Giantess World
Alma didn’t turn around at the sound of that voice, nor even tilt her head back to take a peek at her much-larger daughter. However, upon going dead-silent and slowing her own breath to listen, Lexi picked up on a sound, beginning like the whine of air hissing out of a tire. For a moment she tensed again, prepared to quickly withdraw from under the bed if her mother came out spitting and lashing, rabid wildcat-style. But the noise didn’t crescendo into the hollow scream the Alpha still had etched in her memory after that fateful night so long ago when she fled the life her mother had planned for them. Instead, the sound stayed low and quiet, transforming to a yowling cry, not of anger, but honest-to-God sorrow, the kind that Lexi didn’t believe could exist in a creature like her parent who had also done the things she’d done. Nevertheless, Alma was weeping.
“Oh, my baby. My baby,” the tiny Alpha chanted between cries. At last Alma craned her neck around nearly all the way like an owl’s, her narrow face just as sallow as Lexi remembered, only now stained wet with pent-up melancholy. “Look what they’ve done to you.”
“They haven’t done anything to me,” Lexi said. This wasn’t entirely true, but it felt correct in the moment.
“They have. You’re just not old enough yet to see it for yourself. You hadn’t seen the things I have,” Alma said. Though the waterworks hadn’t let up, she spoke rather plainly through her tears, as though two voices spoke out of the same throat. The compressed Alpha turned herself over onto her hands and knees, arched her back, and commenced a slow crawl out from under the bed to where her child’s prodigious face awaited.
Lexi, not ready to see her hauntingly puny mother slithering toward her in the shade of the white cell, immediately backed out from under the mattress, but remained sprawled on the floor. She kept her legs pointed at the bed, each sneaker raised in case she had to bat the diminutive criminal off with the rubber treads. Unperturbed by the credible threat of her daughter’s feet, each of which was just barely smaller than Alma’s whole body, though, the inmate stood with some effort and placidly shuffled a quarter-inch at a time toward Lexi. The little woman’s catlike eyes, still gushing saltwater, never faltered from meeting her daughter’s gaze above.
“I guess that’s true,” Lexi heard herself say. “I haven’t seen… as much as you.”
“Of course it’s true,” Alma said. “You’re still a child in many ways. My child. I can see it from here.” She lumbered forth like a wind-up toy, arms outstretched, and for a moment Lexi’s pulse flummoxed, imagining the kind of harm a creature so heinous could still accomplish despite a lowly stature. To her surprise, her mother threw her wiry frame around as much of Lexi’s lower leg as she could reach in a desperate, ankle-numbing hug.
Hesitant at first to touch her parent, Lexi finally reached out after an uncomfortable minute, pinching Alma’s uniform scruff between her thumb and forefinger, and gently tugged to encourage some space between them. It felt like peeling off an oversized tick. “That’s, um, probably enough of that.”
“Yes, yes. You need time to get to know me again. I was ready for that,” Alma said, seemingly taking this rejection in stride. She kneaded her tear-glazed cheeks with bony knuckles. “We may not have the time now, before they ship me off to whatever bottomless hole they can find next, but… we’ll have other chances one day. I believe that.”
“Oh,” Lexi mumbled.
She knew she should’ve done more to deny these impossible dreams from her mother, who very-clearly had faith that she could still pass on her treachery to her offspring, just like she’d tried to do nearly twelve years before. However, now that she was standing in Alma’s presence once again, even if Lexi humorously dwarfed her parent, courage didn’t come easily.
“It’s so terrible what happened to you. My heart broke when I heard,” Alma continued. She placed a hand on her chest, right over where Lexi imagined her mother’s heart would be if she had one. “And it’s broken every day since for you.”
“Um. Thanks.”
“I guess you think I deserve to be here, while your time was undeserved,” Alma said, “but at least you can believe I know EXACTLY what you went through.”
“I…” Lexi couldn’t finish the thought. Of course her mother could never comprehend what she had endured, but lying on the floor of the cell now, with Alma’s flinty rasp of a voice poking needles at her emotional status, she couldn’t find the strength to say it aloud. Like she’d feared, the ant had its teeth in her.
“It must have ripped you up inside, to know that the people who pretended to adopt you, pretended to support you, pretended to make you one of them, would fall back on their old protocols, the natural totalitarianism in each of them, to see you as less than them, as soon as they had a good enough excuse,” Alma continued in her daughter’s quietude. “You don’t have to say you agree. I know it must be hard. And, while I can’t relate in that way, seeing how I’ve lived my life knowing that you can’t trust an Omega any more than you can allow a Beta to think they’re special, I do have some experience in family members turning away from me. Don’t I, dear?”
