Second day of my giantess having left. I’m better today. I’ll be better going forward, I’m sure. I had a bit of an emotional outburst last night, you know, once the reality hit.

Nothing like a huge piece of your life disappearing, to show you all the other gaps and lacks in your life. When you’re only four inches tall, the basket into which you pile all your eggs is itself not very large. Hah. One egg will fill it.

I can start with getting back into hobbies. My giantess left me with plenty of food, lots of threads taped to any tables or counters I’ll need to access. Really, I should look at this as retirement rather than empty-nest syndrome.

So much time on my hands…

Calligraphy’s in order. I requested a stack of miniature blank books (thank Goddess for hobby boutiques), and I can just manage the ink cartridge of a 0.25mm Slicci, with the last two-thirds of it snipped off. The extremely fine pens have more things that can go wrong with them: in this picture you can see the ink going away as I wrote with the black ink pen. Actually the ball in the tip became jammed and won’t spin to take up more ink. I broke a fingernail trying to loosen it, before resigning myself to a more colorful hue of ink. Whatever. One does what one can with what one has.

Light enough to haul around, strong enough to haul me up.

It sounds strange, I know, for a tiny person to have become entirely reliant upon a giantess. For one, what are the odds I could find someone so gentle and understanding? I lucked out there. After that, what could I possibly have to offer her? All normal guys are over 100′ tall to me. They can drive, they can reach things on tall shelves (or any shelf), they can give substantial hugs. What do I have to offer?

She said she liked my conversation. She said we talked about things normal-sized guys never asked about, never thought about. I find it hard to believe that alone offset my endless needs, like chopping food up finely or orchestrating clever bathroom facilities, but who can know the mind of a giantess? Certainly not me.

The house is awfully quiet now. The power’s been cut, because why pay for electricity for an entire house if no one’s there? Not “no one”, but at my height and with my needs, I hardly count as a person. The only concern was the fridge, but I can’t open the door so it will retain cold long enough. My grappling hook will carry me up to a small opening we drilled at the top of the fridge, insulated plastic flaps to keep out the warm air, and then I can rappel down to the food in storage. Cold sinks, you see, so we didn’t want my portal at the bottom or all the cold air would flow out like invisible water and the perishables would perish. This way, I can eat whatever’s in there for a couple weeks, and then I switch to dry rations. There really was no elegant solution for opening cans, so… jerky and cereal it is.

No stereo, like she used to leave on when she went to work. I can hear traffic outside, just the intermittent car in this sleepy neighborhood. I can hear a single branch brushing against the siding on windy days. There’s a dog a house or two over: the story I tell myself is that he’s an intelligent mutt who only barks when there’s real need. Not one of those horrible collector’s dogs, a teacup chihuahua or whatever, just yipping endlessly due to a chromosome failure.

Once in a while I can hear the neighbors to the north of us… of me. They were yelling the other night, the girl was really screaming, but then I remembered they’re sports fans. They were having a good time, getting emotional and whooping it up. Probably hugging each other at each score. Something I could never do with my giantess. We tried to watch an exciting show together once, she nearly crushed me under her hip. Sitting in her lap, I still bounced around and got thrown a couple times. So we decided we couldn’t watch certain shows, she just got too excitable. We watched dramas and documentaries together. I felt bad because we both love comedies, but she gets uproarious…

We’re still in the warm season, so the nights won’t be too bad. She was knitting washcloths for a while, I use them as quilts. There’s one in every room where we hang out. Used to. I still do, just…

Her scent is everywhere. I couldn’t sleep in our bed last night because the pillow was full of her shampoo and whatever product she uses, and the mattress was just full of her. The bodily oils that wick away into the sheets, the sweat on hot nights, the dead skin cells. I laid on her side of the bed, where her heavy and huge body has been wearing a divot into the mattress. If it had been a little warmer, I could’ve believed I was curling up in the small of her back, so redolent was my landscape with her aroma.

I cried for about half an hour, until my muscles couldn’t take it anymore. Slowly, slowly pulled my shit together, dragged myself off the mattress, and trudged out of the bedroom for good. I can’t be in there. I can’t do it.

She’s still everywhere. I went to the bathroom, and I could almost see her huge bare feet padding across the white tile and grout around me, see the way the nail on her big toe rolls when she reaches over me for the floss. Down the hallway, I can almost feel the air move when her calves used to pass over me and her hips would go rolling away like a fleeting dream. One quick flash of a grin at me, yards and yards overhead, before she turned the corner.

The kitchen, at least, smells like everything else. Spices, compost, dish soap, charred whatever in the base of the oven. She dominated the kitchen, that was her domain exclusively, but I was rarely in there when she was (one incident with a gas blockage in a burner was enough for both of us) so… I can do what I have to in there without too much heartbreak.

It would’ve been easier if she could have explained the fact of me to one of her friends, but you’ve got to have really understanding friends for that. In her group, she was the empathetic, understanding one. The others… one was a man-hater, so she’s out; one was artistic and flighty, we couldn’t trust her to be responsible for me; another just loved to drink too much and cause trouble. Untenable. One of them might’ve worked, she was curious and understanding, but she insisted on bringing her goddamned barky dogs with her everywhere she went. Wasn’t worth the gamble. Instead, we rigged up this system of ropes and food storage, which should get me through the first month.

She’ll be back. I just have to survive long enough to wait for her.

I just have to recall how I lived without her.

We have so many useless conventions of speech in English. It just struck me the other day. Like in the office, when someone greets you with “how’s it going?”, they don’t really want to know. It’s just more civilized than a grunt, less paranoid than “I see you, I’ll fight back if you try to kill me.” Or when you’re paying for groceries with a credit card and the clerk hands you the merchant copy of the receipt and says, “If you could sign.” And that’s it. It’s an IF/THEN statement, but there’s no “then,” like “then I’d be really happy” or “…then that would fulfill my purpose in this store.” Does she even think about what she’s saying?

But it’s true, we just make noises at each other, in the guise of other words that have been bled of their meaning. Handing linguistic carcasses back and forth in the name of polite society. Isn’t that strange? Does anyone else ever think about these things?

Take, for example, the text message I received from my giantess two weeks ago, where she announces she has to be gone for another month. That was a surprise: hearing her personal smartphone go off on the end table in the living room (she brought the nicer one that her office supplied her). I scrambled up the loveseat to find that the phone, left plugged in, was now fully charged. She said she called to have power restored since she wouldn’t be home and hoped I was okay. She told me that she couldn’t come home but didn’t express why she couldn’t come home. And I asked, believe me.

Right before she signed off she tacked on a “I hope you understand,” which isn’t a question and doesn’t invite a response. What if I didn’t understand? Would she fly home and return to me? Of course not, so why bother with this feint at politeness? We both know what it means.

Pardon me. I’ve grown bitter over the past six weeks. All in all I’m doing well, even a little surprised at myself for how well I’ve adjusted and survived in this place.

I’m sitting on a coaster on a glass-topped end table by a loveseat, in our living room. I’m writing this out with a thin graphite rod, ordinarily used to refill a mechanical pencil. Not that she left the refills out for me: I spent all of the last Sunday in October laboriously disassembling my giantess’s favorite crossword pencil. She won’t mind, I hardly use any of it, and my handwriting on this Post-It note is too small for her to scry without significant optical augmentation. These are really good leads, I like them.

