Imagine you’re me.

You have a great 9 to 5 serving the people of this fine country, when a strange package comes across your desk. You examine its contents, and it is impossible to believe. There are five photos with dates, but they are obviously doctored. They’re all of a woman being measured in what looks like a hospital gown. Her back is to the wall, and in each subsequent picture seemed to show her growing steadily larger. You look at the dates, each image allegedly a week apart. Impossible, you think, for a human to grow from six feet, ten inches (already extremely tall for a woman) to an unbelievable eight feet tall in a month.

But you’re a master of forensics, and you study the images anyway. Much to your shock, they appear to be real. You go over the documents again, a packet put together by someone named Dr. Douglas Vale, a nutritionist at Sunflower State University Hospital. The writing is urgent, insisting that whatever is happening to this person is a national security threat. He insists that she now stands at a preposterous nine feet tall, and is projected to grow to at least fifteen feet tall. This is clearly more of a case for a strange medical documentary, not the federal government.

But… it's been a slow couple of weeks at the office, and you decide to call him. He’s just as unhinged on the phone as you figured he would be, but it’s not the unhinged ramblings of a nut job. No, you’ve been in this business long enough to know that he isn’t crazy, he’s scared out of his fucking mind. He speaks of this woman growing hundreds of feet tall. He paints a vivid picture of a future at the feet of the giant woman, a person so large that she could snuff out a city block with a single step. And then there was the food. He wouldn’t shut up about how much she would have to eat to sustain herself as she grew ever larger.

And now all this sounds like a bad science fiction movie, until a few days later he emails you a video. You almost don’t click on it because of how ridiculous it all is, but curiosity gets the better of you. The scene is dark, and it’s hard to make out anything. All you can hear is upbeat dance music and the sound of a man breathing short, scared breaths. Another man walks onto the scene with a flashlight, whipping it around the darkness to search for something hidden before kneeling down to turn off the source of the music.

That’s when she appears, planting her feet on either side of him, her naked outline just barely visible in the darkness. She dwarfs the man with the flashlight, nearly twice his size, his head barely reaching her bully button. The camera shakes as she comes into view, hastily repositioning to try and get a shot of her face high above the man. She crouches over the man, nearly flattening him underneath her, pressing her nakedness into him. You put yourself in that guy’s shoes, standing underneath the titanic woman, and for the first time you think you feel the fear that grips Dr. Vale.

This thing that seemed like a hoax suddenly feels like a fire about to grow out of control. You drive there from Chicago that night, to stake out the gymnasium where the monster dwells. But you’re not sure what to do about it all. All you know is that you need to see her, to gauge the threat she poses. You are in and out of consciousness, fighting to stay awake as you watch the gym. You nod off and wake up an unknown time later to a commotion outside. That’s when you see her with your own eyes for the first time, strolling down the road, twice as large as any human had a right to be, smaller people swarming around her like children.

Looking at her was like the moment right before a roller coaster drops down the first hill: inexorable momentum building and threatening to release. It makes your back tingle and your insides squirm. You know you have to contain her, to control her.

You arrange a meeting with your informant, Dr. Vale. He shows up to the meeting with a massive black eye. You ask him how he got it, and he tells you a story about how the monster woman back handed him when he didn’t get her enough to eat. And normally that story would ring like bullshit to you, if it weren’t for that pit in your stomach wanting it to be true. You can see so clearly how it would all go down. The impotent Dr. Vale gathering the monster’s food, the bratty and petulant woman, drunk with power, doling out punishments to the insignificant people that lived under her.

You breathe a sigh of relief. You have her. All you need to do is follow the proper procedures and the full force of the American criminal justice system can be used to help you deal with her. You present the case to your superior and manage to get some sparse resources together to make the arrest. Finally, after months, the giant woman is at your mercy.

You enter her compound with a few agents, your gun drawn and held in front of you with a tight grip. You’ve seen the charts. Fourteen feet tall today. More than twice your size. You rehearse several scenarios for confronting her, heroic visions of the monster rising to strike you, only to be put down by a few well placed shots to the head.

Your heart is in your throat as you breach the final door, so ready to slay Goliath and save the world. That’s not what you get, however. You walk onto the court and the giant woman’s back is turned to you, clad in several towels. Water from a recent shower drips off her skin, and she’s busy brushing out the brown hair that falls down around her shoulders. The scene reminds you of walking in on your ex-wife in similar scenarios. Nakedness that is covered, but so fleetingly. The voyeuristic thrill of seeing her without her seeing you as she goes about her routine of preening and beautifying. The association is so strong, your words get caught in your throat. The same choking feeling you got seeing the video of her naked body rises up again.

