giants for houses

in arden
When Adam moved out to the woods however many years ago, out
of sight and out of mind, when he found that shuttered and beautifully
condemned-looking house, a house only geniuses could possibly live in,
he was certain that it would be the thing to solve it all, the perfect shady
place to hide, to run to and never from. A final, secret resting ground.
He was young, then. Certainty grows and evolves with the body,
with the cells. It was more spite that wore the costume of ambition which
wore the costume of certainty.
It’s relatively simple, running away, when one is fleeing the site of a
fire. He gathered all of his belongings in boxes, a panicked yet careful
inventory—the glass equipment, all of his metal wires and cords, his
testing technologies, his chemicals, his stolen goods, his meshes, his soils,
his clippings. He loaded all of his work in the bed of his truck and he
slammed it shut and the world shook like it was afraid, and it did
something to him, then, in some dangerous way. It made him wholly
convinced that he wasn’t what they said he was.
The mad scientist. Printed neat, bolded headline, a hundred copies
sold for each of the hundred homes in Arden. That grainy photograph
paperclipped to his resume for the rest of ten forevers, taped to doors,
posted onto neighborhood forums, crumpled up and tossed into the bin.
One hundred separate times.
He moved out here to run from that. The name, mostly, and the
things it implied. The things it made happen. Within minutes of the
publication, a slow banishment started. Muted but no less offensive looks
he’d gain when he stepped into shared spaces, a suspicion that grew into
something less passive. One day, he had everything. The podiums he’d
stepped behind for planned presentations, the lectures he’d creep

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uninvited into. The grocery stores, the local garden center, those corners
of convenience he’d linger in, buying their half-dead bouquets for science.
He had everything he wanted, and the means to get more, and in one day
it was gone. Into the bin, one hundred times.
It’s a scary word to a small town, science. That something invisible
could change everything so much. They funneled the fear of a word into
the form of a man, this man who spoke of invisible things, and they
ushered him away. And so easily the threat was gone.
That was years ago. The exact count slips his mind through the fog
of his own constant numbers, but some numbers are meant to be
forgotten anyway. All that is left of the beginning is his intention, good
and honest and true. The intention to succumb to a simple sort of hidden
living.
As he looks at his home now, though, so far from the beginning, it
doesn’t seem so clear. Standing on this creakiest, last step of his lonely
basement stairs, he reconsiders the outrage. His, and theirs. Perhaps it’s
the strap of these goggles digging into his skin, cutting straight elastic lines
across his temples, or maybe even the workbench full of bubbling vials
and intersecting wires, but the sight speaks for itself. And it speaks
something about mad science.
It doesn’t take long to come to terms with that, really. The forest
dampens much of the noise. And, besides, he has things to do today other
than get his foot stuck in the tar pit of reminiscence. He pulls his gloves
off with his teeth. He sweeps his creations into his arms fondly, gently,
lovingly. And he decides to forget whatever he was fretting about in the
first place.
Do insane men often dabble in floristry?
He doesn’t know. He thought he knew. On the surface, sure; by
definition, scientists must harbor a little bit of insanity to discover
anything new.
How sad, though, that definitions seem to change when pluralized.
Sad and confusing. Once, he had a workbench in a sterile lab, a place
among those who had been similarly insane.
But that can’t have been right. Through extensive surveillance and
persistent emailing, in the days up to exile, Adam learned himself to be
the only one in his team that believed that plants had consciousnesses. He

2
understood that science, if used correctly, if used with care, could get very
close to magic. He hadn’t understood at the time what the difference had
been. His difference to theirs. Of course, looking around, he also recalls
that he was the only one to cross the treeline that day, the only one
escorted inelegantly off the lawn of the institute which had previously
been a sort of second home. So perhaps he isn’t that. Insane. Perhaps he’s
something slightly-to-the-left of insane. Something scarier.
The flowerbed was built about two miles out from the house. He
visits them every week.
It began as an experiment as all things do, how lonely men find
families in the most unlikely places. He built and nurtured them himself
in the perfect spot, the trees above allowing enough sunlight, allowing
enough rain. A simple five-by-five array of single-stem petunias protected
in a wooden frame. They were white and thin and gangly when they first
sprouted, he saw himself in them with pride. They’re all the same type,
borne from the same stolen packet of seeds.
You wouldn’t be able to tell that from looking at them.
Adam holds a half-full vial in his mouth. It’s got marks in the stopper
from so many years of biting in the same spot, the grooves of his crooked
bottom teeth immortalized in rubber. He kneels by his garden. He
empties his pockets onto the grass and falls next to them, a desk made of
his legs, a paper weight made of his boot. The notebook rests on his knee.
This is routine. Template. He leans to inspect their changes.
Petunias are fascinating things, more than they receive credit for.
Their cells welcome interruption when given the chance. He’s got the
pictures tucked away of their beginnings, their first day, their first month.
These flowers all sprouted at the same size and shape and color, mirrored
siblings. They’re decidedly not that, anymore.
Adam uses his madness with care. A little chemical serum applied
under the leaves, under the sepals, and they regenerate within days. Seven
days. They reorder themselves, their own cells, alter their own matter.
Evolution. Within a week.
Some stems remain straight, tall, proud. The others have shrunk,
thin yet still structural, comfortable conditions for a flower to breathe and
drink and bathe in sun. White has become purple on some, pink on
others, blue or red, plain or striped. The soft petals curl or grow sharp on

3
the edges like blades, some grow bumps and ridges to protect themselves,
to hide themselves. Leaves and petals can be formed into any shape he
wants—hearts, circles, perfect triangles.
His favorite is the matter of size. He uses those lotions sparingly but
it always makes him smile to bring out the tape measures. An eighteen-
inch petunia dwindling to a tiny, two-inch fingerling of a sprout. A seven-
inch stem branching up to almost seven feet. Sure, color is easy to
manipulate with simple chemical addition, but to manipulate an entire
life? Requires far more planning. Requires good, smart ideas. He
compliments himself each time. He makes himself blush.
It never grows old, their progress. It never pauses for long enough
even to consider. He meets his flowers anew each time he comes to visit,
writes them down, tells them he’s proud, and moves on to the next
alteration. Momentum. Routine. Template.
Adam sits beside his bed of petunias and sees magic.
He leans the new vials against the wood before flipping his notes
open. He re-reads the findings from last Sunday as if he’s not obsessed
over them since he put them down, memorized and hummed like a song
from a memory.
“It’s me again.” Shuffling closer, he offers the eraser of his pencil to
gently lift up the leaves of Specimen Thirteen. He gasps. “Look at you.”
Her stem is red at the bottom, that bloody and vibrant color which
fades just before it reaches the fragile leaves beneath her petals. Like a soft
mist.
“That gradient leveled out real well, actually.” He pats those petals
gently. Thirteen’s limbs jolt when touched. She pats him back. “I’m sorry
I doubted you.”
He mutters to himself as he writes, glancing up, glancing back down,
tapping the pencil against his cheek. Adam’s mind can only move so fast,
in spite of its sprawling list of possibility. He wants more vibrancy, wants
to see if he can get the pigment to reach the sepals before next August to
ward off any of the creatures that love to chew on them. He wants to make
the stem wider on Twelve, taller on Seven. He wants Twenty-Five to be as
small as it can get, under an inch if possible. He wants Nineteen to grow
thorns. He wants Two to grow fuzz.

