Little Giant
Self-written and illustrated children’s book. In progress.
1.
“A giant!” Her mother had cried upon seeing the child’s face - or rather, the sheer size of it.
“3 dinner tables, at least!” declared her father, the carpenter of the village.
It was truly a miracle how her mother survived the birth. Not the doctors, shamans, or the neighbor who never grew out of sniffing sap and thus knew much about the universe, could make sense of how such a slight woman birthed such a creature.
Not that she was a creature by any means. In ten years, she had grown into a lively young girl. Two pinkish spots rose in her cheeks every morning, sometimes reaching her thick, black brows. Her strong legs thundered on the ground when she ran.
She was also 98 feet tall, but very proportionally wide, her mother would assure her.
But now, she wonders if her mother’s unexplained survival was also her greatest curse. Undoubtedly, it is what saved the girl from being exiled as the freak that killed her mother. She isn’t sure who she would be without her father and his fortuitous carpentry skill with which he crafted enormous armchairs and tables. She often forgot that her bedroom was actually a grassy plain -until it rained, of course. Or how she would be without her mother’s army of brothers who loved her, toiling in the fields and hunting in the woods so she could eat her fill. Smaller from malnutrition, probably. Her life felt miraculous then.
A Miracle is a slippery thing, though. It takes a few years, but it grows big too, winding its way down roads and through towns, and whispering in every desperate ear.
Did you hear? Did you hear?
2.
So today, like every day since she was seven, she wakes up to a crowd of the hopeless, the gullible, and the passionate. She still has to be careful not to crush anyone under her step despite the practice. Dave, from two towns over, originally came to her to pray for his niece’s health, but now adds a P.S. for his own speedy recovery. He bows his head, and tucks more red poppies in between her toes.
She talked to them once, but quickly found that even accidentally breaking the news to the hopeless that their hail-mary was actually just an unnaturally large child led to tears, despair, and anger. It was better for everyone to pretend.
And it was fun at first. The adoration and devotion - and the gifts! The gifts! She had felt like the luckiest girl with the prettiest ankles, waking up to beads and woven fabrics wrapping around and around them.
Ryan, her sourest uncle, grabs her attention. “Lemons, again?” He scoffs and hefts the piles of gifted fruit into his wagon. “I’m going to turn yellow!”
Lemons today, mangoes tomorrow, spices and breads everyday. Her family had gotten fat. And without her even noticing, different.
“By the way, Laura agreed to go to the Midsummer festival with me. Do me a solid and do some magic so it goes well?”
“Well, I can promise you won’t turn yellow.”
The pilgrims at her feets jump.
3.
This day, something unusual happens.
The first unusual thing is that she is looking straight forward, and something appears in front of her eyes. A bird!
A very dignified, bespectacled bird. She gapes.
He says, in a very deep and clear voice for a bird, “O Lady Grand, I have flown day and night to beseech you - my high-rise condo? Sure, it's missing a few sticks and the storm last week blew away part of the nice leaf detailing, but their offering price is just insulting!”
“I’m not O’Lady Grand. How could you have possibly confused me for someone else?”
“You’re not? But you’re just as big…well, you’re not white-gray like the stories… no. Or have long flowing hairs. And I never heard of her speaking, either.”
“She’s like me?” She barely heard the rest. “This.. O’Lady Grand?”
“THE Lady Grand. And I wouldn’t say that you’re alike, you’re just big. Unless you grant wishes?” He starts flapping his wings harder. “Why, I certainly hope you do, I’ve flown three days to be here.”
She hesitates. The bird squawks disgruntledly and leaves.
…
She spends the next few days in a trance. The Lady Grand appears in her dreams and daydreams. Finally, after absentmindedly stepping on her fifth pilgrim, she asks the cowering sixth, “Where can I find the Lady Grand?”
4.
Find the skeletons. The girl thought mystical directions were supposed to be poetic but still sensible. How else were throngs of people showing up at her feet everyday?
But, the cosmos proves it still has a sick sense of humor because she suddenly spots a trail of bones. The girl sets off right away, in case the path disappears while she does rational things like pack or think.
The trail goes further into the land than she has ever even seen, which is quite far considering her eyesight is probably sharper than the equivalent of a human-sized telescope. Although, a giant-sized telescope would be a different story.
She walks as the sun says goodnight to the mountains and the white light from the moon casts a low glow into the hollow between them. The bone trail curls and stops, neatly circling the valley.
No more bones, but no skeletons.
“Is this a build your own skeleton situation?” Alarmed, she wonders, “I’m not too familiar with the human anatomy.” She moves to grab one.
The bones suddenly tremble, chitter, and shake, as if sensing the near violation of their autonomy. They scramble around, reorienting themselves to spell out:
W A I T
And so she waits.
5.
The moon gets brighter and brighter. When she thinks it can’t possibly get any brighter, the ground rumbles.
She watches, dumfounded, as skeletal hands burst out of the ground - clawing, grasping, scraping. They pull themselves up, first arms, then heads, then torsos and the smell of the freshly churned, wet earth floods the valley. Some spare arms and legs flail limply, stuck in the ground, but there are so many skeletons that the girl hardly notices.
Elbows bending and knees crackling, they jolt, jump, and step, as if learning to move again. No, not to move -to dance.
It’s an awkward contrast: the implication of flesh moving and hips swaying to the eerie reality of the white bones. But their eye sockets are so deep and dark that they feel kind, and she chooses to read their bared teeth as sheepish grins. She smiles back.
Then:
D A N C E
“But I don’t know how to dance!” She has never danced in her life. A safety precaution, really.
D A N C E D A N C E D A N C E
“Maybe this is an inappropriate question, but how are your bones staying together? I see some arms and feet on the ground, and to be honest, I shake the ground when I walk. I would feel really bad if I vibrated you all apart.”
