A week later, we were married in the courthouse. Only my aunt and uncle came, and Baba and a few of Maja’s siblings. The ceremony was simple, there was no reception or honeymoon. We simply kissed our family members and returned to our little apartment.

I remember at the threshold I stopped to pick her up and carry her inside. Then I pressed her against the wall, covering her mouth with frantic kisses beneath the painting of the space dragon. When it was shaken loose by our lovemaking I barely managed to catch it before it crashed down on Maja’s head. She just laughed and loved on me even harder.

We were always like this. Always wild and spontaneous, eager to kiss or to make love at the slightest provocation. It didn’t matter when or where. If the mood took us, we ran with it. And wherever we walked, we went hand in hand, fingers laced tightly together. Anyone with eyes could see we were deeply, madly in love, with eyes only for each other.

A clerk at the nearby grocery store, Maja worked her ass off those first years, using every spare dinar we had to buy art supplies. She tried her hand at several books and faced more than a few rejections, but I wouldn’t let her give up on herself.

“It’s no use, Žarko,” I remember she said to me one night, crying from frustration as she often did in those days. “I’m trying everything I can think of to break into this industry. I’ve studied the trends and I know what the kids are supposed to want. But nothing I do is working. I can’t even blame them for rejecting me. Even I hate these paintings,” she said, swiping her arm across the kitchen table and sending them flying.

I picked up one of the paintings and studied it. It was a jungle scene, a portrait of a very cute lemur named Sasha with a striped tail and oversized ears. Technically, there was nothing wrong with the painting. But something was missing. It was her heart, I thought. Her heart wasn’t in it.

“You’re painting for the wrong reasons,” I said to her seriously, tearing up the picture before her startled eyes. “You don’t care about animals, you don’t care about Sasha the lemur. You want to paint space dragons!”

At my words, I could almost see the light bulb go on in her head.

“Pavle and Monet,” she breathed, and I grinned at her.

“Pavle and Monet.”

Inspired, Maja dug out our old notebooks and went straight to work. In fact, she worked all through the night, and fell asleep at the table. She missed work that morning and was fired from the grocery store, but she hardly seemed to care. That afternoon when I got home from classes, she showed me a rough draft of her book idea, complete with sketched illustrations.

It was our comic, I realized with a warm feeling of nostalgia. Pavle all alone in space, looking wistfully at the peaceful planet. Then suddenly—BOOM! Monet punched it to smithereens! Pavle chomped off Monet’s head, then pooped him out. Undaunted, the space man’s head just grinned. You can’t defeat me that easily!

“Now that is a book I would like to read.”

“And one I can’t wait to paint!”

After many drafts and unwavering persistence, Maja finally sold her first book, ‘The Unexpected Adventures of Pavle and Monet’ the same year I graduated from the University of Belgrade. Using the money she’d earned with that first publication, we moved to a small house in country. I spent those early years traveling with other established vets mostly, going between dairy farms, performing routine checkups, administering vaccines, helping with births, deaths and giving various consultations. Meanwhile Maja worked hard on the sequels to her book, which turned into a beloved children’s series, praised by critics for its whimsical prose and perfectly matched artwork.

Like this, we saved our money and studied English in our spare time, until at last we felt ready to make our move to America. I did some research and decided Montana was where I wanted to be, with a ratio of 2-3 head of cattle for every person, and plenty of horses and sheep besides.

“The Big Sky state,” I told Maja. “That’s the place for us.”

It’s been ten years already since I moved to America with my beautiful wife. Ten years since the space dragons granted the wish I made that morning outside her window. As a memento or perhaps out of pure superstition, I kept the rock I picked up that day, the one I said was a dragon scale. Sometimes I still pick it up and kiss it as though it were a saint’s figurine at an Orthodox cathedral. Maja likes to tease me about it, but I tell her not to be too irreverent.

“Pavle is watching you!”

We’ve been so happy till now, I never even considered that our life together could be anything but what it had always been; peaceful and perfect and always together. Not for another forty years, at least.

But six months ago, everything changed. Maja started getting headaches. Forgetting things. Losing her balance. She was frightened, but I told her she was probably just dehydrated. We went to the doctor together, and they ran a bunch of tests. A week later, we had her results. 

“What are you saying?” I demanded of the little doctor sat in front of me with his bow tie and his bad comb over. “She’s only thirty-six!” I shouted, throwing the diagnosis papers back at his chest. “How can she have brain cancer?!”

“Žarko! You’re embarrassing me. Please doctor,” she said with a brave face. “Go on.” 

For Maja’s sake, I forced myself to take a breath and listen to the man, though inwardly I was screaming. 

“People can get brain cancer at any age,” he explained. “We’ll have to take a biopsy, but I suspect it’s a glioblastoma, grade four. An aggressive brain tumor.”

“Can it be taken out?”

“If this were a discrete mass, we’d be talking about surgery immediately. But your tumor is diffusely infiltrative. It doesn’t have clean borders. It’s grown into the surrounding brain tissue.”

“Meaning you can’t operate.”

