I was stretching on my yoga coaster when I heard the front door’s code beep. I closed the calisthenics app on the smartphone and checked the time: prompt, a little early. I appreciated her attentiveness.

Across the vast expanse of the living room, beyond the mountain range of white sofa, the tall and lanky brunette let herself in. “D____? I’m here,” she called out, looking around for a moment, then laughing at herself for looking for a person-sized person. She had a pretty voice, ringing and rich. Or maybe I was just starved for a human voice that didn’t come over a tinny smartphone speaker.

She closed the door behind her. The crook of her elbow supported two canvas bags, out of which stuck the telltale ribs of celery, like an Art Frahm reboot for local co-ops. I stood up, resting one palm against a huge sandstone lamp, while I shook out my legs but otherwise gave her no indication of where I was. I wanted to watch this one for a while.

“This one” being Freda, one of my giantess’s close circle of friends. After a couple of efficient, meaning-laden texts, my giantess agreed it would be a good idea for a couple of her friends to stop by, once in a while, seeing as how she herself wasn’t returning to the house any time soon. I tried not to be resentful that they received the courtesy that I apparently didn’t merit—to wit, the restoration of all utilities—but I shrugged it off and basked in its convenience.

Freda made her way to the kitchen slowly, studying the ground and placing each foot carefully before the other. Good woman. “Don’t worry about the dogs, they’re at the neighbors.” She was still using her I’m-guessing-you’re-somewhere-in-the-house voice. “They’re super cute and I know they’d love to meet you, but I want you to know I respect your needs, okay?” I liked her more and more, and not just because she was making me lunch.

Lunch! A fresh lunch, with fresh ingredients! After she’d unpacked the groceries and started washing vegetables, I texted her to look on the loveseat’s end table, where I stood in full view. She walked up, dressed very cutely in an oversized fisherman’s sweater and tight jeans with sneakers. Everything about her said cute and friendly and I liked her immediately. She rose up, approaching the table with the deceptive ponderousness of a freight train at top velocity, then palmed her knees and bent over, peering at me. I was wearing a breezy black sports top and baggy black yoga pants—one thing my giantess did very well was befriend BJD enthusiasts who made their own clothes, commissioning a diverse wardrobe for me. I was never wanting for style.

“Look at you!” she said, immediately apologizing and covering her mouth when I exaggeratedly covered my ears. Quietly she said, “I’ve got a lot to get used to, but I want you to know I’m going to pay attention to whatever you need, okay? C____ asked me to look after you, and I’m going to do the best I can for you.” She used my giantess’s name, which even I don’t say. Reasons.

But she grinned, white long teeth all in a row, and she started to gesture to shake my hand, quickly realizing how out-of-place that was. I explained all she had to do to greet me was tap the surface of whatever I was standing on, right beside me. “Like this?” She carefully rested her palm on the edge of the end table, extended one slender finger, and banged her French manicured nail on the glass.

Lots of things flooded my little body all at once. Freda was beautiful and young, there were no flaws on her hand at all. The glass plate beneath my bare feet rattled with such sharp force I thought it would shatter and I’d plummet to the magazines beneath. I could imagine the diamond-like shards spinning through space with me. I had to train a new giantess to get used to me… me, who had all the disadvantages, who was completely vulnerable and exceedingly frail! I had to train this massive creature how to be gentle around me, how to listen and how to move, and she was entirely willing to learn. The insanity of this… And there was another person here. More than anything, after two months of surviving on worsening food and hauling myself up rope-like threads for anything I needed, bundling up in a cold, silent house each night… After my rising dependence upon that size-fetish chat board, navigating the politics, dodging the increasingly specific questions, all the support and the significant betrayals, all the conversations that nearly went too far… After all this, there was a real person here, standing before me.

I’m afraid I wept.

Freda’s eyes went wide, both hands covered her mouth and she gasped. She fell all over herself apologizing, too loudly and then quietly. Finally she just stood there, bent at the hips, looming over me like a construction crane, quietly allowing me to have my momentary meltdown. I fell to my knees, face in my palms, making no attempt to hide my ugly male sobbing at all. In less than a minute I’d gotten the worst of it out, took a deep, shuddering breath, and wiped my face off on my shirt to grin up at her sheepishly. “It’s not you, Freda,” I shouted up at her. “Please believe me. I’ve just got a lot to adjust to right now.”

