Several different species of apes sat in a corner, keeping their distance from the tiger, lion, leopard and other cats on the other side of the enormous room. The apes were chatting in the animal language that had come to them somehow over the last year. Stones precious only to humans were scattered about, and provided a freaky, unnatural light.

A few other animals were hanging around the apes, but mostly just observing with great interest. A beaver was chewing something at the side wall of the ship.

“Wait,” the chimpanzee said. “So you’re saying this whole flood started because of the humans?”

The orangutan nodded. “Yeah, I heard them talking.”

“But I thought they were saving us,” a lemur squeaked.

The orangutan snorted. “Yeah, from themselves. They ticked off God because they were thieves and too violent and …”

“Violence isn’t all bad,” a gibbon interjected.

“Right,” the orangutan agreed, “But their violence is mostly without purpose and they steal from others who deserve it.”

“Sometimes you need to do that for territory rights,” a gorilla said in a deep voice.

“True, but they also don’t take care of their poor and handicapped,” the orangutan finished.

“What’s handicapped?” the gibbon asked.

“You know,” the chimpanzee answered. “Like when you are born without legs or arms.”

“What’s wrong with that?” a python asked. It had been observing quietly from the floor.

“Oh, well, um,” the chimpanzee stuttered.

“He also meant blind animals,” a rhesus monkey said, trying to bail out his friend.

“Hey,” a star-nosed mole squeaked. “I’m blind. What’s wrong with that?”

“Oh, er, nothing,” the rhesus replied.

The mole sniffed. “Eyes don’t do any good when you spend your life burrowing. I use my tentacles to see.” It wriggled the two dozen tentacles on its nose.

“How about penguins? They’re disabled,” the rhesus monkey said.

The chimpanzee scratched his forehead. “How’s that?”

“They have wings,” the rhesus monkey said. “But they can’t fly. So they have a disability.”

Silence as they all considered this.

A coyote broke the silence. “If you don’t have thumbs, are you considered handicapped?”

The apes all looked down at their thumbs.

“Not handicapped, thumb-capped,” a weasel joked.

One of the creatures behind them snickered.

“Anyway,” the orangutan said, trying to get the discussion back on track. “Disabled can be many different things. The humans weren’t treating theirs well, and they made God angry, so He told these humans to make this ship, collect two each of us non-humans, and then the world was flooded.”

The room gasped.

“Every other creature was killed.”

The room gasped again.

“Including my brother and my other brother and my other brother and my sister and other sister and other sister?” a meerkat piped up in an anguished tone. The little mongoose’s eyes were large behind its black mask.

“Yes, all gone,” the orangutan said with pity in its voice.

“And they killed the handicapped humans, too?” the gibbon said.

The orangutan nodded. “Yes, it doesn’t make much sense, but the handicapped were drowned, too.”

“But why punish us animals for something humans did?” the chimpanzee asked.

“And even punish their own human babies,” the orangutan said.

The gibbon nodded. “Yeah, and how come fish and dolphins and sharks get off free? This flood just expands their territory. And I know the flies cheated,” he growled. “I’ve seen more than two of them.”

The rhesus monkey waggled a finger. “You know, on that note this might be a good opportunity to wipe out mosquitoes.”

They all perked up at that.

“All good questions,” the orangutan said. “And then there’s the fact they isolated us from our females so we don’t procreate while we are on this ship.”

“I miss my lady,” the silverback gorilla said mournfully.

“Not me,” a praying mantis said, perching on a nearby wall watching with bulging eyes.

The chimp gave the mantis a look. “Why don’t you miss her?”

The mantis looked a bit sheepish even though the sheep were on another level of the ship. “Well, yes, I love her. I want to have babies with her.”

The chimp looked confused, “And …?

“You know, uh, after we mate, she, um, well, she bites my head off.”

“Oohh!!” the room chorused.

“I mean, yeah, it’s wonderful up until then.”

“Um, yeah, that’s gross, but how come the humans on this ship didn’t have to separate their males from their females?” the gibbon asked, frowning.

“And how come they got to bring their children? There are eight of these humans, but only two each of the rest of us?” the chimpanzee said with anger. “This is all their fault and they have it better than us.”

The gibbon’s lips twisted. “Wait a minute, wait a minute, every future gibbon will be descent of mine? Adam and Eve of the humans?”

“Looks like it,” the orangutan nodded.

“That’s a lot of in-breeding. The kids will have to mate with their brothers and sisters.”

The orangutan shrugged.

“That’s probably why humans are screwed up,” the chimpanzee said with a monkey smile.

Before anything else was said, a raven appeared.

They all looked at it.

