Sparky the Baby Green Dragon Read online



  Sparky the Baby Green Dragon

  A children’s story

  Created by

  Philip Michael Cooper

  Copyright 2014 Philip Cooper

  About the Author

  Philip was born and educated in the United Kingdom. He joined Citibank in London before moving to Athens where he worked as a foreign exchange trader for both Citibank and Chase Manhattan Bank. Philip was then posted to Citibank's Middle East North African Training Centre in Athens/Beirut as the operations manager and a foreign exchange trainer. After returning to the United Kingdom Philip joined Union Bank of Switzerland as the Head of Learning and Development and introduced trading simulations as a safe way for new traders to trade. In 1993 he was appointed Head of Learning and Education for UBS in North America. He later left the bank and went into partnership with two colleagues and set up a successful financial training company (New Learning Developments) in New York City. At New Learning Developments he developed relationships with all the major investment banks such as Goldman, Lehman, JP Morgan, and other major financial institutions such as The Federal Reserve Bank, Chase, Citibank, ABN-AMRO and the World Bank. In 1999 he returned to London where he worked as a training consultant to financial services institutions and the Ministry of Defence. In 2001 he went to Greece where he wrote books to teach English as a second language as well as developing knowledge databases for on-line brokerage houses. He returned to London in 2012 where he works with autistic children and conducts webinars on foreign exchange and on-line retail trading. He has also written several fictional short stories, nine books on forex and is currently writing his first novel titled Operation Gladio.

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you want to share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return it to the retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  One sunny afternoon Christina and Maria were walking home to their house in the village of Achinos near Stylida, where they were spending their holidays with their brother Costa and their Auntie Eleni and Uncle Vangelis.

  As it was very hot in Achinos, they had been into Raches, the next village, to buy some chocolate ice cream for themselves and Costas. As the ice cream was melting fast they decided quite naturally not to wait until they reached home and sat down in an olive grove under the shade of an olive tree to eat their ice creams.

  They hoped that Costa’s ice cream would not melt away into nothing before they could give it to him. Maria suggested to Christina that if the ice cream was almost melted by the time that they had finished theirs, that they should eat Costa’s for him. Christina thought that was a nice thing to do for Costa because at least the ice cream would not be wasted.

  Suddenly a skinny dog ran into the olive grove. Maria who loved dogs felt sorry for it and got up and started to follow it with the intention of offering it some of Costa’s ice cream. Within seconds she had disappeared. Christina who was deeply engrossed in thoughts of castles and beautiful princesses did not notice Maria's disappearance at first. By the time she realized that Maria had left she had lost sight of her.

  Christina got up from where she was sitting and looked around the olive grove. Maria was nowhere to be seen. Then Christina noticed something moving in an olive bush not far from where she was standing. She walked towards the bush thinking that perhaps there was a bird or a rabbit moving in the bush.

  When she reached it she very slowly moved around the bush so as not to frighten whatever was there. Suddenly she froze. She looked hard not believing her eyes. Barely visible but unmistakably green in color, just visible under the bottom most branch of the Olive bush was a kind of foot. She edged closer and then stopped. She had seen a foot like that before in a book. It had three green claws, like toes and a kind of rough bumpy green skin joined together by green webbing.

  Christina scratched her head trying to remember which book she had seen this kind of foot before. Then she remembered.

  "No”, she thought, “this can't be true. This is the foot of a dragon, a green dragon and what’s more a baby green dragon.” For the foot was only twice as big as hers. "I wonder if baby dragons like chocolate ice cream,” she thought.

  “We do!” said a voice. Christina jumped out of her skin.

  “Who said that?” She thought.

  “I did, little girl” said the voice again.

  Christina was confused. She was certain that she had not said anything out loud. “Could dragons, and baby ones at that, hear thoughts?” She wondered.

  “Of course we can!” Said a voice from just out of sight, “we can do most things better than little girls”.

  With that the baby dragon stepped out from behind the Olive bush right in front of Christina. Christina stepped back. She stared at the sight before her. Facing her was indeed a baby dragon.

  It stood about twice her height and was quite green all over, except for its eyes, which were a sort of angry red color. It had two funny looking feet, green with three toes and green webbing between its toes. It stood on these funny feet waving a stubby pair of skinny green arms around as if to keep its balance. The arms ended with a kind of hand that had six fingers. It seemed to have wings folded down its side, fairly small baby wings. Its neck was longish and its head had short pointy ears, a high forehead, no hair, funny red eyes and a long snout ending in a big mouth full of baby teeth. Oh! And there was its tail. It was longer than its body and lay along the ground behind it, twitching back and forth. The end of the tail had an arrowhead point to it. It looked quite dangerous to touch.

  “Have you finished?” said the dragon.

  “Finished what?” asked Christina.

  “Finished staring at me,” replied the dragon.

  “Sorry”, said Christina, “you surprised me that’s all. I never expected to see a real live dragon, especially a baby one.”

  “Well”, said the dragon, “now you can see me.”

  Christina was thinking fast, well fast for her at least. She wasn’t scared, not much anyway. “I wonder if baby dragons breathe fire and smoke.” She thought. Then another thought crossed her mind. “Do dragons have names?”

  “Sparky” said the dragon.

  “What!” said Christina.

  “My name is Sparky and I can breathe fire and smoke.”

  Christina giggled. “What sort of silly name is that?” She thought.

  Sparky snorted and said. “If you’re not careful with your thoughts I’ll breathe fire at you.”

  Christina giggled again. Then she said. “I don’t believe you can, you are only a baby dragon.”

  Immediately she said it, she regretted it. Too late, Sparky raised himself up to his full height then leaned forward towards Christina, his mouth opening wide.

  Christina shrank back expecting to be burnt to a cinder from Sparky’s fiery breath. Her eyes were as large as saucers. When the baby dragon’s mouth was only a couple of feet from her, a small wisp of smoke came out of its mouth accompanied by a squeaky noise, and no fire.

  “Oh no!” cried the dragon. “Not again. I’ll never get the hang of this. It’s so embarrassing.”

  Christina let out a nervous laugh. She actually started to feel sorry for Sparky.

  “My name is Christina.” She said. “And I don’t mind if you can’t breathe fire, in fact I quite prefer it.”

  “I wish I could learn to breathe fire.” said Sparky. “You see I lost my mother and father a month ago at a fancy dress party and I
have been looking for them ever since. They were about to teach me how to breath fire and now they are gone, I have no one to teach me. I also lost my pet dog today, so I’m all alone.”

  “I think I know where your dog is,” said Christina, “I think my sister Maria saw it earlier and went after it.”

  Just then they both heard a shout. It was Maria calling for Christina.

  “I’ve got the dog, I’ve got the dog,” shouted Maria from behind some Olive trees.

  “Come on,” said Christina to Sparky. “Let’s go find Maria, bet she found your dog.”

  “We’re coming Maria” shouted Christina. “Where are you?”

  Maria emerged from behind an Olive bush, clutched in her arms was the little dog. When she saw Christina and especially her green companion she stopped dead in her tracks. Sparky on the other hand on seeing that his pet dog was safe and sound in the arms of a little human girl, became very excited. He started to flap his tiny wings and waddled at speed towards Maria, making little squeaking noises.

  Maria did not know what to do, she did not know that the little dog she had found belonged to Sparky, and she had no idea that Sparky was not really a bad dragon, and a baby one at that. However Maria was brave, she stood her ground as Sparky hurtled, well waddled, towards her. Now, Christina too was running towards Maria. To her surprise she was actually catching up with Sparky. Christina