Now, Paul Bunyan was a big man, born big and grown bigger every year, so that by the time he was nine years old, he was obliged to duck down when he went outside, in order to avoid any low-flying F-35A stealth fighters. But there were cold nights in the lumber camps where Paul worked, when the temperature went so low that if you struck a match, the fire would freeze, and on those nights, Paul would pull himself in tight, tight enough you could fit three of him into a 5.56 mm NATO rifle shell. He was so good at holding in the heat you couldn’t even see him on a short range PTZ thermal security camera, and that’s how Paul Bunyan made his way to the mousehole in the wall and the fleahole in the mousehole, and then into the enemy compound.
It irks Paul to squeeze through a chipped wall in a building he could cut down with one swipe of his axe. It irks him to move so slowly, and to feel his bones folded in mazes around each other, to grind his knees against his spine. Stealth irks him, and it always has. There’s something undignified about doing things that can’t be done in the open, and can’t be told bigger afterwards. His handler called the building he’s approaching a compound, and, exaggeration shouldn’t irk him, of all people, but here it does. It’s all in good fun to say a fish was two hundred pounds when it was a hundred and sixty, but it doesn’t feel fun to call a run-down apartment complex a compound, or the tired young men with guns “enemy agents”. Most of all he’s irked by the bounds of his story, which he’s always felt pressing against him but never like this, never so tight or so uncomfortably.
Before the mission, Big Ole, the blacksmith, had whipped up a few gadgets for Paul, which he was about to find pretty useful. Big Ole had made him a pair of sunglasses which turned into night vision goggles at the flip of a switch, and a tiny revolver so powerful it could shoot .357 magnum hollow point bullets. With the guards still watching the perimeter, Paul under the side door, and made his entrance.
Inside, the building is stripped down and crammed with people. Thin cots line the floors and stray equipment and clothing are strewn around the sleeping soldiers. There are no drop ceiling tiles, no banks of fluorescent lights, and nothing so even so large as Paul’s palm. The soldiers don’t have the shiny shoes and ironed shirts that Paul’s handler insists on. He scutters along the floor, once again folded in and too small to see.
There were three hundred men in the hallway, which was almost hard work for Paul Bunyan. He swung his axe and the first hundred were cut in half so clean they didn’t even bleed. Then he swung again, and sliced through another hundred, and this time it was so quick they didn’t even notice they were dead until the funeral. And then he swung once more at the last hundred, and it was such a fast blow that they all fell dead before the week before they even got there.
But there weren’t three hundred men. There was only the one who spotted him, as he was unfolding himself to open the office door, and that one wasn’t even quite a man. A boy, scared and angry, but mostly scared, and trying to look more sure of himself than he was. And Paul didn’t cut him in half either, he just brought the axe down onto his face, like he was planting it in a stump. And that was that.
Paul Bunyan walked into the room, footsteps heavy as a Gerald R. Ford class aircraft carrier, and struck a final blow to his target so quickly he was done before he started. A single vertebrae from the militia leader’s spine soared out into the sky, and it became Halley’s comet.
But Paul didn’t strike quickly. He didn’t strike at all. He stood there, staring at the office, at the chipped plaster revealing cement walls, and the old computer and the stacks of papers in old folders, and the flag hung unevenly, and the spatters of miscellaneous brown on the uncarpeted floor, but most of all at the man behind the desk. The man who was just old enough to have grey in his beard, and who had sharp, careful eyes, but that wasn’t what made Paul stare. Paul stared because he was small. Not remarkably small. Not small enough to stand on a thumb or fly on a bird’s back. He was about 5’6”. And what was Paul Bunyan supposed to make of that?
Paul Bunyan executed the target and made his way to the extraction point. He didn’t do it immediately, but he did it quickly. He paused for a little first, but then he remembered himself and he remembered the mission.
If the man had been two inches taller. If he had been as thick as a redwood tree or had arms that could flatten a mountain range. Paul had always needed the gigantic, needed something there he couldn’t find anywhere else. There was a splendor in size, even if you were only cutting it down. There was a magnificence in the way it fell, and the boom when it hit the ground.
Paul, Babe is here with me. She wants you to finish the mission for her. Can you do that, Paul? Can you do it for Babe the Blue Ox?
But Paul was already leaving. His footsteps shrank as he went. The first was large enough to be a lake, but the second was only a pond, and after that, smaller and smaller puddles, until they were simply ordinary footprints. Ordinary footprints, walking away.