The door closes behind you. The giant startles as she hears the sound, and the towel that contains her chest falls down into her lap. She whips around, wet hair spraying, hands clutching for the escaping towel to guard her nakedness from you. Her face is a deep red color, and her eyes are wide from the fear of being walked in on, and then grow wider when she sees your gun.

Looking at her, words refuse to form in your mouth, but she is already beginning to comply. She lets the towel drop from her torso to put her hands in the air for you. Her pretty tits hoist high on her chest, her nipples still stiff from the cold and the wet point up to the ceiling. That’s right, you remind yourself. You’re in control here. 

“Patricia Hostettler, you are under arrest for the assault of Dr. Douglas Vale. You have the right to remain silent…” You rattle off the boiler plate, much to her confusion. You’ve been around the block a few times. The look on her face as you explain the charges is not some cute act to disarm you. You’re sure this woman is innocent as soon as you see her.

In your haste to contain the threat, you had failed to properly vet your ‘victim’ and now everything is at risk. But you can’t put the bullet back in the gun after you pull the trigger. You can’t tell your boss about Dr. Vale’s lie or you’ll be fired, and you can’t let the monster go or humanity might not have another chance to defend itself from her. You see so clearly that the only way out of this is forward. You’ll just need to be a little more creative if you’re going to be a hero.

Your first thought is to provoke the woman. It doesn’t matter if the case is a sham if she commits some other crime. You try all the classic enhanced interrogation tactics. Sleep deprivation, food deprivation, gaslighting, isolation, anything. You keep turning your back to her to give her the opportunity to crash down around you like she crashed down on Dr. Black on that shaky cellphone video. But it doesn’t work. The harder you press her, the more she seems to shrink around herself. It’s like she agrees with you about what a monster she is. Paradoxically, this gets in your way of litigating her as a monster. A month of this and the only thing that’s changed is that the bitch got bigger. 

So you switch tactics. You figure that it doesn’t matter if she actually does anything so long as you can make the jury as scared of her as you are. But you need something to go off of, because when you look at her now all you can see is a victim. So you get your team to start digging into her past and her relationships. It doesn’t take long for you to find the chat messages between her and Dr. Thomas Black, the very same man that actually gave Dr. Vale his black eye.

It’s hard not to feel strange as you read the logs. They talk in a not so subtle code about screwing each other. It’s baffling to imagine what the towering beauty sees in him, of all people. But nevermind that, you have a scab to pick at. You quickly figure out that Thomas is currently dating some other woman and he is sleeping with Hostettler behind her back. It’s not a lot, but with the right jury composed of the American heartland’s best conservatives it just might be enough. Plus, now you have two closets to dredge for skeletons.

And oh, there are skeletons.Your digital forensics guy finds out about Tiny Tommy’s widdle secret. An affair would make the jury blush, the kind of stuff this guy was into would make them faint! And he was her psychologist! The narrative is easy to draw, and it doesn’t matter how much people want to sympathize with the overgrown woman if they believe that she is being groomed by a pervert to do monstrous things for kicks.

When you show her the receipts it’s clear that she had no idea about her boy toy’s predilections. The dazed, sickly, vacant look that she usually wears when you talk to her glimmers with detectable emotion for the first time in weeks, and that emotion is the cold anger that only comes from being betrayed. Everything is going according to plan. And just when you think it couldn’t get better, when she leaves your custody the fool runs to try and win her back, and you finally get what months of tormenting her never got you: she is violent with him. Not overly so, just nudging him with her foot, but it’s all on camera and it’s another nail in the coffin you’re building for her.

And now all there is left to do is hang tight and wait for the cogs of justice to turn. The trial is only four months away. Four months to put Dr. Vale through his paces and make sure he says the right things. Four months to grease the wheels of the court. Four months, and you can’t get her out of your head. You miss having her in her little cage. You miss rattling the bars. She was like a tiger at the zoo, safely contained, that you could look at and visit in safety. Yes, like a tiger in a cage, so that it was safe to witness their grace and power.

You find yourself taking to the forums that you nailed Thomas on. At first you tell yourself that this is monitoring for potential extremist activity, but you know that’s a lie. You do it because they’re writing your nightmares in real time. Giant women, impossibly powerful and throwing that power around. Women who could bring cities and countries to their knees. Women who ate people like they were gummy bears. Nude monoliths shaking the world with their steps. An aching feeling arises deep in your guts whenever you think of her as a titaness, and that ache follows you to bed.

