Falling and Love

She coughed and rubbed her eyes and it seemed to take far to long for the dust to finally settle. When it did, she looked up at the hole she had fallen through and could not believe she had fallen so far. How could she still be alive? The answer began to dawn on her as her eyes adjusted to the darkness and she found herself looking up into an enormous face that could have filled up a billboard. But the face wasn't on a billboard, it was on a head, and the head was on a neck, and the neck was on a body, and the body had arms, and the arms had hands, and one of the hands was holding her up.

She screamed then, not because she felt it was the responsible thing to do at the time; rather, the scream had come naturally to her and no other ideas had presented themselves so the scream was the default response. The huge face winced and the huge hands set her down, and then they covered up the huge ears until her screaming stopped.

The echos of her scream finally faded away, but this took some time as they were in a rounded cavern the size of a football stadium and all the noises seemed to bounce around forever. It all seemed too much to take in, the giant room and the giant thing which looked less like a giant human and more like a giant bear with human proportions and digits. Though he sounded human enough when he said,

"Thank you for stopping."

"Thanks you for not killing me." It seemed like the appropriate thing to say and, like the scream, it had also come naturally.

"Why would I want to kill you? Have you done something to me?"

"No, it just seemed like sort of the thing a monster would do to a little girl."

"Oh, I didn't know you were a little girl." He thought for a moment before continuing, "I didn't know I was a monster." And because he had heard of little girls and that they were often silly things he was sceptical of her claim. "How do you know I'm a monster?"

"You look a little like the monsters in my books."

He knew about books. He had heard the birds talking about books. People used to try to catch the birds and eat them, but now they just waited around and watched them and tried to find them in their books.

"And these monsters, they kill little girls?"

"Yes, they kill everyone or chase everyone until a hero kills them."

"All the monsters do this?" He had always been wary of sweeping generalizations.

"Well, I suppose not all of them. I guess sometimes they fall in love like in Beauty and the Beat, and then they are good. Or sometimes they are funny like in Shrek and he fell in love too."

"Oh, so to be a good monster you have to fall in love?"

She thought about this for a while and couldn't think of any monsters who turned out to be good and didn't fall in love. In fact, most of them fell in love with princesses.

"Yeah" she said, "I guess it's pretty important to do that."

He had been in love a long time ago, before he came to his cave. Before there were little girls or even that many birds on the outside. He hadn't thought about it in a very long time, but now that he did he could feel a little bit of the way he used to feel.

"I was in love once, I may still be in love with her a little."

"That's good." She said with huge volume of relief in her voice. The monster was surprised that something that small could seem to be filled with that much relief. "Was she a princess?"

"No, I don't think she was a princess. At least she never mentioned it."

"Was she beautiful?"

"I loved to look at her. And she was very soft."

The little girl looked at his bear-like fur and could easily believe that something it loved would be very soft.

"I would like to hear about her, but I should be getting home. Can you you lift me out of the hole?"

"The ceiling is too high, even for me. But I can carry you to another opening, and while we walk I will tell you about her."

And maybe he did.