Superterranean Homesick Blues

Well, from the sound of things, this might be the last message I ever record for you folks out there, the last to get read or heard by a wide audience anyway. You should give the young scribe recording my thoughts a commendation for bravery. She sought me out, having heard tales that I occasionally gave friendly, respectful artists and writers a chance to capture my likeness, or record my stories. It’s hardly a fair repayment, but I feel I ought to give the world something in return for the vast, vast amounts I have taken from it. I won’t reiterate all the details. According to my little friend here many of my deeds have passed into legend over these centuries: the Trampling of Seattle, the Shattering of Denver, the Grim Feast of Tokyo. However, the young scribe also tells me that my name has been lost to the mists of history. Not surprising, considering that no one has spoken to me in the last five hundred years or so. In any case my name is Alice, and as you may have guessed by now, I’m the giantess who demolishes your cities from time to time. You can hold the applause.

I’m going to dispense with the entire story of my existence, with nearly three or four (I lose track) thousand years of life it would take my scribe’s lifetime several times over to record it all. As such this will be a bit of a highlight reel, or a greatest smash hits album, whatever you folks call a collection of the most significant works of an artist nowadays. Not that what I do is generally very artistic. I will go in a rough chronological order, starting with my origins. Many of these stories are from what is, for you, the ancient past, so many of the terms may seem strange to you, if my scribe indicates a lack of familiarity I will explain something in greater detail.

It all started millennia ago during the dawn of what we called the 21st Century. I was a fairly ordinary young woman of the period. I lived in a smallish big city of the West Coast of the United States of America. It was Portland in the state of Oregon. This is far across the ocean and another entire continent from where my brave little scribe and I sit now. I lived in a house that I shared with three other people my age. It was a common accommodation arrangement for young students at the time, which all four of us were. It was about the noon hour on what we called Saturday. My scribe tells me this is now called Smasherday due to it being the day of my “ascension” as she puts it. Anyhoo, I was making myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch. My housemate Cassie came into the kitchen.

“Whatcha doin’?” She asked.

“Just makin’ sandwiches.” I answered, “Want one?”

As I scraped the strawberry jelly onto the bread with a butter knife, I felt strange warmth filling my belly. I dismissed it as a hungry tummy, but as I looked around I noticed that I was now naked and standing on the shattered remains of my own and several neighboring houses. The city beneath me spread for miles around. I could see the river separating downtown from the East side. Tiny people nearby stopped and looked up to see what the people who were already stopped were staring at. It was me. A gigantic (More than 500 hundred feet tall if you want units of measurement.) naked woman tends to attract attention. A bit dazed from the sudden shift in altitude, I gave a small wave down to the people. I looked down at my feet and saw that they had plowed through four more houses during my expansion. Through the shock of surprise, the thought of my neighbors raced through my head. Without thinking I stepped from the rubble. I looked down for a clear place to set it down, but there just wasn’t one. Any place I put my foot down would smash buildings cars or people. I set my foot down back on the ruble. My intellect kicked in. Surely Cassie was dead at the very least, along with anyone else in my house. I squatted down to examine the ruins beneath me. Picking through the rubble with a forefinger, I came across bodies. Perfect little inch long dead human bodies.

Jesus! I thought. (I know that few reading this will know who or what that exclamation refers to, but I don’t feel like going into detail, that would take weeks.)

My growth spurt had killed my friends and neighbors. An incredible wave of guilt washed through me. It was about to come out of my eyes in the form of tears. I felt the sad heat welling up in my chest. A sob was coming at any moment. I looked back out at the city around me. I loved cities back then. In my way, I always have. As I looked at the sprawling carpet of human construction covering the hilly valley floor, I felt my sadness replaced by strange lust. The little people were still looking at me. Looking about I could see emergency vehicles racing through the streets toward what was left of my neighborhood. I could feel the gaze of hundreds of little people affixed to me. A sense of power rushed through my whole body. I was aware of a pleasant breeze caressing my gigantic body. My nipples began to stiffen. Strange desires crystallized as I stood there. A burning need for action filled me. Lusty heat filled my entire being as I stepped from the rubble and toward the downtown area just to the west, across the river. As I strode ahead, I felt buildings, vehicles, and people crushed beneath my massive feet. Nothing I stepped on hurt me; my new size seemed to have come with increased toughness. Although it didn’t hurt, I could feel everything as it crumbled to ruin beneath me. I felt the crunch of every rooftop as it gave way, the crumple of each vehicle I mangled, and the squishy pop of every human body my massive feet pulverized to wet bony mush. As grotesque as it may sound, it felt splendid. The slight resistance before an object inevitably gave way to my sheer physical power gave each step its own sweetness. After a particularly pleasant crushing, I would wriggle my toes luxuriating in the havoc my merest step created.

