On a warm afternoon in late spring, a man was returning home from a business trip. He was glad the trip was finally over; it had been nothing but one frustrating obstacle after another. Every day it seemed like there more idiots out on the road, plodding along dumb in their lanes, too blinkered to move over.

On foot it was no better. Everywhere young people strolling along playing on their phones, never looking up. Or chattering away side by side, taking up the whole sidewalk.

He'd started taking shortcuts through a public park, cutting diagonally across the grass. But even there people were always getting in the way. One time he practically tripped over some little kid who'd been lying on the ground playing with marbles. The marbles scattered in all directions and the boy cried out. Some lady ran over from one of the benches and gave the man a dirty look, but he just kept walking. He didn't have time to get in an argument. Shouldn't she have paid better attention and gotten her kid out of the way?

All of that was over and done now, and he had the weekend to look forward to. A sunny weekend of mowing the lawn and sitting out on the back deck by the pool. He took the last right turn off of the main road and passed through the gate into his community. As he drove down the rows of houses, he saw a glint up above and glanced up.

There was a bubble floating across the cloudless blue sky: a perfect sphere, transparent with an iridescent sheen where its filmy surface dazzled in the sunlight. An ordinary soap bubble — except that it was floating high above the rooftops and it was the size of a Volkswagen. Another bubble wobbled over a roof just ahead and descended toward the street, then burst a few feet above the man's car. With a wet plop, foam splashed onto the windshield; there was a whiff of lemon.

He drove on beneath a procession of giant iridescent bubbles drifting south-southwest in the gentle summer breeze.

The man's house came into view. Two stories of stucco under a red tiled roof, French windows, and a portico flanked by two columns. A McMansion, his ex-wife's friends had called it, snickering into their single-origin coffees and artisanal ciders. They'd gone on about “symmetry” and “proportion”, making her ashamed of the big house he'd put so much time and money into. Eventually she grew ashamed of him, too; of his idea of the American dream, mowing the lawn and painting the shed and grilling steaks in the backyard by the pool. She went back to the city, to her friends with their arts degrees and tiny apartments, and left him with the big house and a bigger alimony.

He still loved the house, and he'd grown to appreciate living there without anyone nagging him about leaving the toilet seat up or second-guessing his choice in decorating.

Another bubble rose from just behind his house. And after it, something else appeared. A head poked up behind the roof of his adjoined two-car garage. It was the back of a young boy's head, fat and thick with unruly hair. And it was huge; wider than one of the garage doors, maybe.

The man slammed on the brakes and stopped in the middle of the road, unable to process what he was seeing. He didn't dare enter the garage. In a cold sweat, he drove past and around the block to get a look at the back side of the house.

A giant boy was sitting in the backyard, slumped against the garage; his shoulders were about as wide as it was. His legs were stretched out over much of the yard; he had to be something like forty feet tall. At the boy's feet was the man's twelve-foot above-ground swimming pool. The mesh cover had been torn off and lay wadded up like discarded tissue paper, and something had been mixed into the water; it was frothy and bubbling.

The boy leaned forward and hunched over the pool, clenching a green plastic rod the size of a lamppost, with a hoop at one end. A bubble wand. He twirled the wand around the pool, sloshing about the thousands of gallons of water like it was no more than a drinking glass, then brought the wand to his lips and blew. A glistening soap bubble grew over six feet before drifting off over the rooftops.

The man stopped the car in the middle of the road, got out, and ran shouting into his backyard. His garage, his pool, his whole yard were being destroyed; he had to do something. Forty feet or not, who did this kid think he was?

The boy didn't seem to notice the man until he glanced down while lowering the wand to make another bubble. He didn't say anything, or show any other indication that he heard the man's shouting. He just looked puzzled for a moment, and poked the man with the end of the bubble wand.

The man was hit square in the chest and went sprawling, rolling out of the yard and onto the sidewalk. He lay there face-down, and didn't get back up for a time. All his belongings, his whole identity, was threatened by something completely beyond his power to confront. He needed to try something else. A lure maybe, something shiny and tempting far away from his house. He didn't have any idea what would work or how he could arrange it before his home was damaged even worse.

He had been lying on the sidewalk a minute or two when the ground shook.

