Like a Yukon prospector, Remy dug the legs of his easel into the sand, staking his claim. Except, I’m in Ireland, not Alaska. The cool morning breeze blew at his Bohemian-style clothes, ruffling his unbuttoned jacket shirt and rolled up pants.

The slim-bodied, wavy-haired young man of twenty-three had hiked barefoot down from the small-town inn in the wee hours of morning. It consisted of little more than half a dozen rooms and a lobby where meals and bookings were conducted.

The inn possessed all the old-world charms, right down to the old innkeeper’s wife who stopped him at the door with his things, fervently warning, “Don’t go to the shore before dawn, you’ll get taken by them.”

“Taken?” He’d said, “By who, fairies?” Part of his study abroad included learning the local mythologies and legends. He knew of the Fair Folk, the Fae said to whisk the unwary into the Otherworld.

“No,” answered the crone of a woman, “by the Fomorians.”

“The who?”

“Balor’s people. The first settlers of Ireland. The sea giants.”

“Really? I didn’t know Ireland had giants in its myths. I thought it was just little people.”

With a deadly seriousness, the innkeeper’s wife said, “they came ashore here long ago, Balor’s people. After losing the battle of Mag Tuired to the Tuatha De Danann—”

“Who were Tuatha De Danann?”

“The old gods,” she snapped as if it were obvious. “They banished the Fomorians back to the darkness, but they still come up to prowl the shores at night,” she lowered her voice and whispered, “and at dusk and dawn to take the unwary.”

“And where do they take them? What do they do with people?”

“Devour their victims whole like the sea, most say. On the off chance someone pleases them, a Fomorian might decide to take a human back to the Otherworld.” The old woman locked him with a hard stare. “Either fate can be avoided if you don’t go down to the shore before first light.”

“But I’ll miss the sunrise,” he pouted. A quick check of the wall clock showed he had less than an hour before the event, so Remmy brushed the innkeeper’s wife off with a patronizing, “I’ll watch out for sea giants. Thanks for the warning.”

A simple stool went behind the easel, followed by his brushes and paints. Seagulls cried in the twilight sky, slivers of white flitting against violet. The moon hung low and pallid, receding westerly into the sea.

The sun proved shy and coy. He checked his watch, often a source of ridicule from those in his art circles who no longer believed in schedules—it read 6:17. He frowned. The sunrise should have happened half an hour ago, at least that was when it had risen the previous day.

The only light on the beach came from a small fire like the one he’d burned his draft card in before heading to Europe. The flames crackled, consuming the scavenged driftwood in the ring of tide-smoothed stones. The gentle orange light illuminated his long-haired face, middling beard, and bedroom eyes that had fetched many a companion during the summer of love.

Take your time. I’ve got nowhere to be and other things to paint. He began with the sky and horizon while waiting, getting the essential dark backgrounds down he could then lighten with the rise of the sun. Dipping the horsehair brush into a dark purple pot he blocked out sky in deep violet.

He painted the dark sky, the rolling navy sea, and even the white specks of seagulls though the subjects themselves had departed at some point, leaving him alone on the beach without so much as a crab for company. I should look for a local girl eager for a dalliance with a passing artist. He never failed to find one in every town.

The fire had burned to glowing coals, yet the sky remained dark above, his frustration mounting at the lack of a sunrise. Remmy sighed, looking away from his shadowed canvas, ready to start drawing in the sand with a stick.

He saw the beach was no longer empty.

Less than a dozen yards away, a woman lay before him on her side like a centerfold model. A giant woman, his shocked mind corrected. She had to be over a hundred feet tall from head to toe, watching him with a bemused smile, her eyes glowing with pale, purple-tinged irises like the twilight sky above.

Her skin was a pale shade of teal, her shoulder-length hair the golden-green of fresh kelp. A net-style one-piece covered her bombshell body, drawn low at the front and forming a loose skirt draped across her thighs. The tattered, patchwork shape suggested the outfit had not been woven or sewn but scavenged like the driftwood Remy had used for the fire.

What the hell? I haven’t done acid since Woodstock! Nor had he touched his usual chemical inspiration since arriving in town, the locals being strict in conservatism and him still to learn where the local dealers hung out. He closed his eyes, opened them, then closed them again. He fell back upon the stool, hard.

She laughed, not a girl’s high-pitched giggle, but a woman’s mirth, a purring chuckle like gentle thunder in the distance. Then she spoke, her voice powerful but soothing like the sea, “Yes, I am real, mortal.” He blinked, quivering as she added, “No, you are not dreaming.”

“I don’t think I could ever dream something like you,” he whispered under his breath. He thought it was too soft to be heard, but her smile widened and he suspected she had taken what he said as a compliment. The old woman in the inn’s warning popped back into his head. “Are you…a Fomorian?”

“You know of us?” The giantess sounded bemused. “I thought humans had forgotten our kind.”

“The old lady in the inn told me about you…about you losing the war with the old gods and—”

Her eyes sparked purple with anger. “We did not lose the war!” The lapping waves surged in violence, smashing against the shore, saltwater stinging his face, blown up by a hot, furious wind. “We agreed to a peaceful separation.”