This was the beginning of the first ever Giantess Alice rampage. I have to say, I pretty much covered all the bases I would return to in subsequent rampages. I ran around smashing anything around me, I masturbated myself with some of the smaller buildings, and I intentionally corralled humans into mobs so I could enjoy the feeling of dozens of people squishing to warm pap beneath my feet. For nearly two days I played until the city was nearly unlivable. When I got hungry I would satisfy my hunger by plucking any humans I could find from the ground and swallowing them whole. None were spared. I eliminated men, women, and children with delight and intention. The worse a thing I did was, the better it felt. My biggest thrills came from catching buses of fleeing survivors and peeling them open to devour their contents or to use them for rather more lewd pleasures. It was all pretty awful, I suppose.

I never suspected that such a sadistic temperament could be within me. Although I chose how to carry out the business of reducing Portland, Oregon to slag, I never felt I had a choice about whether or not to do it, just a strong compulsion to smash and destroy everything I could in the ways that would gratify me most. I may have tried some domination stuff with a boyfriend or two over the years, but nothing approaching the human lives destroyed in my lusty rampage. I used the populous in every way too. Smashing large mobs into my breasts and into my vulva gave me pleasure unlike any I had known. Just the thought of the squirming masses my pussy has devoured gets me hot, gives me that urge to indulge in a nice big rampage, but I know that’s not possible anymore. Part of it, I’m sure was just me giving into the realities of the situation, but at the same time I really felt I had no choice in what I did. My later experiences lend credence to this.

Having pulverized my adopted home I walked south leaving a smoldering ruin of a city behind. Eventually I found myself in a pasture in the country that was big enough for me to sit in, and I sat there. I knew the military would be coming for me. The enormity of my actions only occurred to me then, as I sat, with nothing to do but think. I had obliterated hundreds, maybe thousands of lives for my own pleasure. It felt good, I couldn’t deny that. I knew I had murdered innocent people. In fact, I had particularly enjoyed smashing and devouring them. In a few instances I had even deliberately targeted children just to be perverse. I stuffed a school bus partway into my vagina and felt as the metal crunched and the children’s bodies were mashed for my pleasure, then ripped off the roof and gobbled up everything that was inside. Their terrified shrieks delighted me in the moment. I finally let out my interrupted tears. I sat naked in the field racked with sobbing despair. I wanted the military to come. I wanted them to bomb the shit out of me for what I had done. They did. It didn’t work.

For days the military threw everything short of an atomic bomb at me. Artillery shells, columns of tanks, multiple aerial bombardments, all were deployed against me, and none of them did more than tickle my skin. I should have known it wouldn’t work. During my rampage, I managed to punch through buildings (To gather little people to eat and cram into my cooch.), and stepped over all sorts of rubble without a single scratch. The attacks confirmed what I suspected. Not only was I giant, I was nigh-invulnerable, possibly just straight up invulnerable. I wished in those days that they would obliterate me for what I had done. Eventually the attack stopped. They sent a diplomat of sorts out to meet me. She was my mother.

She stood at the far end of the pasture but I could make out her features quite easily. My growth seemed to have not only come with great strength and invulnerability, but some enhanced senses.

“Alice!” She called up to me with a loudspeaker.

“Hi, Mom.” I said.

“We’re all pretty scared about the present situation,” She said.

“I can imagine.” I said.

“Do you have some explanation for your behavior? I certainly didn’t raise you to be some monster that goes around destroying cities.

“I’m really sorry so many people got hurt,” I sobbed. “I didn’t mean to, honest. All of a sudden I was gigantic, and at first I was worried about my housemates and neighbors getting hurt, but,” I paused trying to compose my thoughts between sniffles and sobs, “I looked around and saw the city spread out beneath me like a miniature model, and I had this strange feeling. It was like a twitch or a sneeze, and before I knew it I was acting on pure lust. I couldn’t think about the lives and feelings of the people I was hurting. All I could think of was my...” I choked up a bit here from shame and embarrassment, “...my own sadistic pleasure.”

