Lauren was walking home from her job as a corporate communications specialist. Her job was essentially writing bullet points and feel good articles for employees of a fortune 500 company. Didn’t really matter what she wrote, yet somehow her deadlines meant that she had to stay until 7pm today. Her Friday night was essentially ruined, not that she had even made plans anyway. Today was hard, she had at least earned some kind of reward. So she stopped by her favourite pastry shop before heading home.

Tina also finished work late that night. She worked for a credit union owned by the agricultural syndicate. Her late night was from annual elections for their board of directors, which she had just clinched the vote to become treasurer. Her colleagues were going to throw her a party later that night but she wanted to change before hand. Cutting through the tiny part of town would save her quite a bit of time, so she indulged herself.

The giant woman carried herself with the pride of what had been a stellar for day her. She had her long red hair still up from work, and ported a blue blazer with a thin lapel and a nice pair of heels. Her shoes clacked as she walked down the asphalt. She walked briskly through the outskirts of the tiny town. Her footfalls rhythmic and causing little destruction. This did not slow the heart rates of the late night commuters in town. Eventually she missed a step and the spike of her heel went right through the engine block of a Camry. Embarrassed, Tina turned onto a less busy street.

“I didn’t mean to do that.” Tina said looking at a smaller woman who was standing paralyzed in fright. It took Lauren a moment to realize that the giantess was talking to her. She needed to play it cool and say something.

“Shit happens.” Lauren said to the giantess. She had never actually seen a giant in her life before. Up until she heard the enormous footfalls her mind was still turning over the report she had just been writing. It felt like she had suddenly been yanked out of real life. The scale of this woman made no sense with the landscape behind her. The woman looked just like her. Spoke just like her. Yet her scale as barely comprehensible. Lauren clenched her hand into a fist to hide her shaking.

“Yeah. It’s not even my fault. If I hadn’t been late at work, I wouldn’t have even taken this route home.”

“Ugh – me too. I had to stay to finish writing a story that I am pretty sure no one is ever going to read.”

Lauren’s pulse was through the rough. If the giantess could make out her facial features, then she could probably see that her face was bright red. Lauren forced herself to take slow deliberate breaths so that her voice wouldn’t shake. The giantess took a step towards her, then squatted down.

“Sounds like a bullshit job.” Tina said.

“100%. Everything is always a crisis, nothing ever really matters.”

The conversation continued like she was speaking to a normal person. Maybe giants were just normal people. No big deal – well a big deal but not a big deal. A funny anecdote to tell her friends at a party about the time she bitched about work to a giantess, not the rampage of godzilla through the streets. That was until the giant’s hand rapidly approached her.

“Anyways, I should be off.” The giantess snatched Lauren as she stood back up.

“What are you doing?!” Lauren shrieked. Her world was spinning from both her panic and the disorientation of shooting up several stories in almost and instant.

“You said yourself that you had a bullshit job. If I eat you then it probably doesn’t disturb the local economy that much.” Tina said. “So are you going to get yourself undressed or do I need to do it?”

“What! You can’t eat me just because of my job!”

“Oh, I was going to eat your regardless. I’m a giant and you’re a tiny – I’m sure they taught you how to hide from predators in school. You should have been more careful.” Tina said while giving an awkward laugh. She was never sure what to say to someone she had just caught.

The laugh hung in the air for a moment. Lauren couldn’t tell if she was joking but then Tina’s fingers pulled down on her skirt. Her fingers worked her way up Lauren’s body until she could slice open Lauren’s shirt with her finger nail. This was real.

“You don’t have to do this!” Lauren exclaimed.

“Yep.” Tina said while flicking off the last bits of the Lauren’s clothes. She watched the tiny girl struggle in her hands while she brought her up to her lips.

“Then why are you still eating me?”

“Doesn’t have to, doesn’t mean doesn’t want to.” Tina said. She paused for a second. “Guess I said that weird, whatever.”

