I'm helping a small dragon pack a suitcase. This isn't as strange as it sounds. In this parallel Earth, dragons aren't mythical at all, but a reptilian race from another world, with an advanced but rigid culture.

How rigid? When they first met humans they refused to think mammals could be people--so they captured some and made them pets and guard dogs.

In revenge, humans captured dragons and found that without their culture to support their sense of superiority they went into shock and lost their identities. Just as they had enslaved humans, dragons became slaves, pets, guard dogs... Humans even bred them as fighters and eventually used them against their own kind!

But at last--generations later--the two species have tired of fighting and accepted each other as people.

My dragon friend is one of the first free dragons on Earth. Raised by a human family, she's reptilian in form, but rather human-minded.

Now she's ready to go out and see the world on her own terms, explore her dragon-nature too.

I help the dragon pack her socks... though how she gets them on over her big green chicken feet, I dunno. Or why. Do dragonclaws need socks?

NEXT MORNING

• The sad history of dragon/human exploitation is clearly borrowed from Jack Vance's black comedy The Dragon Masters (from its ambiguous title on down. Are the dragons the mastered or masters? Or both?)
• An alien raised human-style = yesterday I came out to my friend Zooop about my having environmental illness. Most of the stuff humans love and want is toxic to me, so not only do most external rewards fail to motivate me, I have to be on perpetual alert around you... How exhausting you humans are!
• Dragon physically but human culturally: the dream suggests I truly am physically different but emotionally rather human--after all, it's what I know. But to be healthy in a body with basically nonhuman needs, I must adjust my self-image and psyche not closer to the human norm, but further away! I need to face my full difference; I'm still only half-aware of it, and keep trying to deny what I have learned. Still trying to be human. Such delusions have a cost!

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