SmokeLong Quarterly

Today’s Fridge Flash is from Evie McClinch, who narrated this piece during one of her many imaginative play sessions. Her mom transcribed it as originally told, read it back to her, and solicited her edits. Evie is a true editor in the making!

 

By Evie McClinch

There was a girl named Maya and she was too small to climb over the wall in her country. She tried to climb the wall, but it was too thick with bricks and poison thorns as big as a big giant head, and so she kept falling and scraped her knee up really bad. She needed a Band-Aid.

“Dragons, please come to me,” she said. “If dragons were real, they could fly me over this wall.” She sent a whisper out to the sky because that’s where whispers go. “I know you’re out there, even if they say you aren’t real.” Whisper. Whisper. Whisper. All the whispers she made out there.

Then a great huge wind came and blew her hair and when she opened her eyes, the queen of all the dragons was there and said, “climb on my back, and I will fly you across this wall, OK? OK.” She was the queen of all the dragons, and had dragon friends in all the colors, like purple and red and purple. Dragons loved humans and tried to help when they could, but sometimes there are just too many humans and not enough dragons sometimes.

Maya climbed on the back of this dragon and her big wings and they flew away to being free in a new land with leafy trees and the ocean and candy.

Maya opened her eyes and was so happy. “I wish dragons were really real, though,” she said. “I will keep pretending they are.”

 

Evie McClinch just turned five years old and is excited to be a kindergartener. She has been narrating tall tales since she was two years old, and is inspired to tell stories when she is playacting with dolls, figurines (preferably vinyl dinosaurs and dragons), and materials (string, blocks, Legos, boxes). Her mom has done her best to transcribe the stories as Evie creates them, and then reads them aloud to Evie for editorial input and revision (“let’s say this instead, mommy”). Evie aspires to be a paleontologist-biologist-dragonologist and tree-planter, and her goal for kindergarten is to “work on my letters so I can write down my own stories myself.”