“The military have already tried to destroy you every way they can think of short of nuclear or biological weapons. They don’t want to risk the lives of more people trying to kill you. They sent me because you haven’t resisted their attempts, and you seem to be genuinely remorseful. They’d like to take you somewhere where they can study your condition.”

I consented and before long I was walking across the country with a military escort. I tried to be careful, but some smaller buildings were accidentally flattened along the way. The military evacuated areas ahead of my path, so no one got hurt. The feeling of the little buildings as they crunched was just as good as it had been back in the city, but I tried not to let it show.

I told myself that I was going to be a good giantess from now on. Maybe they would be able to cure me, or find me some isolated island to live on, or something. The important thing was that I resolved not to hurt anymore people. The “big walk” as the scribes and criers of that time called it, was not really that far. We traveled through Oregon heading southeast to the neighboring state of Nevada which was a land of vast desert and few towns and cities. They took me to a classified Air Force base where cranks of that time believed extra-terrestrial evidence was held. It took a few days stopping periodically so the army people could clear the area ahead, or change personal so others could sleep. I slept a lot, too. As I drifted off, my mind kept going back to the rampage. It had been such a terrible thing to do, but it had felt so good at the time. I wondered what could cause such a change. Was I still me? Was I the Alice who took social science classes and drank bubble tea, or was I some new being? Had Alice died back in the city with all the other little people?

The military designated a lot on the base where I was supposed to stay put. It was a large area of flat tarmac cordoned off with luminescent white painted lines. This set the boundary of my new home. I received communications indicating that high level generals and even the leader of our entire country were interested in talking with me. What I had done could never be made right, they said, but they also couldn’t kill me, so they wanted to try and figure out something I could do as restitution.

My new form didn’t feel any discomfort from cold or heat. This was lucky since I had no clothes and now had to live exposed to the elements in a desert that went from baking to freezing over the course of a day. I didn’t feel any thirst either. I felt a small amount of hunger, but that was easily satisfied with a few mouthfuls of livestock everyday. Ten to fifteen cows’ worth of meat seemed to keep me satisfied for a week or so. I would toss whole sides of beef into my mouth and crunch them up, bones and all, as if they were sardines. (Those were a kind of preserved fish that many people ate in those days.) It was really quite satisfying, but it brought back sense memories of the people I had eaten during my rampage.

For hygiene, a fire crew were sent out to me every couple of days to hose me down. I presume due to my odor than concern for my comfort.

They did numerous measurements and tests. I had enlarged to exactly 100 times my original size as far as they could tell, from 169 centimeters to 169 meters, that’s a little over 5’ 5” for anyone still using the other system. Unfortunately, they found no hint of what could have caused my growth, or any way to shrink me back down. I knew they were also trying to test whether or not anything could injure me, could kill me. I’m certain that a lot of the beef I ate was coated or injected with various things they thought might poison me. All those tests ended in failure. The government had no idea what to do with me.

My mother was there the whole time living on the base. We would talk about things. My family was doing fairly well. They had become celebrities of sort, going on shows and being interviewed about me. (Shows were performances people watched to see entertainments, and to hear news and debate on important issues of the day.) They apparently rounded up a few of my ex-boyfriends from high school too. A lot of people were really mad that nothing was being done to punish me for my actions.

As for me, at that point I was getting bored out of my mind. When you’re a big huge giant, you can’t really do any of the regular things little folks do to pass the time. Studying and school seemed pretty much out. Nothing was really stopping me from going out; certainly the military couldn’t do anything to stop me. Even if I left the base, there wasn’t much for me to do. Dating, clubbing, pursuing hobbies and most other normal fun things were things I just couldn’t do. Then they gave me the offer.

They would transport me to a remote, uninhabited island. I could live there with some space to run around and do as I please. I could have visitors if I wanted, but they didn’t want me to ever leave the island without their say-so. It seemed better than doing nothing, so I agreed.

Transport was arranged much as it had been before. We traveled as a convoy through the desert, clearing civilians from the travel path as we went. The island was off the coast of California. No ship or plane could carry me, but I was an okay swimmer. They said that it should be easy for me to get there with my size and endurance. I was unsure. An island was better than a desert, but it still didn’t seem like there would be much to do besides wait for supply ships to bring me food and give interviews. That was the point, I supposed, and I wondered if it wasn’t what I deserved anyway. My doubts turned out to be pointless, anyway.

