I have no idea what I’m doing when it comes to love. When I see my tear-streaked reflection in the subway car’s window, my makeup ghostly against the tunnel walls, I know it’s all my fault. I got my hopes up, I pretended I could be myself, and now I’m six inches taller than when I left home.
“Be small,” I tell myself. After a date as harsh as the one I just lived through, maybe I can make myself believe it. “Small is good.”
I close my fist around my brand-new amulet full of ground-up clover, bamboo, and everything else the internet suggested, and try to shrink. My favorite blue date dress, ripped in half a dozen places when I couldn’t keep myself small, relaxes a little.
Not enough.
The subway slows to a crawl and stops in the tunnel. I dig into my purse for Toppy, my stuffed anxiety octopus, and squeeze.
“Don’t make a fuss.” When I’m this stressed out, I want to be big. I need to be big. Being small hurts. When I’m small I might as well be living in a vise. “Keep it together. Stay small.”
The walls aren’t closing in yet, but that can change fast. This type of subway car is ten feet, three and five-eighths inches wide and eleven feet, eleven and three-quarters inches tall. Enough space for three hundred people at crush load. Barely enough for me.
I clench my fists. My nails carve smiling craters into my palm. No blood, not yet.
At last, the train moves. I fly out the doors at the next station, take the escalator two steps at a time, feel my dress straining against me. If I had focus it’d grow with me, but I don’t and it doesn’t. I crash through the paddle gates, dash into a parking lot. I’m glad I didn’t wear heels.
I collapse on the cold asphalt and let go. My watch breaks apart on the rocks of my wrist. My necklace goes taut and snaps. I’m barely able to make my dress grow with me, and here and there it rips in new places. I’m ten feet tall, twenty, thirty, knocking over garbage cans and pushing cars aside. People must be staring at me, and I cry.
There isn’t a woman on Earth who’d love a woman like me.
I’d love to know why I grow, but I’ve got no clue myself. One morning when I was fifteen, I just woke up nine feet tall. Toronto’s a big enough city that you’d think it’d have some other giant women in it, but all the ones I know are stuck with what puberty gave them.
I’m just stuck with knowing that of course it couldn’t be so easy as me being a queer lady in a world like this. No, I’ve got to be a giant queer lady. Today I’m six feet tall and every glance makes my smallness hurt even more.
“Maybe you should take a vacation.” Erin beams at me from the other side of the café table, as if her smile could drive off shadows. “See new sights, clear your head, and when you come back maybe you’ll find the girl of your dreams.”
“How quickly we forget Niagara,” I say. A couple of years ago, Erin and I went on what turned out to be a halfway trip to the region’s finest wineries. Halfway because during a quick nap, I grew enough to blow out her tires. “Do you know how many nightmares I’ve had about getting big in a plane?”
“You could rent a tractor-trailer,” Erin says with a mischievous grin. “Stretch out, travel in style.”
“Come on, this is serious.” I rest my forehead on the table and try not to think how long it’s been since it’s had a proper cleaning. “I’m a fat queer lesbian giantess. How many people are going to check all those boxes?”
“More than you think.” Erin’s eyes are full of — well, it better not be pity, not after everything we’ve gone through. Call it sympathy instead. “It’s not hopeless, Carol. There’s someone out there for you. All you have to do is find them.”
“All I have to do.” My stomach acid is bubbling, burning the butterflies to cinders. “I’ve found a specialist. She thinks she can keep me from needing to grow.”
“That’d be a hell of a trick.” Erin leans forward with interest. “How?”
“I don’t know.” I imagine growing beyond skyscrapers, beyond mountains, beyond any chance of love. My problems are mountains so big I could be as big as a mountain myself and still not be able to climb them. “Something’s got to change.”
“You really think it’s right to change yourself to suit the world?” Erin peers at me, frowning. “You’re incredible already, Carol. I’d love to be able to be big like you.”
“No,” I say, my voice jagged and bent. “You don’t.”
