…wip…

The littlest giant always had to ask someone else to fetch him down things from high up. A spoon for his breakfast from the high drawer, his toothbrush at night from the little shelf above the bathroom sink. He could never reach the bread in the middle of the table…

When the giants came down from their high land above the plains and the valleys of the normal-height people, the townsfolk could see them coming from a long way off. The giants dwarfed the trees of the forest as they walked through them, trying to be careful not to break too many oak trees or crush the delicate willows. As a path they would follow the line of electricity pylons and the cables between them, a swathe through the green mountain side. They would step over the pylons gingerly, a little bit afraid of getting a phizz phizz from the electricity.

…

The townsfolk would often hear them coming before they saw them, of course, especially if the giants came down from the mountain plateau early in the morning for market day. In the early years of the giants coming to visit the town, the mayor would be woken not by the thump thump of their huge footfall, but by the hammering on her door knocker of some concerned citizen shouting that the end had come, that we should all only be murdered in our beds. In the early years she would have jumped up in fright, in fright first of the hammering and second of the calamitous cracking of splintering oak branches as some giant accidentally snapped a 309 year old tree.

monkeys

These days, however, the hammering on the door wasn’t that of terrified citizenry afraid that their houses would be smashed, but more of politeness, to inform the mayor that she needed to get up to say hello to the nice visitors. Of course, the mayor had high notions of herself and would not ‘get up’ nor ‘say hello’ or any of that. She would, rather, ‘arise’ and ‘greet’ her ‘esteemed guests.’ Such was the Most Honourable Lord Mayor, in her dignified bearing, well, in her own mind at least.

When the giants would descend from their great heights above in autumn when the summer’s clearness and blue skies were giving way to winter’s rain, the sight they presented was a curious one. As the early morning fog still wrapped itself into the nooks and little side valleys of the mountainside, the giants, being giant, were only somewhat visible, for the most part their feet, knees, and legs were unseen in the clinging mist. For the most part, the early risers in the village would see them from the waist up, some of them taller so a part of the tight visible above the cloud line, one or two of the smaller giants maybe they could only see them from the chest up, their heads and necks and upper arms they could make out, but nothing from the elbow down unless they swung their arms about like children do when they are excited. And children of giants are excited too, just like children of normal-sized people.

The first people up and about the marketplace were always the ones from outside the village. The ones who got up early to walk the long way to the village. Those people got up much earlier even than the giants. Because, although the giants came from very, very far away, beyond and above the mountain that was beyond and above the mountain behind the mountain above the village, so far away that no-one from the village had ever been there or even knew where it was, even despite all that distance, the people from outside the village had to get up even earlier because a walk of an hour for them was just a few minutes for the giants. No, the people who arrived first at the market had already left home an hour before the sun came up, but the giants were still snoring in their beds an hour after the sunrise. You see, giants make such giant steps that nothing is ever very far away for them compared to normal-sized people. Therefore they could set out later that everyone else and still arrive in time. So the people from the six other villages were first to get up, then the giants got up, and the last person was usually the mayor, the one with notions of herself, as we mentioned already. She arose ‘at her leisure’ not to go to the market, but to ‘preside over it.’

In the land of the giants there were some very tall people. Some very, very tall people , the kind of tallness that gets asked about the ‘weather up there’ and ‘if they play basketball.’

It was on one of the misty autumn days that some one of the towns folk first noticed the one they came to call the littlest giant. One morning as they watched the line of giants threading their way down the mountain side along the line of the electricity cables, a little girl saw the curious sight of what appeared to be a red ship floating along in the middle of the line of giants, bobbing just on top of the fog line. It was an odd sight, she thought, just a little red ship bobbing along exactly as it might in the waves on the sea. It wasn’t a ship, they knew that of course, for how could there be a ship, red or other colour, floating down the hillside? It didn’t make any sense. Little by little the ship seemed to sink into the clouds, until you could only see it’s sail, then the pointy tip of of the sail, and then finally nothing at all. It disappeared entirely, just as all the giants did a little bit later. As the came down and down the slope of the mountain, down to the narrow band of cloud, they would inevitably drop inside the cloud and out of sight for a while. Once they had vanished inside the cloud the little girl would hold her breath, fearful that they might never reappear, until a few minutes later and a long way further on the mountainside, they started to reappear underneath the cloud, first the feet of the first giant, then, in order, the feet of the giants behind the first giant, then the knees of the first giant followed by the knees of the giants behind the first giant, then the rest of the legs of the first giant followed by the rest of the legs of the giants behind the first giant. Bit by bit, all of each part of each giant reappeared underneath the clouds as if they had very slowly and gently dropped out of the clouds. The little girl would exhale, relax a little bit, as her fear would melt away like the clouds would later in the mid-morning. She loved to watch the giants reappear like this, bit by bit, foot by foot, knee by knee, top of leg by top of leg, and on and on. It should have been a funny thing to watch but it didn’t strike her as funny, for she was a serious little thing. She worried for the giants when they disappeared down into the clouds, she held her breath, worried for them, until they started to reappear underneath. She tried to count how many of them were above the clouds so she could be sure they all safely reemerged from out of the cloud, but she always lost track and couldn’t remember how many there had been. It’s a lot for a little girl to do in the morning, count giants disappearing into clouds, count them reappearing again, all the while remaining very serious. Another child might just have pointed and laughed, but not this child. She was, as we said, a serious little thing.