“Not without causing significant damage. The tumor is involving eloquent cortex—areas responsible for language and memory. There’s no safe surgical margin. Attempting to remove it would almost certainly leave you with permanent neurological deficits. Even if we were able to remove part of it, we couldn’t change the trajectory of the disease. Glioblastomas recur quickly, even after aggressive treatment.”

I was a doctor too, of sorts, so all he was saying made a little too much sense.

“How long?” I asked him, voice breaking. “How long has she got?”

“There’s variability, but based on the tumor’s location and how it’s already affecting her cognition…”

“How long?” she asked, reaching blindly for my hand to grip me with all her strength.

“With chemotherapy and radiation, around six months.”

I stopped working almost completely to take care of Maja, and selfishly, to spend every minute I could with her. I took her to her chemo treatments, and watched with agony as she wept over the chunks of her beautiful black hair that fell out in her hands. Her appetite disappeared, more and more she threw up what she managed to get down.

I was helpless. Broken inside, living as though she were already dead. I knew there’d be nothing for me the day she left this world. I didn’t know how I’d go on.

I called Aunt Tamara and Uncle Goran to tell them what was happening. I even called Stanko and Branislava. Everyone was devastated. My aunt and uncle paid for some of her family to fly out and visit her in Montana for a week, though Baba felt she wasn’t well enough to come with. We were both disappointed. She was the one we’d really wanted to see.

After her family left, Maja had an idea for another book. I encouraged her to pursue it, wanting to give her this one last gift, but the undertaking proved too difficult. Her poetry fell flat. She’d lost her rhythm, forgetting her words in both Serbian and English. Even painting became too much for her, the delicate watercolors bleeding together, turning her starry space dragon scenes to a muddy mess.

One day I came home from an emergency operation to find she’d soaked all the papers for the book in the sink, and ran them through the garbage disposal, clogging it completely. While the plummer worked in the kitchen, I held her in the back room. She didn’t speak of what she’d done. She never talked of books or painting again.

I could tell she was depressed, but I didn’t know how to help her. With her faculties declining and the inevitable end approaching so quickly, there seemed to be nothing left that could bring a smile to her face. Until about a week ago, when they announced the coming meteor shower.

At the prospect of seeing the dragon scales fall once more, Maja’s face had lit up with anticipation. It gave me joy to see her looking forward so eagerly to something for the first time in what felt like forever.

Yes, this last week, we were both happy. And now at last, the much anticipated moment is upon us.

But as the sky blazes with its fantastic light show, with a spreading sense of dread deep in my gut I feel my wife growing more and more still in my arms.

“Draga?” I call to her softly. “Maja?”

She does not answer. Her eyes have closed.

Eventually, she ceases to stir, and I feel her tiny chest deflate against me for the last time. She’s still warm, I think. But she won’t be for long.

She’s gone. My wife—my whole world—is gone, and the slowly growing ache in my soul that was planted the day we received her diagnosis suddenly ruptures, and runs out of me.

Numb, still holding her in my lap, I watch the lights shoot across the sky another minute before I finally find the strength to rise. Clutching her tiny, skeletal frame close to my chest, with heavy footsteps, I carry her down the hill to our house, where I lay her reverently atop our neatly made bed. 

I watch her body a minute, mind reeling. Then I see the stone I took from her childhood home on the fireplace mantle. The dragon scale.

So much for miracles…

In a blind rage I grab it, hurling it violently to the window with the shriek of a madman. It breaks the glass with a terrific crash, sending a night bird flapping away on noisy wings.

It’s not enough. This peaceful house, I cannot bear it! How could it look so neat, so perfect when my whole world’s just been shattered?! This house doesn’t know yet—it doesn’t know she’s gone. Doesn’t know her laughter will never again ring from the kitchen, nor the sounds of our lovemaking rise to the rafters. It doesn’t know or it would be howling too, the way I howl, wailing and screaming for a pain that can never be healed.

“MAJA!”

Frantically, I look around for something else to smash, and my eyes fall on the painting of the space dragon she gave me when I was just ten years old. Before I knew my mother had died, before I ever could have guessed what our future would be together.

I rip it from the wall and grip the frame in my hands. For a moment I think I’ll smash it too—hurl it straight to the fireplace. But something in me holds back. Her last words, I think. What did she say to me?

I’d wish for you to be happy. So many dragon scales… At least one of them must be for you...

Oh, God… Maja…

Tears blinding me, I set it aside and stumble to the broken window where the meteor shower still lights up the sky. As I watch the stars fall, I can’t help but recall Baba’s old story.

“They lived among us once, the zmaj,” I recount softly, and my breaking heart swells with gratitude when I imagine Maja’s precious space dragons are up there this very moment. Come to escort her soul to the edge of heaven.

My phone rings atop the nearby dresser. After listening for several seconds, I pick it up automatically, and glance at the caller. I answer.

“Alo, Baba? It’s me…” 

So it is, by day or by night, if you see a shooting star, it is a dragon, shedding one of its marvelous scales for some lucky soul to find. And if, by a miracle, that lucky soul who finds the dragon’s scale happens to be you, know that your prayer has been answered.

Your wish will surely come true…