Homeland Security.
“We’re gonna have to ask you to submit yourself to tests,” Bob said.
Now she knew exactly what she was, and she got more frustrated than ever at Bob and Homeland Security and the Stanford nuclear physicists and the farmers who’d kept their distance farther and farther off and all those jokers from the on-line dating services who’d kept pretending to be interested in her until they found out she had a bit of a size problem and everyone else who’d ever said anything about any of this to her. So she stood up like an Oklahoma cyclone—stood way up with the clouds of the sky in her face. The mists and dust from the ground and suspended humidity slurped right up with her and wooshed around her in a big swirl, a big helix that rushed upwards as if it was drawn up with her in a single big breath. She lifted one of her gigantic elephantine legs and stomped down, right on top of all those men in their black suits with their Rock-a-billy ties and crew cuts, right on top of those black Homeland Security Hummers, right on top of Bob.
For a moment, she could not bring herself to raise her foot back up. When she did, she looked and found that her attitude toward things made a difference: some things expanded with her, some things did not, some things…were left just curls of metal and flesh and nothing resembling much of anything, Bob or his friends, living or dead. Nothing living. Nothing threatening or comforting or anything.
She really was alone.
She really needed to get back to Redgunk, Mississippi.
Needless to say, when you stomp on Homeland Security, you essentially go on a list of citizens somewhat in disfavor with authorities representing the federal government. But that wasn’t her biggest problem, and you and I know it. It was that she was big, and no one loved her—how the hell could they? And out in the middle of Oklahoma you can get that feeling of blankness and flatness and nothingness faster than you can anywhere, except for maybe Kansas, and that was why she took the tent-fabric that had been her shelter and folded it into a pouch into which she stuffed a bunch of her fruits and vegetables and feminine needs articles and the computer and all of that, and she shouldered it and started walking.
She walked parallel to and just in sight of the interstate—and Good God, I cannot tell you how many petty little accidents she was responsible for that day and the next, with the gawking onlookers from the road all seemingly unable to both drive and text message and watch giants out in the heartlands of America. She walked clear across Oklahoma and down through Arkansas, then she waded across the Mississippi and, within a couple of days, she found herself standing like the Eiffel Tower over Redgunk, Mississippi. And all that’s to say that by the time she got there, she was tired and cranky, she was dressed in something that looked like an awfully wrinkled, awfully short-and-tight-and-growing-shorter-and-tighter dirty hospital gown, she was alone and hunted and misunderstood, some one hundred feet tall, an anomaly to contemporary science, and America’s number one most-wanted federal criminal.
Now I suspect you remember Horace Daryl Hudspeth, who played fullback with the Consolidated Schools when they won that championship over in Blue Falls about ten years ago. Now I am not saying Horace was stupid or mentally delayed, he just never really had it in him to, say, go to Stanford to become a physicist or to sign on as an executive officer over in Homeland Security, and he never did pay much attention to technology of any sort—like the internet—since the electric company usually kept his service shut down; but he was a good enough soul. I suppose if I were St. Peter, I’d likely let him through the gates for mostly just not doing anything particularly bad. And for some reason, though most everyone in the South had heard of the incredible rapidly-growing 100-foot-tall woman, he hadn’t.
So he was probably more shocked than anybody I’ve ever known when he came round to the driver’s side of his rusted old Impala with a package from Uncle Joe’s Corner Liquor Store and Gas only to see an extremely tall and rather distraught-looking woman-monster-skyscraper-thing of enormous proportions lumbering down the kudzu-edged strip of County Road 63. There were other people whooping and shrieking and gasping and starting to run off—a little gaggle of Christian ladies who’d just ended their afternoon tea-and-conversation session and a couple old war vets who had been admiring the new bust of Colonel Beauregard Ryan Howdy that we erected downtown last year—but Horace just stood there, his mouth agape.
There was something really weird about this, he thought, but he did not feel like running. He felt like…shaking his head, holding up his hands, and trying to get that young woman giant to stop right there in her tracks because, in fact, he saw that it was Idella May Sauerwein. It was his girlfriend from eighth grade—the one he dated before Eileen Sawitsky.
So as this 100-foot-tall monster woman lumbered up above and with crashing, thunderous steps came up County Road 63 right toward his Impala, Horace Hudspeth just stood there with a flabbergasted look. He stretched out his arms as if he wanted to just grab that big foot now coming right down toward him, and when he realized it really was coming right down toward him, he called out, “My Gawd, Idella May Sauerwein! Is that you?”
And Idella May stopped her foot in mid-downward plunge, just inches from the top of his head. She withdrew it, leaned over a bit and said, “Horace Hudspeth?”
“I—I ain’t seen you in, good Gawd, Idella May, probably ten years.” He gulped. “You’ve grown a little since then, haven’t ya?”
And at first for some reason she smiled as if glad to see a familiar face after having been so long out in the Oklahoma wheat fields, but then she scowled as if that familiarity thing pretty quickly cleared and left a memory or two: that junior high boy had been a pervert with nothing but sex on his mind and that was why he went with Eileen Sawitsky. “Horace?”
