“Other stories tell how I eat innocent newborns, how I’m ten feet tall, how I breathe fire and have great dragon wings. None of these are wholly accurate. I don’t have dragon wings, I don’t breathe fire, I’m only eight feet tall and I’ve never eaten a newborn that didn’t have it coming. My name is Mevolent. What’s yours?”

“I’m just me – half a family, no awareness whatsoever about style, or what’s in and what’s out. I’m not like the lizards. I don’t really even know how I’m supposed to be with a guy that I’m attracted to. I’ve never been a game player. I don’t know how to be coy… or sexy… or whatever. I have no finesse.”

“I don’t tell him about how I have to leave my family organism, break out firmly and finally. I don’t tell him that I’m a parasite, and I’m ruining them. That my functionality is tearing them to pieces.”

“...if the spell was off, I’d have my heart eaten before I could turn around.”“Don’t you want your heart eaten?” asked the fire. [...]“Naturally I don’t,” Sophie answered.”

“Here’s something I bet you don’t know: every time someone writes a story about a dragon a real dragon dies. Something about seeing and being seen something about mirrors that old tune about how a photograph can take your whole soul. At the end of this poem I’m going to go out like electricity in an ice storm. I’ve made peace with it.”

“We think that behind that steel door of resistance there’s a dragon breathing fire; if we open the door we think we’ll be devoured. So often, we open the door, and as someone once said ‘we don’t find a fire breathing dragon, we find a gerbil in drag.”