Lexi nodded, her skull feeling leaden as the rest of her. Her neck went stiff. She hadn’t known how this meeting would go, but in the back of her mind had expected it might take this swerve. Still, that awareness didn’t save Lexi from cowering on the floor and drinking in her mother’s words, knowing that hidden between all the violent bigotry were, in fact, grains of truth. For many months of her time away, she’d mired in the idea that she’d been betrayed. Now she was having it echoed right back at her from a distorted reflection of herself, plus a few decades and some unsettling scars.
“I know you still see me as the bad seed. For now. I’ve… accepted that. And there will be time later to prove that I only want the best for you,” Alma murmured. “But please, sweetie. I need you to know, here and now, that I feel the SAME way you do. I want justice for you, and all the wrongs that were committed against you.”
Justice? Lexi wasn’t even sure what justice was now, especially when it came to herself. Somehow, though, she doubted her version of justice was the same as Alma’s. Nevertheless, her limbs stuck frozen to the cage floor, her body in thrall of her tiny mother’s twisted language. With every word, Lexi remained aware that she could swat Alma out of the way, silence her with a finger, kick her back under the bed. Only now did she grasp precisely what Jenna meant when the Omega said that Lexi was free to “communicate” any way she liked with her parent. But she didn’t, either on purpose or not, have it in her yet to shut up the little prophet of calamity. She wondered if she ever would.
“More than all that, though, Alexandra, I understand what happened to you, and what it meant. To us,” Alma blubbered. “Better than anyone else ever could.”
“What do you mean?” Her mother’s word choice was puzzling to Lexi, even though she already knew where this had to be headed, if only because she couldn’t allow her heart to be grouped in with the demon before her.
“The way they threw you in a cage, just like me, even when you hadn’t yet begun to help our crusade. I didn’t have time to teach you. They used you as a scapegoat for that filthy lying insect, who took it upon himself to prove right everything I’ve ever said about… them. About Betas,” Alma ranted, though still in the same state of mewling gloom. The front of her uniform was soaked dark with tears. “It wasn’t just you hurting from that, Alexandra. It was everyone who’s ever been ripped off or put down or cast aside by the likes of vermin the size of my finger, but wasn’t allowed to do what was right and even the score, just because of this dictatorship’s obsession with “equality.” We all felt that with you, darling. We were with you. Not those freaks who threw you in a box like their precious pets, and certainly not the ones who stole you from me and called you their kin. No, it’s us. All of us. All of us like you. And it’s not too late to come back.”
As her mother spoke aloud her longest thought yet, Lexi’s stomach began twisting over itself in quadruple-knots. By the time Alma was finished, her daughter was so woozy with the existential sickness of the little woman’s declaration, she could barely keep herself upright. But, biting her tongue and clenching her fists, she managed, looking down on her mother now for the first time in spirit as well as physically.
“You’re wrong,” Lexi said. From somewhere at the base of her fractured identity, she felt meaning swelling back toward the surface, pushing past the loss, the resentment, and the unknown. When she spoke, it was with a fiery wit, but it spilled forth like poetry: “You’re wrong about EVERYTHING. I… probably wasn’t ready, or strong enough to tell you that the last time I saw you. Maybe I’m not even strong enough now. But you have to know, either way. I wasn’t taken from you. You… didn’t deserve me, so you never had me to begin with, and you never will. Not now or ever. And it doesn’t matter. I found something… so much better than you that I don’t think the word “better” is even enough. No, it’s not. The people I love, that… that I belong to now and who belong to me, aren’t anything like what you’ve deluded yourself into believing they are all this time. The Omegas or the Betas.”
“Alexandra, baby, please. No,” Alma croaked. The tears turned back on, somehow realer than before, and this time gargled her words. “You… you have to listen to me-”
“No, YOU listen to ME now!” Lexi shouted. “Even after everything, I believe that they’re all better than us, you and me. They don’t have all the baggage like we do, that we have to make up for. But you know what? They accepted me anyway. My real sister, and my real mom. They took me in like some stray animal that got dumped on their porch, and they’ve loved me all I’ve ever needed. Even when they thought… that I might be a little bit like you, they still… loved me harder than you ever could. I know that now, too. And you know what? I think I finally know what I have to do. What this all means. You think it means I’m ready to become something like you? No. Never. I’ll tell you what it ACTUALLY means. Instead of sitting here, wishing I could scrub out the stuff that got in the way of my life for a while. I have to do it. I… have to fix this. I have to go to her.”
