Fiction | Short Story

The Giant

It was here that Dad told me the story. I didn’t know where the story had come from, or how long he’d carried it inside him.

At the bottom of the lake, there lay a giant. The villagers had tried to kill him, but giants aren’t like men. You can’t just put a bullet in the head and be done with it.

My father understood guns. He’d been a military man before he came back to the farm. He used to keep a Sig-Sauer P226 in his bedside table.

When I was a small girl, he taught me how to clean and load a shotgun. Then he took me out to the back pasture, which stretched out green and soft to the river, and he showed me how to hold it against my shoulder.

When the giant still roamed the hills, he’d cast shadows into the valley where the villagers made their homes. When they heard him snapping trees as he moved through the forest, they froze in their huts. The children, lying together on beds of fern fronds, shut their eyes and gripped each other’s hands.

The villagers longed to kill the giant. For years, they’d discussed possible plans. But they lacked the right sort of weapon.

“Don’t look at the barrel,” Dad said. “Your eyes should follow the bird. Keep one breath ahead of the bird.”

My finger kept sliding off the trigger. At that moment, I knew, the girls in my grade at school were lined up at ballet practice, their legs enclosed in smooth pink tights. They were pointing their toes in unison.

I closed my eyes and pulled back on the trigger. But when I opened my eyes, the bird was still cutting a clear arc through the sky. I was watching the bird when Dad yanked the gun out of my hand and took aim. Just like that, the bird fell out of the sky. I saw it happen before the gunshot rang out in my ears.

One night, the giant descended on the village, smashing several of the huts into splinters and killing two men. But that was not, in the end, what upset the villagers so much. They had become, over the years, resigned to the occasional losses of their warriors.

This time, the giant had taken with him a young girl—a princess. And they could have accepted her death. Had he devoured her, they would have known what to do, how to mourn. There would have been a funeral feast and the singing of songs. But the giant hadn’t eaten her. A young warrior had seen the princess, still alive.

In the days after she’d been taken, this warrior had trailed the giant through the forest. It was not, after all, hard to track the giant; it was only hard to look at his gnarled face through the canopy of the trees. When finally he reached the giant’s lair on the side of the mountain, the warrior crouched in the bushes, peering through the leaves. There was the princess, sitting in the mouth of the cavern, bedraggled but otherwise unharmed. As the warrior held his breath, the giant picked up the princess and set her down in the center of his palm.

Dad sat in his truck outside my high school, waiting for me to emerge. As I walked out, I hoped the girls who streamed around me wouldn’t notice his dented truck, its tires caked with mud. When I yanked open the door of the truck and hauled myself inside, Dad snorted in contempt. His eyes were on two girls, who were walking, shoulder-to-shoulder, bent over their phones. They wore skin-tight jeans, strappy sandals. One girl had long hair that she pulled over her shoulder, revealing an expanse of cleavage.

Dad threw his cigarette butt out the window. “They let them dress like that?”

“I guess.”

He yanked the truck into gear and craned his head over his shoulder as he reversed. “Thank Christ you didn’t turn out like that.”

I pressed my calloused hands against each other. My fingernails were rimmed with dirt that no amount of washing could get rid of.

He was glad I wasn’t like those girls. That was something—a fleeting breeze that felt almost like approval. I tried not to remember what I’d been thinking as I’d walked out of school, my eyes on those same two girls. How it would’ve been nice to walk like that, like they did, not noticing your shoulder brushing against someone else’s.

*

Days later, when the warrior returned to the lair, he saw the giant squatting at the entrance to his cave, holding his hands in front of him. The giant was speaking: a terrible sound, like rocks breaking against each other. It took the warrior a moment to realize that the giant wasn’t talking to himself. He was talking to the princess. She was seated inside the giant’s hand. The warrior could see the outline of her body between the giant’s thick fingers. The young man reached for his knife, knowing as he did so that there was nothing he could do.

Then he heard another noise, something fine and high-pitched that raised the hairs on the back of his neck. It was the princess. She was speaking, but not in any words that the warrior could understand. Her words had become sharp and jagged. She was learning the giant’s language.

“Fence is down in the back paddock,” Dad said. He was getting dressed in his bedroom, but he knew I could hear him from the kitchen.

“I’ll swing by after I feed the pigs.” I finished washing the dishes, then rinsed out his Thermos and left it propped in the drying rack so he could grab it on his way out the door. If things were not in their proper place, he could become enraged.