“Good news,” it cawed.

“Really?” the orangutan said. “We could use some good news.”

“I was out flying, and I saw something wonderful.”

“And that was?”

“Land! I saw land! I think the flood is finally over!”

There was an eruption of cheers.

“Yay, we can get off this boat!” the gibbon declared.

“But what’s it going to be like out there?” the chimpanzee asked. “We had one hundred days of flooding. Did trees survive?”

“And what will we eat?” the weasel asked. “If we eat meat, we will destroy the entire animal species of whatever we eat.”

“I remember hearing the humans talking about this,” the orangutan said. “They are going to leave the remaining food out from the ship for us until we can repopulate. Somehow their God keeps it fresh.”

“Blech, I don’t like fresh,” a hyena said. “Give me stinky, rotted meat any time.”

The orangutan nodded. “I think you’ll get what you’ve been able to exist on here. And then …”

“I think the cats have been cheating,” the rhesus monkey interrupted, gesturing to the tigers and lions and leopards on the other side of the room.

The orangutan looked up. “What do you mean?”

The rhesus monkey’s eyes were wide. “I think they’ve been secretly hunting.”

“Hunting?” the orangutan asked.

“Yeah, they’re sneaky. I think they got the unicorn and its …”

Before he could continue, the beaver eating near the wood wall interrupted. “Hey guys, I think we have a problem.”

Everyone looked at him. Now they could see he’d been gnawing on the gopher-wood sealed with pitch that made up the wall.

“You’ve been eating our wall?” the chimpanzee asked.

“Well, yeah, um, just snacking” the beaver stuttered. “But we have a problem. A serious one.”

“What’s that?” the orangutan asked.

“The wood. I think termites. They somehow have infested the entire wood of the ship. There aren’t just a male and female. Either they massively bred or their entire population all sneaked onto the ship. The wood is very corroded.”

“So what’s the problem?” the chimp asked.

Suddenly a cracking sound came from the wall.

They all jumped.

That’s when the wall collapsed and a massive flood of water cascaded in.

“God help us,” the raven cried.

Then there was a flash of lightning.

I went there (Nicaragua) hoping to be kidnapped, adopted, and romanced.  I had no intention of going back home until I had been transformed – whatever it would take.  I wish I could say that I was taken by surprise, but even though I was still that same little fish, I only pretended to be stunned by the “plastic castle.”  I came with a plan.  It was all contrived. My parents could not understand why I was so dead set on changing.  They warned me I’d come back too foreign, too far gone to ever find a husband, and begged me not to stay too long.  Every time I got into a relationship, did they feel like I had been captured by dwarves and worry that I’d be whisked away?  Were my boyfriends that strange to them?   I know that when I fell in love in Nicaragua, they thought they’d almost lost me.  But why was the journey I chose so threatening? 
 
I had been truly kidnapped before.  Didn’t they remember the middle-class drop-out with the dideridoo who took my virginity by force?  The one I tried to make into a good guy, so I could marry him and still be chaste.  The one who took the keys when we were on our road trip, and wouldn’t let me call home?  Remember that guy? Remember 48 hours, thinking, “Oh, my God, I have been kidnapped. Oh, my God, I have been kidnapped.”  After staying with him and trying to make him into a good guy, it was not too hard to seduce him then, to let him think I was in for the ride.  Pretending was my only sense of control over the situation . . .  and so I waited.  Until we drove into a public park with picnickers galour and made a run for a pay phone. When the police searched my car and found his drugs and I went to jail. . . .  When my parents thought the drugs were mine and left me in Wisconsin to sort myself out, . . .   didn’t they know that that was when I really became unrecognizable?  They were not my drugs, but they may as well have been.  I felt so dirty, so responsible for the oppression I had suffered under his foreign reign, that I wanted justice for the whole world from that point on . . . and all the tests I gave myself from that point on were testimony to my awakening – to the harsh reality and to the possibility that hides in every shadow and every gasp.  Adventure now coursed through my veins and drove my learning. . . my growth elixir.

When Sarahi came back to the village, everyone knew duendes existed.  Everything about her was different.  Through still strikingly beautiful, her sad, dark eyes searched desperately for something that was not there.  She was disconnected.  She no longer braided her raven hair, but let it hang widely like the bramble that grows at the edge of the cliffs.  She was still a “cachetona” with big, round cheeks that made her look like she had swallowed two small planets, but they blushed, almost scarlet now, with new found life.  She was a wild thing now, not ugly, not savage, but not of this world either.  For the first few months, she didn’t speak.  She just searched with wandering eyes, surveying people’s faces, the landscape, and animals, for something that was now missing – her evasive past, the adventure, the wonder, gone.   No one saw her eat, but she didn’t lose weight either.  Shee seemed to be getting rounder, actually, swelling, transforming into her own world, the sole inhabitant.
 