Alma looked on her daughter with abject horror, withering in on herself and jerking at every benevolent word of rhetoric Lexi piled upon her shrunken mother. Gradually the elder Alpha slunk back to the floor on her knees, clutching her stomach like a worm was eating her gut from the inside-out, the thing brought to life from Lexi’s power: the one thing Alma had ever created in her lifetime instead of destroying, now set to erase the inhuman potential she’d dreamed up for her child. The ten-inch-tall prisoner’s tears and sobs redoubled, but so quiet and tortured she sounded like she was asphyxiating.
Drawing ragged breath, Lexi realized only now that she too had started crying somewhere in the middle of her impromptu deposition, but that the welled tears had waited to fall until she was finished. She was grateful for that. After wiping her eyes, she nudged her mother with the toe of her sneaker and stood up, using the bedpost for support. Now that she could look down on her parent from her full height, she was struck by how truly miniscule she was, almost as though Alma was continuing to dwindle right before Lexi’s eyes, even though the opposite was happening.
“You’re small, “Mom.” And you’ll always be small,” Lexi said, hunching over the gnarled puddle of her old mother and her old fate. “And… you know… I just feel so sorry for you, that I almost can’t stand it. But that’s the best I can do, except to say… well. Goodbye.”
Lexi turned on Alma now, something she might’ve felt afraid to do even minutes before under threat of the ten-inch snake coming after her for an ankle-bite. When instead the Alpha looked past the window-wall of the cage and out to the Omega bedroom beyond, she realized Jenna had returned, either with uncharacteristic stealth for a one-hundred-and-forty-something-foot-tall being, or while nothing else in the world mattered except for Lexi’s message to Alma, which was just much intended for herself. The giantess approached, her freckle-dotted face filling up the glass visage, tranquil and none-motive enough that Lexi had no idea how much of the conversation Jenna had actually heard. But perhaps it didn’t matter now.
“Just checking in,” the Omega stated. Her pupils only flashed in the direction of her shrunken charge once, but otherwise she kept Lexi squarely in her sights. “Is everything going okay?”
“Yes,” Lexi said. She cleared her throat, and tried unsuccessfully to bow her head enough that her reddened eyes and watery cheeks were concealed, still knowing that Jenna could spot every solitary teardrop on her little face. “I’m… ready to come out now.”
“One second.” Jenna reached inside the cell as before, but this time angling the shelf of her hand so that it blocked the sight of Alma behind it while Lexi climbed aboard. The Alpha didn’t look back once at her mother while she was air-lifted via Omega palm out of the box and next the bedroom, finally shutting the door behind them and re-sealing Alma inside.
Lexi exhaled so hard she became dizzy, though the adrenaline likely got her most of the way there. Her hands shook, but not uncontrollably. Knowing how seriously someone like Jenna surely took her job, Lexi wondered if the Enforcer would fish for any debriefing comments about what Alma had said or done, and in fact the Alpha reasoned that it probably would be appropriate for her to relate how stuck the prisoner remained in her chaotic doctrines. For now, though, the rawness made it hard to think straight.
“Alexandra…” Jenna said, stopping in the middle of the living room. She lifted Lexi up to eye-height. “…I’m sorry I wasn’t able to make it, when everyone came over to see you and welcome you back. I don’t really have anything to say about everything that happened before. But I did want to ask you-”
Looking up, Lexi readied herself. Here came the questions about her mother. But she was prepared.
“-would you let me play something for you?”
Taken aback, the Alpha frowned, turning her head in all directions, until she spotted it. Under the mantel was a beautifully carved violin shining like polished brown marble, resting on a stand beside the accompanying bow and open case, which Jenna evidently had pre-set up. There was nothing pushy in the Omega’s question, but Lexi could sense the hope. In her vulnerable state now, the unexpectedness of the offer almost made the girl break down again, but she steeled herself this time and muscled through the throat-bubble.
“I’d like that.”
For half an hour, Lexi sat atop the mantel in a cushy Alpha-sized armchair just a few feet above Jenna’s eyeline, while the Omega serenaded her with continuous flowing melodies, the beautiful likes of which the little audience hadn’t experienced in a long time. The songs ranged from sleepy lullabies to upbeat jaunts, each of which caught her ear in new ways and gradually replaced her brain’s current focus after the face-off with Alma, which was a welcome trade. Lexi didn’t know much about Bridget’s peers to begin with, but before today she would have bet folding money against the idea of Jenna Reynolds, with her stiff upper lip and martial exterior, being such an accomplished musician. Yet here she was, having that first impression proved delightfully wrong.
