Giantess World
“Cl…aire… David murmured into the abyss, as his mind seemed to be circling the drain amongst a swirling bathwater cyclone of his friend’s cloudy, sweltering, saline-sludge pore elixir. The dread and disgust of this existence had beaten him down so far by salt and sorrow and cruciation that he wasn’t sure he could come back from it, even if Claire could see through the fog in time to save him, but his options were either make this last-ditch attempt now, or descend into the never-ending solitary confinement of soaking, funkifying, toe-cheesy sockdom as the mummified wrapping around the giantess’s diligent puttied beast of a foot. “Please… put… it… back… on.”
Once again crashing back to reality, Claire was left in too much guilty post-asphyxiation upheaval to even make time to shriek ‘goddammit,’ as she let the cig butt fly and practically broke her own hand in the race to slot it into the glove. Her fingers spread into a neutral posture, though her whole body couldn’t help but shiver while she burst into tears again, as David gratefully abandoned his incarceration in her shoe, and again resumed his original post around the hand he’d once fetishistically coveted, but which now just served as a poetically ironic reminder of his accidental fall from humanity. The difference in intensity between serving as her sock and glove was significant enough that David was able to enjoy the equivalent of a sensory vacation, but as the familiar downsides of Claire’s hand possessing the Hardy tailoring of his body gripped him again the instant his soul was brought back to this higher place, his mood wasn’t much improved. At this rate, with Alex nowhere to be found, and Claire’s memory of his condition fragmenting fast, did they have even a chance of returning David to normal?
Again wiping her eyes with the opposite glove, Claire shook her head, gazing at David with self-flagellating heartache, unable to find the words. Neither could the glove-man speak, for that matter, refocused now as he was on the cloying disembodied intimacy of having a giant hand stuck up inside his padded receptable of a form, while brain-folding scents of rubbed-off rubber grit and fresh dredged tobacco filled in the void left by her ruddy-peach sweat-percolating foot. Just as Claire opened her mouth to attempt apologizing and offering David some uncertain comfort for this increasingly bleak situation, however, her eyes lit up and lips curled with bona fide jubilation. Her phone rested in her other gloved hand, and upon the screen, David could read a name on the caller ID that, despite all he’d been through, made him feel a sudden drug-like rush of hope.
“ALEX! Goddammit, where the hell have you been?” Claire practically screamed into the receiver upon answering her girlfriend’s long-delayed return call, exasperated but relieved above all else. “It – you – that crazy THING you put around me, to stop people from trying to get with me, it went OFF! On David! But he didn’t DO anything! Your fucked-up ritual thing, it… w-what? YES! Please! I’ll meet you at home and explain the rest of it there. Just… hurry! Get there as soon as you human-fucking-possibly can, understand?”
The next twenty minutes was a blissful blur for David, as Claire promptly abandoned the décor shop with less than half their shift to go, hopped in her car, and barreled home. Though earlier they’d feared the consequences of putting any potential strain on David’s glove body, and with good reason, as it seemed they were now in the homestretch of this surreal calamity, the damp elongating joint-pinching duress of serving as Claire’s glove became somehow easier to bear, knowing that it would be over soon enough. All the way home, with David’s friend driving like a maniac, he was showered in more apologies, as Claire alternated between furious rants about Alex’s paranoia and blame over her own missteps during the day that worsened his state, none of which were even her fault. Again and again, David reiterated that he held nothing against her, and though it was hard not to feel some ill will toward the girlfriend’s overzealous dark-magic relationship security system, so long as Alex could set this right again, he was certain the catharsis of retaking human form would eventually soothe all grudges.
“Alex! You have to FIX THIS!” Claire bellowed, practically kicking in her front door. David could feel it was taking everything in her power not to ball him into a fist. “Goddammit, he didn’t do anything wrong! STOP – THIS – NOW!”
“I will, I will!” Alex gasped, as she charged in from the other room, appearing at long last. At least the woman looked suitably remorseful: bug-eyed, rosy-cheeked, and gripping her jaw with both hands like she’d just witnessed a natural disaster rip through the neighborhood. “I’m so sorry! This wasn’t what was supposed to happen! It should never have just gone off like that for one of your friends. He’s… in your glove, right? Just take him off, and I can get everything settled.”
