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I had become exhausted by the excruciating and banal conversations I was forced to suffer through each day in communication with my milquetoast coworkers, so I smashed my phone with a chunk of granite, threw its sharp guts into a grassy field, and began taking long walks around the grounds of a derelict prison near my house.
This was a wonderful decision. Without the constant, vampiric distraction of the electronic demon that was my phone, I suddenly possessed the time and mental energy to focus on the most important things in my life, such as the prison’s abandoned guard towers, it’s decaying sheets of chain-link fence, and the vacant, red-brick buildings scattered about the grounds.
After six months of walks, I found myself powerfully drawn to the abandoned loading dock behind the large, central building of the prison. This is because on certain evenings, just after dark, an extremely tall, thin woman would lean against the red-brick wall beside the loading dock, smoke a long cigarette of creamcolored paper, and stare into the syrupy blackness of the forest.
How tall is this woman? This is a question I cannot answer. I’ve never been good with estimations. The most precise figure I can produce sits between twelve and fourteen feet. That being said, I cannot speak to the accuracy of this projection. All I know is that I am approximately five feet, ten inches tall, and this woman is more than twice my height. Or maybe she is not. Perhaps I am fooled by a trick of perspective each time I pass her by, and her great height is merely an optical illusion.
But I don’t believe this is the case. The force of the woman’s presence cannot be understated. There is something primal and terrifying in her looming stature. It evokes in me a cocktail of reptilian emotions no other soul has ever stirred, not even the most passionate of past lovers. These emotions could be approximated with words such as fear, awe, curiosity, panic, reverence, and others, but that would be a gross simplification. The storm of horrific dread and volcanic sexual arousal the woman seeds within me floats somewhere beyond the reach of my vocabulary.
So I return to the prison each evening and walk circles around the grounds until midnight. This activity is vastly more important than any other task I have performed in my thirty-eight years of life, and I cannot stop now. Fourteen times I have seen the woman smoking and fourteen times I have continued walking with nothing more than a quivering hello and a nod of my sweat-glazed head. But this evening, when I approach the abandoned loading dock and glimpse the woman’s bob of platinum hair shining beneath the glow of the blue sodium lamp, I force myself to stop walking. I look up at her and say hello. I comment on the beauty of the desolate ruins and ask her how long she’s been coming here.
The woman sucks a long drag from her cigarette. The end of her creamcolored cylinder glows orange. The woman gazes down at me and exhales a cloud of gold smoke.
Now she takes a large, frightening step in my direction and begins speaking in a clicking, guttural language unlike any I have ever heard.
To this I have no response. My body is unable to move. I cannot create a sound.
I stand in place as the woman rests her massive hand on my shoulder. I watch as she slides her saucepan-sized palm down the trembling pipe cleaner of my arm. I grimace in surprise at the sandpaper bite of her skin. Then, amid the flurry of her alien words, she wraps her long arms around my torso and carries me like a child into the forest.