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 The specimen numbers are clunky, he will admit. It’s been years and
he still hasn’t gotten around to naming them. He’s never been good with
names. But names are sacred for little things with consciousnesses. And
Adam can be forgetful. The fear is that, should he ever confuse one for
another, should he ever miss or add a syllable, they’ll start to wilt.
Numbers are more absolute.
The book thuds as he tosses it aside. A finger cap on his pinky
protects his skin from the small drop he tips onto the latex. Each dose is
measured to the minim. None can go to waste.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “The worst is almost over.”
He scoots forward, nudging One’s spiny leaves up so that he can
apply underneath. The curved spine of her stem unravels into a better,
receptive posture.
Medicine then water. Just like always.
Each of twenty-five flowers, wonderful specimens, beautiful
children, get their dose. He corks the vials and switches caps, giving them
each a special change that’ll make them cozier, happier, prettier. In the
silent minutes of application, he wonders what they’re thinking about. If
he could attach a little sensor to their chins, if flowers’ ideas are something
that could possibly be collected.
Adam smiles at the thought of tiny microphones. He cleans up his
mess. The latex is collected and tucked into his pocket. Notes, pencils,
vials. They all get a drink of water, just enough to treat them. Two and
Fifteen bow their heads in a little thank you motion. Their language gets
clearer by the day.
“I’ll leave you be, now. Give you a rest from all my prodding.” He
pushes himself to stand, stretches his arms over his head. Something
cracks inside. “See you in a few days, little ones.”
They copy him, their leaves shaking in relief at the wonderful
stretching feeling. They wave to him, an afterthought, before leaning into
one another, sharing their weight, a secretive huddle for planning. Or, for
talking about him.
The walk home is sprawling but nice, since weather is always so
perfect in isolation. Each day a more beautiful, more successful recreation
of the madness of yesterday.

5
 He whistles, hands in his pockets, thumbs tracing the small vials like
lucky pocket stones. He follows no particular path. He zigs and zags
around trees that have gone unbothered for so long that they’ve begun to
grow in loops, in jagged lines, parallel and perpendicular, whatever feels
right. No paved roads in the forest, no predetermined routes, no little
orange markers, an Adam-shaped pinball rolls forward through the forest
until he can see the little landmarks attributed to home. And, eventually,
the building.
Somewhat of an anomaly, his home. A dilapidated farmhouse
with… no farm devised to it. Merely a boarded and battered building in a
clearing, likely built with a purpose that was quickly lost or thrown aside
or abandoned or forgotten. Or banished. If it were given a glance and no
further exploration, you’d think it were haunted. Something about its
placement, maybe, surrounded by tall trees, shouldered by its broken
shed, the way that the grass only gets weaker the closer it grows to its front
door.
It’s perfect. No matter how close to collapse its outsides appear to be,
its belly is full of all his favorite things. He’d never let this old thing go to
ruin. Not until he’d become ruins himself.
When it comes into view, that beautiful fortress, Adam sighs like he’s
had a revelation. His tired feet take command from the brain and push
the body into a jog. Always so good to be home. It’s looking particularly
grubby today, its siding and shingles starting to tilt, to slip out of their
foundations. He’s been thinking about engineering some nice, winding
vines to cover it all up, hold it together. A little bit of topical solution
could hide the faded white paint, for aesthetic, for camouflage. Wishful
thinking, that last part. No need to hide from a town that’s not looking
for him anymore.
The porch steps squeak as he climbs them. So too do the old stairs to
the basement, which creak under his weight in the same pitch, same tune
as always. There are dustless silhouettes on the workbench that mark
where his tools go. Everything is returned back to its assigned place, clinks
and thuds and miscellaneous organizational sounds that play like music
to his ears. Same pitch. Same tune.

6
 He resets the world in preparation for the next day and goes to his
bed, which always welcomes him home, and blinks once, twice, three
times into sleep.
The earthquake happens at around four in the morning.
He must doze through the opening tremors, the slow fade-in of a
rattling earth, because he wakes up inside a cataclysm. The house shakes
as if it’s held in a closed hand, thrown like dice. Or like the ground outside
has turned into an ocean and the building is bobbing violently within it.
Adam falls out of bed. He isn’t sure if the bed had lifted up and
poured him out or if, in an all-consuming panic, he’d managed to roll him
free of the blankets. The noise his body makes against the floorboards is
lost in the rumble of other, sharper falling things.
The familiarity of his bedroom is distorted through the shaking,
through the darkness. He can’t identify early-late or morning-night
through the uncooperative window. It does nothing to assist him with
orienting his head, or his body, or his hands which blindly feel across the
floor for his dresser, for his glasses, for his mother.
Things fall and crash and break in this room, in all of his others,
shattering sounds that just manage to breach the roar. It is admittedly
impossible to dodge an avalanche one cannot see. He never understood
seismology, couldn’t be bothered, though he wishes he did now, wishes
he could at all assign a number to this whirlwind he’s experiencing.
Numbers are absolute, and yet all the important ones have tumbled out
of reach.
Something inside him tries its best to motivate. Come on, it says,
don’t be stupid, madman, get yourself together.
Yes, it would be wise, getting himself together. Of course, it’s easier
said than done when half of his intelligence is still tucked snugly into bed.
He thinks blindly, he acts blindly, his head goes one way and his hand
charges in the other direction. There’s no helping that now.
He find the cold metal drawer handle entirely by accident. It scrapes
the chapped skin of his knuckles. Fear mistakes the discovery as a victory.
Logic pinches him by the earlobe to stop him with haste.
A few handy numbers tumble around the space between his ears. To
open the dresser, to tug at its drawers, welcomes high probabilities of the
damn things shaking themselves free and plummeting upon the frail skull

7
placed conveniently beneath. Bad ending. Continuing to hold onto the
handles, however, will drag the whole ten-ton antique down. With similar
results.
He lets go.
That comfort of action vacates, leaving him with the invisible enemy
he can’t hide from. All that is left to do, in a last heroic effort, is to fold
himself up into a ball by the bed, covering his head with his hands. Pitiful
noises are muffled by the cloth of his pants which he presses his mouth to
and sharp knees prod against his chest as he makes himself small and
compact, protects his organs, interlocks his fingers in his hair.
He pulls. He curls his toes. He shuts his eyes so tight they burn.
In the chaos, in the preparation for his last few minutes alive, the
scientist is horrified to find he’s also forgotten how to pray.
So, the booming continues for a while longer, tossing fists of wind
at the side of the house. It gets stronger and louder, louder like the dirt
outside has begun to splinter and crack like a missile shooting toward
him, toward the very center of him, toward all those fragile, squishy,
living parts. He wrinkles his nose, scratching at his scalp, reacquainting
himself with all of the old news articles he read about miracles within
natural disasters, the people that are recovered, those helpful, lovely
survival rates—but who would think to send the recovery squad out to the
middle of nowhere?
The missile gets closer and louder and stronger.
And then it stops.
Without punctuation.
No aftershock or reprise, no hint that anything had happened at all.
The world is crumbling and then it goes suddenly, deathly still.
The house lurches like an empty stomach. Adam thinks it might
actually cave in on itself but, as he waits to be digested, everything settles
instead. Unbroken glass rings with the old vibrations. The picture frames
that haven’t yet fallen scrape against the wall as they swing, restless, ready
to drop and break with their brothers.
Adam hesitantly lifts his head. Something has been upturned on the
inside and he presses at his temples and winces at the ache. Maybe it’s his
brain still swimming around in there, in the bowl of his skull, well-stirred,
well-scattered. Otherwise he finds himself unharmed. His eyelids slip

8
open slow and shallow, glancing around for some sort of culprit but he
knows there is none. Just a mess with no answers. His shaking hands slip
down to the floor as he breathes in the dust that’s been turned up from
the quake.
Thirty seconds pass before he’s taken account of all his limbs, and
another thirty until he’s absolutely sure that the worst has passed him by.
He sits back on his heels, feeling that thrumming in his bones, in his
blood, savoring those sensations which mean he survived, and he stares
into nothing for as many seconds as it takes to consider the un-obvious.
To account for the parts of him that are not fastened to his body. The parts
of him that exist two miles out into that vast, deafening, shaking darkness,
those which are confined to a home of wood and dirt and not much else.
He thinks, and then blinks, and then looks back to the window.
The drawer crashes against the floor as he throws it open, his muscles
quivering like they’re afraid, and maybe they are, and he fumbles through
the dark for the old flashlight reserved for emergencies.
This is an emergency.
He has to check on the children.
The tongues of his shoes are stuffed down to his toes as he trips into
them in his hurry. And then, further, as he trips down the porch stairs, a
dim circle of light dancing and fracturing into the forest. The front door
latches loosely into its frame, swaying in and out, waving after him.
The flowers. Poor things. No hands to cover their heads, no roof to
protect them. No training in doomsday scenarios. They’ll likely have been
afraid in their own ways, in those flowery ways he can’t yet measure.
Conscious things have feelings, he knows, but classification is different.
Harder. He’s only skimmed the surface of cell regenerative possibility, he
hasn’t started to learn about their feelings. That was supposed to come
later. There was supposed to be enough time.
The trees are eerie at night, and this lingering quiet after the storm
only plays accomplice to the mood. They rustle like normal, they creak,
make their presence known even when the spotlight isn’t on them. Adam
brushes against their trunks as he struggles on his unwieldy legs, his
shoulders and arms scraping against the bark, but he still finds himself
thankful for their echoes. As night masks their familiarity, they remind
him of the map.