The pavement bucked violently beneath him, like a car jumping into gear, and suddenly it was dark. He rolled over, looked up, and found himself in the long shadow of a titanic woman's bare wet leg. The calf tapered some twenty feet up to the eaves of the houses, where a strong taut knee was slightly bent and a long supple thigh sloped elegantly into the sky. Large drops of water glistened in the light, gliding slowly down the leg's smooth curves and clinging for a moment before falling. They plopped on the pavement, in the grass, or on the hoods and windshields of parked cars in a slow halting rhythm like the tentative sprinkles at the start of a mid-spring rain shower.

A second bare foot descended. It was as long as the man's neighbor's Porsche, and just as sleek and streamlined. There was another jolt as it touched the ground.

The giant woman had now stepped fully into view: eighty feet of her in a black bikini, the straps fastened with knots that left loops the height of a grown man dangling from her hips and her upper back. Her breasts swelled from cups the size of the satellite dishes at the nearby radio station; her long straight hair hung wet and limp around her shoulders; her eyes were hidden by sunglasses but her lips were curled in a small conceited smile. In the suburban subdivision she was by far the tallest object in sight; the tops of the young trees and the peaks of the houses' roofs were barely above her knees.

She tossed back her head and ran her fingers through her hair, straightening and untangling it. There was a rain shower below, as water from her hair pelted the rooftops. The man's SUV, abandoned in the middle of the road at the woman's feet, looked like it had just driven through a car wash.

As she arranged her hair, the woman looked down at the giant child blowing bubbles in the backyard. A loving smile lit her face.

“Sweetheart? Mommy's finished her swim. Time to go home.”

The boy didn't react to his mother's words; he didn't even look up. He was intently hunched over the soapy swimming pool between his feet, churning up a foamy whirlpool with the six-foot bubble wand clutched in his fist.

The woman's smile faded a little. She bent over and laid a hand on the boy's shoulder. Her long elegant fingers easily wrapped around the giant boy's upper arm, though it was thicker than most tree trunks.

“You've played here long enough. We need to go home. Mommy has things to do.”

The boy looked up with wide blank eyes and whined, “I don't wanna!”

He looked back down and raised the wand to his lips.

The woman's smile disappeared entirely. She pursed her lips, crossed her arms, and sighed.

Then she bent down and picked up the swimming pool with one hand effortlessly, like a tub of butter. With a simple flick of her wrist she overturned it, and thousands of gallons of soapy water rushed out with the might of roaring rapids. In an instant the backyard became a pond, and the pond overflowed into the house and onto the street. The backyard shed was pulverized under the deluge; the walls and roof the man had once spent a weekend putting together were reduced to scraps of flotsam that washed away along with his lawnmower, his grill, and his top-end power tools. What had been a faint scent of lemony-orange soap was now overpowering.

The boy cried out as his toy was taken away and his feet got wet. The woman hooked her hands under his shoulders and picked him up out of the flooded yard.

The child thrashed in his mother's grip, his legs kicking helplessly. As he was lifted above the house, a stray kick landed on the roof. It instantly crumbled beneath the struggling boy's heel, with a terrible creak and a loud pop. The Mediterranean tiles under the giant foot were smashed into red clay dust; others went flying out onto the street or slid down into the yard.

The woman hugged the child to her chest, turning back and forth and patting him on the head to shush him. The same kicking feet that had crushed the house's roof like a cheap paper cup in one errant blow were now beating harmlessly against her vast flat abs. She didn't seem to even notice.

“It's okay, sweetheart. You can play more later. How about we go home and you can have some ice cream?”

The woman turned and stepped back the way she'd come, still carrying her screaming child and trying to calm him with pats on the back and whispered promises of toys and treats. As she turned, her left foot clipped the man's SUV, sending it tumbling like an empty tin can. It flipped over and skidded to a stop in the middle of the front yard of the house next door. The roof crumpled and the windows shattered.

The giant woman took no notice and continued walking. After two steps she lifted one leg high, ascending onto some invisible stairway, and disappeared. The sound of her child's wailing faded away.

They were gone, and the man was left with the smashed remains of all his possessions. The roof had collapsed and the first floor was flooded. Broken timbers and furniture bobbed and drifted lazily in the soapy pond that the backyard had become. The red roof tiles were spilled all over the street like candy, and even as he watched another clump of them slid off the ruined roof into the water and sank to the bottom, leaving only ripples and froth. His swimming pool lay on its side empty, like a paper bowl tossed on the ground after a cookout. His car was crumpled scrap, upside down in the middle of the neighbor's yard.

The incongruous citrus smell of dish soap was everywhere, and clusters of large bubbles glistened in the bright afternoon.