He was glad I wasn’t like those girls. That was something—a fleeting breeze that felt almost like approval.

The kitchen door pushed open, and Jimmy leaned his tanned face into the kitchen. I hadn’t realized, until I’d dropped out of school last year, how many hours Jimmy put in on the farm. Dad was always talking him into staying late to finish up some task or other. From the kitchen, I’d watch them out in the yard, their bent backs silhouetted against the sky.

“How’s he today?” he said, cocking his head toward the back of the house. “Dalai Lama or Joe Stalin?”

I sponged down the countertop, making sure to wipe away every offending crumb. “He’s fine,” I said.

Dad thumped into the kitchen, yanking his belt through the loops of his pants. “Wasting the morning away, Jim-boy?”

Jimmy glanced at his watch. “I’m ten minutes early.”

“That’s ten minutes you could’ve been working on that tractor engine.”

When Dad turned to face me, Jimmy rolled his eyes, trying to make me laugh.

Dad grabbed his Thermos and then pointed one paint-crusted finger at me. “Don’t forget . . . ”

“I know.” He didn’t have to mention the mineral supplements. I knew we were running low.

“And the other thing—”

“I’ve got it,” I said. I’d learned years ago to stay one step ahead of what he wanted. You had to pay careful attention; you had to observe and not ask questions.

He smiled then, but it wasn’t a smile Jimmy would’ve noticed, just a wrinkle at the edges of his eyes. As he walked out the door, he gave me a mock salute. “Carry on, soldier.”

*

The warrior gathered the villagers together to tell them of his plan. Each night, the giant slept stretched out on an enormous bed of bracken—bracken that would go up like tinder in this dry spell. The warrior held up a flickering torch in his right hand.

The villagers looked at each other. Why hadn’t they thought of it before? The fire that kept them warm at nights, the fire in which they cooked their food—they’d had the weapon all along.

In the blackest part of the night, the warrior led a small group of men up the side of the mountain to where the giant slept. As he climbed, the warrior’s breath dragged in his throat. The torch flames gleamed on his pale face. An idea was alright until you put it in motion.

When he caught sight of the giant’s body, solid as a mountain range beyond the cover of the trees, the warrior dropped down on his hands and knees. Inching forward, bowels trembling, he realized that the others had stopped following him. He would have to be the one to do it. There was no one else who would go. As he crawled closer, the warrior saw the princess nestled against the giant’s neck. She blinked, bewildered, at the sudden light. Quickly, the warrior waved for her to run past him, to the safety of trees. Once she had slipped away, he reached out a trembling hand and touched his torch to the bracken.

The fire caught so easily that the warrior had to scramble backwards to keep from being burned. Sparks caught at his hair as he fled. The warriors huddled in the shadow of a large boulder, watching the fire catch hold, as the flames shot higher than the tops of the trees. There wasn’t a man there who didn’t remember, as a child, lying awake at night and feeling the giant’s footsteps shaking the ground underneath his skull.

After all those years—it was as simple as this.

Men die that way sometimes. Simply. Suddenly. Dad had only been forty-five, but he wouldn’t have been saddened by his own death. There was never any self-pity in him.

I was the only one at the funeral. Jimmy had left the farm years ago, tired of Dad’s moods and the harshness of the land. After the service, standing by the grave, the priest clasped my hand, his fingers soft against my hardened palm. As the wind came through the trees, he shivered.

“Shall we go in?”

I’d learned to stay one step ahead of what he wanted. You had to pay careful attention; you had to observe and not ask questions.

It wasn’t cold out, really. I wasn’t even wearing a jacket. As we walked back toward the church, he rubbed his hands together and blew on them. “Will you be alright there out on the farm? Seems no place for a girl on her own.”

I looked at him, and he flinched as if I’d hit him.

And I remembered the way Dad used to look at me sometimes, when something had irritated him. He wouldn’t say anything. He’d just take a long drag of his cigarette and then stub it out in that way that meant someone, somewhere, had not measured up.

“I only mean . . . ” The priest cleared his throat. “Someone mentioned you might sell.”

“I won’t sell.”

Dad would’ve sooner I’d sold his body.

