Chapter 20: Flatulence to Grow On
The smell of the pizza arrived first, a greasy, meat-laden ghost that seeped under the bedroom door long before the buzzer sounded. It was an obscenity, that smell. It carried with it the echo of shared meals, of normalcy, a taunt from a world that no longer existed. Matthew lay where he had fallen, curled on his side, his body still trembling in sporadic, silent aftershocks. The hollow in his chest had grown cold and still, a cavern where the screams had died. He could still hear the crack of the glass. He could still see, in the darkness behind his eyes, the red smear on the coffee table from a vantage point that was no longer his own.
Hailey had not moved. She was a fossil in the bedding, preserving the exact position she’d held when the vase exploded. Her mind, however, was a silent, frantic processor, running diagnostics on a system that was failing. The clinical detachment was cracking. She could feel it. The data points—Sasha’s termination, Matthew’s catatonia, the forthcoming nutritional intake—were no longer arranging themselves into coherent patterns. They were just stimuli, pounding against a dam of reason that was beginning to sprout hairline fractures.
The buzzer rang, a sharp, electronic bleat that made Matthew flinch.
They heard Chloe’s bare feet pad to the intercom, her cheerful “Hello?”, the metallic crackle of the delivery person’s reply, the click of the lock being released. Then the wait. The mundane ritual of transaction happening just outside their tomb. The front door opened. A muffled, young male voice said, “That’ll be twenty-eight fifty.” The rustle of bills. “Thanks, man. Have a good one.” The door closed.
The smell intensified, becoming a physical presence in the apartment. Onions, peppers, pepperoni, bubbling cheese.
“Food’s here!” Chloe called, her voice singsong. “Come on out, you two. Table’s set.” The irony in her words was a lighter fluid sprayed on the embers of their dread.
Matthew didn’t move. Hailey, after a long moment, mechanically pushed back the covers and swung her legs over the side of the bed. She stood, her wet clothes clinging unpleasantly, and walked to the door. She didn’t look back at Matthew. There was no point. He was either a component that would follow or one that would be replaced. She opened the door.
The living room was transformed, yet familiar. The glass was gone. The red smear was gone. The coffee table bore a single, open pizza box, steaming, garish in its abundance. A two-liter bottle of Coke and three plastic cups sat beside it. The floor lamp cast its same warm, unreliable glow. Chloe sat cross-legged in the center of the couch, a slice of pizza already folded in her hand. She took a huge, unselfconscious bite. Cheese stretched, then snapped. Grease gleamed on her lips.
“Sit,” she said around the mouthful, gesturing with the pizza slice to the floor in front of the coffee table. “Not on the furniture. Floor’s good. Grounded.”
Hailey obeyed. She lowered herself onto the thin carpet, sitting with her legs tucked neatly to the side, her back painfully straight. She was a student awaiting a lecture. The posture was automatic, a relic of a self that was rapidly receding.
From the bedroom, a shuffle. Matthew appeared in the doorway. He looked decades older. His eyes were red-rimmed, empty holes. He moved like his joints were filled with sand. He glanced at the empty space where the vase had been, his face twitching, then his gaze skittered away, landing nowhere. He stumbled forward and collapsed onto the floor beside Hailey, not sitting, but sprawling, his back against the front of the couch, his head lolling.
“Good,” Chloe said, swallowing. She wiped her chin with the back of her hand. “Family dinner. Well, what’s left of it.” She took another bite, chewed with meditative slowness, her eyes moving between them. “You should eat. You’ll need your strength. This is premium fuel. For me, of course, but the process works better if the raw materials are… invested.”
Matthew stared at the pizza. The pepperoni cups glistened with orange grease. It looked like cartoon food, a mockery of sustenance. His stomach churned.
“I’m not hungry,” he mumbled.
Chloe’s chewing stopped. The room seemed to quiet, the hum of the fridge dropping away. “I didn’t ask if you were hungry,” she said, her voice pleasant. “I said you should eat. This isn’t a buffet. It’s a protocol. You’re part of the metabolic chain now. The prey consumes the vegetation. The predator consumes the prey. Energy transfers. You are in the middle. So you will eat the vegetation.” She nodded at the box. “Go on. A slice each. Now.”
Her tone brooked no discussion. It was the same tone she’d used before reshaping the world.
Hailey leaned forward. Her movements were precise, robotic. She selected a slice, lifted it. Strings of cheese dripped, breaking on the cardboard. She brought it to her mouth and took a small, careful bite. She chewed. It tasted of salt, grease, and nothing. It was texture without flavor, fuel without pleasure. She swallowed.
