Things Real

Abstract

47 LISA FISHMAN Things Real  mong the sunflowers, eight feet tall, Anna Ferguson waited for her true love, who was under the weather and a little late. Edward Afton was also eight feet tall, at least when he resisted his tendency to stoop. Upright, he was exactly as tall as Anna. They found that being the same height resulted in a kind of instantaneous ardor, because each part of their bodies matched up exactly with the other’s. Behind his breastbone, Edward’s heart was neither higher nor lower than Anna ’s, although of course when he faced her their hearts were on opposite sides. But their hipbones exactly squared each other’s, their knees in contact with their knees, not knee-and-thigh or knee-and-calf. Back to back, their sacra were in the same spot, the lovely undersides of their calves could touch, their articulate ribs (all the way around) matched up, and their spines were aligned. Whether two people were eight or four feet tall, they both thought, it was marvelous to have nerve endings where the same nerve endings connected on the other person. It made for the swift concurrence of desire and its transmission across the space between them. Even their glands and internal organs were so oriented— kidney to kidney, parotid gland to parotid gland, and so on—helping to account, perhaps, for what Anna and Edward were quick to feel simply standing a few feet from each other. They had grown up towering over others, often lonely in their perspectives and thus somewhat scholarly in relation to their bodies. They had come to detect the intelligence of parts unseen. For a great many couples, they sometimes mused, such parts were not only unseen but also askew, never more so than when they most wanted to be “as one” (standing close in an embrace, lying together naked or clothed). That recognition made Anna and Edward gentle with those of moderate or minimal height who were not always kind to them, the “sufferers of giantism ,” as they were officially called. a 48 While Anna waited in the sunflowers, the Earth went around and the flowers imperceptibly turned, too. They noticed Anna, strange plantlife among them, eye-to-eye with their seedy centers, Anna’s blue to their brown. They thought she was draped in birds’ nest fibers, all that debris unraveled, sometimes floating up a little in the breeze but mysteriously not blowing off. It was her hair, which birds in fact did covet at the end of fall when the Cobequid Hills were getting bare, and which they did collect in abundance when she brushed it outside, letting clumps and strands drift off and away to be found, she was sure, by those who built with witchgrass, foxtail, scraps of twine, scavenged straw, and hair from horses’ tails and human heads. —Anna Ferguson, said Edward when he reached her. —Edward Afton, said Anna in return. Not only did they state each other’s names, they also reached out to touch, fleetingly, some inscrutable part of each other’s arms. They did so with the merest hint of formality, as if in consequence of their great height. An embrace could almost be imagined, but for that they tended to wait. Anna and her true love walked a ways into the late successional vegetation of sugar maple and yellow birch and its overstory of largetooth aspen, trembling aspen, white ash, beaked hazelnut, and red maple . They were just as tall in the woods as in the town, but here the scale changed and they didn’t feel so different from the world around them. Edward was looking for dogtooth violets to give to Anna, but it was too late in the year for them. Anna was looking for bears, because she’d never seen one and she knew they were there. Edward, then, stooping again, scanned the ground for violets, while Anna looked out at eye level, hoping to spot the tan muzzle of a black bear. She should have looked downward for that, but in her mind the bear would be walking on two legs, not four. It was hot by now, even in...