Life here is lonely, even with a staggeringly enormous playground for me to explore. That is, I know the whole layout, but there’s also adventure lurking around every corner and new opportunities with my portal to the world (i.e., smartphone), now that I have electricity. When I got sick to death of learning elementary German and French and couldn’t take another iTunes University seminar on ethics, I looked up some YouTube videos on Parkour. I’ve been practicing on the carpet so I don’t break any “spindly little limbs,” as she called them. What I lack in velocity I make up for in lacking mass, so I can still throw myself around in some gravity-defying displays, I think. I can tiger-palm my way up the sectional now, which takes a fraction of the time it would to climb it. She’ll probably think it looks adorable when I get to show her…

Ugh, I hate thinking like that. I’m doing this for me, for my survival, not for my owner’s passing amusement.

…I hate thinking like that. I love her, I don’t hate her. This is just an inconvenience.

The food’s holding out. That was the second thing that flashed through my mind when she said she wasn’t coming home on schedule. But it’s a really good fridge and I’ve followed the order of when food’s likely to decay. The lettuce and celery are no good, so I’ve reverted to the sheets of nori on the counter; the chicken has gone off, so I opened the dried Genoa salami and the jerky, which is actually a nice little treat. I’m sure I don’t need the sodium, but maybe someone should’ve thought of that before abandoning a helpless dependent in a ludicrously over-sized environment.

I hate thinking like that, too. My giantess had a very good reason for taking off and not bringing me with her, and she must’ve had a good reason to extend her hiatus. I have to trust in that. If she really didn’t care about me, she could’ve just dropped me off with the neighbor’s dog.

My waste goes down the kitchen sink drain now. When it starts to smell, I run by the motion sensor and flush it away. Convenient. All the strings running up to all the counters have remained intact and I have full mobility everywhere. Thanks to three weeks of Parkour, I’ve extended my leaping ability considerably and can almost work my way fully around the kitchen without touching the ground. A little more self-reliant all the time.

I can sleep anywhere I like. I’ve long-ago lost that hysterical melodrama around our bedroom, and not only can I set foot in there, I can even climb up and sleep on her pillow. She very thoughtfully left me a pair of her panties, worn once, beside a nice photo of herself. An “action shot,” if you will, a forced-perspective shot she took on her phone and printed out in color for me. Like I don’t get that perspective enough: if she would’ve held the phone overhead and smiled up at it, that would’ve been a refreshing twist. …But I’m grateful. It’s easy to be cranky and resentful, but I have to step back and look at all she’s done for me. Oh, we’re going to have a long talk when she gets back, let that be clear, but I hope I’m not just a bundle of expectations.

And she has no right to be mad about what I’ve done to her underwear. No right.

Yeah, she texted me a week ago on Thanksgiving, simultaneously apologizing for not being with me for the holiday and announcing she’d be gone through December. Allowing myself to freak out a little, I pulled myself together and talked logistics with her. Let the record show it was her idea, not mine, that she have one of her friends stop by and check on me, at least drop off some groceries. I said I’d think about it.

It’s down to her artistic friend or the mature, smarter one with the annoying little dogs. If they spotted me up on the counter, they’d never stop yapping their heads off. My giantess figured her friend could probably drop them off with the neighbors for about $20, a kind of doggy play-date. And then, what, she or the artist would just hang out with me for the afternoon. Goddamn it, it’d be nice to see another living person.

I mean, I do chat with people. I found a size-fetish chat group, and I can Skype with them on my smartphone entertainment/education center. If I sit close enough to the camera to look like a regular-sized person, the camera won’t focus, but even when I sit back and people see how small I am, they think I’m faking it somehow. So that’s fine, but the conversations are very limited and they’re entirely online anyway. I’m not about to invite any of them over to my home, so… maybe one of her friends is the way to go. The drunk’s out, the embittered misandrist’s out…

Even if she just sat and watched TV the whole time, just to feel someone else here in this apartment, to hear the floors and walls echo with movement, that’d be something. Now, if I hear a noise, it’s either the house settling or something happening outside, and that’s not relaxing at all. Hearing a giantess thumping around in another room, that would be comforting.

I wonder if she’d stay the night. I don’t have to sleep in the bedroom, I can camp out in the living room, but… just knowing someone was here all night long, someone who could start up coffee in the morning… Would she even want to talk to me? I’ve seen her friends from a distance, hidden in a pocket or peeking over her shoulder at her phone. They seem nice. They know I’m her boyfriend, or that she has a boyfriend, but I don’t think she’s explained to them that I’m only as tall as their ankles and as frail as… well, just really frail.

Well, hell. If my giantess is going to be gone until the New Year, maybe I’ll take her up on that. Maybe each of them could come over, two whole visits for the month of December. That’s two more than last month.

I’d love to challenge the universe with an ironic declaration, “What could possibly go wrong?”, but I just don’t have the energy right now.

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.

I woke up and the house was chilly. I really didn’t want to leave the nice, warm spot on my bed. I was wrapped up in C____’s panties and dreaming of her, and when I sat up and hit the cool air I didn’t want to leave any of it.

But I sensed something was up. You can just sense these things. It’s like waking up and all the sound is a little louder, all the clocks are a little fast, the walls are a little closer than before, and more people than usual on the street are noticing you. That’s what it’s like when your personal bomb is about to drop.

Being unable to flick the light switches on and off, I had to trot downstairs and look around. Daylight streamed through the windows, lighting up all the rooms. But when I hooked a right into the kitchen, no warm exhaust air blew from under the fridge. It wasn’t humming. I looked around: the digital clocks on the oven and microwave were blocked from my view, and the wall clock in the kitchen runs on batteries.

I sprinted to the living room and climbed up my end table, my base of operations, my yoga studio, all of it. The smartphone was down to 32% power, having wasted most of its energy searching for Wi-Fi all night. That meant the router was down, and I saw that the phone was no longer charging, despite being plugged in.

I couldn’t even form the thought that the grid might have gone down, interrupted by the fact of one incoming, unread text message. My stomach dropped before I opened it.

Long story, short: things had changed. She was furious and frustrated but it was all out of her hands, and her heart was breaking but I’m on my own now. Her agent would sell the house, fully furnished. Minus one tiny  man.

She also talked about our relationship, but I have no need to share any of that here, except to say, to admit that I do see things from her side. If I’m completely honest, caretaking a tiny person isn’t a convenience. More like an exquisite burden. I get that. And I’ve done things to move the needle from exquisite to burden. And that’s as much as I need to say on that here.

Personal possessions: well, I don’t need the phone. It’s larger than me, I’d never be able to bring it anywhere. I took my time going back upstairs to stuff my wardrobe into one of her tennis socks. And that’s about it for personal possessions. I did not keep C____’s panties, and I didn’t bother to hide her compromising photo on the bed. Merry belated Christmas, real estate agent.