Matthew watched her. The hollow in him yawned wider. To eat was to participate. To accept. It was the final betrayal of Sasha, who was now a stain in a trash bag. But the alternative was her focus, her displeasure. The memory of the jar, of the suffocating, liquefying pressure, was more immediate than his grief. His hand, trembling, reached out. He pulled a slice free. He took a bite. The food was ash in his mouth. He forced it down.
Chloe beamed. “See? Teamwork.” She finished her slice, licked her fingers one by one, then reached for another. She ate with a gusto that was both captivating and repulsive. It was a display of pure, unapologetic life. She was the nucleus of this terrible new world, and she was thriving.
They ate in silence. The only sounds were the wet, tearing bites, the crunch of crust, the glug of Coke as Chloe poured herself a cup. She didn’t offer them any. Matthew finished his slice, the grease coating his throat like a sickness. Hailey managed half of hers before setting the remainder carefully back in the box.
Chloe finished her second slice, wiped her hands on the thighs of Matthew’s t-shirt, and let out a small, satisfied sigh. She settled back into the couch cushions, one hand resting on her bare stomach. Her eyes grew half-lidded, contemplative.
“Okay,” she said, her voice dropping into a confidential register. “Digestion’s underway. Gasses are forming. Systems are priming. Which means it’s time to talk about the new parameters.” She smiled, a lazy, cat-like curl of her lips. “The vase was… poetic. But a one-off. A masterpiece, really. Tough to follow. So we’re shifting to a more… interactive model. A sustained dynamic.”
Matthew’s breath hitched. He stared at the geometric pattern of the carpet.
Hailey’s gaze was fixed on Chloe’s face, recording.
“You’ve experienced localized pressure,” Chloe continued. “You’ve experienced total integration. Now we’re going to work on scale. Perspective.” She patted her stomach gently. “Every time I fart—which, given the triple cheese and spicy sausage, is going to be frequently and with gusto—it’s going to do two things to you. One physical. One psychological.”
She leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, entering their space. The lamp light caught the faint, greasy sheen on her face. “Physically: each expulsion, regardless of volume, pitch, or fragrance, will cause you both to shrink by exactly one inch. And me? I’ll grow an inch. Symmetry. Balance. A transfer of stature.”
The numbers clicked instantly in Hailey’s mind. Matthew was 5’8”. She was 5’4”. Chloe was 5’6”. If the process ran to completion… the end states were calculable. The progression was a deterministic nightmare.
Matthew’s head slowly lifted. He looked at Chloe, true comprehension dawning through the fog of his shock. “You’ll… you’ll get taller. We’ll get…”
“Smaller,” Chloe finished, her eyes sparkling. “Yes. Every little toot. A race run in reverse. With every bit of air that leaves my body, I become more. You become less. Literally.”
“And the… psychological effect?” Hailey asked, her voice flat.
Chloe’s smile widened. “That’s the good part. Each event will also deliver an incremental dose of fear. Not just any fear. A very specific, curated terror. The gut-deep, primal fear of a giantess. Of me.” She spread her hands, indicating herself. “You’ll feel it hit you, like a drug hitting your bloodstream. The awe. The terror of my scale, my power, my absolute dominance over your existence. It’ll build up in you. Cumulative. By the time you’re looking up at me from the height of a mouse, that fear will be the core of your being. It won’t be something you feel. It’ll be what you are.”
The horror of it was exquisitely simple. It wasn’t just about size. It was about the systematic rewriting of their perception, the forging of a worshipful terror directly into their nervous systems. They wouldn’t just be small. They would be properly, religiously afraid.
“Why?” Matthew whispered, the word torn from the hollow.
“Why not?” Chloe replied, shrugging. “It’s interesting. It’s efficient. It’s fun. I get bigger, you get smaller and more afraid. It’s a perfect closed system. Your diminishing stature will increase your perceived size differential, which will amplify the fear, which will make the whole experience more delicious for me, which will probably make me fart more. See? Beautiful feedback.”
She shifted, settling deeper into the couch. A low, almost inaudible gurgle traveled through her abdomen. They all heard it. A promise.
“We’ll start now,” she said, her voice soft. “Consider the first few… gentle. Introductory. Let your bodies and minds adjust to the new regime.”
She closed her eyes, a look of gentle concentration on her face. Her body relaxed. The room held its breath.
