<blockquote>There was a dragon in town.
Statues all over the city climbed off their pedestals and went walking about. The Winston Churchill from Parliament Square gave an interview to the BBC, still squinting as if the wind were blowing into its eyes. The statue was appropriately witty, but did not seem to remember anything about World War II. It did, however, have a lot to say about pigeons.
Silver griffins bowled down the streets of the City, tripping up lawyers and outraging bankers, and Winged Victory on the Arch finished her yawn and dropped her arms.
The pigeons grew human bodies, all of which wore suits from Austin Reed. They marched in their thousands into architects’ firms, university admissions offices, food consultancy businesses, struggling non-profits; they stole colleagues’ lunches and strewed cubicles with green-grey feathers. Despite these minor eccentricities they made excellent workers: they had a firm grasp of commercial realities, and never went on Facebook.
For several days every Tesco in the country stocked only pomegranates, nothing else. If you ate the seeds from one of these you vanished and your soul was dispatched to Hades. There was a rash of deaths before anyone realised.
The buses of London turned into giant cats–tigers and leopards and jaguars with hollow bodies in which passengers sat. You could still use your Oyster card on them, but bus usage dropped: the seats were soft and pink and sucked at you in a disturbingly organic way when you sat down, and the buses were given to stopping in the middle of the road to quarrel with one another.
Meanwhile the dragon coiled itself around the tip of the Gherkin and brooded over the city.</blockquote>
➤ Or, in which Zen Cho continues to be the awesomest