9
 The wooden frame is found after half an hour of worried and drowsy
sleepwalking. He kneels hard with a grunt, nudging them frantically with
his fingers, counting leaves and petals, checking their colors. While a bit
pale under the LEDs, they’re just as fine they were when he left them,
their heads cocked up to look at him. In whatever ways flowers can look.
“Oh, thank God,” he pants, the back of his throat tasting like metal
from rushing, from fretting, “you look spectacular.”
Specimen Five raises her head, proud. Her sisters follow.
Adam falls the opposite way, down into the dew.
“Spectacular,” he mutters like an insane man would, draping an arm
heavy over his eyes, “spectacular, spectacular. Perfectly spectacular and
safe.”
Down the slope of his relaxed fingers, the flashlight rolls. It settles in
a steep indent made into the grass, the tiniest empty reservoir ideal for
catching the rain, and its beam illuminates the few stalks of tall grass in
front of it, casting striped shadow puppets on the trunks all around them.
It has been a while since emergency. He’d forgotten this feeling, that
silly wonderful feeling, to find the little flowers safe and sound in their
little home. This feeling, relief, that washes over a body that steadily wakes
up, gets ready for a day to begin far before the sun has risen. His pulse
calms. His breath returns. They lay there together, Adam and his bed of
flowers, his only friends in the center of their lonely forest, tucked under
the stars. He lays and listens to the leaves and, against his best instincts,
considers falling asleep. It’s like a lullaby, the gentleness of them. They
brush against each other in the breeze. He listens to the groan of the wood.
He listens to the living hum of the dirt and everything in it. He listens to
the wind. Light and cautious over his head, carrying the sound of…
Adam pushes himself to sit upright.
He listens intently in the dark. The ground is cool and it seeps
through his pants, and perhaps that is the cause of the chill that drips
down his spine. Perhaps that is all, it would have to be. It couldn’t possibly
be anything else, but he finds himself slowly reaching out for his
flashlight.
The wind sounds like someone crying.
“... Wait here,” he tells the flowers.
Seventeen’s sepals curl in response.

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 “It’s nothing, Teeny,” he says. In spite of the words, his voice shakes.
“It’s always nothing.”
The current of the air is carrying someone’s noise in its palms, a
terribly sad noise, and placing it at his feet. But could it really be that?
Could it really be so… purposeful? This sound? At his feet? Could it ask
for assistance? His specific assistance?
Adam stands and considers finding the source. It must be evident on
his face, or in the sound of him standing, as one of the darlings rustles as
if to warn him. It gives him pause, as they’ve never before been wrong. He
stares into the black and weighs the options and, at the end of his
calculations, he begins to shake his head.
“… Silly,” he says, waving away the thought. “Isn’t it silly.”
Scientist insanity gives way to scientist vanity. It diagnoses
importance where there is none. What a danger it’d be to run into the
unknown. A stupid idea from what once was a smart man. There
shouldn’t be anyone around here to cry, anyways.
He pivots, his rubber soles squeaking on the wet grass, but he doesn’t
get far. Just a step or two, staggered, toes dragging against the ground,
before he stills on a previously unknown braking system. Instinct, finally
woken from its nap.
He gazes in the direction toward home. Something there, persistent
in this pause, in this quiet, won’t let him move forward.
No one around to cry means no one around to help.
The flowers begin to move again, twisting their stems to reach for
him. He doesn’t notice, turning back around, facing away from the
darlings. The crying sounds louder, from this way.
Perhaps they’re lost. The sadwhomever that’s out there. A crooked
maze like this, why wouldn’t they be? He wouldn’t mind offering some
directions. He could shout them from afar. Just a few words exchanged
and then back home.
Adam sweeps his light back and forth as he walks with careful,
constant steps. It’s fine, he’s sure. Crying is hardly a sign of danger. It’s a
symptom of it. Yes, yes, merely a symptom. And last he checked, fierce
predators didn’t often weep to attract their prey.

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 Despite each of his airtight rationalizations, the hesitance remains.
In his feet, which slow around each corner, and in his eyes, which refuse
to blink.
They sound so close, but they can’t be. He walks for several minutes
with no luck. He feels like the missile, now, getting nearer and nearer to
a sound that only grows and grows. It is a gentle cry but a loud one,
vulnerable yet encompassing. It almost begins to hurt. Adam winces and
holds a hand to his ear as he continues.
He calls out to them, whatever they are, whatever their intention—
“Hello?”
—but his voice is immediately swept beneath the cries. It surprises
him, makes him pause, a stutter in his gait that nearly topples him over.
He hadn’t thought that’d be possible. Crying is often a silent thing. He
shines and searches regardless, his intelligence still tucked snugly into his
bed.
There is no real understanding of the comfort one might need in this
situation. He approaches the situation anyway. Surely he’ll know what to
do when he finds them.
Of course, perhaps the person doesn’t want to be found. Adam
moved here, he would know. The forest is good to hide in. A good place
to run to and stay ran. But it must have been dreadful to be alone and
outside during the quake. Not everyone’s as brave as a petunia.
“H-hello!” He tries again. He audibly hisses at the feeling, the noise,
the ache. He uses his thumb as an earplug. Sound gushes in through the
gaps, hot and searing and sharp. “Are—are you alright?”
Adam knows his voice must echo but he’s unable to hear it. Someone
weeps, hidden in the dark and the trees, and they’re loud as a warning
siren.
The circle of light dances across trunks and leaves and branches as he
stops in another clearing, which must be… half a mile away from his
flowers, two and a half miles from his home. The crying is insistent, so
loud and dense that it reverberates off of itself, but he can’t seem to find
its source.
He turns in a small motion to look around the perimeter of the
enclosed, almost room-like opening in the trees. He watches the light,
then, mesmerized by the way it makes shiny leaves shimmer and dull ones

12
glow. It gives him ideas, but they’re hardly formed, dropped behind him
like breadcrumbs as he spins, almost making himself dizzy, so focused on
the light, so interested in the shadows it creates, that he doesn’t notice the
mop of tangled hair peeking up from a wall of bushes.
Maybe it isn’t crying after all, he thinks, but indeed a siren.
A natural disaster siren, a seismic-something that the institute
whipped up in his absence. Had they placed it here in the forest
somewhere, hidden in the greenery? Why? Could they even hear it, all the
way in Arden? In their sleep, in their beds? Adam is suddenly assured he
must be standing right on top of it. He must be, the way the noise has crept
into each inch of himself, vibrating his clothes, his eyes, his teeth, the soles
of his sneakers as he lifts them from the ground.
How ridiculous. Well done, madman, to be so disconnected from
the rest of the world that he’d mistake a machine’s alarm for a person’s
cries. It makes such obvious sense now that he thinks about it, with what
is left of himself to think through the blare. He stumbles, so dizzied by
the spinning and by his own stupidity, searching now for the exit, for the
pathway he’d come from.
There is little to recognize out here. The trees stand less twisted than
they are by the house, the grass less dead. It’s lush in the way those few
untouched places on the planet are lush, thriving in neglect, finding its
own water, its own light.
Midway through a revolution, he considers the potential for new
experiments, for collections to be made, that it would be so perfect if he
could inject some patches of bright color, reinforce the weaker bushes,
wind some wide leaves up the dried bark to keep the moisture in and
prevent cracking in their shields.
At once, though, as if in a wave, some fragmented truths become
apparent where, somehow, they had previously not been. And the weight
of each of them causes him to halt immediately, facing that leering wall
of bushes that form a boundary between himself and the remaining half
of woodland.
The foremost fragment, he’s fraught to realize, is that the siren is not
looping as sirens do, but instead making unique sounds on each repetition
as if warped or corroded, playing an alternate song that only gets less
rhythmic, less constant as it plays.