Matthew stared, paralyzed. He wanted to run, to scream, to launch himself at her. But his limbs were liquid. He was trapped in the viscous aftermath of the last horror, and the new one was already unfolding, patient and inevitable.
Hailey ran the equations. At their current heights, Matthew would reach zero height in 68 emissions. She would reach zero in 64. Chloe would be, correspondingly, 134 inches tall—over eleven feet. They would be gone, mathematically erased, long before that. The fear would likely break them as organisms long before their height reached zero. She noted the variables: the unknown intensity of the fear dose, the unknown potential for non-linear effects, the unknown endpoint Chloe actually desired. The model was incomplete. She was living inside an incomplete model.
A low, bubbling pressure built in the silence. It was a tangible sound, a rumble from the depths of the pizza-filled crucible of Chloe’s gut.
She let it come.
It wasn’t a violent release. It was a soft, prolonged sigh of gas, a pfffffffffffft that lasted a good three seconds. It was almost delicate. The sound was absurdly casual, a mundane bodily function.
The effect was not mundane.
The world lurched.
For Matthew and Hailey, it was a sudden, vertiginous drop in perspective. The coffee table, which had been at chest level, surged upward, its edge now looming at eye-level. The couch became a towering, fabric mesa. The pizza box was a vast, greasy plain above them. The air seemed to thicken, the dust motes in the lamplight becoming bloated, floating islands.
They had each lost an inch. Instantly, seamlessly. There was no process, no shrinking feeling. It was a cut in a film reel. One frame they were one size, the next they were smaller. The disorientation was profound, a physical nausea of spatial betrayal.
Simultaneously, the fear hit.
It came like a nasal spray of adrenaline injected directly into the brain. It was cold and sharp. It wasn’t a thought—“I am afraid.”—it was a physical state, a tuning of every sense. Chloe, already sitting above them, now seemed imposingly larger. Her relaxed figure on the couch was no longer just a person; it was a topology of potential threat. The curve of her shoulder was a hill that could crush. The casual drape of her hand was a pending avalanche. The sheer mass of her, the space she occupied, hummed with a dangerous, gravitational pull. It was an instinctive, animal recognition of a larger predator.
Matthew gasped, scrambling back on the carpet until his shoulders hit the couch’s front frame. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic bird in a cage. The fear was clean, undiluted by complex emotion. It overrode his grief, his shame. It was pure survival-circuit panic.
Hailey clutched at her own arms, her nails digging in. The fear dose disrupted her processing. It was an illogical input. Her rational mind knew the size differential had only changed by two inches total—one from each of them, one gained by Chloe. The perceived change should be minor. But the injected terror amplified the difference exponentially, painting it in the stark, blinding colors of primordial dread. Data stream corrupted. System alert.
And Chloe… grew.
It was as seamless as their shrinkage. One moment she was there, the next she was subtly, undeniably larger. Her legs seemed longer against the cushions. Her torso gained a more imposing breadth. The t-shirt stretched a little tighter across her shoulders. She wasn’t a giantess yet. But she was on her way. She was 5’7” now. To their 5’7” and 5’3”, she was once again taller than Matthew. The balance of power, visually and psychologically, had tilted irrevocably.
Chloe let out a contented “mmm,” and opened her eyes. They gleamed with pleasure. “Feel that? The shift? That’s the baseline.” She rubbed her stomach in a slow circle. “Oh yeah, the machinery is warming up.”
Another gurgle, deeper this time. A pressure building lower in her intestine. This one was less polite.
She didn’t bother with ceremony. She relaxed, and a sharper, wetter fart ripped out of her. Prrraap! It was a brisk, businesslike explosion.
Again, the world yanked itself from under them.
The coffee table leapt upward another inch, its underside now a dark, threatening canopy. The carpet fibers became coarse as rope. The smell of the apartment intensified—the garlic powder now a pungent cloud, the stale beer smell a sour, towering presence.
The fear dose came again, stronger this time. It built upon the first, layering it. The awe they felt toward Chloe curdled into a sharper, more specific terror. Her smile was terrifying—the display of teeth from a being whose mouth could now, conceivably, fit one of their heads. The rustle of her shirt as she breathed was the sound of a sail catching wind, promising movement that could shatter them.
Matthew whined, a low animal sound he didn’t recognize as his own. He pressed his entire body into the couch, trying to become part of the furniture, to hide. The analytical part of his mind was gone, dissolved in the acidic bath of this new, programmed fear.
