Aborigen

Life was basically good, Henley decided.

The cool night air flowed around his cheeks and through his hair, lifting away the heat from his scalp, as he cruised idly through campus on a rented bike. It felt as though the night were a stream, and it was washing away his stresses and concerns, leaving him clean and open.

His emotional instability, for one thing. Where did that come from? He’d never hit a person in his life, and then he assaulted his best friend for one of his typically off-color comments. It was insensitive, sure, but was that a reasonable reaction?

The bike’s front wheel twisted slightly as he rolled over a seam in the pavement. Henley gripped the handlebars and drew a long, intentional breath.

Éibhlín.

He wasn’t blaming her, but her gigantic stride into his life couldn’t help but upset everything. She was beautiful, sweet and innocent despite her massive form. So open, so caring … yet there was something she was hiding from him. Not her touch, certainly, and not her body. Just something she wouldn’t talk about. He frowned. He couldn’t put a finger on it—it seemed to be a group of topics, related in a way he couldn’t see, that always caused the conversation to drift or end a phone call early. And it wasn’t her size that prevented him from asking her. It was something directly connected to a nerve, and for that reason, maybe he didn’t want to know what it was.

He braked at a stop sign, looking up the street. Very few cars were out tonight, and no one was coming up to him. The road was a long, black ribbon leading out of the restaurants and offices, into the student housing.

He waited there at the crossroads, watching.

The moon was in half-phase, and wisps of long, thin clouds drifted over it. A couple stars were visible despite the urban light pollution.

“We’re not animals,” she’d said. But the big dark guy, Duibhne, called people “pests” and “critters.” There was a difference Éibhlín was circling but, again, she wouldn’t explain. And he couldn’t shake that gesture Duibhne made, tapping on his wrist like a watch. The way it pissed her off, it seemed like more than just wrap up the conversation with the bug.

Grunting, he started the heavy bike from a standstill and rolled into the intersection, past the wide walking space in front of the burger joint, into some smaller shops.

He didn’t even see the movement. One second, a broom clattered through his front spokes; the next, he barely turned his face away from the rushing pavement. Cold rock and tar punched him hard, then pain lanced from his elbow through his shoulder. He rolled to his back, but only partially as the bike frame tangled his legs.

The silhouette of a man in a pretentious hat moved out of an alley and sidled in front of a streetlight overhead, slowly approaching the wreck. Something long and thin hung from his grip.

“Silas,” Henley groaned.

The hipster took a step back. “The fuck?”

Henley used that pause to tug his legs out from around the bike frame and scoot back. His right arm was fucked, he landed on it badly; he rolled to his left hip and tested his legs. “Cobie did a reverse-image search for your goofy ass. Found your Instagram accounts: your daylight one led to your shadow account. The one where you draw rude pictures of Éibhlín.” He tried to stand, but his knees said not yet.

“You’re a fucking stalker. You’re a hacker.” Silas adjusted the grip on the thin rod. “Even more reason for you to leave her the fuck alone. You don’t appreciate her, and you’re a terrible person.”

Henley nodded at the rental bike. “You ambushed me from an alley. You fucking attacked me.”

Silas snorted. “All for a good cause. You’re not listening to reason. Someone had to stop you.” He raised the rod, a golf club. Some kind of wedge, glinting in the streetlight. “You brought this on yourself, asshole.”

The club whistled down. Henley raised his left arm, blocking the shaft. An ineffective strike. Silas swore, drew back, aimed lower. Henley cried out as the wedge dug into the soft area below his ribs. He kicked out at the hipster, who easily stepped around the bike, choosing his next shot. Henley looked around for any headlights, any pedestrians, but the campus was like a ghost down after a certain hour.

Silas raised the club. Henley rolled toward the bike, hoping to push himself off the structure to get upright. Laughing, Silas reverted to a kick instead, digging his shoe deep against Henley’s kidney. Henley wrapped his left arm around the handlebars to keep from collapsing. Something cold and hard traced an arc around his ear, then withdrew.

“Don’t do this, Silas. This isn’t what you want, and it won’t get you what you really want.”

He heard Silas suck in his breath for another blow, dropped his head and shielded his face with his good arm.

The atmosphere changed. The cool night air went heavy, almost clammy with moisture. Not rain, just pressure. Henley thought his adrenaline had kicked in; his heart was pounding, he could hardly feel the pain in his right arm.