By the time I got downstairs, I realized how stupid it would be to haul a fucking sock around town. I tied the sleeves of one shirt and stuffed it with my clothes, and I looked around the house one more time. The agent would have to make sense on their own of what all the little threads on the furniture in the kitchen meant, and what was going on with the elaborate obstacle course model on the coffee table. I thought about going back for some jerky, but there’s plenty of food outside for someone who knows where to look. I used to, I’m sure I can figure it out again.

What I couldn’t figure out was how to get out of the house. All the windows were sealed, the front door was relatively new and secure against the elements, and I didn’t know where the vents led but I was sure they didn’t dump outdoors. In the end, all I could do was set up a little base camp of a bed and preserved foods by the front door, waiting for the real estate agent to show up, which she did in three days.

The lock beeped and woke me up when I happened to be dozing. The massive door sucked air as it swung on its hinges, and when the agent’s beige pumps stepped inside, when her large, soft feet compressed in that tight leather right next to me… well, there was a moment when I considered approaching her, convincing her very rapidly to…

No. I didn’t. I just grabbed my clothes and hustled out the door into the sunshine. The enormous door closed behind me, I checked for small animals before sprinting into the tall grass of the yard, and we all know where this story goes.

The torn steel bit into the flesh, no problem, and I shoved the pole behind it with all my strength. I jiggled the pole, waggled it back out, stabbed again. This, over and over until I could wedge my hands into the incisions, meeting at the apex of the wedge of meat I’d carved. Fluids ran up my arms and plastered my shirt to my chest. I planted my knees on either side of the gouge, flexed my shoulders, grit my teeth and put every tiny muscle my body to the task of dislodging the meat, representing all I’d need for the day.

My fingers sank into it. I growled, and my grip firmed. After much tearing and crackling, my prize snapped out and I tumbled to my back, buried in tall grass. This, yes, this was what life was all about! My arms, thighs, and back all burned pleasantly as I gasped the sweet air and the juices trickled over me in tribute.

That is how you eat an apple. It’s all in your attitude.

I sat in my neighbor’s lawn, entirely covered in blades of slender foliage because he’s a lazy ass who never mows, leisurely breaking off chunks of apple flesh and truly savoring its crispiness. This was not an awful summer, all things considered. All my old skills came rushing back to me: the camoflage, the snares, and I added to my toolbox with an incredibly useful Parkour regimen. And it seems awfully convenient to mention now, but my ex-girlfriend did have a membership to a self-tutelage online school, and one of the classes I took happened to be about foraging in neighborhoods. It was headed by a bearded ginger hipster in a stocking cap and a girl’s t-shirt, intended for less-than-ethical eatery chefs operating on the cheap, but the information was solid. For the past month I’ve been feasting on grasses, so-called weeds, a wild raspberry bush here and a hobby garden there. My needs are few and my thievery is negligible.

Have there been entanglements? Yes, there have. Gray squirrels will leave me alone, but there are these bastard black squirrels that can be vicious and territorial. It’s far easier to keep a constant eye and ear out for those assholes than to try and fend one off. I did, once, but it took all my wits, every last ounce of strength, more luck than I’m entitled to, and it cost me a finger. But I’m alive. I lost a shirt, converting it to bandages for this incident and in anticipation of others, but I’m alive. I had to wait for a homeless dude to pass out, then wade through his urine to gain access to his fifth of vodka and wash out the wound, but I’m alive.

I lean on that phrase a lot, quite heavily. I use it to justify nearly everything and motivate myself to do worse. This isn’t a world for tiny little guys like me. I think my stint in my ex-girlfriend’s house hammered that fact repeatedly home. So, to counterbalance this ubiquitous bias against my very existence, I have that three-word mantra.

Not that I really see the point to remaining alive. What have I got to live for? What do I hope to achieve? Yet here’s this goddamned biological imperative keeping me walking, keeping me fighting, keeping me scavenging for supplies for…

Ah, yes. There’s that. I had to construct a shelter. The first one, a nice little lean-to made of bark and leaves, that was laughingly kicked over by the first child who spotted it. And it didn’t matter if I built another one deeper into the grove of trees or under a bush: children are curious, self-unconscious little devils who notice way too much and have nearly no fear of wedging themselves into things, under things, if they think there’s something interesting to look at. So more than black squirrels or dogs, I have to make sure my shelter is childproof.

That’s when you go underground. Kids want to explore anything they can see, but they’re not very clever, so a piece of trash or a large leaf is enough to hide the entrance to your tunnel. Not that I dug a tunnel. No, I hauled some scrap metal down into a pocket gopher’s tunnel and blocked off as much as I felt I needed. You know, right at the branch, so they could still move around, just relying on an alternate route. I sealed my exit off with the pointy bits, reinforced it with mud and bark, then spent a couple days expanding my chamber.

Once I had a hidey-hole where I could take a breather, then time was on my side. My neighbor, the lazy-ass who doesn’t mow? I know I’ve mentioned his yappy dog before. Well, he likes to groom the mutt outside, which is reasonable, and it only took me an hour to sneak over, bundle up some tufts of discarded fur, sneak on back when the coast was clear, and fix this around the entrance to my tunnel as an olfactory deterrent to any other pocket gophers with any sense of entitlement.

The rest is trivial: large, flat materials to shore up the walls and ceiling; plastic bags for waterproofing anything that needs it; any discarded container or cap for food stores. After a solid week of hard labor, I was practically on vacation! All my needs met, a secure shelter, what else was there?

That is how you cope with abandonment and rejection by the one you loved, the goddess upon whom your entire world centered. It’s all in your attitude.

Mmm, delicious apple.

Spider, huh? I’ve dealt with his kind before.

I backpedaled carefully, lifting my heels with a slight exaggeration. The last thing I needed was to trip and land on my ass, helpless before the approaching spider. These bastards find my little hidey-hole and think they’ll just move in. Nuh-uh, not after all the effort I put into this lair.

And this guy, I don’t want to hurt him: he’s great against wasps, and I have a hard time with wasps. I’d love him for a neighbor, except this species is awfully aggressive. Our paths can’t cross, and I’ve got to be constantly out and about, looking for food and scraps and resources.

So he was about to charge at me…

And I dodged to the side, into a tiny chute marked with a birch twig. No, there aren’t many birch around here, but I needed something distinctive to mark this tiny little hole. It was a tight squeeze for me to shimmy into, and it took a lot of effort for me to get over my shrieking fear of tight places and being buried alive, but you do whatever it takes. I mean, either you give up and let a bastard like this gnaw on you, or you find clever ways to make it to the next day.

For instance, I listened for a moment to that large bastard scrabbling at the dirt around the hole. He was too chunky to fit in, himself, so he attempted digging. And while he did that, I crawled on my belly and hooked around to this little chamber. There’s no light in there, but I groped around and found that metal bar. It came off of some kind of tin can, a long thin strip that I was able to bend into shape, burying it beneath the floor of the tunnel that leads to my cellar/living room, attaching it to the lid of the can. So when I flipped it up, the spider found a solid metal wall arisen from the floor, sealing him (or her, I don’t know) off from the rest of my network. And he could have hung out there, with two inches of shade to his name, or…

Yes, there you go, buddy. Good luck elsewhere.