13
 And that the siren seems to take breaks to breathe, a gasping and
stuttering malfunction which he’d be content to blame on the disaster
that hadn’t passed but a moment ago if it weren’t for one last piece, one
last fleeting butterfly-thought that lands on the pile.
That the wind has stopped, disappeared like a dream, and yet those
bushes are still somehow moving.
Adam takes a step forward, squinting. The flashlight’s loose button
trigger is rattling in his quivering hand, he can feel it under his thumb, as
he thrusts it forward and away from his chest like a gun.
Between the weak, thin branches of the bushes and the weaker,
thinner fronds they carry, the negative space is not black but, instead, a
blotchy greige and copper color. Alabaster when directly in the beam he
points at it but stippled with earth and metallic matter that sparkles
between the shadows cast by the leaves. And then, above, peeking over the
jagged roof…
The non-siren continues to wail. And breathe. And shiver.
And the scientist presses a free fist to the side of his head, trying
desperately to stop the noise for just a moment, a millisecond, that he
might be able to think.
It’s something auburn, too, up there at the top. Hair-like. But it
couldn’t be, so far up in the air. A moss, then? A brush? Had a car been
overturned, many years ago, and the plants reclaimed it? Grew copper and
green across its sides, brown on its front bumper?
No, no. It must be someone. Someone who climbed up to the top of
the wall. Because they are crying. Now, as he stands in the center, it’s hard
to mistake it for anything else. It is emotive. It is conscious.
More for his own comfort than anything else, to guarantee that his
suspicions of normality are correct, he calls out to them.
“Hello?” The word struggles through the impenetrable wall pushing
back at it. He could swear, in all the commotion, his throat whistles with
the frequencies of someone else’s voice. “Whoever’s up there, I, I think you’ll
be quite alright!”
It must not be the sound of him but rather the light that catches their
attention. Something green, up there, green and slick like emeralds, it
catches the flash and immediately recedes, knocking the bush about.

14
 The crying stops, too. Snipped out of the air. It stings in his ears for
a moment longer. At the very end of it, a quality he could swear he
remembers, that lovely post-scream air that reminds him of home.
“... M, miss?” He sounds hoarse and haunted to his own ears. He
continues forward anyway, “Hello, miss?”
His steps are faster, assured that he has gotten one single thing right,
solved a mystery, proved a hypothesis. Yes, the paleness, of course, not a
car but a woman all along. He doesn’t think he remembers how to speak
to them, to women, but it can’t be so hard. Directions, yes? Only
directions? Granted, it isn’t as though he knows where they are, either.
Adam’s mouth is dry from all the worry, and from the exercise, and there
isn’t much time for a pre-written script or a trip back for the compass.
You’re about two miles out from the middle of nowhere, he could say. Or,
I’ve got a house, back there, if you’d… if you’d, um…
Oh, well. It’s a wonder she’d been found by anyone. They’d both
better be thankful for it. He’ll help her back to the main road and that’ll
be the end of things.
However, stuck in the clutter of planning his introduction, Adam
nearly misses another curiosity.
With each forward movement, only the plants appear differently,
shrinking in periphery, becoming a mass of individual leaves rather than
a strong uniform fence that forbids entry. The greens submit to a closer
perspective, but… Really, it’s silly to think, but… As he approaches,
instead of shrinking with the rest of the world, she seems instead to…
To…
His shoe finds a sun-dried pile of leaves beneath its tread. The crunch
that results shoots up into the sky through the hole in its canopy like a
gunshot.
The scientist drops the light to his legs with a grimace. He finds not
a pile of leaves but, instead, a straight border of them, hundreds of them,
as if they’d all let go of their stems at once. He steps over the mass of them,
almost a foot high, and he has a question for her now, about the leaves,
about what had possibly happened to them.
But above comes a sound. A groaning, creaking sound, like a trunk
slowly uprooting itself from dry dirt, something tall and heavy moving in

15
a way it shouldn’t know to. Adam’s skin prickles and he jolts the spotlight
back up to the bush, thinking it to be falling over, forward, on top of him.
Instead, in the windows of bare branches, at the very peak of the
skyscraping formation, the knotted thicket of fur is moving. Up, up, it tilts
slow, revealing more of itself and the size of that which it grows on, the
clumps of moss and thorns woven inside, until its copper skin emerges,
sewn into the wiry hairline, and further on.
A drop of sweat slips down his temple and into his aching ear.
It's a head. Framed within the fuzzy beam of his flashlight, a head
the size of a car. With eyes, vibrant and leafy, that reflect like an owl’s
would, that see him with such intensity, such stature, that he can feel it
on his skin. The hair sticks up and out and wisps in all different directions
like a stem in dire need of clipping, glowing gold-fluorescent at its frayed
edges. The face, her face, is wet as if it had just rained. And her mouth,
pressed so tight and slick and red that it looks as though she’d sliced it
open herself. A wound to let the cries out.
She moves, then, and he realizes she’s sniffling. It sounds industrial,
machinery grinding together and wheezing and whirring to a stop. Only
her nostrils flare, dripping heavy onto the bush. The rest of her remains
completely still.
Every part of Adam trembles. Muscles he had forgotten. Instincts and
fears. Mechanisms for protection that have broken in the ease of isolation,
mechanisms for denial that have already started to disintegrate. Surely it’s
a trick. A trick, or a dream, but as he scans the clearing that steadily fills
with his tinny, frightened panting, there is no such indication. The more
he searches, the more it is validated. The tops of her knees appear like
mountains over the leaves, her speckled arms wrapped around them. Real
muscle and real bone under a thick, dirt-dusted, chapped skin that’s matte
like dead leather.
The loose button clicks restlessly as Adam’s hand continues to shake.
He grips tighter to the handle, dipping its light down to illuminate the
bushes once more.
The reddish tan of her body is constant from the tip of its topmost
leaves to its lowermost roots. That is… impossible, even despite the fact
of the matter. Her shoulders are hunched and yet they occupy Adam’s
entire wingspan and more. Her arms, from what he can see, are tree trunks

16
in their own right. A cramped body fills the entire space, as if she had been
made for this one hiding spot, and as if the bush had been made for her.
Even curled so tightly into herself, she must be upwards of… Oh, God...
Ten…? Eleven feet tall?
Everything sits on his desk at home. Every certainty, every method
of measurement, any chance of security lies miles away gathering dust.
And further beyond that, in town, a hundred households sit populated
with people that could never possibly believe a word of it.
It does no good to panic. She’s clearly upset. How irrational it would
be to fear her—how little he is, how substantial she is, he dreads to think
what it would take, what size and shape, to make her so afraid.
It may help to inspect his company.
That thought occurs to him, to come closer, and her headlight
attention flickers down to his feet with haste as if she’d heard it. The very
thought. In her eyes, the reflection of the flash looks apprehensive. He
moves himself backward until it disappears, until the lines of her face lose
the deep shadows of overexposure, until he’s certain he’s out of her…
mindreading… forcefield.
The frustration is merely delayed. It will come to him later, once the
shock has vacated from this early Monday morning, that he has walked
into the woods and he has found a giant on the one night that he isn’t
wearing the pants with the notepad for sleeping epiphanies. For now it is
the shock, and the fear, and above all of it, a numbing sort of…
nothingness.
Because, really. What’s a little more insanity to an insane man?
He tilts his chin up. Switch by switch, second by second, it feels as
though he’s losing the key components of intelligence. A response to
some chemical imbalance, some improbable event in an all too probable
body. It does no good to panic. She stares and he stares back. Her nose is
red and dripping and her chin wobbles and Adam can’t tell if he’s truly
standing so far away or if she is just so massive, if it might ever feel as
though he is close to her, that even if he were to walk forward and into
her belly, she could just stand, launch into the air, disappear. It does no
good to panic.

