In a gymnasium, the fortuitous nexus between their two cultures, Otto slowly circled his protegee as she went through the movements. “Back straight,” he advised, gripping his elbows. “Hold your back upright and lift your chin, here, like this.”

Melati found the position uncomfortable. It cramped her muscles in places she wasn’t used to using, or forced them to hold a position she wasn’t accustomed to. Any time she felt a twinge or a pull along her spine, she rolled her shoulders and sent a wave of motion down her back and into her hips. This relieved it immediately, but it also earned Otto’s disapproval. “You looked like you were about to fall over. Are you sure you’re feeling well? Is the heat getting to you?”

The question galled her, as she was born in this climate and savored it like the flap of the magpie goose’s wings or the little tree frog’s resonant croak. It was the German who always mopped his shiny, round head with his kerchief or stood beneath the gust of the AC unit. She enjoyed swaying and stepping further from the AC, compelling him to either holler instruction at her or else step out of his comfort zone.

“Don’t writhe so much, fraulein. Your spine twists this way and that, it’s no good.” He sighed, nudging his glasses back up. “Please, just for me, just this once. Here, observe. Left, dip, rise; right, dip, rise. And then left again, sweep your leg clockwise, right again, sweep your leg counter-clock— …no, the other one. Left leg, left sweep; right leg, right sweep.” Sweating in his uniform of black T-shirt and breezy traveler’s pants, he held his arms spread, tilted his chin up, and demonstrated the step.

Melati detested the movement. She felt that Germans danced as though they were balancing a tray of glasses in one hand and trying to see something over the heads of the crowd. This was not her way, even in her blended style. The vision of the squirming, restless naga was what pleased her and to which she aspired. The roll of her neck as her head scanned the heavens and swept the ground was her regal gesture, surveying all her countryside and the heavens above. The idea of her giantess-self positioning herself at right angles to the ground, ducking and swooping while balancing upright, created an ungainly, offensive image. It would be like one of the skyscrapers downtown suddenly coming to live and twisting like a screwdriver into the ground, attempting to demonstrate something beautiful. She wondered if there was something in German history to be learned by the way Otto held his head steady, his gaze fixed in one direction no matter what his limbs did, while he danced.

Yet his choreography was not without beauty, especially when he performed it. She enjoyed watching him perform the moves from his homeland. The way he held his arms aloft, how his strong legs lifted and bounced his upper body no matter what position he took, he almost looked as though he were floating in the water or hovering in the air. She saw the conviction in his movements, the way his face shifted from frustration at trying to control the snake-girl to confidence, even peacefulness, as his muscles pulled him through his gestures. She admired the controlled posture of his arms, angled like the crystalline structure of sugar, and the musculature of his legs, carrying him smoothly from one step to another. It really wasn’t so different, the way their legs bent and knotted to support their bodies, moving them forward and through their turns. Some part of her wanted to glimpse his strong legs, out of curiosity, to see the muscles bunched and pumping under his pale skin.

“You see?” he barked, snapping Melati out of her daydream. “This is the proper form. I’m not asking you to make a career of it, but … how do we say … One must learn the rules before one breaks them.” Stiffening, he bowed slightly and dumped his open palms toward her. But she did not feel like performing for him just now.

It was not often the young giantess, at any size, condescended to speak to those around her, but now she did. If she didn’t speak, she would have to break something or set something on fire, whether a neighbor’s house or the self-satisfied choreographer wiping his temples on his shoulders. “I think there is something you’re missing, in my style of dance, the way I was taught.”

Raising his eyebrows, Otto very nearly smiled as he asked her to elaborate.

“It is a feeling in our dance. You have it too, sometimes. I can see it in your eyes as you perform. But it is not the same as our spirit.” Her bottom lip pouted as she considered how much she should reveal to this outsider. If she was going to work with him, if she was going to hang around for much longer, then there was something intrinsic to her that he needed to understand. “We call it rasa. It’s … this feeling.” Melati knew the words would run out, so she let her body take over. Her arms reared as her torso twisted, shoving her ribs this way while her hips did something else. The way he danced, with simple moves that mirrored themselves, was completely incompatible with the expression of her soul in her movements. “It’s open, you open yourself to it,” she murmured. “You don’t memorize a pattern and perform that pattern. Do you see?”

