Miranda Muñoz’s footsteps clomped down the stairs, slow and heavy, creaking in the antique house. She knew it was antique because the steps were so narrow. They forced her to turn sideways and kind of do a crab-walk to go up to their bedroom. It was annoying at first but now it was kind of charming, except when it hurt her ankle that one time. She’d heard a lot about awareness and intention and all that New Age crap, so she figured that a tricky environment like this made her more aware of her body and the strange house, constantly in need of upkeep.

She passed through the living room, still full of boxes, and the dining room, circling into the kitchen to put on a kettle for tea. The kitchen had a gas stove and looked antique as hell, which she loved. She kept posting pictures of the oldest features of the house on Instagram, showing off what a cool-ass place she and Bruce had secured. Mainly through her job, since she made twice what her boyfriend did, but he was very useful for maintenance and handiwork. Now, for instance, she went to the patio and stuck her head out the screen door: “How’s it goin’ out there, muscle-man?”

Almost on the other side of the yard, a big, burly blond man paused in digging holes for posts, wiped his brow, and grinned at her. “Making progress, though it doesn’t look like it.” She watched him turn to survey the large backyard. Along with all the old-ass shit of the house came an old-ass yard. It was beautifully large, which Miranda loved, but the garden had been overrun with brambles and weeds, which she would take care of once Bruce was finished unearthing the decrepit fencing and replacing it with an entirely new structure. He had been excited about doing all this himself, despite how labor-intensive it was. Miranda was somewhat less enthused about the garden: while she wanted to learn how to grow food and start a compost heap, she had no experience with this and anticipated many hours of YouTube tutorials to get her on track.

“Looks great, honey!” Her voice rang brightly through the morning air. “You get yourself nice and sweaty, and maybe there’ll be a treat waiting for you upstairs when you’re ready to take a break.” She stuck her rear out the door, waggling it for him. She knew her big, round hips drove him crazy, and her fleece pajama bottoms showed off her curves—and the deep cleft between them—very nicely. She saw him bite his lip and gesture a powerful thrust of his hips at her, across the yard. She blew him a kiss and went back in to start her coffee.

Half of the kitchen was set up: plates and bowls were in the cupboards, mugs were hanging above the sink just like she’d always wanted. But so many appliances, from their combined households, were waiting in large cardboard blocks in pillars that filled the corners. The old-ass refrigerator hummed, occasionally groaned, and held a basic assortment of vegetables in plastic packaging and two cases of beer. Miranda frowned, wanting nothing more than a big bowl of Count Chocula and soy milk, to get snuggly in front of the TV with and watch cartoons like she grew up doing every Saturday. This was her house, now, wasn’t it? She should be able to do that, except the TV wasn’t even hooked up. The internet guy would be coming by later this afternoon to hook them up, so if she wanted to watch anything, it would have to be on her stupid phone with its stupid tiny screen. Pouting, she scooped grounds into the coffee maker and stumped off to the living room, clearing boxes off the couch to park herself there.

She was halfway through an episode of She-Ra when she heard a gentle knock at the front door… gentle, or timid. Frowning, she paused her phone and rested her cereal on a box marked “albums” and padded out to the front porch, only mildly self-conscious of still being in her sleeping clothes. She hoped it wasn’t Jehovah’s Witnesses. Could it be the internet guy already?

It was neither: it was a lean, handsome man with moppy brunet hair and running clothes, a loose shirt hanging around a lean torso and sprayed-on shorts that showed off strong thighs and what she knew would be a tight little butt. This was a friend of hers. “Ricky, what the fuck’re you doing in this part of town?” She laughed and flung her arms open; he stepped into the house and wrapped his arms nearly twice around her. Ricky was also her ex-boyfriend.

“Just going out for a run, a bigger loop than I usually do. Getting ready for the 5K in two weeks.” He let her go, panting, and looked around at the moving boxes. “I realized where I was and remembered your new place, thought I’d stop by and say hi.”

