Free The God Patent by Ransom Stephens Page A

being. Appropriately, all the gift boxes are empty, like the man’s soul.”
    Ryan pointed at one of the boxes. Its reindeer wrapping paper made it stand out. “What about that one?”
    Katarina picked it up and looked at the tag: “For Katarina, From Ryan.” She looked at him with mock distrust. “It’s not going to blow up, is it?”
    Then she tore it open and found a skating helmet and wrist guards. Ryan could tell by the way she looked at them and then back at him that she appreciated the gesture, but she didn’t say “thank you.” Ryan figured that she didn’t know any better.

    Ryan’s favorite odd job was something Dodge had managed to sneak into the rental contract: security guard on weekend nights at Skate-n-Shred. Skate-n-Shred was a turn-of-the-century theater that Dodge had converted to a combination skate park/concert venue catering to Petaluma’s teenage population. Two blocksdown the hill from Nutter House, the building occupied the corner of a busy street a block from the boulevard. Katarina spent most of her waking hours there.
    Ryan felt more like Margaret Mead in New Guinea than a security guard. He enjoyed getting to know the kids. Mostly, though, he felt responsible to watch out for Katarina. Skate-n-Shred wasn’t the safest place in town for a twelve-year-old girl with no curfew.
    On a cool, dry Friday night, he passed a few kids out front smoking cigarettes, their skateboards leaning against the wall. One wore a “Surf 707” hoodie, another had on a patch-covered denim jacket, and a few sat on a bench strumming guitars. Inside, the walls of the lobby were covered in graffiti of varying levels of artistic promise. Dodge left a box of markers, some acrylic paints, and brushes to encourage his patrons to release their creative angst. To him, it was a device to convince parents and police officers that Skate-n-Shred served a public purpose.
    Katarina stood on an old stained couch working on a mural. Her black skirt was decorated with Celtic knots along the hem and a crucifix on the seam in what could have been the same paint she was using. A smiling black dragon, smoke shooting from its nostrils and a few random flames leaking between its fangs, looked like it was jumping out of the wall and over the couch.
    Ryan sat on the sofa’s armrest. “Whatcha doin’?”
    “Painting death.”
    He stared at the painting for a second. The dragon only looked black at a glance. Colors swirled into its skin and the spiny structure of its neck, with shades of purple on its belly. She’d included shadows that made it look three-dimensional. It was a happy-looking dragon.
    He said, “Shouldn’t death look more, um, dead?”
    “No.” Katarina stepped up on the back of the couch and brushed white paint above the dragon, covering the wall’s olive drab up and onto the ceiling.
    On the wall directly across the lobby, a much larger dragon looked back at the little smiling dragon. The small one was vivid and sharp. The larger was dun brown and mottled. “Did you paint that one too?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    He went across the room and looked closely at the larger dragon. The mottles were from the olive drab of the wall leaking through. Where the little dragon sparkled, its layers of acrylic reflecting the fluorescent light, the big dragon’s flat latex absorbed the light. A few wisps of smoke curled straight up from the big, old-looking shadow of a dragon. “This guy looks pretty beaten down.”
    “He’s not
beaten down
,” she snapped. “He’s doing the best that he can.”
    “Oh.” Ryan noticed that the little dragon’s eyes, complete with little stars in their irises twinkling like emeralds—the same color as Katarina’s eyes—were aimed directly at the old dragon, but the old dragon was looking up at the ceiling.
    “If you were dead, you’d look beaten down too.”
    “Sorry, Katarina.” Ryan went back to the couch. “What do I know from art?”
    Reaching her brush farther out on the ceiling,