Every morning and every afternoon, the schoolgirls walked through the middle of the village. They were visible from one end of the village to the other; their knees were above the highest rooftops and their shadows darkened entire blocks. Even indoors their passing couldn't be missed, for the ground shook with their every step.
Some of the rougher village boys would chase after them, pedaling their bikes furiously along side streets one safe block away and peering upwards. They would hoot and holler, making empty boasts to one another about everything they'd do if they had their way with any of these towering unreachable goddesses. How they would climb up onto their nipples, ejaculate onto their lips, or crawl between their legs. That they had not an iota of a chance of actually doing any of this did little to diminish their enthusiasm. They would unfavorably compare the breasts or hips or legs of the merely human village girls to those of the giants above. Or they would dare each other to dart out and try to race between a girl's legs and peek up her skirt.
Kostas followed also, but stayed well behind the others. Their leering made him uncomfortable, and he couldn't join in. He used to try, but they'd just made fun of him. Words like “pussy” or “ass” or “tit” stuck in his throat when he tried to use them. No matter how hard he tried to sound knowing and worldly, they heard his stammering and mocked him mercilessly.
That was one reason he kept his distance. The other reason was that he had his eyes on one girl in particular, and she too dawdled behind her peers.
He liked to think that this made them kindred spirits, no matter how separated they were by species and size. He imagined that she didn't fit in with the girls further ahead in their giggling and tittering and playful pokes, just like he didn't fit in with the other boys in their boasts, dares, and leering. That she and he were purer souls. Like raw geodes, lacking in superficial dazzle and glitter but holding deep and enduring beauty within.
It was uncommon for him to get a good look at her face. It was too high above him, and her stride was so long that trying to stay ahead of her was futile. His clearest impression was of how she looked from behind and beneath.
Her skin was a very pale shade of gray, as if she were cast from marble. Her hair was straight and cut fairly short, ending just above her neck. It was deep indigo, with a glossy sheen. No human hair came in that color without being dyed, but he assumed hers was natural. She wasn't the type to dye her hair, or so he imagined.
When she stood, her legs were like the columns of some great temple from a forgotten, grander age: clean and smooth, gracefully curved, and contemptuously dwarfing the crude hovels that lesser civilizations had thrown up beneath them. When she walked, they were as the dinosaurs must have been: majestic and powerful, mighty enough to shake the earth and carelessly trample anything in their path.
She always wore a bulky blue backpack, larger than Kostas's family's house. Maybe even twice as large. It was amazing to think that an entire extended family could live in the space that this girl carried around on her back. It was noticeably bigger than the comparatively slim satchels and shoulder bags the other girls carried. Big backpacks made him think of bookish nerds, even though he'd never seen bulky paper-bound textbooks outside of old movies. If he didn't use paper textbooks, then it was inconceivable that they would. He had no idea what she carried inside that backpack, but it was another reason he imagined she was different.
He had little hope of ever learning her name. She didn't chat with the girls ahead of her, and even if she did it would be in an impenetrable alien tongue. He wondered if her uniform or backpack might have her name written on it somewhere, but if so it was somewhere higher up than he could see. He wouldn't have been able to read it anyway.
And even though he didn't know her real name, he would not make up a nickname to call her. To do so would belittle and disrespect her, he thought; it would be little different from hollering empty boasts and crude innuendo like the boys who ran ahead. So the nameless girl was just her. For Kostas there was no other her.
There were the girls at his school and around the village, of course. Human, like him; small and limited. Skin and hair the same dull earthy brown as his. They looked like his cousins. In fact, there was one he'd gone to school with for years before finding out she was his second cousin.
Some were not unattractive: the girls who practiced with him on the track team had runner's bodies, taut and trim. But they were not interested in him. They were drawn to boys with broad shoulders and with rakish smiles; to boys who always knew what to say to make them laugh.
Nor was he very interested in them. They were always talking about who had done what with which boy, about which teachers were cute and which were creepy, about which clothes and which songs were popular and which were passé. It was easy to imagine that years later, they would all be talking about which fish were cheap this season, whose no-good husband was the laziest, and whose son or daughter was the most successful.
They never wondered about what lay beyond the wall, about the strange objects that sometimes washed up on the shore, or about what kind of worlds might orbit the stars in the night sky.
