Lilly

“So, the avalanche trapped them in the caves for months,” Alex recounted, “They were exploring for another way out when they found my egg.”

“You’re kidding. In a cave-in?”

“I swear, it’s true. Anyway, they’d never seen an egg like that before, so they were trying to figure out what kind of animal it was from. The emergency rations had just run out a week ago, so naturally–”

“Oh, God. They were going to eat you?!” I stopped in my tracks.

“Once they figured out how best to prepare me, yeah. I mean, they figured it would be their last meal, so they wanted make sure it would be a really good one. Naturally, without the proper ingredients, they couldn’t cook me as a deviled egg or anything real fancy–not even a proper omelette. And they didn’t have a big enough pot to boil me or–”

“Um… can we skip to the part where they end up not eating you?” I was getting pretty grossed out.

“Oh. Right. Anyway, they’d finally decided on scrambled, and were trying to crack me open when… they dropped me right into the fire.”

“Into the fire?” I was starting to find this story a little hard to believe…

“Right. And nobody wanted to just stick their hand in there and get burned, so they had to try to roll me out with a ski pole. And then the shell started cracking. They didn’t know what to do, figured either they’d hit it too hard with the pole, or… or the heat from the fire was causing the insides of the egg to expand, and it was going to blow up like a potato in the microwave.” He pulled his hands apart to gesture an explosion.

“Wait. So did you… did you hatch in the fire?”

He nodded. “Confused the hell out of everyone present, I assure you.”

“Wow. Then what?” True or not, I wanted to hear the rest of his story. It certainly was interesting. If a bit unbelievable.

“Another debate.”

“Over what?”

He smiled. “Whether I’d be better medium rare or well done.”

“What!?” I nearly jumped in horror. “They were still going to eat you?”

“I was not a very cute hatchling.”

“But–but couldn’t they see you were an angel? I mean, you have six limbs! Couldn’t they–”

He burst out laughing. “Kidding. Kidding. Like you said, once they counted the limbs, they knew I was something special. Also, I got cuter after I was cleaned up. Anyway… long story short, they grew attached to me while we were all trapped in the cave, couldn’t track down my biological parents, so… they kept me.”

“Okay, now that you’ve admitted to making up part of it–”

“The rest is one hundred percent true, I swear. I just couldn’t resist that punchline.”

“Well, how did you get out, anyway?”

“Oh, I so wish I could tell you. But I doubt you’d believe it anyway.”

“Come on. I want to hear it. How did you get out?”

“We were rescued.”

“That’s it? You made it sound like–”

“Rescued.” He turned around slowly and dramatically. Smiled. “By a dragon.”