David S. Bull

Her eyes were sunken like buried treasure. They shone brightly from the shadows of the room. A book rested under the palm of one hand. A pen and paper lay by her side. She stared at me and tried to smile. She was wondering what was wrong with me. Her eyes followed my gaze as I looked around the room.

An old radio was on the bedside table. A large church candle rested on a pink saucer. And a tall bottle of mineral water stood on the dresser. It was surrounded by a horde of little brown bottles, all with big white plastic caps. The bottles stood guard over my mum twenty-four hours a day. Like cowboys and Indians they chased each other around the water bottle. They watched her. Waited for her to wake. Then sent her back to sleep.

I pushed myself away from the window ledge. I glanced at Mum. She looked agitated.

‘There used to be a giant in the forest,’ Mum said suddenly. ‘When I was a girl. A huge statue of a man. All covered in leaves and ivy.’

I looked closely at Mum’s pale face. Was this another one of her stories, her way of keeping me in the room? I couldn’t tell.

Mum gazed up towards the ceiling.

‘We used to play around it. Some of the boys climbed the outside and sat on the giant’s shoulders.’

She turned a small black stone in her fingers. Her face seemed to flicker as her mind raced back to when she was a child. Sometimes she smiled and her eyes sparkled as if she’d had a happy memory.

‘We had a special name for him,’ she said to herself. She dropped her head and smiled at me. ‘The Mistletoe Giant.’