Once Upon A Dragon

By Tabitha Ormiston-Smith

A non-themed, cross-genre collection of short fiction, including fantasy, science fiction and horror as well as general fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tabitha Ormiston-Smith
• Release date: Jul 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311223319

Tabitha Ormiston-Smith

Tabitha Ormiston-Smith was born and continues to age. Dividing her time between her houses in Melbourne and the country, she is ably assisted in her editing business and her other endeavours by Ferret, the three-legged bandit.

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Tabitha Ormiston-Smith

Copyright Tabitha Ormiston-Smith 2015

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword

Sophie's Revenge

Professor Tomlinson's Last Experiment

Restless Legs

Perspectives on a Dragon Part I - The Young Prince Lorn and the Dragon's Hoard

Perspectives on a Dragon Part II - Breakfast

Nigel's Holiday

Lifestyle Choice

The Last Dragon

Excuse of the Day

User Pays

The Dragon of Butter

The Real Winner

Acknowledgements

AUTHOR’S FOREWORD

This book has been a long time in the making. I wrote my first few short stories some years ago, but only really started writing short fiction as a regular exercise at the beginning of 2014. Over the eighteen months, I’ve found that I could use it as a kind of laboratory, where I can play with different styles and genres without risking a great big commitment.

Accordingly, Once Upon A Dragon is a bit like a box of mixed chocolates. Some are hard centres, some soft, some more soft than others, and the flavours are various. There is no unifying theme, although four of the stories concern a dragon, viewed from different perspectives over time.

I hope you will enjoy my stories, or at least some of them, and if my work gives you some pleasure, do please consider posting a review.

Tabitha Ormiston-Smith

14 July, 2015

SOPHIE’S REVENGE

Well, okay, I’ll tell you. We’re not supposed to talk about it, that’s why I didn’t want to back at the office. So anyway. It all started back when Sophie Green joined the sales team. That was when Bethany went on maternity leave. Back then Angie Davis was the queen of sales, she’d been there for like ten years or something, it was like selling insurance was her life. She was good at it, I’ll give her that. And she was all buddy-buddy with all the bosses, they’d stop and shoot the breeze in the mornings, she was one of the boys, you know? Good old Ange, they used to say. She’d go out drinking with them on a Friday night and stuff. She was like the quintessential business woman. Power suits every day, hair so straight and sharp it looked like the edges could cut you. Everything about her was sharp, right down to the pointy heels on her stilettos. I never heard her talk about anything personal, it was all work, work, work with her. I don’t think she had much personal life.

I saw it all. No one notices plain old Margaret. I was invisible. Oh, not like magic, I mean I’d get a nod and a ‘G’day Marg’, maybe a wink if they were feeling frisky, but they never looked right at me, you know? I suppose those thousand-dollar-a-day eyes have their own sense of entitlement.

So, Sophie. When Sophie started with us it was like a breath of fresh air. Literally. She was the opposite of Angie. Angie was hard and fast, always standing a bit too close, talking a bit too loud. Everything about Sophie was kind of soft. Soft voice, soft hair, her clothes were always soft-looking fabrics in sort of misty colours. And she always looked so happy, as if the day was this big, shiny present she was going to unwrap.

Everybody liked Sophie, but we didn’t expect her to do all that well in the job. She was so laid-back. Angie would be on the phone going yattata-yattata-yattata like a machine gun, and Sophie would be on the phone too, but she never seemed to talk much, just listen mostly. She’d be sitting there all relaxed, smiling, one hand stroking the leaves of that big, shiny pot plant she had on her desk, and just murmuring something occasionally. She got the sales though, right from the start she did well. I asked her about it once, and all she said was People want to buy insurance, Margaret. You just have to let them.

I loved having Sophie in the sales room. Somehow she just seemed to brighten up the place. Even the air seemed different when she was there. It reminded me of the fernery in the Botanic Gardens, all green and cool and running water in the background. Sometimes if I squinched up my eyes I could almost see it. Even the office plants perked up after she started, no really, a couple of the dead ones even started to put out leaves again.

Well, over a few months Sophie’s figures just got better and better, and it got to the point where they were edging up to Angie’s. Angie never liked Sophie much, but that wasn’t all that surprising, she never liked anyone unless they were an executive or going to buy some insurance.

