The sky was red and pale, that morning. Two braziers, left burning for hours, lit up the interior of the tent, and their dim glow (like the old, rose-colored filament on the inside of a murky light bulb) was visible almost from the beach.  The smoke inside smelled of incense and apples, and beneath these smells there was just the faintest wisp of a messy room, after the door has been opened in the morning. The two French girls, Miriam and Marielle, were just waking up when Nia ducked her head under the flap of their tent. I peeked out quietly from her breast pocket, to see and listen.

“Knock knock,” she whispered, and poked her head inside.
“Entrez,” Marielle said, pushing aside the bedcovers and pulling back her hair in a knot. Miriam, I thought, was probably shamming sleep. Sometimes you get a feeling in the morning—(as you roll over, grouchily, it may become a conviction)—a feeling that day has come all too early for your taste. And even though sleep is lost, and you know this, it will still be fifteen minutes or more before you’d be ready to fess up to yourself that it’s lost, it’s gone, and there’s nothing in heaven or earth you can do about it. But in those fifteen quiet minutes, before turning your body out of bed, you’re nothing and you’re nobody—like you weren’t yourself but a ghost, a ghost that’s eavesdropping on the rest of the world as it gets ready for the day, a ghost that’s listening to the conversations, the birds, the marching sounds of footsteps, plates clattering, and engines starting. And that fifteen minute calm, before you finally agree to meet the world, and say Yes, I’m awake—that fifteen minutes is heaven on earth. That’s Miriam’s state of mind at the time, so she was particularly irritable. 

“Come in, but don’t disturb her.” Marielle spoke low to Nia, and indicated Miriam with a nod of the chin. “Let her sleep.”
Nia stepped inside and pulled back the tent-flap behind her. Marielle patted the covers at the foot of the bed, and Nia crossed over and sat down.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I have him,” Nia said.
“What? You do?” Marielle leaned in. “Already? No way. Fais voir.”
Fear gripped me as I saw Nia’s hand descending toward me, inside the pocket. She plucked me up between two of her fingers, and then spread me out in her palm. Marielle drank me up thirstily with her eyes, this girl I knew by acquaintance, having lunched and talked with her over the table, once or twice—and she smiled.
“And the others?”
“Sofia has the girl and the other boy.”
“We have to wake Miriam. Miriam!” Marielle stretched out her leg and gave the fat blanket-lump on the other side of the tent a light kick with her foot.
“Miriam, réveille-toi! Idiot!” Miriam groaned a little, and curled inward like an armadillo. “Come on, sleepyhead, wake up! We have to leave in an hour! We’re getting out today!”
“Ferme ta gueule,” she muttered under her breath, winding the sheets around her like a funeral shroud. “Shut your trap. Lemme alone.” There was a pause. Then, after a long sigh, an afterthought: “Stupid,” she added.
“What did you say?” Marielle asked. There was no answer forthcoming; Miriam was determined to find her way back to dreamland, but had probably lost the way. Nia shrugged her shoulders, and turned to me.“Twenty centuries of stony sleep, as they say, and she’s still not ready to wake up.” She turned a mock-frown to Marielle, who smiled, and asked me how I felt.

Well, I said nothing, but I felt like I was floating on a sea made of bed, with two towering giantesses flanking me on either side. The camp sounds were beginning, in a low hum, outside the door, and the gold of the sunlight began to shine underneath the tent, and between the stitches in the seams. 

