There used to be a forest outside of town and beyond the hills that sloped like a woman on her side, where one tree, called Yevaeldyr, towered over all others and could be heard weeping. Millie often sat with her grandmother on their porch swing, rocking gently back and forth, watching the leaves of this one great tree shimmer beneath the light of a blood-orange sun, and listening for the breeze to carry in Yevaeldyr’s soft cries. With Millie wrapped in the warm cashmere of evening light, her grandmother, Rose, would often tell her of the giants.
“Wonderful creatures of stone and moss,” she always began, “Yevaeldyr and Verdaeliah roamed the earth. They were here before the trees grew, before the ocean filled, before the wind learned to speak, or the sky could shed tears. Forever, they walked across rolling hills, jagged valleys, and towers of mountains, before they settled here, with us.” And she gestured to the town, the many buildings and their stagnant lights; she gestured to the hills and the trees behind them, to the river that fled from the forest, ran through town, and, eventually, bled into the sea.
The giants were the center of many stories, the heroes of a local mythology. Often, Millie heard of their arrival. How the giants cut through a dense fog—their glowing saffron eyes diffusing through the water in the air—dressed as shadows. They approached with long, knobby strides. Spheres formed their feet and dimpled the ground below (the earth sighed beneath their weight). Kneeling in front of the town, they peered down at the residents with the curiosity of children trying to see into an anthill. The light of the giants’ eyes fell from above with the grace of dancing snow and warmed the cheeks of those beneath them.
The townspeople did not lack fear during this encounter. Mothers held their children, fathers held their breath to steady their pounding hearts. Monoliths had cut through the fog, eyes like fire, and braced the settlement beneath their bodies; fear was natural. But with only a finger, one made of quartz and stone, the giants became trusted.
With the town they stayed, sitting where today’s boundaries lie. They regarded the city with the warmth of parents watching their children scurry about a playground, fiddling with trees they’d pick like dandelions, plucking branches and letting them fall to the ground. They did not sleep and at night their eyes shone with the moon and stars.
“Wonderful creatures of stone and moss,” she always concluded. “Forever, they had roamed. Until one day, they found us here and learned they weren’t alone.”
And Millie, though her eyes would be setting with the sun, always begged, “Tell another.”
Her grandmother always obliged. “Which one would you like to hear?” she asked and began to think of all the stories she knew. Maybe Millie would want to hear about the river—how the giants pulled the earth apart so water could flow through the city. Maybe she would tell of the drought—how the giants, when crops struggled to grow, leaned over and offered a tear to each farm, spurring the plants to shoot up overnight. Or maybe she’d want to hear about the children who’d scramble up the giants’ feet, spread their arms wide, and sink into the soft moss around their ankles—how sometimes, Verdaeliah would lift them and let them steal a glance of Heaven. From the ground, you could almost hear her purr with delight as kids awed at clouds that seemed but an arm’s length away. Or maybe she’d want to hear about those hot summer days where the giants followed people to the sea—how Yevaeldyr waded out into the water and let people dive from his hand.
But Millie always made the same request, “Tell me about the dancing.”
“The dancing?” Rose said. “Of course, the dancing.” She took a moment to remember the details. Then, with her voice of crushed velvet, she began, “At the end of their first year with us, when autumn colors fell, the giants went away. Into the distance, they walked and were slowly swallowed by the horizon.” She took a bite out of the air. “When this happened, everyone watched and wondered why.
“Rumors spread that they had gotten bored, that they went off to find something better than them, or that the giants had been offended in some way. But their worries were replaced with excitement when a week later, the giants came marching back.
“The town was so thankful that they threw a big party,” she said. “It was a welcome home that shook the earth. There was music and dancing, and enough food to feed everyone twice over. Everyone laughed and cheered and sang beside the flame of a great big fire. And the giants, though initially confused by the row, were no sticks in the mud. Hand in hand, they danced, twisting and spinning and swaying back and forth. With the fire roaring and the music filling the air, and with the giants dancing beside them, the town was sure they wouldn’t leave again.
“But come the next year, off they walked, sinking again below the horizon, and returning a week later. And so this happened, year after year. And so we celebrated, year after year, singing and feasting and dancing with the giants,” she said, and started humming a waltz. A waltz that sent Millie to dream.