Sarahi had just walked calmly back into El Guanacaste one day, dragging her feet, smiling at the sound of pebbles scrambling out of her way, after having disappeared for almost a year.  She stank of sweat, earth, and animal musk.  She was embossed with red-green mud that emanated a dark glow.
 
Months before, the town had given up on looking for her, so, of course, her mother and father were overjoyed to see her, but later, her mother said, “I’m not sure if this is my child.  My child was different.”  She looked wistfully out of the window at the strange girl drudging around the patio, whispering to the plants.
 
“What happened to her?” The younger children looked at her imploringly, and the aged woman settled down in a rocker to tell the story.
 
“This way you’ll learn not to go out into the forest alone,” she said, giving the children a stern look.  “Mi hija was beautiful.  She still is . . . but then, she was different, she was different.  She was a normal girl before the day she went out into the forest alone that day . . . The school closed because of a storm warning.  Sarahi finished her chores early, so she went out on the patio to play.  Old Jaime next door saw her talking to herself, but he thought she was probably just playing with imaginary friends.  Jaime is a joker.  He loves Sarahi.  He teased her, “What’s your friend’s name, Sarahi?”
 
Sarahi looked at him and laughed, “It’s a duende.  He brought me a present.”  She held up a little crown made of flowers.
 
Now, the flowers on that crown were flowers one can only find around the crater, the kind that bloom deep blue at night, and there she was with a crown of moonflowers on her little head.  Jaime knows about the duendes. He knows they are dangerous for little girls.  The people say that duendes seduce little girls with gorgeous presents and entice them into the forest.  Then, they don’t let them come back to their homes . . .”
 
The little girls gasped at the thought, but they couldn’t help blushing at the idea of little men bringing them presents.  The little boys laughed.
 
“Don’t you laugh,” she chided the boys.  “And don’t you go wishing a little principito would bring you gifts,” she shot at the girls.  “The duendes are very bad men,” she added sadly, “Ni si quiera Dios, heaven forbid a duende to take you away from your mama and papa like they took my Sarahi from me!”
 
“Anyway Jaime knew about the duendes, and he knew that Sarahi didn’t pick the flowers by herself, so he locked her up inside of our house until I got home to keep her safe.  When he opened the door for me, we found the house in complete ‘alboroto.’  Pots and pans were all over the floor.  The food was gone.  The pillows were torn and the foam was strewn on the bed.  The sheets were on backwards, the floor was covered in honey and rice.  And there was Sarahi, sitting on her little bed, blushing and laughing.  She was wearing a new crown and a dress made of leaves.
 
“Sarahi, who was here?” I asked her. 
 
‘My friends,’ she answered defiantly, scrambling to her feet.  She made a run for the door, but Jaime caught her before she escaped, and she started to scream.  We had to tie her up to keep her from leaving the house, and she screamed all night long, sometimes like a human, sometimes like an animal.
 
I told her all the stories I had heard about the duendes, stories I wasn’t even sure were true until now because this had never happened to anyone in our village.  She wasn’t hearing any of it.  She just screamed and spat at the wall, trying to break fre from the bed.  I slept by her side that night, watching her breathe wildly.
           
The next day, I left her, but Jaime was going to keep an eye on her.  When I got home, Sarahi was gone.  Jaime couldn’t conceive of how she had escaped.  He swore up and down that he had just checked on her five minutes before . . .
 
We sent out a search party, and at about three AM, after 8 hours of searching they found her near the crater, wearing the same out fit as before, a new crown of fluorescent flowers, and a dress made of leaves.  The men brought her back to the truck, but she wasn’t the same.  ‘This girl is gonna fly away,’ they said, watching her wave her arms at the sky, in the back of the vehicle.  We took her back to where her home once was, but she did not want part of our world anymore.
 
She wanted to escape.  She wouldn’t eat.  She wouldn’t talk.  We had to keep her tied up with someone watching her.  But strange things started happening.  Houses were broken into and turned upside down.  If a mom turned her back on her baby for even a moment, a duende would come and paint his or her face with coal.
 
And one day, they took Sarahi away.  She disappeared for almost a year, and here she is.  You see her?  She’s not normal.  She’s absent.  Se quedo dunda!  Do you want your momma to suffer like I suffer?  Do you want to end up like Sarahi?!”
 
The boys looked at the girls, stupefied.  The girls wagged their heads back and forth dumbly, but then a strange thing happened.  The same little heads began to bob, up and down, as if they belonged to someone else, possessed, and the frightened woman and her grandsons heard a strange laughter in the distance.

