The same evening her boys and husband were enjoying a night together in town, Lilia sat on the deck of their beach house, absorbed in the idyllic tranquility of the unremitting waves. She and Ramona had quietly walked the stretch of road behind the row of colorful beach houses, the one that led up into town to a street of little touristy establishments: a few eateries, an ice-cream parlor, a drug store, a couple of boutiques, and a gift shop or two. Ramona had eschewed the ice cream for the local library a block back (she'd looked up its location) and they'd spent a bit of time lost in shelves and setting up a temporary account so they could check out books before heading home. On the way back, they'd meandered through a green space where there was a playground and a soccer field and a basketball court and a bike path. There were some families out with small children, a few young people shooting hoops, but otherwise, the well-lit park was empty.

Lilia felt perfectly safe, though, even considering the odd encounter she'd had with that boy several days earlier. In truth, her argument with Arthur had overshadowed her run-in with that child. She'd been absolutely furious with him for allowing Ramona to wander so far on her own so late into the day, and she'd been even more thrilled to let him know it.

Swirling the red wine in her glass, Lilia watched the liquid, mesmerized. She knew how poisonous her desire to torment Arthur was. She knew that the twinge of pleasure she gained in watching him suffer said something more worrisome about her than it did him. And yet if only he'd done something different, some banal thing married men tended to do like have a fling or . . . or a separate bank account or . . . oh anything else! Why had he instead, ten months earlier, ripped apart the fragile threads laced across their imperfect union to confirm what she'd spent years denying? Why'd he have to do it? And none of it with words, either, the confirming or the denying. Had they been living in silence for all this time? Speaking to one another but not actually saying much of anything at all? The answer to that question was painfully obvious, now. Whom could she blame but herself as much as him? There wasn't even anyone she could talk to about all of the tangled mess they'd made, so where else was she supposed to vent her anger if not back at its source?

No, she didn't feel bad about the way she was treating Arthur, now. He deserved to experience every bit of her suffering with her, not just because of what he'd done but for the fact that they were still husband and wife, and she had no one else to turn to.

That weird little boy had made her feel helpless in such a way, too—different, of course, and yet similar, because there'd been no one to help Lilia when he'd become so strange and insistent. What would she have done, slapped the little weirdo? He'd not been the sort of child one might hug or console. There'd been something distinctively feral about him. She hoped that wherever he was, he'd found his parents or guardians, at least someone to get a pair of shoes on his feet. A deep sigh escaped her. Children aren't at fault if the ones that birth them are deadbeats, Lilia thought. She tipped her glass of wine at her lips and poured a good deal down her willing throat. Some people should just be sterilized.

The sun had set some while earlier, and yet the warm glimmers of it remained in rogue leftovers, languid golden eels sliding across the rolling water. Lilia sat hypnotized by the light play and by that perfect, unnamable shade of indigo-sapphire-black at the very edge of the world, seeming to rise out of the ocean itself, permuting into barely discernible lighter variations until it rushed into the firmament above in one vast sweep of star-prickled cobalt. The waves were calm enough, not the sort small children might wish to run from but enough to make sound, to perfectly match the rush one heard when holding a large shell against one's ear. Lacy gray lines peeked over ridges of slate before submerging once more, dancing adagio in the continuous oceanic ballet.

Perhaps it was Lilia's second full glass of wine on a relatively empty stomach that caused her to become so enamored of the scene before her, or perhaps it was her artistic eye. It was true that she'd rekindled a dimming inspiration, bringing home sketch after sketch of the beautiful vistas this new landscape allowed. She'd spent so long painting city skylines and street corners that she'd nearly forgotten what space without people looked like.

She'd wanted to do something with her art, long ago, something more than just sell it in Lincoln Park galleries and on Etsy. She'd wanted to do something real, something pure . . . to create for creation's sake and live off the vapors of her own passion. Meeting Arthur, having children, raising those children—those things hadn't stifled her dreams so much as grounded them. She'd found ways to create, but she'd always done so with an eye for how to make her products worth the time and resources she'd put into them. How to monetize them. She did, after all, have responsibilities. People who needed her. There were no moments or dollars to be spent on frivolity, anymore. Any expensive hobby (and those painting supplies, the good ones, anyway, did add up) must have some lucrative ends. Arthur had never said as much to Lilia, but she'd known their finances, and she'd sensed that if she wanted to continue pursuing her passion instead of seeking some kind of employment, she'd need to ensure she contributed. It'd taken a bit of time and much self-promotion those first years, but Lilia had always maintained the proper connections in Quebec, and Chicago wasn't so far south; by the time the twins were tweens, she'd made something of a name for herself as a local artist and earned a modest income in sales.