I walked west across the desert along with my escort. The plan was for me to head west out of Nevada and cross California. The trip was plotted to give towns and cities a wide berth, not to be wide enough it turned out.

After crossing the long hot desert we came to the mountains separating the two states. We were actually making pretty good progress and they expected us to reach the California coast by the next morning. We went all through the night with my escort coming and going in shifts, all with great military efficiency. My mom was with us the whole way. Sometimes she even let me pick her up, very carefully I’ll add, and carry her. It was dizzying for her, but she said that if she was close to me, she felt like she was protecting me.

We crossed the mountains without too much trouble, for me anyway. Despite walking for hundreds of miles for many hours I felt no tiredness, no need for sleep. It was something I’d noticed when we’d traveled to Nevada. If I wanted to sleep I had no trouble doing it, and it was very relaxing, especially when there wasn’t very much else for me to do. It filled the time between the exams and tests they ran on me.

Anyway, as we walked on into California the scene shifted. Barren dessert mountain was replaced with lightly forested areas. I saw trees and other green things for the first time since leaving Oregon. It got me a little wistful, to be honest. We trekked onward, They tried to keep me largely in the dark about exactly where we were heading, but I overheard enough to guess that we were traveling on a course that would take us almost exactly halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, the two nearest major cities. The hope was that keeping me as far away as they could from any major population centers would be enough to prevent any destructive urges I might get. It was optimistic, but if they’d known what was good for them, they probably should have just left me in that desert base or some other wasteland.

What they hadn’t counted on was a little city by the name of Fresno.

After a few hours travel beyond the mountains and foothills, the trees stopped again, replaced by a vast flat area. I wouldn’t exactly call it desert, there was grass and farmland and things. We traveled on using highways that had been long cleared of other people in advance of my passing. As night fell, things changed for me. I was carrying Mom again, holding her up to my ear, so she could tell me about ideas she had to keep us occupied once we got to the island. I kept getting distracted by something off to my right, something way beyond the barren highway we were traveling on.

Mom was saying something like, “Maybe they’ll let you finish your degree remotely, they let prisoners do that, hardened criminals.”

I turned my head to try and figure out what was distracting me. There was something over there, something I could sense in the back of my mind. The smallest sliver of a glow peaking up over the dark horizon of the night. Without thinking much at all about it, I turned off of the road and began walking toward whatever it was that had caught my eye.

Mom, started screaming, so I took her away from my ear. I still kept hold of her, though.

Behind me the Humvees and trucks of the escort screeched to a halt. They called orders after me, but I could barely hear them at that point. They fired gun turrets at me. They felt like nothing more than a water sprinkler, that’s a device we used to use to spray water around crops and other plants to help them grow, anyway, it felt like nothing but a little water splashing against my back. I believe they fired a surface to air missile at me, but it felt like nothing but a warm wadded up rag hitting the back of my neck. I kept a slow, but steady pace, and they did their best to follow me. As I walked on, the glow rose more and more into view. It was a city. My heart pounded with dread and joy. My mom pounded her fists against the closed palm of my hand. I was aware of her; aware of who she was. I actually still felt a strong instinct to protect her. Unfortunately, I also felt a strong urge to do something about the pretty lights of the little city I was approaching.

With a walking speed around 300 miles per hour, I easily outpaced my escort without even trying. I reached the edge of the city in less than five minutes.

By the first night of my Portland rampage, I had knocked out most of the city’s power grid, so I hadn’t seen it like this. Fresno was like a beautiful glowing rug covering a nighttime bedroom floor. That glow entranced me. I lingered for a moment enjoying it. When the moment was over I stepped forward, intentionally obliterating the outermost houses under my feet. They felt nice, but my real target was the glowing downtown core. I wanted to go to those beautiful lights, and stomp them all out. Anyway, it all descended into another standard rampage. I tromped around the city, my mother safely in my hand the entire time. I smashed in buildings. There were none that even came close to my size, like there had been in Portland. That was a little disappointing at the time since it had been so satisfying to demolish the Wells Fargo and Bancorp. (Nicknamed “Big Pink” back then.) towers slowly, floor by floor until I could push the whole thing over to fall on to the neighboring blocks like a felled tree. Instead, there was a lot of kicking and stomping.

