As he did each Thursday, Allen drove his SUV to the state park before closing, hours after most of the rangers had gone home. He trundled past the last campsites, off-roaded down the creek, and parked himself inside a large and yawning cave in the side of a hill.
Allen strapped on his headlamp and tied a 1.5” poly-hemp rope to the truck’s front tow pintle with a simple clove hitch. If this cave were a mouth, he’d have parked on the tongue and was now slowly rappelling down the throat.
“If it isn’t my worthless worm,” said the giantess in the stomach of the cavern. She plucked at his stout rope as daintily as if it were a thread, and she gave it a little shake. Little was a relative term: Allen cried out in fright as he whipped back and forth in the darkness, his headlamp wheeling wildly.
“Aurore! Goddamn it!” He slammed against a bank of milky mineral deposits, all the strength shocked out of his arms, and the rope slipped from his stunned fingers. He tumbled through inky space, pulse racing, until he slammed into the giantess’s leathery palm. It was better than colliding with the cavern floor, much farther below, but still not a comfortable landing. The giantess’s laughter exploded in the narrow space, echoing sharply in his ears. Her other hand tugged at the rope, snapping it near the truck, and it spooled into her hand and piled upon him.
He swore again, quietly, reflexively: “That was $70, you cunt.” Immediately he froze.
“The fuck did you just call me?” Her huge fingers folded over him easily, covering him like a thick quilt, and the crushing strength she applied cost her nothing. She held him flat, pressed into her palm, and then she squeezed him. And squeezed him again. Once more, too. Under her fingertips the bones in his arm felt like nothing, and the round cage of his ribs only suggested themselves.
When she relented and he could draw a pained breath, Allen apologized. “I’m sorry, my goddess. I’m terribly sorry I spoke so thoughtlessly to you.” The massive fingers lifted and he pulled his aching body up into a kneeling position, hands and knees. His headlamp spilled a glowing disc onto his suddenly tiny hands upon the broad heel of her palm.
“Sorry for what?” Aurore said. Her middle finger dipped from its partners, and the thick pad of her fingertip pressed upon his lower back and pelvis, bending him like he was not meant to be bent.
He cried out, his thin voice bouncing off the mineralized esophagus. “I am sincerely sorry for my disrespectful tone, for the callous and crude words unfit for your divine ears.” To his credit, he even sounded pretty sincere, mostly.
The giantess groaned. “You pathetic worm. I don’t know why I even bother with you.” She plucked him out of her palm between thumb and forefinger and held him suspended in the darkness. His headlamp shot up at her face, then swung to the right as he averted his gaze from her sacred visage. Smirking in the gloom, she shook the tiny man for a second. It was more than enough to make his arms and legs flail violently, and to squeeze all the breath from his bird-frail chest. “Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you right now, you shitty little insect.”
Allen coughed heartily in her grip. “There is no reason you shouldn’t kill me, my goddess.”
“I told your boss to stop showing up.” She smiled at him, and his headlamp made her incisors glow. “Told him to fuck off because I couldn’t take his clinginess anymore. He cries, did you know that?”
Aurore couldn’t see Allen’s satisfied grin in the darkness, beneath the dazzlement of his powerful LED lamp. “I’m sorry you’ve shed another worshipper to your greatness, my goddess.”
“It’s like I say, you little creeps need to be worth my time.”
“One can only wonder why you haven’t killed him, just as I wonder why I still live.”
She chuckled indulgently. “I thought it would hurt more to make him live on, knowing what he’s lost. Not everyone gets to enjoy the audience of a goddess, you know?”
And it went on like this all night: Aurore dangled Allen by one arm, shaking him like a noodle. She pinched his leg the same way. She tossed him up and down in the darkness, laughing at his fright and frustration. When the first rays of the sun began to glow in the cave overhead, she stood up and raised her arm to the level of his SUV, dumping him beside its tires. “See you in a week, you pathetic fuck,” echoed her voice from the depths.
Allen took a moment to rest before clawing his way into the driver’s seat. It hurt to breathe, and he couldn’t turn his head all the way to the right. There was a sticky patch darkening the crotch of his chinos. He looked at it, smirked, and started the ignition.
“Back so soon?” Aurore’s lips pursed with smugness. “You’re just a little addict, aren’t you? A glutton for punishment.” As before, she snapped Allen’s lifeline back to the truck. The giantess showed him in this way that his life fully belonged to him.
“Every week, my goddess. Just as you wish.” He knelt in her palm, releasing the carabiner on his belt, letting the expensive climbing rope slip off her hand into the darkness around her knees far below.
Her huge eyes narrowed, glinting in the ambient glow of his headlamp. “You have no idea what I want, worm,” she hissed. “You can’t conceive of it.” Her other hand, hovering like a helicopter beside him, extended one index finger toward him. “Your headlamp: off, now.”
