Dragonrider

It’s weirdly easy for me to pinpoint the moment I became a science fiction fan: it was when I discovered the paperback spinner rack in the library. I was in elementary school still, but I was allowed to check out these grown-up books! I remember “I, Robot” catching my eye because of the title, and “2001” because the cover was all stars. I dove deep into Andre Norton and Robert A. Heinlein. By the end of junior high I was working my way through every book Asimov had ever written and picking my reading material based on presence of robots and/or rocket ships on the cover. I hardly remember all the books I devoured. If pre-teen me had only had a Goodreads account! If only Goodreads had existed in 1984!

I digress. There’s a memory from when I was a little older that has always stuck with me. I grew up in a house with no central heating. In the winter we’d staple a blanket over the entrance to the stairs and let the upstairs freeze, but it didn’t really increase the temperature in the living room, where a gas space heater struggled to keep us warm, ticking on and off to its thermostat, which Dad taped to the outside of the heater itself. (We later put a styrofoam box between heater and thermostat in hope for more frequent turning-on. It didn’t work.)

I remember depression, and anxiety. That walking-on-eggshells feeling that an argument could erupt at any second. The house was a mess. We were a mess. We huddled in the same dirty, threadbare patch of carpet, looking at the brown tin slats of the space heater, waiting for its next, too-brief exhale.

It was freezing upstairs, but intolerable downstairs. So I went upstairs. For some reason I had a cardboard box big enough to sit in. We must have gotten some large item in it. Maybe the shop-vac? I curled up inside it for warmth and read my most recent library book: The DragonRiders of Pern. I remember the slippery, fake wetness of the cold sleeping bag, the echo of my movements in my cardboard chamber, and the glorious sunset colors of the novel’s cover.

I realized exactly what I was doing: escaping my life through words. “So this is why they call it escapism,” I thought, feeling warm. Transported. This was when I realized not that I was a science fiction fan, but WHY.

This November, Apple Tree Books invited everyone who took part in their annual “Writer in the Window” promotion to write a poem on the theme of the importance of books. There would be a contest and prizes. This memory was the very first thing to come to me, but I pushed it away. Too small. Too boring and ordinary. I played around with a poem about the books that were most important to me. Maybe the books would be characters, or places. I made a list. Dragonriders of Pern kept drawing my eye.

I gave up and wrote on my first instinct, assuming it would be dismissed out of hand. It wasn’t very good. Just a slice of life. But to my surprise, it won first place:

The heat is out,

My family is jagged—

Slivers of sulk and knives of hate,

Cutting each other,

Bowing to the space heater in the living room.

Mom rocks in a flannel cocoon

Spitting words at us like needles.

I go up to the arctic to crawl

Into a cardboard box. I

Pull my comfort in after–

Flashlight and blanket and I

Fall into words.