Anyway, in the middle of the line of reappearing giants she solved the riddle of the bobbing red ship. As one of the giants reappeared she noticed that one giant reappeared fully before the giant in front of him did. all the giants reappear in strict order, bit by bit, but not this one, He reappeared before the one behind him. How was this? Well, it was because the giant in front was a bit taller so he took longer to come back into view - when his head was still up there in the cloud, the slightly less tall giant behind him had fully descended from the cloud. And then she noticed that he was wearing a hat on his head, a hat that when you couldn’t see the head holding it up, looked just like a bobbing red ship. From that moment she liked this giant the most, he was a little bit more little and he sported a hat that looked like a ship.

…..

I like your hat she said, I noticed it this morning when you were coming down the mountain. He smiled what for a normal-sized person would be a little smile, but he was a giant, so it was quite a large smile. Secretly he was very proud of his hat. He had made it himself, out of a stiff kind of material that folded nicely. So nicely it folded in fact that it had seemed to him like origami paper. Thatt was how he had the idea of making an origami hat for himself. He had pulled a book on origami down from the shelf and followed the instructions for a folded paper ship, except with material instead of paper and finishing with a hat instead of a ship. When he had put it on his head he had felt quite nautical and adventurous. He didn’t tell the little girl any of this of course, he just smiled his little giant smile and said thank you. He mumbled something about origami and wanted to take his hat off to show her, but he was too timid. She didn’t catch what he had said and his half attempt to take off his hat to show it to her just looked like he was reaching up to adjust the brim.

She told him how his hat looked like a little red boat coming down the mountainside. She told him very seriously her impression of how his little vobbibg hat seemed to sink in the wispy clinging clouds. He liked her little story, or more particularly he liked how she told it. All serious, like it was an important thing for him to know. It was important that he understood. He understood that it was the first time she had ever seen him and her memory of the event was so strong to her that he would listen respectfully every time she retold the story, and she told him the story quite a lot of times once they became good friends, which they did straightaway She told the story of that first time seeing him mostly to him but sometimes to other people as well. He noted how she told the story a little bit differently each time. Was this because she didn’t recall it correctly? No, her samll variations in the details of the story were her way of trying to understand for herself why this little silly incident was so important to her. Telling and retelling the same story with slight variations is a way of honing the story, Circling around a kernel of truth. Something in this little story was vastly important to her, and so it became for him also a fundamental truth of their joint story. He was somewhat sad that that this story, so central to their story, only for him was someobe elses story. His part in it was distant to him. He tried to remember his part in it, aspects of walking down the hill, entering and leaving the cloud. But try as he might, it never quite worked. The story was hers and he was a minor player in it. But he knew that he also served, he who only stood and waited. It wouldn’t come to him, an active memory of the story… only that she had a story and he didn’t have a foundation myth of them together. That was hers alone.

…

He tried to make a little hat for her, as a present. He wanted to give her somwthing he had made himself, an offering, a part of his own world. It had to be a little red bobbing boat hat, like she had spoken about. It shouldn’t be hard to do, he thought. After all, he had made one for himself and he was rather happy with the way it turned out. The one he had made for himself, howeve, had been easy to make, not just because of the size he made it but also because there was no expectation on it. Nobody would have known if it hadn’t worked out well because he simply wouldn’t have worn it in public. But it had comw out quite well so he wore it all the time.

Her hat would be trickier…

Truthfully he’d forgotten about making it; it was just his hat now. It didn’t seem important or special, or at least it hadn’t until now.