There were also the other giant girls who walked through every day. They were even prettier than the girl he admired, truth be told. Taller, curvier. Always walking with their heads held high, laughing and tossing their hair. But for all their towering height and dazzling beauty, they acted like little more than gigantic versions of the girls in the village. They were probably just as insular and incurious. They probably all talked about the same things every giant alien girl talks about, and would grow up to talk about all the same things every giant alien mother talks about. Whatever that might be.
They probably never wondered about the mysteries and curiosities in their greater, wider universe.
She was different. It was so clear to him from how she walked, silently with her shoulders drawn inward. A dreamer, like him.
He dreamed of her all the time. Whenever his attention wandered during class, he looked out the window and imagined her walking past. When he ran laps outside, he looked up and imagined her lying there resting her chin on her hands, idly watching him. And, it went without saying, he thought of her when he found himself alone and furtively slid his hand into his pants.
In his fantasies, he and she would go exploring together. He rode on her shoulder or in her open palm as she strolled through the village or the nearby countryside. He showed her his house; the tree out back he used to climb (the highest branch he had ever reached came just to the top of her anklebone); his school and its athletic field; the church, whose steeple she could touch without bending her knees; the little taverna with the best souvlaki (in real life she unknowingly stepped over it twice a day); the small river letting out onto the sea; the many slopes and curves on the seaside road; the little cave on the beach that she could only see into by lowering her head sideways all the way to the ground.
Always he dreamed that these places were deserted, that he and she had them to themselves so that they could explore and probe and meddle to their hearts' content. She would crouch down and peer into the windows of houses and stores, or pry their roofs off and inspect the objects inside. She rang the massive church bells by gently poking them with her index finger. She rearranged parked cars or outdoor tables and chairs into neat stacks or cute designs.
The structures in his dreams were much more resilient than they would likely be in real life; they were easily set right when disturbed. The girl tore roofs off of houses, but she laid them back down good as new when she was done. Boxes, crates, and even cars were overturned and knocked aside by her footsteps, but she gathered them up by the handful and set them down one-by-one where they belonged. In one recurring dream he had, the girl was wading barefoot down the river while he rode on her shoulder. With a rising step, she accidentally dislodged a small footbridge. The bridge was lifted up on the top of her foot, then slid off and landed upside down on the shore. It was perfectly intact; she just picked it up and laid it back in place spanning the river, and they shared a relieved laugh.
She also climbed over the fifty-meter wall that encircled the village and took him to places he'd never seen before: distant regions of the world or even other planets. Since he knew little to nothing of these places they were hard for him to imagine. The images were what he extrapolated from pictures he'd seen, or else they emerged from some deep subconscious well. He saw the Egyptian pyramids, the Parthenon, and the Great Wall of China. He saw great roaring waterfalls, snow-capped peaks, and pillars of red stone in the desert. And he saw glittering expanses of impossible spires and arches under the uncanny light of an alien sun. All this he saw while leaning against her warm neck, sitting atop her soft palm, or peeking out from inside her shirt pocket. It was only in dreams that he'd ever be able to see any of these places at all.
He and she never spoke to each other in his daydreams. They just pointed, smiled, and laughed. They could not speak each other's tongues but they shared their own secret non-verbal language of signs and winks and nods. He also often imagined that she understood him completely on a level that transcended mere words; that when her deep dark eyes fixed on him his mind was laid bare, as small to her as his body, so that she could peel it open and know all his wants and needs and fears. She picked apart his psyche like she did his tiny house and she accepted it all, even the weaknesses he was ashamed of admitting even to himself; to her they made him not repulsive but cute and pitiable, like a lost puppy.
He never imagined doing any of the things to her that the other boys shouted and jeered about. He dreamed of standing on her shoulder and nuzzling up to her neck or chin, but he rarely dreamed of crawling under her clothes and never of seeing her naked. At most, he imagined himself simply embracing her, wrapping his arms and legs around one of her fingers or toes. No matter how overactive his imagination, he couldn't conceive of physically satisfying a girl sixty or seventy times his size; he didn't even have more than a dim notion of how it was done with girls his own size. He would give her devotion and companionship instead.
So went Kostas' days. He went to school and struggled to pay attention to lifeless lectures about dactylic hexameter or 18th century merchant shipping. He ran laps around the school field, or ran along the trails beside the river or the shore. He helped his mother peel potatoes or chop cucumbers and he swept up wood shavings from his father's workshop. He pretended to be interested in his grandfathers' and uncles' stories about the old days in the village and he devoured all the old books and old movies he could from the library's meager collection, escaping into stories about places far, far away.
