Good Skipper

You wander a quiet stretch of beach with your small dragon companion at your heels, her paws leaving tiny commas in the damp sand. The lake is calm today, its surface a sheet of brushed silver, perfect for skipping stones. You crouch near the waterline and begin your search.

You select a smooth basalt pebble first – dark, dense, and promising. It plunks once and sinks without ceremony.

Next comes a pale quartzite disc, cool and glassy. Two skips, maybe three, before it disappears.

A speckled granite chip.

A soft-edged limestone oval.

A flat slate shard.

None perform reliably better than the others. The dragon watches each attempt with bright, unblinking interest, her tail flicking like a metronome.

Eventually you find it – a good skipper, the perfect stone.

It’s flat. Oval enough to avoid being round. Just hefty enough to feel certain in your palm, but not heavy.

It’s a stone made for flight.

You turn it over in your hands, reluctant. Once you throw it, it will be gone to the deep places, lost among the quiet shifting sands. You hold it a little tighter, thumb tracing its smooth shape.

The dragon flutters her wings. Then she bonks the stone with her nose, hard enough that you almost drop it. You laugh and pull back, but she bonks it again, nose aimed with insistence.

It’s clear she has an opinion about this.

So you take a breath, step to the water’s edge, and let the stone fly.

It leaps.

And leaps again.

And continues in a long, miraculous chain of skips, each one a tiny heartbeat against the surface of the water. You try to count the skips, but the dragon darts past you in a blur of warm scales and splashes straight into the lake.

She disappears beneath the surface. The water calms.

A moment later the dragon bursts back up, triumphant, the perfect stone clutched gently in her mouth. She paddles toward you with a pleased little trill, as if to say: Some things are meant to be enjoyed more than once.

You kneel to take the stone, and the dragon presses her damp forehead against your palm before letting go.