The summer of giants

Short story written 'on the road' in Thailand, summer 2024                                                                                                             

As children, stories are our truth. It is only with the creeping cynicism of adulthood that we learn to doubt the tales we gobbled down so eagerly in our earlier years; a slow reversal of the optimism we are born with. 

                Noi was an avid devourer of stories, choosing early on to largely absent himself from the company of others. To be alone did not equate with loneliness when a galaxy of imagined company existed within the confines of his head. His mother, Dok Mai, seemed not to notice his absence, and his brother Choo had his own interests requiring no input from a younger sibling.

                As a baby, Noi’s closeness to his mother had bordered on claustrophobia, but his assertion of independence upon starting school was interpreted as rejection, and their communication dissolved into reprimands and evasion. More often than not he avoided all contact, skipping meals at home in preference for the quiet company of his grandmother, Si, whose house further up the valley was a legitimate pit-stop on the school commute. Her apartment was simple and clean, little more than a cupboard behind the shop she had run with her husband, and then without him, for a half century.

On the days that Li nudged him back home, fearing the estrangement becoming permanent, he felt the remnants of his early attachment tug hopelessly at his mother’s firmly-tied apron strings. One evening as he watched her knife flash through lemongrass stalks, he had asked why everyone in the family had such short names, setting them apart from characters in the tales Li told him. She had slapped down her cleaver and snapped, “There’s no time in my life for fancy names and fancy words. All I’ve time for is eat – work – feed. You want fancy words, get to school and stop hiding in the forest like a tree-ape.” Noi had skulked away, unable to decode his mother’s dark moods, though suspecting they were linked to absence. Vague memories of the easy laughter of a big man on the porch sucking sugar cane and teasing the old white dog gave him an unpleasant chilling sensation which he recognised as loss, but it seemed so distant that it could have been from another life. For her part, Dok sunk so deep in slumber that it took the morning bird calls to draw her back into life. Mynahs, Bulbuls, Pittas and Drongos; Munia finches trailing blades of grass in the eaves, walking on soft feet so as not to wake her. The last few years had been a struggle and she felt as if everything she once thought she might become had been whipped away. The move away from her mother’s house was hard on the young family despite her ache for independence, and when the accident at the site took Boon away so soon after, she reeled for months. A lesser woman might have caved, but even when the ‘gross negligence’ verdict came back negative, she hugged her babies close and swore to give them the life she had lost.

 Grandma Si answered Noi’s question one evening after school, as she set straight so many things for her introverted grandson. “Historically,” she told him while expertly portioning a mango, “Names of ethic Chinese Thais were unwieldy as they were derived from a transliterated jumble of family names and auspicious symbolism. Many families simplified matters by shortening them to fit into the emerging Thai kingdom, after which familiarity shrank the names even further to single-syllable pet or nicknames. It makes life easier, even if we do sound like a litter of pups.” Noi frowned at some of the longer words his grandmother used, but his ferocious memory kept them preserved long enough to consult the dictionary she had bestowed upon him for his fifth birthday. His mother had no idea of its existence and he cautiously kept it that way. Words were not welcome en masse under her roof. 

Once school was out, Noi would slip through the gap in the fence by the dark, expansive Jacaranda tree and take the old logging trail into the forest beyond the village boundary. Grandma Si had shown him a way to find peace when his mind was in turmoil, instructing him to sit quietly by a pool of still water in the forest and wait for the animals to come. Sure enough first birds, then tiny mice and squirrels, then elegant, wary deer would come to drink the cool water, using the reflection to warn of danger over their shoulders, while Noi sat undetected and silent as a stone. If the disquiet came when he was far from the shelter of the trees, he learned that just imagining the forest pool could slow his breathing and cause the animals of his mind to gather. He may have come to tolerate school, but Noi lived for the marginal times; summer dusks full of incense and the chuckles of roosting mynahs, when tendrils of cloud reached down into the forest after a storm like lonely ghosts. 

One evening, a month into the rains, he had taken refuge among the trees as usual after classes. Pressure was building in the air and the crackle of static was almost palpable along the perimeter road where the red mud trail snaked off into the understory. Frogs were loudly celebrating the last evening’s deluge or heralding the next, and away towards the mist-shrouded hills by Mae Rim, lightning flickers strobed in a pitch-dark cloud like trapped spirits. Having ignored Dok’s command to grab his jacket that morning, Noi was drenched in seconds when the monsoon broke, water running straight through his clothes to join the muddy rivulets on the forest floor, as the birds clamoured to shelter under the big teak leaves. The insects’ chorus tuned up as the deluge intensified, cicadas deploying their repetitive chorus and a low-key buzz divulging the presence of beetles of a myriad colours carrying out their tasks despite the giant droplets knocking them off-course.