Soon he would leave school and spend his days at the workshop instead. Maybe one day he would marry one of those village girls and listen to her talk about the price of fish. They would raise a son who would sweep up the wood shavings in what would then be his workshop. But nothing that mattered would change. He would still live in the same house in the same village. Every day he would walk the same roads, passing by the same houses and the same old gate that clattered against its posts in the wind.
He could see a succession of days like these stretching out to the vanishing point. The noisy gate clattering over and over, forever. It gave him a dreadful vertigo, like teetering at the edge of a high cliff. If he didn't break away, he would be hurled down and the days would pass in a blur, until he hit the bottom.
Thinking of it made him long for that girl's fingers to close around him and carry him away from here.
Then one night in late autumn he saw her unexpectedly, alone.
It was late. He had been running far up the shoreline, almost all the way to the wall, and was turning around to return home when he felt the ground tremble beneath him. He did as he'd always been taught and darted for shelter under an overhang, staying there until the tremors had subsided. Chasing after giant girls from a safe distance in daylight was a bit of boyish recklessness, but being out in the open at night as an unknown giant walked about was downright suicidal. A person would be invisible against the ground, and only dumb luck would make the difference between escaping unscathed and ending up smeared on the bottom of a giant shoe.
He emerged from cover and resumed running along the trail, turning the bend around a tall promontory that jutted out into the ocean. And then stopped. Beyond the promontory, a massive figure was sitting on the hillside.
It was her. The full moon's light shone on her glossy indigo hair and pale arms. She was sitting on the hillside that sloped down to the rocky shore, leaning back on her elbows. Her legs were arched over the trail, with her feet resting on the rocks just above the water.
She wasn't in her uniform but a simple gray shirt and black leggings, almost like the running clothes he was wearing. Her backpack was resting on the hill beside her with the ends of its straps running down across the trail. They were as wide as it was. He had never seen her wearing anything but her uniform before, and he was struck by how slight she looked without the skirt and blazer; almost waifish. Her thighs loomed over the trail like mighty tree trunks, but in proportion they looked so thin that if she were human, he could have wrapped his hands halfway around them. Her chest, too, was rather flatter than the image his fevered teenage imagination had conjured. It didn't matter; he was still intoxicated by the sight of her.
She had been looking away, but now turned her head this way to look down at her backpack. Her eyes and cheeks glistened in the moonlight; she had been crying.
Kostas's heart skipped a beat when he saw her tears. Here was the object of all his fantasies, sitting just ahead not as a distant aloof goddess but a sad and vulnerable girl. A powerful dream took hold of him and tugged him towards her. He should go to her, and comfort her. Her tears showed him that she too felt lonely and unloved. He could show her that there was someone who adored her and thought of her all the time. That could be the beginning of everything he had fantasized for so long.
But common sense and well-justified fear were just as strongly pulling him back. Sitting on that hill ahead was not the loving companion from his dreams but the real being he had only admired from afar: gigantic and alien, incredibly dangerous, and completely unaware of him. If she straightened her legs while he was on the trail beneath, he would be crushed into paste beneath those skinny delicate thighs. If she shifted her arms or moved her backpack, he could be knocked down and dashed on the rocks below.
And so he stood transfixed, torn between desire and self-preservation, watching as the girl opened her backpack.
There was no velcro, zipper, or buttons. She just traced her finger in a circle on the fabric and a seam opened at the top. She withdrew from the pack a dark oblong box the size of a bus and then something much larger: a long thick cylinder with rounded ends like a pill. About as long as her forearm, it was silvery-white with an iridescent sheen that swirled in the moonlight. Like an elongated pearl.
She connected a cable from the box to one side of the pill-shaped device. The box must be a power pack; it was about the same shape and size as the alien power packs that sat in the transformer station on the outskirts of the village.
She laid the pill-shaped device across her knees and gripped both rounded ends. From the two ends came a dim milky glow, like moonlight shining through clouds. And when she released her hands, her fingertips also glowed with that same soft pearly light.
