Ogreness, Black Lake-book5

Chapter 36
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There were about sixty adults and little people, not real little people, human younglings, crammed into the front office when I eased in the door. Every eye streaked my way. If I wasn’t already feelin’ persecuted, the awe-like glares would have made me feel that way.

A tiny woman about six-foot-tall rushed toward me, hand extended, blabbin’ I don’t know what. Okay, I’ll be honest. I really don’t understand Standish that well when it comes out of an excited human’s mouth. But she herded me to my right.

Down a short hall, into maybe what was usually a significant-sized conference room for a couple human teachers, a counselor, and a couple parents, was tight with an extra ogre camera and sound guy, five hundred pounds of equipment, and a hen who I couldn’t guess what her gig was.

A female youngling about eighteen inches tall leapt to her feet as the unidentified hen started paintin’ my cheeks with a dry brush.

“What are ya doin’?” I hissed.

“The lights will turn ya even whiter and shinier than ya are,” she rumbled.

Okay. I wasn’t gonna argue with her. Maybe she’d hide the last hint of my double shiner, too. I asked her. She gave me a wink.

“Why are ya so pale?” the hen asked.

I ignored her. “Ya must be Daisy,” I said to the tiny little human package starin’ at me. She sprinted around the table and shoved an itty bitty hand at me, which got lost inside my mitt. I really, really worried I’d break her.

But she didn’t scream in agony or anything. Actually, she grabbed my hand with her other under-sized one and opened my hand out flat, and explored it like it was an alien critter.

“Your hands are so big,” she said, those tiny little eyes poppin’ a bit wider.

Lights flooded the little conference room. “Light check,” one of the bulls mumbled. Ouch. I’d see stars for a month, but the tiny human pretty much ignored them. The hen flipped her brush over my chin, and then my tusks. My tusks?

“They reflect back a lot,” the hen explained. “Ya two sit. We have to fit ya into a frame.”

Whatever that meant. The hen pushed a human-sized chair to me. That would work, if I wanted nothing but my knees in the camera view. The tiny human female sat on top of five telephone books. Her feet were propped on twice that many. I sunk into the human chair beside her.

“Perfect,” the camera guy said. “Hit it, Daisy.”

And the tiny female went at it like a pro, though her voice vibrated a fashion prolly not normal for her kind.

“Can you tell me what it’s like to be an ogre?” she asked.

I felt my jaw drop. Nothing at all came to a single one of my brain cells for a week or two. Then I woke up. “Nothing different than it’s like for ya. I lived in a family like ya, went to school, had friends, played sports, studied, got a job. We eat three meals a day like ya, though I prolly eat more than ya.”

The human youngling giggled.

“Did you get in a lot of fights?” she asked.

Hmm. “Not at all. My mama woulda whacked me aside the head.”

She giggled again. “Have you ever killed anyone?”

Wow. That got my jaw droppin’ again. “Of course not. I’m just like y’all, just a bit heftier.”

“A lot heftier,” she said. “You study war stuff, shooting and fighting, and stuff.”

“I took an archery class one summer when I was ten,” I said.

“But you do a lot of scary stuff, right?” she said. “That’s why we’re so afraid of you?”

I was actually ready for this one. “Ya know how kitties purr when they’re happy?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Ogres and all of the other giants have a patch of tissue in our larynx—” I pressed my hand against my high chest, which irritated my wound a tad. “A little like yar vocal cords, that vibrate when we’re excited. It sounds a bit like a lion’s roar, but softer, and can sound a little scary if ya aren’t use to it.

“But it doesn’t suggest we’re mean. We growl when we’re happy, confused, well, pretty much all the time.” I found a grin spreadin’ out my lips.

“Can you show me?” she asked.

“Uh. Our forced growl does sound a little, uh, scary. That isn’t what I want ya to leave here today rememberin’.”

That was the last of the meaningful questions. I mean, my interviewer was eleven for goodness sakes. But I angled every answer to imply we aren’t that different from humans. She kept repeatin’, “But bigger and stronger.”

When her questions turned truly pointless, I asked her if I could send a message with her to her friends and family. Her brown, doe eyes looked up at me with a lot of the earlier excitement tamed. We were now just buds. She nodded.

And I executed my little blatherin’ I’d been composin’ in my head—that giants were being treated unfairly and a lot of things were gonna be in the news about us being mean to the Northerners, but that we’re simply tryin’ to get across that we all need to learn to live together in harmony.

“Not fear us simply because we tend to growl. It doesn’t mean we’re about to eat ya.”

Though there was a time our people maybe left that impression as a possibility.

Daisy’s mouth opened wide. “Eat us?”

“Has never happened,” I rushed to say. “We just want to raise our younglings and live in peace just like humans.”

A human woman who I hadn’t noticed enterin’ durin’ the interview, broke in then to blah, blah, about how happy they all were I took time out of my very busy schedule to come talk to the Lincoln Axemen.

I noticed she didn’t want to shake my hand, or even look me in the eyes. That moment, the sense that any amount of socializin’ I tried to do, would be a waste, hit me.

I strode out of the conference room, dejected. I waited out by the van I assumed belonged to our folk. The hen who’d dusted me off good, met me with a sour expression. “What?”

“How’d it go?” I asked.

“How do ya think it went?” she said.

“Not great?”

“Not great,” she agreed.

Stink. Well. It was worth the effort.

~