I awoke prematurely this morning from a nightmare inspired by the hit anime series Attack on Titan.
It was 10am. Early enough for me, but Samara had been long awake and was sitting right next to me, showered and coffeed, reading a book and generally firing on all cylinders.
Anyway. Attack on Titan is about hostile, skinless, eerily-grimacing giants who routinely break through the defenses of a walled city to eat the humans within.
It’s terrifying. It’s also horribly nihilistic since the Titans don’t actually need to eat. They don’t digest anything. They just chomp the humans up and swallow them down for no clear reason whatsoever. Well that’s just plain naughty.
“If I were a Titan,” I said sleepily to Samara, “I wouldn’t eat you.”
It was just my dreamy, morning way of saying “I love you”.
“That’s kind of you,” she said.
“I’d keep you safe from the other Titans,” I said, “in a little house inside my big Titan house and I’d just look in at you through the windows.”
“Would you be all skinless and grimacing?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I’m not at all certain that I’d enjoy that.”
“But I wouldn’t be able to help the skinlessness and the grimacing,” I said, “That’s just how I’d look.”
“Well, I suppose that’s okay then,” she said.
She saw me laughing and she knew what would be coming next. I always say the same thing when we’re talking about giants looking through windows, a surprisingly common occurrence.
“Would you be wanking?” she said in that tone of voice suggesting she’s heard all of this before.
“Yes,” I said.
“I thought so,” she said, “And crying at the same time, I suppose?”
“Yes,” I said.
There is nothing funny about mentally-ill giants, looking in windows and wanking and crying at the same time.
She was reading An Edible History of Humanity by Tom Standage, which I thought was a bit of a creepy coincidence.
“I’d make sure you were comfortable,” I said, “and that you’d be spared from the Titan rampage.”
Sensing that this somehow wasn’t enough of a proposal, I added, “and I’d make you a sandwich every day.”
“A nice tofu sandwich?”
“Yes. But it’d be difficult to make it with my massive Titan hands, so I’d have to keep a puny human chef around on retainer.”
“He’d live with me?”
“No,” I said, “he’d have his own tiny house.”
I thought about this a little more.
“And,” I said, “I’d have to keep some farmers around to grow the beans required to make the tofu.”
The ramifications of this sandwich promise began to dawn on me. I’d need to spare some human farmers to grow the wheat to make the bread for the sandwich. I’d need bakers to bake it, other farmers to grow any seeds to add to the bread, and further farmers to grow any salads or other vegetables my tiny human wife might want in her daily sandwich.
“Oh, the whole thing’s too complicated,” I said.
Before I knew it, I’d end up with a whole human village in my Titan house. Where I come from, that’s called an infestation.
“Why can’t you just eat Titan food like I do?”
“Titans don’t eat, remember.”
“Oh yeah.”
I didn’t have a solution to any of this. Before I knew it, the entire human race would be safe and uneaten in my house. That wouldn’t be any good at all. I’d be the laughing stock of the Titans.
“I wouldn’t eat you,” I said again, perhaps a little too defensively.
“Okay,” she said, “Thank you.”
“I probably would eat you, actually.”
“But you just said that you wouldn’t eat me.”
“Yes,” I said, “I feel that way now, but I’d be a Titan. It would be in my nature to eat you.”
“Well, that doesn’t sound very fair to me,” she said.
“You’re just saying that because you’re a puny human. If you were a Titan, you’d understand. I’d just have to eat you up. I’d pop your head right off. Om. Nom. Nom.”
I mimed what this would look like, in case it wasn’t clear.
I patted my stomach and pretended to burp.
“Quite tasty,” I said, “Not delicious. But quite tasty.”
I got up and stretched and went off to cook our breakfast of non-human vegetable matter.