Hailey’s breathing came in short, sharp gasps. She was fighting the terror, trying to observe it, to quantify it. Increased heart rate. Palmar sweating. Pupil dilation. Subjective feeling of catastrophic vulnerability. But the terror was sticky. It clung to her thoughts, slowing them, making the very act of observation feel like a suicidal act of defiance. To think was to be noticed.
Chloe sighed happily, stretching her now-longer arms above her head. She was 5’8”. Matthew’s original height. She looked down at him, a mischievous glint in her eye. “Hey, look at that. We’re the same size. Well, were.” She chuckled. “Bros before… oh, wait.”
Another fermentation event announced itself within her—a long, rolling cramp that made her shift her weight. This release was different. It was a prolonged, trumpeting blast that shook the couch cushions. BRAAAAAAAAP-P-P-P! It echoed in the room, a vulgar fanfare.
The third contraction of the universe.
The scale shifted dramatically now. Three inches of loss was visually transformative. The coffee table was a high plateau. The couch was a sheer, unscalable wall of fabric. Chloe was a goddess lounging on a cliff. The light from the lamp came from a distant, miniaturized sun.
The fear dose was no longer an injection. It was a transfusion. It flooded their systems. This was no longer just fear of her; it was a perception filter. The world itself became threatening through the lens of their own insignificance. A falling crumb from the pizza box was a potential boulder. The sound of the fridge kicking on in the kitchen was a subterranean tremor.
Chloe was 5’9”. She looked down at her own legs, admiring their new length. “This is fun,” she mused. “It’s like unlocking achievements. ‘Grow Taller Via Flatulence.’ ‘Induce Existential Dread.’” She looked at them, her head now cocking at a more severe angle to see them on the floor. “You two are doing great. Really leaning into the vibe.”
Matthew was crying. Silent, helpless tears streamed down his face. The grief for his sister was still there, but it was buried under tons of this new, heavy, mineral fear. He was not Matthew who had failed Sasha. He was a small, fragile thing in a room owned by a giant.
Hailey was losing the fight. The terror was systematically dismantling her rationality. Each new dose didn’t just add; it multiplied the previous one. The model was irrelevant because she was ceasing to be a modeler. She was becoming a subject, raw and uncomprehending. Her body began to shake in unison with Matthew’s.
Chloe’s stomach gave a massive, gluttonous groan. The main event was arriving. The digestive culmination of her feast. She clenched slightly, her face flushing with effort and anticipation.
She clenched slightly, her face flushing with effort and anticipation. Then she seemed to change her mind, her expression shifting from internal focus to playful scrutiny. She uncurled her legs and planted her now-larger feet on the floor with a soft, authoritative thud.
"Actually, stand up," she said, her voice a lazy command. "I want to see the gradient. The visual of the decline."
The fear coursing through them made the command feel like a physical threat. Moving meant exposing themselves, making their diminished forms a spectacle. Not moving meant disobedience, and the memory of the jar’s acidic confines was a fresh wound in their minds.
Matthew pushed himself up from the carpet, his movements clumsy, his limbs not quite obeying the old spatial rules. The room swayed as he found his feet. Everything was wrong—the distance to the ceiling was vast and intimidating, the floor seemed further away than it should.
Hailey stood with more mechanical precision, her body rigid. She kept her eyes fixed on the pizza box, a neutral territory, as she rose. The simple act of standing was a logistical challenge; her center of gravity felt off, her perspective tipped like a capsizing boat.
They stood side-by-side before the couch, two diminished figures in damp, wrinkled clothes. Chloe remained seated, which now put her eyes nearly level with theirs. She leaned forward, her gaze traveling from the top of Hailey’s head to Matthew’s, then back down. A slow, delighted smile spread across her face.
"Well, look at you both," she chuckled, the sound rich with condescension. "My little step stools. My bookends." She tilted her head. "Matthew, buddy, I’m looking you right in the eye. That’s new. And Hailey… wow, the top of your head is just about at my nose now. This is hilarious."
She didn’t just look; she inspected. Her hand came up, and she held it flat above Hailey’s head, then swept it horizontally across to Matthew’s. She measured the air where their statures used to be. "You’ve lost a good chunk already. And I’ve gained it. It’s like you’re donating to me. How charitable."
