Petrified

“There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.” – Genesis 6:4 

“There’s a sucker born every minute.”  – P.T. Barnum (apocryphal)

Another wakeful night.  Her head thumps heavily on the pillow.  She sinks in as low as she can.  She digs herself in, a desert lizard burying herself in sand.  One eye swallowed by pillow sees nothing.  She faces the window.  The moon shines outside, near full, an overripe pear with one soft side caved in slightly.  The light draws her exposed eye like a magnet.  The light holds her eye upright.  The moon overturns like a pitcher and pours all the light into her thirsty eyes.  Her mind is a patch of earth that gulps the light down. Extravagant flowers bloom there.  

She pulls up from the bed, her body tracing a quiet arc.  Her feet glide into slippers.  She dares not light a candle.  She needs no candle.  The moon’s rays are barreling inside the house like the cold glow of a limelight.  Her cousin slumbers lightly on the room down the hall.  His door is shut against the moonlight.  He has shuttered the windows, cradled himself inside a sealed womb of darkness. She still has to creep quietly for he sleeps lightly.  He is careful of her, she knows, but she is more careful of herself than he can imagine.    

She lifts the latch on the front door handle, eases the door open, asks herself whether she might not just leave the door ajar.  She decides against this because of the chill of the night outside.  The door might blow open.  The draft may wake her cousin. 

The early spring rains have come, earlier today, watered the grass, and it is moist and springy and gives easily beneath her feet, muffling her footsteps.  She hops briskly down the gentle slope.  Across the moon-drenched lawn.  Down to the entrance gate and the little shack standing in the gap in the rickety fence erected mere weeks past.  Instead of walking through the turnstile (it is so poorly greased, and makes such a caterwaul as it turns!) she raises up her nightskirts and carefully steps over the splintery fence.  Past the fence a canvas tent.  The smooth canvas catches so much moonlight it appears to shimmer.  

The entrance flaps are tied with bits of dirty string.  She pulls at the string and it undoes with a smooth scraping sound.  She eases the knot loose, cautious enough to fear the soft scrape may carry inside the house.  She throws the flap open and the moonlight streams in in and illuminate the colossal man-shaped figure lying on the table.  

She has always been fascinated by the giant, but seeing him like this hits her like an open-palmed blow to the stomach.  In the rays of the moon his stony skin appears shined and burnished and glints like pearl.  She stands stock still and gazes at him.  She feels mesmerized.  The great limbs are so rough and so angular and at the same time so soft and yielding.  The pale blue moon lights up parts of the giant the sun can’t touch.  Little chinks and depressions all along the surface of his naked body fill with soft floral shadow.  

She remembers the ugly side-whiskered little man who came to see the giant several days previously.  He had addressed the guests to the effect that the giant was no giant, that what appeared to be the petrified body of an extinct creature was really just ordinary stone, and that he could probably find the quarry it came from, given the chance.  Her cousin had chuckled and said he could believe what he liked so long as he paid the entrance fee.  If only that impertinent little man were standing in this tent at this hour!  She would defy him to tell how ordinary stone could make such a lifelike glow.  How crude human tools could fashion mere rock into the divine shape she beholds.  

The cool night air rushes in and swirls and mixes with the stale, oil-smelling miasma trapped inside the tent by the thick canvas. He is positioned in the middle of the tent and the light frames the heavy table on which he lies like a shrine. A lectern stands a short distance away from the giant’s head. Dusty placards, set all around, far back in corners of inky shadow, show the giant as he would have appeared in his proper age. When paying customers fill this tent, her cousin, or one of his trusted busi, stands at the lectern and spins grandiloquent tales of the life the giant lived in his proper age. In her cousin’s stories, the giant walks, he talks, sleeps, fights with the other members of his giant race.  The drawings show him mingling with the ancestors of the red men of this continent, who hover about his chest, as half-grown youths to him.  In the drawings he is curiously stolid, immobile eyes, a fish’s eyes, the painted-on eyes of a doll, as if the artist could not imagine how that massive stone face that lay on the table could ever bend itself into expressions befitting an ensouled creature.  Fear kept him from reaching his hand out and grasping from this table what was plain and free to take.

She pities the artist his failure of imagination.  She has no trouble at all picturing that imposing cliff of a forehead as it arches and bunches in surprise, gathers forward in anger, melts in a cascade of painful melancholy.  But in another way she appreciates the pictures.  The stilted figures on the placards remind her of pictures of saints in the stained-glass windows of a church, or epic tapestries in the tomb of an ancient hero, depicting his fantastic exploits.  They turn this into a funerary place, sanctify it, imbue it with the breath of the ever-living.