Tina put the tiny woman into her mouth. She was quite warm from the panic she was in. After catching her breath in the humid air of Tina’s maw, Lauren ran for the giant’s lips. Stomping on Tina’s tongue trying to run out of her mouth only to fall when the giant’s tongue undulated. Tina chastised her meal with a grazing of her molars before swallowing.

Lauren’s heart felt like it was going to beat out of her chest as she felt the giant’s teeth crash down on her. They didn’t slice through her but the squeeze froze her in place. An instant later the tongue upturned and she was forced into the contractions of swallowing. She couldn’t breath with the compression of the oesophagus. Still she hyperventilated pulling in almost no air until she reached the stomach. Air filled her lungs but the air was hot and humid. She felt the acidity creep into her lungs.

Tina looked over and there was another man on the street. He was staring at her the whole time. Feeling like she should say something to avoid being awkward she spoke, “Some people, eh?”

“Yeah, it’s not like giant attacks aren’t on the news all the time. Everyone knows the danger.”

“Like yourself?” Tina asked.

“Yep.” Grant said while unbuttoning his shirt.

“Really? You guys always put up a fight. I’m tempted to let you go now. If I eat every willing little guy, then I’ll be using natural selection against myself.” She said while picking him up. She brought him up to her eye.

“Gal as pretty as you doesn’t need to worry. Anyways, that other chick was hot and I want to get some action before she’s too far gone.” Grant said. Tina’s eyes narrowed at him.

“You what?” Tina said.

“Don’t act all high and mighty, you literally ate her.”

“I’m a giant we hunt humans. I’m not interested in a little piggy.” Tina said with disgust. She dropped Grant onto the ground.

“But I guess, I can’t leave you to go harass other people. Hmm...” Tina tapped her toes thinking about what to do with him. She kept tapping her toes in rhythm but advanced forward towards the tiny man. Not even looking down she heard the crack and shriek as she crushed his knees and everything below with her shoe. She turned around and continued her walk.

“You can’t leave me like this! Please put me out of my misery.” Grant called out.

“Nah, I couldn’t do that. What if someone else wants some action with you before you’re too far gone?”

She could have just eaten that guy, she thought. She could have chewed him to not give him what he wants. The act of eating is about fulfilling your own desires after all. Tina had never chewed someone up completely before. It would have been gross for that other woman. As gross as being digested alive, she thought, Probably but only like going from a 9 to 10 on the grossness scale. Well, she had made her decision and was still hungry as a result.

Tina approached a highway that split through town. The highway was pretty wide and the median in the middle was just a concrete barrier. She had to half-jump to get across like it was a small stream. She skipped across but realized she wasn’t going to make it cleanly. She tried to propel herself forward a bit more but the effect was to drive her foot harder into the right lane, followed by her heel crashing into another lane. She heard the sound of the crash and instant later.

“Oh shit.” She muttered. She looked down at the crash site, “Sorry.”

The crash had disrupted two lanes of traffic. In real time she could watch as a traffic snake elongated out from her. Thousands of commuters trapped with nowhere to go. Possibly hundreds of hours of people’s time wasted. She thought about the math of the situation. If a year is 8760 hours, say 10,000 hours and the average human lives 70 years rounded down since I overestimated hours in a year, that’s 700,000 hours of life. Humans sleep for a third of that so maybe 500,000 waking hours. There’s probably 5,000 cars on this highway, so that’d make causing this traffic about 1% as bad as eating someone. But wait what about carbon emissions? Eating people is random – wrong time, wrong place. Cars make emissions, maybe I’m doing good by terrorizing them into taking the bus? Should I go step on the other lanes of traffic for good measure?

