As she stood over me, her head scraping the low-hanging autumn clouds, I looked up at the titan who used to be my girlfriend. The moonlight caught the tears in her eyes, making them look like vast, shimmering lakes of sapphire reflecting a world that was much too small for her. I felt the vibration of her breathing in my chest—a rhythmic, low-frequency thrum that seemed to shake the very atoms of the driveway.
"Amelia," I shouted, my voice straining to reach her through the rushing wind created by her sheer height. "What happened? How did you... how are you this big?"
With a thunderous groan that sounded like a shifting mountain range, she began to slowly, agonizingly kneel. The displacement of air was so immense it nearly knocked me off my feet, carrying the sharp scent of ozone, damp earth, and the familiar, crisp floral smell of her hair. Her bright blue eyes, now the size of bay windows, swam with tears that looked like falling sheets of rain against her cheeks. She reached down, extending her gargantuan palm toward me—a hand so large it could have easily cradled a compact car. I climbed on, my fingers sinking into the fine, warm ridges of her skin, which felt like living velvet stretched over reinforced steel. She lifted me toward the sky until I was level with her massive, trembling lips.
"It started when my dad called," she began. Her voice was no longer a human sound; it was a resonant, heavy cello vibration that rattled my ribcage. "When I got home, he was frantic. He led me to the basement, and I felt the air change—it was thick, like static."
She looked toward the darkened Rose household, her long wavy black hair lashing around her shoulders like a storm of silken cables.
"He showed me a machine he called the DGX. Double Growth. It looked like a giant, industrial toaster made of light grey metal and bullet-proof glass, with green and purple transparent tubes spiraling down its sides like translucent intestines. He told me it was a frequency amplifier—it reacts to the bio-electricity of whoever is inside. He told me he finished it for me. Then, he left. A board meeting for funding. He gave me a quick, distracted hug that smelled of chemicals and vanished into the night."
Her blue eyes flared with a sudden, sharp defiance. "I went back down. I stared at the DGX. I thought about Mom—how she loved the pink bushes that bloomed in the spring. My dad is the opposite. He wants to force growth. I picked up a heavy iron wrench from the red shelf. I wanted to smash it. But as I stepped toward the platform, the machine hissed. A laser tracked me like a heat-seeking missile. My right arm and the sleeve of my black shirt got caught in the sliding glass. I heard a high-pitched, harmonic whine. Then... ZAP."
She looked down at her bare, colossal feet resting on the ruined driveway, the concrete spider-webbed with deep cracks. "I thought I was okay. I ran back out here to the driveway to find you, but that's when the world started to shrink. I felt my skin burning, and I heard the bathroom tiles upstairs shattering from the pressure of my shoulders before I even cleared the porch. Then the sneakers failed. I watched them strain until they were taut as a drum skin. The white laces snapped into a hundred crimson threads. Then, the solid red rubber soles split with a sound like a high-powered rifle shot. They burst off my feet in a spray of red fragments, peppering the lawn like shrapnel. I rose up past the roof of the garage, past the oak trees, until I was looking down at the town like a plastic model kit."
I looked at her from her palm, my brown eyes wide with a mixture of grief and wonder. "I’ll help you, Amelia Rose," I promised. "We’ll find a way to fix this. But we have to move. The neighbors are waking up."
Amelia nodded, a movement that created a visible gust of wind. She picked up her bike with two fingers—it looked like a tiny wire sculpture—and began to walk. Each step was a rhythmic, bone-shake THUD-THUD that set off car alarms three blocks away. We reached the forest, where the ancient oak trees leaned away from her massive frame as if in prayer. She found a secluded lake, the roar of the waterfall shielding us from the distant sirens.
She sat me down on a moss-covered rock. With her titanic hands, she began to snap dead logs like toothpicks, her brow furrowed in concentration as she tried to manipulate the "tiny" debris of the forest floor. She twisted the wood, green moss, and thick vines into a primitive, temporary wrap to cover what her shredded jeans could no longer hide—a titan trying to clothe herself in a world of toothpicks.
As she let out a deep, bellowing yawn that shook the remaining leaves from the trees and finally fell asleep, I stayed awake. I leaned my back against the warm pillar of her calf and watched the stars. Amelia Rose wasn't just a giant; she was a daughter ready to fight back against the cold, metallic world her father had built.