She felt the German’s eyes upon her, studying her, straining to understand rather than to critique. With gamelan in her head, she lunged this way and melted in that direction. Her hips thrust to the Western off-beat, while the naga churned her in a slow circle upon the floor. She lifted her arm, twisted her hand, and her smiling face followed its track, then retreated and reversed. In that sense, her moves were not entirely unlike the patterns Otto relied upon in his execution, maybe. “I’ve given a hundred performances,” she said, alluding to a much larger number, “and I don’t think I’ve ever moved the same way twice. It’s just how you feel, how the musicians are behaving that night, what you ate and what you talked about with your mother, dancing while the birds swarm before the mosquitos arrive, followed by the bats until the stars fill the sky.” It was difficult for her to put it into words, but not hard at all to contrast it to the rigid positions he wanted her to memorize and stumble through in correct order.

Otto’s nostrils hissed. He never raised his voice with the Jogja woman, and he never swore. He never so much as stood and trembled with barely suppressed rage. At his worst, he gusted two lungs of air through his pinched nostrils and waited a couple seconds before speaking. “Slowly, I’m beginning to understand, perhaps. And yet as different as our dances appear, perhaps they are not so unalike, yes?” He listed the aspects that she herself had noticed, how his disciplined choreography brought out a shining light from within him, at its embodiment and mastery, not unlike the vision of the huge, beautiful naga that she tried to emulate, bringing out the raksasa wanita at last. It was a different path, generating the light within as opposed to following the light’s call, but the destination was the same.

They spoke much longer, shifting from defending their heritage to seeking out the points in common. She moved her fluid arms, he cast waves from his shoulder to his wrist. Her legs bent and turned, bending with the elusive frequency that flowed all around her, and his steps and stomps created a personal resonance to fill his body. Melati aped him briefly, showing him how silly it looked to hold her spine so stiff, until she turned and stepped backward and bobbed forward and found herself in a position befitting Indonesia’s historic ruling class. Bordering on offensive, Otto gesticulated a loose, random dance styling he thought looked like her bedhaya style, when suddenly his shoulders rolled in a counter-rhythm to his swinging fists, punctuated by his Germanic stomps. He stared at his limbs, not recognizing them for a moment. “That felt really good,” he said quietly.

“It looked really good,” Melati said, and it did. He tried to replicate it and failed, but her quick eyes soaked the sequence in readily and they practiced it together. When it would ever come in handy, who could know, but it was a fun move to have in their collection. She noted, without wanting to make him feel self-conscious, that he had come dangerously close to smiling.

Melati practiced a little while longer, earnestly wanting to understand some of what Otto was trying to get across. “I think we have found some moves that aren’t entirely conflicting,” she said. “How about this: I will practice and perform some of your steps that we find compatible, but you must leave me room to pursue my spirituality.”

His jaw fell open at her words. “My dear, the last thing I would ever want to do is crush your spirit.” He stepped close, reached out for her cheek, then withdrew his hand.

Melati was surprised to feel her heart leap in anticipation of that touch.

How ironic, then, that the conflict seemed to reduce and dissipate only when they actually danced together. The clash of their minds and wills was one form of dance, each performer reading each other and strategizing their approach, but when their bodies moved together it changed entirely. Otto wasn’t as tall as the other foreigners, but he still had several centimeters on Melati, and with his strong, carved torso and disciplined confidence, she felt almost sheltered by his presence hovering so close. Hot as the day was, she could feel the healthy energy radiating from his chest against her shoulder blades. “Yes, now, lift … and lift …” The barking commands from across the gymnasium melted into a warm vibration just behind her ear. She unconsciously turned her head so her ear could drink in that delicious purr, feel it tingle down her neck and into her shoulder. She lifted her arm, as he did his, grateful to hide her raised gooseflesh from his sight. And if she could perform her sequence of moves just right, with the German man as her shadow, then he had no correction or guidance to offer and she could catch the gentle grunt from his nose, the gasp in his throat after holding his breath during a complex maneuver.