 Slowly, carefully, she steps over the velvet rope separating the giant from the rabble. Her long shadow casts a ghostly shade on the giant’s brilliant skin, and she quickly moves to the side to leave her view clear.  She wonders what kind of a giant he was in life. How he measured up among his people.  Was he an extraordinary giant, a titan, his tribe’s terrible protector and avenger?  Or was he a mere giant peasant, content to scratch out a living from the land, only concerned with protecting his own hearth and family?  

Her breath catches in her throat as she draws abreast with the giant and looks down at him.  So thick is the massive body that the table which reaches to the middle of her shins supports a mass almost level with her chin.  Unable to keep her fingers away, she reaches toward a shoulder the size of a medicine ball.  She turns her palm inward and trails the backs of her fingernails along some of the patches of shadow, puddled in his concave areas like black milk.  Her nails make a soft scraping sound as they trace up the neck, along the jaw. The jaw is massive and its width makes the giant’s head almost perfectly square.  His head is so huge she imagines she could only with difficulty hold it in her lap.  Difficulty or no, she imagines it, imagines the massive weight pressing upon her little legs and feeling the heft of its comforting boxiness.  

She takes a sharp inhale and holds it as she runs the nails of her other hand along the giant’s flank, through the grooves of his ribs, and it’s almost too much for her to bear, it’s just her imagination, of course it is but she could swear the rough stony skin was flush with heat, almost too hot to bear.  Blood pumping inside, bursting with hotness and life and she draws her hand away.  Her fingernails make a soft scraping sound, much softer than she would’ve believed, like the kind of scrape living skin would make.  Her hand turns over and lays on the giant’s hip, making skin-to-skin contact at last, and this shatters the spell, it is cold, a cold beyond the ability of the chill night to impart, a cold that seems to radiate from deep within.  With the sensitive skin on her palm she can feel, she can pick out every single pocked imperfection, crag, furrow and chip he’s picked up from his long sleep under the ground.  It still feels like flesh beneath her hand, but flesh of a different kind, of another order.  The cold feels as native to it as heat to the body of another animal, it suits him and far from making him feel dead only adds to the illusion of animation.  

She finally exhales in a long, stuttering gust and her palm, almost by itself, arcs smoothly from the flanks, from the subtle indentations of rib and bone beneath, down the angles of his body, so like a man’s but so alien in size, in aspect.  She traces with the thick cushion of her lower palm the long ridge of his shin bone, down and down to the gigantic knob of a knee, almost melon-sized, and then back all the way up again, this time with the fingers splayed to interpret the gentle hill-like crest of the muscles in the powerful thighs.

She’s never touched a man’s thigh before.  She’s chaste as a nun, her cousin’s suspicions notwithstanding.  This doesn’t bother her much. But chaste this creature certainly was not.  She wonders what kind of giantess mate he took in life.  Certainly not any would do.  She just knows, gazing at his shadowed face, that he was a worthy example of a giant, and could afford to be choosy.  She imagines his giant wife, tall and strong and heavy-limbed, pulsing with life and strength as himself,  looking at him with amative passion.  She imagines them lying down together. The picture she conjures is seared behind her eyes, etched in moonlight and bathed in cold vitriol.  

Snatches of her cousin’s usual speeches flutter unbidden through her mind. Her cousin expounds on the giant, who belonged to a race forsaken by God, given up totally to the Fiend, savage, cruel, in aspect and comportment cruder than the Indian, cruder still than any animal.  She looks at him and finds nothing of the devil in his face; hard, stern, yes, and lacking some refinement, but not wrathful, at least not after the human fashion of wrath.  She is sure that he would be moved to great violence if provoked.  But he did not appear easily provoked.  What could a man like this possibly fear?  What could be taken from him that he could not easily regain?  The largest of God’s creations are placid by nature, she reflects, there being so little which can harm them.  As a girl she used to sneak into the barn and nap among her father’s cows and oxen.  She would sleep against their warm, gently undulating sides for hours, and if they even noticed her there at all they would give her a good glance over with their huge moist eyes and return to sleep. They were the most gracious and giving creatures.  She climbed on them and swung from their horns and they stood patiently all through it.  All the vile creatures, she thinks, are the small ones.  The mean ones.  The tiny dog that bares its teeth and growls, the snake which bites, the bird which swoops and pecks and squawks.  These kinds of creatures are naturally fearful, hostile, precisely because they know themselves to be inferior, and therefore must puff themselves up and make a great noise and strike out with hate at unpredictable intervals.  It was the way of our fallen world that cows and giants alike both bowed to the dominion of smaller, nastier creatures.  At least the giants died long ago, and did not have to suffer the indignity of human dominion.  