“Well, hi,” she said, pulling his head down to plant her full lips upon his mouth. Startled, he failed to resist: her lips pulsed against his, and then his pressed back and his palms lit upon her shoulders, when suddenly she pushed him back. “I’m sorry, that was… I could never resist you in your workout clothes. Fuck you, showing up all hot like this.” She sucked in her breath and clenched her fists, giving him a long and slow once-over. “Goddamn it, man. Come on in, I‌ guess.” She spun on her bare heel and led him into the dining room, knowing the sway of her ass was enough to lead him wherever she wanted. She turned and silently signaled for him to not follow him further, slipping into the kitchen.

---

Ricky Welch let out a lot of pent-up energy in a stream of air through pursed lips. He’d been making good time on the morning’s run, but his route led him closer and closer to Miranda’s new place, and he had to see it. And once he saw it, he just had to knock on the door, knowing there was a chance Bruce would open it. He had no beef with Bruce Wood, a decent guy in his own right, if a little meaty in the skull. Ricky had fucked around with other women while dating Miranda and lost her fair and square. She deserved a nice, solid, boring guy like Bruce: his lack of imagination meant he’d be endlessly faithful to her. Still, Ricky couldn’t resist the allure of the one that got away, especially when she was built like that. Did she know her pajama bottoms were creeping up between her cheeks? He ran his fingers through his sweaty hair and found himself staring at himself in a mirror. The dining room had a built-in hutch, like all these older places, with a mirror in the back.

He knew he looked good. He liked to be lean and fit for fucking so many delicious women. And perhaps it was no coincidence that he remembered how Miranda loved the way his shirts draped off his shoulders, when he got geared up for running today. He laughed at himself and checked out the dining room. It was sparse with boxes in the corners, marked with their contents. It seemed all they’d done in here was set out bottles of booze in the hutch and assemble a large, oak dining table, a beautiful monument of Canadian orange oak. In the center of it, next to an orange power drill was a glass bowl with spilling, flowing sides like an orchid, filled with little hard candies, only most of which were wrapped.

Ricky picked up one of the unwrapped ones and held it up to the sunlight, streaming in through wide portrait windows. It glowed with an enticing raspberry light, muted with frosted sugar. Was it safe to eat unwrapped candy like this? He laughed at himself, as though Miranda and Bruce would set out dosed candy for themselves. He popped it in his mouth, sugar and citrus melting readily over his tongue, and the room exploded. The ceiling raced off into the heavens and the table shot past him, clipping his shoulder. He cried out in pain and sprawled upon the hardwood floor.

Miranda, through the window above the kitchen sink, called out to her future husband: “Hey sweetie, I’m going upstairs to take some time to myself. A long bath, if you don’t mind. You good out there?” His distant voice assured her he had his hands full, what with the cement mixing and setting the new posts. “All right,” she yelled, “then don’t bother me! I’m-a be up there with candles and podcasts and shit, just relaxing.” She shut the window on his laughter.

“And as for you,” she started, sashaying into the dining room, but there it stopped. Mid-sashay she froze, looking around the empty room. “Ricky?” Her voice bounced between the empty rooms. She hadn’t heard any clomping footsteps up the old-ass stairway, and it was likely he couldn’t identify the hidden door that led to the basement. Did he take off already? Slowly she padded through the dining room to the living room.

When the gigantic woman burst into the room, Ricky stared up at her in awe. There was no way any living being since the brontosaurus could be that huge. Maybe a blue whale, but the new Wood/Muñoz household was no place for the largest aquatic mammal. As his mind grappled with the proportions of the immense, striding giantess that raced at him, some small parts of processing apprehended the long, raven tresses that flowed around her heart-shaped face, and the flowers and bees sprinkled over her pink fleece pajama bottoms. Holy fuck, he realized, this looked a lot like Miranda, except for the fact that she was taller than the skyscrapers downtown. Ricky staggered to his feet, stumbled over the seam between one board in the floor and the next, and then one of Miranda’s soles hovered directly over him.