17
 But the cries. Someone so big to hurt so badly. He is out of his
element in this moment as he so often is, but… where panic is not
helpful… perhaps a companion might be.
“Are you alright?” asks someone who sounds quite like Adam.
The woman stares. The sensation of it, like touch, makes him
squirm, and his hand wants to drop the flashlight, if only to spare them
both from this bothersome burn through the dark, but it holds steady.
They watch each other. Adam thinks in the frantic pause. Are you
alright. What could that possibly mean at a time like this? Alright doesn’t
translate, to his woodland sensibilities, any larger than the size of a human
brain. Alright fizzles once it scrapes the atmosphere. Alright becomes
awesome, he’d thought, that’s what the books about Great Unknown
Powers say. But surely meaning isn’t the matter. Her face is kind. And
perfectly large enough to register the kindness from a distance.
Another thought: perhaps she doesn’t understand, if alright gets lost,
if language gets lost up there as well.
As if in reply, or offense, her shoulder begins to move, a boulder of
bone rolling underneath like a piston. Attached to the bone is her arm,
and attached even beyond is her hand, which lifts with a whistle of wind
between her incredible fingers. His stuttering instincts register a threat
when it’s halfway ascended, the sheer size of that palm, the sheer weight
of its flesh, and as he flinches away, the ancient light flickers as the dust
jostles around its springs and bulbs. His wide, nightblind eyes trace its
ascent, but he finds it odd. That the hand raises slowly, meandering,
ignorant to any sense of urgency. And once raised, it does not cock like a
gun, or peel into a mass of leaves, or slap at him as one would a fly.
Instead, the massive hand is brought to a brooding, trembling chin,
brushing against it, and she begins to wipe at her eyes with her knuckles.
Wide-rule flecks of dried salt fall in sheets at his feet. Once done, she
glances at him again, owly and moonlit, making sure he’s still here. Adam
isn’t sure, currently, if he’s ever been anywhere else.
She hears that too.
Her palm inverts, and the tears caught in the gutter creases of her
fingers pour in torrents down her wrists, and she rests it lightly atop the
boundary, the hedge, the wall between them. And she pushes it down.
Crushes it like paper. Twigs snap and leaves rip with near to no effort. The

18
ground rumbles but remains unbroken, and the boundary between them
has been leveled with all possibility of forced perspective along with it.
The first impulse is to look away. The woman, the stranger, is as
naked as she is large. The flashlight is casting sharp shadows over her skin,
the ridges of her ribs and the creases of her stomach that aren’t hidden by
the legs she holds close to her body. The obstacle now removed, she
wordlessly requests his attention, and he’s unsettled at the immediate
sense that he knows this for certain.
Adam opens his mouth with no idea of what he might say. An
apology or an offer. A name or a fact. But it isn’t a word she wants. It’s
clear, once he glances down—down, for the first time in a great number
of minutes—and finds it.
Her fingers, each of them longer and broader than his legs, are
wrapped around her ankle, cradling a bloodied foot. Her cracked
knuckles catch and divert much of the flow away from the ground, an
accidental aqueduct that drips in gallons into the crevices of her fingers.
She holds it delicately, distantly, like she’s unsure what to do with it
between keeping it or ripping it off and burying it. As he kneels to inspect
the damage, he finds himself doing so carefully, slowly, giving due space
to the gashes half his size. Certainly it wouldn’t matter if he brushed
against them, but he can’t think of that now. He treats this like he would
a flowerbed, and perhaps it’s all he knows.
The red glistens in the light. But through the red, there’s something
else. Brighter and more reflective. He adjusts the light, tilting it upward,
from the earth up to the sky. Jagged shadows creep up the pillar of her
shin, cast by what appear to be small shards of metal lodged into her ankle,
her heel, not deep enough to hit anything important but enough to
hurt. Enough to cry.
She sniffs above him. A tear splashes in his hair, heavy and cold as a
water balloon, leaking down his face and into his eyes and into his mouth
and into his ears and into his shirt collar. He looks up at her. She looks
back. The word would be breathtaking if he had the breath to say so.
“What…?” he asks, gaze bouncing between the wound and her face.
“What’s happened to you?”
No response. She grips her ankle tighter. Her joints creak as if
petrified. Adam imagines roots in there, in place of veins and bones and

19
tissues, but if she’d been grown, she wasn’t grown here. Her toes are
independent, non-webbed, detached from the grass that sprouts like
peach fuzz around her soles.
The scientist notes all of this. And, at the end of a long string of
conclusions, he swallows and begins to nod.
Perhaps it’s the late night air. Perhaps it’s the sudden empowerment
of standing beneath an injured goliath for this long and not being stepped
on like an ant. Perhaps it is the sight of an injury that he knows how to
fix. More or less. Big or small.
It’s another impulse, a new one, one that cranks the dial of
motivation and snaps off the dial of reasoning. He finds himself standing.
The woman shifts with him, backward to his upward as if anticipating a
blow. He offers a hand to assure her, finds himself reaching up for the
stars to do so, that he’s got nothing to do anything to her with. He’s
practically as small to her upright as he was on his knees. She studies his
individual fingers. This is a fascinating dream indeed.
“I can… help,” he chokes through the heavy smell of dirt, and of
blood. She blinks at him. An answer, he assumes. “If you’ll… stay here.
I’ll. I can be back with… some things. To help. You. Alright?”
A pause. The wind sounds like itself again. She listens to it, the wind,
before she gives him the slowest and heaviest nod.
In the heat and weightlessness of the moment, he turns too fast on
his heel in the dew and upturned dirt of a post-disaster. His sneakers slip
on the debris, his legs slide back and into the air, his chin thuds against
the ground. His teeth click like stones into one another. For the next few
scrambling seconds, he can feel her watching him. He doesn’t glance
back, by some miracle, but if he had, he’d find his light there, between his
feet, catching the lowest branches and little else. Instead, he gains his
footing, finds his place, and his pride, and he sets off into the dark.
Adam runs two and a half miles in far too short a time.
His footfalls hit silent against the ground but his pulse makes up for
the sound, it sets the rhythm, fast and hurried and worried and thrilled.
His body bounces off of trees, scraping his elbows, his ribs, his palms,
finds himself stumbling, gasping, his mind running yards ahead of the
rest of him. The air whips across his face and tugs at his clothes as he goes,

20
like it wants to intervene. Stop now, madman, before you get hurt. Close
your eyes, madman, and wake up in bed.
The burn of his lungs is too real to deny. He shoulders his way into
his house, tripping over an overturned lamp, collapsing into a pile of
overturned books. He’d forgotten the mess. He swims his way out of the
pages and throws himself down the hall.
Along with the light he abandoned in the clearing is his capability.
Somehow the run hadn’t thawed the uselessness of being afraid. His keys
fall out of his hands when he grabs them. He walks to the door. He walks
into the door, his head thunks against the wood. It takes him a few tries
to remember how to work the knob. Until then, he stares at it.
Her eyes. And her hair, and her breath. Can she still see him through
the trees? Through the walls? Can she still hear his thoughts? Does she like
them?
Old Truck sputters as if it knows how early it is, like a muffled groan,
like a threat within it. He pets the dashboard in apology, for what he’s
doing, for what he’s going to do.
The true miracle is that he doesn’t crash. Cognizance is in and out
like radio static. Deep breath in. Adam is driving down the dirt road, he
blinks and suddenly he’s driving on pavement. Deep breath out. He drives
until he finds himself at the one convenience store whose lights are still
on at this hour, the one convenience store that still takes his business.
The truck door slams closed and startles him so badly that he screams
and nearly faceplants into the concrete. His chin is sore. His legs are tired.
Stop now, madman, before it’s too late.
It’s already been too late. The store shelves have all been upturned.
The television over the register plays the early morning news through
static-prone speakers, a report on the blast-like earthquake that had rattled
the town mere hours ago. A level of magnitude they’ve never seen before, they
say, the highest in the town’s history.
Adam maneuvers through the rubble, leaving green footprints
between chip bags and beer boxes, to find the back aisles where giant-
mending equipment can be found. Even standing in front of it, even with
the memory, the conversions astound him. Every box and bottle of soap,
every roll of bandages, it still doesn’t feel like enough when he tries to
overlay them onto the picture of her wound.