So it'd been unfortunate that the past few years, she'd lost her motivation to put pencil or brush to paper. She might've been able to explain the reason for her artistic lassitude if she'd really wanted to, but in truth, the woman had been afraid to admit much to herself, and Arthur's indiscretions, though occurring long after her apathy had settled in, had made the perfect scapegoat.

This trip, on the other hand . . . it was too soon to call the summer a miracle, but Lilia hadn't thought it possible to reclaim the spark she'd thought was no more than a bit of smoldering ash within. Her seascapes, the wavering grasses and shifting clouds, the rows of quaint houses and the umbrellas and kites and colorful chairs along the sand. At some point, she'd walk down to paint the rocks where Arthur had found Ramona, and she also planned to complete a series of the street in town in the evening, the one with the bars and restaurants, the old theater and little outdoor patios with their party lights. Maybe she'd even get one of that odd shop on the edge of Blackswallow—what was it called? Quack's? The marionette shop. That door handle had been so interesting. The window display, not so much. But the door was certainly worth a rendering.

Three large, black shapes emerged from the left of Lilia's line of sight, soaring majestically in spite of their cumbersome delineations: pelicans. Lilia watched them move across the water and would've nestled back into the pillows on her chair had she not done a double take at the sight of a fourth silhouette beneath the birds, this one on land, heading slowly in the opposite direction.

This unexpected figure moved like a person, and yet it was abnormally tall—Lilia could tell, even from her distance up on the deck. At this time of night, there were no other people down on the beach. Her husband and boys had yet to return; Ramona was reading in bed. Lights were on in several windows of the other beach houses, but for all Lilia knew, she was alone. The figure wasn't yet near her house but was instead a ways off toward the right, walking along the sand near the edge of the water. If it kept its pace, though, it'd soon enough be in front of her house. She wasn't particularly bothered by this, not really. Whoever it was, the person (for surely it was a person, moving on legs, albeit very long ones) had no reason to approach her. She was only sitting and enjoying a glass of wine on her deck. There were no reasons to be concerned.

Still, as the figure neared the end of her rental's walkway, that wooden path that led from the sand to their deck, Lilia decided to pop inside for a moment under the pretense of using the bathroom. Or topping off her glass. Or grabbing her cell. Or—why did she need a pretense at all? She could do as she wished, and it was perfectly fine to admit the shadowy form of an abnormally tall stranger in the dark of night was discomfiting.

So inside she popped, and she wasted a solid fifteen to twenty minutes doing various things, including checking on her daughter (who was happily tucked in bed and sleeping soundly) and attempting unsuccessfully to call and harangue her husband for keeping the boys out past eleven. With a cursory glance out the back windows, she saw no dark looming figure, and so she happily threw on a large sweater, grabbed her phone and refilled glass of wine, and slipped back out the squealing screen door only to be greeted by a literal head gawking at her through the railings of her deck.

Actually gasping in terror, Lilia dropped her glass and stumbled backward. Even in the gloom, she could see that the face belonged to a man, and she knew that man had to be at least nine feet tall to be communicating with her through the rails of the deck; the house stood on ten-foot pilings!

"Pardon me, madam," the head spoke in a resonant, apologetic tone, forming each word slowly though not in a condescending manner. "I don't mean to frighten you."

Lilia was too flabbergasted to respond. She stood in limbo, unsure whether to run inside or hope that if she froze, this impossible scenario would disappear.

The head wore a top hat, an old-fashioned top-hat, like something Abraham Lincoln would've worn, but his face wasn't good-natured and black-bearded, not honest and kind as she and her contemporaries had been led to envision the sixteenth American president. This head's face was instead strikingly cadaverous: cheekbones so pronounced they were sharp as glass, a nose disfigured and protruding as a broken rowboat, teeth like tiny tombstones separating from one another in the hills of his emaciated gums. The eyes in this man's face were set too far back to properly see, too deep to catch anything more than a fleeting glint of light—had Lilia been unable to note that light, she'd have supposed only holes existed on either side of that lump-of-a-nose.

"I—I wonder whether you'd be able to help me."

And then it occurred to Lilia that this talking head belonged to the very tall figure she'd seen walking along that beach, that this shape hadn't passed her by but had in fact come specifically to her house, had strode right up to her deck and waited for her to come back outside—had waited for her!

Her stomach dropped; she realized she'd spilled wine down her leg.