He stepped back. “I—I’m sorry about th-that thing with Eileen,” he responded, reading her thoughts from those glaring eyes he knew pretty well from across the Consolidated Schools playground. “I know we didn’t get a chance to talk about it, not with having to go on to high school and then graduation and then finding a job and then—”
“Not without you ignoring me for ten years, you son of a bitch.”
“Well, I—” How did you combat someone’s complaint about that if…if it had been her and not him who’d done the ignoring, the real cold-shouldering, the never-forgive-this-one-little-indiscretion thing, not even enough to just say hi. Water under the bridge? “Idella May, what the hell happened to you?”
And she leaned over even more toward him, and he caught a glimpse down the front of that hospital gown and he was amazingly—amazed. And he said more quietly, less stupidly, less like the moron he suddenly felt himself to be because he saw in her eyes a kind of quiet loneliness, a subtle uncertainty, a melancholy—all of which he had felt too most of these years since those days in junior high, not from any one cause he could discern but just from being, just from keeping on living—“Idella May, what has happened to you?”
And she saw that he did not mean: “What happened to you to make you so big, to turn you into such a weird little chunk of space-time that you are now expanding faster than the expanding space-time of your immediate environment?” He meant: “Are you okay? As another person from Redgunk, Mississippi: are you okay?”
It was the first thing he’d said to her in ten years—ever since that Eileen Sawitsky stole him from her—but more importantly, the first little thing anyone had said to her since her growth spurt that made a difference to her. It was the first thing that made a difference at all.
She could not get into her house, of course, and really could not even get into the back yard, but luckily the back fence, once folded down, opened the yard out into the mucky woods just south of Redgunk Swamp, which meant there was plenty of ground there for her to sit on, minus a tree or two.
He took a slug of Jack Daniels, offered her one and then realized, if you calculated the ratios, that the whole bottle itself would not cover a swallow, not even a taste. She shook her head and took it
from him anyway, and just swallowed the tiniest bit—and seemed satisfied that it was a mouthful.
“I’d’a thought you couldn’t even taste that little.”
“You’d be surprised. I—turns out that the usual amount of food and drink becomes the proper amount. It’s small to me when I pick it up and put it in my mouth, but then—they said I wasn’t growing but expanding, whatever that means. It means normal-sized food, your size food, works for me in the normal amounts, your amounts, once it’s in me it expands too—I didn’t expect that. I spent half my savings pre-ordering trucks of fruits and vegetables that I’ve since had to…unorder. When I take something in—” She really did not want to tell him about her experience with the tampons the scientists had made her. “I mean, like when I breathe or eat or drink, the air and food and water expands to match my size.”
He shook his head and smiled goofily. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand that. I—”
It was the first time they’d talked since junior high. It was the first time she’d let him within ear shot. She trembled noticeably. “You hurt my feelings, you know,” she said, that being what she’d needed to say all these years, using the energy of it to build a wall between him and her—it was a lot easier to say than she’d thought. Maybe it had something to do with how little it would take to crush him. Wanting sex like that!
He took a slug of the Jack she handed down to him. “It was a long time ago, Idella May.”
“I know. But it hurt my feelings.”
“All I wanted was…” A kiss. It had been a heck of a lot easier to get a kiss from Eileen Sawitsky; just a kiss and maybe a little fondle or two. That was it, but boy howdy, who’d’a known just how a little something like that could screw up ten years? “Just a kiss.”
“A kiss?” she said, taken aback for reasons she could not comprehend. Something as small as that? “Just a—” And right then and there, the world changed for her.
“Want another drink?” He handed up the Jack and she took it; this time, she took a longer draw.
And then her voice was softer than it had been before, maybe ever. She noticed it even if no one else did: “Is it funny how you could be on one side of town—Horace, ain’t you working down at the chicken processing plant?—and me on the other, commuting down to First Felpham Bank and Loan, and how we never saw each other even?”
“I saw you.” He nodded to himself, remembering how sometimes both in school and then afterward he’d look over toward her, across the playground or the store or the highway, and wish he could just go up and say, “Seems we could just go have a pizza over at Mabel Delashmit’s, maybe rent a movie?” But being unable to, sensing around that grownup girl the cold force field she’d wrapped herself in, the impenetrable distance she’d created between him and her, all because she wouldn’t forgive him that little something that really didn’t even seem to need forgiveness.
Sensing that had made him despair of it. It seemed so silly for her to be out there in some different distant universe she would not let him enter. All because of his—well, kissing and fondling Eileen Sawitsky that one time in the eighth grade, for God’s sake. Didn’t seem right. He said, “Idella May, I ask your forgiveness. I really do, here and now. From the bottom of my heart, I am sorry I hurt your feelings and did something that made you feel bad. Idella May Sauerwein, from the bottom of my heart, I really do ask you to forgive me.”
And she looked down at him, now fully cognizant of how far away his universe had been sent by so little. She said, “There’s nothing to forgive. It was a long time ago. Forgiven and forgotten.” And with that bit of performative utterance, it was done.