Millie often returned to the same dream: The sun had long been asleep; the moon and stars had long been shining atop a depthless night sky. It was the festival of the giants. All were wearing masks of Yevaeldyr or Verdaeliah. Millie stood amongst a mass of dancers, but she did not dance. All was bathed in the monarch glow of fire.
Millie stood alone and watched as people swung merrily ‘round and ‘round. She stood alone and watched as something began to shine saffron beyond the hills. Alone, she watched as Yevaeldyr and Verdaeliah rose above the city. And with their radiant saffron eyes, they gestured for her, alone, to join them.
Without hesitation, she accepted. Through the crowd, she walked. People danced around her. As she approached, she grew taller and taller, each stride became longer and longer. She got to the hills and cleared them in a single bound. With the giants, she danced, twisting and swirling and rhythmically turning. She held their hands; she spun them around. She laughed and screamed and cheered. She was able to look deeply into their eyes and see how their color dripped out as if their beauty was too much to contain. Up close, she was able to see that their stone bodies were intricately carved as if they were sculpted from a mountain. They were more beautiful in her dreams than even her grandmother could describe.
Blissfully, she danced with Yevaeldyr and Verdaeliah, but not for long. Always, the stale city lights would catch her attention and refuse to let go. She was a giant now, and far beyond the hills; the town was but a footnote. Yet she could still hear the music of the festival tapping her on the shoulder, the roar of the bonfire, and the galloping of the dancers.
As she became fixated on the town, she too became motionless. Stagnantly, she watched the people who would not watch her. No one so much as stole a glance, she noticed, of the giants or herself, and she could not figure out why. It was as if they didn’t care anymore about the giants. As if they weren’t interested in Millie, how she became one of them. They were wholly content with their festival, with their imitation masks and loud music, and anything that was not warmed by the bonfire wasn’t important enough to be acknowledged. The giants danced outside of town, outside the thoughts of its people, and Millie danced beside them. Once, they were loved. Now, they are forgotten, dancing alone behind the hills.
The dream always ended with Millie standing there, staring at the town. Always, she would feel herself, Yevaeldyr, and Verdaeliah, crumble beneath the joy of the festival, the thump of their music, the stomp of their feet.
“Why haven’t I ever seen them?” Millie asked one day, pulling loose threads from her blanket. It was early September and the heat of August had been swept away by the crisp winds of fall. She was older, her blue eyes fading grey.
“You see them every day,” said Rose, holding Millie at her side. “They are the hills. They are the trees we watch sway in the evening.”
“But those have been there forever. The giants were here before that.”
“To you, they’ve been there forever. But you’re still young and believe the world won’t change when you’re not looking. I remember a time when the forest wasn’t there, or the hills for that matter, because the giants were still here.”
“You’ve seen the giants?” Millie said, looking up at her grandmother.
“Long ago. By the time I was your age, they were gone.”
“What do you remember?”
“Well, sometimes the light from their eyes would shine in through my window at night, and I would lie there like a cat in the sun, waving my hand through the dust suspended in the saffron beam until I fell asleep. I would always wake up when the light left and my room felt colder,” she said. “Or on long car rides, I would watch them through my window. No matter how far we drove, they were there, evertall and resting beside the town. But most of what I remember is from after they’d left. When I would share evenings like this with my mother, listening to her stories.” She squeezed Millie a little tighter.
“What happened to them?”
“One night,” she said, “when the moon was absent, the usual babble of crickets was silenced by the collapse of Verdaeliah. The giants had never slept, had never lain down, so when Verdaeliah was found thrown like a chopped tree, all were shocked. Yevaeldyr stood over her and tried to rock her back to life, but found no success. In his grief, he withdrew. Beyond where he would normally rest, deep in the distant green, he buried his head in his hands and cried. From his tears came the forest, and Yevaeldyr was quickly overgrown. He became wrapped in the bark of a tree that grew taller than all others. She became the hills that curl around the city like a crescent moon.”
The wind sailed by with a hush. Millie reexamined the forest and the hills, trying to find the giant that hid within each. Together, Rose and Millie rocked back and forth on the porch.
The beckoning of autumn winds was disrupted by the creak of a screen door. Millie kept her head resting on her grandmother’s shoulder. Rose looked up at V standing in the door frame, admiring the picture of her mother and daughter together in the honeyed light of sunset. “Is she asleep?” asked V, her voice hushed.