I reset my trap door and crawled my way back to my little room. My muscles ached very nicely. I brushed the soil off my arms and looked at them: yes, living on the edge of someone else’s property all this time has done wonders for my BMI.

Not that I’m about to express any gratitude for the giantess who abandoned me. Not after−

No. Actually, I’ve been trying to push C____ out of my mind. It does no good to dwell on my former living arrangement, and her deal was so wrapped up with so many mysteries, it’s not worth meditating on. Hell, for all I know, I ended up with a psychopath and got out all right. I could’ve been… No. I can’t give that any energy. C____’s dead to me, and I’m the captain of my ship.

I plonked my tight little butt in a bright yellow plastic chair I hauled down here a month ago. That was a great find: I really don’t like to cast about too widely, but I’m starting to realize how oblivious Southern Californians really are. I swear, a teenager looked dead at me two weeks ago and was completely unfazed. No reaction at all, just kept on walking, rapping aloud to whatever he was listening to. Fine with me. So yeah, I found this chair, scuffed the back two corners of it pretty badly as I dragged it a full block from where some little kid had left it outside, and had to widen my little dugout a little more to accommodate it, but now I have a freakin’ me-sized chair in here. A couple swatches of fabric for cushions and the thing’s nearly civilized.

Kicked my feet up on a stack of bottle caps, held together with gum. Glanced over at a portrait of an attractive women I laboriously tore out of a magazine and stuck up on the wall. Did the old “dying battery and LED” trick, giving me enough light once my eyes lose the sun-dazzle from my above-ground adventures. I found a small fragment of carpet, actually, just large enough to cover the bottom of this little chamber, but thought twice about introducing it: the last thing I need is tiny-black-lung from a mildewed carpet.

The Hilton it ain’t, but it’s shaping up.

This is just the room where I kick back and relax, because it’s important to do that. I tried an all-purpose chamber where I eat, sleep, plot, store, all that crap, but that’s no good. One of the things I studied during the long days alone at C____’s place was feng shui. You may see that as a load of mystical crap, but actually I thought the placement and function of items was handily analogous to the condition of one’s mind. You can see this on the basic level: a cluttered house either leads to or is indicative of a cluttered mind. So many artists and writers insisted they had to clean up at least their creative space before doing anything useful, and I think that was getting their minds in order, sure. So I’ve got this room for relaxing and attempting to capitalize upon my meager creature comforts. Down the tunnel is my resources chamber, some plastic baggies I cleaned out and can store food in. It’s all perishable, anything I have access to is perishable, but some things last longer than others, so I’ve got my “must eat NOW” bag and my “you’ve got a week” bag.

Down the hall from that is my bedroom. And because no one’s here and no one can listen to me, as I run through these thoughts in the privacy of my tiny skull, I’ll go ahead and admit that I padded them with C’s panties.

I ran back to that fucking bungalow, yes. It’s right across the street, staring at me every day. I knew the inside much better than the outside, but now I’m very familiar with that sloping facade. I watched the new people move in, a giddy young couple who I have to guess were recently married and this was their first home. Sure as shootin’, they didn’t pay for it themselves, but it’s a nest for the lovebirds. I watched them haul their stuff in, and I watched another crew trundling C____’s possessions out. Seven over-sized boxes that presumably held the most expensive stuff, and then a couple large bags of anything that couldn’t be sold, donated, or foisted off on the lovebirds.

Under cover of night I sprinted across the street and tore a hole through the bags, which the agents had just set on the curb. Lazy palookas. Seeing as it wasn’t due to be collected for three days, I went ahead and camped out in there for two. They just dumped all the food in there with what looked like C____’s oldest clothing. I couldn’t get at any of the good stuff in glass jars, sealed tight, but an hour of steadfast burrowing and climbing over detritus yielded a packet of almonds she brought home from a flight and stuck in the fridge for no good reason. Energy-dense stuff like that gets hauled to my little burrow, where I can worry it apart at my leisure. Just look at these forearms: these are almond-smashing arms, baby.

But I was poking around and my head was swaddled in an all-too-familiar smell. Above the hot plastic bags, above the rotting pizza, and deeply entwined in a twist of fate, I found my face mashed into C____’s panties, the used pair she left me on the bed. Still smelling very distinctly of her. I permitted myself to cry openly for five minutes, no more, and promptly hauled that tremendous garment across the street. The pastel pink fabric glowed a radiant blue under the full moon, I’m still stunned I didn’t attract anyone’s attention. It was nothing to drag it into my hole, haul it down the corridor, and pack it into my bedroom. It fills the space, it’s not like there are floors and walls in there. It’s an uneven oval-kind-of-sphere-cavity that’s full of C____’s panties, her dried juices still redolent through the fabric, and I crawl into this and gratify myself to sleep.

I still get urges. I can’t forage all the time, sometimes I just park it and people-watch, and… This is the season when young women like to show off their bodies. They complain when anyone notices them, but there is no question they’re showing themselves off. I’ve long since stopped trying to riddle that one out. Whoever said people should make any sense? I just fill my head with images and crawl back into my faithless ex-lover’s underwear and rub one out. It gets me through the days.

I do a lot of people watching lately. Back in the house, it was just me and C____, and when she disappeared, I had that online community, at least. More of them began to realize I’m actually a Tiny, and I lost some followers then but also gained a few. That got a little creepy, so it’s for the best that my connection was severed, in that sense at least.

But there’s a gnarled tree in the sparse grove, in which I’ve dug my living quarters. It’s nothing but handholds and ledges and protrusions, super easy to scale. I can break into a piece of candy (Smarties are really handy for portioning), get all jacked up on sugar, and climb pretty high into the branches. It doesn’t bear fruit, and its blossoms aren’t much to write home about, so I’m unmolested by birds and squirrels up there. The highest I’ve dared puts me around shoulder-height to the Normals, and on a busy weekday afternoon I get to watch all sorts of people going about their business. People going to and from shifts of work. Kids and teens trudging home from school. Malingerers and tourists and whatnot, just anyone out for a stroll on these balmy summer days.

I used to make up little stories about them in my head, you know, try a cold read like I’ve heard done, but my point of reference is bullshit. You’re supposed to look at someone and go, oh, he’s chiseling at work, or she’s incapable of being faithful to her boyfriend or girlfriend. But that’s not the world I come from. All my stories were like he’d probably be gentle with me, but I really don’t want to go down his pants or holy fuck, she’d tear me apart with her teeth out of boredom and see nothing wrong with that. Now I just clear my head and watch people drift by, without judgment or association, as remote as clouds.

I’m doing that right now, in fact. I’m sitting in the crotch of a branch (that’s what it’s technically called) and watching this rusted brown flatbed truck turn the corner and park across the street from C____’s old bungalow. Kind of a burly dude sitting in the driver’s seat, checking his phone.

Ah, there he goes. He must’ve been looking up directions or taking a call or something. Very responsible of him.

I hear birds far overhead, but they’re not interested in my tree. I hear two groups of birds, in fact, chattering at each other. They’re describing their territory—I learned this on a nature documentary. They sound angry but they just have to be strong or they’ll lose resources to some ballsy competitor. Yeah, humans are just large animals that are too stupid to accept this. If they could see their relationship to the animal kingdom, they’d learn so much about themselves. Even outside of forming new bonds with animals and understanding them as sentient beings, they would at least learn how to resolve some of their own problems.