21
 Blood and sweat pouring in torrents down the bone of her ankle, the
trough of her calf where the muscle exists beneath.
He takes it all anyway. Stacked up past his head, he wanders stiffly
up to the register. The clerk assumes him to be a late-action ransacker and
doesn’t pay him any mind until he piles his treasures at the register. And
even then, the attention is delayed. It seems that the rush of thieves has
already passed him by. Adam can’t afford to join them.
“Hi,” he says.
It doesn’t sound quite right. His chest aches and his throat burns and
he’s barely reclaimed his breath. He sweats dirt and instant mashed
potatoes. The statue behind the register finally finds him. No comment is
made on the state of him. No comment is made at all, in fact, until he
gestures with torn palms to the city he’s erected in front of the broken
card reader.
“That.” He jumps at his own voice, then recoils into himself, cupping
his face, scratching casually at his cheek. “That, please. Is all.”
Wordlessly, the man begins to ring up one of likely fifty boxes.
Adam’s fingers are restless at the edge of the counter. He thinks
about small talk, about initiating it. The window of opportunity opens
and closes a few times, up and down with each lifted box.
What stops him in the end is self-awareness. That this is definitely
what criminals look like. Shifting from foot to foot, looking up at the
television, looking over toward the glass doors, toward his truck that’s
parked outside, searching for someone on the horizon. Luckily, it doesn’t
matter. The town sleeps and the cameras were cut for cost and the clerk
chews gum and watches the lottery stats on the handheld television. So
the window remains closed.
Beep. Beep. Beepbeep.
“Uh,” Adam hears himself say. Sounds slightly haunted. Slightly
despondent. Two bright-white dots remain in his sight no matter how
hard and how often he rubs his eyes. And he does, and he does. “Tell me
something, if you would.”
Beep. Beep.
“Uh-huh.”
He glances over his shoulder toward the mess. A guilt settles in his
stomach like it’s his fault. He taps the counter, thoughtful, horrified,

22
before pivoting again, leaning close, nose against the glass barrier between
them, “... Hey, is? Is this real life?”
An answer comes in the form of a total. “Sixty-seventy-five.”
The air is cool and not quite comforting as he steps back outside. Too
quiet, this street and the millions of paths it branches out into. The bell
on the door is delayed and startles him for a second time as it bids him
adieu. Past the large bin of bagged ice, past the ashtrays, he keeps his head
down, watching his feet as they walk independently, avoiding singed
cigarette wrappers, avoiding discarded plastic, discarded foam.
As the ground begins to slope, his attention stutters a little ahead, an
inch before the torn rubber of his sneaker toes. Between the faded white
lines for parking spaces, he finds thick, gash-like cracks in the ground. He
slows his pace. He traces them like arrows to find their origin. The handles
of the bags dig into his wrists as he follows a broken map in the dim lot,
and his body stops in front of it before his mind can catch up.
A large… crater in the pavement.
A quick survey confirms that it is, in fact, in company. He counts
two of them in the light alone. They were certainly created with enough
force to inspire a level of magnitude they’ve never seen before. He considers
the earthquake, the damage, and stares just long enough to track the edges
of the holes, to identify the slope, the rounded curves that mimic soles of
impossible feet.
He trips forward and over the big toe’s indention.
An earthquake is awaiting his return.
The sun is coming up just as Adam returns into the forest, driving
only somewhat recklessly. The truck bed is full of boxes that slide around
as he weaves around thin trees, and the buckets of water in the passenger
seat slosh and threaten to spill. They do no such thing.
She’s stopped crying. Her cheek is resting on her knee as she watches
him drive into the clearing, the rims of her nostrils pink and dried and
cracked like stone. The blue morning light makes her edges softer,
blurrier, less sharp, less afraid. Crumpled greens and branches encircle her
like a nest.
In the daylight, he can see the blood on her face too, faded streaks of
it over her eyes and eyelids, dried in flakes around her throat. Like she’d

23
panicked at the pain, like she’d thought for some reason she could hide
behind her own red hands.
His truck, named Truck, seems to make her nervous. She relaxes
when it splutters itself asleep a few meters out.
He pokes his head out of the window, “Hello.”
The woman looks at him.
“... Right.” He hops down from the driver’s seat. Upon examination
of the bounty, and upon further consideration, he finds her over his
shoulder. “Would you… mind coming out from there?”
It doesn’t feel like such a difficult request for the sake of convenience.
Of course, in the advance planning, he’d not thought to include
communication into the equation. He wonders if anything has ever been
convenient for someone so big. He wonders if anyone has ever asked her
to do anything.
“It just,” he says. “Just might be easier if you’d…”
He waves his hands around, tries to make a coherent shape without
words. Convenient looks like a circle, and then a pointed finger to her, and
then a pointed finger to him.
She reads his signs.
She looks away.
It takes him ten trips from Truck to the hedge. A pyramid is built
between them. Back, forth, back, forth, he doesn’t look at her much unless
to know she’s there. Her eyes are locked somewhere in the forest, not
looking at something but rather looking away from something. From
him, from his effort. Making a point silently. At least, he thinks, she
understands what he’s trying for. Adam’s no stranger to taking care of
things that don’t talk back to him. The gratitude, he finds, comes in the
way the stems mend. Stronger. Greener. Sometimes, sharper.
Her foot is the size of his entire body. He sits by it, and by the village’s
worth of first-aid he’s acquired. Though the whole world sits in front of
him, he thinks about what isn’t here. It feels like a mistake to have so little
prepared, but his mistakes tend to have advance notice. He misses his
notebook anyway, misses it like a mistake. His pen, pencil. His vials. He
hesitates to start without them. And he should have run to grab gloves.

24
 She drops her head to regard him. He must be taking long if the
seconds are reaching her all the way up there. If they’re weighing as heavy
as they are down here.
Her hair looks like vines, reaching down to rest past the small of her
back, touching the grass in all directions, various plant debris knotted in
almost intentionally. A lock of it lays heavy on his knee.
She looks like she may say something.
Adam waits, but nothing.
“Okay. Yes, yes, okay,” says the madman to himself, but preparation
is just a word. “Like the flowers. Like the children.”
She moves. Breathes. Hair slips from her shoulders and thuds against
the ground, weighty like industrial rope. She watches. Breathes.
“This…” He rolls up his sleeves, scooting closer, shaking his head at
fifteen things all at once, “I’m sorry, but this...” The air feels clear and
empty, so he leans back to shout, “It’ll hurt! I’m, I’m sorry!”
Somewhere in her eyes, big enough to hide inside, he can register
understanding. Or maybe offense. It likely hadn’t felt good when metal
had lodged itself into her skin either. And she likely hasn’t forgotten.
The fragments come out easily once he starts on them. He winces
every single time he pulls one out, the sound of it, the wet, as if he were
the one pruning himself. The woman doesn’t bat an eye, though. Maybe
giants don’t blink. Or feel, or… cry…
He pushes his damp hair out of his face with the back of one hand,
grasping blindly behind himself for the handle of a bucket. It’s a
surprisingly arduous task. Repetition. His back aches from the movement,
pulling the debris hard down between his legs until it gives, twisting,
tossing the pieces aside, resetting. Repeating. He isn’t used to toiling away
at anything above his head. Everything that mattered has been beneath
him, reflecting colors on the underside of his nose. Rustling, in their
flowery language, and always saying please.
“Can, can?!” He rests back again, he’d forgotten. “Can you take a, a
breath?” He mimes it, his arms urging out and in, modeling ribs and lungs,
flowing as if underwater. “A deep one?!”
She doesn’t hear, so he repeats, louder, tearing something deep in his
throat. It takes a second to reach her. Her eyelashes flutter an