“No, just dreaming, I believe.” Rose ran her fingers through Millie’s hair.
“Were we talking about the giants?” V sat on the bench beside Millie, wrapped her arm around her mother. Together, the three of them watched Yevaeldyr. “What were we talking about today?”
“Where they went,” said Millie, her voice tired.
“Ah, yes. The trees, the hills. ‘As long as he weeps, he’s here beside us,’” V echoed her mother. “A pretty story for a pretty day.”
Light fell before them and reflected off the distant forest. The sky was painting itself pink as the sun fell behind the horizon. The moon, a polished stone in pastel skies, kept the sun company, holding its hand as it slipped away. Nighttime trickled over treetops; the air began to smell of rain. From Yevaeldyr came an easy sigh, followed by rainfall. Lazily, it drizzled, tapping against the roof and windows. Without the sun, the breeze was chilling, and Rose, V, and Millie soon withdrew.
Lamplight and candles lit the house. Shadows gathered in the corners of rooms, beneath furniture and shelves. Old wood groaned beneath the patter of three pairs of feet. Rose went to the kitchen and started washing the dishes in the sink, the ones from yesterday. V traced through each room, picking up stray clothes and toys, crumpled up newspapers and mistreated books. One by one, the rooms were pieced together, cleaned, blackened, and abandoned.
With the house clean and the moon gleaming in an inky sky, Millie was sent, first to brush her teeth, then to bed. Rose and V shepherded her to her room, as was often necessary, before readying themselves for sleep.
Bristles scratched against teeth and fillings. “I think you tell those stories too well.” V spat into the sink.
“Maybe it’s because they’re not just stories,” said Rose.
“Maybe it’s because you wrote books about ’em,” V said.
Rose scratched under her eye with a particularly charming finger. “They were real.”
“Right, right. ‘Wonderful creatures of stone and moss.’ Whatever. By the time I was her age, I was done with them.”
“That’s because you’re a wet blanket.”
“No, I think it was because I was seven feet tall and named after one of them. And people wouldn’t leave me alone about it.”
“I think your name is pretty. Whoever gave it to you had good taste,” Rose winked at her daughter, spat in the sink. She turned the faucet on. The pipes hummed loudly enough that they didn’t hear Millie’s door open.
“I just think it’s funny she doesn’t believe in Santa, but she believes in the giants. I guess stone monsters are more believable than a man coming down our chimney. Whatever,” she said, placing her toothbrush on the porcelain and moving towards the bathroom door. “She’s still young; she should enjoy her fairy tales while she can.”
V opened the door. Millie stood behind it. “Shit—err, Millie, baby, why aren’t you in bed? How long have you been standing there?”
“I had to use the bathroom.”
“Nope. C’mon, let’s go. Go, go, go, go, go. Back to bed.” V glanced at her mother as she chaperoned Millie to her room.
Millie’s room tasted of a midnight glass of water. Silvery lunar reflections settled in the room; dust bounced in the rays. A large, latticed window, slightly opened so that the music of the rain and wind wouldn’t be muffled, overlooked the town—its incandescence—and the forest, the hills. Millie crawled into bed and V pulled the sheets up to her chin.
“Goodnight, love,” V said. She kissed her daughter on the cheek and tried to scurry out of the room before—
“Are they not real?”
A huff of air. Then, “Of course they’re real. You’ve heard the weeping, right? We’ve been to the tree. How could they not be real?” V sat beside her daughter.
“Why does it feel like Grandma is the only one who’s ever seen them?”
“Because my mom is an ancient witch who will never die,” V said. “She’s the only one old enough to have seen them. They were beautiful and expansive, and the way she talked about them when I was young, when this room was mine, when that view of the forest kept me company on rainy nights like these, it seemed as if they were old friends.” A moment’s pause, a riff of rain and wind. “‘Lonely in the trees, gently does he weep, in waiting of his love,’” V said, the sway of waltz on her tongue. “‘Waking from the hills, returned to him like spring, merrily they’ll dance again.’” The words were nostalgic, the tune sweet and warm, pulled from a time when V used more than a letter for her name. In the shimmering moonlight, V sat with her daughter and dreamt of weeping goliaths, sleeping hillsides. When she knew Millie was asleep, V snuck out of the room, a waltz on loop in her mind.