A dusty pink grin crept over her broad, pale face. “Why don’t you tell me about it over lunch,” she whispered. I showed her how to lower her hands and hold still as I climbed aboard, how to walk evenly as she held me near her torso, and how to raise and lower me slower than she expected. She was a quick study, attentive and considerate, and more than a few times that day I found myself questioning my loyalties. If it wasn’t for her excitable and chompy little dogs…

Oh my Goddess, that lunch. I could only eat crumbs of it, so I missed out on the grandeur of a mouthful of swirling flavors, but what I got was amazing. My body was craving fresh vegetables! She laughed to see me tear into the baby spinach, burrowing into the roma tomato. I had no idea 18-year balsamic vinegar could be so thick and syrupy, but it took forever to lick off my hands and forearms. Freda only picked at her own salad, staring at me apparently mesmerized, with a lopsided half-smile that never fully closed.

“I can’t apologize,” I told her. “This is amazing. I’ve been subsisting on miso paste and jerky for a month. I don’t care how this looks.” I tore off a corner of spring greens and rubbed it all over my face, for her rich laughter. Daylight glinted off her teeth like the windows of a cathedral.

“I don’t want to be rude, but I’ve got so many questions for you, D____.” She called me by my name, which my giantess doesn’t even do. She can, she just chooses not to most of the time. It’s “little man” this or “bitty guy” that, sometimes “morsel” in bed. To hear Freda pronounce my name, in that warm, resonant voice of hers, tore my eyes from watching her lips dance and turned my focus inward.

“Ask me anything you like,” I think I said.

I showed her how I get around, the pieces of tape and the threads that lead up to everywhere. I demonstrated my Parkour for her, bouncing off the tin of crackers and leaping from the kitchen island to the radiator to the counter, skidding short of the toaster oven. For a moment I was somewhere familiar, listening to my tiny feet slap against the cold black granite, feeling the warm air blow around my body, relying on my pumping muscles to keep up my momentum and hurl me through space. It felt good to feel so capable, and now to display it to a normal-sized human was a new thrill. I wrapped up my routine by taking a little chance, throwing myself from the sink counter to bounce off the extra stool beside Freda, not far at all from her denim-wrapped hip, and spring back up to the granite island, coming to a rest beside her salad plate.

Freda looked as out of breath as I felt. Her cheeks were flushed, and she was controlling a long and slow exhale. Her sweater rose slowly, fell slowly, a breathing wall of creamy wool a few mere feet from me. Her eyes looked like she was having trouble focusing on me.

“You’re amazing,” she whispered. “I’ve never… seen anything like that before in my life.”

I blushed so hard. She had to have seen that.

“Do you perform anywhere? Do you do this out in public?”

The thought had never occurred to me. Without my giantess, I equate outdoors with imminent demise. “Who could possibly be interested in this?” At my question, her eyes began to dart around the room, around the next room. Hastily she put the lunch mess away and asked if she could carry me to the living room. Her palms were cool from the granite counters, but soft, and… I confess I allowed myself to lie down in them, during the brief trip.

She rested me on the coffee table. The couch cushion sank threateningly low beneath her hips—a sobering reminder that however slim and willowy she looked, she was still a naturally destructive force for one such as I. “I know people, D____, something like a physical artists community, I guess you’d call it.” She pulled out her phone, turned on the widescreen TV, and threw up a YouTube video at it. I watched normal-sized guys doing Parkour, balancing glass spheres, performing visual feats with a deck of cards.

It was all fascinating, but I was doubtful. “Who’s gonna be interested in me? Tiny people are a joke to most people.”

“You could easily be part of this! What would you think about putting on a little show some time?” Her heart-shaped face was alive with enthusiasm, with that infectious smile of hers. “We could rig up little cameras, set up a little…” She paused, looking around the room. “We’re doing this!” She clapped her palms on her knees and bounced where she sat. Before I could ask what it was we were doing, Freda was on her kicks and racing around the house. All I could do was watch the monolithic yet graceful woman scurry and spring from place to place, picking up objects from different rooms. I had no idea what was going on until she returned, panting and grinning. I dodged effortlessly as her huge sneakered foot cleared the coffee table of everything else on it.