25
acknowledgement. Then, she does. Breathes. And the entire forest is
drawn close.
To clean the cuts, he has to stand. Each bone cracks, his skeleton
resets, but the woman doesn’t mind. She just looks at him and waits.
Waits for something, he’s beginning to believe, she couldn’t even define.
“I, I.” He points to himself. His belly. “I have to clean—” To the
bucket. “Those—” The blood, all the blood, and the cuts beneath. “Or
they’ll fester!” He hesitates. Fester. A thumbs down? No, no. He jumps,
starts waving his hands like crazy, “Bad! It’ll be, be bad!”
The woman nods, somehow, without moving.
Adam takes the first bucket. It tugs on his tired arm. He looks up at
her and considers asking if she’d do it, if she’d want to. If that would be
better. She hears the question he hasn’t asked. After a beat, after
considering it, she turns her head in the opposite direction. A declined
invitation.
A smaller breath is taken in between her stained teeth when the cold
water rushes down the hot hurt. She still steals all the oxygen. The pail
clunks as he tosses it aside.
“Alright?” he asks.
Adam stops himself from resting his bloody fists on his hips as he
studies for a reaction. To get the details, even millions of feet high, it feels
like he has to stand absolutely perfectly still. It’s irrational to think he’ll
scare off the emotion on her face if he makes any sudden movement, like
watching birds or deer. But he bends slowly anyway, vertebrae by
vertebrae, to take the rags and soap in hand.
At a loss for etiquette, he simply cleans her wounds like he’d clean a
car. Her skin is rough and dry, catching on the fibers of fabric, especially
over the knot of the ankle bone where the scales flutter down around his
shoes. The earth dips where she sits and he stumbles on the incline.
She makes no note of his mistakes. Her focus is elsewhere. Creatures
chirp around them and her breath sounds like a breeze. Her gaze jumps
from branch to branch to try and find the source of all the noise.
“Birds,” he explains up to her.
The sound travels and scares them all away. She frowns at him.
Curiosity melts into offense. It seems she’s well familiar with the concept.
And it seems she wasn’t yet done looking at them.

26
 He ducks his head with a wince and dunks the rag into the water.
When the soap bottle is depleted, he grabs another one. And another. And
another. And as he works, each move he makes feels futile, pouring and
wiping and scrubbing and rinsing and still so much left to clean. But the
water that runs down her skin turns into a lighter and lighter pink as it
moats around her before sinking into the grass. And he wonders if it’ll be
good for the plants, the iron of it, of her. If there is any iron. Would there
be? And how much? For someone so big? The darlings, the leaves, would
they overdose? Would the forest soak it up, turn blazing orange like rust
for miles? Would they blame it on him? His hands are full and his mind
races and he mends the hurt of a person who should not likely exist. Could
they blame it on him?
For the first time in years, silence is painful to Adam. Peaceful, yes,
but not fulfilling. He wrings out the rag once the cuts have slowed their
spray into steady drips. It doesn’t feel finished, but there can’t be much
more he can do. His thread is too thin, his needles too small. Even if he
managed to stitch the marks together, marks the size of his arms, she’d
tear them with the tiniest movement.
He tries to wipe his hands clean but the blood has dried into
concrete. She watches him poke at the stain. He doesn’t want to make it
seem like it’s her fault, so he makes a show of dismissing it, waving it away,
reaching for the next step.
The tape gauze rips loud enough, somehow, to scare her. He feels the
heat of electricity radiate off of her in a wave. It makes his hairs stand up.
And hers too, black and coarse and frayed like molded twine.
“Almost done,” he tells her, and gives her a thumbs up on accident.
She blinks at his thumb. Surprise? No, different than surprise. If she
had petals, maybe it’d be easier to read. What is the name for the feeling
one has right before something ends? It’s that, in her eyes.
He wraps her ankle anyway. Several yards of gauze disappears in
seconds, unspooling, tightening, creaking. He pins the loose ends with his
shoulder as he trades for another roll, nudging them close with the toes
of his shoes. It all feels so loose no matter how hard he pulls, and he finds
himself being cautious. Stupid. Caution is a very subjective concept
regarding size. So he pulls harder, walking the perimeter of her foot, the
pale of the bandages appearing white against the tan of her hide. Tossing

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the roll of bandages up and over her ankle, walk around, tuck it under.
Rinse and repeat.
His arms grow sore, his fingers run raw by the friction. She rests her
chin on her knee to observe him. It’s a mild thud that refracts down her
shin bone, and the bandage he holds vibrates at a frequency he can hear.
Like a guitar string. A spider web he’s tangled up in.
“It’s not my best work,” he admits, tugging gently, shyly. “You’re no
lily, but… how does that feel for you?”
Her jaw clenches.
This feels like progress.
All evidence of a cry has disappeared. There is a reluctant sense in
him that they are collaborators, and their mission is coming to an end.
But the craters are still clear in his memory. And sure, anyone else
who hadn’t first seen a giant woman would assume that they were just
unfortunate results of a tremor. They’d likely not try to assign a culprit to
it. They’d not diagnose urgency in the steps. But of course, Adam had first
seen a giant woman. And what a fortunate twist of fate that he’d already
believed in magic. And what a sad thing, to find such a perfect match and
lose it so quickly.
He ties her tightly together before taking a step back. It isn’t his
prettiest work but aesthetics, in some cases, can kneel at the throne of
function. She’s patched up nicely, tightly, snug enough to move around
without unraveling.
He has yet to see her move around. It's all been within implication,
what something so heavy might be capable of, what something so… quiet.
Adam tries to find some indication of footprints in the grass. There’s no
concrete to dent and break apart, just soft and forgiving soil that cushions
the fall. Any result of impact has been blended in.
Adam scratches his jaw, continuing to scan. His arms hurt and his
neck hurts and his head hurts.
He takes a breath to summon the words, or courage to ask them.
“What were you running from?”
Something shifts inside her, a lever pulled, maybe, or something less
simple to explain. It drags her face downward.
“It’s okay,” he says, stuck only in the beginning of panic. He lifts a
hand to calm her. She glares at it. It’s the most her face has moved in

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hours. He lowers his arm, then pushes at his eyes with it to show her, to
speak to her, “I saw.” Then, pointing, back over his shoulder in the wrong
direction. “In town. You were running, weren't you?”
She reads him, then thinks, then looks away. Off into the distance,
up above the trees, a sight he couldn’t ever imagine but one he tries to
conjure anyway. Most important, though, is that it’s fast. Her movement.
Whatever was frozen inside her has thoroughly thawed by now. As the
seconds draw on, as he watches her without etiquette, she begins to turn
her entire body, swiveling on her bum, huffing and hugging her legs
closer. Her jaw creaks like timber as it clenches, and her bottom lip drips
wet from the corners as she pushes it outward, and… well, any fear that
Adam had before is swiftly dissipated.
Perhaps she did grow right up out of the ground, right here, just like
this. Perhaps she was born only yesterday. How scary that must be, to
wake up so high up in the air. To learn to walk, to run, and to fall into
something so sharp.
It does seem to be the largest tantrum he’s ever seen.
After a moment of tersely staring off into the distance, the woman
hesitantly peers over her shoulder to see if he’s still there. When she finds
him, because he hasn’t moved an inch, her eyes widen and she’s snapping
back into her stern gaze forward. Her hair whooshes behind her, swaying
against her back, and her fingers clutch at her arms in order to fold them,
to keep them solid and statued.
Adam feels his face pull into a smile.
“... Oh, I see,” he leans his weight onto one foot. His arms cross, a
lame sort of smug. “You’re just a big softie, aren’t you?”
She pauses her pout. Her focus slides down to him, lips parting, and
what a feeling it is to perplex such an impossible thing.
“Not to worry, my large friend,” Adam says, bending to hide his face.
It only makes sense while he’s down here, though, to gather the mess of
cardboard and plastic and paper and cloth, all ruined, all reeking of metal
and dirt. He mutters toward the ground, forming a ball of garbage with
his fingers, remnants of clay and dense blood helping it all stick together,
“You’ll be free of me soon enough.”
He sweeps up an armful and heads back toward Truck to load them.
She traces him with her eyes as he walks back and forth. Most of the boxes