Annoying as his stilted ideas could be, they were still bonded in their love of dance and their appetite for something more than what existed. Though she didn’t always agree with his strictures, she adored that he had earned them and held them. It was clear how much he revered dance, the concept of breaking one’s body to the fulfillment of an ideal. At moments she could see him as an embodiment of their pursuit, a manifestation of dance in physical form. They chased the same dream, their torsos shifting to the side as if reaching for that future, their legs swishing in the sprint to pursue that vision. When his knee brushed between her legs, his developed thigh rubbing through her sarong against her softer inner thigh, she blocked out his hasty apology as it marred the fleeting image of both his thighs wrapped around her hips, the question in her soul of what it might be like to be crushed under his weight, in bed. He apologized diligently at each inadvertent contact, even those that weren’t entirely accidental on her part.

Despite, Melati knew he was interested, just not like this, not until the raksasa wanita manifested.

Many days could go by before she enlarged herself. She could do this at any time, but there was no need. It was more important to learn the steps, to mitigate the foreigner’s flood of ideas and find a compromise with her own passion. Every once in a while, however, she could see the naga swimming through the land, its crown glinting with no shadow, churning up the volcanic loam and plowing the trees aside as it arrived. She inhaled, deeper and deeper and deeper, filling her expanding lungs. Her shoulders ached to stretch, her calves knotted and relaxed, and the ground felt so much more fragile than before. Finally, the giantess spun and pranced and tiptoed through the oversized structure for Otto’s eyes only.

The German man looked so small and alone, in the middle of the gymnasium floor. He never ran to the side, always stayed where he had been, a rigid little toy struggling to look up her considerable length while she danced. Melati felt his gaze burning against her skin, a warm spot running along her shin and up her thigh, and she would turn. The warmth ran over her toes, up the bridge of her foot, focused on her ankle that bent and flexed to support her incredible weight. He admired her thick, sturdy bones, but he savored her dense, potent muscles. Her huge calf shifted above his head, her long toes flexed right in front of his face, her bones of her ankle ground beside his hips. How badly she wanted to poke her big toe right into his soft guts! How easy it would have been, when she raised her thigh, to simply let her foot settle one meter to the side, coming to rest upon his little body.

Yes, at least as much as she wanted to feel all that low-fat German beef piled atop her, she also wanted to feel this hardened, stubborn German tourist squirming against her sole. Perhaps his stern head could poke between her big and second toes, reddening as her foot unleashed more of her mass upon him. Or maybe she would cover him entirely, her heel shattering his thin ankles, his scrutinizing expression buried in the ball of her foot. Of course she would never do that, it was a personal rule that she never use her gift as a weapon against lesser people (and she was surrounded by lessers).

But Otto drank her in with his eyes. He never stepped out of her way as she danced unless he had been standing in the spot where her foot should land next. Their contact at same size had been pragmatic, to guide an arm in a direction or to remind her to straighten her spine. He was much more affectionate and forward with the raksasa wanita, however. His soft palm upon her ankle, less to guide her posture and more to sense the incredible tendons at work beneath her skin. All the encouraging pats upon her dinner plate-sized toenail or the stroke along her instep, twitching beneath his feathery touch. The playful boot to her large, callused heel, smug in the knowledge that such a gesture could mean nothing to the giantess. One time, and only once, he had ventured to crawl upon the bridge of her foot. It appeared to be an idle gesture after “let’s take a break” and he discussed the rest of the afternoon’s sequence of moves. But she knew these moves, and he knew she knew them, and his description was circular and lofty, taking up too much time to describe.

He relied on her mercy at these times. The little German man expected her patience as he lounged upon her foot, waving his arms in the air and repeating himself. Melati had to stand in place, hang her head to perceive him down there, and listen to his rambling in mostly fluent English while he soaked in the experience of their contact.

He was also more complimentary during these times. “So majestic,” he called her. “The fact that you haven’t torn down these walls and stampeded up the jalan to the government office or any embassy of your choice is a testament to the grandness of your character.”

“I have no desire to do these things,” she said simply. “I only want to dance.”

“But a magnificent young woman such as yourself, you could do anything. You could carve away the beaches or shore them up for more real estate. You could punish the reckless drives on the jalan with the tip of your finger. Imagine that!”

She didn’t wish to and declined to reply.