There are two places I let myself relax. The first is my apartment, where no one can see me. I’ve got the furniture arranged so that once I draw the curtains, I can hit twenty-three feet with my head in one corner and my feet in another. The other is Dr. Sheridan’s office. She works out of an unusually bright basement on St. Clair Avenue, and one time when I curled up with my chin in my knees she measured me at thirty-five. I’d never felt so comfortable and so free.
Every time I go in hoping I’ll find a smaller way to feel like that. Comfort tastes like charcoal when you can’t share it.
“You’re smaller than usual.” Dr. Sheridan gives me a nod I don’t deserve. Today, I’m just tall enough for my head to scrape the ceiling when I’m sitting down. “Would you say you’ve been making progress?”
“Goddess, Doc, not at all.” I let it all unspool, the awful dates and the failed amulet and the daily pressure of life, until she coughs and points to the ceiling. I’ve grown without thinking and dented it. “I’m broken.”
“The roof is broken, not you.” Her voice is heavy with kindness, but it’s hard to believe it’s true. “Have you ever thought about intentionally being big in public?”
“I–” The fear of all those people looking at me, focusing on me, makes me grow by reflex and deepen the dent. I grit my teeth and squeeze Toppy like an orange. “I can’t. They’d all see me.”
“People would see you, that’s true,” Dr. Sheridan says. “Could you tell me what has you so afraid?”
I close my eyes, breathe in clean air and breathe out my fears. There are people out there who think giant queer ladies don’t have anything to worry about but artillery and power lines. They’re wrong.
“I’m too dangerous to love,” I say. “It’d be so easy to roll over in the night and crush someone in my sleep. Who’d risk that for me?”
“You’d have to do a proper experiment to get an answer.” Dr. Sheridan thinks for a minute, and all I can feel is the sweat of being seen. I don’t know how she’s so calm while I’m so big. “What do you think about ten feet? Big, but not gigantic. You wouldn’t be holding anything back at that size, even if it makes kisses an odyssey.”
“A little.” I smile to mask my pain, my fear. Isn’t that what I’m supposed to do? Hide myself behind a mask? Not make a fuss? “I thought I was supposed to be little.”
“You’re supposed to be what’s best for you,” Dr. Sheridan says. “Whatever that is, you’re the one who decides. Not me.”
I nod. I can’t manage much more. Maybe once she sees that being tall can’t work, she’ll suggest something that does. The rest of the session is a blur, and when I crouch-walk out, I bump my head on the door frame.
Erin insisted that we go to High Park for my first big day, and a pun that groan-worthy deserves respect. At least when I’m there, I can find shade under the trees.
“You look good today,” Erin says. “Strong. Confident, even.”
“It’s amazing what you can fake.” Every time we pass a bush or go around a corner, I expect people to jump out, point at me, hurl words like grenades. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“Me too.” Erin gives me an admiring look, all irises and eyelashes, and it warms me up all over despite the day’s heat. I never could have made it this far without her by my side.
We’re hardly the only ones in the park. I get a few reactions, mostly quiet whistles and god-damns and sidelong stares when they think I’m not looking, and I stop for the children. I like being a reminder that the world is full of amazing things, and what’s more amazing than the impossible?
“Excuse me.” The voice is glass shards and barbed wire in my ears. I open my eyes and wish I hadn’t.
There’s a cop in front of me, white and mustachioed and deadlier than a blue-ringed octopus, and it’s only because I can’t choose between shrinking or growing that I don’t do anything at all.
“Afternoon, officer.” Erin speaks up for me, and I don’t know where she finds the courage. “Is there a problem?”
“I’m following up on reports of a giant woman on the loose.” I drive my nails into my thigh. Of course he is. Some busybody sees me and suddenly I’m a fifty-foot monster, crushing houses and picking up cars. “Care to explain?”
“Following my doctor’s advice.” I look down at him with as much steel as I can forge. “Am I free to go?”
The cop lets the silence bake like a heat wave. He must be baking in that black uniform of his, but he was the one who chose to put it on.