Suddenly Miriam sat up, and turned over onto her side. She looked blearily across the room, toward us. “Is that Theodore?” she asked, clearing the phlegm from her throat. 
“Yes, it is,” said Nia and Marielle.
“Huh,” she pulled the sheets off her, and tiptoed over the ice-cold ground to Marielle’s bedside.
“Wait, wait, I forgot my glasses,” she said. “I can’t see anything.” She groped around the nightstand until she found her glasses-case.  Miriam turned back to her friend’s bed and knelt down in front of me, fitting the arms of her glasses behind her ears.
“Wow. It is.” She blinked her eyes.
“Yeah, I already told you that, dummy,” said Marielle.
 Miriam ignored her. “You must be pretty weirded out right now. Aren’t you?”
“I don’t know what to think. I’ve never been this small.”
“Oh, really? I thought you had,” Miriam said. “That was rather inconsiderate of her.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“He told me this was impossible, before,” Nia said. “When we were on the beach, I mean.”
“Impossible? I wonder what he meant by that, huh.” Miriam was interested. “Theodore, did you mean impossible impossible, or just impossible?”
“You’re Miriam?” I asked. Miriam smiled.
“And you’re Marielle?” That girl tucked her legs underneath her, and the bed swayed and protested for a while.
“I woke up this morning, by the shore, under a boulder, and Nia was there. I…I…”
“Too cute,” said Nia. “I picked him up, and that was it. Do you want to tell him, or should I?”
Miriam shook her head and stood up. Marielle volunteered to “to tell me,” and got comfortable first. She lay down on her belly, and straightened her legs back against the headboard, burying her feet under her pillow. 

“Theodore,” she said, “this isn’t impossible, not even close, not even a little bit. It is needful, it is ‘must happen’—you understand?” I didn’t understand.
The girl was irritated at my slowness. “You have a Destiny. This is amazing. Not many people have it. I don’t have it and Miriam doesn’t have it.” Miriam shook her head, in confirmation. “Nia has it, I think. I forget. You have a Destiny, right Nia?” Nia nodded. “Yes, so some people have a Destiny and others don’t. That’s the way things are. This is why you’re here. It was prophesied, by someone—a god, or a man—doesn’t matter. You’ll find out.”
“But why didn’t I know?”
“You never know until someone tells you, Mr. Impossible.” She liked the sound of that, and won smiles all around. “I just told you. Anything else you want to know?”
“Why am I so small?”
Nia answered this. “Because you have to meet her very soon.”
“That’s right,” said Marielle, while Miriam climbed onto her bed and rummaged through her pack for clothes, to get herself ready for the day.
“Who?”
“You’ll know. Or maybe you won’t. In any case she’ll tell you.”
“The goddess,” said Nia.
“A goddess,” corrected Marielle. “Nia will take you to see her, later, and you’ll need a way to fly to her.”
“What about the camp? What about my team?”
“Where’s Roy?” asked Miriam, over her shoulder, casually.
“With Sarah, I think.”
“Okay.” She turned back to her things, comparing the colors of shirts and skirts, biting her tongue out of the corner of her mouth (looking very preoccupied), and snorting a little to clear the morning phlegm from her pipes.
“When are we going?” Marielle asked Nia.
“In an hour, I think. After breakfast.”
“But where are we going, and why are you coming?” I was curious.
“That’s where we live, Marielle and I,” said Miriam, from the far corner of the room. “There are apple trees there, Meliades.”
“Bravo, Miriam,” said Marielle, clapping her hands slowly, “Bravo, idiot, telling everyone where we live. Pheu! I’ll get dressed and meet you down there. Okay?”
“Okay,” Nia agreed. “Theodore, come with me.”