Yevaeldyr was not one tree, but many. A tightly woven tapestry of trunks and branches. He shot into the sky and spiraled around itself as it pierced the cloudy veil above. Leaves fanned out like a million outstretched hands. As with the surrounding woods, it was always green, almost as if the golden days of summer were perpetuated within.
When Millie was young, she often visited Yevaeldyr with her family. Sitting atop a raggedy gingham blanket, beneath a canopy of emerald leaves, they would eat and laugh and think about the giant crying within. Always, she would make her way to the body of Yevaeldyr, the many trees that held each other as lovers do, and place her ear against the bark, hoping to hear the giant. She never did. Yevaeldyr could be heard crying, but only from afar, only when delivered by wind. Up close, he was silent. Millie always thought it was because he was shy. “It’s okay,” she would say. “You can cry if you want to. I cry all the time.”
Never could she convince him. Eventually, she stopped trying. She settled instead for the few pieces of music she heard in the breeze, resonating in her ears like a violin’s bow and strings. Beautiful howls, a giant’s song.
She became older, legs long and awkward, hands delicate and adorned with slender fingers. Freckles constellated across her nose, below her sinking eyes. No longer did she visit Yevaeldyr. There was no reason to; he had stopped crying long ago. Besides, the giants and their stories were meant for children. She was old now. Mature. Taller than her classmates, especially taller than the boys. Millie was too grown for fantastical imaginings of stone sentinels, weeping goliaths.
Privately, she dreamed of giants. Not Yevaeldyr or Verdaeliah necessarily, but giants beyond the town, beyond the forest or the horizon. She enjoyed the thought of cumbersome creatures roaming the world, their heads in the clouds, enjoying heaven and earth at the same time. But these thoughts were kept private. She had no friends who shared her ruminations, her hope for magic in the world.
The last she saw Yevaeldyr, his tree was cracked and brittle, its crown brown and balding. Bark peeled away like a hangnail. Heavily it leaned, threatening to collapse. Machinery surrounded it, bulldozers and industrial saws. Yevaeldyr was coming down.
Millie and V stood among a crowd and were ready to bear witness to the death of a giant. Mothers, fathers, and children all gathered. Only the oldest among them looked sad. All else were more prepared for a parade than a funeral.
Clumsily, the saws came to life, groaning and roaring like a myriad of jungle cats. Kids began to cry from the noise. Into the bark clawed the blades. Sawdust filled the air. Whether it was the tree or the machines, something seemed to squeal in pain as if a leg was being amputated and all that was used for anesthesia was whiskey. Higher and higher droned the scream as the saws dug deeper and deeper. Yevaeldyr was a large, dense tree, and many assumed that cutting it down would be a lengthy process. Some families had even brought lawn chairs in anticipation of a logging marathon. But after only a few minutes, the blade slipped into the tree with ease.
The saws were stopped, the droning was quieted. Confused workers extracted the blades. They popped like a cork as they exited the tree. Water sprung from the cut as from a broken dam and poured over the understory.
Over the roots and down the hill flowed the water. The current was strong enough to tip over chairs and knock down the unsuspecting. The sound of rushing water overtook the meditative ambience of crickets and crows, squirrels and snapped branches. Everywhere it wet sprouted flowers and fungi. The forest smelled rich and botanical, youthful in a way only ever depicted by rosy retrospection. Millie’s feet were submerged, her shoes soaked through, moss growing on the canvas. As she wiggled her toes in the waters, she felt a strong satisfaction wash over her. Yevaeldyr had wept for years, but no one saw a tear.
The kids began playing in the water, splashing each other, picking the flowers that grew. Millie giggled to herself as she kicked her leg back and forth in the flood. Her mother beside her was in awe, her eyes wide, her mouth agape. V looked at her daughter and saw uninhibited joy. Playful splashing grew to stomping. Together, V and Millie made a mess. Water was thrown recklessly, wetting their clothes and hair. The forest filled with laughter as the rest of the crowd joined in. Merrily, they danced.
Spencer Rian is a writer from Ann Arbor, Michigan currently navigating the literary scene in New York City.
Punt Volat 