Chapter 4: Comparison
The hospital room wasn’t a room; it was a converted storage space on the fourth floor, reinforced with steel beams and equipped with a hydraulic bed that looked like something from an industrial garage. The air smelled of antiseptic and the slow, humid decay of illness, but beneath it, Thomas could still detect her—the musky, potent scent of Helga’s skin, her cologne, the faint, sweet tang of the growth hormone serum seeping from her pores.
A week had passed. A week of silent drives, of cleaning the ruined bedroom until his hands were raw with bleach, of burning the shredded bedding in a rusted oil drum in the backyard. A week of sitting in the vinyl chair by her bed, watching nurses come and go with a mixture of awe and barely-concealed disgust. A week of avoiding his mother’s calls.
Helga was propped up, a mountain range beneath a thin hospital blanket. The scans had shown internal bruising, a torn abdominal wall, but no rupture. Her body, forged by chemistry and will, was stubbornly holding together. She was bored, irritable, and hungry.
Thomas placed the brown paper bag on the bedside table. “From home,” he said quietly. “Your syringes. The log book. The chocolate wafers you like.”
She didn’t thank him. Her eyes, like chips of flint, watched as he unpacked. The maroon ledger with its faded, gold-embossed eagle. The box of sterile syringes. A jar of pickled herring.
“The police came to the house yesterday,” Thomas said, his voice barely above a whisper. “A detective. Follow-up from the paramedic’s report. Tina talked to them.”
Helga’s expression didn’t change. “And?”
“I told them the story. Again. They asked about Father’s… injury. They seemed… skeptical.”
“Skepticism is not evidence,” Helga said, picking up the ledger. She ran a thick finger over the eagle. “It is a background noise. Like tinnitus. Ignore it, and it fades.” She opened the book, her eyes scanning the columns of dates, weights, and dosages. “You have been feeding me hospital slop for seven days. My levels will be suboptimal. Draw the dose. Now.”
Thomas’s hands trembled as he opened the syringe, pierced the vial of clear liquid. He measured exactly 2.5 milliliters, as he had a hundred times before. The ritual was grounding, a terrible prayer.
“Roll up my gown,” she commanded, not looking up from her book.
He did. The expanse of her hip was revealed, the skin stretched taut and shiny over a vast plain of fat and muscle, marked with the faint constellations of old injection sites. He swabbed a patch with alcohol. The smell bit his nostrils.
“Do it slowly. Do not waste a drop.”
He pressed the needle in, depressed the plunger. She didn’t flinch. He withdrew the syringe, placing a cotton ball over the tiny bead of blood that welled up.
“Good,” she murmured, finally looking at him. “Now, come here. Stand next to the bed.”
He obeyed, moving to stand by her shoulder. She looked him up and down, a farmer assessing livestock.
“This mattress is an insult. It sags. But it gives a useful perspective.” She shifted, the hydraulics whining. “Look at your feet. Then look at mine.”
Thomas looked down. His worn canvas sneakers, size 3, looked like children’s toys abandoned at the base of a cliff. Her feet, jutting from the end of the blanket, were bare, each one longer than his entire forearm, the nails thick and yellowed, the veins mapping a history of immense pressure.
“The length of my foot is nearly the length of your entire leg,” she stated, a teacher presenting a fascinating fact. “From heel to knee. Measure it, if you doubt me.”
He didn’t move. He could see it was true.
“My hand,” she said, lifting her right arm and letting it flop heavily on the blanket beside him. “Place your hand against mine.”
He hesitated, then laid his hand palm-down next to hers. His fingers, slender and pale, reached only from the base of her palm to the middle of her third knuckle. Her hand engulfed the space, a fleshy paddle that could completely conceal his head.
“You see?” she said softly, a cruel warmth in her voice. “You are not just small, Thomas. You are miniature. A figurine. I could close this hand and you would vanish.” She demonstrated, curling her fingers slowly until his hand was a tiny, trembling island in a pink sea. She didn’t squeeze. She didn’t need to. The potential was the point.
He felt a familiar, shameful heat in his gut. Awe. Terror. Arousal. It was all the same rotten color inside him.
“When I fell,” she continued, her eyes locked on their stacked hands, “my weight was roughly eight hundred and eighty pounds. Your weight, on your last weighing, was eighty-seven. Do the math.”
He didn’t need to. The math was the story of his life.
“I am more than ten of you, Thomas. Ten of your bones, your muscles, your wills, crushed into one superior form. That is not an accident. That is a design. A triumph.” She released his hand. “Your father, in his way, understands this. He sees the beauty in the scale. Your mother sees only the injustice. She is small in mind as well as body.”