Coming to a clearing in the canopy, Noi closed his eyes and let the rain hammer down on his upturned face; the coolness of the falling water was a tonic he could never get enough of. As the sounds of the insects reached fever pitch, he laughed out loud as he scanned the dense foliage for the culprits. How could something make so much noise while maintaining perfect camouflage? Often in a rainstorm the huge, leathery teak leaves would detach from the canopy and create a spectacular clatter as they descended to the forest floor, and watching their haphazard passage always delighted Noi. Staring up into the sun, one such leaf seemed to be coming down right towards him, taking an unusually clear path through the break in the trees. Playing chicken, Noi tried to position himself directly under the line of descent, shifting from side to side while squinting into the haze of backlit raindrops. Directly above his head, just as he was marvelling at the symmetry of the leaf, it halted in midair, blocking out the sun with its proximity and size. Noi gasped. How was this even possible?

The sounds of the storm had crescendoed to a degree that isolating a single sound was virtually impossible, but Noi became slowly aware that the one loudest instrument in the orchestra was directly above him. And it was not a leaf, but a gigantic cicada, wings spread and mandibles cocked, looking straight down at him.

Grandma Li listened patiently to the unlikely story pouring from her drenched grandson as she peeled off his t-shirt and wrapped him in a towel. “It is always the rainy season when they come,” she began.

“Long before the Kingdom was born, when tribes from surrounding areas poured into the wilderness that we have tamed and built our homes upon, giants ruled the forests.” Noi sat up straight in the chair, cocooned in his towel and tousle-headed like a cockerel. 

                “We may acknowledge just one reality, but for long lifetimes it was accepted that mankind was one of many layers of existence in these lands. Animals formed another strata, ghosts a third, and in the fourth dwelt the supernatural beings: giants, demigods, angels and spirits of the trees and earth. Thao Wessuwan, a tusked behemoth the size of a house, adorned with jewelled regalia, is the giant charged with the protection of our northern realm and lies dormant under the forest awaiting our time of need. Centuries ago, the rains came longer and stronger than ever before, and it was said that the waters disturbed the sleepers. They were seen walking the earth, crossing the forests and swimming the inland seas that mark the northern hills like footprints.”

Noi gasped, his eyes as attentive as Li had ever seen him. “Are there other giants? Giants of the animal realms?” He asked breathlessly. 

“That I could not pretend to know,” his grandmother replied thoughtfully, “But the rains have been long and persistent already this August and we are still months away from the burning season. Who knows what has been disturbed as the water table rises and floats the sleepers upward towards our realm?”

                Noi hugged his secret close in the following days and brooded over his grandmother’s words. The rain kept falling, but nothing unusual happened until the next Thursday. Sitting by the pool below great Banyan trees after a day trying to concentrate on his schoolwork, Noi watched as lizards and finches crept to the dark water’s edge. Silent as smoke, he didn’t even flinch as he felt the warm breath of an animal on his neck, saw the shadow fall across the entire pool. A huge stag, antlers like Jacaranda branches and a body bigger than the elephants’ barrel bellies bent its velvet neck down to drink.

                This time he ran straight home, bursting in on his mother tossing vegetables into the soup pan over the burner. His garbled story was met with silence as she continued to slice and hew, but when he paused for breath she spoke sharply.

                “Mee Noi. Your grandmother is a wise and loving woman, but she mistakes truth for fiction and lets your imagination run riot in her house. If I hear one more story about giants in the woods you will be coming straight home after school or getting a beating.”

                Noi sat open-mouthed, knowing better than to talk back to his mother and feeling Choo’s sarcastic gaze burning into the back of his head. His brother always slunk into rooms like a rat, and with similar intentions.

                Noi kept his head down after dinner and, curled up in bed, cursed his family for their lack of imagination and understanding. If his grandmother was right, the giants’ coming could predict a great inundation, bringing more hardship and devastation to their already sorely tested family. How could he begin to open the closed minds of his family? 

                Friday saw the clouds darker than ever, much of the forest obliterated by low cloud and a smoky, metallic tang to the air. Molten ochre butterflies filled the brief abatement in the rain with an inundation of their own, grasping fervently their tiny span of life. Dok made her way up the valley after shushing the boys off to school, to the house she had been born in. Grandma Si was not surprised to see her daughter, but saddened that it was anger that brought her, not love.

                “It rains, the water rises, then it falls. Same every year,” Dok began, sitting on the edge of her chair nursing the tea her mother had pressed into her hands.

“Not the same.” Li shook her head deliberately. “Change happens slowly, not in great chunks so we can see it, just like ageing. Each day I see a little less, my knees ache a little more, but I don’t notice the creeping, just the contrast between then and now. Each year the rains last a little longer, fill the earth a little more, and bring us closer to the time of evacuation. The earth knows, the giants know. That is why they are stirring.”

