He came up out of the garden the way damp comes up through plaster. Not all at once. A smell first, wet soil and something sweeter underneath, going off. Then the shape of him, assembled wrong, like he'd been built from whatever was lying around the yard that year.

Fingers the length of fence posts,

knuckled like tree roots,

grimed under the nail with the black

dirt that never washes out of anything.

His mouth was more hinge than mouth. When it opened, you could see the inside of him working, wet machinery, string and gristle, the smell of a compost bin left too long in the sun. He chewed on nothing constantly. Old jaw grinding old jaw.

Skin like the underside of a log you shouldn't have turned over.

bark

and

grub-holes

and something pale and blind moving just beneath it.

He didn't walk so much as arrive, the way weather arrives, the way a smell gets into a room before the source of it does. And when he reached down through the roof, his hand came apart at the last second into a hundred smaller hands, fingers within fingers, the way a wet branch splits when you bend it too far, and every one of them knew exactly where to put us. That was the game. He'd pick us up and set us down somewhere new and watch to see what we'd do about it.

He listened the way he built things: exactly, missing nothing, an absolute stillness that let sound arrive whole, gathered without him ever seeming to move.

he'll grow into himself,

his dad's chair squeaking, turning circles,

does he need the ramp resurfaced, council never rings back,

never had glasses worth using, never had the guests either,

who left the flywire door open,

the boy asks too many questions,

beige doesn't show the dirt, not like the green does,

still no ramp at the back door, he manages,

just tell him the truth when he's older,

he already knows more than we think,

who moved my keys, nobody moved your keys,

somebody always moves the keys.

He filed it all away, and never once told us what he did with any of it.

There was a flywire door between the kitchen and the yard, the kind that never quite latches, that swings a little on its hinge if the wind gets under it. His first cat went out through it once. Just a gap, a breath of a gap, the door not caught right, and the cat gone before anyone thought to check. It didn't come back.

I used to think the giant left it open on purpose, testing what would slip through if he gave it the chance. Not cruelty exactly. More like checking his own work. Seeing what a gap in the measurements would cost, if he ever let one through.

I knew he'd been at Dad's place because of the dust. Real houses don't collect dust like that, settled even across every surface, like something arranged to look lived in rather than actually lived in. I used to run my finger along the beige carpet in the living room and think one of his smaller hands had been through, smoothing it flat.

You walked in and the main door was straight ahead of you, and the living room was through a door on the right: his desk shoved against the wall, the leather couch, the coffee table, the TV. The hallway and the kitchen had this green tiling, ugly and specific, the kind you'd only find in a house like his. Dad moved between four spots and nowhere else. The desk. The couch. The bedroom. The kitchen, because there wasn't much reason to go in there besides making something to eat.

The hallway was exactly wide enough for his chair. Not an inch more. There was one step too, at the front door, no ramp there, nothing built to bridge it, and I used to watch him haul himself up through it by the doorframe, arms doing what the chair couldn't. I used to think the giant had gotten so precise everywhere else, the tiles, the hallway, the desk and the couch and the four exact spots, that he'd simply run out of room to be careful right at the very end. One thing left unfinished, on purpose or not.

At night, in my room there, I'd listen for the walls to creak. Real houses settle. That one never made a sound, like something enormous was holding still on purpose, listening back, holding its breath.

I worked out how big the giant was from the doorframes. Too tall to be a person, short enough to reach in without bending. I pictured his hand coming down through the roof like weather, coming apart into fingers within fingers, lifting Dad from the desk and setting him back down at the couch, wheels locked at the exact angle they always stopped at, and Dad never noticing, because noticing wasn't a thing that had been built into any of us.

I never stopped noticing the green tiles after that. Something about how exact they were, corner to corner, like the room had been measured around us instead of the other way around.

Sometimes I still remember the thumping. Low, through the floor, furniture dragged from one place to another, and I would lie there and think, he's rearranging something again, or maybe he'd only got up to put the kettle on, some enormous ordinary errand, and any minute now he'd come back through the roof and set us all down again, exactly where we'd been.