Highlights included: Gathering hundreds of little people into the baseball stadium, where I could have a super crunchy, super messy, crush-fest, sitting on buildings until they crumbled delightfully under my bare ass, and experiments with picking up entire two story family houses, about the size of a baseball to me, and eating them like apples.

They crunched between my teeth very nicely, when people were still inside they tasted pretty good, and they really filled me up. It only took four or five to make a full satisfying meal, and they were more interesting than the sides of beef they’d been feeding me.

All the while I was entirely protective of my mother, not allowing a single bit of harm to come to her, even as she screamed and screamed in horror at my atrocities.

About an hour into my fun the military showed up. It was pointless. If they were further away than whatever destructive activity caught my ever changing interest, I ignored them. If they got close, or it seemed like my mom might get harmed, I slaughtered them without hesitation. There’s something particularly satisfying about feeling a highly engineered, highly expensive armored tank crumple like a can under your foot, especially knowing that there are little soldiers getting smashed to pulp inside. After a half dozen attempts and a few pointless airstrikes, they pulled back beyond the city limits. It seemed they were giving in to practicality, and more or less ceding the city to me. Although it was only a little smaller than Portland, it was much faster decimating Fresno. The geography made a big difference. (Portland had had a bunch of hills and varying terrain to walk around in. Not so in Fresno.) Once it was all rubble I left the city heading West. I had no idea where I would go, so I figured I’d head toward the coast, following the original plan. When I came a little more to my senses, I examined my mom. Physically she seemed perfectly fine, but she was quiet. She just sat in my palm shuddering and shivering.

I tried to connect. “I’m so sorry you had to see that.” I said.

She said nothing; didn’t even look up at me. I loved my mom, still felt that love for her. But I had traumatized her, exposed her a type of violence and atrocity that had never been imagined before whatever changed me. I decided that I wasn’t going to let my actions hurt her anymore.

As I walked, I must have veered north, because the next day I could see that miles ahead was San Francisco Bay and it’s eponymous city. It was larger still than either Portland or Fresno, and a tide of anxiety washed through my stomach. Then nothing happened. I looked out at that big hilly city, and felt no urges, no imperative, no instinctive desire to smash it and it’s citizens. It was so strange, that I just sat there for hours.

Eventually the military caught up with me. I gave my mother over to them, and told them that unless she explicitly wanted it, they were never to bring her within 500 miles of me. I didn’t know if I could trust their promises, but I hoped they would honor it. They informed me that the casualties in Fresno had been even worse than in Portland, due to the flatter geography leaving fewer places to shelter from all the smashing I’d done. I told them how being this close to a much bigger city wasn’t setting me off, speculating that there may be some sort of “safety window” immediately after the urges overwhelm me. They reiterated that if they ever found a way to kill or destroy me they would. They had only refrained from nuclear options under the theory that those would actually be deadlier and more destructive than I was on my own. I told them that if they could find a way to kill me, they should. I was too dangerous to let live, my life wasn’t worth thousands of others. If they wanted to nuke me, I welcomed it. I deserved it for what I’d done to my mom.

They still wanted me to go to the island, and I agreed to go. I wanted to leave as fast as I could, before any destructive urges returned.

They had me walk out into the ocean. Helicopters hovered around to watch and guide my journey. I was actually able to walk quite a ways out at my new height, but eventually the sea floor gave way, and I had to swim. The Coast Guard did a good job keeping the route clear of any vessels. It was refreshing, swimming and bobbing in the ocean. It was still so much massively bigger than me, that I almost felt like regular sized human for a few hours. Before the change I’d get very tired swimming, but I found I could just keep going and going. There were so many odd, seemingly impossible things about my new body aside from just the size difference. I felt like it wasn’t really mine. The fact that I seemed to lose control over it around cities made it feel even less like mine. Sometimes I felt like I was just riding a horse or something, some creature that was mostly under my control, mostly followed my directions, but if the right or wrong stimulus came along, it would do whatever came natural, and I was along for the ride, not just along for it, but participating in it, loving it. I know it sounds awful, and I know I felt bad about it for a long time, but I’ll freely admit, as I have for a long long time now, I love smashing your cities, I love crushing and devouring you little folks. Even though it might not be in a way you enjoy very much, I do love you all.