Some nights you can dream yourself in control of the situation. She’s small and sitting in a holding tank like so many of the other threats to polite society you’ve put away in your career. She’s completely at your mercy. You can ask her why. Why was she growing like this? Why can’t I stop thinking about you? Why don’t I put my hands around your neck and end you before you kill us all? And you take her soft, thin neck in your hands, but all she has for you is that bright eyed smile that makes you wake up in terrified confusion.

And other nights… other nights make you remember the importance of your work. Your brain plays for you the frightful scenarios that Dr. Vale first told you about when you took this case. You are in a city in the shadow of the monster. Her face is the sky, and her eyes twinkle like twin moons in the darkness she casts over you. And you can tell she’s hungry because she’s licking her lips. And there’s nothing you can do about that, because her mouth is opening wide and she’s placing the tip of her tongue down to flatten the south side of Chicago. You can hear the screams and sirens pick up and become silenced as she drags her tongue across the city, a wall of red flesh you would need a helicopter to escape. It collides with the skyscrapers a few blocks away, most not even clearing half the height of the muscle. You can see the ground breaking in front of you under the tip of her tongue as she drags it relentlessly forward, and there’s no running. You should have killed her when she was fifteen feet tall. There’s certainly nothing to be done now.

Just when she is about to lap up the block you are standing on, she tilts her head back and rolls the tongue back into her mouth, bits of concrete falling off of the edge as she carries half of the city on her tongue up to her waiting mouth. Impossibly, it’s like she is making eye contact with you, looking down her nose to see how you’re reacting to the terror she’s causing. Seeing how you regret ever defying her. Seeing you reckon with being spared when so many weren’t. She swallows, and you can see her throat contract around the lump that was once Chicago as it travels down her throat.

The nightmares only get worse when you see her outside of the courthouse standing thirty feet tall, twice as big as she was when you last saw her. The person that arrives at the courthouse is not the beast that you laid low over those weeks. She’s taller than two story buildings, wearing a cute dress, and smiling confidently to the press. Surely everyone will see what a threat she is now. Surely if you demonstrate that she can’t even fit inside a court of law then that means something has to be done about her, right?

Wrong. It’s like the monster has a devilish charm that protects her from you. She manages to turn a criminal case of assault into a fucking anti-authoritarian protest. People actually sympathize with a thirty foot tall monster, adulterer, boyfriend kicker, doctor flicker. Ah, but it only works if Dr. Vale can manage to keep his big mouth shut. You would think a man who believes that the fate of the world hangs in the balance would be able to lie for just a couple days to do the world a service of containing the bitch, but no, he cracks under the pressure and the whole thing ends in a mistrial. She wins. You lose.

Your boss is not happy, to say the least.

But you can’t just do nothing, right? Your window of opportunity is swiftly closing. Screw the FBI, This is, she is, bigger than that. You begin following her every movement for an opportunity to change public perception about her. You think there might be something to the way she looms over the prison that Thomas gets sent to, but before you can think of a way to spin that he’s released and back in the hands of the now fifty foot woman.

All hope of changing the public’s opinion shatters after Thomas’s proposal. There’s no way in hell you can alter the torrent of well wishes that springs up from it. In another couple months they will be married, and another outpouring of support will surely follow. Public perception is no longer a battlefield you can win on. 

Time to do things the old fashioned way. You get a group of extremists riled up and outfit them with guns and bombs courtesy of an old contact. Fanatics and ordnance: a classic equation for getting someone removed from the face of the earth. You continue to wait and monitor, embedding yourself in the little hippy village of fools that actually deign to worship her that has sprung up near where she dwells.

You wait, and you wait, and you think they ran off with your supplies. Happens all the time. Then one day, you get as close as you have ever gotten to her since the trial. She stomps over to save the day when her dad’s security team tries to kick the hippies and you along with them off the land. But that’s not all she does, she flexes her power and forces the hippies to kiss her feet. You get footage of the hippies kissing her feet alongside of you, their faces twisted in delight. Pathetic people.

You’re just about to send out the video to your former boss, telling them that you were right. Look, look, we are over the hill, hurtling unchecked towards the loop de loop of this hellish roller coaster.

But those fucking idiots you supplied, they chose that night of all nights to strike. The giantess manages to tie up the situation with a bow, capturing all of her attackers alive, if battered. They couldn’t even do you the service of dying in the process. And the public laps it up, and once again she’s the victim, and once again you are defeated.

By now it’s clear that she is blessed and you are cursed. You have paid every cost, pulled every thread, and nothing was enough. You orbit her, documenting her growing body, power, and darkness. There will be a time to strike, you know it, you just have to watch her every move.