I think the tipping point for Angie really came with that book business. By this time, quite a few of the bosses had taken to stopping by Sophie’s desk to chat at random times during the day, about various things, personal stuff. I used to hear the most amazing things. Who knew our CEO was into dog breeding? Certainly not me. Or the problems Mr Jacobsen was having with his teenage son? Wow. Sophie always seemed to get him feeling better though. You could practically watch the tension drain out of him as they talked. But then Mr Benjamin turned out to be into detective fiction. And Sophie, of course, was interested in it too, not that I ever knew her not to be interested in something that someone else liked. Anyway, this day Angie had been out to a client’s place and she came back in about two, and there was Sophie nose to nose with Mr B. She was reading out a passage when Angie came in; I still remember it – ‘Here, in a new shrine – in a hall inlaid with precious stones, under a roof supported by pillars of gold – the moon-god was set up and worshipped. Here, on the night when the shrine was completed, Vishnu the Preserver appeared to the three Brahmins in a dream.’

See, what you probably don’t realise is that Mr Benjamin was the office heartthrob. He was some kind of bigwig in marketing, but he was only about thirty and very, very good-looking. Angie had always considered him her personal property, and we all knew better than to spend long talking to him. And there he was, listening transfixed to Sophie reading out this passage from an old, leather-bound book, and gazing at Sophie like she was heaven on a stick. He didn’t even notice Angie.

You read about people going white, but you don’t really see it that often. But Angie did, the colour just drained out of her face and she froze. You could see what she was going to look like when she was old, if that makes sense. She just put her bag down quietly and sat down at her desk, but the expression on her face. I knew there was going to be trouble.

Not that Angie was ever what you could call easy to work with, but from then on she was just hell to be around. Every little thing would set her off in one of her rages. She totally shredded poor little Sam one day, just because she’d brought the mail in late. Right in front of the whole office she ripped into her. I found her in the ladies’ afterwards in a puddle of tears, she was a right old mess, poor little thing. It was pretty low the way Angie went on about her complexion. I went to get her a glass of water and an aspirin, and on my way out I saw Sophie heading for the lav. She’d do that, gravitate to someone that was upset or in trouble. Anyway, she seemed to have done Sam some good when I got back; she was already managing a bit of a smile. The following day when Sam came round with the mail, she gave her a little pot of cream and told her to use it instead of her normal moisturiser. After that, Sam’s skin cleared up like magic. I don’t think it took more than a week, from a face like a volcano erupting to perfect, smooth skin. There weren’t even any scars. You know her, Samantha Benjamin she is now. Ironic, really.

Anyway, Angie got more and more nasty until I just dreaded coming to work in the morning. She’d sit there at her desk staring across at Sophie and muttering to herself. If looks could kill! You could cut the air with a knife. Sophie never seemed to notice though.

And then the calendar was announced. You know that special calendar we get made up every year to send out to the big corporate clients? And each month features one of the top clients? Angie had been doing it for years, everyone thought of it as being her job, but this year they asked Sophie to do it. By that time her sales were topping Angie’s consistently. Angie wasn’t doing so well. I suppose all that staring and raging took away energy from her work.

Angie always used to design the calendar on the computer, but Sophie never liked to have much truck with doing things electronically. She made up this, I think it’s called a dummy, in a big sketchbook. Oh, it was beautiful. I don’t think we’ve had such a nice one before or since. Such a pity... but there, I’m getting ahead of myself. Sophie made up this dummy calendar, it was all soft and romantic, like an old-fashioned scrapbook. She used to work on it in her lunch hour every day. I loved watching it take shape, it was a real work of art.

I remember the day it was finished, everyone came round to see it before it went off to the printers. They were all saying it was the best one we’d ever done. All except Angie, of course. She just banged her drawers and muttered. Sophie wrapped it up in brown paper and took it out to reception for the courier.

We didn’t know anything was wrong until suddenly we lost the Northland General account. They’d had this massive deal where we provided insurance to all their employees at a discount. That client was literally worth millions, and suddenly they’re going to AMP instead. Then, one by one, calls started to come in from other clients, saying there was no October in the calendar. Our calendar. Sophie’s calendar. October was the month that had featured Northland’s founder.

There was a huge argument, of course. Mr Benjamin naturally complained to the printers, and they swore blind they’d printed exactly what we’d given them. They sent back the prototype, and sure enough, the October page had been ripped out. You could still see a little shred of paper