After a day of swimming, the island rose into view. After a few hours more swimming I made landfall. A platoon of military folks were standing along the beach waiting for me. I call it a beach, but really it was just a rocky place where the island more or less just started. As I stepped up out of the water they greeted me, informing me that I was now on San Miguel Island, that they would prefer me to stay there for an indefinite amount of time, and that after I was examined and debriefed further, I would be allowed to explore my new home.

From where I stood, there didn’t seem to be much to explore. It looked mostly barren with only the sparsest of plant life, practically a moss covered rock at my size. It was quite windy, and I suppose I would have been very cold if not for my change.

The rest of that day blurs together. I laid down so the scientists could measure and record data, while a military doctor asked questions about how I was feeling physically. When all that was done, most of them left on their boats and helicopters. A small contingent stayed behind. One of them, Steve I think his name was, was a representative of the National Park Service, the organization that actually managed the island under normal circumstances. They had apparently agreed to lend it, and the neighboring island, Santa Rosa Island, to the Department of Defense in light of the special circumstances. The special circumstances being me. Steve informed me that there were a number of sites on the island associated with the indigenous Chumash people, and requested that I not go to those areas of the island. There were two airstrips and a ranger station. The ranger station was normally manned, but due to my presence it stood empty until they felt more confidence about my intentions. I promised to be on my best behavior, and tried to explain that I didn’t want to harm anybody, it was just that when I saw these big bustling cities I seemed to get in these weird “city-moods”. Steve actually cracked half a smile at that and I clearly remember what he said next.

“I’ve been know to get in a few ‘city-moods’ myself. That’s why I joined the Park Service.”

Steve left. One of the remaining military men informed me that he was charged with supervising my time on San Miguel. He told me that troops would be stationed around the clock on Santa Rosa, an island visible to the east of San Miguel. They requested that I never make any effort to go to Santa Rosa. They would be sending scientists and technicians to examine me just about everyday. He informed me that since my time in Nevada they had been working on getting something I’d be able to wear; that even in the face of the enormity of my crimes, the U.S. Military was not in the habit of denying prisoners the basics of human dignity.

I had taken enough history and political science classes to know that that was not exactly true, but I let it pass.

He informed me that shipments of food and other supplies would arrive by boat and sometimes by plane. The runways were part of the reason this particular island was chosen. Given the traumatic effects an experience like mine no doubt had, they would be flying in a therapist associated with the armed forces to speak with me and help address any mental health needs I might have.

I thought that was an odd thing for them to provide me, but I suppose if you have a 500 foot tall invincible being of sheer destruction in your custody, you want to have some insight into her mental health and thought processes.

Having informed me of all this, he told me that after this day, I would probably never see him again. He would be on the other island, where they didn’t want me to go. If he ever did come back, it would be because either something very bad or something very good had happened, and he left.

I was alone. For the first time since Portland, and even before that. I was living by myself for the very first time in my entire life. I’d gone from home, to college with roommates, to a rocky island off the coast of California.

I walked around the island a bit for the rest of that day. There wasn’t much to see. It was eight miles long by four miles wide, so even for a 500 foot gal it wasn’t the worst you could do in terms of space to roam. A dorm room would have been more claustrophobic. But I knew the truth. This island was a prison cell; a zoo cage. One that I could effectively leave anytime if I wanted. I didn’t want though. At the end of the day I sat on San Miguel Hill, the highest spot on the island, near the very center of the island, watching the sunset light the sky on fire above the Pacific Ocean. I tried to pretend I was a normal girl on a normal camping trip. I was solo, so maybe it was some sort of Outward Bound thing; something to build my resilience and self-reliance.

I tried to tell myself that I hadn’t annihilated two whole cities, I couldn’t have. Me? Little old Alice? She doesn’t knock over skyscrapers for fun; she doesn’t squish little people into herself to have the best orgasms of her life; she doesn’t traumatize her mother who was only trying to help her; who raised her alone after her dad died. Alice didn’t do stuff like that, she was a decent human being who went to school and definitely wasn’t an enormous stomp monster. Those were the sorts of things I told myself most days on that island. The blankness made it easy to pretend.

That night, I slept on that hill, naked and sprawled out under the stars for all the universe to see. If it was going to judge me, I supposed that that’s when it would have judged me.