To eat my love the way she always dreamt, either she had to get smaller or I bigger. Porn she liked was big broads, fifty-footers sort of big, queen kongs, skyscraper-legged and black-hole-mouthed to hoover up lovers the size of mites. Porn I liked was—no matter.

Decided was we drew straws. The straw decided: I, Alice, Bigger.

I could not dwell. I swallowed quickly pride, and pills, overnighted from a site (Amazons) that specialized in such sexual bents.

My love said Trust me. What choice had I?

These strange effects took no sweet time. I bigged all right, hundredfold. Broke the house on through! Right arm filled the master bath, left leg wrecked the drive. Skull met with reclaimed beams where the sun beat in, plaster like confetti down my hair the mile long. I stood, and thus standing, darkened the town. 

At spurt’s end—was it end? Would it ever be?—my love marveled me up and down and fairly. I was a thing to marvel. Straddling my pinky nail, her chirp demanded from a great distance: GO! and IN!

I swallowed her, most specialest pill, as she begged of me in dreams. Her final act: the happy shriek of eatenness, the last of her. She tasted of, well, nothing. Not teatree shampoo, not chicken. Within the day I’d passed her. She exited the other side in a cocoon of waste, dead of course but smiles all over, as ever, ever on this rictus in the muck. Her fantasy so quickly wrung, most happiest death. Wasn’t it? What she asked of me? Didn’t I?

I remain. Here. My days of largesse pass like velvet curtains ever-parting from a play without end, and I unaudienced. And there she, joy voided in the earth’s commode—happy? Oh, dear, what choice had I. With bloated fingers thick as blimps I mark her little spot to ward off urinating dogs and reckless kids, though already all steer clear of the lone giantess of the plains. Clumsily—but hopefully!—as I now maneuver all my days—I plant this pack of seeds. I water, tend, and hope; so as not to galumph, defile, or barge. Come spring, with any luck at all, my hyacinth girl.

Lauren Friedlander is a writer from Kansas living in Brooklyn. She was a recipient of the 2018 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and has fiction published or forthcoming in Catapult, Washington Square Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a novel. www.laurenfriedlander.net.