The Tallest Man
by James Grinwis
When I met the tallest man in the world, it was noon. He was ten feet nine inches, and he walked like an enormous sail in a uninspired breeze, or a hull bumping against the shoreline with a lone tendril of wind. More wood than wind, more space than point towards. He grasped my hand with the limp melancholy of the terminally doomed, and the sun pushed from his face a tiny grin which exploded into my brain chamber and left a huge thumbprint as found in alkaline flats when prehistoric beasts are excavated and arranged into unusual patterns.
I tried not to stare long and managed not too and then the fact of his height and his lugubrious bearing was this constant conjecture to me, that held aloft in my senses the way a fleeting glimpse of an animal or bird in the woods may.
His baby seized my wallet and was taking the bills out and stuffing them in his mouth.
I liked his baby, and brought him home when the tallest man in the world left his baby there.
“You will be tall,” I said to the baby, “and you will help me.”
James Grinwis has microfiction out in Quick Fiction and Sou'wester and Bitter Oleander. It has appeared in Cafe Irreal, Fringe, Opium, Sleepingfish, Bullfight, Spork, Turnrow, and others. He lives in Florence, MA, and recently started up a new mag called bateau.