My name is Jacqueline Roberts. Jackie for short. And in many crucial, material ways, I have not had a difficult life.

I am an only child, and I never had to fight for recognition from my parents vs other siblings. I have always gleaned the love and devotion of my mother and father, and even though at the age of twelve my parents divorced, my father still visits regularly and sends me no end of presents.

School has never been a challenge for me. I’ve always performed well, and I can count on my fingers the number of times I’ve brought home a progress report with the letter B anywhere on the page. English and history are trivial, mathematics is a fun challenge, and science is a puzzle I’ve always been eager to put together. Though I think I can safely say I am currently out of the running for valedictorian or even salutatorian, I’ve received my share of honors and academic achievements through my years of education, and I can more or less take my pick of any number of colleges. I am a healthy, strong girl, and gym class has never been a problem. On the contrary, I’ve found that I outperform most of my female peers and a not inconsequential number of my tweedier male classmates. From an objective view, one could say I’m rather attractive. From my objective view, I’ve put a lot of effort into maintaining my appearance. I style my hair regularly. I put together my outfits with intention. I apply makeup every morning in perfect balance with my penumbra-colored skin tone. I have a lovely circle of friends, many of whom I would die for, and though I am currently single there is no shortage of eligible boys (and, perhaps, even some girls) who I wouldn’t be opposed to courting and could certainly have at a moment’s notice, if only I were to ask.

I’ve never wanted for anything. My life has been comfortable. There have been struggles, yes. Difficulties. Challenges. But I cannot deny that the cards handed to me at birth are particularly fortunate.

I want you to understand this fact about me, so you also understand the implications when I admit, reader, that in my time, I’ve realized something crucial about my desires and personal yearnings for the world.

It’s my sincerest belief humanity should be exterminated. Down to the last man, woman, and child.

I can’t deny it would ease my conscience to tell you this was a decision I arrived at after many years of thought, philosophizing, and pontificating. I wish I could say it was the result of my objective, analytical evaluation of millennia of conquest, subjugation, man’s inhumanity toward man, and the irreparable damage my own species has done to the natural world. In fairness, these did mankind no favors in my mind. But I have been a proponent of the eradication of the human race since long before words like “genocide”, “Holocaust”, and “slavery” were introduced to my lexicon. I stop short of stating that I have been like this all my life, but I truthfully cannot remember a time where imagining the neighborhoods in which I’ve lived, the cities I’ve traversed, the people I’ve met… razed, vaporized, and otherwise decimated… I cannot remember a time where thinking such things did not fill me with a gentle, warm feeling of peace and contentment. I can’t pinpoint precisely why, and to be frank I have never seen any reason to, any more than anyone should have to justify their tastes, desires, and dreams.

As well, it would ease me to admit that I have felt some guilt over feeling this way. But I must once again disappoint; I have felt none. Despite a lifetime of socialization designed to make me feel some level of sympathy and empathy for my fellow man and woman, I’ve not felt the tiniest shred of guilt for harboring such dark, morbid desires. Entering my school building and daydreaming about it being burnt to the ground. Talking to friends and smiling blissfully at the thought of them reduced to charred husks. Watching a football game and imagining the packed stadium seats overflowing with endless rivers of red carnage overlooking a deadened, stagnant competition.

I’m under no illusions of my normalcy. I readily admit this isn’t “normal” in any conventional sense. I’ve considered going to a therapist or psychiatric professional or even a priest… but for what? I promise I don’t mean to boast when I say if you were to look at me, it would seem I’m a happy young woman who is satisfied with her lot in life. I seem that way because I am that way. And though my deepest desire may be sordid and macabre, I’ve never had any reason to share it with anyone. Since this wish had not provided any difficulty for me in building connections, making friends, and getting ahead in life, I had every intention to live and die without ever divulging my greatest secret.

***

Senior year. A week before my 18th birthday.

It was a temperate spring afternoon.