She shifted again, wincing slightly, but the injection was already working, a flush of well-being spreading through her massive system. “The nurses… that blond one with the weak chin… she asks questions. ‘Does he help with your care at home?’ ‘Is that safe?’” Helga mimicked the nurse’s pinched voice. “I told her you are my essential counterweight. My anchor. Without you, I would simply… float away.” She chuckled, a low rumble that vibrated the bed frame. “Now, stand at the end of the bed. I want to see the whole picture.”
Thomas walked to the foot of the bed. From here, the scale was apocalyptic. She filled the reinforced frame, her head propped on three stacked pillows, her shoulders spanning the width. He felt like a spectator at the foot of a dam, looking up at a wall of looming, living concrete.
“This,” Helga said, spreading her arms slightly along the mattress, “is the truth. This is the fact that makes all their little stories, their suspicions, their paperwork, irrelevant. You can police a person. You cannot police a force of nature. They look at me and their protocols short-circuit. They look at you and see a victim. But they are wrong. You are not a victim. You are the chosen witness. The one who gets to stand this close to the fire.” She smiled, her teeth large and very white. “It burns, doesn’t it?”
The door swung open abruptly. The blond nurse stood there, her clipboard held to her chest like a shield. Her eyes darted from Thomas, standing small and lost at the foot of the colossal bed, to Helga, who slowly lowered her arms, the picture of weary patience.
“Everything okay in here, Ms. Grosse?” the nurse asked, her voice too bright.
“Perfectly,” Helga sighed. “My husband was just admiring the engineering of this excellent bed. Weren’t you, Schatz?”
Thomas nodded, unable to speak.
“Well, physician’s rounds are in fifteen. Doctor Mehta will want to discuss discharge planning.” The nurse’s gaze lingered on Thomas. “There’s… a woman in the waiting area. A Tina Little? She’s asking for you. Says she’s your mother.”
The silence in the room thickened. Helga’s smile didn’t waver, but her eyes went flat and cold.
“How kind of her to visit,” Helga said, her voice smooth as oil. “Thomas, go and see your mother. Give her my love. And then come straight back. We have planning to do. For my homecoming.”
It was a dismissal and an order. Thomas turned and walked past the nurse, who gave him a look of fraught pity. He didn’t meet her eyes.
The hallway outside was a river of noise and light after the oppressive silence of her room. He felt unmoored, his sense of scale distorted. Door handles seemed too high, the floor too far away. He was a miniature man in a giant’s world, a perception she had just meticulously reinforced.
The waiting area was a soulless box of blue chairs and wilting plants. Tina sat perfectly upright on the edge of a seat, her purse on her lap. She looked ancient, shrunken further, as if the last week had leached the remaining substance from her bones.
She stood as he approached. She didn’t hug him. Her eyes were red-rimmed but dry.
“How is he?” Thomas asked, his voice hoarse.
“Sedated. They’re calling it ‘comfort care.’ He doesn’t want the reconstructive surgery. He just… smiles.” She spat the word. “He asks for pudding. He asks if she is comfortable.” Tina took a step closer, her head craning up to his face. “The police. They came to my hotel. I told them everything, Thomas. About the papers I found. The things she’s said. The… the violence in that house.”
Thomas said nothing. He was still feeling the phantom pressure of her hand around his.
“They listened. They took notes. But I saw their faces. They think it’s a family dispute. A weird, sad family dispute.” Her voice cracked. “They asked why, if I was so scared, I waited until my husband was… was mutilated to come forward. They asked about your statements. Your consistent statements.”
“It was an accident,” Thomas whispered, the mantra leaving his lips on autopilot.
Tina slapped him.
It was a small, sharp sound, more startling than painful. A passing orderly glanced over, then quickly looked away.
“Stop it!” Tina hissed. “Stop saying her words! Look at what she is! Look at what she’s turned you into! A… a keeper of lies!” She was quoting his own terrible truth back at him, and it broke something loose inside her. Tears finally spilled over. “Come with me. Now. We’ll go to the police together. We’ll tell them you were afraid. We’ll get you out. Before she comes home. Before she…”
“Before she what, Mutter?”
The voice rolled over them like seismic thunder.
Helga stood framed in the doorway of the waiting area, her hospital gown tied loosely around her immense frame, a pale green mountain blocking the light from the corridor. She leaned heavily on a reinforced walker, but her presence was utterly undiminished. She had somehow gotten herself out of bed and traversed the hall. A nurse hovered helplessly behind her, saying, “Ms. Grosse, you really shouldn’t…”
Helga ignored her. Her eyes were fixed on Tina. The entire waiting area had gone preternaturally quiet, visitors and patients frozen, staring at the spectacle.
