There was only silence above. But from under the ground and on the earth shouts of glee and malice filled the air. The beasts ran wild, serial killers with the restraint of law enforcement completely removed. They swooped and bit at the Woodsman’s neck, while prodding the little people to keep piercing his heel, from which blood gushed.

I looked at the blood on my own hands. I gazed up at the giant, certain that in one moment, deliberate or unguarded, he could hurl us into the abyss. Something grabbed hold of my insides and made me stop and wonder.

“Why do you do what you do?” I cried up to him, holding out my hands, with nails and hammer, covered with blood.

He looked down into my eyes, and in the next instant he was looking straight into them—that quickly he had shrunk again to my size. “You are why I do what I do.”

My heart was pulled toward him, then I considered his words. Was he blaming me for this again? How dare he? I backed away from him. He stretched out his bloody hand, and I retreated even farther.

A great dark cloud formed and spread. The sky looked as if it had been rubbed hard by a dirty eraser. Within seconds a ferocious wind blew, lightning struck, thunder roared, like the storm in which I first came to this world.

The Woodsman walked alone to the base of the tree. I could not see the nails in his feet now. He climbed up the side of the tree, slowly and deliberately, cutting hands and feet on the barbs. When he got to the top, he stepped on it, his right foot bleeding profusely from the wounds in his heel. The fishhook spurs of the great tree cut into his feet, but he kept walking and wincing, walking and wincing.

He seemed so terribly alone.

The hell-hawks circled over him. The farther he walked on the tree the darker it became. Then, when he was barely visible, I saw him stop, raise his hands, and lie down on the tree. Suddenly he disappeared into the darkness, becoming inseparable from it. For an eternal moment there was nothing, as if all creation braced itself. Then I heard a terrible thud—one, then another, and another, as if hands and instruments from another world fell down on the tree. The force of blows from those great hands must have been much harder to bear than that of the little people.

I heard sounds like flapping tarp and morbid victory shrieks. Then soft weeping. Then nothing.

There was a long silence in which I stared into the darkness of the tree, the darkness of the chasm, and the darkness within me, unable to distinguish one from the others. Then at last the air filled with a solitary scream.

“Whyyyyyy?”