Hiking up the long hem of her nightdress around her knees, feeling like a little girl again, she climbs up on the giant just as she used to do to the cows and oxen in her father’s barn.  The dead giant gives no more stir of resistance than those animals did.  She struggles to get a foot over the giant’s wide waist.  Her feet dangle over the edge.  She touches her bare cheek to the giant’s chest and her heart skips a beat.  She can’t tell any longer whether it’s hot or cold to the touch.  Every time she lets her consciousness drift back down to her skin it changes: hot, cold, hot, cold, it comes in waves. It’s magical. If she hadn’t seen him dug up with her own eyes she would disbelieve that the giant was of this world at all.  She would expect an angel or a sprite of Hell to be this inscrutable to the senses.  Energy pours into her and she opens up the buttoned portion of her nightdress to press her bare ribs onto his.  

She wonders what it would be like to be this giant’s wife, to live inside the circle of his protection.  He looks so overabundant, a mighty tree thick with sheltering shade, heavily laden with fruit.  She has lived every day of her life under sheltering shades, some more pleasant than others.  Her cousin is quite fond of bringing up the ways in which he looks after her.  Whenever he denies her this pleasure, that privilege, fills her day with household tasks, tells her whom she may see or where she may go, he plays some variation on this theme. He is wont to cite the chapter and verse of her father’s will at her every protest.  “Would you rather I had turned you away?” he asks.  “You’ve no idea how a girl like you would be treated out in this harsh world.”  She cannot believe that, were she this giant’s wife, he would deny her anything that was in his power to provide.    His protection is of another kind.  He wouldn’t keep her under lock and key. Such meanness isn’t in him. He protects not what he fears to lose – what could he possibly fear to lose? – but what he has freely chosen as the object of the overflowing beneficence of his spirit.

And she would repay this beneficence any way she could.  She would be a wife to him. She would fulfill a wife’s duties to keep hearth and home.  She would work twice as hard for him as she does for her cousin and feel honored to do so.  Her father had actually wished the two to marry.  Her cousin still sometimes tells her this, although when he had first died, and she expressed no interest in the proposition, he had seemed more relieved than anything.  She knew him well, even back then.  He only wanted to marry her so she would have to welcome him as a wife must welcome her husband in bed.  Unworldly as she is, she knows that much. Since then she’s had precious little contact with the male sex. Her cousin mostly keeps her away from mixed-company engagements out of concern for her fragile disposition.  She had never felt worse off.  That is, until she saw the giant naked beast hauled out of that hole where her cousin was having a well dug.  

She sits up, reaches both hands behind her back, feels the breeze billow through her open nightshirt.  Her fingertips wander until they find and grip the organ between the man’s legs.  She knows that this is the penis, and serves as the generative organ, or rather served as such when still the giant lived.  She does have some familiarity with the process. She had watched bulls put out to stud. When the bulls became amative it was as if some horrid spirit entered their bodies.  They always became agitated.  They made the most unnatural noises that ever escaped from a living thing’s mouth.  They foamed crazily.  Their eyes became wide, with pinprick pupils, and whirled crazily in their sockets. And their male organs, normally swinging at their bellies, became monstrously large, rigid weapons.  Observing this, the cows would move slowly and carefully, and scan their pens as if looking for a way out.  The bulls would follow them around, nudge them brusquely, jump up on their backs, and plunge their organs right into the cows’ most sensitive areas in a motion frightfully similar to a stabbing.  She had first seen this process at a young age and quite against her father’s will, and when she’d asked what the bull was doing, his fair cheeks had pinkened behind his sparse side whiskers. “He’s making a calf inside her,” he had said.  She wondered how the cow ever stood still for this.  How the cow let this happen.  It seemed pretty clear to her that if there had not been a pen there, the cow would certainly have run away. Her father had no need to elaborate that the process was similar with people.  She had guessed as much already and felt nothing but disgust at the idea.