“Go on,” the cop says. “Watch your step.”
Erin grabs my pinky finger and drags me down the trail. Once I can’t see the cop I sink to my knees and sob. I can barely hold myself in.
“You did a good job back there.” Erin brushes tears from my cheek. She looks like she’s barely holding together herself. “How are you feeling?”
“Like a menace.” My terror crystallizes into anger. I’m not hurting anyone. I’m just taking up space. “Better watch out, or I might go on a rampage.”
“Hey, you and me,” Erin says. “We’d be unstoppable.”
When I come home from High Park, I start living for spite. Being small, humble, and unnoticeable was what the world wanted, but it never bothered to ask what I wanted. For too long, my dating profile said I was 5’2″ — the height on my ID, before I first grew. That night I change it to a proud ten and message a blue-haired, pale-skinned artist named Tara who put “loves standing tall” on her profile.
I wake up the next morning to her reply. That night I meet her in a brewpub with high ceilings and not too many people. Tara’s jean shorts are stylishly torn, her bag’s covered with enamel pins, and she’s wiry, lithe, active — everything I’m not.
“Ten feet indeed,” she says, looking me up and down. Her gaze doesn’t raise a single hair on my neck. “I was worried you were exaggerating.”
“Never.” We settle down at a small table; I sit on the floor. I’d snap chairs like dry twigs. “Which is why I’m here like this.”
“Just so you know, I have a thing for confident women,” Tara says.
As the evening rolls on, strong drinks and sweet words carry me forward. There’s a depth to Tara, a storm of passion, and all I want is for that storm to rain down and wash all my fears away.
“You’re so incredible.” She’s been skating around saying it all night, and when she does it’s all I can do to keep from bawling. “Can I ask how you do it?”
“Pretty comfortably, thanks,” I say with a sly grin. “I think about being big, and I get big. Watch.”
I grow another foot, brush my head against a hanging light, and knock over an empty chair, but it’s okay. Tara’s focused on me as if the world’s fallen away.
“Wow.” She reaches out and touches my skirt. “Can you make anything bigger?”
“Just me and my stuff,” I say. “I’d get in trouble if I went around naked.”
“That’s the difference between art and people,” Tara says. “Art gets away with a lot of things. What about you and me and the art of conversation, for starters?”
We mix our voices and paint wonderful things. I don’t get home until late, my face layered with kisses and my head in the clouds. I collapse on my mattress with a smile on my face and it takes a minute to realize I haven’t shrunk, I haven’t grown, I’m still eleven feet tall.
“It sure was a hell of an odyssey,” I tell Erin the next day. I remember kneeling for a kiss, remember Tara climbing me like a mountain, remember wishing I was the size of a mountain so it’d be that much more satisfying when she summited me. “Who’d have thought?”
“I kept saying there are people out there.” Erin smiles at me, a bit softer than usual. She’s wearing a T-shirt I’ve never seen before, and it looks a bit tight. “What do you think?”
“She’s incredible.” Hardly original, but that’s the thing about love — it’s all different, all the same, all at once. “I shouldn’t have doubted you.”
Her smile hardens for a moment, as if she’s holding something in.
“I’m so glad,” she says. There’s honesty in her voice, and maybe a hint of wistfulness. “I knew it’d come true for you one day.”
Tara and I bounce between galleries and museums and graffiti-dappled alleys, but no matter where we go her attention’s always on me. She sprinkles my hands with kisses, tickles my legs like a cat, breathes honey into my ears.
I leave Toppy at home and hug Tara instead.
“There’s my giantess,” she says with satisfaction when I meet her at her door. The place she’s staying has an elevated porch, so I can kiss her without having to kneel. “Feeling good, I hope. I know some incredible people who want to meet you.”
I can’t hide my excitement, and I don’t want to, either. She’s not embarrassed about being seen with me. She’s serious.
“I was good as I could be without you.” I lean into the kiss, let it linger. “Now I’m better.”