Here come two girls. I’m guessing elementary school age. Summer dresses, pail and a bucket, those sneakers that light up in the heels. That’s sweet, just a couple friends going out for…

Wait. What are they doing?

No. Not here. Not my tree. They’re squatting down right outside… oh, fuck no. No.

One of them’s singing and digging. The other one’s asking what she’s looking for. Did the wind blow the leaf off my hole? I covered it, didn’t I? Why’s that girl going straight for the hole? For all she knows, a ferret or a snake could live down there. Doesn’t she have any defensive instinct? Didn’t her parents…

Fuck. Fuck me. They found my chair. I guess that belonged to the little girl that’s not digging. Yes, be delighted, go away now…

Goddamn it. They decided there must be treasure in there. You little shits.

Bottle caps. Battery and light. The magazine picture. Great, you little brats, you got it all, all my treasure. Where’s that damned spider? He’d chase them off with much hilarity.

My entire body just chilled. They found the baggie of perishable food, and that means they can’t give up until… yes, the less-than-perishable food. Well, that’s all I had to survive on, so please go straight to hell, you brats.

NO.

Leave the panties. Put those back. You don’t need them. You don’t need to ask your mom what they are.

Come back and put the panties back in the ground. Keep the food, I hope you choke on it. Just come back and…

I can’t decide whether I hate C____ more than most people, or if I really just hate all people in general.

Dear Journal That Doesn’t Exist, I’m Just Talking to Myself in My Mind,

So here’s what happened. I had that first nice little hole in the ground. Nothing fancy, just a bunch of skill-building projects as I gained my outdoors-legs, so to speak. It’s one thing to watch survivalist videos, another thing to put them into practice when time is against you and your life’s on the line. Still, better to know that shit than not. And then those two little girls came by and dug all my crap out, rejoicing in their “treasures” and laying waste to my lifeline.

Sure, I was furious, but I didn’t do anything. Size differentials regardless, Normal society tends to frown on Tinies taking action against little girls, even in self-defense. They don’t think much of us, and they rarely take our side in any dispute. What was I going to do, anyway? Even if I’d had my little apple-hunting spear (which, no, was destroyed by their excavations), I couldn’t have leaped down to one kid’s scalp, recovered quickly from the impact, stabilized myself on her glossy hair, and made any kind of meaningful stab before she or her friend killed me with one swipe of a bare hand. I just had to sit there and fume and swear and watch my life fall apart, watch them go skipping away…

And then just sigh, spit on my palms, and start all over again elsewhere.

I thought about the neighbor’s place with the smart mutt. He gets a little worked up now and then, the teens like to whip him up and annoy his owner, but mostly he’s got a good temper. That’s important, because I don’t need him catching my little rustle in the grass and have him freaking out at me. At the same time, he’s smart enough that he’s probably curious, and he’s probably fully capable of sniffing around, finding me, digging me out, and gobbling me down in a few sloppy bites without making any undue noise or disturbance whatsoever. A very good dog, but no friend of mine.

On the other side of the property was the unruly neighbors, the trashy couple that fight and party too hard, who let their property go. Long enough grass to hide in, but that’s just an invitation for rats, and with all the trash they leave around, rats are pretty much guaranteed. Also? I could foresee a likely scenario in which I’m making my way around their grounds during one of their shindigs, and some jackass goes out for a smoke and sees me, and then the theme of the party turns to finding inventive things to do with me. If they don’t kill me outright, I could be in for hours of torture and mutilation, all of which is laughingly recorded for YouTube, always a popular subject. I mean, YouTube takes it down after a week or so, but there’s no shortage of “fucking with the little guys” videos online. It’s the new hobo fight.

The woman in that house is kind of cute, but she’s usually drunk and always stupid. I wouldn’t trust her an inch, as much as I think about her. She doesn’t close her blinds when she… well, when she does anything.

That leaves the old property. That newlywed couple has been in love with the place since they moved in. Once in a while they have elegant cocktail parties with very nice-looking people. Not so much lately, since they called the cops on their neighbors once, and the trashy couple made all the polite and apologetic noises they were supposed to, but then subtly harassed the nice young couple over some weeks: kicking over their trash, graffiti on their front door, even keyed their car once. Just a couple of shits. Cops were called again, light investigation was done, trashy couple was seriously reprimanded, but now there’s an uneasy truce and neither of them have any more parties at all.

Maybe I sound like a quidnunc, but I had a lot of fucking time on my hands, let me tell you. I built another shelter… no, hold on. Wasn’t as simple as that.

Go back to that day, the girls walking up the street, parading their ill-gotten booty. I sat in that tree and let myself freak out before getting ready to go back to building a new shelter. Same area, why not? I know the environment up to those three yards and this plot across the street, a couple trees stranded outside a chain-link fence. There was supposed to be a municipal park or something in there but no one ever uses it. I just found a nice gnarled root to start digging under, cleared out some space, sawed away at the smaller roots. Figured it’d be safer to embed myself within the wooden supports, for a number of reasons. Lined the entrance with scrap metal from up and down the block, set up another food chamber of nuts and seeds, and once in a while the rambunctious couple leaves or throws out something I can use, either materials or food. Useful idiots.

I was about half an hour into digging when I hear this angry voice coming up the street. Not angry like a woman gets with her idiot boyfriend, more gently scolding. “Show me exactlywhere you got this!” she was saying. Two girls whined and sobbed in response. “I don’t care! You knock that crying off right now, I see right through you! You show me right where you pulled this stuff out of the ground!”

Hackles raised, I ducked behind the roots and pulled a leaf up over me, patted my face in dust and listened. I wasn’t in a vantage space to see anything unless they… yup, here they came, right up to my tree.

Whose tree? My tree.

The girls were in their pretty dresses, dragging their leather-soled shoes in a dreadful cacophony up the sidewalk. They clearly did not want to be there, and they absolutely did not want to surrender their hard-earned prizes. But there was a massive woman with them, legs shifting and swimming under one of those wrinkly peasant’s skirts with busy designs and colors. She was barefoot, I saw later, round and pink toes crusted with outdoor brown over what should have been adorable, soft pads on the tips of…

I sighed heavily. I never knew what would rise up to remind me of C____, damn her eyes.

And a maroon poet’s blouse, and frizzy blonde hair that shook with her stern words. She wasn’t mad, but she was doing a good job of impressing the girls with the urgency of their chore. “Is this it? Is this the tree?” she said. She had the girls clamped by their scrawny upper arms and navigated them to face the scene of the crime. The little one kept sobbing and the slightly older one pouted and nodded. The woman swept her frizzy mane to the side and peered around. Her voice grew quiet and somber. “Oh God… is that the hole? Okay, look: I’m not mad at you girls, do you understand? Patty, Cindy? I’m not angry at you, but what you did was very, very wrong.” She knelt on one knee and stroked their shoulders tenderly. “Someone lives there, do you understand? A little man found all that furniture to make a nice little room for himself, just like in your dollhouse.” She nodded at Patty. “And he saved up a bunch of food for himself, too, Cindy, just like you do under your bed. Right?” The older girl reluctantly nodded.