Not until she had first seen the giant, extracted bit by bit from that muddy chasm, had she really understood what was happening within the four walls of that pen.  It was a dance, a rhythm as old as the world.  The bull and the cow had joined themselves to the pounding beat emanating from the earth.  It was the beat she felt now.  The beat had seemed to spill out when the earth opened to disgorge this giant.  Its power was like the power of God, and one approached it as one approached God in prayer.  In earthly love there was no room for fear, but this kind of love waxed alongside fear, mixed with it; there could be none of this kind of love without power, and fear and trembling awe of the power, for without then came bowing to the power despite the fear, and in the fear to find the exhilaration of submission, to tangle with it, to leave your earthly will behind, take this thing that could easily destroy you and feel it on you and within you and make it as much a part of yourself as anything you were born with, and to trust in the power, and to find joy in it, and to give endless thanks to him who would share it with you rather than destroying you, and each moment walking that razor’s edge, fearing destruction but trusting in salvation, for the wielder of this power is good and gracious, and his thoughts, his ways are alien to you, and you may never reckon the mystery of his even noticing you, but the mystery is as a precious jewel dug from the ground, in whose facets you may stare endlessly, and whose crystalline structure you may spend a lifetime tracing and the sum of all the staring and tracing is you.  

She grows warmer and warmer, straddling the elephantine torso of this dead beast, as if he is alive, as if he can reach out with his heavy fingers like young trees, his palm like the lid of a coal scuttle, and pet her gently on the head.  She grows hot at the thought.  She feels like she shouldn’t be sitting on the giant, she’s going to un-petrify him somehow, turn him back into flesh, somehow re-animate him with her body heat and then where would her cousin be?  This giant is only valuable to him as a mummy.  Surely, the scientific world would adore to have a genuine Nephilim to study, but she cannot imagine a scenario where he would consent to be studied.  If he did not want to stay, who could possibly make him?  He could break out of any prison you could possibly devise and his skin is thick enough to shrug off bullets like raindrops.  

What would she do, if the giant sprang to life? Would the giant destroy her?  Or would he be able to tell, as the cows had, that she meant him no harm?  She felt a piercing sadness at the thought that he would be alone in this world, the only living specimen of his kind.  She wanted to give him everything she could. Could he understand human ways?  Would he be able to discern her intentions  Could she make him understand?  He seemed intelligent enough.  Could she teach him human ways?  Could she bring him into a household, and live with him?  Would he possibly one day accept her as a mate?  There was no man among the race of men from whom she would accept this honor.  She, like the giant, was alone in the world.  She could forge a bond this way.  She could make him understand.  She could keep his home as well as any giantess.  She could hold and comfort him.  Lay with him.  Bear his children.  She wants so badly for it to be real.  

She fancies the giant’s skin in the moonlight begins to flush with blood. She leans forward again to hold him. Her own heart hammers next to his, vibrates it, gives of herself through those layers of aged mineral.  His chest begins to rise and fall.  Or is it herself who was rising and falling?  Her head spins, her perceptions blur and she can no longer tell where she is in relation to him, where she ends and he begins.  She feels like she is melting into him.  A man will go unto his wife and become one flesh.  She feels the hot breath from his nostrils on the crown of her head, ruffling her hair.  She presses her face into his chest.  She scoots downward.  It feels tingly between her legs.  Still pressed to the torso, she feels the gigantic stony member through the folds of her nightdress.  She moves along it, inching upwards and downwards.  Her nightclothes become hot and moist between her legs.  She bucks along the member almost without thinking. Warmth floods from underneath. Pleasure explodes in her mind.  

Impossibly the body grows warmer.  She looks down at the massive chest, stretching before her like the horizon.  There is no mistake this time – color is returning, the grey flecked rock is turning a deep reddish brown, not like a white man’s but not like an Indian’s either, a tone she’s never seen before on a person.  It comes in markedly in those areas where she lays her hands.  She claws her fingers and draws downward as she moves on top of him, leaving a flesh-toned stripe all the way down to the giant’s waist.  It’s really happening.  She is bringing him back to life. This is the herald of destiny.  No one could do this but her.  

It is already becoming a chore to focus her eyes properly, her head is whirling so, but she pulls things together to look at him right in the face.  The breath of life is returning to the giant’s wide face.  Fluid pumps into the giant’s eyes, and the shape of an iris and pupil can be seen.  She swoons and when she returns to the world the giant’s eyes are open and staring right into hers.  He looks like one of her father’s bulls, but simultaneously much more animal-like, and at the same time more human and noble than any man she has ever met.  