The proximity of her hand, the casual ownership of the space above their very beings, sent a fresh jolt of the programmed terror through them. It was a spike, clean and sharp. Matthew flinched as if struck. Hailey’s breath caught in her throat, a tiny, trapped sound.
Chloe saw it. Her eyes lit up. "Oh, that! You felt that, didn’t you? That little heart-squeeze? That ‘oh god she’s right there’ feeling?" She giggled, a genuine sound of amusement. "It’s working perfectly. The fear is tying right into the size difference. Your own nerves are betraying you, making me seem even bigger than I am. Which is pretty big!"
To emphasize her point, she slowly rose from the couch.
It was not a quick motion. It was a deliberate, unfolding expansion. Her hips lifted, her torso straightened, her neck elongated. She kept growing upwards, a human tower being constructed in real-time. The process of her standing amplified every inch she had gained. To them, it was a seismic event.
She was now 5’9”, but to their terror-enhanced perception and reduced scale, she was a colossus unfolding from a seated throne. The ceiling light haloed her hair. Her shadow, thrown by the floor lamp, engulfed them both, a cold, dark blanket swallowing the geometric carpet pattern. She loomed.
She took a single step forward, closing the small gap between the couch and where they stood frozen. Now she was truly over them. They had to crane their necks back to see her face, a distant, smiling moon under the brow of her forehead. The sheer verticality of her presence was a physical weight. The air around her seemed denser, warmed by the massive furnace of her body.
"This," she whispered, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial rumble that vibrated in their chests, "is the good part." She stared down, her amusement crystalline. "Look at your faces. You’re not even people right now. You’re just… prey optics. All wide eyes and pulse points." She giggled again, the sound rolling down over them like a fall of warm, toxic pebbles. "I could sneeze and you’d think it was a hurricane."
The fear response wasn’t a dose anymore. It was the atmosphere. It was the medium they breathed. Her looming posture, her giggling commentary, her undeniable and growing physical dominance—it all fused into a single, paralyzing truth: they were tiny, and she was everything. Matthew’s jaw trembled. A thin, pathetic sound escaped Hailey’s clenched teeth.
Chloe sighed, a sound of deep contentment. She placed her hands on her hips, arching her back slightly. "And now," she said, her voice tightening with a different kind of focus, "the main attraction. I’ve been holding back a concert in here."
A visible, almost theatrical wave of pressure distended her lower abdomen beneath the thin cotton of the t-shirt. Her gut gave a loud, protracted gurgle, a cavernous sound that spoke of immense volumes and fermentation. Her face smoothed into an expression of pure, unadulterated release. She didn’t brace. She simply opened the gates.
The first one was a declaration. A deep, resonating BRAAAAAAAAAAAAP that tore through the room with the force of a ripped canvas. It was long, wet, and profoundly powerful, shaking the cups on the table and vibrating up through the soles of their feet.
The world dropped.
The ceiling launched away into a dizzying, distant height. The couch became a looming, monolithic wall. Chloe herself seemed to surge upward, her hips now level with their faces. The fear chemicals flooded their systems, a tsunami that wiped away any last semblance of coherent thought. It was raw, neurological scream.
Hailey’s mind, drowning, clawed for one lifeline: data. She focused on the numbers, the only things that might still hold shape in the dissolving world. Her internal voice, a ghost of its former self, chanted the metrics.
Chloe: five foot ten. Matthew: five foot four. Hailey: five foot zero.
Before the echoes of the first blast had faded, the second erupted. This was a staccato barrage, a rapid-fire sequence of pressurized pops and bursts. Prrap! Prrt! Poot! Blat! Each one a separate, vicious punctuation in the air.
Each pop was another yank on the fabric of reality.
Their perspective crumpled further with every sound. Chloe’s kneecaps, previously at their eye level, rose to their chests, then their shoulders. The weave of her t-shirt cotton became a vast, textured landscape. The smell of her, of digested pizza and profound human interior, became the thick, pervasive scent of the world.
Chloe: five foot eleven. Matthew: five foot three. Hailey: four foot eleven.
The terror was now a continuous state, a white-noise shriek in every nerve ending. Matthew had sunk to his knees, unable to support his own weight under the psychic pressure. He wrapped his arms around his head, making himself a ball, a negligible stone. Hailey remained standing, but she was a statue of pure panic, her tracking the only thread tethering her to existence.
Chloe took a deep, ragged breath, her immense chest rising. The buildup within her was audible now, a sloshing, churning tempest. She let it go not as a series, but as one continuous, catastrophic eruption.