When he looked up, there was no Silas. Just a wide sheet of black sky, partially behind the blur of a dark and spreading tree.

He rubbed his wrist against his eyes to clear them of moisture. When he lost the blur, he saw it wasn’t a tree.

“Doireann?”

She was glaring down at him, or maybe she always glared, couldn’t not-glare. Her hair was glossy, styled in a sharp bob, framing ivy-green eyes that flickered, taking in the bike, his legs, his face. “Pathetic,” she murmured. Her face slowly rose, retreated from him.

“Doireann!” Henley finished pulling his legs free of the bike and turned onto his knee, propping himself up. He kept his right arm curled against his chest. “Wait, Doireann! What—”

Her clothes struck him, abruptly. She wasn’t wearing the Polo shirt and cargo shorts the titans were issued for agricultural work. She wasn’t wearing the worn tank top and pleated plaid skirt he’d spotted her in during her day off. The angry giantess, the manifestation of nature’s fury, was dressed in a clingy LBD with cuffed white socks and Mary Janes.

The words were out before he could think: “Where the fuck have you been?”

Doireann’s mouth opened, shut, and she glanced down at herself in surprise. “Night out. Social. None of your business!” She knelt before him, taking up a lane of street and some sidewalk, one knee on the ground. Her right arm rested on her other knee, above Henley’s head, and her hand was curled in a loose fist. Her skirt was pulled in such a way that, at any other hour of the day, he could’ve seen what color underwear she was wearing, if titans did. He snapped his head away quickly, and after a beat, the titaness chuckled.

He struggled to right the bike and walked it over to rest against the streetlight. From across the street he could look up at her without threat of impropriety. “Doireann, you saved me. I didn’t even hear you come up.”

She sneered. “We don’t go stomping around like stupid giants all the time. We can move right through the earth. We’re part of it. How do you not know this?” She flattened her left palm against the pavement, as though connecting with the ground underneath.

“I don’t know anything about the titans. That’s probably not even what you call yourselves.”

“It’s not.”

“See? I’m willing to admit what I don’t know. I’ve asked Éibhlín, but she won’t tell me. We’re open about a lot of things, but there’s a lot she won’t talk about. I don’t know if she’s being mysterious or you’re, like, top secret clearance or something.”

One slow chuckle rippled up from Doireann’s belly, heaving her chest, then rocking her head as it exited. Henley was in a position to appreciate its journey in detail. “Maybe you don’t need to know. Ever think of that?”

She paused, watching him, and to him her brow seemed to soften. “That’s not true. There is something you need to know.”

He felt the heaviness in the air again, but it wasn’t displaced by a gigantic, silent body moving into the area this time.

Doireann looked down the street, frowning. “I don’t like you little people. I hate working for you, and I hate working with you. I don’t know why the fuck Meadhbh makes us do this, we don’t need you.” Her loose fist tightened and Henley heard a muffled scream.

She looked down at him again. “But … I love Éibhlín, and fucked as it is, she loves you. What we have isn’t love like you think of it. It’s a real connection. I don’t care to explain it, but it’s part of what we are.”

“Not animals,” he ventured quietly.

She laughed, and the way her throat shifted in the street light was frightening, powerful, and intriguing. He wished he knew why. “No, not at all. You won’t get it. But Éibhlín loves you, in the way you think of love, so I can’t let anything happen to you.” Her lip curled and her head shuddered slightly. “I will admit you’re not the shittiest little person I’ve met. I can sense you through her eyes, and …” She shrugged.

Henley licked his lips briefly and smoothed back his hair, tugged his jacket more neatly into place. “Who was the shittiest?”

---

They found themselves on the river bank, the same area as his date with Éibhlín. Doireann slowly kicked her huge bare feet in the water, displacing hundreds of gallons in waves off her toes. Her enormous shoes, musty with wear, rested on Henley’s other side, confining him with her hip. Her left hand propped her up from behind; her right fist rested between her thighs, in the lap of her dress.

“I tried one of you guys, a long time ago. You know, dating, a rela—” She grimaced. “I just tried it, a couple times. Never worked out. The first one, he was just too scared. Didn’t matter how much we talked. I don’t know if he was just being polite or what. I mean, we talked fine, we had great craic like that, but as soon as I reached for him he pissed himself. Almost every time.”

Henley could picture it, someone like Doireann even attempting to be tender could be fucking frightening.

“The other one, Fabian. He was a prick.”

