One day I will tell my child or someone's else's child or the child inside of me the story of the giantess. The children will clutch plastic bags puddled with water in their dew-slick fists. Each bag will contain a just-born orange fish, swimming in a careful circle [I am proud of you, class, says the chalkboard to the children. I am proud of you, class, says the window to the sky]. I met the giantess on the half-moon, when the sky appeared sliced. The giantess lived in the pine-needle forest, among the moth giantesses and worm giantesses and giantesses wrapped in silk shells, tethered from barely perceptible branches by numerous barely perceptible threads [among them I felt mythless, like a thread through my own life]. She wore a brown velvet coat and green velvet gloves. It was important to the giantess that she came across as expensive and elegant, without being tacky or gauche. Or perhaps this was important to the giantess's mother [the giantess had trouble discerning her own desires from her mother's]. On the day I met the giantess, she was turned from me, taking a phone call. I'm not trying to embarrass you? the giantess said. Her shoulders slumped forward like cliffs. Her face valleyed. I was a mote of dirt, barely as tall as her ankle. I fastened my palms to her gingham trousers; my knuckles hooks around her. I began to climb. By the time I arrived at the crook of her neck, the giantess was sniffling and flipping over logs. Hey! I yelled. The giantess looked down. Hey, she said. I hung onto her red hair like an inchworm on a string of silk, nearly carried away by the wind in her voice. The giantess had the stare of someone who wants to say something, but has to check first whether they are allowed. She pressed her palms and knees to the dirt floor. I scrambled to the back of her shoulder blade and hung. I could fucking cry, the giantess mumbled to herself. I am getting my clothes so dirty. I could cry. The giantess did not cry. She found finally what she needed: a tank of yellow goldfish. There were worms in the tank, attached by each of their long fangs to the scales of the fish. The giantess removed the worms so that the fish could live. She performed this culling carefully, scooping out each worm with the crescent of her pinkie nail. The goldfish had fluffy white flesh around their eyes, which formed striations, like the outlines of coral bleached by sun. The fluffy white flesh indicated infection [I am sick of you, said the infection to the flesh]. I slid down the giantess's arm to look more closely at the tank, which called me, the hammer of glass against glass. The goldfish needed someone to see them and weep for them. I could tell from the way they were begging. They blew bubbles in one corner of the tank, then rushed to blow bubbles in the opposite corner. The children in the classroom took notes on this action, writing in big red letters: THIS IS BEGGING. The children tapped their pens to their chins, trying to decipher the moral of this story [The fish floated up like ghost-fish in slumped bags atop their desks]. I wept for the fish. I had to. I knew that they would weep for me. As I wept, I half-expected the infection to disappear, like how sometimes when you smile at a baby it stops crying. I knew that this was silly. It still half-killed me that it stayed.
Erika is an MFA candidate in Poetry at the University of Alabama, former poetry editor of Black Warrior Review, and co-founding editor of A Velvet Giant. Erika's creative writing has been featured or is forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Ninth Letter, Booth, Passages North, So to Speak, and elsewhere. Connect with her on Instagram @erika4evaa or on her website at erikamwalsh.com.