She utters not a word. This is the only common language they need.  Everything is exchanged with their eyes.  She knows that he’s looking within her and feeling everything she feels for him, that he wants everything she has to give to him, without terms, without limits.  A slight grinding noise issues from his upper body as his eons-dead limbs crackle to life.  The massive hands reach up and grab her around the waist.  They encircle it easily.  They grip her fair flesh deeply, taking her breath away – she gasps and begins to tingle and lose sensation beneath that iron grip but she loves it, silently runs a hand along the fleshy pommel of one of the giant’s palms to urge more and more.  He squeezes, he compresses, he moves up and within her and she is being pummeled from within and crushed from without and nothing has prepared her for this rapture, this is everything she ever wanted.  She exists in this time and in this place to submit to this giant and mingle his flesh with hers.  He jumped out of the ground, out of the countless ages past to unite with her.  She feels like a key that has finally found its lock and the door swings open and impossibly bright beams of light flood her and burn her eyes and cook her mind and it’s agony and she wants it all, she grinds and bounces and tries to take more and more and she lets herself loose, shrieks like a terrible avenging angel, flails her body this way and that and then the giant rolls over and they both fall off the table and she knows no more.

They found her in the tent in the morning; unconscious, pale, bruised.  The flaps she had opened had fallen back down.  Her tiny feet were pointing out on either side of the giant’s body in a rather unmistakable pose, and even if it weren’t for that, the skirts of her nightdress were hiked up and the heavy miasma of sweat and passion hung inside the tent, the night’s drafts doing but little to clear the air.  

Seeing as the giant weighed over a ton and a half, her injuries were not as bad as they might have been. The giant had not been petrified with his limbs and back laid perfectly flat, and through sheer luck the way the contours of his boy met the swell of the ground at the side of the table allowed him to fall on top of her in such a way that he did not kill her immediately.  She still had bruised her pelvis, snapped one arm and several ribs, and evinced a whole spate of internal injuries.  Furthermore, one of her ankles had been pulverized to such an extent that the doctor had no choice but to cut off the limb midway down the shin.  She stared languidly off into space while the gruesome operation was performed, although she had had no laudanum at all.

Her cousin found the whole affair shocking, but not entirely surprising given her history of instability. He arranged for her convalescent care to take place within the same sanitarium where she is now interned.  The giant has made him rich beyond his wildest dreams.  He wasn’t able to keep her incident out of the local papers, neither in the abstract nor in its salacious details, and as the giant was already a favorite of the wire services, the gushy story splashed across newspapers from coast to coast.    Surprisingly, far from driving his customers away, the story had only increased traffic to see the giant.  People crowded up to his farm in droves to see the giant who, though dead for millennia, managed to seduce and ravish a human woman.  The money rolled in; employees were needed and the money was there to pay them, but even after hiring a whole crew of ticket-takers, custodians, security guards, clerks and business managers, he found himself swamped by the amount of work the giant demanded.  After another unstable man, provoked to madness by news of the giant’s unforgivable conduct, tried to blow up the “satanic” creature with a bundle of dynamite, her cousin found himself looking for any excuse to sell the giant, and when a huge circus offered him one hundred thousand dollars on the spot for the giant, he gladly took it.  He’s looking into buying more farmland now, he’s purchased large interests in several shipping firms in the city, and he’s courting a woman from a wealthy family.  

She hasn’t seen or heard from her cousin in weeks.  His money keeps her in this building, and it pays the several alienists who come to speak with her about her delusional encounter with the giant, about other delusions she’s had in the past.  She’s already given up all hope of ever getting out. She did so the second she heard about the courtship.  The alienists see her far too infrequently to be making any real effort to cure her.  She’s in here to be shut away.  An inconvenience.  This thought might have distressed her before but it doesn’t matter much to her now.  

Her disposition is docile in the extreme.  Even the alienists have noticed. They regard it as a sign of derangement.  They make notes saying she’s taken leave of her senses, possibly forever. Nothing could be further from the truth.  She sees all. She sees everything much more clearly than she ever has.  Her supposed derangement is how these learned men interpret the imperturbable inner calm she now enjoys.  They say this happens to women in a certain condition.  That power she felt radiating off the giant in waves is within her now. That was his gift to her.  The true gift of the truly superior man, who overflows with such gifts, is the one he bestows upon the woman he freely chooses to bear his flesh and blood.  She can feel the blood of a god within her. To her and only to her falls the unimaginable honor of bearing the giant’s child. She observes the goings-on of the lesser mortals around her with an air of saintly renunciation.  She inhabits her plain cell, sits up on her bare mattress and wedge-shaped pillow as courtly as any queen on her throne.  She has been visited by the herald of her fate and been anointed by its blessing.  She has been chosen.  She is the matriarch of a new dynasty, a new order of life.  History will record her name.  She sits regally upon the mattress and widens her eye to catch the moon’s rays streaming in through the window.