There’s a van in the driveway. I’m too big for seatbelts, but that’s okay; I’m too big to be thrown through the windshield, too. Tara winks at me and we’re off, out into the deep night that falls once Toronto slips away. I’d be afraid if Tara wasn’t there to anchor me.
We stop in front of a warehouse, long and tall and nondescript, the sort of place that could be anywhere and house anything. The loading dock doors are big enough that I barely have to duck, and once we’re through the sheer black curtains draped across them, we’re in a party.
Hundreds of people.
I freeze.
I sweat.
They’ll all see me.
“Incredible, isn’t it?” Tara’s eyes are for the crowd. It’s thick, buzzing, deep, like talking lava. It’ll swallow me up.
“Yeah, I… I need some air.” I don’t wait. I crash outside and slump against the wall. There’s a cold wind and bright stars. Looking at them, tracing the constellations, my fear lifts. The lines I draw are light-years long. No matter how big I get I’ll always be infinitesimal to them.
It takes Tara ages to follow me out. There’s a drink in her hand.
“I wasn’t thinking.” She sits next to me and takes a sip. “I should’ve got you here earlier.”
“It’s okay.” My heart drops a little. She planned all this, brought me all this way, and I couldn’t last a minute without cracking. “It’s my fault. I’ll try to do better.”
“I’m sure you will.” Tara smiles at me. “I know you’ve got it in you.”
There are so many people inside. I don’t know how Tara can handle it. Every few steps we stop, she introduces me to more people I’ll never remember, and they study my every bend and curve and angle. They appraise me.
All I can do is force a smile and remind myself that Tara is there, guiding me, because she loves me.
Of course she loves me.
Someone’s knocking on my door. Hard, sharp, serious. Erin’s style. I crouch-walk over, holding my head. Damn. How much booze does it take to get a giant woman drunk? I should’ve taken notes.
“You’re all right.” Erin leans against the door frame. Relief? Satisfaction? I’m too hungover to think. “Thank god. You weren’t answering my texts.”
“Phones don’t like growing.” I wrecked two before I learned. I check mine — hard with giant fingers — and find a dozen messages from mild concern to OMG. “I told you I was with Tara.”
“We had plans,” Erin says. I blink at my phone. 1:35 PM. Good thing it’s Saturday. “I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“I’m fine,” I say. “Need some water. Come in, already.”
Erin comes in, shuts the door. Probably would have stayed in the frame forever if I didn’t say otherwise. That’s the kind of woman she is.
“I’m worried about you, Carol.” I wince. She’s named me. It’s serious. “I know things are different for you now, and that’s great. But just because you’re comfortable, you’re not invincible.”
“Never thought I was.” I fill up a liter stein at the tap. I knock the water back and feel a little better. “I can take care of myself. I’m a big girl.”
I can’t tell if Erin wants to groan, or slap her head, or laugh. Maybe she wants to do all of them. Instead she walks up to me and puts her hand on my wrist. She must want to reach my shoulder, but there’s no way.
“Please, be careful.” She bites her lip. “Okay?”
“Don’t worry,” I say. “I’m good.”
We end up staying in, playing games, ordering pizza. That’s good enough for me. My apartment feels bigger when there’s someone I care about in it.
A few nights later, Tara takes me back to the party warehouse. It’s empty now and echoing. It tells me I’m not so big after all.
“I come here to work on megaprojects sometimes,” Tara says with a grin. “Big things that make you feel. I want to make you feel like you’ve never felt before.”
“But you already have.” I kneel down and kiss her cheek. “You make me feel loved.”
“The whole point of art is pushing boundaries.” Tara kisses me back and looks me up and down, like she’s scanning me. “What I want to know is, have you ever pushed your boundaries?”
Tara’s never seen me at my most compressed. Leaving my apartment day after day, scraping my head against the ceiling, unapologetically being who I am — how’s that anything but pushing boundaries? I try to say yes, but the word is bitter on my tongue.