I was on the bus. I was tired. We were just coming back from a fieldtrip to the local aquarium.

My best friend, a redheaded bookworm named Selena, was to the left of me, on the aisle seat. I put my trust in her to guard our stuff on the floor betwixt our respective legs, and I leaned my temple against the bumpity glass of the window. I closed my eyes. The sun intermittently peeked out between the shrinking buildings as we left the city and entered the suburbs, its harsh glow enough to breach my sealed eyelids. It was annoying, but I tried to ignore it.

I peeked open one eye. Selena was absorbed in her e-book. I tried to sketch her face in my memory. I had a plethora of photos of us together already, whether only the two of us or as members of a larger group, but I wanted to remember this. Her. Her slightly parted mouth, lips full. Her somewhat chubby, relaxed body in a colorful tank top and sweatpants with jacket. Her knit brows as she focused on something. I tried to etch it into permanence.

Our last fieldtrip as a collective; considering how many of my friends were going out of state for college, it hit me all at once that I was rarely if ever going to see them again.

My heart throbbed. The thought hurt. I tried to push it out of my mind.

“Hey.”

My eyes fluttered open. Selena had her nose right in my bubble. She asked, “Are you okay? You feel… hot.” Selena scooched an inch or so away from me on the seat.

I squirmed. I didn’t feel hot. “I don’t know… I’m a bit sad, I guess.”

“Yeah, the end of school will do that to you,” Selena mused, staring into space. “I mean, I’ll definitely come visit you up at U of C, often,” Selena specified with a pointed glare. “But these were some pretty good years. It sucks to give ‘em up.”

“Mm hmm.” My stomach grumbled. “It’s gonna be a bitch making new friends up there. I’m shy.”

“You? Shy?!” Selena guffawed loud enough the bus driver spared a quick glance to his rearview mirror. “You are nothing but the prettiest, funniest girl I have ever known. Ever. If anybody is going to have to worry about making…” Selena scooched away from me again. Her thigh had somehow ended up against mine in our fidgeting. “…friends… Are you sure you’re fine?”

“I’m –”

I was cut off when Selena put her palm on my forehead. “You do feel hot.”

“I don’t…” My stomach turned. I put a hand on my tummy. “I…”

This feeling. I’d never felt anything quite like it before. A tingling beneath my skin, as though at any moment, millions of microscopic organisms might burrow up my flesh and burst through. I had to scratch at my arm as I started to wobble and wheeze.

“Uhh…” Selena looked around, not entirely sure of what to do in this situation. She propped took hold of the headrest of the seat in front of her, standing up partway, wondering if she can get the attention of the bus driver. “Uh, stop the bus? My friend… she’s…”

Selena’s voice was stilted and demure; only a few people around her heard, and they graciously transferred the message forth in a game of telephone. I, meanwhile, had fallen into a stupor as Selena looked back on me, closely.

“Jackie…?” Selena asked. She put her cold hand on my forehead again. “What’s going on…?”

I stopped just short of vomiting on my legs, pressing my forehead against the seat in front of us. “What do you… what do you… mean…”

That was around the point I grew in earnest.

My expansion was nigh-instantaneous; it was enough that my new mass of flesh shoved my beloved Selena at unsafe speeds out of the seat, into the arms of the unwitting student next to us.

I groaned, I grit my teeth, I looked around. My head was spinning, and a draft had formed, which I realized soon was the result of my clothes beginning to rip apart. Alarm had begun setting in amongst the students. I was finally tall enough to see above the seats without standing up; some students were fumbling with their phones to take video. Some were simply leaning as far away from me as they could. Some were already standing up to navigate to a safer space.

“J-Jackie?!”

Selena was coming to, and she was the only one who seemed willing to face me, then. I looked down at her, still not entirely sure why she looked so small, there.

“What’s… happening to me?” I remember saying that. I remember Selena, crouched beneath me, craning her neck.

Then another burst.

This time, I outgrew the seat, and the bus.

