He’s twenty feet tall, easy. People say ogres don’t grow that tall, but people don’t know. He also wears glasses and calls them spectacles like he’s forgotten what century it is. His house is a converted silo next to an abandoned barn on a former cattle ranch. The cattle are long gone and were delicious. When the ogre sleeps, he sleeps the only way he knows how: sitting up. Did you know, he likes to say, that people once believed lying down was only for the dead? It’s true. What’s also true is that despite being married nearly a year, he almost always sleeps alone. It’s because he’s so tall and because he snores. The ogre’s wife loves him, she says, not because of his height and not despite it, but irrespective of it. She’s a human woman. A Spanish human from Majorca. She smells of almonds. The ogre often talks about marriage as something not meant for his sort, as something destined to fail, and says he’s sure his wife will one day leave him. Why do you do this? she asks. Why must you talk this way? To which he says, Did you know that people are sometimes killed by falling airplane debris? When his wife goes out one morning, he doesn’t expect her to return, not ever. He tries to forget her face, to imagine it as a blank canvas. To pass the time, he throws boulders at trespassers and dreams of his property as a wind farm with turbines much taller than he is. With such technology, he might, for once in his long, dull life, not be the last among laggards. Between boulders and bouts of screaming, he hears his wife’s voice because she came back, after all. Why must you bellow? she says. Why must you treat others this way? He’s sorry, he says. His wife tells him it’ll be all right. Stick with the meditation, she says, and you’ll see. Inside the silo, she has a treat for them both: macarons and ice cream. Did you make these? he asks. Are they safe? To which she says, Am I your wife? Are you my husband? He hangs his head in apology and says, It’s just that I have so many enemies. They’d all prefer me dead. You have no enemies, his wife says. You have only me and these macarons which I made myself. I think, the ogre says, that I might need bifocals. To better see the world below me. And it’s true that he has trouble with up-close things like the words on a page or macarons or the woman who loves him. She’s beautiful, his wife, but so very small. Her voice, though lovely, is no match for the wind.

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Stephen Tuttle’s fiction and prose poetry have appeared in Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, The Nation, and elsewhere. His collection of short stories, We Should Be Somewhere by Now, is forthcoming in 2025 from Cornerstone Press. He lives in Provo, Utah and teaches at Brigham Young University.