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are empty by this point, barren rolls of bandages and tape or soap bottles
that can be recycled. He can toss them into the truck bed from his place
by the bushes. Most of them land perfectly. He thinks, confidently, that
the woman’s silent watching means she is impressed, even with the trash
that deflects off the hubcaps and bumpers in all the same places.
Rigidity washes off the giant with no water required. She fails to
recall that she was upset, spinning slowly to face him again. It appears
she’d hoped for subtlety but every move she makes has somewhat of a
domino effect. It’s as if the world rushes out of her way in order to give
her plenty of room. Trees and grass rock back and forth as if to clear a
path.
Shattered metal bits clink into empty pails. He carries them up to the
passenger seat, places them on the floorboards. He lingers, there, huddling
by the glove compartment, wondering if there’s anything he has
forgotten, wondering if there are any more excuses. There are none to be
found under the seats, or in the console. He rummages beneath the mat.
Nothing there either.
The both of them jump when Truck’s door slams closed. They look
at each other. An understanding is reached. He just doesn’t know what
kind.
The sun is high overhead now. The day has begun and the dream has
not yet ended. She is seeming realer and realer with every passing second.
Moving more, feeling more, shining more. Her ears are like thin red
lanterns, the sun catching the veins and guts inside. A sudden
classification finds him in his solemn observation: she has the face of a
friend. Of course, Adam finds friendly faces anywhere he hopes to.
Flowerbeds and giants alike.
“Do you think you can stand?” he asks, and demonstrates.
She makes a face. She lifts her leg to look at his handiwork in the
sunlight. Adam covers his eyes with his hand and turns a little, his face
burning. A long, still, blind moment. There’s a loud boom that jerks him
around, her foot dropped back to its place, and he peeks through his
fingers just in time to see her nod.
“Why don’t you try?” He leans against the tailgate. Try looks like an
open loop drawn in the air. “Before I go. Just to make sure I’ve not made
you worse off than I found you.” Closed hands, prayer form. “Please.”

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 The woman considers the offer. She shakes her head. A slow
movement. It’s as if the air is too thick to allow free motion. Adam wishes
he had his notes. He knows what he’d write and how he’d structure it.
Weight and gravity, structure and density, her posture bends to its own
mass rather than embracing it. It shies away from itself. Makes itself
heavier in doing so.
He frowns. He taps his fingertips against his palm. “Why not?”
She stares at his hand. It looks like she might mimic. She doesn’t.
Instead, she sighs and parts the trees. Drops her head. Her hair falls
into her face. The reflective eyes and the silence and the stiffness has faded
and she… She really just is a large lady, isn't she? Everything is normal
under the same sun. The same light.
Her mouth opens and every living thing tilts close to listen. Adam
leads the charge.
“Big,” she says.
It is a voice. He thinks. It sounds like… well, he doesn’t even know
what it sounds like. Like a big woman.
He holds onto Truck to keep himself upright.
Her word rumbles in his chest long after she’s stopped speaking it.
Just like her cries, it is meant to be soft, he knows, but a whisper to a giant
is far louder than he could ever expect. She speaks toward her lap and the
sound lands heavy in the bowl her legs create.
It doesn't hurt his ears. It's quite pleasant, in truth. It rushes like a
waterfall. It's the least voice-like voice he's ever heard.
“I…” He would walk forward if he thought he’d be able to keep
steady. He gestures to her, face stuck in a smile, “I know that, yes.”
She huffs. It blows his hair back. She looks toward the woods again.
Finished with the conversation. Decision made.
“Ah. Well. A pleasure meeting you, Miss Giant,” he bows his head,
clinging to Truck’s side as he walks around its border, a child clutching at
the edges of a deep pool. His legs are still clinging to their common sense.
They ought to follow the leader here, everything else is long gone.
The woman bites the inside of her cheek. The further away they get
from each other, the more human she seems. He isn't certain if it's because
she trusts him, or because she feels better. Or if it's a trick of the sun. Or
if it's a trick of his mind.

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 “Who is to say?” she asks.
Truck’s windshield fogs up bright white.
He doesn’t understand for a moment. He’s out of practice with this,
with introductions, and with goodbyes. He forgets the proper farewells,
how to respond to them.
“Who is,” Adam repeats stupidly. “To say. About what?”
“That I’m no Lily.”
The way she says it, like she’s protective over it. Over the word, Lily,
like a badge, like something she had that she lost. And at the same time,
the way it doesn’t fit in her mouth, like it’s the first time she’s ever heard
of such a thing. Such a word, such a… name. He forgets about names.
People don’t give him names anymore.
But this is rather spectacular, he thinks. If anything were to be
spectacular enough to remember.
“... Lily?” he echoes.
It’s a brief hesitation, enough time to make him think he misheard,
but she nods once, briefly, as if to tell him that she is a very busy woman
with many forests to gaze despondently into. A few leaves fall out of her
hair. It's charming.
What would a handshake with a giant be like?
“Nice,” he says, and then, “to meet you,” and then, “Lily.”
Her hand, resting limp on the ground by her bottom, twitches. Her
fingers curl and begin to press at the wound, at the cloth overtop.
“I’m,” says the scientist, pushing at his heaving chest like it were a
wound on its own, “I’m Adam. If you wanted.”
She sighs again, a bit louder. The trees creak.
“Not so good at meeting.” One last fleeting glance. “Little man.”
Adam is fine on the drive home. He is, at least, capable. The
remnants and unused equipment of a last-minute surgery rattle around
him, at his feet, in his passenger seat, in his truck bed, in his chest. He is
fine. He waves to the flowerbed as he passes it. Only a few of them wave
back, little colorful blobs of wilting stems that must have stayed up all
night, and the others have curled up into overlapping circles, linked like
a daisy chain, deep in sleep.

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 The front door creaks as he enters, the floor groans. The old house
greets him as if nothing had gone wrong at all, as if it weren’t in the state
it’s in. He tosses his keys onto the table, toes off his shoes. Looks down at
his hands, tilts them, rotates them and flips them. The creases and cracks
of his skin are dark red, the edges of his nails, the ridges of his knuckles.
Adam begins to laugh.
Sort of.
Ha, he says quietly. A word more than a laugh. The humor will catch
up to him soon alongside the reality. So, ha, he says as he walks to the
kitchen sink, rinsing impossibility from his fingers overtop the stacked
and dirty dishes. Ha, he says as he walks downstairs, as he picks up his
notebook, writes the word giant, and puts it back down. Ha, he says, with
more feeling, climbing the old stairs, standing at the top, staring at a floor
that is thoroughly covered in broken glass and fallen books, seeing
millions of tiny scientists reflecting in them.
Adam stands in the center of everything, every mess and new
revelation, looks up toward the sky, and laughs to himself. He laughs until
he can’t stand straight. He laughs until he can’t breathe and, promptly,
laughs until he passes out on the floor, surrounded by the remains of an
earthquake named Lily.

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