Thu, 19 May 2005

Sarah The Giantess
The children, where I come from, are convinced that all greater and lesser demons can only see motion, not form. When they go out into the woods, where paths have been stamped through the grasses and underbrush (as their parents did, as their parents did, as their parents did: history is that which cycles), where fortresses have been built up in the treetops which bounce the wind around until it whistles and moans, the children hear and know to be afraid, to be perfectly still, until the evil which flies on claw-lined wings passes them over. The children have never actually seen these demons, not face to face, of course: no child has seen the demons and lived. Everybody knows that. There’s a dread the children hold in their hands and words whenever they walk through the forest, and that dread has no place to go. It’s little wonder that so many of the children open their small stained hearts and let their terror loose on the first target outside of the trees.
      Sarah was a giantess. It’s quite possible that she was the tallest woman in history: the people who took her away have yet to tell any of us their final findings. Her parents were not giants; they were not even tall. They were algae-farmers, running the rafts over the forest-ponds and gathering the luminous plants which grew on the surface. The children tell rumors of this family, have for years, for no better reason than because nobody actually knew them. Once Sarah the giantess was born, however, there was a focus for all our misplaced fears. Sarah’s father had to build his daughter a separate house, the roof extended from oak branches, the walls built up from shore-stones. Sarah could not do much moving because her heart was too small for her body and ached to get blood through her, but when she had the strength she climbed gracefully, easily, through the trees. If one follows the logic of children, this made her a demon, and curses and snow-cold silences held to her all through those days.

One afternoon, on the morning train, a man from across the ocean came to see the giantess. We all fell so fast to flutter over the famous, the semi-famous, the possibly famous — anyone from someplace far away who might be able to take us back with them, somehow. We were more than happy to show him the way down the road, past the churchouse and graveyard, past the place where the factory used to be, out to the woods, to the house. The man from across the sea knocked first on the door of the house, talked to Sarah’s father, then walked out to Sarah’s building and asked her outside. The man from across the sea took all method of measurement, which Sarah responded to quite gallantly, if somewhat bemusedly, and was quite polite in dealing with his gawking and ogling. The man from across the sea told both Sarah and her father how wonderful it would be if Sarah was to leave her body to him in the event of her death. Both Sarah and her father dismissed the notion; not only would she certainly outlive the man, she was also to be buried as we were all buried, in the pond, with our relatives and friends. The man looked at Sarah, told her she’d never see twenty, and left on the evening train.

Sarah’s heart finally burst not long before her seventeenth birthday.

The man from across the sea returned, bringing with him two gnarled apish men, and as Sarah lay in her bed-casket, quilted only in the hair of her parents (all her classmates stayed home and spent the day staring at the walls of their bedrooms), the man from across the sea stole her body and left the next day. We have not heard from the man since, although we all are now ashamed at having the only thing that ever made us different taken from us.

The children now tell no stories of demons in the trees, but of the ghoul who comes out at night and steals the bodies of boys and girls when they sleep. The rest of us have all forgotten about being famous. Sarah’s father was made sick with the disease of outliving one’s child and will die soon, if he hasn’t already died, out in the woods. Sometimes, in the silence of our small hours, we all wish the whole town would die and blow away, but it has yet to happen.
(12:11.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #