(note: contains cursing and swearing)

The Meal

The Giants of Grum were so fucking clever and powerful that the difference between them and us was like the difference between us and dogs.

An average Grum mathematician could calculate the odds of an asteroid hitting his planet in seconds, a decent Grum arable farmer could blink his eye twice, tap his back and blow some smoke and his field would be full of big green vegetables with large juicy leaves.

I wanted to write this whole bloody thing from the head of a Grumman but I couldn’t possibly do it – believe me it would be like a dog taking a fucking pen and writing in his Master’s notepad. I would be the cleverest human alive by a light year. In fact they don’t even write - they flick an eyebrow and cry a curse and rumble like a belly the size of a sun, and the information darts out their eyes in something akin to forked red lightning and whacks and thuds into some sort of fizzing gas hardware. The words then harden into a kind of viscous brown bubbling chocolate and scream back into the giants’ faces. Sometimes they roar and trees crumble into the ground, and the ground spits the bits out and coloured symbols shimmer in the coloured air : a Grumman has just clicked his lip. Their libraries are the purest drama. I entered one once with the stealth and luck of a desperate stray with a preposterous plan to kill one of the bastards. As if they didn’t know I was there ! They picked up the first violent thought and in a second I was pinned by wind to some great metal shit. The metal shot me into the Grumman stratosphere and I swam involuntarily in the ether with pointed fingers forward, nails crystal blue and stretched to the size of spaceships. I think my molecules were then dispersed and slid at supersonic speeds down blinding gasways. I reformed with slight neck pressure, and looked upon thousands of freaked faces in mercury costumes. I’m still here in a soundproof chamber of some transparent Grumman plastic, cubes of which stretch as far as the eye can see, all touching one another. All with a moronic beast inside.

Back to the Giants and I reaffirm the impossibility of seeing things from their point of view. I could tell you of their 96 billion words for the word word, or whatever they are, and it’s no good asking me to explain, as they are not words, or things, or sounds, or thoughts or impulses, and our feeble intellects can’t grasp it.

I FUCKING HATE the Giants of Grum.

Yet if the Giants of Grum were as thick as pigshit they would still be getting ideas about shoving me in their slavering gobs and crunching and swallowing me down and I’d dissolve in their acid lakes of gob. Their brawn would trap me, and like walnut brained idiots of prehistoric monsters they’d rip my head off and devour me with gusto.

They ate my son, the fuckers ! A twelve-year-old boy, nice’n’ tender. My wife too. I didn’t want to do this and I don’t want your sympathy – but I cannot penetrate the Grumman mind and spew out the results. Perhaps some of the more sensitive giants would want to stroke my hair and bind me with strips of suede. If I could only write this from a Grumman point of view you would be able to see that they’re the cleverest bastards in the galaxy and maybe you’d love them so much you wouldn’t give a monkeys about my son and wife or even hear about it.

Have you read the famous ‘Cow manuscripts’ of Blakely Field in England from 1889? All grunts and moos and swishing leather- not much paper involved ! No? Didn’t think you had !

HE WAS JUST A BABY !

I await my future as essence of belch and odour of flatulence. A buzzing sound filters through the magical perspex which crackles and forms shapeless green lumps as the morons disintegrate. I assume directly onto Grumman tongues. It’s getting louder, that buzz, that whine, that infernal white light wobbling and wiggling, renting oxygen like a gaseous chainsaw. There’s a pain now…

AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHH ……

*footnote :

Twelve thousand days after the demise of the author the Giants of Grum used their extraordinary - humans might say godlike- intelligence to dissolve their physicality and become eaters of light and gamma rays. They are in the process of reverting back having decided that physicality is central to one’s well-being but are having some technical problems. Unfortunately the dissolution came too late for the author.

The Giants of Grum are the most worthy creatures in the known Universe.

Straight up.