In ten minutes, Freda had set up an intriguing little obstacle course. I watched her huge hands flying down from the heavens, slamming objects into place, taping them for stability. She’d throw her head down to the table, one lovely blue eye peering down a cardboard tube for alignment, her long, mahogany hair flopping all around me… smelling of flowers… It would have been very easy to fall under her spell, if she had wanted that at all. And yes, I do have loyalty to my giantess, but that loyalty has been sorely tested the past two months. Three? Has it been that long?

But once the course was set up, it was all I could think about. I basked in her enthusiasm and walked around, checking the ramps, the jumps. She’d propped up two heavy books so I could show off my tiger-palm climb, which she’d wanted to see over and over. I was exhausted, and my voice was beginning to give out due to heavy use after months of disuse, but I hadn’t been this happy in a long time.

Freda opened the camera on her iPhone and filmed me trying out the equipment. “Here’s D____, guys, a very active and handsome little guy.” I glanced up at her, and she winked at me from behind her phone. “Why don’t you show us what you can do, D____?”

I took a deep breath, stretched, and ran into the paper towel tube. It rested at an incline, emptying into a soap dish of red pepper flakes, over which I sprang. I rolled once on landing, crouched, and sprinted over a thick marker that rested unsteadily along a row of pens and pencils. From here I jumped up to grab a sequence of paperclip hanging from a wire dish rack, swinging my way down this tunnel of arching metal rods from one end to the other. Freda’s iPhone was waiting for me at the end, pulling back slowly as I neared her, one merry eye peeking around the glossy white rectangle.

That accomplished, I climbed up a steep ruler to access a kind of latticed platform of table knives supporting each other, resting on glasses. I skipped over their sides easily, doing a brief cannonball into a makeup applicator sponge that bounced me toward the books. I leaped from spine to spine, slapping the leather covers with palms and feet, springing my way up to the top. I saluted her iPhone, rubbed my hands together, and dove into a tall tumbler of water. Nothing daring, but with a forced-perspective treatment it could look fun.

Freda shut off her phone and clapped. “Excellent! That looked great!”

“Really? It didn’t look too simple? I’ve got some ideas for maybe some new tricks to try.”

“But did you like it?”

I beamed at her distorted image through the tumbler wall. “I loved it! That was incredibly fun!”

“I’m glad you had fun with that,” she said quietly, slowly wrapping her long, slender fingers around the glass of water. “And now I’ve got you.” The water sloshed around me as I treaded, the warbly image of the table through the water diminishing, gaining altitude in the living room. Freda’s eyes bore intently upon me as she raised the glass. “All this time,” she murmured, “building up to this moment… just to get you where I wanted you…”

What was she talking about? There were a hundred times she could’ve snatched me off the counter or trapped me under her sneaker! But there was no time to argue as her eyes lifted, her nose rose, and those soft lips parted, exposing two rows of ivory teeth that also parted, and then the thick and writhing tongue in her mouth…

Beyond thought, I gasped and ducked into the water, kicking to the bottom and bracing myself at the base, eyes clenched. There was a resounding crash that shot through my whole body, nearly stunning me, a collision like a boulder ramming into another.

I was still underwater. The water was motionless. Air burning in my lungs, I peeked and saw the tabletop, warped through the sides of the glass. Freda’s palm was missing from the sides, too. Frowning, I let myself surface and breathe, and the young woman’s face was hovering some distance overhead, grinning like an idiot.

“I hope I didn’t scare you too badly,” she said respectfully quietly. “I was just having some fun with you. Was that too much?”

I gestured for her to let me out, and she hooked a finger just above the water where I could reach it. She laid me upon a bed of Kleenex where I patted myself dry. “Really not funny, Freda. I know you meant nothing by it, but I don’t know you well enough. I know you’re one of my giantess’s friends, but…” I sighed, sitting up in damp, clinging black clothes. “Going outside is very dangerous for someone like me, Freda. Some people think my kind are just up for grabs, like we’re not people and we belong to anyone. Other people think it’s hilarious to just step on us as soon as they see us, or take us somewhere and torture us for a long time.”

“I would never!” Freda had visibly paled. She sat back on the couch and covered her mouth with those long and shapely fingers.