You get what you want, finally, after this last year. Patricia does heinous, gut wrenching things to a town with a bright smile on her face. She crushes buildings by sitting on them. She stomps cars into pancakes. She rips apart houses with her bare hands. And she rubs herself as she does it. You capture it all from the safety of your van with a telephoto lens. This footage on the news would be enough to finally show the world a taste of the future that awaits them.

But you don’t release it. You hoard the footage jealously in the van you sleep in, along with all the other thousands of images you have of her. Snapshots from the news, photos taken of her from long distances. She is gorgeous, just like the devil would be. Her humor filled eyes cast down on the world below constantly stab at you and pull apart your insides. You have to cover up the images when you rewatch her smashing the town to bits every night.  She is blessed and you are cursed. You know that even attempting to release it will just rouse fate to sweep through your life and ruin you further. No, the die is already cast. You are doomed. Everyone is. All you can do is attend to her image. And when she finally flattens America underneath her, you will be the last surviving bug to shout: “I told you so!”

And so you watch. You watch as each morning, slowly but surely, she has to crouch down further and further underneath the giant entry way to her quarters. You watch as she does her morning stretch, reaching her hands up higher and higher each morning. Life is a blur of images of her taken through your camera. Your singular focus makes the days go by in a flash. It’s like you’re watching her grow taller and taller by the second, the top of her head inching up until it’s reaching over the roof of the warehouse, ninety feet in the air. You watch as her clothes appear to shrink on her, her soft, womanly curves pressing out against the strained fabric. Just when they are about to burst off of her, she’s in a new set of baggy shorts and a shirt, and the process begins again, slowly filling them until she is ready to burst out of them. She is all that matters anymore.

And one day, you feel her footsteps coming from outside of your van. You wake up and scramble to look out of the window behind you. Objects in mirror may be closer than they appear. She’s spotted you, and she’ll be on top of you in just a few of her massive steps. Your brain screams to step on the gas, to peel out and escape, but both your spirit and your body are too tired to resist her anymore.

—

“Look at that.” Trish signed, pointing to the white van parked at the far edge of the property. “That’s not my dad’s.”

“Be careful Trish, this could be bad news…” Thomas warned, clutching more tightly to her neck as her pace picked up.

“I’m ninety feet tall.” She scoffed, and cleared the remaining distance to the van. When she was within about fifty feet of it, she picked Thomas off of her shoulder and stooped down to place him at her feet.

“Wait, what?” Thomas protested, and reached back up for her hands as she released him on the ground like a kid begging to be picked back up.

“Well it’s not like I’m going to be good at communicating with whoever is in there.” She signed. “Go get’em, tiger.” As she signed ‘tiger’ she gave him a wink.

“Trish, I’m not ninety feet tall!”

“Oh, stop worrying you little baby. I’ll be watching everything from up here. I won’t let anyone hurt you.” She brushed her hand forward to jostle him towards the van. Thomas stumbled away from it, shook his head, and approached the vehicle with a forced smile on his face.

Trish watched the whole thing unfold from her seated position almost fifty feet above, craning her neck forward and brushing the hair out of her face to keep her eye on her tiny messenger. She readied her hand to intervene as she saw the driver side door open, and a person tumbled out of it. Thomas said something Trish couldn’t hear as he approached, but then turned his back to the man as his whole face scrunched up around his nose.

“He reeks!” He signed with big motions so Trish could see. As he did, the stranger ambled towards him, raising his fists to slam them down on her unwitting fiance.

“Ah ah ah.” Trish scolded as she brought her hand down to pinch the comparatively five inch tall man and lift him off the ground before he could. The greasiness she felt on her fingers made her regret it just as soon as she did.

“Just some bum, huh?” She remarked as she pressed her thumb firmly against his chest to immobilize him.

“Uh, Trish.” Thomas called up after he caught sight of the interior of the van. He circled around the outside and opened up the back doors. “I think you have an admirer.”

Trish tilted her head curiously and picked up the van with her left hand, bringing it up to her face and closing one eye so she could focus on what’s inside. It was covered from floor to ceiling with images of her taken from a distance.

“Creepy.” She observed. The hair on the back of her neck raised as she sensed danger, just for a moment. It was an instinctive memory of when she was small and vulnerable, a warning telling her to beware of a person stalking you. One glance down at her stalker held firmly in a single hand, no match for the strength of her thumb pressed on him, dismissed the memory. She squeezed him to reassure herself of this fact, causing him to groan. That’s right, she thought. You’re in charge now.

She set the van back down for Thomas to explore as she brought him to her face. Something about him looked familiar, but she couldn’t place him.