It took the giant a while, that night, to feel the fire eating away at his flesh. The giant’s cracked, leathery skin could repel spears. He walked barefoot in summer and winter alike and felt no pain in the soles of his feet. The only places in his body that still retained any feeling at all were the palms of his hands, which he ran along the top of the treetops as he strode through the forest. That night, he’d been dreaming that it was summertime; he’d been lying on a sandy beach by the lake, letting the sun burn his shoulders. By the time he awoke, he was dressed in flames. He flung his arms out, and the fire spread to the forest, lighting up the mountainside.

Dawn was still a long way off, but the sky glowed a bright, hot orange. High up on the mountain peaks, where the ice had made turrets, the glacier began to sweat, then trickle. At first, it was just a small stream that ran down into the valley. And then came more. Rivers of bone-chilling water rushed over the rocks. At the bottom of the valley, among the lacy ferns, the water began to pool and spread.

The villagers hadn’t thought about that. What a blaze big enough to eat up a giant might do.

The day Dad died, he’d driven down to the river’s edge with a length of rope and a Thermos full of gin. He was going to pull loose a cow that had gotten stuck in the mud. A late autumn storm made the river flood and was turning the paddocks into mush. I’d hardly noticed him leaving in the truck. It was hours before it occurred to me that something might be wrong. An hour more before I went down there myself.

The river was churning brown foam. The cow in the back pasture was nowhere to be seen, but I saw the indentations in the mud where Dad had pulled it free. I had to travel half a mile down the river before I found Dad’s body.

The villagers hadn’t thought about that. What a blaze big enough to eat up a giant might do.

I didn’t know why he’d gone into the water. Maybe he’d seen another animal in the water that needed rescuing. Or maybe he’d had some darker impulse. Either way, the rapids had snatched him up and pinned him against a boulder. Water rushed up and over him, turning him into any other piece of wreckage. I might not have noticed him at all, except for the movement of his leg, waving gently on the surface.

*

The giant’s charred body slid down the mountainside and into the lake that was now forming in the valley. The villagers, standing in silence, watched the waters close over him like a silver blanket. The surface of the lake went still, and they saw the stars reflected in it.

Winter passed, and the fields grew green and lush again. When I went out to drive the cows from pasture to pasture, I wore Dad’s hat, and it started to form to the shape of my head.

When the work became too much for me, I hired—as he had—some workers from town. I soon saw why Dad had griped about those men, why he fired them as often as he hired them. They were always taking cigarette breaks that stretched into half-hours. They’d gladly do a shoddy job on a task if they thought I wouldn’t notice. But they soon learned there wasn’t much that I missed, that I wouldn’t hesitate to dock a day’s pay for a job poorly done.

After that, their work improved, but no one invited me down to the pub at the end of the day. No one stood on the steps of the porch chatting before they headed home.

As the sun went down, I sat alone on the porch in Dad’s old rocking chair and watched the river in the distance turn a pale pink.

After many years passed, the villagers grew to love the shape of the lake, the way it curled around the mountain like a child sleeping on its side. Men built boats and began to fish in the icy waters. Children splashed each other in the blue-gray shallows. In the evenings, the princess took her canoe out onto the glassy water and watched the rose-colored mountains slide under the prow of her boat.

It was on one of those evenings, as she was pulling her canoe back up on the sand, that the princess noticed it. The lake was moving. The water crept up the shore and then slid back down again, in a slow, even rhythm.

The princess called the whole village down to the water’s edge to watch it, to make sure she wasn’t imagining things. Together, they watched the lake rise up and sigh down again.

And that’s when they knew that the giant wasn’t really dead down there. They’d underestimated the strength of his heart, which was, despite everything, still beating.

I woke up in the middle of the night and saw Dad’s silhouette in my bedroom doorway. That was the narrow set of his shoulders, the angle of his hat jammed low over his head. All the air rushed out of my lungs.

I rolled over and pressed my hands over my eyes. He wasn’t here. I knew that. It was only my mind playing tricks on me.

Still, it didn’t seem so strange to me that he would be standing there. The house kept him alive every day. The reek of his cigarettes still clung to the curtains. The easy chair still held the shape of his head. At any minute, he would walk back in the house and demand to know what I’d done with his Thermos.

After I counted to twenty, I made myself roll back over. The doorway was empty. What I’d thought was the shape of him was only a shadow cast by the moon. I closed my eyes and let out a breath. For one long moment, I was really alone.

Then he said: Stop breathing so loud. Jesus. Do you hear yourself?

My chest constricted. His voice was loud, but it wasn’t coming from the room around me. Its source was deeper, some sly part of my brain that played his words back to me on a loop.