Time slowed down. His blood chilled. He looked up at the fragments of dust and particulate that coated the ball of her foot, how the ridges and whorls spun in an enticing pattern, interrupted by fragments of cardboard box, speckles of food, and the itinerant scraggly hair. Her darling toes, normally pink little pearls that begged for sucking, spread in long limbs over his range of sight, preceding the sheer crushing force of her wide bare foot. He could shriek, he could throw up his arms, but his basal neurology took command and threw his body gracelessly to the side. He watched as Miranda’s immense foot collided with the hardwood floor, the suggestion of the internal bones spreading and relaxing, cushioning the impact of her sheer tonnage; how the sole of her foot spread and blossomed, meat and flesh diffusing the force of her gigantic body in efficient seconds. All that poundage, all that immense bone and meat descending from the heavens in the spot where he’d been standing seconds before…

“That prick,” Miranda said, walking to the porch. “Did he just take the fuck off? I‌ told him to wait right here. He couldn’t wait for five goddamned seconds?” There was no one on the sidewalk for the entire block, looking up and down it, except an old man with two angry little dogs. She wanted to call out for him, except she didn’t know if Bruce would hear her. Bruce, her boyfriend. It was wrong, she knew, to make out with her ex with her boyfriend right in the backyard. Goddamn it! She folded her arms angrily, pushing her breasts up and making her shirt stretch: it felt empowering, sometimes, to see how sexy she could be. It was Ricky’s loss, then, and if he ever tried to come back and act all cool around her again, seducing her the way she liked, then he could just fuck off. She brushed the soles of her feet off on her pant legs and went back inside.

When his heart slowed down from pounding so hard, Ricky looked around. What he saw was impossible: gigantic table legs rising like a forest, polished wood floor stretching all around for yards and yards, the built-in hutch stretching up like a cathedral, to say nothing of Miranda’s adorable feet blown up to the size of SUVs. What the fuck did it all mean? He watched his ex’s bare heels lift and swing away as she stomped off to another room, after having nearly flattened him like a can of soda.

That couldn’t happen again. He had to gain higher ground and make sense of things. The table legs had plenty of lathed loops and curls to grab onto, but they led straight up to the flat plane of the table, with no way to crawl over to the surface. What, then? Beyond the table were long drapes, glowing in the late morning sun. Easy to grab onto, but too far from the table to help. He could climb them and flag Miranda down, maybe, but what if she didn’t notice him?

Lost in thought, he walked backward and gawked all around him, until his heels struck something solid. Like a lever his body swung sharply down, and he only protected his head at the last second. “What the fuck,”‌ he growled, looking at what tripped him up. His legs hung over a thick, orange cable that ended in a chunky black plug and ran up, up, up into the sky. His heart leaped: the power drill! He grabbed the cord and began shimmying up its length. The rubber sheath was more than helpful in providing some grip, and Ricky had kept himself in shape, so in no time at all he’d reached the tabletop. In fact, no sooner had he thrown himself to the wood grain surface than he heard rolling thunder in the next room.

The giantess came up swiftly, her face glowering darkly. He was nowhere near eye level, but he came up to just below her waist, and he had to make that count. “Miranda! Hey, Miranda! Down here, look at me!” He jumped around and waved his arms, but she took no notice. Instead, the massive woman turned toward the mirror and seemed to adjust her boobs beneath her large black T-shirt. “What the fuck? Knock that off and help me!” Ricky glanced at the power tool. It was far too large to lift, but there was a chance he could trigger it and get it to run for a second. That’d get her attention… except it wasn’t plugged in, duh.

On the other hand, now her huge ass practically thrust itself at him. The fleece bottoms fit snugly in her crack, emphasizing the two beautiful spheres that hovered in front of him. Ricky’s jaw dropped, taking in how much larger they were now. Oh, he missed her sitting on his face with that cute butt, but now… yeah, if she tried that now, he could disappear between them.

And would that be such a bad thing? He smiled, estimating the distance between the edge of the table and Miranda’s butt. It looked pretty far, but he could get a good running start, and then he was lighter than usual, that could work in his favor. He bit his lip, wanting so badly to leap onto her butt, but not liking the risk of falling back to the floor again.