It was a torrent. A vulgar symphony. It began as a low, roaring blast that trembled into a wet, fluttering vibrato, then climbed into a series of sharp, air-ripping reports before descending into a final, bubbling cascade. The sound filled the apartment, a brutal music of pure biological excess.
The contractions of space were relentless, sickening. With each component of the barrage, the room expanded away from them. The coffee table was a distant continental shelf. The floor lamp was a glowing skyscraper. Chloe was the landscape itself. They were ants in the shadow of a mountain that was still growing.
Chloe: six foot two. Matthew: five foot zero. Hailey: four foot eight.
Chloe: six foot three. Matthew: four foot eleven. Hailey: four foot seven.
Chloe: six foot four… six foot five…
The count in Hailey’s mind began to stutter, the numbers blurring as the visual evidence became too bizarre to process. Matthew was now shorter than she had been when they started. She was shrinking toward the realm of a child’s doll. And Chloe… Chloe was ascending into a different category of being altogether.
The barrage finally ended, not with a whimper, but with a final, emphatic PLOOP that sounded like a soaked plug being pulled. A rich, complex odor now hung in the air, a testament to the consumed feast.
Silence descended, thick and stunned.
Chloe stood, panting softly, a sheen of sweat on her brow. She looked down, way down, at the two figures on the floor. Matthew was a fetal curl. Hailey stood rigid, her head tilted so far back to see that her neck looked strained.
A low, sated laugh bubbled out of Chloe. "Wow. Just… wow." She took a single, ground-shaking step closer. The shadow of her foot fell over Matthew entirely. "Talk about a growth spurt. I feel fantastic." She placed her hands on her hips, her fingers now nearly brushing the ceiling. "And you two… look at you. You’re adorable. Like action figures. No, smaller. Like… detailed miniatures."
She knelt.
It was a slow, tectonic folding of her enormous body. Her knees hit the carpet with soft, twin thuds that Matthew felt through the floor. Even on her knees, she still towered over them, her face now a gigantic, beautiful mask hovering at a level with the distant couch cushions. Her breath washed over them, warm and smelling of Coke and conquest.
"Let's get a closer look," she murmured, her voice a canyon echo. She brought her face down even closer, until her single, enormous hazel eye was the size of Hailey’s torso, peering at them with microscopic interest. The dilated pupil was a black pit leading into infinite amusement. "Yep. The fear is just… baked in now. I can see it. It’s in the way you’re shaking. It’s in your little heartbeats—I can practically see them hammering in your throats."
Her gaze shifted to the side, where the pizza box sat. "Still hungry, actually. That really worked up an appetite." She reached out, and her hand, now so vast that her palm could have covered them both completely, passed over their heads. They felt the downdraft, the displacement of air as the continent of her flesh moved. Her fingers, each as thick as Hailey’s leg, plucked another slice from the box with impossible delicacy.
She straightened up slightly, taking a bite as she looked down at them, chewing thoughtfully. "The process is efficient," she said, crumbs tumbling from her lips like small, greasy boulders. "I consume. I convert. I expel. I grow. You shrink. The fear makes the growing feel even better." She swallowed. "It’s alchemy. Turning pizza and terror into stature."
She finished the slice in two more colossal bites, licking the grease from her prodigious fingers. Another, smaller gurgle echoed from within. She smiled.
"Aftershocks," she explained, and gave a soft, almost delicate little puff of gas. Pfrt.
Another inch gone. Another inch gained.
The world recalibrated once more, a nauseating click downward. The carpet fibers were now a forest. Dust motes were like drifting planets. Chloe’s kneecap, resting on the floor, was a smooth, rounded hill of flesh and bone the size of a small car.
Hailey’s internal tracker, fractured but still sputtering, registered the new datum through the haze of terror.
Chloe: six foot six. Matthew: four foot ten. Hailey: four foot six.
She was four and a half feet tall. Matthew was under five feet. Chloe was approaching seven. The differential was no longer a difference. It was a chasm. It was a predator-prey differential from a nature documentary. The fear that was woven into them resonated perfectly with this new scale. It wasn’t misplaced. It was the correct, rational response to the living monument that loomed above, blotting out the light.
Chloe settled back onto her heels, looking immensely pleased with herself, with the world, with the two tiny, broken creatures shivering in her shadow. The static from the TV was a distant cosmic background radiation. The flicker of the lamp was a pulsar. This was their universe now. She was its center, its creator, and its final, devouring law.