It was true that I breathed too loud. I noticed it often in the quiet house, the way it announced my presence in any room. When Dad was alive, just the sound of it could make his shoulders tense up. In the years since he’d died, I’d stopped noticing it so much. But there were times—at night, mostly—when it became the loudest thing on earth.

When the villagers looked out at the lake, they were happy, mostly. The fishing was good here. In the summer months, the children explored the small islands that dotted the center of the lake. But there were other times, when the wind came up and the surface of the water curled with waves, that they dreamed terrible things. They saw their bravest men climbing up the mountains under a star-filled sky. They saw the young warrior’s torch flickering in the dark. And they heard the giant roar.

I got out of bed and shuffled into the kitchen, where I poured myself a finger of gin. If Dad were here, he’d be out on the porch, huddled in his chair, and I would go sit with him. We often sat like that, staring up at the stars. He could be a peaceful presence in the evenings, when the weather was just right and he’d had the right number of sips from his Thermos.

I walked to the back door and opened it. The sky above was black and open.

When you start to hate this place, he said, you have to remember this. This sky.

That was something he said every once in a while. Once, after he’d said it, he’d reached out a hand and laid it, heavy as lead, on my shoulder. It startled me as profoundly as if he’d tried to give me a hug.

I can’t remember what I said in reply. Probably nothing. I didn’t recognize him when he was like that. I didn’t even think it was him speaking, really. It was just a person who flitted through him from time to time.

*

Eventually, the villagers began to forget the giant. Their children now played freely in the forest, unafraid of the shadows cast over them by the trees. And the princess—well, she grew old like any other woman. Her legs swelled and her shoulders bent forward and she stopped blinking at the news of death.

But in her later years, when she stood knee-deep in the lake, washing a pot or chewing on a piece of grass, she was sometimes taken off guard by a memory. She had stood, once, in the center of a giant’s hand. His fingers had risen up and formed a wall around her.

She remembered. And in those moments, the lake dropped away under her feet and she became a stranger in her own home.

That winter, I decided to camp in the woods above the lake, at a place Dad used to take me when I was small. As I hiked through hills above the lake, I stopped at an overlook where I could see down to the water below. It was here that Dad had told me the story about the giant. I didn’t know where the story had come from, or how long he’d carried it inside him.

There’s a giant out there in that lake. Sleeping right there at the bottom.

What other stories had he known?

I inhaled slowly, unscrewed the cap of my Thermos, and took a sip of gin. At the bottom of the hill, the path turned and meandered through a meadow, alive with insects. I reached out my hands and let the tall blades of grass brush against my palms.

When you start to hate this place, he said, you have to remember this. This sky.

When I reached the lake’s edge, I sat down in the cool, gravelly sand and pulled off my boots and socks, and then my clothes. In the lake, fish flicked through the shallows, which were as clear as bathwater. I stood and walked into the lake, shivering as the water closed over my ankles, then my calves. The lake stretched out long from east to west. I might’ve been the only person in the world.

The water was freezing. But Dad had taught me how to withstand the cold, how your skin, once numbed, soon ceased to feel anything at all. When I’d walked out far enough, I sank under the surface, then pushed off the sandy bottom and swam underwater for as long as my lungs could tolerate it. When I rose to the surface, the mountains stretched tall above me. I watched the water tremble around my shoulders.

In the depths below was a massive boulder, the one Dad said was a giant’s heart. I could see its shadow against the lake floor. This was a thing I had to do each time I entered the lake—dive down to touch it. I took a deep breath and ducked under the water, using all my strength to swim toward the boulder. The closer I got, the more I realized its size. It wasn’t so much a thing as it was a place. A geography.

When at last I was close enough to touch it, I reached out a hand and felt its surface, which was slimed with algae. My hands were so cold that they’d lost all feeling, but still, I thought I could detect, inside the rock, a faint, pulsing warmth.

The giant didn’t mind being at the bottom of the lake. It had been a strange kind of life for him, always being alone. In these last centuries, he’d begun to feel not so different from the rocks that slept, crusted and silent, at the edges of the lake.

Except—he still remembered the princess, those few weeks when he had kept her for himself. He remembered the patter of her feet across his palm. When he’d spoken to her, she’d replied in a voice so fragile that he thought it might break him.

She was scared, the little thing, but over time the fear became the thing that cradled her. She’d slept against his neck as she’d never slept again in her life, like death was nothing to fear.