He leaned back, resting upon her girthy tarsals. “And if you stayed this way too long, your appetite would surely be a force to be reckoned with. Have you ever eaten in this state, say, a cow? Even a person?”

“Your questions sound like those of the schoolchildren I left behind a long time ago.”

“Not that long ago, I think,” he chortled, stroking her instep. “But I take your point. Yet it seems to me an incredible injustice, to you, that you must hold yourself back from your abundant potential as a raksasa wanita. Your consideration for others is commendable, this is obvious, and yet part of me would love to see you …”

He faltered, which was more surprising to her than if he’d cursed or vomited abruptly.

“What is it you would love to see, Herr Lehrer?”

He slid off her foot and walked some paces away from her statuesque pose. “Pardon me, I forget myself. Two more minutes and we begin again.” He turned and walked away, simultaneously growing smaller as he walked and larger as she called off the spell and reduced to normal size. She watched him drink some water, his canteen shaking in his hand.

That was a week and some days ago. Melati recalled that moment, in reflection, as today’s events took a different, new course.

“Again.”

Melati turned, raised her elbow, let it follow an invisible track that carried her aloft and back down again. She whipped her head the other way, wearing a mask of surprise, before stretching her legs out to carry her body across the floor. Even she knew she hadn’t paid attention to her left foot, which would guide the right. Otto clapped sharply, once.

“Again.”

She drew a deep breath. The clap stung her ears. It tensed her back and neck. It shook her out of the fluid warmth she created for herself when she danced. This was Otto’s way, she knew. He said it was preferable to the Zen master’s rap on the skull with a board, to shake the student out of their incorrect path. Was it, though? Melati could dodge a stick, but when he clapped those thick, strong hands, it rang throughout the gymnasium.

Melati took the position once more, elbows back, palms up as though she were pressed against a window. One shoulder dipped down, one rose to sweep her elbow in the arc that would turn her S-shaped spine into another arc, reaching behind herself. From that pose her right leg shot out at an angle, and it seemed as though she would topple backward until her left leg reached further, defying gravity to pull her forward. This time she focused on her ankles, what they were doing, where they twisted in their own continuum before her heels reached the ground.

His clap rang out. “Again!”

“What did I do wrong this time?”

He was an impassive stone statue, roughly chiseled, standing by the fold-out table with the water cooler. “Technically, nothing, but as you stepped forward you left your heart behind. Bring your heart with you, don’t just haul your carcass across the floor.”

This was too much, even from him. She’d practiced this sequence a dozen times, at least, and he always found something new to complain about. The only thing he couldn’t complain about was something out of his jurisdiction, and so she lapsed into her own dance, one of the trance-dances when she was a poor villager selling her body (as a dancer) for rupiah from fastuous tourists. Losing herself to the cozy familiarity of her strengths, she found it easier to block out Otto’s disapproval. He shouted, she knew, and stamped his leather shoes upon the floor. Her mind was full of the neighborhood gamelan: old men with cigarettes dangling limply from bottom lips, unbuttoned shirts and shaved heads, hunched in the bamboo hut and hammering out the tunes they could perform in their sleep. Walking away from the German choreographer’s lessons would be a defeat of herself, but retreating for the moment to nostalgia was a slim act of rebellion, one she could indulge in occasionally.

Immediately, the naga squirmed within, writhing and stretching and shedding its light throughout her limbs. Melati gasped ecstatically, unable to drink enough air to feed her expanding limbs. She flung back her arms to greet the sky with her breastbone; her quads and calves shivered as they pulsed with the energy of life, hauling her developing trunk toward the ceiling. And soon there was nothing the petulant little German could do but stare in awe at her magnificent form, radiant with height and mass, radiant with the fact of herself.

Hiding the smirk of her full lips, the giantess tossed dozens of kilos of hair over her shoulder. She thrust her shoulders and elbows back, spreading her long fingers to emulate her hands pressed against a vast invisible surface. The vertebrae of her spine toppled like a tower, spilling to the side as her left shoulder dipped and the right rose, round and robust, to swing her powerful elbow like a comet through the atmosphere and contort her upper body clockwise, against her motionless hips. When she flung her right leg ahead, her sole gripped the smooth surface of the gymnasium floor; her left leg shot out with the unstoppable force of a locomotive, and her toes likewise seized the floor and hauled her immense body forward.