Dok almost spat her tea to the floor mat. “Always so many stories from you. When will you stop filling Noi’s head with these ideas and let him grow up? I need a man about the house, not a dreamer.”

“You forget so fast. When you were a baby you wanted so many things, all different, all the time. You would spin such stories, and then the next day it was something else entirely. But now.. you think you’ve always been the working mother, the suffering one. No, no, you were once much like Noi.” Li rocked gently to herself, eyes focused beyond her daughter to the trees as if gazing back in time. 

School let our early on Friday, which made it Noi’s favourite day. More conflicted than ever after his mother’s telling-off, he didn’t stop running until the smells and noise of the village were far behind him and the drumming rain had slicked his hair and pasted clothing to skin. The dense cloud-cover had brought the gloom of dusk to mid-afternoon and under the trees’ canopy it was hard to see more than shapes and shadows in the gloom. Running his hand over fern-adorned trunks as familiar as his own body, Noi peered up into the sepulchral heights. Trees swayed in a timeless rhythm, the deluge fell down in drenching sheets, and a huge face materialised out of the gloaming. 

                The giant was directly above the boy, largely human in structure, but elaborate towards its upper limits where glowing eyes cast an eerie light on a complex headpiece with winged protrusions and a chilling hint of curling tusks. While the lower limbs were grounded in jungle vines, the upper reaches were level with the canopy, picking up some of the ghostly violet light of the storm clouds. Clearly defined limbs, separated from a richly textured torso, were extending first away from the body and then inextricably downwards to where Noi’s rigid figure stood like a toadstool, rooted to the sodden earth. Somewhere off in the forest a feral yawp split the turgid air, then another, closer and more determined. The sudden noise was enough to punch through Noi’s petrified terror and he half ran, half fell through the dense ferns and gripping vines, looking only forward, coating himself in mud and splitting his skin repeatedly against the rocks and bark beneath the silt.

                Tending to his grazes and wiping away the patina of the sodden woods with a hot towel, Grandma Li listened in silence to the disjointed tale exiting her grandson in exhausted gasps. She knew better than to return him home until she had calmed and fed him, but a real fear had begun to take root in her mind. To her, the stories were as real as the table in front of her, but she knew that the new ways had largely eradicated the wisdom of previous generations. How strange that the span of a lifetime could bring such changes to the land, where corporate lies are welcomed as gospel and the ancient truths dismissed as perfidious nonsense.

                “I will talk to your mother,” she reassured Noi as he petted the old orange cat that chose to visit the house during the rainy season. “But she is like that creature; the owner of her own mind and not one to bend to the will of others.”

                Skirting the trees on the way down the valley by the red mud road, rivers ran in the ruts created by vehicles and deepened by the torrents. Tarmac was deemed an unnecessary expense to the upper reaches of the settlement, where the village centre previously stood. Once called a hill tribe, the population had lessened and migrated ever lower and further south until neither particle was accurate. Li whistled low and steady as she walked beside her grandson, turning her attention to the forest whenever he took his eyes off her. The dusk had crept in to the point that little was visible beyond the shoulders of the old road, although a temporary abatement of the deluge had let the clouds split and rejoice in colours of persimmon and bruise.

                As they reached the track leading to Noi’s family home, a flurry of movement caused them to pause and shuffle onto the gravel shoulder. No light appeared to indicate a motor vehicle’s approach so they expected the arrival of either a pedestrian or a bicycle. What reached them before the footsteps was a high shrieking like a girl facing a green forest snake, as the gloom gave up the alarmed figures of Noi’s mother and brother, running towards them in uncoordinated panic.

                Dok seemed unable to speak and collapsed to her heels upon drawing level, letting her long hair hang to the dirt road, mixing with the gritty rivulets. Choo was left to make sense of their haste, but he too seemed incapable of comprehensible speech, gesticulating backward towards the house with wild, windmilling arms that explained nothing. 

Grandma Li gripped Noi’s hand tightly and strode past her daughter a few paces in the direction of the house. A tricksy spiral wind like the herald of a storm whipped the roadside grasses into a frenzy and, in the middle distance, a small dog started yipping hysterically. Behind them, Dok collapsed onto the road completely, hugging herself into a tight ball like a wet stone, a tiny, jagged whimper escaping her hidden lips. 

In the creeping dark by the great overarching Jacaranda trees, part of the forest separated itself from the mass of foliage and moved slowly and deliberately towards them. Level with the treetops, a pointed, ornamented crown topped the wide, swaying head, hooked tusks protruding from a gaping mouth below a pair of curdled chrome-yellow eyes. 

The rain began to hammer down again in earnest, taking with it all vestiges of daylight.