gone right into my heart
i. Fundamentally, mean children everywhere are all the same.
ii. Eustace Scrubb didn't think of himself as mean, of course, but he was. Cruel, petty, entitled, spoiled - all fine descriptors.
iii. All mean children have tough, scaly hides under which they conceal vulnerable flesh. They breathe fire and hope no one notices that it reeks of rot. Their claws are sharp, and because of this they cannot write in soft sand or hold hands with their loved ones.
iv. Eustace's cousins came to stay for the summer, and the worst part of it all was that it'd been years since he'd gotten a proper rise out of them. It was infuriating! Having them around would be no fun at all.
iv. Later, in Narnia, Eustace began to understand why they were so impervious to him. He'd been mean, sure, but they were knights.
v. Take me home, take me home, take me home, he said. Over and over. Take me home where it's safe. Take me home where I am in control. Not afraid. Not vulnerable.
vi. Eustace was never in control. It took becoming a dragon - the natural culmination of all the entitlement and cruelty that lived within him - to finally make that clear.
vii. He was wrapped in tough, scaly hide when the Lion came by moonlight. Eustace was a dragon, but if he still couldn't reckon with knights, what chance did he have against a lion?
viii. The lion's claws were sharper than his. They were sharper than anything else in the world.
ix. When those claws tore into his dragon hide, Eustace thought he would die. Perhaps, in a way, he did.
x. Claws that sharp should not have been capable of such dexterity or care. Yet they found their mark with like scalpel blades in a surgeon's hands; not like the crude things that hung off of Eustace'a wretched dragon-limbs.
xi. He could feel them tearing through the scales. The tough dragon hide parted like butter. The lion's claws dug deeper, through tissue and muscle and the contorted cage of his ribs. They found his heart, and struck.
xii. After that, there was a pulling sensation. Eustace should have been dead, but his heart was beating, even impaled as it was with the lion's claws. Slowly, with an agonizing gentleness, the lion drew the boy's heart out of the gnarled dragon skin.
xiii. The body that came with it was soft and vulnerable and naked. How could he pretend at meanness now, with his armor so thoroughly destroyed? It would rend him to pieces.
xiv. Oh, thought Eustace. Was I ever anything else? Or have I always been this soft and naked?
xv. Yet the lion did not leave Eustace to his nakedness. He dressed him in soft clothes before returning him to camp.