There is nothing innocent about kidnapping another person, no noble cause to justify it.  But what if the experience of being kidnapped makes you grow so much that you want to be kidnapped again and again and again just to keep growing?  What if in the moment of threat, you learn to make the release of control, the sensation of being whisked away, the strange sights, sounds, and tastes into pedagogical tools?  The real and the unreal self (Boyatsis), and the pulleys you use to leverage yourself between them are an alchemic mix of exposure and will to meaning (Frankl).  By kidnapping me, Justin Tinkle (that’s his real name – sounds like a dwarf name, no?) released me from fear and challenged me to better myself through exposure.

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley.  In fact, the Valley wasn’t always a valley.  Before the two Morganite moons joined as one, what is now known as Wind Tunnel Valley was a tepid, underwater lake, tucked in neatly under a thin layer of molten rock that stretched itself out to keep its secrets safe, black veins crumbling slightly and mixing with windfall to produce soil rich in minerals. 
 
Mermaids hid their burrow holes under clumps of duck grass, so they could pass undetected between land and water.  They would emerge leafless from the bubbling bracken, sun their scales, and stretch before weaving themselves green play dresses out of moss and scampering around on the hot, blacktop.
 
They had no idea they were atop a fire-bellied mountain.  To them, kissing the sky was, well, quite natural, and not at all extraordinary.  The thick air and the smell of sulfur in their tangled tresses felt solid.  A reality that had stood the test of time.  Arms out-reached, skin flecked with black and silver, they made sparkly silhouettes, as they spun arpund in the wind  . . . ring-around-the-rosy-ashes-ashes, painting arches in the sky in much the same way they made whirls of bubbles under the depths.  
 
But standing above the molten crust of their crater lake allowed them to lavish in the feel of gravity on their heads, shoulders, and buttocks, challenging them to push their muscles harder in resistance.   And when they snuffed themselves away through their grassy little secret trap doors on the surface and returned to buoyancy, they were that much more lightning-fast - danios, flashes of tungsten, silver, and green parting the water molecules and ionizing the mountain air.
 
 
So, in the beginning, there was no valley.  And there were no dragons.  Just heat bubbling underwater in the sky . . . and gentle merfolk.  
 
Unless . . .
 
 . . . unless everything already is what it could dream of being at any given moment, waiting for the right urge to break the barrier . . .
 
Would it disturb your sense of the world too terribly much if I made the audacious suggestion that these spirited merwomen were the predecessors of dragons? 
 
Bear with me here. . . .
 
Now,  - imagine the scales  - simply displaced in a casual moment of liminal identity and reconfigured to serve a different purpose. 
 
Thousands of iridescent gems, just as easily spun into fins and tails wrapped tightly around muscular legs as they could be draped from sinewy arms to rebel against the wind. 
 
 
 But as you know, magination always finds a way to the surface of everything.
 
 
Perhaps one moonlit night of folly carried over into a particularly colorful and provocative sunrise.  Perhaps, the pinks and oranges and indigoes rising from the mountain gave the suggestion of vastness.
 . . .and maybe a certain mermaid, drunken on sunrise, got to wondering. 
 
And quickly, . . . wondering became dreaming. 
 
Then, dreaming begat urgency . . .
 
and urgency became rebellion against the confines of what is and isn’t - as
 
 It often does, among spirited creatures like you and I, so why not her?
 
Perhaps this one very unremarkable mermaid shed her scales, stretched her arms, and suddenly felt her own enormity. 
 
Perhaps she saw the towering shadow and flicker of her arms pulsing against the wind in a pool of water.
 
 Maybe the glistening and a chance gust of wind set her heart afire and the iridescent scales reconfigured themselves as wings and rose to challenge the force of gravity within her.
 
And would it disturb your sense of the world too terribly much if I told you with every iota of certainty contained within my small being that this urgent rebellion against the bounds of ‘what is” is the force behind all shape-shifting - land formations, evolution of species, and the very splitting of universes that give birth to life upon life and age upon age, permutation upon permutation, each with its own alchemy of urges? 
 
It’s not just mermaids that think themselves into becoming dragons and crater lakes who accommodate by transforming themselves into wind tunnel valleys.  It’s everyone and everything all at once, the stuff legends and changing the face of reality.
 
I know you don’t want to believe it.  The responsibility of being so capable is a tremendous weight to bear.  And that is why we have story collectors and tellers.  Someone has to demystify it all for the fearful ones.  This book contains the implements of your liberation. 
 
Scales to Scales (song).