Daniel's Den

A Skillet and a Scar

When I got to heaven, Jesus was waiting at the gate like somebody who had been expecting company but still liked the surprise of it.

He looked exactly like every Sunday school picture and nothing like any of them. His eyes were too alive to ever have been painted. His robe moved in a wind I couldn’t feel. And because I am who I am, the first thing I did in paradise was look down and say, “Well, shoot. Do I still have this?”

Jesus’ eyes cut to the cast-iron skillet in my left hand.

I lifted my shirt.

Jesus leaned forward.

“My goodness,” he said. “That’s a terrible scar.”

I said, “You should have seen the paperwork.”

He laughed, which made the leaves on the trees nearby bend toward him.

Then he said, “Tell me what happened.”

And that was when I realized he was asking for the story to be told the way it should have happened, not the way the insurance coded it.

So I said:

“Well, the first time was the dragon.”

Jesus raised one eyebrow.

“It was not a large dragon,” I clarified. “More of a regional dragon. County-level. The sort of dragon that lives behind a Walmart and considers itself underappreciated.”

This particular dragon had moved into the North Georgia mountains during one of those summers when the air hangs over the exposed pink marble like wet laundry. It nested in the quarry outside Jasper, in the city of Tate, and developed a taste for church casseroles, unlocked sheds, and the occasional riding mower. Nobody believed in it at first. People blamed teenagers. Then bears. Then teenagers riding bears, because once a town starts gossiping there is no graceful place for it to stop.

But I knew.

I knew because it stole my poor dead mother’s cast-iron skillet.

There were lines.

I followed them.

I found the dragon at dusk, curled around the stolen skillet, blowing little flames under it and trying to fry potatoes without oil. The smell was tragic. Burned starch. Sulfur. Arrogance.

I said, “You are doing that wrong.”

The dragon opened one golden eye. “I am ancient.”

“You are scorching the potatoes.”

“I have eaten knights.”

“Did eating charred knights for centuries teach you nothing?”

That was how I ended up standing in a marble quarry, wearing jeans and a Pickens High School blue-jean Tuesday CTAE T-shirt, giving a dragon a cooking lesson while it huffed smoke through its nostrils and pretended not to listen.

Everything might have been fine if the skillet had not recognized me.

That is one thing people do not tell you about well-loved cast iron. After three generations, it becomes loyal. When I reached for the handle, the skillet jumped.

The dragon lunged.

I dodged.

The skillet flew.

The dragon sneezed fire.

And somewhere in all that confusion, a shard of enchanted marble split loose from the quarry wall and drew a bright, burning line straight down my middle, slightly curved around my navel because belly buttons carry their own type of enchanted magic. But a lesson in the magic of anatomy is for a future day.

For today’s story, concerning the enchanted marble…

It should have killed me.

It did not, because the skillet landed between me and the worst of the flame, ringing like a church bell.

The dragon froze. I froze. Half the mountain froze.

Then the skillet, still smoking, flipped one perfect potato slice into the air.

The dragon caught it on its tongue.

It chewed.

It blinked.

Then it whispered, “Needs salt.”

That is how peace came to Pickens County.

The dragon returned the mower, two bicycles, and three propane tanks. My mother’s skillet? He totally kept the skillet. In exchange, the Methodist ladies agreed to leave a covered dish at the quarry every third Thursday, and the dragon promised to stop setting off car alarms during choir practice.

The scar healed crooked and dramatic, as if my stomach had signed a treaty with lightning and my belly button had drawn a legal line wanting no part of it.

That was the first time.

Jesus nodded like this was all perfectly reasonable.

“And the second?” he asked.

I sighed.

“The second time was my own fault.”

Years later, I had almost forgotten the scar could still tell stories. It had faded, in no small part, thanks to Black Jamaican castor oil being applied daily. It transformed into one of those things you live around. A pale road. A map line. Proof that once upon a time, I had been ridiculous and brave in equal measure.

Then the dragon came back.

I looked at Jesus, his eyes showing disapproval at my lack of imagination.

I stammered, then corrected myself.

“Not the same dragon… His daughter!”

A sparkle of approval showed in Jesus’ left eye. It gave me the confidence I needed to continue.

She arrived during a rainstorm, tapping one claw against my kitchen window with the anxious expression of somebody holding a problem too large for normal doors.

Behind her, wrapped in a tarp and tied with bungee cords, was an odd collection of cast iron: skillets, pots, and lids that could only be matched through generational fighting.

I opened the window.

She said, “Are you the woman who taught my father potatoes?”

“That depends who’s asking.”

“My name is Magdalene.”

“Of course it was,” Jesus joined in.

Magdalene explained that her father had retired to a warmer cave at the true beginning of the Appalachian Trail, just a giant’s skip away from Pickens High School, and taken up watercolor painting. Unfortunately, before leaving, he had hidden the skillet for safekeeping. Unfortunately again, he had hidden it inside a cursed Civil War cannon. Unfortunately a third time, a historical society had found the cannon and planned to fire it at the Fourth of July celebration.

“With the skillet inside?” I asked.

“With the skillet inside.”

“You understand that would ruin the seasoning.”

“I was told you would comprehend the true danger.”

So I went.

That is the part of the story where, if I had been wiser, I would have called somebody. A sheriff. A priest. A metallurgist. But some troubles arrive wearing your name, and there is no committee for them.

The cannon sat in the town square under a bunting of red, white, and blue. Children had sticky hands. Men in khaki shorts discussed fuses with the confidence of people who had never met consequences. The rain had stopped, but the sky still looked undecided.

I could feel the skillet inside the cannon.

Not hear it. Feel it.

A pulse.

A memory.

A stubborn little hum.

I climbed the rope barrier.

Someone yelled, “Ma’am!”

I yelled back, “This is a cookware emergency!”

By then Magdalene had landed on the courthouse roof and was trying to look like a weather vane. She was bad at it. Weather vanes do not usually tremble, or sneeze.

I reached into the cannon.

The fuse sparked.

People screamed.

The cannon woke up.

And the old scar on my belly, the one from the quarry, lit up like it remembered being a doorway.

That was when I understood. The marble shard had not only wounded me. It had marked me. It had made me, somehow, the only living person who could touch dragonfire and not be immediately turned into a cautionary tale.

So I grabbed the skillet.

The cannon fired.

The world went white.

For one second, I was inside the sound of every church bell that had ever rung.

Then the old scar opened.

Not like an injury.

Like a zipper in the universe.

The blast went through me and out the old wound, up into the clouds, where it burst into a rain of harmless sparks over the town square. Children cheered because they thought it was fireworks. Adults crossed themselves. One man fainted into the funnel cake table.

I was left standing there with my shirt smoking, the skillet in both hands, and a brand-new scar laid right over the first one, darker and rougher, like heaven had underlined the original sentence.

Magdalene dropped from the roof and bowed her long neck.

“You saved us,” she said.

I looked at the skillet. Not cracked. Not warped. Perfectly seasoned.

I said, “Somebody owes me dinner.”

That night, the dragons made potato tacos.

They were terrible.

But they tried.

When I finished telling it, Jesus was quiet for a moment.

Then he smiled at the scar like it was not ugly at all. Like it was a road he recognized.

“So,” he said, “dragonfire twice?”

“Apparently.”

“And you still kept the skillet?”

“Lord, I am not wasteful.”

He laughed again, and this time I laughed too.

Then he touched the scar, very gently, and it no longer looked like damage.

It looked like a story that had survived being true.

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