The tiny German was transfixed. She knew her execution had been flawless this time, and even supernaturally rendered as her massive dimensions changed the contour of the floor, the resistance of the air, the balance of the tonnage of her meat and bones and fluids. There was nothing he could complain about now, and she knew it, and she knew he knew it. When she completed the sequence, Melati took her resting position, fists on hips, head tilted demurely, and extended one potent, toned leg toward the diminutive figure by the water cooler.

He was frozen where he stood. His eyes drank her in, unabashed, flickering up from the bridge of her foot, to the sheen of her shin, to the muscles of her thigh, twitching with impatience. All aboard, little man, she thought. Move it or lose it.

As if in his own trance, the tiny man moved toward her posed foot. He shucked his shoes, tossed them aside, and bent to climb upon the bridge of her foot on all fours. The ivory milkiness of his spindly arms stood out against her skin; she could feel his hot little palms flat against her foot, gripping, sliding, reaching for another grip.

Melati drew a long, deep breath. She knew that this gesture was breaking a barrier, but not the gesture of his ascent upon her limb: she reached out to invite him, that was the breach. He had wanted her, she had seen his own muscular legs twitch restlessly while she moved. She had felt his hot glance run over her massive limbs as she grew. If she daydreamed about his weight upon her body, in bed, then he waited breathlessly for the uncommon moments she erupted into a young goddess, holding him in her private audience.

She could have kicked him away and laughed off the incident. She could have apologized and brushed him gently to the floor. Melati did neither of these and nothing like it: she held herself steady, static, giving him a chance. Giving him the opportunity they both had waited for.

Once his little arms wrapped around her ankle, she withdrew her foot and resumed a standing position. No: she bent her limbs into the modified plié he taught her. This stance was a waiting position between dance sequences, a graceful hold that accented what had just been done and hinted at what was to come. Now, however, it was a pause in time, a place for her to wait while the little man tested his physical prowess.

His fingers dug into the smooth skin of her lower leg, and his shirt brushed over her shin as he clawed his way upward. It was impressive to watch him grip the limb so much larger than himself. Her leg tickled as he inched himself upward, slowly but surely. In another minute he accessed her knee and allowed himself to dangle there, hugging the round joint.

Otto looked up at her. Without changing her expression, Melati winked at him. His tiny face rumpled in a pleased grin; his tiny jaws parted to suck in the humid air.

Then his tiny hands reached for various spots along her thigh. The tickle up her shin transformed into something much more ticklish, something like plush bolts of velvet at the clothing store, or the drizzle of molten caramel over rice cakes at the wheeled cart that crawled down any jalan at any time of day. She stared at the tiny, audacious man, now embracing her thigh. At her size, he was about as large as her hand, or a little longer: the tiny body wrapped around the front of her thigh was not unlike her own hand resting upon her leg, as she might do while sitting in a chair and chatting with friends. Except it wasn’t her hand, it was an impatient, demanding little man from another country. It was a small man splayed across her thigh like a splash of paint. It was a small animal crawling up her limb, staring at her with intense, beady eyes, creeping closer to the hem of her skirt.

An animal would not have known or cared what lay hidden within her skirt. Otto was not an animal… or he was, now, but a knowing animal who crawled up her firm leg with intent. When his tiny, digging fingers had pulled him up enough, the bald knob of his head disappeared under her skirt. Then so did his shoulders, and then his rib cage. The tiny, clawing fingers now dug at her inner thigh, hidden from her view, and the slight weight of the miniature man’s body twisted only gently upon the surface of her thigh’s skin, drawing inward toward her other leg.

Melati wondered what she was doing, letting this little transgressor creep into her personal region. But even as she wondered, she let it happen. Part of her wondered, and the crushed velvet, caramel-drenched part of her wanted to see what would happen next.

She knew she was large. She saw the way the warang asing unfailingly backed away when she grew up, as though she’d turned into a gorilla or a tiger suddenly. She remembered the times she’d blown up indoors, ruining her parents’ home and earning a scolding from the government officials. The way undeveloped ground gave beneath her soles was too familiar; the moment of vertigo as she suddenly looked across her neighborhood from a frightening height was also familiar. There was no question in Melati’s mind that she was a gigantic woman, when the dance moved her and the naga took her. There was no question of it.