“What are you, some kind of pervert?” She demanded. The man squirming under her thumb didn’t answer.

“He’s got photos of you from all the way back to your trial.” Thomas informed, reemerging from the van and opening a laptop he found. “Oh my god.”

“What?”

“He has footage of us playing cat and mouse.” Trish’s face flushed, half in anger, half in embarrassment.

“What gives you the right?” She lectured at nearly full volume, and shook the hand she held him in to punctuate every word. The man grabbed her thumb and pushed against it, prying it off his chest over so slightly. Trish responded by tilting her hand to the ground and releasing him. The man screamed as he fell five feet down to her other palm. He didn’t have any time to recover before she pinched his leg and lifted to leave him dangling upside down.

“Hahaha” Trish laughed, and released him to fall back into her left hand. She proceeded to dump him from hand to hand, his body flailing like a rag doll between them.

“What are you doing?” Thomas called up to her, as disturbed as he was aroused by how much fun she seemed to be having toying with him.

“I’m teaching him a lesson.” She responded with a grin, not taking her eyes off of her unwilling toy.

“I think he got the message.” Thomas suggested, hoping she would stop.

“I’ll be the judge of that.” She said firmly, and closed her fingers back around him. “What do you have to say for yourself, you little pervert?”

The little man’s head rolled on his shoulders, dazed, battered, and exhausted. “I’m sorry.” He managed to groan. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“That’s what I thought.” She said sternly. “Leave and don’t come back. If I catch you scurrying around again…” She shifted her hand, leaving him and her threat to dangle. She lowered her hand and dumped him roughly on the ground. She rubbed her hands on her shorts to try and get rid of the sticky feeling from handling him, and then scooped up Thomas as she stood and raised her foot above the van.

“Hey wait!” Thomas said.

“What?”

“I dunno, I kind of want that footage.”

“Don’t be gross Thomas.” She huffed, and the worm that was once Agent Grisham watched as her foot pressed down on his van, her heel crunching down on the back, her toes hanging well over the hood. The sound of scrunching metal drowned out the sound of his soul leaving his body as he watched all the work he did to resist the giantess flatten underneath her perfect feet in a matter of seconds.

“I’ll send the security team out to drive you to the city. Get a job or something.” She ordered as she took her long steps away.

“Yes. Yes. Goddess.” He stammered, though she couldn’t hear his prayer.

—

“What’s the matter?” Trish signed to Thomas as they walked away, detecting tension in his body language. Thomas didn’t respond for some time, trying to figure out how to word what he was about to say.

“Don’t you think you were a little rough with him?”

“Aw, is my little toy jealous that he isn’t my only plaything?” Trish taunted.

“I’m serious Trish, you could have hurt him.”

“But I didn’t.” She reminded him, but already she was beginning to see his perspective on it. She was huge, and he really wasn’t a threat to her. She probably didn’t need to crush his van, and she definitely didn’t need to toss him around. Trish’s shoulders fell and she sighed.

“You’re right, Jiminy Cricket.” She relented. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine, but it’s probably a good idea to ask yourself why you did that.”

Trish walked in silence as she contemplated it. She did it because she could. He was stalking her. Why shouldn’t she just have her way with him? When she was small she would have put up with stuff like that, mostly because of the threat of escalation. That reason didn’t exist anymore, so what was there? Not disappointing Thomas, sure. But there had to be something more. She thought about Agent Grisham, for some reason, and the things he would do to her when she was in his custody. He had power over her and used it to abuse her. Had she just done the same?

“I’m just getting used to having power, I guess.”

“That’s fair.” He said.

There was another long silence.

“And yes I was jealous that you were playing with him and not me.” He admitted.

“I knew it!” She giggled.

“It’s just that you only really flex your power when it’s a sex thing. So I was worried…”

“Ew. No, Thomas. It wasn’t a sex thing with that guy. I just got full of myself.”

Silence again. Trish cast her eye down at Thomas on her shoulder with some suspicion.

“Wait…” She said, but she knew her suspicions were true when she saw the color on his cheeks.

“You little pervert!” She squealed, the smile on her face betraying her show of outrage. “You actually liked watching me do that?” She brought her finger up to her shoulder to poke at him teasingly.

“I can’t help it!” He squirmed at her touch, but he couldn’t resist her putting her finger tip against his lap and his erection.

“Mhm.” She hummed. “My poor, tiny lover. He needs to be the goddess's conscience but can’t help getting off at her being naughty.” She teased. She exhaled lustily and rubbed her fingertip against him until he came in his pants.