The rear tires exploded, and the bus careened into a stop. The window I had been leaning against moments before, burst – as did the metal and plastic side of the wall within which it was set – as I expanded through it. A me-sized hole had been dug into the bus by my thighs, torso, and head.

Sunlight. Screams. Confusion. My head ached. My sense of time was out of joint.

I fell out of my hole, in a ball on side of the road. The bus driver was screaming. The students were screaming. I was the only one who wasn’t screaming.

***

“She’s gotta be… ten feet… yeah that sounds good.”

“Ten feet? Man, she’s at least twenty.”

“What on earth do you think twenty feet looks like? Fifteen, max.”

“Shut the fuck up, dude, she’s waking up.”

I opened my eyes. Asphalt.

I looked around. My legs still felt elevated; I realized this was because my feet, bare and exposed from my growth, were still on the bus. A feeling not unlike, as I reminisce, the feeling of falling out of your bed in the middle of the night. A spot of warmth on my midsection, the reason for which I could not identify, flummoxed me.

My vision cleared. The students had gathered in a circle around me, hushed, murmuring among themselves. I was naked.

The bus driver was hurrying to keep them corralled on the bus, but it was a tall order for one man. My classmates were looking at me with fear, anxiety… concern.

I remember gleaning that from them. And now, I realize it only makes sense. I had never done anything to forfeit that right. I was always a kind, caring, compassionate person. So, when something unprecedented and dangerous happened to me, it was only natural that these students with whom I had shared four tumultuous years would be worried about what happened to me. And before them, Selena stood, most concerned of all. She wasn’t wearing her jacket – then I realized: her jacket. She’d taken it off while I was out to cover my exposed genitals. She didn’t have anything similar for my breasts, both of which now were roughly the size of yoga balls.

I felt relaxed.

The bus driver trotted over. “Oh, thank God,” he heaved, resting his hands on his knees. “I called the ambulance… they should be here soon…” It was clear he was still in shock. He beheld me with a certain fear. In those eyes, I realized that he was not the outlier. He was the rule.

Everyone here feared me. When I shifted, they weren’t merely scared for me, they were scared of me.

I moved my body. I sat up. My inertia had changed; what were once simple movements required new calculations; I almost fell forward, and while my swinging breasts weren’t as much of an interference as I thought they might be, they weren’t negligible either. Hunched over, exposed, and now the size of a Christmas tree, I knew I should’ve felt something. Some type of fear, some terror, concern for myself, for my body. At the very least, concern for the bus I had inadvertently totaled.

“S-Selena…”

My first words. Though it was merely a whisper, the waves of sound seemed to call out and sift amongst everyone. They stood to attention.

“Hm? Yes?!” Selena failed to contain her fear.

“Can you… can you come here, please?”

I was feeling it. Another growth spurt. The asphalt rumbled and cracked as that feeling beneath my skin returned. But gone were the spiderwebs and parasitic feelings of something beneath the skin. The initial barrier to my expansion had broken, and where there had been discomfort, now warmth only flowed.

I grew, and I accidentally began pushing the bus further out into the street. My classmates murmured and yelped amongst one another as they dove out of the way of my growth, my hand flopped here or there, my thigh spreading out more and more on the empty street. My butt causing hairline cracks to spread into the concrete. Only trees seemed to line either side of us. Soon, I realized, I would eclipse them in height if this didn’t stop.

The bus driver redoubled his efforts to gather his students together, but he realized now that the bus likely wasn’t the most optimal place to store them. In his confusion, Selena tiptoed closer to me. My height had leveled off at about thirty feet, taller than the bus was long if I were to stand up.

“Selena,” I whispered. It made a breeze flow through the foliage.

“Yeah? Uh-huh?!” Selena was shaking.

“Are you listening?” Another spurt of growth. That feeling of warmth was spreading everywhere. But it felt… incomplete. As though there were something unfulfilled. Something I still had to do. Selena’s jacket had long-since fallen into the crevice between my thighs by now.

