Sitting at her small round table in the middle of an empty room, Sally sat pondering the story she was yet to write. Her short blonde hair lay dead against her thin neck. The room lacked any inspiration but she found it liberating to be influenced by nothing. The rectangular loose papers in front of her lay on the circular table lifelessly. It was stained not with ink, but a drop of ginger ale. She started to describe everything she did in her head.

Gingerly, (get the pun?) I traced the outline of the stain.

That was just one of the many thoughts littering her mind. She licked her finger tasting the soap she had recently washed her hands with. She then proceeded to leaf through her blank papers for the irony and paused on a page. She then pretended to examine some of the invisible squiggles that emanated from the smooth white surface. She soon got bored of this and clumsily dropped everything she held in her hands leaving a mess of still blank papers.

She looked out the one lonely window the room had and noticed a tiny little eye peeking in at her. Hovering just outside was the smallest dragon with the most amazing baby pink coloured scales. But the wings! They were twice the size of its body and looked angel-like without the feathers.

Sally opened the window and let the gecko-like dragon step onto the window ledge onto its needle thin legs and pinpoint claws. The dragon’s body was the size of a highlighter, its head a pencil, and its tail the same length as its body and head put together. It jumped onto her curious hand and licked her. She wouldn’t have even known that it had licked her if not for the heat of its tongue.

This was to be her little dragon. When a dragon licks a person it means they’ve chosen that person for something. No-one knows what though.

Sally decided to give the dragon, not knowing its gender, a name.

“Hello Pinq spelt with a ‘q’ but pronounced as a k.”

After a slight pause in thought she frowned and said, “why me?”

Pinq, having just found its way to her round table, had just decided to show off its talent for making different shapes with its fire. Sally supposed that this was the way this dragon greeted people, if it ever did greet anyone.

Dragons couldn’t speak and were quite rare to find but once one found their person, life was certainly different. Each dragon had their own way of communicating with their chosen person. Some even used charades as their form of communication.

So far Sally couldn’t figure out how this dragon communicated. She looked hard at the dragon that was having fun blowing hot bursts of flame into different shapes. After a few minutes of hard staring she slowly began to recognise the shapes the dragon was breathing out. They were hot bursts of flaming letters.

H – E – L – L – O

She clapped her hands in delight and sat down at her table. She took a piece of paper from the table and was about to start cutting it out when Pinq jumped up, startling her, and started breathing fire at the paper. Sally let go immediately only to find blackened letters on the paper.

What’s your name?

It said. Her fingers edged to her pencil but then stopped herself.

“My name’s Sally.”

Pinq stared at her knowingly and puffed out an exclamation mark which Sally liked to interpret as “nice to meet you.” But was probably more along the lines of “Watch out!” She had accidentally edged her bottom too far forward in her chair and had just dropped to the floor. She looked up dazedly at HER pink dragon and smiled. She had a story to write!