She’s brought me to this place, big and wide and empty, for a reason. I can see it in her eyes. After all the love she’s given me, isn’t it only right to give her what nobody else can?
“You want me to grow.” Even saying it makes my heart thunder.
“Like never before,” Tara says. “And I’ll make you feel incredible things. I’m just going to need you to take off your panties first.”
My breath catches in my throat. My heart roars. For a moment I can’t hear anything but blood. But it’s the price of love, isn’t it?
Isn’t it?
I reach under my skirt, pull them down. Tara nods approvingly.
“All right,” she says. “Now show me what you can do.”
It’s not comfortable to grow while I’m lying down, and the concrete floor is cold, but I have to show her. I close my eyes, focus, and let myself go.
So much tension I didn’t know I had evaporates as I push my boundaries. I don’t stop until I feel the walls. I’m the size of a building and if I was standing I could see for miles.
Tara’s already made me feel incredible things, but I know this wasn’t what she meant.
“All right, that’s great!” She’s got a megaphone. That, more than anything, makes me tear up. I grew so big that her voice isn’t enough. “Hold still, all right? Now it’s my turn.”
I can guess what she’s planning but I still bite my lip. There must be something wrong with me. This is love, after all.
She must be wearing cleats. I wince from the strangeness, the sharpness, the unfamiliar edge between pain and pleasure as she enters me.
I know she means me to be enraptured by this, but I can feel every step she takes. I can’t help but think of bugs, skittering and crawling and doing things I can’t see. I close my eyes and force myself to bear it.
Isn’t that the price of love? Bearing it?
“Are you all right down there?” I ask, to distract myself.
“Oh, it’s incredible!” I bite my lip so hard I’m sure I’ll draw blood. It’s wrong. It’s all wrong.
I focus on breathing. In, out, in, out. Stay calm. Be what I need to be. Don’t wall off love. I just have to get used to it.
Step. Step.
I can’t get used to it.
“Actually, I’m not feeling too good,” I say. “Can you get out, maybe try again later?”
“I’m almost there!” Tara shouts back. “Hang on, it’s going to be amazing!”
“Please, this is really new to me, I don’t know if this is the right thing now.” Fresh tears start wetting the concrete. “Please get out.”
“This can’t be rushed, my lovely!” She’s so confident, so assured, so focused on herself. “I’m almost there, and then it’ll feel incredible, I promise!”
Something snaps in my brain and my world tilts. I’m not just uncomfortable, I’m not just scared; I’m angry. Love isn’t supposed to be any of that.
I’d rather be alone than feel like this.
“Get out, now, or I swear to goddess I’ll shrink!” I can imagine how that would feel: compression, crushing, pain that won’t end. I hope she listens. Periods are bad enough when they’re boneless. “Get out, get out, get out!”
She gets out. I’m not too big to miss the look of betrayal on her face. I start shrinking before she can dive back in and call my bluff.
Assuming it’s a bluff.
“What’s the matter with you?” Her voice is wavering, unsure. Wounded. “I was doing this for you.”
“You were doing it for you!” I wipe away my tears and wriggle back into my panties. “It was all for you.”
Tara doesn’t have an answer. She stands there, looking at me. I can tell what she’s thinking. How lucky I was to have her.
I don’t feel lucky anymore.
“I’ll call when I’m ready to talk,” I say. “I need time.”
I don’t wait for her answer. I crash outside and grow until I could crush her little van with my heel, until I could take apart her tiny warehouse with my fists, until I can see familiar lights on the horizon. At least those won’t lead me wrong.
I wait until the little warehouse is out of sight before I let myself cry.
I go small to Dr. Sheridan’s office. It’s been two weeks since Tara and I go small everywhere now. The pain’s worth it. At least I know what people see.
“I need to get used to it,” I tell her. The office is so big now. I could disappear inside it. Would anyone even notice? “I need to know how.”
“Are you sure you want that?” Dr. Sheridan looks at me with kindness and compassion. Things that Tara never looked at me with, now that I can see clearly. “You’ve been clear about how much it hurts. You shouldn’t have to hurt to live.”