“But I don’t know that until it’s too late. My kind, we don’t know who to trust. We can’t just run away from danger like you can. We can’t tote around pepper spray or a small gun.” I scowled at how the damp Kleenex stuck to my limbs. Freda offered to help pick it off, but I warded her off and she respected that. “All we can do is watch a giantess for a long time, study her for clues as to what’s in her heart, and then maybe, after months of this, maybe we can approach her and hope for the best.” At least the tissues rolled off efficiently, and my clothes didn’t take long to dry. “Doesn’t always work out.”

“Is that what you did with C_____? Did you approach her after you figured out she was a good person?”

I looked up at her. She seemed genuinely interested, and genuinely contrite, so I gestured for her palm and had her place me on her knee. I sat there, splay-legged, leaning back on my arms, letting her heat flow into me. “She bought me from a store. I lived in a warren for the first part of my life until a local pet store chain raided us, dug us out, and kidnapped those of us they didn’t accidentally kill on the spot.”

“Oh, my God.” Freda’s eyes were huge and serious, brow furrowed. Her mouth hung open a little. Did she really not know any of this? Were the large people so clueless as to their own world? Quietly she asked, “Did you know anyone who got killed?”

I took a deep breath. “My mother was reading to me at the time. She was showing me some long words in the newspaper, because it was my birthweek and I loved vocabulary, so she was going over how to pronounce dirigisme… I’ll never forget this. I couldn’t get the pronunciation right, so instead of going down to dinner she sat with me and drilled it into me.

“All of a sudden there was a loud hiss, and this steel wall plunged through the ceiling. Their shovel tore my mother in half, right in front of me.” I stared up at her, challenging her. “They laughed about it, the pet store employees. They scooped a bunch of us up, dumped us in a plastic bucket, and laughed about it on the way to their van.” An edge crept into my voice. “Your kind always laughs about it when you kill us. We’re just funny little accidents to you.”

Freda was sobbing now. I felt bad about that, obviously she wasn’t one of those stupid high school employees, but the words just fell out of me. All these words, thoughts, and feelings that have been waiting to come out. And Freda was asking me more than my own giantess ever did.

She reached for me, then held herself back. I nodded at her and waved for her hands to come back down. Very tenderly she cupped me into her palms and apologized for those horrible kids. She brought me up to her face and very carefully brushed me against her soft, warm cheek. She said she didn’t know how to apologize for her society but she did anyway.

I reassured her I didn’t blame her at all. “If I hadn’t been so dense,” I called over to her large ear, shrouded in that warm spill of dark and glossy hair, “if I could l have just learned that fucking word in time…”

She said “oh, no, no, no” and mashed me against her cheek and cried, her voice vibrating through every muscle and organ in me. And I cried into her hot skin, spreading myself flat against her jaw and cheek and cheekbone, lodged securely against gravity by her palm. We carried on like this for a minute or so. I was astonished at how good it felt—among the wreckage of molten, jagged emotions—to let all that out and to be listened to and taken seriously. My whole body felt like one big need for something I hadn’t dreamed was possible in this world. In my world.

We watched some comedy on the widescreen for the next hour or so, cooling down together. She found some cookies in the freezer and broke them up for me, letting me lie on her thigh (chastely distant from her crotch, I feel the need to point out).

“It’s getting late,” she pointed out eventually. “I’ve got to get my dogs and start dinner. Are you going to be okay here?” I reminded her how the fridge worked, and I thanked her at length for the fresh vegetables. “That’s not what I mean. Do you, um,” and she paused, pursing her lips, “want me to stay here? Not to, like, you know. I just mean, do you need someone around?”

I did, I very badly did. But I put on a brave face and convinced her I was fine and sent her home. She said she’d text me tomorrow, and she got her bags, locked the door, and walked around the house to the neighbor’s. Evening was dimming outside.

I ran through the obstacle course a couple more times, slowly, studiously, training my muscles to anticipate every transition and demand. Then I feasted on a grape before picking my way along to my bedroom. I rested on the quilt above where my giantess’s sizable bottom had worn a divot into the mattress, and I found a clean corner of her panties, and I wrapped myself up and stared into the darkness until sleep took me.

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Photo by Taylor on Unsplash