Vacuum

Dave, 1542

It's cold.
The men from The Mission kept walking without me.
This forest was filled with Giants when we came.  Naked Giants. I am piled in between two of them, freshly dead and piled.  I'm not asleep but my whole body is.
The fat man on top of me keeps calling the guy below me "Tom",
"Hey Tom, why didn't you cook for me and my kids last night?"
"Not interested."
Tom has been telling the guy on top of me that he's "not interested" in anything or at least he wasn't interested in anything before he died.
I don't even think Tom knows he's dead because he doesn't seem particularly upset that he'll never do anything again,
"Tom! TOM!"
"WHAT?"
"If we ever eat again, I'm not feeding you."
"That suits me."
"You seen my wife?"
"You don't want to know."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Some men took her."
"What do you mean some men took her?"
"Same men that killed us."
The whole pile heard Tom announce their death. None of them knew. These Giants must sleep a lot. The pile of dead people starts chattering.
"What do you mean killed us?"
"We're dead?"
"I don't feel dead."
"None of us even look dead!"
And Tom, responsible for a cacophony of dead whispering a, has to chime in,
"You didn't see a herd of Men come this way, killing us and taking our women? No wonder we're all dead! No wonder! We're too slow, that's all it is. We're just too big and too slow."
Giants do not like to be called slow.
"I would have know if someone was killing me!"
A high pitched sounding voice from my left gets really hot in ear and spits dead saliva as he defends himself,
"I have weapons and I have muscles and I have eyes, Tom."
Tom, bored with the assassination of the knowledge he swears by, that Giants are slow, defenceless creatures, booms in a final answer,
"But you don't know how to win like they did or you would have killed us all a long time ago."
Nobody spoke. A few people sighed.
"Excuse me," I said, "excuse me."
A large outrage of questions regarding my identity began until I promised,
"I'm not an enemy. I'm actually only ten years old and my name is David and I'm the one who liked you up after you died and I just want to thank you for having me."
The Giants are louder and angrier. If their speech wasn't dead, it would be murderous.
A very small pair of hands is poking through the bodies.
"Hello? Hello?" I hear the voice of an old woman who just found her youth in a pile of dead bodies.
The hands squeeze through gigantic mounds of fat and stare at me, waving back and forth.
"Hello? Can you hear me?"
"Yes" I answer.
"Come out." She says, "if you come out I can help you. We're the only living souls in this forest."
I push my hands where hers are already inserted and climb through. She is a tiny woman with long hair and a flat face. She looks like she's been sat on by many Giants or like she's been sleeping with her face against a rock for many years.
"You have a beard!" She says, rudely pointing out my grey beard that I've always been ashamed to have grown.
"So? My mom and dad both have beards too and that's why." I explain.
"Never mind. Let me take you inside."
"Who are you?"
"I live here. You came with the murderers?"
"They brought me to pile their dead bodies. But I don't want to help them anymore so I hid in the pile. I could hear them talking."
"I know you could. I know you could. Come with me." She says and she takes me to a small shed.
She tells me her name is Rain and she is the forest's soul sorcerer she knows I was in the pile because she could hear me speaking to the souls of the dead giants.
"Not everyone can speak to souls," she says, "but you can help me."
Rain feeds me wild animal eggs and roots we drink muddy water and she shows me the souls of people she used to know.
"We must retain the souls of the good people and when the murderers die, we can resurrect the good in their powerful bodies. No one will ever listen to a giant. Giants have been cursed with the Dismissal of Oddity just like you are dismissed because of your beard or I am dismissed because I am a woman but if we restore the souls of good people into the bodies of powerful men, we can make great change."
Rain calls herself a Mystick. She says the forest used to filled with Mysticks but The Mission took all of them because they were women. Rain hid beneath the floor of her shed until the men left and now she's the only Mystick available for the sorcery of all the newly dead men.
Rain takes me through the piles of dead men. She teaches me how she puts her hands on the mouths of each of them and repeats the word "everything, everything, everything" until she becomes the dead man, holding his mouth, collecting the extraction of his soul. Rain climbs through the piles, collecting souls and tying them off into little sacks of flesh. But she gets weaker with every extraction. As Rain weakens, I watch, ready to help. She places her hands around a man she tells me is named Sin a man she knew and even lived until he married her sister. Rain proceeds with the extraction but it totes her quickly. She falls to her knees and I take over. I place my hands over Sin's mouth and I say "everything, everything, everything". My hands feel crusty. The air doubles. I hear Sin say,
"Never could have known I didn't have room for two women, trusted the first one but had to have the second one."
He tells me the entire story of Rain, her sister, every other woman he had been with, stories about his siblings, his father's death, his love for arithmetic, his pet rabbit, his kite making hobby and the eventual invasion of his home by The Mission and I listen to it all, I become all of the experiences, I age forty years in what feels like ten seconds.
The stories end. His mouth becomes an elastic band. I seal the mass of his soul into a little packet of flesh that slips off his face and I give it to Rain.
"Ok." She says. "Now the rest."