 She said her goodbye, and left that sweet-smelling room for the cool, dusty breeze outdoors. Lifting me up to her face, where the wind blew the thick strands of black hair across her cheeks and into her mouth, she said, “I’m sorry for the suddenness of it. It had to happen like this and I couldn’t help that. If I were in control I wouldn’t have surprised you.”
“I don’t know what’s happening—and I don’t even know who I am anymore. Miriam said they were nymphs—Meliades are nymphs—I mean they’re apple trees! Am I going crazy? I see you. I feel you. And those were really them, in the tent. And I’m really me—I mean, I must be me, because who else could I be? So I’m not dreaming. I’m not dead. But, you see, everything is huge, or I’m small—” Nia covered my face with her pinky finger. The blood in her cheeks rose to the surface, and she gave a smile that showed her red, unpainted lips, and the long row of white, glittering teeth. “Theodore,” she said. “Your mother...”
“Who? I have a mother.”
“No, I mean, your mother is not your mother.”
“My mother isn’t my mother?” My heart stopped, and I almost understood. “Who is my mother, then?”
“She is. You’re hers. That’s all I can tell you.”
“Why can’t you tell me? I’m so confused.” I was.
“Well, you’ll know when you see her. Shush, Theodore, and don’t worry.” Her expression changed, and she licked her lips. “Oh, I could just eat you. You don’t even realize.”
“What?!” It’s interesting how drastically those familiar, affectionate phrases and terms of endearment change meaning when you’re sitting in the palm of a giantess, and staring deeply into her mouth. Not her eyes—those black orbs were piercing and bright enough to blind me, at my size, and I had to look away. If eyes are the gateways to the soul, then Nia’s soul lived in a very, very large room. Maybe her soul was was larger than mine to the same extent that her body was larger than my body. Thoughts like these paced their way through my addled brain.
“That was a joke, as in LOL,” she said. “Laugh out loud? Yes? MDR. Morte de rire. I am dying of laughing.”

She sighed. “Are you hungry?” We were walking outside her tent, avoiding the main paths. Still most of the camp was asleep, or buried under the covers. Someone yelled, and a dog barked across the huge bay, down there in the distance. “I bet you are. I’m very hungry.”

Just then a dragonfly swooped down out of the sky and hovered beside Nia’s hand for several seconds. The million glass shards of its giant eyes, the fragile gauze of its wings flickering like a flame, and reflecting the sunlight back and back—and its working mouth and mandibles, as it contemplated me, lying in Nia’s hand, with my back resting against her thumb. You would have thought it was about to say something—and it was.
“Is he ready yet?” the insect asked. Nia studied the dragonfly, for a minute.
“It said something,” I said. “I think.”
“What did she say?”
“I don’t know.”
“Talk louder!” she ordered.
The dragonfly zipped up to her ear and asked again, with renewed vigor, “Is he ready yet?”
“Oh! You’re early,” Nia said. “Wait until we’ve had breakfast.” Up it flew above the mountain into the fields, and the clouds. A goat bleated and jingled, and then we turned inside.
Nia frowned. “She’s really too impatient—always sticks her tooth where no one wants her.”
“Who?”
“Thespia. At first you didn't recognize her. But that’s her.”
“It was a dragonfly.”
“Yes, of course,” Nia said. “She’s a naiad,” she went on, as if that explained it. “Sometimes she’s a dragonfly, I mean. It gets confusing, because not all dragonflies are naiads, but all naiads are usually dragonflies.”
“But you’re Nia, right?” I wasn’t sure. I’d just heard a talking dragonfly.
“Yes, I’m Nia.”
“Sometimes?”
“Well, yeah—sometimes. No one’s someone all the time, not even you.”
“I was someone last night.”
“And you’re someone this morning, just not the same someone. But you’re always Theodore. I’m always Nia.”
“Are you a naiad?”
She scoffed at the idea. “Don’t insult me! Enough talk for now. Let’s get dressed for breakfast.”

I met with Roy and Sarah at the breakfast table, that morning. The others from the team—Catherine, Bonnie, Emily, and Tiffany—would learn that morning that half their team had disappeared without a trace. That was the last morning they would eat together. A search would be made of our tents, and the tents of two French, and two Greek, members of the camp—all girls. A few people claimed to have seen Miriam, Marielle, Nia, and Sofia at some point during the early hours of that morning, but there was no proof, and there were no leads. People talked of the kitchen fire the night before, the wailing of the siren, and the slow, circling flood light over the bay. Just before dawn, a swarm of dragonflies passed through camp, and then there was silence—the slow jingling of the goat herd, up on the mountain.