###
Alma locked her chin back to her chest, creating a shell around her head with both arms until she had no tears left to bleed out. Distantly, she heard the humming song of the violin strings, something she had become used to now over the course of the year, and usually cupped her ears to avoid the grating racket. Today, however, she listened, feeling nothing, but following the lyric threads anyway until eventually it went quiet. When in time she finally looked up again to the percussion of fingers clunking on the glass, she found Jenna resting her fist on her cheek and disaffectedly spectating the shrunken creature inside the cage.
“I guess you got what you wanted,” Alma spat up at her keeper. “She’s turned against me. All of you turned her against me.”
“Well, yes, you’re right. That is what I wanted, and I got it,” Jenna answered with a simpering smile. “But I don’t think we did anything. Certainly more than you, but still. Give your daughter some credit. You owe her that. That, and everything else.”
“Whatever,” Alma slurred, turning away. “You’ve had your fun torturing me and convincing yourself it’s not just because you’re a sadist on the inside. Might as well have your laughs, too.”
“Right again,” Jenna brightly replied. “I have had my fun with you. More than I’ll probably ever have with any other Alpha I take into my custody. But, you did get one part wrong there. I don’t have to convince myself of anything. I know that I like what I’ve done to you. I like it a lot, just the way you think I do, and what’s more, I know what I am on the inside. Unlike you.”
This got Alma’s attention back. She stared, transfixed, up at the tractor-beam gaze of the Enforcer’s crackling green eyes, the Alpha’s chapped lips spooling open in recognition. A round marble shape puffed out from Jenna’s cheek like a gumball, clacking against her teeth as she pushed it with her tongue, making some effort to let her prisoner hear the object bouncing off her cheeks. The Omega shut her eyes and swallowed loudly, only reopening when the round lump had passed fully along her neck. Now under scrutiny again, Alma was alarmed to realize Jenna’s irises glowed incandescent.
“And so, as my parting gift to you, I’ll give you the chance to find out for yourself. Not what you are on the inside, obviously, but what I am,” Jenna said. With that, her hand swooped into the tank and snatched up the little woman between her fingertips, who at a foot tall and climbing now, was a cinch to capture. The Omega held her toy before her vast mouth, licking saliva-gloss over her lips and steaming warm huffed air into Alma’s face.
“Right,” Alma scoffed, feigning a yawn as she stared into the dark wet void of Jenna’s spread jowls. She’d been through this fake-out cannibalistic song-and-dance before, deciding to take solace in the fact that at least her Enforcer would have to eventually vomit in order to carry out this session plan, since leaving her permanently inside wasn’t an option. “So, how long before you bring me back up this time?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t expect to come back up this time if I were you. This is more of a one-way trip,” Jenna explained, pausing to savor the ecstasy she received from watching Alma’s gaunt face contort in total realization. “But before you go getting ugly thoughts in your head, relax. I will see you again later. In fact, I look forward to it.”
The Omega allowed no time for rebuttal, though she did relish the screeched protests she heard as she stuck out her tongue and deposited Alma onto the sticky, bud-dappled flat of her pink muscle, before slurping it and her miniature captive within. Rolling the Alpha from cheek to slimy cheek, Jenna gave Alma a final tour of the hot airless cave she’d entered so many times before, though usually at a larger size that therefore allowed her the slightest resistance and scrap of dignity.
But not today.
The tiny flailing creature was dunked head-first through a moat of syrupy drool, her limbs bumped and flossed along the groove-divots between Jenna’s teeth. She was pinned from the ribbed palate above to the molars to the edge of the uvula, then back again, all while the Omega’s cheeks compressed in and out like a beating heart, sucking on the prisoner one last time, to taste the fear that seasoned her meal just before dropping her down the water-slide for the umpteenth time. Only now, as Jenna had made perfectly clear to her hellion of a subject, there would be no reversals. No quick stint in her stomach before upchucking back along the tract to be spat into the sink. Instead, Alma would be exploring regions previously untraveled by anyone in the being she hated most of all in the entire universe. With a farewell squeeze of the ten-inch morsel in her tubed tongue, Jenna gathered the hungry sea generated by her salivary glands, pressed Alma into the sticky sludge, and gulped hard enough to have swallowed a horse. The wretched critter’s wails marked the timeline of her journey all the way down Jenna’s throat, past her chest and into her stomach, a sonic beacon which the Omega listened to and adored at each and every note like the marvelous sonata it was to her.
###
Lexi remained outside the Reynolds’ front door for several minutes after she was let out, feeling much different now than she had before setting foot in Jenna’s hand: much more the ideal her, and the person she’d known herself to be two years before.
“Okay, Bridge,” Lexi sighed like a vow, looking to the sunny skyscape with reborn devotion as she set off down the street to return home, but only for long enough to pack and collect guidance from Evelyn. “I ran off and found you once. I can do it again. And this time, I’ll bring you home.”