ACT ONE

Caleb woke up the way he always woke up: slowly, like a building settling. His body took up most of the trailer, and when he moved, the floorboards complained in a language he had learned to understand over forty years of listening to them complain.

Outside, the world was the world it had been for the past three years since Everything Happened. Nobody called it by name. The news had stopped before Everything Happened, or maybe Everything Happened was the thing that made the news impossible, and nobody had figured out which yet. What they knew was this: the sky was the colour it had always been, the ground was the colour it had always been, and the people who lived in the town of Millerton, Arkansas, were the colour of people who had learned to live with less.

Caleb was less. He was also more. He was six feet eight inches of everything, and the people of Millerton had called him Giant since he was twelve and shot up past everyone else like a tree that had been told to grow fast.

He pulled on his jeans and his shirt and walked outside. The trailer park was quiet. Mrs. Higgins' house—the post office, really, since the post office had folded and Mrs. Higgins had kept the building open anyway—had its light on. A few other houses had lights too, dim and yellow in the grey morning.

And across the road, in what had once been a Walmart parking lot and was now a garden, there were people.

They were small. Not child-small. Something else. Maybe three feet tall, maybe less. They moved through the garden with a purpose that Caleb respected, even though he couldn't have explained why. They were planting something—rows of green things in soil that had been nothing but asphalt and gravel a year ago.

One of them looked up. It was a child, or something that used to be a child and had gotten smaller. It stared at Caleb with eyes that were too wide and too dark, and Caleb stared back, and neither of them moved for a long time.

Then the child said, "You're big."

"I am," Caleb said. It was the same conversation he'd had with that child—or a child that might have been that child—three times before.

The child ran off. Caleb watched it go, then walked across the road and sat on the curb and watched the gardeners work.

ACT TWO

The newcomers had arrived six months after Everything Happened. They came in groups, at night, walking along the highways with bags on their backs and faces that were set in the same direction. They didn't speak English at first, or not the English that Caleb spoke. Their words were short and sharp, like stones dropped into water.

Mrs. Higgins had been the first to talk to them. She was sixty-five and stubborn and had spent forty years delivering mail to people who didn't talk to her, so talking to strangers was second nature. She walked out to the highway with a thermos of coffee and a plate of biscuits and stood in front of the lead newcomer—a woman, or what Caleb categorized as a woman because she was carrying something small wrapped in cloth—and said, "You look like you could use a cup of coffee."

The newcomer looked at the thermos. Looked at Mrs. Higgins. Looked at the biscuits. Then she said a word that sounded like: thank you.

That was the beginning.

Over the next six months, about fifty newcomers settled in Millerton. They didn't take over. They didn't ask for anything. They found the abandoned farm on the edge of town—the one that had belonged to a man named Patterson who had died and whose children had never come back—and they made it their own. They built shelters from scrap wood and tarps and corrugated metal. They planted gardens in soil that Mrs. Higgins said should have been dead but wasn't, not really, not as long as somebody kept tending it.

Caleb watched them from his trailer. He watched them build and plant and cook and sleep and laugh and argue and make up. He watched them live.

He also watched them notice him.

They noticed everything. They noticed the way he moved slowly, carefully, so his feet wouldn't crush the gardens. They noticed the way he spoke quietly, so his voice wouldn't drown out their conversations. They noticed the way he sat on the curb and watched them work and never tried to help, because he knew that help from a giant was the same as destruction.

One afternoon, the child—the one who had called him big—came over to the curb and sat down beside him. It was a boy, Caleb had decided. Boys had a way of carrying themselves that was different from girls, even when they were this small.

"What's your name?" the boy asked.

"Caleb."

"Mine is Tom. Little Tom. Everyone calls me Little Tom because my name is Tom and I am little."

Caleb nodded. "That makes sense."

"Are you always this big?"

"As long as I can remember."

"Did you choose it?"

Caleb thought about this. "No."

"Did you want it?"

"I don't know. I was twelve when it started. I was too embarrassed to want it then, and too used to it to want it now."

Little Tom nodded, as though this were an answer that made sense, and sat in silence for a while. Then he said, "We are going to have to leave soon."