“What’d he do?”

She sucked in a long breath, and Henley didn’t hide noticing how her chest swelled in the moonlight, under the glossy black fabric. “Why’m I even telling you this …” She looked at the moon, she looked down at him, and she laughed softly. “Doesn’t fuckin’ matter, it’ll all be over soon.”

Unwillingly, Henley pictured Duibhne tapping his wrist.

“Fabian, construction contractor, international. I thought maybe a European would spare me some of the bullshit from you Americans. Nope.” She grinned. “Just a different stink. Fewer preservatives, but it’s still shit.”

Henley’s eyes drifted down her side, to the swell of hip straining under her dress. It was a short dress, exposing most of her thigh, and her legs were toned and strong but in the moonlight they seemed soft.

He closed his eyes, hard, and willed his head to turn. When he opened them again, they looked at the slivers of moonlight reflected in the water, and he stared at them with a vengeance.

He didn’t notice Doireann glance at him, far above, and how her expression softened for a moment. “We dated for a while. It was nice, for a while. He had the money to arrange really nice dinners, proper. He told me things about where he’d come from, and we …”

She shook her head. “Long story short, he was recording our conversations, and he had cameras everywhere. Contracting wasn’t earning him enough money, it turned out, so I was his, what you call it, his side-hustle.”

Without tempting himself to look at her, Henley said, loudly, “You mean his side-chick?”

“No. Monetization, just without consent. The internet was new then, so word didn’t spread quickly. I didn’t know what he was doing until I overheard some roofers talking about pictures of me. Me, in particular. None of them were suicidal enough to talk to me like they would have a woman their size, you know. Knowing questions about my cunt and tits. Real cute shit. But I heard them, and by bizarre coincidence the roof they were all on collapsed, and I got sent back to torpor. So now I don’t fuck with you little creeps anymore.”

Henley could picture it: hard hats, hi-viz vests, chest thumping and jokes about an unaware woman’s anatomy. Close-up shots, no doubt. And then the beams splintering and four or five men falling through empty space, helpless to stop. Shouts, and eventually impact.

Then something wiped all those thoughts away, and regardless of her being a big, beautiful goddess in the moonlight, Henley stared straight up into the side of her face. “Wait, hold on. What’s torpor?”

Doireann bit her bottom lip and looked away. “Nothing, forget it. I have to be getting back, and so do you.” He caught a glimpse of her partially shaved armpit as she reached over him and collected her socks and shoes. “Good talk. Must do this again never.”

“Doireann, wait!” He struggled painfully to rise to his feet, standing beside her long, folded leg as she donned her footwear. “Please, tell me what torpor is. Is that what you mean when you guys say time’s running out?”

She turned to look at him, and then Doireann reached down for him. She tucked her middle fingernail behind her thumb, other fingers splayed out of the way, and held it right in front of his frail little head. He could feel the tension vibrating in the air, as she waited for an excuse to flick him away, right out of this mortal coil.

He raised his hands, open hands, and bent his head. After a moment, she withdrew her hand and buckled her shoes. “But tell me what happened to Silas. I’m guessing you did something to him.”

The titaness laughed. “Not yet. But what I’ve gathered from Éibhlín is that he’s really curious about what it’s like to make love to a giantess.” Her smile was a broad, cruel blade in the night as she opened her fist, keeping the oddly dressed little man pinned under her thumb.

Silas looked terrified, wordless with horror. His eyes bugged, his jaw worked silently, but his mustache had the unfortunate effect of tinging his expression with comedy. Somewhere he’d lost that stupid little hat.

Doireann leaned down to where Henley stood. “I’m going to give him everything he’s ever dreamed of, and then some. I don’t think I need to tell you, he’s never, ever going to bother you, Éibhlín, or anyone else, ever again.”

He stared up into the titaness’s face, hovering so close to him. He could smell a trace of booze on her breath, and her eyes fairly blazed in the darkness. He stepped up and gently palmed the curve of her chin. “My hero.”

The titaness’s double-take was so much more dramatic at her scale. She may even have blushed, hard to tell in the moonlight. What she did do was rise quickly, growl “be good to Éibhlín, you little freak,” and stomp off into the night to the tune of a thin, thready scream.

It was a long walk back to the dorms, and Henley’s body wasn’t in good shape for it. He would probably have to pay for the bike, too, if Silas ruined it. But none of this was in the storm that swirled in his skull.