Giants wept alongside me

Together we mourned the fever, only months old. The ice ruined us and the bridge leading to town, to space and time, to money and food and everything we need to remain deserted and stingy.

Horses tried, boots tried but everything was oily and our bones quickly exhausted, our muscles coddled after decades of mild winters. My name set up camp north of the river and across a wide and unyielding bridge, according to the state’s history books, and we’ve time and time again seen the folly of absolute resolve. The grass yellowed quick, everything grew at the bank of the river begging for sun, and most of our land carried trees. I once found our yard poetic and simple, stocked of wildflowers and shrubs. ‘At least there is enough tea,’ father told me, while the giants, avaricious, picked buckthorn and giggled.

We shrunk but — is this barbarous? to find solace in this? — so did the south, my father theorized: we ran out of food, they out of money. Gold dozed greedily in our safes, spoils from our last contest. Feeding giants is expensive work and the south had also grown accustomed to our cash. We’d kept up well for a long time at feeding our herculean cousins but we can’t span that damned viaduct today and the city had too much pride to admit they depended on us as well. Or so father posited. Maybe our family just conceived our importance. It’s too late to care.

And the giants soon learned hunger after the first snap. As well as we had done to treat them with respect but discipline, we saw them grow ravenous and thoughtless, unrecognizable. Our cows were gone, our sheep and chickens too. Trout dreamed at the bottom of the river, the one place the stupid giants feared. Father tried teaching them to swim, years and years ago now, but they only drowned and so I learned instead. The giants cheered from the shore. But my skin can’t withstand the glassy, freezing water these days and we, selfishly and reliant on others, never made our own boats or even fishing poles, only cut and traded wood from our forest. The timber lay useless and tragic to me now for we had no idea or tools to fend for ourselves when snow tiptoed onto our camp. We should have learned, should have taken up skills months ago but instead we begged gods that ignored us for higher temperatures.

Before the giants tore and charred my limbs, they and I howled pointless tears, all of us futile and weary on my last day. They loved and knew me from birth, brought my mother honey after her first contraction almost 19 years ago. I loved and knew them, too. They were affectionate and syrupy, full of pastel jokes and flimsy pranks. So I knew, too, they feared death and malnourishment the way living creatures should.

Every memory I have of these lovely beasts is kind: a southern man auctioning nodding onions said months ago (to somebody else, mind you) that his wife loves the crocheting from the north and the giants gasped and pointed to me for I weld the needle. 

“It’s her, it’s her pieces your wife loves,” they told the man while they juggled his onions like fools. I blushed, asked him to apologize on my behalf for the crooked seams, and finally allowed myself a grin when we reached the bridge on our return home, our cart releasing an acrid perfume for weeks afterward. At the bridge that spring day, that selfish day which blurs in memory now, the giants jostled each other, still bragging for me, still grunting, still juggling onions and turnips and cabbage heads.  

My family digested in their stomachs now, even churned inside them from guilt, while I guessed how long I’d stay conscious and how long they’d grieve. Not for long, I wished, would my eyes and brain respond to the torment. I prayed to God he’d release me quick and my brain would sleep as they cook my flesh. They prayed to the same God for my same fate. We were both wronged, by the way: the gods have no mercy for sake of biology. The brain doesn’t turn off until after your arms are torn from the shoulder and you are borne to watch the muscle ripple and crease, the sinew ease.

Please know this: they didn’t like killing. we had crossed the bridge for years in order to find other food so they could avoid the livestock. They didn’t mind so much when their food also became books and yarn but they hated the noise that came with and so my father held the knife while the giants took down trees and ran for hours and miles in the forest, playing and snapping like wolves. They were loud when necessary but soft-spoken most of the day. We’d whisper for hours by a fire behind our keep just before fall turned to winter and brewed tea. The giants drank from worn black-bear skulls as we pretended then to forget the moon’s seat and that my mother would scold us for chatting until dawn.

In our new harsh winter, in my last hour, my mother rested listlessly inside of them while I bared a pouch from under a rock. for a moment I saw the faces I saw at the fire by the keep a year ago now before their eyes returned to grief, remembering this was the last of any pampering. We drank the bubbles, made by salt and snot, in our buckthorn. The softest, my lumbering Sam, held me gently before his sin, as he always had, in a gesture too tender for what he prepared to do. Sam was ever the only to hug me as he was the only to not fear crushing me. He waterboarded me with tears and I let him and the tea boiled. 

I watched the fire, the yellow tongues leaping from wood, and prayed near boo-hooing giants. She wasn’t even enough for their vast stomachs: she’d grown thin in age and was full of dexterous bones on which they chewed and hacked into their palms. I begged them after their rangy meal, anger spreading in my heart, to explain sparing me, forcing me to watch them eat my father, brothers, dogs and now my fucking mom?

Sam whimpered then: they’d hoped the freeze would end before me. The ice has never been this bad.

But why not let us starve instead? A longer but less violent death. And surely they could last longer. He touched his belly, smaller after months of dieting but still whopping and protruding from his chest. Jesus Christ, we spoiled them.

These ones, born after my family was caring for theirs, had never killed and didn’t know the fear of an animal seeing the future. I picked thorns from their cups, balanced the sweet gesture with the cruelty, my veteran love with my new hate. They had to kill me; I had to let them. We took hours on the buckthorn — for me to finish my cup, they their skulls — until the tea was bitter and crisp. As they rose I closed my eyes. They were slow by then and I was drifting, slack and jaded in the brittle, firm wind.

My adopted family (my only family that night; the last of my known blood digested and absorbed) and I prayed then for more tea, for more hours in front of a fire, for days and months and years of easy chit-chat. In the silence after his apology, I realized Sam may still bury in the snow later anyway — for I was last of their meat and they remained unskilled, untaught, privileged — barely north of a city that may or may not care.