When I woke after the surgery, I could still feel my arm. The weight of it on the blanket, the pressure of the bandages. It felt larger than my left arm. Each of my fingers was long and muscular. When I curled them up towards my wrist, they scraped the ceiling. As the anaesthetic wore off I slowly understood that, for a second time, my arm had been removed from my body. That wherever it was now, floating in a jar of formaldehyde or burning in a medical waste incinerator, it was not with me.
First, she hid the heart inside an egg. An egg is, after all, a perfect container. It has no edges and no corners. Unbroken, it is inviolate and smug. If anyone finds the egg, they will think it belongs to a duck or a goose. They will think it is an animal in the process of becoming, and leave it be. Only a monster would take a heart, sealed inside an egg, and crush it in their fists until the giant whose heart it contains is dead.
The giant who kept her heart inside an egg woke from a terrible dream. Her shoulder ached and her feet were cold. While she slept, the green blanket had slipped off her large body and the morning fog had coated her feet and knees, her thighs and hips, in sadness. She made coffee and sat with her back against a tree, wondering how to keep her heart safe.
On the far side of the mountain there was a well that was as deep as the world. When you dropped a stone into the well, you had to wait three hours to hear it plop into the water far below. If the well was dry, you had to wait even longer to hear the stone meet the back of the turtle beneath the mantle of the world.
Finally, the giant reached the bottom of the well. She lowered the egg gently into the water, which was surprisingly warm and faintly green. Then she tied the feather to the end of her rope, and the rope bore her up out of the well.
The giant who kept her heart inside an egg, inside a well, woke from a terrible dream. Her hands smelled like bones. Like death. She went to the river to wash away both the dream and the smell of death, and while she was sitting by the side of the river, she thought about her heart. How safe was it, really, inside an egg at the bottom of the well as deep as the world, if even a crow could find it there? She lit a small fire and toasted some bread over the flames. On the other side of the river, three crows sat in a tree. Each of them was as fine and glossy as silk, their beaks sharp with grief; their eyes full of dark light.
The crows were singing their morning song. Nonsense words, their song might seem to some, but not to the giant. The crows sang the songs of the dead. Syllable by syllable they sang the song of the bones. The crows were particularly concerned with the dead who were not complete. They sang the song of gathering bones. The broken and divided bones.
The giant tore a tree from the ground and threw it across the river at the birds, who rose up affronted. She was sick and tired of having such terrible dreams. Her shoulder ached with stiffness: perhaps she had made it worse tearing up that tree, throwing it so hard and so far. The pain, when she moved it in a certain way, made her wince and cry out. It brought tears of frustration to her lake-blue eyes.
Once, the giant had been told, a woman had built a tower in which to live. The tower was so high that its base was on the earth, but its crown touched the joists supporting the floors of heaven. The woman made sure that there were no windows in the walls of the tower below the level of the clouds, and when she entered the tower for the last time, she sealed up the entrance behind her with bricks and mortar and magic. Then she climbed the stairs that wound up the inside of the tower until she reached the first four windows. These windows were placed to look out to the north, west, south, and east of the tower from the first chamber. The first day when she opened the shutters, she could not see the world beneath her: the whole of the earth was blanketed in clouds. Nobody could reach her; the woman cried tears of unparalleled joy.
The giant packed her tools into her backpack, tied her bucket to the rope at her waist, and set off again to the well as deep as the world. She took her wheelbarrow with her, and on the way she collected rocks and stones, piling them on top of the barrow until the mound almost obstructed her view of the road ahead.
The giant rolled onto her left side and pushed herself up from the floor. The whole right side of her body was a racket of hurt. She gathered each of the bones and put them in her backpack. It was hard work going down the stairs carrying the bones. She had to sling the backpack over her left arm when she would have preferred to use her stronger side: her right. She had to spiral down the tower anti-clockwise, which was the way the stairs wound down the inside curves of the tower. This meant her bad shoulder was against the wall. When she stopped to rest, she had to twist herself awkwardly to lean against it. The cold of the stones sometimes eased the pain, but sometimes made it worse.
At the base of the tower, she used her pick and her sledgehammer to create a doorway. Every thud of the hammer on the stone sent a blade of pain through her. She used her left hand and arm as much as she could manage. Clawing broken stone from the wall with the pick, with her bare hands. Finally, she had made a hole as big as her fist, then as large as her head, then as wide as her body. She pushed her backpack out through the hole, and then slithered through it herself. Outside, the crows waited. Two of them sat in a nearby tree, one on the ground. They were pleased to see her. As pleased as crows can be.
For seven days she followed them. They crossed rivers and climbed over mountains. They skirted the edge of a desert and passed through a forest so dark that within it there were no shadows, even on the brightest days. Each night, she worked on stitching a gravesack. The sack was long and narrow, and made of the finest and palest linen. She embroidered eggs, and wells, and towers in the cloth. And stars and clouds and windows. Finally, the crows let her know that they had reached the place they had been leading her towards. There was a road nearby, and a creek. By the side of the road someone had constructed a shrine of sorts. Faded flowers drooped in the heat.
The moon brightened. The trees softened into silhouettes: dark fingers reaching across a dark sky. The giant had lit a fire, which warmed the front of her body. Her back was to the road, and colder, but she quite liked the feeling of being divided in that way. It was like being two creatures at once: a creature of darkness, and a creature of light. A snake and an egg. A tree and a seed.
That night, the giant dreamed that pain lifted from her body. That she danced, as her mother had once danced, her great feet stomping, unafraid. Fruit fell from the trees, birds lifted into the air, waves formed on the surface of a lake, crashing onto the pebbled shore with a stone-wet and satisfying hush hush. In her dream, the giant looked out of the south window of the tower and saw her mother, whole and tall. She looked out of the east window and saw her father. She looked out of the north window, and there were her sisters, all six of them, dancing in a circle.
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