.

  “You too, my beautiful blue dragon,” he said, and the blue dragon flew up to the chandelier above them.

  The little green bird landed on a paper gorilla and whispered in its ear. The gorilla pointed with one long arm, and the mockingbird took off again. The origami models knew where the dragon hid, but they would never go near him for fear of being attacked. My brother had made the mockingbird to be brave, and it was determined to find the red dragon. My brother also made the bird to be rude, and its taunts made the red-and-gold dragon angry. The dragon leapt out from behind a vase in the library, screeching and roaring as it tried to catch the little mockingbird. The little bird was agile enough to dodge the attack, and fast enough to stay just in front of the dragon as it made its way back to my brother. It flew as fast as it could, teasing the red dragon continuously as they raced through the air. The red dragon bit down on the air in frustration, always just a second behind the bird.

  They entered the main hall, and the red dragon roared in anger as it saw my brother.

  “Now!” yelled my brother, shutting one of the room’s three doors.

  The dog shut the second one, and the two bravest paper dinosaurs slammed the last door shut.

  The mockingbird flew straight up my brother’s sleeve and into safety. The blue dragon dropped from the ceiling and towards the red dragon. The red dragon blew a paper fireball immediately, but it bounced off the blue dragon’s paper skin without bursting into fire. The red tried again, and this time the blue answered with a fireball of its own. The two paper fireballs met in mid-air and exploded into streamers of yellow ribbons. The two dragons circled, charged, backed off, circled again. The two beasts seemed equally matched, and each time they clashed both would tear at each other, ripping off tiny pieces of paper that floated down to the watchers below.

  Everyone and everything in the room watched the fight, transfixed on the outcome. The old lady, her dog, and my brother stood side by side with their faces turned towards the air. The origami animals waited in their hiding places, too cautious to emerge completely.

  The combatants were equally matched, and it seemed like the fight was doomed to end in the total destruction of both dragons. Then the tiny mockingbird leapt out of my brother’s sleeve and flew like an arrow straight for the red dragon’s face. The dragon roared and caught the bird in its mouth. It bit down hard and threw the bird away with a roar of glee. The distraction was enough for the blue dragon to gain height on the red, dropping down on to it.

  The mockingbird fell quickly, but my brother managed to catch it gently and tuck it safely in his pocket. The two dragons were not so lucky, both shooting past my brother and plummeting towards the ground. The blue dragon managed to pull up at the last minute, skimming across the ground and back into the air. The red dragon wasn’t so lucky, hitting the ground with a soft thud.

  The last thing you need to know about my brother is that he believes in justice. There was a bully in his school, a huge boy who loved to torment his classmates. The bully was charming to adults, and his parents were generous donors to the school, so the teachers left him alone. He used to steal people’s lunch, eat a bite and throw the rest away. He would steal kids’ lunch money, and then flush it down the toilet. He was a jerk, a relentless jerk. One day he tried to steal a kid’s lunch, and my brother stepped in to stop him. The bully weighed three times more than my brother, so the physical confrontation was short, the bully victorious. The bully broke my brother’s arm (just a mistake, Miss, I promise!) and hurt his pride. Three days later, during a crowded science class, the teacher was called out of the room to answer a very important phone call. When she got back, the bully was no longer in the room. He was later found chained to the school flagpole, covered in yellow paint and with a bucket on his head. Twenty kids had been in the same room as the bully, but apparently no-one had seen anything at all (really, Miss, would we lie to you?). Even the bully wouldn’t say what happened, who was responsible, or why. The bully left the school soon after that to be homeschooled. My brother swore he had nothing to do with it, but I never did get my bucket back. True story.

  My brother watched with pride and quiet pleasure as the red dragon hit the ground and rolled awkwardly. One of its wings was badly bent, and its head was tattered and torn. It could have ended then, with the red dragon caught and put in a cage. It could have ended peacefully, but the paper remembers. The lions and dinosaurs came out from behind the furniture, the squirrels and unicorns crawled out from their nooks and crannies. A hundred paper mouths opened, a hundred paper bodies ran forward. The lions pounced, the unicorns lowered their horns and the gorillas beat their chests, each eager for revenge. The red dragon didn’t stand a chance.

  And let that be a lesson to paper dragons everywhere. True story.