Jake hated his life. Jake hated life in general. Jake hated ever having been born, and he was probably justified, considering his current circumstances. For the past three months he had lived in a dark, stuffy, inescapable prison. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst part of it was that this impenetrable fortress that held him and thousands of others like him was nothing more than a small box owned by a cruel and powerful teenage girl. He knew her only from the occasional glances he would get from her whenever she opened the box, and then she was impossible to miss. Her face absolutely filled the sky. She was clearly foreign, probably Hispanic or Middle Eastern, with big, dark brown eyes and long, flowing black hair. Whenever she spoke to them it only came out as a deafening rumble, but he was confident that even if he could understand it he wouldn’t know the language.
Jake had no idea how she got her power, or what else she used it for. He only knew that he had been on a United Airlines flight from Miami to Minneapolis when all of a sudden the sky went pitch black and the cabin lost power. The plane rocked violently back and forth like no turbulence he had ever encountered before, and was flipped upside down and held at near vertical angles. Almost losing consciousness from the vertigo, Jack pushed up the shade on his window to figure out where they were.
That’s when he caught his first glimpse of her. The sight of the mammoth girl holding the plane almost gave him a heart attack, and these days he almost wished it had killed him and spared him the torment of living in this box. She was impossibly large, and her right hand easily dwarfed the jumbo jet airliner. Her face was easily over two thousand feet wide, and she was…smiling. That scared him more than anything. It was a genuine smile of pride and mischief and, worst of all, of utter disregard. After examining the airplane to her satisfaction, the three-mile tall girl unceremoniously stuffed them into her purse.
The ride in her purse seemed hours, but by his watch he knew it had only been about 15 minutes before they emerged from the darkness again. Her hand wrapped around the plane once more and hoisted them out and into what appeared to be an enormous black box. She rumbled something unintelligible at them, but he got that the gist of it was to get off the plane. As he disembarked on the yellow air-filled slide, he looked around and saw thousands of others. Apparently, he was not among the first to have been brought here.
After most of them were off, she lifted the plane back up into the sky. One or two people who had failed to make a timely exit fell out of the cabin and splattered on the ground as she lifted it thousands of feet above. Jake stood awestruck, transfixed by this colossal beauty who was so huge and powerful that she could hold an entire jumbo jet, which to her was only three inches long. Her once smiling lips now had a vengeful and contorted look, as she shouted something angrily and tore the plane in half. One half she crushed in her hands, the other she popped in her mouth like a frail metal candy, chewing it once before swallowing. She then smirked and replaced the lid on the box, and put them in the drawer.
The next few miserable months dragged on for Jake. Occasionally the girl would peal away the roof of their prison, either to get people out or put more in. She would sometimes show up with another jet airliner or a cruise ship or a train, and place it in the center of the box. Jake would watch as the hundreds of bewildered people exited, slowly realizing that their lives were now meaningless. And after most of them got off—it was always most, some people always thought the plane/ship/train was safer than the box—she would snarl angrily and make a show of disposing of it, either by eating it, crushing it in her hand, crushing it in between her breasts (which were easily size C or D, Jake knew), or by sitting on it. The message was very clear: they were not going home, and there was no point hoping.
When she didn’t drop new people off, she would amuse herself by killing a few dozen of those already assembled. She had a few favorite games she would play. Sometimes she would slowly lower her thumb over the box, darting it around from side to side as it descended so that no one knew exactly where it would land. Invariably it would squish about thirty or forty people. Other times she would slide a piece of paper down into the box and scoop up about a hundred people and carry them off to a fate Jake didn’t want to imagine. And still other times, she would simply lean down over the box, pucker her lips, and kiss the bottom. This tactic frequently killed almost two hundred people at a time, since her generous lips covered so much area. Then she would lick her lips, transferring from her lips to her tongue the few writhing survivors of her crushing kiss, smile contentedly, and replace the lid, once again resigning them to their hopeless prison. It was clear they no longer existed as people, but merely as disposable playthings. And they were higly disposable. After all, they were only about one-fiftieth of an inch tall to her. And she could always find plenty more.
There were several thousand of them in there now. Some of the newer ones still had hope, but Jake thought they were the most foolish. There was no point in hope. There was no escape. There was only her and her torments. And now today, as he felt the familiar rumble of the box being pulled from its drawer for the umpteenth time, he wondered if this would be the day that he could finally die and be released from the hell that was his life.
That’s odd, Jake thought. The box was rumbling much more than usual. The giantess’s experienced hands were usually much softer and more precise, having done this dozens of times. Perhaps today she was particularly excited about something. That doesn’t augur well, sighed Jake. Or maybe, just maybe, it was someone else. Maybe someone had found the box without her knowing and was about to discover them. Maybe this was all over.
Jake fought to suppress these foolish ramblings, knowing that when it turned out just to be her again the pain of his despair would hurt more than just not caring. But try as he might, a small glimmer in the back of his mind was curious. He could feel his heart beating faster and tried to slow it down as his hands began shaking with the irrepressible notion that today might be different. There was no way the girl would have fumbled with the box this much. It just…felt different. As the lid of the box was lifted and light penetrated the prison, he stared eagerly and intently and saw….