G I R L
D A N C E
O R
L E A V E
What the hell. Why not? She begins to copy the skeleton next to her, but no, she can’t quite replicate the spiny shimmy.
So, she flings her head back, she stomps her feet. She jumps and jumps and spins and jumps. A faint beat thumps its way into her ears. She spins some more.
Suddenly, the song is about the lemons she didn’t get to eat, her family she left behind, and the pilgrims she left behind too. She thinks about how they could all probably benefit from a little bit of dancing. And she thinks about nothing at all, but the way the air feels as she waves her arms. Soon, her body belongs to her and doesn’t.
There is no rhyme or reason or beginning or end. She does not wonder if the skeletons spinning beside her were always skeletons or if they once lived as people. The girl and the skeletons are the same in this moment.
They dance and dance until she feels her own feet have been worn to the bone and her cheeks are numb. She doesn’t know if she collapses on her own or if the skeletons by her feet trip her balance. Sprawled on the ground, she feels the damp of the earth and grass seep into her skin. She closes her eyes.
The girl had thought the moon was blinding when the skeletons first rose, but she now knew, beyond even sight, that the world was brighter than she had ever known.
When she wakes, the skeletons are gone. The ground is untouched and unstomped. She raises her hand to rub her eyes and pauses, startled.
The only sign the night had happened was clutched in her hand: a spiny, purple shell.
6.
The shell as her only clue, the girl follows the faint smell of salt and brine through the mountains and thicket. The journey is really no different from the path she had walked to the skeletons, but now the trees are waving at her, their branches creaking musically as light streams through them. She waves back and marches on.
The grass turns to rocks turns to sand in between her toes as the sound of crashing waves crescendo. When she breathes in, the girl feels grains of salt catching in her nose, a sting that feels wonderful. And so, when her feet stumble on the wet shore, she wants to dive in.
The girl has never been to the sea before. From the stories of those who dared leave dry land and found themselves lucky enough to return, the sea was not just furious and uncontrollable but full of dangerous and demon things. But for some reason, the girl wades so deep that it’s soon a struggle to keep her head above the water. The salt waves crash into her gasping mouth and it’s impossible to tell when the slimy, ice cold sensation brushing her legs is the current or something else.
Then, her foot slips on a mossy rock and she follows, arms flailing underwater in painful slow motion. She scrambles for a ledge and her toenail scrapes painfully on a rock, but her head goes under. The current shoots water up her nose, leaving a blazing, salt trail. The sea batters her every way, her size unregistered in its dispassionate tempest. She doesn’t know which way is up or down; she only knows fear, a fear that only crescendos as she frantically tries again and again to find her footing. She feels it as clearly as the fiery burn in her airless lungs. And regret, squeezing her stomach.
The girl realizes that she has never been so helpless. Nothing had ever felt like it could touch her from where she stood. Is this the primal feeling that drove pilgrims to her feet?
Carried far from shore, she sinks deep, deep, deep. She sinks until she finds herself squarely in the infinite sea. By the time it reaches the girl, the light from the surface has already dissipated into blue, sourceless and untraceable.
The sea has made the girl small.
7.
The girl has floated for so long that she believes she is dead. Simply, there is no other possibility because last she checked, she did not possess the ability to breathe underwater or have supersized gills.
But when she opens her eyes, she realizes she is probably not dead because she is face to face with a whale - or the side of a whale’s face. It looks her squarely in the eyes with one of its own, curved mouth extending far into the water.
The whale just looks. She wonders if it is equally astonished to see something as large as it is, although the whale probably has a very nice, equivalently sized family. But, the girl has never looked something in the eye like this before.
One of the beaded strings wrapped around her ankles by the pilgrims floats loose and knocks at her calf. She unwraps it from her leg, but then quickly rewraps it. She wanted to affix the beads to the whale, maybe to mark it or this moment or leave a final proof of her own existence because she still kind of wonders if she’s dead. She imagines the beads sliding right off, barely catching on the ridges of his back or his fins. She imagines everything would slide right off this whale. Better to leave him unburdened.
They float together for a while, and she looks at the barnacles that speckle his body, the one thing that sticks to him.
He blinks his lidless eye somehow -then, he swims around her, languidly and easily, and grabs her arm with the very front of his long mouth. Before she can register what's happening, everything blurs and water shoots up her nose again. A pain reverberates through her head, ears trying desperately to pop as the whale propels them up, up, and up.
The girl breaks the surface, disoriented and alone. The specks of light from the stars blend with their reflection on the sea’s horizon, where she sees the faintest flip of whale tail. She dunks and bobs, waves crashing and churning until the sea spits her out onto shore. She coughs and lays shivering in the sand’s embrace.
8.
When the girl finally sits up, she realizes she has been sprawled at the feet of the Lady Grand. The Lady Grand’s face is terrible and cold, the deep corners of her mouth cutting stern lines into her face. Her arms are outspread and the girl wonders if she is about to be struck down.
She scrambles to her feet, profusely apologizing for her discourtesy. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude, you see I think I might have just drowned-” but when she is face to face with the Lady Grand, the girl realizes many things at once. The Lady Grand is huge and imposing, the Lady Grand is a beautiful luminous white, the Lady Grand is solemn, because the Lady Grand is made of stone. The Lady Grand is a statue.
The cosmos has a sick sense of humor. But she knew that.
“I have been tricked in the same way that those I have despised for coming to me had been tricked,” she says to the statue. “I am a fool.”
She sits at the base of the Lady Grand for a long while. The breeze catches and lifts her hair. The sun finishes rising and warms her sea-mangled, sand-crusted dress.
When she begins walking, she might be the same girl who first followed the bone trail, but she is a different sort of fool.