Caleb felt something move in his chest. It wasn't surprise. It was resignation, which was worse. "When?"

"Soon. The land is getting crowded. We need more space. We're looking for a place with more room."

"Where?"

"Somewhere with more room." Little Tom stood up. "Thank you for the coffee, Caleb. Mrs. Higgins gave it to me, but you didn't say anything when she gave it to me, so it's the same thing."

He ran off. Caleb sat on the curb and watched the gardeners work until the light faded and the sky turned grey and the world became the world it had always been.

ACT THREE

The phone call came on a Thursday. Caleb was in the kitchen, eating a piece of bread and watching rain hit the window, when the phone rang. He picked it up.

"Mr. Caleb?" said a voice that was not Mrs. Higgins'. It was a man's voice, flat and professional, like someone reading from a script.

"Yes."

"This is the County Health Department. We're conducting a routine survey of the area. We need to clear the settlement on the Patterson farm."

Caleb stared at the phone. "Clear it."

"Yes. Relocate the residents. The area is designated for redevelopment."

"Redevelopment. What does that mean?"

"It means the area will be used for something else. The residents will be relocated to a designated zone."

"Where?"

"There is a designated zone."

"Where is it?"

"Mr. Caleb, I'm calling to inform you of the survey. You don't need to know the details."

Caleb looked out the window at the garden, where the newcomers were working in the rain, their small figures moving quickly and efficiently, their faces set in the same expression they always wore: determination mixed with something that might have been hope.

"How long do I have?" he asked.

"Forty-eight hours. After that, the relocation team will arrive. The residents will be escorted to transport."

"Escorted."

"Mr. Caleb, I'm sure you understand that this is a routine procedure."

Caleb didn't understand. But he said, "Yes," because saying yes was easier than saying the thing that was actually in his head, which was: this is the same thing that happened before, and I'm supposed to stand here and let it happen again.

He hung up. He sat down at the kitchen table. He stared at the table. He thought about going outside and telling the newcomers what had happened. He thought about driving to the Patterson farm and sitting in their shelter and telling them face to face that they had to leave.

He thought about doing nothing.

He did nothing.

ACT FOUR

The next morning, Caleb woke up early. He made coffee—black, no sugar, the way he had been drinking it since his wife died—and sat on the porch and watched the rain stop and the clouds part and the sun come up over the gardens.

The newcomers were already working. Little Tom was there, pulling weeds from the rows of green things, his small hands moving with a speed and precision that Caleb had always admired. Other newcomers were carrying water from the well, mixing soil with compost, planting seeds in the spaces between the growing things.

Caleb watched them for an hour. Then he stood up, went inside, and opened his refrigerator.

Inside the refrigerator were three things: a jar of pickles, a carton of eggs, and a bottle of pills. The pills were prescription—sleeping pills, prescribed by a doctor who had visited Millerton once a month before the visits stopped. Caleb had been taking one every night for two years. Last night, he had taken three.

He held the bottle in his hand and looked at the label: CAUTION: FEDERAL LAW PROHIBITS THE DISPENSING OF THIS DRUG EXCEPT UPON ORDER BY A PHYSICIAN.

He unscrewed the cap. He poured pills into his palm until he had seventeen. He looked out the window at Little Tom, who was now standing in the garden, looking up at the trailer with an expression that Caleb couldn't read.

Caleb put the pills in his mouth. He swallowed them dry. He sat back down on the porch and waited.

The waiting was not dramatic. There was no pain, no struggle, no moment of clarity where he saw the error of his ways and reached for the phone to call for help. There was just a slow fading, like a light dimming, like a sound getting quieter, like a man who was six feet eight inches tall slowly becoming smaller and smaller and smaller until he was the size of a garden, and then the size of a seed, and then nothing.

Little Tom watched from the garden. He didn't understand what was happening, not exactly. He understood that the big man on the porch was going to sleep, and that he would not wake up, and that this was the way of things—the big things sleeping and the small things continuing, the things that took up too much space making room for the things that didn't.

He went back to pulling weeds.

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