The Great Night by Chris Adrian

worried moon. He started walking into the dell, looking for something now. The tall gray trees began to space out the farther in he went, but the little bonsai started to cluster together more thickly. The bells and chimes sounded louder and more insistent as he loped along in a one-shoe run; his sock was getting long in the front, and it waved around wildly as he went, threatening to trip him, but even before he heard the moaning he was in too much of a hurry to stop to fix it. It was a woman’s voice, or a little girl’s voice, or there was both a woman and a little girl up ahead, experiencing something unpleasant. Will ran faster and soon came into another sort of clearing, though this one was carpeted with the tiny trees instead of grass. They clustered in circles around a giant tree that had the form of an oak, but its bark was shining silver and its leaves, shaped like the hands of little children, were gold. “Carolina!” Will said when the woman moaned again, because this was her tree, and because it made perfect sense that he should be called to rescue her from some affliction, in a dreamy undream, in a park that was not behaving like itself, under a moon that was making faces that it shouldn’t.
    It didn’t matter if this was some terminally weird reconciliatory setup engineered by Jordan Sasscock, or a wild kidnap coincidence, or just a really odd bit of fortune. What he should do now was as clear as what he should not have done back when he and Carolina were together. There was a table under the tree, big enough, it occurred to him as he rushed it, for sacrificing a Jesus-lion, and the moaning was coming from a little figure tied down on it. The littleness stopped him short—whatever was
there was the size of Carolina’s smallest purse—yet it moaned with a big voice.
    â€œDeath!” said the little woman. She was impossibly small; Will was sure she was actually smaller than Carolina’s smallest purse, a hand-sized clutch made of fake pearls. Something unspeakable had been done to her. “O my death! Are you my death?”
    â€œNo,” said Will. “I’m going to help you.”
    â€œDeath!” she said again. “He said death was his gift to me, and his gift to the whole world. Are you a gift?”
    â€œI’m Will,” he said again, looking around for something—he had no idea what—that would explain this or make it less strange. “I’m going to help you.”
    â€œRadish was my name,” the woman said, more calmly. “You cannot help me. If you are not my death, you should run away. If you are not my death, he’ll not treat you kindly.”
    â€œI’m going to get you to a hospital,” Will said, though he couldn’t imagine what hospital would be able to care for her, given her unusual size and the extraordinary ways in which she was crumpled and twisted. He moved forward to pick her up off the table and felt a wetness all of a sudden on his head, a warm rain. He looked up and saw a naked woman in the tree, hanging from a branch with her legs spread, pissing on him. He wiped stinging urine from his eyes and shouted, “What are you doing?” And then, when he saw her more clearly and examined her face and recognized her, “What are you doing here?”
    â€œWhat I do,” the lady said, and climbed down the tree, head first like a lizard. She leaped onto the table, took the tiny lady in her hands, and tore her in half. “I am your host,” she said to Will, as blood sprayed around his eyes and his head and against his open lips. It tasted quite strongly of rosemary.
    â€œWhat …” Will said. “What …” He meant to ask, What
are you? because even though it looked like the first woman he’d ever had sex with, popped up inexplicably naked in a park in the middle of the night, it felt like something even stranger and much more