Would it help to climb into the bowl and start tossing candies to the ground? Would she hear that?

Ricky and Miranda both glanced at the kitchen door when the clomp of heavy boots resounded through the floors. Bruce called out, “Hey, honey, making good progress out there. Think I’m ready to start mounting some beams to the posts I did yesterday. My drill in there?”

Miranda looked over her shoulder at the drill and put on a coy little smile as she backed her butt against the table, lining the thick cord down her crack. “I don’t know, what’s it look like?” she called back.

At the same time, Ricky flinched from the drill. The table was too wide to cross, and the thought of hiding behind the candy dish never occurred to him. Instead, he watched the immense hemispheres of his ex’s butt float toward him like a beautiful, deadly planet. He watched those round buttocks close in on the thick utility cord, watched them bulge over the table’s edge. He spied the wall of her tan skin as her pants tugged down and her shirt flared overhead. Beyond thought, he sprinted at her, leaped, and wrapped his arms around her thick waistband.

“Ah ha ha, you little smartass,”‌ he heard Bruce say. He grimaced, listening to kissing noises and gentle moans. A gigantic, muscular hand reached around the giantess’s waist, and powerful fingers wrapped around the black textured grip of the power drill. An index finger the size of a body pillow flexed the trigger—“It’s not connected to anything, you gigantic oaf,” Ricky wanted to shout—and the enormous mechanism simply lifted away and disappeared behind Miranda. “Maybe when I’m done outside, there’s some drilling to do in the bedroom.” The giant’s voice was throaty and dry, laughing discordantly with Miranda’s mellifluous giggles.

“Drill me hard, daddy,”‌ she said. Ricky sneered and looked away. There wasn’t much for him to look away toward, however, but he realized that the pajama bottoms were sagging. And he realized she wasn’t wearing any underwear. And he realized how close he’d landed to the shadowy cleft where her butt crack started, and a smile crept across his face. He loved Miranda’s ass when they were together, nice and big and full, but now it was large enough for him to move into and rent.

---

After a few more sickening exchanges, Bruce’s heavy boots tromped on out of the house. Miranda watched him go, admiring how his calves churned beneath his cargo shorts. She sucked in her breath and clenched her fists. “Goddamn it, Ricky had me all worked up. That could’ve been a hell of a housewarming: making out with my ex, then getting my brains fucked out by my boyfriend. Living my best life,” she muttered, bending over to stare at herself in the mirror some more. She straightened her hair, then grinned to see her boobs swinging through the loose collar of her shirt, when she felt something scratchy brush against her pelvis, right above her butt. And then it went in!

Yelping, Miranda spun around and swatted at her backside, but there was nothing to brush off her pants. She did a panicked dance, struggling to hike her pajama bottoms down. Her fingertips swept over her butt, then anxiously picked between them, hoping to God there wasn’t a bug in there or something. That’d be a lucky bug, she thought distantly, or Ricky would’ve thought so. Him and those fucked-up fantasies.

Her eyes went huge as her thumb and forefinger happened to clamp down on something. She screamed and yanked it out and hopped away from the table. “Holy fuck! Holy fuck! Goddamn it! What was that?” If it was a bug, she did not want to be confronted with it, whether it was pissed off at its treatment or she’d only dislodged half of it, the other half waiting to be extracted. She groaned with disgust and scanned the room for any sign of it.

Beside the candy dish, a large, dark bug flailed. Its limbs swam slowly through the air. It was likely damaged, but it could recover any moment. She stifled a scream and seized the glass bowl, holding it over her head.

She got a good look at the bug. It only had four pale limbs sprouting from a dark body. One of these raised up at her, and very faintly she heard a high, tiny voice peal “Miranda, don’t!”

Thoughts flooded her head. She lowered the candy bowl and peered inside it. There were only three tablets lying among the wrapped candies now, instead of four. “Oh, shit,” she whispered, setting the bowl carefully aside. She leaned over the sickly bug, brushing her thick, black hair behind one ear, and realized her idiot ex-boyfriend hadn’t gone anywhere.