“Except this isn’t a game to him, girls. He doesn’t come out here and play-pretend and then go back to a nice, warm, safe home with someone who loves him and takes care of him.” The woman wrapped her arms around the little girls and made them look at the devastation they’d casually wrought. Who the hell was she? “He lost his home, and now he has to live in this little hole. And it was very easy for you to dig it up and find all this, but I bet it was very, very hard for him to find it all and bring it all down to one place. You know how hard it is for you to drag your mom’s dining room chair from room to room? It’s even harder for this little guy to drag a toy into his shelter, and it’s more dangerous because he has to drag it across the street.”

“Why doesn’t he get someone to do it for him?” asked the little girl.

“Because he can’t ask for help. He doesn’t know who’s going to help him, and lots of people think it’s funny to hurt him or capture him.” The woman nodded to herself, rocking back and forth slightly, bringing the girls with her. “You remember what happened when you found that little woman? And you didn’t tell your mom?”

The older girl looked away.

“What happened to her, Cindy?”

The older girl shrugged.

The woman let go of Patty and turned Cindy to face her. “What happened to her, Cindy? You’re not in trouble, this happened a long time ago. But what happened to her?”

“We played with her,” the girl said quietly.

“I know you thought it was playing, but what happened?”

“She broke.”

The woman drew a long breath and rubbed the girl’s shoulders soothingly. “Cindy, what did I tell you about using the passive voice?”

Who was this woman?!

The girl’s voice broke and she sniffled through her response. “I was making her go down the stairs and her leg went the wrong way. I thought it would be funny to see her fall down the stairs.”

“And was it?”

“Yes,” she said quietly.

“No, it wasn’t funny at all. What happened next?”

“She wouldn’t be quiet so I put a book on her.”

“Cindy.”

“Some books. And I jumped on them.” My blood ran cold to hear this come out of a little girl’s mouth. Didn’t matter that she was dozens times larger than me: a young kid confessing to a cruel murder like that? The stuff of nightmares.

The woman closed her eyes. She wore a lot of colorful makeup around her eyes, and some dangly jewelry in her ears. “Tiny people are very fragile and they break easily. They don’t know who they can ask for help, so they have to hide. The little man who was living here−”

“Where is he?” chirped Patty.

“Well, I don’t know. He’s probably hiding because he thinks we’ll hurt him.”

“I won’t hurt him!”

The woman snorted and ruffled the little girl’s hair. “You say that now, but you just dug up his home and stole all his stuff. I hope you didn’t hurt him with your shovel.”

“I’m sorry, little man!” Patty shouted around the tree. “I don’t want to hurt you! Please come out!”

“No, no, no, Patty. We’re going to leave this stuff here for him.”

“No!” Cindy stamped her foot.

The woman’s hand slid up from the older girl’s shoulder and around the back of her head, and then her fingers spread and knotted into her hair, holding her savagely in place. “After what you did to that poor, little, helpless woman,” she said in a threatening tone, “and what you did to this little man’s home—and maybe to him—leaving a couple pieces of furniture here is the least you can do. And if you don’t, I promise you, your mom will hear about all of this.”

Cindy glared at her defiantly, but it was only a reflex. The little girl was not prepared for the full brunt of a grown woman’s stare, and she quickly cowed. She didn’t like it when the woman made her personally place the Baggie with new doll furniture outside the hole, but she complied nonetheless. Patty was much more willing to drop an energy bar in the hole and earn the woman’s praise.

I blinked slowly, under my leaf. On the sidewalk stood two pairs of white leather shoes and ten bare, dirty toes, and between them and me was an airdrop of supplies and support. I tried to memorize the woman’s features, but her hair kept flopping around her cheeks and over her eyes. This was a very free-wheeling kind of free spirit, but she had a tremendous heart and an extremely rare humanitarian streak for Tinies. Extremely rare.

“Thank you, girls. Now we’re going to walk away, and we’re not going to look for the little man.” She took them by the hands and led them down the street. “No, Cindy, I see you peeking. You just walk away and leave that stuff there. You’re doing a very good thing right now. He just has to feel…” They were out of my earshot very quickly.

I didn’t crawl out from hiding when I couldn’t hear them. I crept around the vast oak trunk and peered down the street. I didn’t crawl out for my loot when they got to the end and turned the corner, and I didn’t crawl out for ten minutes after they disappeared. Cindy seemed like the type who’d break free and try to see me or even reclaim her possessions.

After more time passed I slit the Baggie open with some entrance-guarding spikes and hustled two white, carved Victorian chairs into my new chamber. Not that I’d ever have guests, but it was a nice thought. There was also a dresser. I left the this outside, not as a concession to vengeful Cindy but because I simply didn’t need it. It took up too much space, would’ve required too much work to move down there, and basically I was down to my last outfit.

Oh. There were clothes in there, too. I took the lightest shirt and thinnest pants and left the rest. The shoes were solid plastic molding and useless to me except as construction materials. As for the energy bar, it was well worth excavating extra space in my tunnel to move that inside, and well worth digging a new food storage room. With the clothes was a swatch of washcloth, judging by the soapy smell and stiff terry cloth, and I knew I could soak that in water at some point and wrap it around the bar to keep it cooler. Every little thing added up: surviving on your own was literally a game of fractions. Making a piece of food last six hours longer was an advantage over not doing so.

This little windfall, I didn’t let it go to my head. I was on guard for weeks afterward. Predictably, Cindy found a reason to swing by my block two days later, and she claimed all I’d left out for her. She looked around for the other stuff, announced that she hated me, and ran back home. I haven’t seen her since.

But you know who I have seen? That exotic, artsy creature who disciplined them. She came back three days later and just sat down next to the tree. I wasn’t in the hole, I was up in the branches, so I watched her saunter up and carefully pick a clear spot to rest. Sweeping her head from side to side, she spoke in a soft sing-song.

“I’m very sorry about what happened to you, little man,” she sang, rocking back and forth. To the people across the street, she must’ve just looked like some stoned hippie. She pulled out a piece of chalk from the folds of her outfit (dressed not too differently from before) and drew daisies on the sidewalk. “The little girls will leave you alone, I’ll make sure of it.”

I stared down at her, watching her golden scalp sway back and forth. Her voice was sweet and breathy. I would have liked to hear her sing for real.

“I hope you have a new home now, and I hope the supplies we dropped off helped. I can’t apologize enough for what happened, but I want you to know you have a friend in the neighborhood.” She put the chalk away and pulled from her wrist what I thought was a bracelet but turned out to be a hair-tie. She pulled her frizzy mop back, exposing her neck and shoulders to the late-afternoon sun, and rested her hands on her knees. Her fingernails were deep aubergine, like the wide vertical stripes in her skirt today.

She laughed, and cliché as it sounds, it rang like little bells. “I’ll check in on you every once in a while. I’ll be careful not to attract any attention. And if you ever want help or protection, I hope that someday you’ll come to trust me and ask for it.” She mentioned the names of some nonprofits she volunteered for, places that rehabilitate Tinies and other good deeds. I always found them condescending, in a way, but she wasn’t bragging when she mentioned them. “But I respect your decision to rough it in the wilderness, you powerful, independent little beast.” She laughed again and part of me wanted to let go of the branch and tumble into her broad, multihued lap.