“You were saying?” Helga prompted, her voice dangerously pleasant. “Before she what?”
Tina took an involuntary step back, her courage crumpling under the sheer physical reality of the woman. “You… you monster.”
Helga smiled. She took one slow, grinding step forward with the walker. Then another. She was closing the distance, not with speed, but with inevitable, glacial force. Thomas stood between them, a speck in the no-man’s-land.
“A monster?” Helga mused, stopping a few feet away, looming over both of them. “Perhaps. But I am his monster.” She looked down at Thomas, her expression softening into a parody of warmth. “Aren’t I, Liebling?”
Thomas’s throat was sealed shut. He watched his mother’s face, a mask of terror and despair. He felt the weight of the entire room’s stare. He felt the gravitational pull of Helga, a force that simplified everything, that turned complex love and fear into a single, brutal equation of scale and power.
He turned his back on his mother.
He took a small, shuffling step towards his wife.
It was the only answer he had left.
It was the only answer he had left.
Helga’s smile widened, a crevice splitting a cliff face. The waiting room air, already stiff with antiseptic and anxiety, seemed to solidify around Tina’s tiny, receding form. Thomas could hear the rasp of his own breath, the distant beep of a monitor, the soft, wet sound of Helga’s lips peeling back from her teeth.
“Good,” Helga said, the single word a judgment that settled everything. Her gaze, heavy and satisfied, slid from Thomas back to his mother. “Now you see the shape of your family, Tina. It is no longer a circle. It is a pyramid. And you are at the bottom, in the dust.”
She turned the walker with a slow, grating squeak. “Come, Thomas. We will visit your father. It is time he learned his new place, too.”
He followed, a dinghy trailing a dreadnought. He did not look back at the sound of his mother’s choked sob. The hallway stretched, a fluorescent-lit tunnel leading only where she led. Nurses pressed themselves against walls to make room, their eyes wide and avoiding direct contact. The power she exerted was gravitational, warping the hospital’s orderly reality around her mass.
They arrived at Room 327. The door was ajar. Eric lay propped up, asleep or medicated, his face pale but peaceful against the pillow. Tina must have come straight from here to the waiting area. The room smelled of sterile dressings and old blood.
Helga parked her walker just inside the door. She stared at Eric’s sleeping form, at the flat, bandaged space below his belly. Her expression was one of pure, clinical assessment.
“He looks smaller,” she observed. “Reduced. A finished sculpture.” She took a heavy, lurching step forward without the walker, testing her strength. The floor joists groaned. “Wake him up.”
Thomas moved to the bedside. He touched his father’s shoulder, the bone sharp under the hospital gown. “Dad.”
Eric’s eyes fluttered open. They focused, blurred, then found Helga. A slow, syrupy smile spread across his face. “My dear. You’re walking. That’s wonderful.”
“Sit him up,” Helga commanded Thomas.
Thomas pressed the button on the bed. The motor whirred, raising Eric’s torso. He winced but kept his adoring gaze on Helga as she loomed closer, filling his entire field of vision.
“The police spoke to your wife,” Helga said, her voice dropping to a conversational tone that was more terrifying than any shout. “She is telling stories. She is trying to dismantle our pyramid.”
Eric’s smile faltered, just for a second. “Tina is… upset. She doesn’t understand.”
“Understanding is not required,” Helga said. She placed a hand on the bed rail. It bowed under the weight. “Obedience is. Loyalty is. You gave me your loyalty, in your way. But your wife gives me only poison.” She leaned in, her shadow swallowing Eric whole. “She must be corrected.”
Before Thomas could process the words, Helga’s other hand moved. It wasn’t a fist. It was a flat, sweeping backhand, a casual gesture of dismissal made with the force of a falling sandbag. It connected with the side of Eric’s face.
The sound was a sickening, wet crunch of cartilage. Eric’s head snapped sideways so violently Thomas heard the vertebrae pop. A fine mist of blood sprayed the pillow. Eric made no sound. His eyes rolled back, showing whites.
Thomas screamed. It was a thin, animal noise, torn from a place deeper than fear.
Helga ignored him. She looked at her hand, at the smear of blood on her knuckles, with mild interest. “Fragile,” she murmured.
The door burst open. Tina stood there, frozen for one heartbeat at the threshold, her face a mask of incomprehension as she saw her husband’s shattered, motionless head lolling on the pillow.
Then she shrieked.
It was a sound of pure, atomic grief. She launched herself into the room, not at Helga—that was impossible—but at Thomas, her nails aimed for his eyes. “You let her! You monster! You let her!”