He clicked it off.
“Off your head, asshole. Put it on my finger.”
He clicked it back on, and the beam of light swung from her chin to the tip of her finger, now looming beside his frail body. He tugged the lamp off his head, stretched out the elastic band as far as it would go, slid it over her long fingernail, getting it caught once or twice on its jagged edge. She ordered him to fix the light so it shone from her fingertip, and he did, and she showed him the flat of her other palm, his own light picking him out like a spotlight.
In the dim glow Allen could just make out the sparkling papillae on the tip of her tongue, running between her thick lips. “I told Douglas and Jaden to stop bothering me. They’re my Tuesday and Wednesday appointments.” Her face ascended in the darkness, disappearing just as her massive twin globes of flesh rose from below her palm. “That leaves just you and one other pathetic little worm. Did you know that?” Her voice bounced off the calcium-slick walls of the cavern. His headlamp shot through the gloom from somewhere by her face, spreading to illuminate her sternum.
“And I’m starting to think one of you isn’t necessary.” Allen could hear the mocking treble in her voice: she was smiling, way up there. Her shoulders shifted, and the pool of light flowed toward him as one ponderous breast rotated into being. Her dark areola was revealed, as was her protruding nipple.
“It all depends on your performance, you inadequate piece of shit,” she said. The beam of light fell through space, past the palm on which Allen rested. Alarmed, he sprang up and lunged for the only security he knew: his tiny hands clawed at her erect nipple, its burning heat in sharp contrast with the humid, clammy cavern around him, the cold that sank into his bones.
She ordered him to work at her nipple. She warned him not to gratify himself. The beam of light bobbed and jerked upward from below, and the cavern echoed with thickly slick slurping, somewhere far below. “Harder, you asshole,” she gasped, working at herself. “I can’t feel your weak ass. Are you even touching me?” Her nipple swayed away from him, then swung back. It thrust at him, throwing him back into her hand, in the darkness, and he groped for it again and again, as the musk of her arousal enshrouded him.
Allen slumped on his couch, staring at the glowing TV screen. His attention was directed out of the confines of his affordable downtown loft, drawn toward a series of rhythmic explosions growing in intensity. Then four powerful fingers plunged through his living room wall and tore a section of building away. The violence jolted him with alarm, but the broad and lovely visage of Aurore floating nearby explained everything. He cursed under his breath, rose from the couch, and trudged to the edge where the floor went missing.
She grinned at him, arching an eyebrow. “I haven’t seen you in a while. Are you that scared of me, little man?”
“Not scared of you,” Allen said, not looking up. “Just fucking tired of you.”
Aurore stared at the tiny man standing on the carpet of his ruined loft. The evening air made his clothes whip and shift as though they were waiting impatiently for something else. She had never seen this expression on his face before, a mixture of lethargy and disgust.
“You may not speak to me this way,” she said with a choked laugh. “I could crush your little head, you pathetic worm.” She lifted her hand to the gaping hole in the building and framed his skull between her thumb and forefinger.
His face stared boredly from the gap. “Do it or don’t, already. Okay? Kill me, or walk away and find something better to do.”
Slowly she lowered her hand and peered into his loft. “Do you have another woman? Is that it? Did you find a sickeningly sweet little relationship to take up the time you should be spending with your goddess?”
He slumped. For such a tiny little man, it was a hugely dramatic gesture. “I was just watching TV. I’m not seeing anyone. I’m just enjoying some time to myself, for a change. All right?”
Aurore didn’t see anyone else in the loft. Posters, furniture, an armoire, a TV glowing in the darkness of the evening. She blinked, and blinked again.
“You know what? Let me make this easy for you,” Allen said, and from where he stood he simply dove into the open air.
She was stunned at this sudden, graceful gesture. Her hand shot forward to catch him, reacting too slowly, in light too dim to see accurately, and she strained to focus on her empty palm. When she at last discerned the dark shapes were folds of skin and not her tiny boyfriend, her little worshipper, she pulled her hand away and looked for him in the air. But already he had reached the ground, sprawled and bleeding in the gray wreckage between her bare big toes.
“Allen,” Aurore breathed. “Allen… you…”
There were screams from the other apartments. Sirens slid into hearing, the lower floors strobed blue and red. She had to go before the second wave arrived, before the National Guard could be assembled. She started to bend and reach for her little worshipper, but she caught herself. “Why,” she started, then glanced at the police officers getting out of their cars, guns raised as high as the smartphones of bystanders. She swung her left arm through the building and caved the upper floors upon those below it, rubble showering those below. She pivoted on her foot and sprinted down the main boulevard, pounding craters and flattening emergency vehicles on her way out of the city.
In her cave deep within the state park, Aurore sat in the cool and clammy silence, feeling her pupils adjust to the perfect darkness. Her Thursday was wide open, suddenly.