She told him, “You know, the worst isn’t growing so big.”
“No?”
“The worst is that I stepped on Gustavus, my cat, and broke his back.”
Horace nodded that he understood; they both understood. It wasn’t really all that much about Gustavus, either. They both took long quiet drinks from the bottle.
Now, the Federales were not holding back from attacking because they did not know where she was. In fact, she’d been in their sights since she’d gone past 25 feet tall, and all the way to and from Oklahoma they’d tracked her with the help of their satellites and a Doppler radar or two. They knew exactly where she was each step of the way, but were at odds with one another on how to handle her. She was no doubt a monster; she had killed 23 men from Homeland Security and crushed five Hummers, so she was a threat to the nation and the world.
But there was debate among the generals and the physicists about what to do and what might or might not happen if they did it. For example, there was some movement to just out and out shoot her—but with what? Just a shotgun might work if things going through into her little event-horizon of space-time expanded to her size; one tiny bullet might even do it. Others argued all you needed to do was rile up some hundred-foot monster-woman with some pesky and non-effective bullet and you’d have havoc up and down the central United States and racing toward the coasts. What you needed, some of them argued, was a missile sized to do the job, and if not that, then maybe an atomic bomb.
But whoa, said the others, their hands up and their faces looking desperate. Even the discharge of the energy of a single bullet might cause some sort of rip in the fabric of space-time and no one could predict the results of that—it might open up a wormhole that would suck the whole planet to some far end of curved space. What would a nuclear explosion do? Or maybe there’d be some sort of chain reaction that would not only ignite or demolish the entirety of Redgunk and Blake County and the whole of the atmosphere across Mississippi and the US and Canada, but it might just start something universal that would break the gravitational bonds of the planet and expand out into the stars and the galaxies and consume them all. It was possible.
While the Federales were talking like that in their makeshift camps outside of Redgunk, up near Blue Falls, Idella May, much altered in mood by the Jack Daniels and by the thought of how a kiss could be both infinitesimally small and infinitesimally large all at the same time, was telling Horace something like, “I don’t even know if someone could kiss me anymore.”
She brought her giant nose and giant teary eyes and giant lips right down in front of his much smaller ones and said, “I don’t think I’ll ever be kissed again.”
And Horace might have said something in response like, “Your bottom lip is bigger than my Aunt Shrilda’s whole body, and she hasn’t been able to get out of her bed for eighteen years!” but instead he said, “Maybe it’s not a touch or a kiss that matters, Idella May; maybe it’s just the being together of it.” And they both felt, as you would have if you’d been sitting right there in their particular event horizon at the singularity of their re-encounter, that it really was about just being with someone. They felt it and melted into the feeling and opened out to it in ways neither one of them could have even imagined in all those separated years since junior high.
“I want to kiss you so badly,” she told him. “I wanted to then.”
And he eyed that huge gaping mouth before him with its wide rubbery lips and said, “I don’t know how it would be for a man like me to…try to be with a woman like you. But, I—” He wanted to try. He’d wanted it for ten years. He’d wanted all his life to be with her, to just be with her, and maybe he’d wanted it longer than that if men and women lived back into distant past lives in other universes, as perhaps all people who come into some contact do, as perhaps you and I do. “I have so wanted to be with you, Idella May. I so badly want to—”
And Idella May understood. And what she did was sit up and look around her, realizing that a crowd of maybe five or six hundred people, including me, had accumulated at her side fences—the ones she hadn’t knocked down—and in her front yard and down along County Road 63 through Redgunk, and there were a whole bunch of people sitting on the roof of the First Mount Zion Christian Church of Redgunk and they were all watching: watching her re-encounter with the boy she kne
w she loved from even as far back as junior high, loved so much she’d had to just cut him out of her world altogether, until now, because she’d hurt too much to really be able to feel anything at all back in those early days of junior high. Until now.
She said, “Excuse me for a moment, Horace.” And she stepped over to County Road 63, where most everyone’s car or pickup truck was parked along the road, and she scooped them all up and brought them to the edges of her yard and stacked them, with all those people watching, until all those people and their prying, staring relentless eyes simply disappeared from view, leaving just her and Horace in view of each other, sitting in a private little space, their own private space, together.
But I could see through a crack between the cars: she brought her face down to his and he puckered his teeny little lips—and where their lips met, it was like real human lips meeting real human lips, perfectly proportioned for each other.
“I don’t understand,” he said, drawing back just a little.
“I breathe in,” she said, “and the air, which is normal-sized molecules for the world, comes into me—bigger, expanded, as I need it; like food, the air must become normal-sized for me. I breathe it out, it must shrink back. Yeah? I need your lips like I need air and food.” And all that fear of being touched, all the fear of embarrassment, all the fear she’d always felt to say what she really wanted, really needed—all that fear was gone.
Horace rubbed his lips because he had the distinct feeling they’d gotten bigger, a whole heck of a lot bigger, on contact with hers, and that some of her breath had come into his lungs. Part of her through her breath had come into him, and he’d had little expansions of himself here or there where they were sharing at least part of the same space and the same world in some of their parts.
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