Helga moved. She didn’t need to step. She simply shifted her weight and her left arm shot out, a piston of flesh and bone. Her hand closed around the back of Tina’s sweater and the small body beneath it. She lifted Tina clear off the ground as easily as Thomas might lift a kitten.
Tina dangled, kicking wildly, her screams now muffled gurgles against the fabric choking her throat.
“Quiet,” Helga said, not unkindly. She gave Tina a single, brisk shake. The woman’s limbs went limp, her head lolling. Helga held her aloft for a moment, examining her, then tossed her onto the foot of Eric’s bed. Tina landed in a heap, whimpering, her breath coming in ragged, wet hitches.
Thomas was pressed against the cold wall, his hands over his mouth, his whole world reduced to the two broken figures on the bed and the colossal, breathing engine of ruin standing between him and the door.
Helga looked down at Eric. A dark stain was spreading rapidly across the front of his hospital gown, from his bandaged groin down his thighs. The smell of urine, sharp and ammoniac, cut through the metallic scent of blood.
“He loses control,” Helga noted with distaste. “Pathetic.”
She then looked at Thomas, her eyes holding a strange, glittering intensity. A low, deep gurgle echoed from her own abdomen. She unclipped the side rail of Eric’s bed with a decisive clack.
“Look away, Thomas,” she said, but it wasn’t a suggestion. It was a command to witness. She hitched her hospital gown up around her waist.
Thomas did not look away. His body was frozen, his mind a shrieking blank.
Helga positioned herself over Eric’s lower half. She braced one massive hand on the wall above the bed. Then she let go.
It was not a trickle. It was a torrent, a thick, hot cascade that hammered down onto Eric’s chest, his bandages, his unconscious face. The sound was a heavy, relentless rain on fabric and skin. The acrid smell of her urine mixed violently with the other smells in the room, creating a new, unholy perfume of humiliation and rot. The yellow stream flooded the sheets, soaked Eric’s hair, pooled in the hollow of his throat.
It seemed to last for minutes. Tina, from her crumpled position near Eric’s feet, stared in silent, catatonic horror. When Helga finally finished, she gave a contented sigh and let her gown fall.
“Better,” she whispered.
At that moment, a man in a white coat stepped into the doorway. Doctor Mehta. He was a slight man, gentle-faced, perhaps five-foot-four. His clipboard clattered to the floor as he took in the scene: the unconscious, battered Eric, the sopping, reeking bed, the weeping Tina, and Helga, looming like a monument to violation, dripping.
“What in God’s name—?” he began, his professional calm shattering.
Helga turned. She saw his size. She saw his shock. A new, hungry light ignited in her eyes. “Doctor,” she breathed, her voice suddenly syrupy. “You are just in time. I am not well.”
She took a step toward him, the floor trembling. Doctor Mehta took an instinctive step back into the hall. “Nurse! Security! Code Gray!”
Helga was on him. Not with rage, but with a terrifying, possessive speed. Her arms, each thicker than his torso, enveloped him. She didn’t strike him. She pulled him into a crushing embrace, pinning his arms to his sides, lifting him so his feet scrabbled for purchase a foot off the ground.
“So small,” she cooed into his ear, her voice carrying down the hall. “So frail. You cannot help me. But you can comfort me.” She rubbed her cheek against his, smearing his skin with her sweat. He gagged, his face buried in the damp expanse of her breast, his glasses askew.
“Let him go!” a nurse shouted from the hallway, her voice trembling.
Helga ignored her. She turned, still holding the writhing, helpless doctor like a teddy bear, and backed into Eric’s room, kicking the door shut with a foot that resembled a small canoe. The last thing the staff in the hall saw was Doctor Mehta’s tiny, polished loafer kicking once, twice, before the door slammed, cutting off his muffled cries.
Outside, two orderlies and the blond nurse stood frozen. The sounds from the room were wet, rhythmic, and deep, the squeal of the bed frame under enormous, rocking stress. They heard a low, feminine groan of satisfaction. They heard a pathetic, choking whimper.
The blond nurse slowly bent to pick up the fallen clipboard. Her hands were shaking. She looked at the other nurse, a veteran with tired eyes.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” the older nurse whispered, staring at the closed door. “Did you see? He looked like… like a kid next to her. A little boy.”
The blond nurse just nodded, her face pale. The gossip began there, in hushed, horrified tones, as the bed springs screamed on the other side of the door. It would ripple through the entire hospital by sunrise, the story of the giant woman and the tiny doctor, a story no official report would ever contain.
Inside the room, Thomas slid down the wall until he sat on the floor. He hugged his knees to his chest. He pressed his forehead against them. He rocked.
He heard everything.
He obeyed.
He did not look.