She raised her index finger and traced a line in the air. A note rang out, steady and clear. It didn't sound artificial but rich and pure, like a mezzo soprano at the climax of an aria. And with the note, there was a light in the air. A vertical line shining magenta, hanging in the air over the girl's head high above the device. For the half-second that the note rang out, everything nearby was illuminated in brilliant neon pink, as if by a flash of lightning.
The girl did a scale, progressing from low notes to high and from red to violet. Then she flexed her fingers, raised both hands with fingertips spread, and began to play in earnest.
Notes echoed around the hillside; only a few at first, but multiplying into a chorus. Some sounded like bells, some like singing voices, some like whistling wind, and some like distant crashing waves. More than rhythm or melody, there was texture and contour: gentle rolling like hills or waves and brief intense crescendos like mountain peaks or sheer waterfalls. And with them, lights danced in the air: a suffuse nimbus of shifting color like an aurora, and shapes that bubbled out from within it. The shapes drifted outward and fade away, or burst in a intense flash, or remained revolving in steady elliptical orbits that tracked the pulsating intensity of an individual element of the complex music. They progressed in complexity from spheres and cubes to polyhedrons and eventually to intricate fractal-like patterns.
The girl's glowing fingertips moved with incredible speed and grace, tracing in the air above the instrument serpentine knots and sinuous loops and weaves. As the music intensified, she started to sway gently from side to side. Kostas was mesmerized and found himself swaying also.
But her playing was not flawless. As the complexity escalated, there came discordant notes: ugly blatting sounds accompanied by distorted shapes that veered about drunkenly. She persevered, but while a pianist could recover from the occasional slip, errors with this instrument seemed to cascade and multiply. More and more chaos leaked in, gradually but inexorably overwhelming the sound and image with glitches and static.
Finally the girl was fed up and closed both fists, instantly killing the music with a final discordant wail. She tossed the instrument down and collapsed onto the hill, turning to lie on her side. Fresh tears were trickling down her cheeks.
Something had changed in Kostas. The music lingered within him even after it ended. He saw a ghostly afterimage of the dancing lights when he closed his eyes. This, he was convinced, was fate. The girl he'd admired for so long was right in front of him, had just performed haunting otherworldly music as he watched, and was now lying on her side crying. He felt sure that if he did not go to her, he would regret it for the rest of his life. Drunk on the music, his hopes and confidence buoyed, he set about climbing up the hill.
The hill was steep and rocky. He scrambled up with some difficulty, clambering from rock to rock almost on all fours. The girl's torso loomed above him as he drew closer, massive and dark, rising and falling slowly with her breath. Her shoulder was against a sheer bluff and her head resting on its side at the top. She was sniffling and her upper lip quivered. Her eyes were closed and her cheeks glistened with tears.
As he drew near, there was sudden movement from the body looming overhead. There was a rush of wind as the great dark mass seemed to fall towards him, and he froze in a panic. She was going to roll over, and in a moment he was going to be reduced to a stain for her to wash out of her shirt.
But as suddenly as it had begun the avalanche reversed itself, the great living cliff above him rolling back and shrinking in on itself with a moan. The terrifying mountainous convulsion had just been a sob.
It was some time before Kostas caught his breath and started moving again. That he'd been paralyzed in fear of that simple sob underscored just how dangerous it was for him to be this close. Yet seeing her cry, and hearing the sound of her voice for the first time, made him want all the more to continue to climb towards her.
He approached her hand. It was lying there face-down, a great pale slab rising to the height of his waist and stretching out several meters ahead and on each side.
This was by far the closest he'd ever been to her, or to any of her kind. He'd long dreamed of sitting in the palm of this very hand, but he'd also been afraid that in real life, being so close to someone so huge would be an unendurable terror. Now that he was here, it wasn't quite as he'd feared. Her body and head, her arms and legs, were indeed too intimidating to bear looking at. Seeing he was in easy reach of such terrible mass and power made him want to bolt and run. And seeing that mountainous body convulse in a sob had been downright terrifying. But surprisingly, being around her hand was more manageable. Lying flat like this, her hand was small enough to fall within the bounds of what he could relate to from everyday life. It was something like a big flat boulder along the river. By focusing only on the hand in front of him, he could forget for a time that it was just a small part of a staggeringly enormous body.
Step by tentative step, he got closer to her hand, approaching the base of her little finger. The sweet, cloying scent of some lotion or perfume became overpowering, stinging his eyes and nose and making him light-headed. It didn't drive him back; instead its effects mixed with the lingering lights and music in the emotional cocktail that was urging him onward.