She smiled to herself as a titanic ecoterrorist but was interrupted by the voluminous blaring of klaxons. Driver’s shouted obscenities and made rude gestures at her as they made it past the wreck. It was her fault after all. Carefully she knelt down and pushed the damaged cars over to the side of the road. With the block lifted, cars in the right lane shot off at speed until three cars collided when a driver from the jammed up left lanes tried to get into the newly cleared right lane.

“What the fuck you guys? You did this to yourselves?”

Tina was indignant. She had actually done the nice thing for tinies. Giants almost never clean up their messes when it comes to humans but here she had. And the result? The humans screw it up for themselves. She couldn’t believe that they subject themselves to this. It doesn’t even take her to cause a problem.

She raised her foot over the pile up and pressed down on the cars. She twisted her foot through the metal frames like they were a cigarette butt. If she wasn’t culpable then she might as well enjoy it. The give of cars against her sole was so delightful. 5,000 hours of human life wasted and she hadn’t even eaten anyone. Her stomach growled. She should attend to that, though.

Tina made her way into the central business district. It was pretty quiet at this point in the night. Too late for work, too early for Friday night revelrie. To think that her ancestors tracked humans for days to catch them and she didn’t even have the sense of timing to come when they were drunk on a Friday night. Her luck changed when she noticed lights on in one of the office tours. She gave the windows of the board room a playful knock.

Inside the board room a biweeekly sales meeting was happening. The meeting goers tried to stay calm. Conventional wisdom was that giants tend to be playful. They are often just trying to have some fun. If they engage play along and hopefully they will be on their way. A bored giant is where the real destruction tends to come from.

“I’m going to cut to the chase.” Tina said while she broke the glass window with a series of flicks. “You guys are in a 7pm meeting on a Friday that if I’m reading the agenda right is biweekly? Whoever set this up should be punished and my stomach is a pretty punishing place. If you undress whoever is responsible and feed them to me, I think we’ll all be better off.”

Everyone in the meeting room looked at their director and then at each other. The director was shocked and exclaimed, “you can’t seriously be considering this!” He stood up and made to leave but his secretary forced him back into his seat. Realizing he’d just made a big gamble on what his colleagues would think the secretary said they should put it to a vote. To the secretary’s relief all but two voted for feeding the director to the giantess.

Tina watched while the director was forcefully undressed. Two men linked there arms around his and a woman pushed the director from behind to the window. The director dug his heels into the carpet but the woman behind him kicked his feet out from under him. Tina stuck her tongue out playfully them and said “ahh” while the three coworkers heaved their director onto her tongue. He fell limp onto her tongue and she swallowed with out much trouble. The only other person who had voted to not feed the director to her bolted from the room, the rest watched in shock.

“I hate to ask y’all for another favour but he wasn’t very filling by himself. Would you mind stripping down and joining him?” Tina said.

“No!” screamed the woman who had been behind the director. “You can’t make us!”

“I never said I was going to make you. If y’all bolt like that other fellow so be it. But as I understand it, you don’t get food and shelter unless you spend the better part of every day in this drab building. Some idiot gets appointed shareholders to tell you what to do. Said idiot makes you do pointless tasks, work longer hours, and cuts your benefits for shareholder profit. Then you take your meagre pay cheques and if you’re wise you invest them in mutual funds. The mutual funds buy more shares and tell your idiot manager to make even more profits at your expense.

“I know humans talk about the bad old days when us giants were more pernicious and malevolent in our hunting practices. But I got to hand it to you, you guys made a real ouroboros of your own misery. So you can end the cycle and have your life wrapped up in a meaningful fashion, burp, or you can come back to this on Monday.”

The last part of Tina’s speech was quieted as she tried to hold down a subsequent burp. Of course the guy in her stomach decided now was the time to fight for his life. But that ship sailed as soon as he was swallowed. She pressed her hand into her stomach hoping he’d aspirate some acid and settle down.

“I’m not going to lie down and take this from a giant. You seem to think we’re just mice in a cage.” The woman who had pushed the director said. Maybe she had point, she was definitely a killer who might even have a backbone.