“No! I CAN’T!” Claire squealed, protectively shielding the David against her stomach with the opposite glove. “T-That’ll just make him turn into my shoe or my sock or… or…”
“It won’t. I promise. Not while I’m here. Just trust me,” Alex vowed in a calming drawl, crossing the room and locking lips with her girlfriend for an audible smooch. David wasn’t quite sure he agreed that this was the time for amorous gestures, when Alex had screwed up so badly and his odds of returning to normal were severing by the minute, but the amateur witch’s knowing poise still brought him comfort. Nodding, and looking down at her friend on her hand with an unspoken plea for similar faith, Claire hurriedly unstrapped and removed David. He braced himself for the usual transference down to her foot, but just as Alex had sworn, he remained the empty glove.
“D-David? Are you still there?” Claire muttered, sinking into a kitchen chair to catch her breath.
“Yes, I’m here,” he thought back, and saw the alleviation of her fears, as his glove-body was gently passed into Alex’s hands.
“Whew. Goddammit, I don’t know what I’d have done if we couldn’t fix this in time. But… we… we made it, David! It’s going to be okay now!”
“Of course it’s going to be okay. Why don’t you go have a smoke outside?” Alex suggested to her girlfriend, carefully balancing David’s flat form over her open palm. “This is something that I need to do alone, or else it won’t work. Don’t worry, everything is going to feel totally normal in just a couple minutes. You have my word.”
“Okay. I’m… sorry I yelled so much,” Claire sighed, while reluctantly rising to do exactly that. “I was just afraid.”
“Seriously. Go on. I’ll have this straightened out like that,” Alex said, snapping her fingers for emphasis, and gave her partner a smile that made even David feel almost completely at ease. Since there was no longer a hand or foot molesting his insides, with wall-to-wall flesh sweating like a pig into his disintegrated lining or constant shifting articulations morphing him into every combination of constriction and swell, almost every unseen affliction he’d taken on today had abated. He watched Claire disappear through the front door again with a final winking glance at him, and allowed some of the existential turmoil to subside as well, right up until Alex spoke again, this time without moving her lips or making a sound except inside his consciousness, but with hate-fueled venom imbuing her tone:
“I guess this’ll teach you to try taking things that don’t belong to you. Won’t it?”
“What?” David yelped back, wishing with abrupt trepidation that Claire would return.
“You heard me, you skeevy little homewrecker. You think I don’t know what’s been going on here for a long time? Not JUST today. You’ve had your eye on my girlfriend for a long time. You’re around her all day, working together, and you think because you can make her laugh and smile, you can just steal her away from me.”
“Alex, what are you talking about? You’ve got it all WRONG!” David roared, as the combined nervous terror of the day came rushing back a hundredfold. Here she was, the only person capable of saving him, and her possessive delusions went deeper than he could’ve ever imagined. “Claire is my FRIEND, and that’s ALL! I only gave her a new lighter!”
“I think that’s enough jabbering from you. A glove shouldn’t know how to talk, anyway,” Alex coldly declared, swiping her fingertips across her own lips as if to mime a silencing zipper, and just like that, David felt his telepathic link cut, met by the supernatural equivalent of TV static when he tried to scream at her again. The hostile giantess only nodded with satisfaction at the peace she’d bought herself, before carrying on: “That’s much better. Anyhow, do you really think that somebody who could actually do something like this to you didn’t ALSO consider every single fucking detail of it super-carefully, and do exactly what they meant to do? That’s a hypothetical question, by the way, since you can’t answer me anymore, and you’re not going to answer anyone ever again. Anyway, the point is, this wasn’t a mistake. I don’t make mistakes. It’s not like a mousetrap you could accidentally step on. You turned into Claire’s glove because you got way too close to her. Believe me, I allowed for the curse to leave her actual “friends” alone. That’s why this has never happened before with anyone but you. Which makes you special, or I guess, that means you thought you were special. You thought you were a part of her world. So, it didn’t really matter exactly whatever the fuck you said or did before you changed. This was just the last straw. And let me tell you, David, that I protect the things I love. I love Claire, more than you can know. Which is why you’re never going to bother us ever again. Though, I guess in a way you’re getting what you wanted, because you are going to stay close to her, forever. She must’ve told you that after a day, the curse would make her forget about you? Honestly, that was just something I told her to keep her from losing her goddamn mind, once it finally happened someday. The truth is, it’s already been happening way faster. You’ve noticed it, and so does she – at least sometimes, but soon, as in two minutes, she won’t remember any of this happening, or you at all, for that matter.”