Once he was standing next to her waist-high finger he hesitantly extended his own trembling hand to touch it. When he made contact, it was like an electric current had run through him; he tingled and shivered all over. The skin on her finger was silky smooth, soft and yielding. It was barely warm to the touch; she had been out in the cold a while. So had he.
Confident from his first touch, he went further. He wanted to give her the affection she needed, to staunch her tears and make her see that she had an admirer who had long watched her from afar and who had been spellbound by the performance she had just given. He bent all the way over, laying his torso atop her little finger and resting his head against the side of her ring finger. The warmth of her finger, barely noticeable when he had felt it with only his hand, now rose up through his body comfortingly. He could sleep on top of this finger. It would be softer and warmer than his bed. He stretched his arms out to either side and rubbed them back and forth in what he thought would be an affectionate, consoling gesture.
She flinched.
Her hand jerked upward and threw Kostas off, sending him flying like a crumb carelessly brushed off the surface of a table. He sailed helplessly through the air, too stunned to even scream — or maybe too stunned to realize he was screaming. Reflex alone made him raise his arms to shield his head before he landed on the hillside several meters away and began tumbling down. He rolled downhill for what felt like an eternity, small stones banging into his sides and legs, before coming to a stop lying prone on a large rock, his head and legs dangling off its sides. It was maybe two thirds of the way downhill.
Rolling up onto his side was unbearably painful. Seemingly every one of his joints erupted in pain when any weight was put on them, and his sides and back felt like they were on fire. From running, the pain of cramps or pulled muscles was not unfamiliar to him. But he hadn't hurt this badly all his over his body since the time when he had fallen off the tree behind his house when he was much younger. The very same tree that he'd fantasized about showing to this girl; the one that was no higher than her ankle. He'd had to wear a sling for weeks after falling from it. He wondered if he'd broken anything this time and it distantly occurred to him that he was very fortunate to have not hit his head.
He craned his neck to look up at where the girl was and saw that she was sitting up again and putting her instrument back in her pack. It hurt too much to keep watching; his head slumped back to the ground.
In despair, he knew that what he'd done was dreadfully stupid. A mere involuntary twitch of the girl's hand had launched him into the air and thrown him over halfway down the rocky hill. He was lucky to be alive; all he could do now was get back down to safety. Nonetheless there was still a compulsion tugging him back up, a part of him that wanted to climb back up that hill and do it again. He imagined throwing himself at her again and again, until he either made her acknowledge him or else provoked her into swatting him dead. That way, a grim thought mockingly reminded him, he'd spend the rest of his life with her.
But it was too painful to even sit up, let alone climb back up the hill. All he could do right now was just lie there. Now it was he who was lying in tears.
He dreamed. Of her, of course. It was a fragmentary dream, even more so than usual: just a few disconnected images. In the dream he was lying face-up on her palm as he often had in dreams before. At times she was holding him at hip level and looking down at him from far above, her face weary. Her lips mouthed words but the sound of her voice was remote and hollow, as if she were at the opposite end of a long tunnel. And at times he was so close to her face that all he could see was her huge dark eyes, each nearly as large as he was. Her eyes were steady as she scrutinized him, but there were flickers of turmoil beneath the surface; in those murky depths churned forces beyond his reckoning.
When he woke up it was just before dawn; everything was dim with just a faint glimmer breaking the horizon. It was a cool autumn morning, damp with dew.
He was lying with his back against the wall of a house, on the outskirts of the village near the head of the trail, with no recollection of how he had gotten there. Maybe he had hit his head after all. There was no sign of anyone around; it was still too early for most people to be up. All was still and all was quiet, save for the faint moaning of the wind and the distant cries of seagulls.
The searing pain of his fall was now a dull ache in his sides and back. He could see bruises and scrapes on his arms; he could feel more bruises and swelling all over his body. His shirt and pants were torn and stained everywhere with dirt and grass. And he was very cold.
He tried to stand up but collapsed as his left ankle exploded in pain. It must be badly sprained. He was only able to stand by bracing himself against the wall of the house. He hobbled along on his right leg, hugging the wall, until he found a fallen tree branch that he could use as a makeshift crutch.
Haltingly and painfully he began limping home. On the wind he heard eerie echoes of the girl's unearthly music, flitting elusively just at the edge of perception.