by Jane Garrett

Once, there was a man who fell in love with an ogre.

On their wedding day, surrounded by tables piled high with raw meat and nettle leaves, his mother wept. His father’s eyes would not meet his, casting about as though they might wander off to some other, less horrible feast. Boys from the young man’s homeland sneered from the aisles, making lewd gestures with their hands and their hips, high-fiving each other in packs. Their bones longed for the days of the ogre hunts, hot clashes of steel and swords.

Still, our young groom was not without menfolk in whose boot tracks he followed, and these few clasped his shoulder in silence. Their steadiness allowed him, when the ogre took his small human hand into the rough expanse of her paw, to smile.

Their marriage, as all marriages, was not without its difficulties — its asymmetries of taste, refinement, and propensity towards rage.

In the evenings, the ogre trudged up the mountain to their home, arriving exhausted and displeased. The gristle of marauding raiders hung from her teeth, her gums inflamed with their plaque. Her pockets bulged with their weapons, and her hands cupped tiny treasures the men had scraped from the creeks and rivers of Ogren.

If asked, she would not admit to stomping, but her arrival home sent their windows to shaking, and twice they needed to repair their too delicate table when her giant fists split open the grain.

Though the man feared for the integrity of their walls, he was wise. Rather than complain, he untied her shoes. Her bulbous feet bared, he reached up, high above his head until his own shoulders strained, and placed his palms on the calloused arch of her foot. With all the strength he possessed, the man pushed the tendon connecting rocky heel to purple toe.

The ogre sighed and collapsed onto the couch, sending motes of dust dancing to each corner of their cavernous cottage. The man massaged her gnarled toes, rubbing bear grease into the cracks and crevasses opened by the boulders of their road. When he had used the last of the tallow, what lay before him was not the body of an ogre but a massive feline, her tail slowly twitching.

Freed from her ogre skin, the lioness stretched, no more aware of how frightening her fangs must appear than a man is conscious of his imposing height when standing before a small child. Pouring herself off of the couch, she paced about the house, leapt on their counters, and flayed the paper from their walls in long vertical strips with her claws. Shredding their love seat under furry toe pads, she let out a mournful howl that threatened to deafen the neighbors.

Still, our groom was wise. Rather than flee he reached for the bucket of cream he’d prepared on the shady side of their porch. Careful to minimize the sloshing of milk, the man poured the bone-colored liquid into the lioness’ trough.

Satiated, the great cat yawned her approval. She curled into a spiral of fur under their westernmost window, where the setting sun lay down the last of her warmth. There, bathed by golden rays, the wise man’s wife finally rested.

But if darkness fell on a man and his love, the rising, slippery-white moonbeams revealed neither a cat nor an ogre. Instead, in their living room, stood a mottled mare, her moonlit mane shaggy and long. Her wet nostrils flared and a warm stench of sweat and straw rose. As the man reached for her, nervous hooves pounded on floor planks, and her wide eyes rolled back in their sockets. He spoke calmly and with care. He sang soft nothings, and whispered tiny praise songs to the majestic beast, telling her what a good and glorious creature she was. Palms stroked her neck, and horseflesh quivered. He brushed her haunches with a teardrop comb, teeth teasing out crusted clay. Her tail he folded into a loose flowing braid, tying it back with a ribbon he otherwise wore round his neck.

When the man asked if he might ride her, she paused to let him mount before carrying him into the hills. They rode through wild rose thickets which snagged at his skin, raising thin bloody welts. Her thunderous canter carried them past silvery ponds and through the frog songs of bogs. She raced beyond the defensive barracks of her people, past the towers which kept diligent watch against raids, and away from the factories of production. They traveled windswept plains and through forgotten forests, galloping under stars that belong to those who still listen.

When his thighs ached and he feared that the heat rising off the mare might melt him, they reached the banks of a wide, silent river — one which did not so much roar as eat all the sound, swallowing words into darkness and brine. The man reached into the mane of the mare, coarse hair sliding between each of his fingers. Closing his hands into fists, he ripped wet flesh from her body until what shone beneath was not the mighty muscles that had carried them here but a luminescent and pulsating jellyfish. 

Sliding into the brackish river after his wife, tangled in the strong arms of her tentacles, they glided through currents. Soft contractions of her gelatinous bell carried them skywards, while relaxation flared and drifted them downward into receiving eddies of compression and quiet.

Together, they floated in the waters that still, to this day, flow between the lands of man and those of ogres. And as the cold water flooded his lungs, they both found a new way to breathe.