I didn’t. My self-preservation instinct was too strong yet. I’d never seen cruel people lure Tinies away with sweet songs and warm vows, but it was totally believable to me that this must happen. And even though naïve Tinies don’t live to breed and pass along their gullibility, neither do we seem to get any smarter over progressive generations.

With a grunt, she heaved herself forward, got up to her feet, and quietly padded away. I watched her slim hips swaying through the leaves.

She came back the next week with a small parcel wrapped in biodegradable paper, so I wouldn’t feel bad about leaving it out like litter. The neighbor on the south side walked his mutt later that day, and the dog sniffed at the wrapper, sensing the honey granola bars it once held. Those lasted me until her next visit, and the bars she dropped off then lasted me until the next week.

I ate well, spied on the neighbors, fought with ground critters, and curled up in the living room chamber. Never bothered with other, fancier rooms. Just one place to live and one place to keep food. But one week I found the small pyramid of chalk that had grown too small for her to use, and I labored to etch out a large question mark on the sidewalk, two squares down from where I lived. She would see it on her next walk up to me.

She did. She laughed, rubbing it out with her bare toes. Her nails were dyed red, orange, yellow, orange, and red, and her rough soles rasped loudly on the pavement. Her hands parked on her hips, and I looked up at her, hidden among the roots, to see this beneficent hippie goddess look around to specifically focus on nothing. Her deep red lips parted as she tossed her hair to one side.

“Because any friend of C____’s is a friend of mine,” she whispered.

My heart leaped in its cage. I watched her walk away that time, but the next time she walked up, she found a little washcloth bundle containing furniture and food. When she bent down to pick it up, I stepped out from among the roots and waved my spare shirt up at her. Her eyes lit up to see me, and her smile was slow and warm.

She knew how to greet Tinies, but it wasn’t any form I was familiar with. Obviously she couldn’t tap her fingers on the ground on which I stood, but she slowly extended her foot to me. I crept back, wary, but she placed it upon the dirt and went motionless.

I walked up to her toes, round and cute. Her second toe had a braided gold ring around it. I could see my reflection in the nail of her big toe. I looked up at her, questioningly.

She waggled her eyebrows and wiggled her big toe at me. Unsure, I placed both palms on either side of her toe and attempted to shake it, like the Normals shake hands.

She laughed merrily. “No, you’re supposed to tap it, D____.” Again, the shock of hearing my own name. It disoriented me and I rapped my knuckles against the bulging curve of her strongest toe without thinking about it too hard.

More giggling. “No, harder than that.”

I drew back my fist and punched her toe, which cracked both of us up. She asked me if I was ready to go, and I let out a long, strangled breath. “Yeah,” I shouted up at her, “I think I am.” Her conventions for lifting me up were exactly what I’d taught Freda, one hand’s fingers lying upon the other as I stepped aboard, sliding to curve into a protective bowl as she lifted me up to chest-level and no higher. Maybe the toe-greeting was a new thing and I was just out of the loop.

Anyway. Her name’s Shavonne, and she’s C____’s bohemian artist friend. I’ve been staying with her for two weeks and not only is she stabler than I’d initially given her credit for, I now trust her pretty well. If she’s going to kill me, she’s playing the very, very long game.

“You are a little warrior, aren’t you,” Shavonne said. Her byzantine broom skirt in red, gray, and black bloomed slightly where her slight hips bent and buried into the couch cushion beside me. As nice as it might have been to be dandled in her soft palms or cradled in her lap, I was still coming down off my survivalist’s high and feeling tetchy.

I kneeled on the cushion in the center of the couch, she lounged over one arm and, beneath her billowing skirt, crossed her legs. Before me was a salsa dish filled, instead, with peach schnapps, and she gave me a cool, wet fiber peeled from a stalk of raw sugar cane to dip into the booze and lap up. Far from insulting, it felt like an exotic luxury. Shavonne’s loft was just the craziest layout: paintings and easels over there, mannequin parts and rusted machinery parts over there, little LED strands and Asian paper lanterns everywhere. I didn’t buy into the apparent chaos: all I felt were the solid concrete walls, the thick glass plates fitted into iron panes, the solidity of the repurposed industrial space. There was nowhere safer than here, and I didn’t realize how tense I’d been for the last several weeks until they began to melt and unknot on this couch, next to an affectionate hippie, in the fumes of Nag Champa, listening to Billie Holiday.

I sighed heavily and dipped the cane into the schnapps and lapped it off the side. The meat of the cane was coarse and cool, and the booze just tasted like candy. “You’d be surprised how long you could survive, when you need to.” I smacked my lips and swished the fiber back and forth in the bowl. “You’d be surprised what you’re capable of.”

Her massy head canted back and her frizzy honey-colored hair spilled all over her shoulders, all over the back of the couch. “Oh, no! I never would! When the shit goes down I’ll be in the first wave of casualties!” She laughed, and I watched her throat ripple in the sunrise through the windows. Her indigo blouse lay flat upon her slim frame, and from my low angle I watched her body rock gently with her mirth, glancing up her armpit and up her nose and yeah let’s have another hit of schnapps.

I changed tack and went straight for the biggest question of all. “So you don’t know where she went?”

She ran her fingers through her hair—how she didn’t snag all those rings in her hair, I’ll never know—and her arm heaved and her breast swayed, and I guess that was a shrug. “She doesn’t tell me anything, D____,” she said, “sorry. We were never that close, just… good-time friends, you know? Go out Bennett Pointe Grill and get shitty on wine, see a movie, drive out to the beach, that’s about it.”

I should note here that Shavonne insists on calling me by my birth-name, which puts her head and shoulders above C____. When my warren was crashed, when my mom was killed, several of us were captured for sale at the pet store. They tried to give us new names, but I remembered the name my mom gave me. C____ called me by that name up until I told her the story of how I ended up in that shop. That was after months of language lessons, learning the Normal tongue the best way, through immersion. And we Tinies have an advantage: we can actually crawl up into the mouth of a native-speaker and watch the interior form the sounds and words we’re not used to, actually bedding upon the mother tongue. Anyway, C____ said my name made her feel horrible, so she just made up a brace of nicknames to call me instead. I used to rebel, and then I just became resigned to it. More misomicrotic insensitivity, or as we call it, “Wednesday.”

But Shavonne calls me by my original name, so I will let it be known here I’m called Dagny. She pronounces it perfectly, too, and I really appreciate that. Shavonne impresses me left and right with her carefulness and awareness, despite the seeming artist’s chaos all around us. Whereas C____ is still unmentionable C____, in these records, to commemorate the grace she never showed me.

“C____ kinda kept to herself, man,” Shavonne said in her dreamy drawl. “She was all business, tight-laced, buttoned-up-whatever…” Her slender forearm rose in a beam of morning and incense, and her graceful hand looped fluidly in the international gesture for et cetera. “I used to tease her that she was a CIA spook or something, and she’d joke that that was closer to the truth than she was permitted to discuss, but that was bullshit. I saw her key card: she worked at Arlington Trust.” Her skirts shifted and she switched legs: instead of her knee jutting toward me, now her bare sole hovered in space above my drinking vessel.

