“I suppose that’s one way to teach someone how not to use the fire lane, especially with the risk of emergency,” Judy said, reacting quickly. Mumbled agreement resounded from below. She scraped off the leftover car pieces in the grass and nudged the totaled vehicle with her big toe. Then, proceeding as though nothing had happened, Judy set off across the parking lot toward the nearest road bustling with life and business, with her cluster of supporters behind.

            Passerby on the street froze, many of them snapping photos of their own, and only a few backing away. Judy regarded them with a friendly, royal wave after she transferred Kyle over to the same hand as Maggie, freeing her up. The two siblings huddled together in her palm.

            Around the bend, Judy came to a stop in front of a half-demolished, condemned apartment building, shrouded in dust. The wrecking ball was already arcing back for another swing at the structure. However, Judy leaned down and caught the destructive black orb in her fist like a baseball.

            “Allow me, gentlemen,” she said, peering directly into the glass cab of the vehicle. Its driver, too befuddled, released his grip on the controls as Judy set the wrecking ball down in the dirt. Then, with that very same hand with which she so skillfully captured the sphere, the power-hungry politician balled her fingers into a mighty fist and punched directly through the foundations of the building.

            Those lingering brick walls, hardened over decades, and probably ready to withstand another several hours from the wrecking crew, collapsed like toothpicks. Judy withdrew her fist in a puff of smoke, which she waved away from her face, and then patted down the rubble to ensure it wasn’t going to slide into the street. The entire structure had been leveled with one blow.

            Scott, shocked by the destruction taking place so near to his home base of Judy’s foot, threw his hands over his face for protection, even as no part of the debris reached him. In that fumbling moment, he released his grip on the anklet chain and rolled down the loping hill of his mother’s ped.

            “Better watch yourself, Scott, if you want to convince me you belong back at this size, honey.”

            Just before he could topple into the street, Judy’s toes parted with expert practice and snagged her son’s arm in the fleshy crevice. Satisfied with the quick destruction of the doomed apartment, she rose back to full height and continued on with her stroll, apparently with no intention to allow Scott another chance at his perch. The young man was left at the graceful mercy of his mother’s firmly clamped toes around his numbing shoulder.

            “By the way, Maggie, sweetie?” Judy said into her hand. “This new form will only be available to a select few at first, but I’ve pulled some major strings. If you like, and it’s totally up to you, I may convince them to let you have the same privileges.”

            “Y-You mean…” the girl stammered.

            “Yes. You can be a big girl too, just like your mom.”

            “Oh my God,” Maggie gasped. “I… I just…”

            “I know, it’s a big decision, and you can absolutely have some time to think about it, dear. As I said, it’s not a done-deal yet, but I think we can-”

            “YES!” the girl squealed, hugging her parent’s giant fingers with suppressed ecstasy. “Yes, PLEASE, Mom! I want it! I want to be just like you!”

            Way down below, though he could only hear the muffled shrieks of excitement from his sister, Scott got all he needed to by listening in on Judy’s motherly pronouncement. And as nauseous as he was becoming being thrashed about from side to side in the vice of his mother’s restrictive toe valley, it made him all the sicker to imagine his sister, as well, regaining the height advantage over him he’d so briefly held this afternoon. Her shoes, too, would eternally be functioning prison cells for him at any size.

            He just couldn’t catch a break, it seemed. Maybe he never would again, judging by how this day was playing out so far. Scott felt his comparatively tiny fingers congealing in the flow of sticky, springtime sweat within the balmy crevice of his mother’s toes. Gluing him down, just in case the woman’s imprisoning grip on him loosened. There was no exit. Fitting, really.

            “But… M-Mom?” Kyle asked timidly.

            “Yes, hon?”

            “Where will we all live? Will… it just be Scott and I and… maybe Maggie, in the old house together, and you-”

            “Oh no, no, Kyle. Don’t be so silly. You think I’d abandon you kids to live alone, just because I can’t fit inside the walls right now? I suppose you’re forgetting we have superior science on our side with this one. Wait until you see the surprise I have waiting, just a little further,” Judy explained. She extended her free hand out, index finger pointing to the forest. With every lumbering, earth-shuddering footfall, she brought them nearer. “Just beyond the trees, there’s a healthy acreage Techilogic has generously gifted our family, simply for being the shining examples that we are. This is where we’ll make our new home. And not in that old dump of a place we used to stay, no-no. You just wait.”

            Scott’s arm peeled away from the iron-hold of his giant mother’s mammoth toes. Of course, it was only because she let him, via the flexing of her digits and a lithe flick of her ankle. He tumbled awkwardly onto his back in the densely shrubbed greenery, just beyond the pines. Above, his tremendous parent loomed overhead as she always did, and just about at the same comparative scale. Somehow, though, the framing of ancient woodland and the sky behind her made the distance seem all the greater. Like the woman was capable of scooping up the earth itself in her long reach and remolding it to her desires, just as she had her eldest son.

            “Get up, Scott,” she instructed softly. “We’re going to take the grand tour.”

            Crawling onto his belly, Scott watched helplessly as his mother’s foot ascended again. Her sole passed mere feet above his head, the rosy, grass-stained wrinkles dotted with brick grit and car chunks. The mass of her ped sunk into the earth just beyond, then, as she led the final constitutional toward the house.

            And what a house it was. Though to Judy, the state-of-the-art modern residence was a bit of a step down in raw square footage compared to her last quarters, the woman was also 150-feet-tall now. This new house was akin to multiple shipping warehouses stacked atop one another, yet with all the taste and décor intact of Judy’s prior standards. It looked like something grown out of a fairy tale, to see a house so magnanimous and fortress-like which now dwarfed the proud trees.

            Scott scrambled after them, even as his bones seemed to protest, aching in warning. He paused briefly, watching his mother arrive at the front door. For a shining moment she appeared normal and surmountable again in front of the towering house, until Scott caught a glimpse of a nearby oak so pitifully shorter than his mother, and the dream snapped.

            This was a veritable giant’s castle at the top of the clouds, except inside there would be no giant: only a giantess, quite possibly soon the daughter of the giantess, and their toy boys wandering around the endless halls and losing themselves to the reality-bending enforcement of Judy’s titanic will on society.

            “C’mon, Scott,” Judy bellowed out to her son across the field as she opened the pristine cream-white front door. “Come home now, please.”