The red day had barely peeped into view when the brass-throated rooster crowed reveille to his neighbors for miles around.
“Now,” Millie Chaykin groaned into Farmer Enoch’s roof, “is there nothing to be done about this? Do they make rooster muzzles, or could you try to make one?”
“Tulode’s got the crow of a champion, I doubt a muzzle would do all that much,” Enoch said, pulling off his nightcap. He looked up to where he imagined Millie’s voice was coming from, only to find that he need not use his imagination—his neighbor was lifting his roof so that she could peek directly into his bedroom. “Now what if I hadn’t been decent, Millie?”
“Then we’d be even,” Millie said, shrugging her huge sunburned shoulders. “I fell asleep in my roomiest dress, and it was all in shreds when I woke up.”
Enoch noticed with early morning clarity that the handsome woman sitting cross-legged outside was at least the size of his house. That was a new development.
“Something in the water, Mil?”
“No,” she said, shaking her ginger head, “something in young John Paul’s trousers.”
Enoch lit his pipe and nodded somberly.
“Bit unusual.”
“I’ve always treasured your gift for understatement, old man.”
“Not that it’s my business,” he said, “but you must be old enough to be his mother.”
“And?” Millie looked down at him from under raised eyebrows. Her round freckled face didn’t blush a bit. “He’s of age, and I was happy to give him a bit of mothering in private. I needed what I needed as much as he did.”
“All right, all right, didn’t mean no judgement. Could you set my roof back down?”
Millie did, and waited with arms folded under her ample chest for Farmer Enoch to emerge, dressed for the day’s work, still taking his neighbor’s new gigantitude surprisingly well.
Enoch looked up her towering shape and reflected that, yes, you really could say Millie Chaykin had what could be called a motherly frame.
Tulode belted from the coop, sudden and loud. Millie eep!ed and jumped with surprise, shaking the house and the barn.
“I thought there was something unusual,” said Enoch.
“About… what? Just in general?”
“Some other young ladies taking on a bit more altitude.”
Millie’s eyebrows flew up and away into the pink morning. She went forward onto her knees and elbows to put her face level with Enoch’s.
“Oh? A lot of them?”
“Well, least a handful.”
Millie sighed. “Then Tulode’s not the only cock I have to worry about. Lad’s been busy.”
“So have you, looking at you.”
She snorted with laughter and blew Enoch’s hat off his head. “How big were they?”
“Bigger than usual,” he said.
“Naturally, but this big?” Millie gestured as her own generosity of form. “Because it took me three times with John Paul to gain this much extra, well, me.”
Two nights ago, after the first roll in the hay had left John Paul very sleepy and Millie bigger than a dairy cow, Millie had endeavored to see how many more rolls it would take for her to outgrow the hayloft. Not to fulfill any agenda; being big would make farm work easy, and it was fun, to boot. She had found herself stomping around her field the morning after she had offered her tutelage to the young man, scattering clouds of dust like a stampede and muttering under her breath, “Fee, fi, fo, fum…”
She had felt the eyes of the barnyard animals on her, judging her.
John Paul Pewtersmith ad felt a bit judged that night, fumbling with Millie’s dress in the dark. Maybe they could’ve gone into her house, but he’d been so excited to do it that they had gone stumbling right into the barn and clambered into the hay. She had laughed, true, but had gasped, too, when he unbuckled his trousers, which was worth the initial laughter.
Lovely Miss Millie would have kept laughing, he was sure, if he had asked to sleep with her even a day earlier, because that would have been before he drank from the little spring in the woods. He had never seen it before he tripped and fell face-first into it while lost in daydreams of taking Summer Flynn to the harvest dance. It was so small and insubstantial, trickling from under that huge old tree, there’s no way else he could have found it.
The water was cold and felt good on his face, so he drank it. It tasted sweeter than cider, so he drank more until he was full. He went home and didn’t feel any different until, after a nap fell on him unexpectedly, he woke to underpants straining from the size of his cock and a brain brimming over with clever, sweet, silvery things to say to Summer… or Brianne, or Lana, or Miss Millie…
So everything was going like a song, from the time he talked his way between Miss Millie’s legs, and learned how tight and wonderful it felt between their ample thighs’ embrace, to when he was lying panting atop her eight minutes later, but then she ballooned. Just blew up like a sapling stretching into a street-cracking oak in 30 seconds.
Then Miss Millie had tilted his head and asked if they could try again and see if that happens a second time, “Just to see if it’s a fluke.”
John Paul Pewtersmith was no scientist, but he repeated this experiment with as many girls as he could talk to after he left Miss Millie’s place that night, and left Miss Millie the size of a barn, snoring louder than a herd of cattle.
And while John Paul didn’t want any of the other girls to end up giants like Miss Millie (though she was a very pretty giant, and had cradled him to her chest like a kind goddess and sang him to sleep after their third time together), Summer was the first girl he’d ever wanted, and he couldn’t help himself—he went twice with her, breathing in the scent of her long blonde hair and her tanned neck and her long legs, feeling all of those increase in volume after his massive new gift left his excitement seeping out of her.
When Millie Chaykin found Summer Flynn picking flowers outside of town, singing to herself and the butterflies, the girl came up past her waist.
“Summer,” Millie said gently, crouching beside the lovely youth, “can we talk a moment? Have you seen John Paul recently?”
Summer giggled and nodded up at her. “Yee-eeesss…”
“And did you, err, do anything special?”
“Oh, Miss Millie—”
“You’re in no trouble with me, young lady, though I do wonder what your parents will think about this second puberty.”
“Oh, Pa’s just happy to have me for heavy lifting around the house. I told him it must’ve been the fairies.”
“Well, your pa was always given to those sorts of fancies… but have you not noticed any of the other girls showing similar… qualities?”
Not far off, both of them could see the outline of Corrine Clay towering over her market stall, an apple barrel hefted onto each shoulder, and Lana Shepherd nearly as tall, haggling with her.
“Oh,” Summer said lightly, “that doesn’t bother me any. See…” She looked away, blushing. “I don’t want to offend you, Miss Millie, because I can tell you and John Paul—”
“Yes, girl?”
“He told me he just needed to see if he had the same effect on the other girls, so we could know if I was special, or if it was just something he could make happen now. It, uh, made a lot of sense when he said it at the time.”
Millie sighed and patted Summer’s head. “Oh, my girl. You’re not still going to see him, are you?”
“Of course! He’s a sweetheart, and he’s made me feel so strong and beautiful. We’re going to the harvest dance together.”
Millie watched the harvest dance with Farmer Enoch on her shoulder that very night, looking over the roofs of the town. It was a rare sight, seeing near a dozen women around as many feet tall, dancing and springing around the square, doing their best to ignore the others’ size and each thinking privately how sad it was, that those other girls were just the result of John Paul’s tests.
John Paul himself had spent the half hour before going to Summer for the dance whacking himself furiously off, wondering if he, too, could grow. He longed to be as strong and huge as his lovers looked, and he dreamed of a day when his buttons would burst and his clothes shred and he’d rise up with a cock like a grain silo to pluck his playmates from their farms and take them home to play.
He’d keep trying.
The day after the dance, Tulode would stride about his coop, survey his hens asleep on their clutches, and crow, the proudest cock in the countryside, and wake up so many huge sleepers, arching their backs to yawn, to obscure his view of the red sunrise.