“Are you the union rep?” Tina asked.

“Uh no, we’re not unionized.” She replied.

“Well then, seems like your mice for corporate cats to play with. See, I’m not so mean. I’ll let you go on your own terms and I won’t keep you on the treadmill.”

To her delight a few men were already unbuttoning their shirts. They stripped down to their underwear and formed a line. Of course they all hesitated to actually jump in. But once they had a line-up formed, Tina pushed them in with her hand in sequential bites.

The scene in her stomach grew increasingly chaotic. Lauren was still hanging on but too weak to move from her position. The director when he realized he was not alone was finally driven to panic. But his panicked pacing was ended when he was hit by one of his employees falling in. Face down in the acid pool he couldn’t get back up. More employees fell in and space was cramped. Acid oozed in from walls.

The last man looked at Tina while he was half undressed but didn’t move. Eventually, Tina closed her mouth and looked to see who was left.

“I don’t want to be eaten anymore.” He said.

“But you already started stripping down, why the change of heart?”

“Well, with everyone else gone I’m pretty sure that I’ll be the next director. It’s not a bad deal and hey maybe I can reform this office with my new position of power.”

Tina laughed.

“I’m sure you will. The first principle of leadership is to feed your competition to the lions. The second principle is to stay in the very back until everyone has faced the danger. A true reformer you will be.” Tina said. She saw the man sit down looking despondent.

“I don’t want to die but I don’t want to be here.” He said.

“I can accommodate that. I think I have had enough tonight. Tell you what, I’ll take you back with me. You can live in spa among my waterfalls and I’ll only require a few minutes of work from you each day.”

Tina stuck out her hand and the half dressed man walked on. She carried him through the streets continuing her walk home.

“This isn’t some kind of joke?” He asked.

“Well, if it is a joke it would have gone on for too long. And besides, I have never had anyone volunteer so eagerly to be my toilet paper and bathroom attendant.” Tina said.

“What?! I never agreed to that.”

“Oh, then maybe I should eat you.” The man was shaking in her hand. “We giants don’t keep humans around much. You’re much too enjoyable to eat. But its become fashionable to have a bathroom attendant and you don’t shit where you eat – which makes you pretty safe in this role. But if that’s too demeaning then I could eat you right now.”

“No, no.” The man said. “I can be your attendant.”

“Great! I knew a leader of your calibre would be well suited to the task.”

Tina slid her hand over the back of the shorts. The man tried to hold onto her hand but the sweat and the tug of gravity guided him down. She felt his hands glide down her crack to slow his descent. She flexed her butt cheeks until he fell snugly into place.

She made it out to the suburbs when she realized her mistake. She could have grabbed some free tinies to share her girlies at the party but she had gotten sidetracked and had nothing to show. She was deep into the suburbs now, catching anywhere near a decent haul would be a pain the ass.

Tina looked back at the city. She could always go back but by this time there would surely be reporters trying to get an exciting shot. Stories like this always made into the funnies of the evening news – though thinking about it they were probably the top story on the original tiny news. Of course no one but old people actually watched it but that meant that she’d get a call from her Aunt Shirley. She knew exactly the story from 1987 when Aunt Shirley and Uncle Ren demolished there way through Madison. It saved their marriage, dont’ch’ya know? Her Wisconsin accent made it all the more cringey. If Tina made it onto the news, there would be jokes are her expense for days.

Tina had to make due with what she had. That’s when she got a lucky. She spied a parade of golf carts at the course just across the street. They were probably going to some kind of shelter but they weren’t getting there very fast. She nabbed them by smashing the carts together like an accordion and gathering up the occupants into the front pouch of her handbag.

She had expected terrified shrieks but more so she was hearing indignant call outs. Bemused by this she asked the loudest what was happening. He told her that it had been a function of bank executives and that she had no right to interrupt them like this.

“Bankers? I guess I’m a banker too.” Tina replied to the tiny man.