“Yeah, Jackie!” Selena didn’t know how to yell without it coming off as aggression. “I’m here! What do you need?”

The rumbling of my body petered off. Selena was a doll to me now. Less than a doll. An action figure. A chinchilla. My breaths and my heartbeat were enough to knock her off balance. And still she came. Stalwart, faithfully by my side. We were best friends after all.

The berth formed around me by the students got wider and wider as necessary. Only Selena remained in my circle. She tried to hop atop my thigh, but she just couldn’t get the height. I propped my finger beneath her, and she used it as a stool, flopping on my toned, muscular thigh like a bouncy castle.

“Selena…”

Selena looked up into my globular eyes. I had to cross them just to focus on her.

“…Thank you,” I breathed out. My breath washed over her in a slow, warm haze. “I love you. You are my best friend.”

I grabbed Selena.

I lifted Selena up before my own face.

I squeezed.

CRUNCH.

I crushed the scream out of her before it had the chance to materialize. Someone else picked up her slack, piercing the hushed silence with a shrill shriek as droplets and chunks of viscera rained on the students in a mist. Warm blood squelched between my fingers, rolling down in millions of tiny droplets, coating my wrist in a thin gauntlet of pure life.

The circle around me broke only moments later. There was no more order.

I spotted a group seeking to run into the trees. My foot angled toward them, rising high before crashing down on the lot. They exploded into nothingness, splattering the underside of my sole with their body-shaped imprints of blood. The bus driver turned tail and sought to run into the woods, but I scooched, crashing my hand down on where he stood. I had meant to grab him, but I just didn’t know my own strength, and he too became just a mess of slurry.

I darted for the next victims analytically, questing for as many students as I could. I didn’t need to stand; in fact, my kill ratio was probably better the closer I was to my prey. And what prey they were. The fear in their eyes, the utter confusion, the desolation. I rounded as many of my former classmates up into my hands, my loving arms, hugging myself as I squeezed them into paste that ran down my breasts in rivulets. As I stretched out my legs – powerful, sinewed, forged in the embers of years of track and field – stomping the little ones into the dirt and the asphalt. And the rest, I stuffed into my mouth, and chewed, reduced them to mush, swallowed down their liquified frames… I could taste every bit of emotion they had. I could recognize who was in my mouth by taste. Hannah, Jefferson, Hameed, Brienne, Tyler, Natalie. It was like nothing I had ever experienced.

I grabbed the bus, ripping it apart at the hole I’d made when I was a lesser being. I jammed my hand inside, a prowling predator. Some had taken refuge underneath; exposed in the light, they fled like termites, only for me to shift my oaken thigh and splatter them under it. In my hands, I knew some students were still onboard the bus’s crowded latter half. I crushed one, grabbed another. Romina, I crushed. Dixon, I grabbed. The rest, I allowed to remain, crumpling the last vestiges of the vehicle like a soda can and allowing their red essence to spill out of the bursting windows and metal seams and rivets.

I raised Dixon in front of me. He was screaming his cute little voice out. I always thought he might be a good candidate for a boyfriend.

“W-WH-WHY ARE, HOW, WHY ARE –”

I stuffed his head in my mouth. My tongue slithered all about him, sampling him, stealing his voice from him as his last rites were delivered into my taste buds.

Crunch!

I bit off his head, and much of his torso. He stopped screaming. His legs stopped kicking. Blood dribbled down my mouth, terminating like ruby-red lip rings. I swallowed his head down, and I deposited the rest of him into the forest.

Nobody was left. A few had run into the forest, but not enough to be concerned about.

I stared down the road. We were close enough now to my school that it would only take a few minutes to walk there…

And I still hadn’t fulfilled myself. I still felt incomplete.

I turned my gaze to the carnage. Bodies and body parts. Everywhere.

Selena’s jacket had been soaked by blood. A useless strip of parchment.

I took a breath. And I walked.