His father spoke with the same fury upon hearing of Korea or Vietnam after the Tet Offensive. As he had then, Remmy quickly apologized with a hasty, “sorry, sorry, I didn’t mean anything!” Sorry did not impress his father, nor the Fomorian woman. She advanced on him on all fours. Her shapely rump pointed to the sky as she moved with fluid grace, a cat prowling towards a mouse.

His canvas fluttered in the wind. His easel rose up on three legs, threatening to pitch over. Without thinking, Remy grabbed and held onto it, covering the canvas with all the protectiveness of a mother shielding her child, holding onto his fluttering canvas. The wind stopped, and the giantess’s anger was replaced with curiosity, feline and feminine, torn from her indignation by amusement.

 “What is so precious to you that you take your sight from me?”

“My painting,” he croaked, voice hoarse with saltwater. “I am an artist.”

No matter the country, the statement never failed to ensnare a woman’s interest. She stretched out on her stomach and elbows, propping her head upon her hands. “A painter, truly?” She inched closer, encircling him with her arms. “What have you painted? Show me!”

This close, Remy saw that her net swimsuit truly was a net, an assortment of fishing line and rope strained taut across her barge-sized bust. Trying unsuccessfully not to stare down her chest, he turned the easel about, surrendering his canvas of the sea, sky, and gulls.

The woman trilled with pleasure, then said, “talented, I see.” Mischief flashed across her eyes. “Can you paint things besides water and sky?”

“I—I came here to paint the sun.”

“The sun?” A snorting gust blew his long hair across his face. She cocked an eye, bemused, her tongue trailing over her lips. Attraction, but beneath the female hunger lay a deeper, dangerous appetite. “I think I can offer you a better subject than the sun.”

“Wh-what do you mean?”

She brought herself up to her knees, flipping her hair over her shoulders, leaning forward with a pout. “What do you think? I want you to paint me.” She leaned forward, grinning a perfect set of bone-crushing teeth. “If you do a good job, perhaps I’ll even spare you from being breakfast!”

“Breakfast?” She nodded factually, and he recalled the final warning of the crone when asked about the fate of those taken by the Fomorians: Devour their victims whole like the sea, most say. He yelped, hobbling backwards, feet sinking into the deep sand. He did not make it far before the giantess casually reached out with a hand, tree trunk fingers caging the errant man and plucking him up casually as a kitten.

Under different circumstances he would have enjoyed her silken touch, her skin soft as a swimmer’s without the wrinkled pruning. The sight of her approaching luscious lips would have titillated him if he were not small enough to disappear forever between them. “Breakfast it is,” they said. She opened wide with a soft ahh, dangling his kicking feet above mouth, tongue extended.

Her breath smelled crisp and salted like the ocean breeze. Screams and babbled pleas escaped the terrified young man; he flailed above the void, staring past tombstone teeth, through a damp cavern of meat flecked with saliva, past a quivering uvula the size of his head. He stared into the chasm of her throat, her esophagus wide enough to fit him whole without chewing.

“I’ll do it!” He cried, “I’ll do it!”

Her teeth shut with a pronounced clack, an ivory gate slamming shut inches from his face. “Good!” She set him back down onto the sand behind his easel. “Now, then. We should discuss how I’m going to pose for you.” She assumed her full height that would put some of the buildings he’d seen in New York to shame. “I will be posing nude.” Her hand went to her side and uncinched a knot in her clothing, and the netting fell away, revealing her body in all its statuesque glory.

Given her scanty outfit, Remmy ought not to have been surprised by seeing her in the buff. But the woman before him, no, the goddess towering above him, proved the exception.

Her teal skin and kelp colored hair were like a subterranean forest while her violet eyes were mystical lights from the depths. Her breasts were rounded swells capped by emerald discs like deeper water while her hips and stomach offered gentle, becalmed shallows. The mossy mound of her sex nestled between her slender thighs, an undersea cavern beckoning for exploration, guarded by a pale vulva.

She personified ocean and femininity with the power of Poseidon and the allure of the nymphs. Playfully, she took a step forward with one foot—over him, bending down and squeezing her bust together. He stared until he thought his neck would break. “You won’t be too distracted to paint, will you?” Giggled the giantess.

“I-I’ll manage,” he answered, his pants so tight he thought his crotch would explode.

She planted herself, legs to either side of him, womanhood bared dead center and leaned backward, invitingly her breasts slack on her chest. A purr trilled from her pursed lips. You want this, the hungry eyes of the primal giantess said. And I want you.

He had painted local girls, often naked, in his travels through the world, though it had led to him being run out of many a village by irate fathers, brothers and uncles. In a small eastern European village, he had narrowly avoided a lynching as was said to happen in the South back home.

The artist abhorred the charges that he was but a smut artist taking advantage of the young and innocent. Remmy insisted his interests were purely aesthetic. He focused on the bared female laid out like a tapestry for admiration and adoration, a celebration and expression of form, not a lewd gawking meant to titillate. The great classicals, the famous Renaissance painters and sculptors would have argued much the same.

But if I were one of those yokels, he thought, I’d call this display pornographic.