“Good, I was worried I might have been captured by someone that I couldn’t reason with but a banker can always understand interests. What sort of accounts do you work with?”

“I work for a co-op owned by the agricultural syndicate. I manage our investments in improving our human farms.”

Greg Weston, the director of his branch, was shocked by this. For one he didn’t know that they had human farms. But more importantly, she worked at a credit union? It was worse than he feared. She was either to timid minded to work at a real bank or some kind of leftist hippie. Maybe that could work for him the discussion.

“I didn’t know those existed.” Greg said.

“Oh yea, it’s why there’s been peace between us and the tiny folk.”

“That and because after the Enlightenment you grew to respect our human rights, correct?” Greg figured he should pull on her liberal heart strings a bit more. “It was a hard fight for human rights. We suffered for hundreds of years before our rights became laws.”

“No – I think it was mostly the farming thing. I guess, once we had them it became easier to care about our image.” Tina replied.

“Well, branding is important too.” Greg thought about which tact to take next. She didn’t seem to care about his human rights comment. Maybe she was just a low calibre saleswoman. He tacked into branding. “So what kind of promotional event are you running with us?”

“Oh, no promotion. Well, I guess I did just get elected to treasurer of my credit union so a promotion of a sort. I needed to get some snacks for the party. As much as I hate to admit, farmed just isn’t as good as free range. Free range humans are so anxious, it’s delightful.”

Tina paused to feel the man trapped between her butt cheeks. He felt like he was trying to crawl his way out but making very slow progress.

“Surely, that hurts your image? Talk is one thing but actions are another.”

“That’s why it’s called image. Image isn’t reality. Hurting my image would be going back where there are probably of dozens of journalists. But I already have you. Which makes you food for my party.”

“But you can’t-” a large thumb covered half of Greg’s face.

“Listen, I’m just winding you up. What sort of banker are you?”

“I run an REIT. We invest mostly in apartments.” Greg realized he was in a bad spot. But she kept talking to him so maybe there could still be a way out.

“So those houses that I smashed through probably helped your valuation. Less supply, more demand.”

“Uh no, umm that’s not how...” Greg stammered. This giant actually was a commie. This was a very bad development.

“Oh, I understand now. Single family housing doesn’t change much for you. You probably want me to knock down this old apartment building. Get rid of some low-income people and you can speed up the gentrification.”

Tina lifted her foot and rested the ball of her foot on a four storey concrete apartment building. Greg looked out in alarm.

“No! Don’t!”

“Are you sure?” Tina ran her foot further along the roof knocking over a satellite dish. “Guess, it’s easier to put the consequences of your actions down on a spreadsheet than it is to watch them in real time.”

Greg tried to argue this point but by this time Tina was bored hearing what he had to say. The struggles in her belly had died down fast, probably from how stuffed her stomach was. So with the loss of that as entertainment, she put Greg into her mouth. She wasn’t hungry but she could chew him like gum on the way back.

Greg knew he had lost once she opened her mouth. Rather than a quick ending, she kept swirling him around and chewing lightly upon him. Her spit went from a cool wash against his skin to stinging as the enzymes began to work on his skin. Each encounter with her teeth left more of his skin broken, more of his skin burning. She kept at this game for what felt like hours to Greg before losing interest. Her chews became less gentle cutting further into him. A more aggressive chew got his foot caught between her molars. He tried to free his foot by pushing on her molars with his hands. But her tongue was pushing him the wrong way. When her tongue couldn’t push him, she bent him back over his molars. The next strike caught pressed through his vertebrae. Greg lost feeling below his shoulders. The next bite took his foot clean off but he couldn’t feel a thing. He eventually lost consciousness from the blood loss.

Tina taste the metallic flavour of blood. She swallowed reflexively then realized what she had done. She was satisfied with her dinner and know just had to wait from the games they were going to play with the bankers.