Never had she felt so large as when the tiny body clutched the soft skin of her inner thigh, tugging at it with his inconsiderable weight, and reached in with one minuscule hand to embed within the tissues that had been off-limits to everyone else in her life. The mad German, only the size of a doll, clutched the most intimate area of her leg and thrust his hand, then his arm into her interior tissues, stroking frictionlessly across steadily moistening folds of hot, pink flesh … and she let him.

More, she wanted it. The giantess held perfectly still, like the Statue of Liberty or the Colossus of Rhodes, with her thighs slightly apart for the tiny white man squirming between them. Now her massive lungs gulped gallons of air, but not to feed her expanding body. Now she sighed and shivered, as the inoffensively small limb reached inside her, stroking, searching for something. Did he know what he was looking for/ Did he have a plan/ Or was he simply groping for the sake of going somewhere unimaginable and unheard-of?

Never had Melati felt so large. Never had she felt so immense as when that tiny groping hand entered her. When her muscles contracted sensitively, his arm slipped out again without resistance. That’s how small he was, how large she was.

Now there was nothing else for her to do but dance. She melted out of the plié and assumed her position, without the sharp clap and the barking “again.” She drew her arms back and thrust out her breasts, straining against her simple sheath dress with the spaghetti straps. Simple, tasteless, but she loved it, and not just because it was one of the few garments that grew with her in these episodes. Her left shoulder slumped, her right shoulder rose, and now she noticed how her thighs rubbed together in anticipation of the wrenching twist of her upper body. She noticed, because now she had a small, squirming man trapped between her soft inner thighs.

Once again he slid his scrawny arm up inside her—scrawny! Melati had admired the iron discipline of Otto’s body, when they were mostly the same size. Even his pinky finger was well-developed and potent. To think of his entire arm as scrawny, now, was difficult to settle in her mind. Yet her dancer’s thighs clenched him in place, and his whole arm was thinner and slightly shorter than her own index finger.

Her sharp elbow raised before her, perfectly tracing an arc through the gymnasium air, rising almost to the girders of the ceiling before she drew it back and turned her torso to follow it. She drew a breath and her breasts rose toward the ceiling; she drew a breath, in no way cooling the rising heat between her thighs as the muscular little being writhed defiantly in her grip.

Her right leg swung forward, swimming through the thick air, and her toes splayed in anticipation of gripping the floor, now finer and smoother at these proportions. This caused her powerful right thigh to clamp down on the audacious little man clinging to her left inner thigh. She could feel his strong shoulders, shrugging against the compression. She could feel his spine, writhing out of the way, seeking a more comfortable position between her colossal legs; there was none, but he sought it regardless. And even as her calf bunched to extend her foot, and even as her toes gripped the floor, the little man never extracted his invasive arm from Melati’s vulva. Her tissues caressed the thin limb, running over it without friction, her juices trickling down his armpit and soaking his shirt around his ribs.

She nearly swooned at this point. So clear was the image in her mind, of the tiny man’s struggle between her cushioning legs, how deep his arm was inside her and how near that stony, comical little face was from her labia. She held her pose just a second longer than she should have, cradling the solid mass between her thighs, flexing her thighs to test his stoutness and endurance, but also to hug him very intimately. She embraced him with her thighs, hugged him tightly on both sides, the muscles of one thigh mashing him into the fat and flesh of the other. And something deeper inside her twitched as well, a brief, pleasurable spasm that ran up from her knees, around his arm, and into her womb.

Reluctantly she swung her left leg forward, breaking the embrace but completing the posture. Her massive sole patted the ground with a loud clap, and the little figure was released from the grip of her thighs. Now he clung to her leg, almost hanging off it (and surely her trickling juices could not improve his grip), but at least she pulled the sequence off flawlessly. Whatever else, he could not complain about this.

The tiny man adjusted his grip. One little arm slipped off, releasing as though shocked by electricity, but swiftly slapped back into place, tiny fingers scrabbling for something to latch onto. They found her pubic hair, and his tiny fist wrapped up in it. Miniature thighs tensed and clenched her inner thigh, pushing his body upward until, she suspected, that wry little face buried itself into her tissues.