The Fomorian woman had no interest in tasteful nudity. Finding human notions of artistic tastefulness irrelevant, she shamelessly bore herself to him like a mare raising her tail to a stallion, the cat yowling in the night. Take this, her body language said, if you dare. Her display swept aside notions of civilization and culture. Remmy’s gaze lingered on the perfect hills of her breasts before falling into her crotch. What man could fill such a cavern?

The notion of a being who could take such a woman for his mate was too horrible to contemplate. Jack met the giant’s wife before the giant at the top of the beanstalk. His stomach twisted.

Remmy’s artistic detachment saved his sanity. The selective disassociation of everything but painting his subject protected his fragile human mind. Focusing on his task kept him from dwelling fatally on the possibility of a Lovecraftian entity rising from the tides to see what mischief his errant wife had gotten up to.

His shaking hand steadied enough for him to dip the brush into the paint pots and mix a solution of blue and green that he hoped would capture the giantess’s natural teal sheen, another spot on the palette reserved for her kelp-colored hair.

The sun still refused to rise, yet he had enough light to see. To work. The giantess gave off her own light, neither that of sun nor moon. But it was enough for Remy to complete what he suspected might be his final opus. Yet he acted not from fear but desire. He wanted to paint this ethereal, mysterious woman, to capture her image on his canvas as she had captured him in her twilight realm.

Trying to salvage some normalcy, he fell into routine conversation with the subject, asking, “do you have a name?”

“Everything does.”

“Can I know yours?”

“Trying to gain power over me?” She chided him like a foolish child. “I am not of the Fae, nor am I a daemon. Knowing my name will do nothing for you.” She stroked the curve of her breast and added, “do I look like Rumpelstiltskin to you?”

He sighed. “I’m not trying to swindle you. I wish to title the piece; it would look better with your name atop.”

She tilted her head, intrigued for a moment before her impassive coquettishness returned. “You do not concern yourself with knowing the name of your breakfast, and neither do I.”

“I thought I had escaped your plate?”

“Have you?” She whispered, deathly sweet. The canvas bore the basic imprint of her form, but he still had much work to do—to block out the figure, to detail and define. He hoped she would not ask to see his work so far, and she did not. She was patient as she was deadly, like the rolling tides.

And still the sun did not rise.

When at last he finished her image and turned the easel around, it was not with a timid servant fearing his master’s scorn but as the proud painter he was, displaying his piece on the gallery of the beach for an inhuman audience. “It’s finished.”

She leaned forward, humming and asked, “do I really look like that?”

“Within my interpretation,” he replied through a swallow.

The woman’s sloop-sized face remained impassive for several moments. Finally, she chortled, “I suppose it’s acceptable.”

“Just acceptable?” He replied, wounded.

“It is decent,” admitted his subject. “We cannot expect your first painting of me to be a perfect masterpiece, can we?”

“I…I guess not,” he answered, feeling his doom approach. He knew when a woman was displeased with his performance. Still, he tried to salvage his situation, or at least escape the breakfast menu with, “but I can paint another, can’t I?”

“I believe you can.” The giantess fetched the netting swimsuit and made herself decent. “I think I will give you the chance,” she said with a smile. All he could see was the gate of her lips and teeth, the image of its previous opening burned into memory. “I like having you for my painter. We will simply have to continue working until you paint me perfectly.”

“Oh, of course,” he breathed a sigh of relief. “I’ll paint you any time you wish as many times as you wish!”

“You certainly will,” teased the giantess with a giggle. “Because I’m taking you home with me.”

“What?!” Too late, he remembered the other part of the woman’s warning about the Fomorians: On the off chance someone pleases them, a Fomorian might decide to take them back to the Otherworld.

Her hand lowered, fingers closing gently around him while its mate found his easel, canvas, and paints. She stood to her full height, his stomach falling away. The palm of the giantess was warm despite her cool complexion, and he was aware of another source of warmth on his head and back.

The sun, it’s been up this whole time. He looked up past the fingertips forming the roofless top of his cage to see the yellow orb in the sky at last. Judging by its position in the sky, it was a little past noon. He’d been painting the goddess in her private night for over half the day.

The legs of the giantess crashed into the surf. Behind Remmy, the beach shrank, falling away with the town upon the hill. He saw the houses in the distance, the homes of fishermen and sailors.

Upon the roofs projected widow walks, balconies where wives would go to wait for their husbands’ ships to return, hoping they would not be trapped upon them forever. Is the old lady up on hers? He wondered. Watching me go with an ‘I-told-you-so’ on her cracked lips?

The giantess’s gait carried her deeper, the waters rising to her hips and waist. Rather than hold him above the water, she kept her hand steady, and he could see the waters climbing ever higher. She came from the sea, and that’s where she’s returning with me.

Part of Remmy hoped that when she submerged, he would drown, certain death but a fate he could comprehend instead of whatever waited below. But her hand sealed over him in a loose fist and plunged beneath the waves, a living bathysphere. He would leave with her; depart from the world he had known and slip beneath the waves forever to a fantasy realm of giants who had predated man’s arrival in this land.

I hope there are interesting things to paint there, he thought, slipping into the darkness.