"Ma'am, I do apologize for startling you. I need only a word, and I promise I'll be on my way."

Every instinct in Lilia told her to go back into the house—the very presence of this utterly bizarre and deeply unsettling person was nearly too much for her to bear. Her thoughts went to her sleeping daughter, to her lack of a husband, to the location of knives in the kitchen. "Go away!" she suddenly cried, waving her phone toward the face and stepping backward. "I'll call 9-1-1!"

Two fat black eyebrows beneath the brim of the black hat lowered; the man's mouth drooped. "There's really no need, I assure you, and it would take an inordinate amount of time before they managed to arrive, I'm afraid." Rather than recede into shadows, the head stayed put, and suddenly four impossibly long fingers pinwheeled up and over one of the rails, gripping the wooden slat like the legs of a crusty crab. "I've lost a few of my associates, you see, and I thought perhaps if you'd seen any of them—"

"No! Just—just go away!" Pepper spray! She had some in her purse, inside. Perfect!

"A boy? A mute, incorrigible boy with an improprietous lack of footwear?"

Lilia's breath caught. Her body tensed. She'd been just about to dash back into the house, but instead she at last turned her full attention to this freakishly tall corpse-of-a-man. "A hungry boy?"

A grotesque smile graced the gaunt face. A second set of fingers joined the first. "Ah! Yes, madam. I see you've met our little devil. May I ask whether he's with you, at present?"

Lilia scowled, shook her head. "God, no. I saw him several days ago. Up the hill, by a—a puppet shop or something."

"I see. Thank you. And a large gentleman? Have you perchance come across one?"

"Larger than you?"

A sonorous chuckle emanated from the man's direction, though his face didn't appear to move. "I should clarify. Horizontally large, not vertically."

Clutching her sweater closer around her low-cut tee, her relatively exposed breasts, Lilia shook her head. She couldn't recall seeing anyone abnormally large, even heavy. "No."

"I'm decidedly distressed about him. A rather morose fellow. He's prone to bouts of melancholy."

No longer sure whether she was dreaming or whether the alcohol was in some way affecting her, beginning to fall prey to the canorous balm of each word the man spoke, Lilia untensed her muscles, placed her bare feet flat on the deck. "I can relate to that," she murmured, more aloud to herself than to the tall stranger.

He nodded his gargantuan head. "I'm sorry to hear that, ma'am. Truly, I am. It seems mighty unfair that a woman as prepossessing as yourself should suffer at all."

Lilia tipped her head of black curls toward the sky. She was prepossessing, wasn't she? Nice to hear someone say it, even if that someone was possibly a figment of her imagination.

"A set of twins? Has a set of twins crossed your path?"

The woman snorted, allowed the sweater to fall from one shoulder as she looked at that mammoth head. "I've seen a set of twins every day for the past fifteen years!" she cried, giggling more than the situation warranted.

The black holes in the man's face widened, showed something almost—almost—like whites of eyes before they faded back into darkness once more. "Ah. Fifteen years. I presume, madam, that we do not have in mind the—"

"My sons!" Lilia interrupted. "My boys. Are you looking for them? Apparently, a lot of people are. They're quite popular here. But I have a feeling they aren't whoever you're looking for."

"No, ma'am," he uneasily agreed. "I'm afraid not."

Moments flowed past, one, two, three . . . the face beyond the deck kept its holes-of-eyes on her, and she watched it with an odd concurrent desire to kick it and run from it, no longer certain what was going on or where exactly her feelings lay.

However, though, after a pause pregnant with growing awareness, the head asked, "Would you like to come for a walk, ma'am? The ocean, it's unabridged poetry this time of eve."

"O-oh, I—uh, no," Lilia managed to stutter, completely taken aback. "Thank you, but no. I need to—want to stay here. I want to stay here, at my house. With my family. M-my husband, and my kids." She nodded a little too vigorously. "Thank you, though, for the offer."

"Another time, perhaps," the Abraham-Lincolny voice drawled, and Lilia thought she sensed real disappointment before he added, "Thank you ever so much. I do hope to see you again, and I'll leave you with one final, sincerest apology for my intrusion upon your peaceful evening."

He tipped his top hat, and Lilia caught sight of a bunch of charms dangling around the band before he turned and sauntered into the shadows. She tried to snap a few images with her phone, knowing no one would believe her (knowing she'd not believe herself tomorrow morning), and then she dove indoors and onto the sofa, where she burst into a fit of tears and laughter, unsure why either came and which would win out in the end.