I sucked my cane fiber and stared at her foot without even trying to hide it. Her head rested on the couch back, and her foot twirled slowly at the ankle, toes flexing and catching the light. Her heel was callused and had seen some days, but she was in terrific shape and… I sighed and tossed the fiber back into the bowl and leaned against the couch back as well. I haven’t had sex in a few months, outside of rubbing one out in C____’s old panties, back in the “salad days” of a condo circling the drain to eviction. Fuck me. Well, I wasn’t going to try anything with Shavonne. I didn’t have the bond with her yet, and it didn’t feel right. Last thing she needed to deal with was some inches-tall horndog.

Music chimed over the stereo, a sequence of little hammers striking bells. “What the hell was that?” I yelled up at my host.

Her massive head came swinging down, and piles of frizzy gold hair floofed around her lopsided grin. “I got a little surprise for yo-o-o-ou,” she sang, waggling her head playfully. I watched her body twist and her billowing skirt mask the liftoff of her pert little butt from the couch. She walked around and disappeared somewhere behind me, and I trotted over to lie face-down in the warm indentation of her seat. Goddess help me.

Women’s voices. They were indistinguishable over “Easy Living,” but Shavonne’s sounded lazy and comfortable and the other’s voice was perkier, excited. It was familiar, too, though I didn’t know how. I hoped the artsy chick didn’t invite some size fetishists over to mess with me. I don’t think C____ would’ve told her about that community, though maybe everyone knew about them. They weren’t exactly hiding in this environment.

Sneakers clomped up behind me like rolling thunder, and I scrambled to position myself by my swimming pool o’ booze once more. A tremendous woman rounded the other arm of the couch, then fell to her denimed knees. Pretty breasts parked themselves on the edge of my cushion and a grinning, leering face lunged at me. “Hi, Dagny!” Her voice pealed in my ears. I cried out, collapsed to the side, and covered my head.

“Oops!” she belted, then, quieter: “Oops, I’m sorry, I forgot! I’m just so happy to see you again!” I peeked out from under my elbow and saw Freda smiling at me like my own private sun.

“Freda!” I yelped. “Put… put two of your fingers down on the cushion, like a little person!” She did, and I leaped up and sprinted around the bowl to hug her fingers. She gushed and cooed and her cheeks turned a deep pink.

“Shavonne! C’mere and look at this!” she cried. “It’s the cutest thing ever!”

The hippie-chick sauntered over and looked: I held Freda’s index and middle finger’s in a lover’s embrace, resting my head on her base knuckles and grinning up at her. Shavonne also made cutesy noises and clasped her hands together, pressed against her lips. “Holy Agartha, that is just too perfect.” She came down and draped her elbows over the arm of the couch, staring at us. I hooked my leg around Freda’s finger and they burst out laughing, too loud for me but I bore it.

It was just nice to be around happiness again. It was nice to be around lovely women, gentle giantesses, and to feel safe and cared for. It took all of my will to peel myself off Freda’s hand—Shavonne told her to check if I left a stain, we laughed. My arms, my chest felt like my major muscle groups were crying. I’ve been so lonely, and just like my need to feel safe, I never realized how deep it ran until I got a taste.

“Aw, fuck,” I squawked, collapsing to the couch cushion and stiffening up.

“What’s wrong?” one of them said.

“Pulled a muscle in my back. Dammit.”

Freda sounded truly distressed. She hopped up, grabbed the groceries she brought in and hove them to the kitchen counter, then asked Shavonne where she kept the ibuprofen. She ground it up in a mortar and pestle while Shavonne scooped me up carefully and took a seat at her dining table, a smoky brown glass affair. She rested me on her thigh and gingerly, oh-so-gently began to rub two fingertips into my back. Freda procured an eyedropper, filled it with ibuprofen dissolved in water, and retrieved my schnapps to cleanse my palate. Medicine administered, she went back into the kitchen and began to cook. I draped my arms down either side of Shavonne’s leg and tried to go limp, surrendering to the tender ministrations of the large, blunt fingertips rubbing wide circles around my upper and lower back. It wasn’t precise work but I wanted it to go on forever.

I explained to them what the last several weeks had looked like, the fighting, the scavenging, my victories and defeats. Basically an endless workout, each day ending with curling up on hard soil. “And I lost a finger in a fight with a squirrel,” I added.

Shavonne’s fingers lifted. “You did not!” I stretched out my little arm and splayed my fingers for her examination. She rested my hand on the fingertip of her middle finger and bent down close to check it out. Her frizzy mane fell upon me, and I was quilted in warmth and herbal shampoo. She sucked in her breath: “Oh my Goddess! You poor little guy!”

Freda called out, “What, did he really?” and she ran over to see, leaving something simmering on the stove. She leaned on the hippie-chick’s other thigh and peered at me. “I will never forgive C____! I will never forgive that bitch!” She stormed back to the kitchen and slammed pots around. “She just left you in that condo to fend for yourself! Just drills a couple holes in the fridge, and that’s supposed to be good enough? Goddess, you poor little guy!” She took out her aggressions on celery, carrots, and onions with a knife that needed sharpening, by the sound of it. “I will claw her fucking eyes out, I swear to Goddess, if we ever see her again. Oh! That reminds me.” Her voice brightened, and I heard her sneakers dance to her shoulder bag behind the couch. She came back, waggling a rectangle in black glass mounted in a white body. “I found her phone.”

I was much more shocked than Shavonne, who offered a tired, “Oh, yeah?” She returned to rubbing my spine… and then one fingertip gently grazed my butt. It could have been an incidental brush, but she leaned down and smiled at me toothily. “Sorry?” she said.

I grinned back and waved at her. “No, no. It’s cool.”

The tip of her tongue ran over her upper lip and she straightened back up to talk to her friend. Now her fingernails ran lightly down the length of my body, from my shoulders down my spine and over my butt and thighs. My entire body flushed with delight (and ibuprofen, and schnapps). This world was full of surprises.

Freda went on from the kitchen. “I drove by the night after the new couple bought the house. I started to look through the trash, but there was too much of it and I didn’t know what was important, so I just tossed them into my van and took off. I was getting weird looks from the neighbors.” She laughed and tossed some bread into a toaster oven: I heard the gentle boff of baked goods hitting wire racks and the creak of the door’s springs. “I found her phone and charged it, just in case there were any messages. I also have a ton of other crap if you want to look through it. Like I said, I didn’t know what’s important. Except I did grab a sock full of tiny clothes, figured that was probably yours.”

“Yeah, probably,” purred Shavonne, running her pinky fingertip in little circles around my butt. Was I going to get laid tonight? What did this mean? I tried to relax and just let it happen. Though I did flex and nudge my butt into her touch, as well. Least I could do, with the whole front of me mashed into her thigh like that.

“Well? Does anyone want to go through her messages?” Freda sounded giddy. I suggested we look at it after brunch, over drinks, and the giantesses didn’t require much convincing. For my part, I didn’t give a rat’s ass: if the rest of my life consisted of this moment (minus the torn back muscle), I couldn’t have been happier.