“Of course it isn’t what I want.” I’m not wearing makeup, so there’s nothing to be smudged by my tears. “It’s my only chance.”
“All this time you’ve been dancing around the same question.” Dr. Sheridan leans in, her eyes soft. “What do you want, Carol?”
I know the answer. I’ve always known, even if I didn’t want to acknowledge it. It was what convinced me I was in love with Tara, because the alternative was too much to bear.
“I don’t want to be alone.”
Tara never gave me anything but her phone number. Before I delete her from my phone, I write it on a scrap of paper.
Then I burn it. It curls and shrivels and shrinks to a breath of ash and nothing.
It doesn’t make me feel any better.
The days go by in a blur. I ache from keeping myself small through the night, and I don’t get much sleep anymore. I remote into work and do what I can before I crash. The cycle repeats. It’s getting warmer outside. I simmer.
Erin still texts me. I answer back often enough that she won’t get worried. When she comes to the door I only open it a crack. I don’t want her to see me. I’m exhausted and raw and small.
“It’s a beautiful day,” she says. “Thought we might share it.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m working on a lot.”
“Okay.” Erin nods, looks at her feet, buries her hands in her pockets. “Keep me updated, all right?”
I nod and shut the door. One, two, three seconds go by before I pull it wide open. She’s already on her way back down the hallway.
“Wait,” I say. “Hang on. I’m not busy. I’m wrecked.”
We talk for hours on my little couch that feels way too big. I pour out all my fears, all my worries, all my nightmares of life never adding up to more than this. We split bottles of wine.
It’s still light when we head outside and down into the ravines. Here, Toronto vanishes behind the leaves. We walk along the trail, nodding at passing cyclists and smiling at squirrels as we go over creeks and under bridges, and we’re both talking around what we really want to say.
“I have to thank you,” Erin says, breaking a comfortable silence. Overhead, a bridge casts a concrete shadow spanning the deep valley. “The way you were so open, even though I know you were so scared, it really made me think. It made me realize a lot about myself.”
“I don’t know if I’m the best example of anything.”
“You’re an example, and that’s enough.” Erin takes a few steps back and gives me a mischievous smile. “Look.”
I look.
She grows. Her shadow stretches across the grass, long and wide and deep. I gaze up at her and my mouth hangs open.
“Careful,” she says, the voice of the ravine. “You’ll get bugs in there.”
I sink to the ground. “How long?”
“Years.” Erin settles next to me. She’s geography. “It hurt so much. You helped me realize I didn’t have to hold myself in.”
All those years, all those days, all those nights. She knew exactly how I felt because she felt it herself.
“I had no idea.” I look at the ground as my shame bubbles up. “All those times I poured everything out on you… I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be.” She smiles down at me, and I feel a bond I never felt with Tara. “Be what you want to be.”
That’s what it all comes down to. Why I went on date after hopeless date, why I stayed with Tara until the end. I don’t want to be alone. Now I know I never was.
I could stay like this — small, constrained, always aching. Erin did. But what kind of example would I set then, to everyone who thinks they’re not supposed to make a fuss, to not take up space, to be so small that they slip beneath notice?
“Okay,” I say. “I will.”
I exhale and grow. The feeling of comfort, of space, is liberating. I step back from the bridge and grow until I can rest my elbows on it. Erin grows with me, a sly smile on her face. I look toward the horizon, toward distant little towers, where the sun is going down.
“We’d better be careful,” I say. “Or we might accidentally knock over some skyscrapers.”
“Hey, you and me.” Erin takes my hand with a smile. “We can put them right again.”
| Phoebe Barton is a queer trans science fiction writer. Her short fiction has appeared in Analog, Lightspeed, and Kaleidotrope, and her story “The Mathematics of Fairyland” won the Aurora Award for Best Short Story in 2022. She lives with her family, a robot, and multiple typewriters in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Find her online at www.phoebebartonsf.com. |  |