Maria had not felt her heart pump this hard since the days before she started having children, when she still had time to exercise for as long as she wanted, any day the mood for an endorphin high struck. Now she ran with great effort, one careful fist pressed to her chest and the other one a pendulum swinging furiously next to her body. She ran west when everyone with life still in them fled east.
When the air got thick with dust and debris that Maria was sure contained human parts, she only slowed down to make sure she kept her balance as she slipped a breathing mask on her face. It wasn’t long before the packed air forced her to run blindly and she tripped often on the carpet of civilization that had been turned to nothing, that first wave of rubble that heralded the arrival of true destruction, the kind no city works could clean up before the next wave descended.
The giantess had finally made her way to Maria’s city after focusing her attention on different parts of the world. Nothing could stop her. Maria had watched the events in her living room, where she also said goodbye to each of her five children, two to the war against the monster, and three that had fled to places that promised safety from the giantess for enough money. Maria had not gone with them. She refused to leave the home where she had lived for almost thirty years to climb down a hole and wait for the end in the darkness, away from the sun. Now she was running square into that darkness and only stopped when the quaking ground rocked so hard it sent her flying into the air, her attention like a gun firing, aimed only at the hand against her chest. When she landed she rolled protectively over it and hoped nothing large crashed on her. She could not open her eyes, which were caked shut with grime and sweat. Maria waited for the end as the ground continued to vault in place, and as she lost track of time and place, the jarring motion of the world came to a stop.
When Maria felt her consciousness return, she was first aware of distant screams framed by the uneven hum of thunder. Petrichor tickled her nostrils and she tried to open her eyes, regretting it immediately as what coated her eyelids stung like needles. She unrolled slowly from the ground, amazed she was still alive. She crawled on one hand and knees until she felt rain pelt her back and then she sat up to let it wash her face. Wherever the giantess was, she was going to have to use her eyes to find her. The downpour soaked her through and pushed down the cloud of dust that lingered wetly in the air and sent it in rivulets too pink to be cement and steel only. Maria leaned forward and tucked her chin into her chest, her upper body a canopy for the contents of her hand. She only opened it then, in the safety of her cover. When she ascertained that all was as it should be, she smiled and furled her fingers again.
As Maria straightened her back her expression changed into one of steel, one that could not be bent like the beams strewn around her, giant glimmering toothpicks that had been buildings earlier that day. She looked in every direction, not knowing what she was searching for, but certain she would recognize it when she saw it. She was right. In the distance, an incongruous mountainside where there had been a downtown revealed the slumbering body of the giantess beyond mounds of debris that became her foothills. It was only then that Maria hesitated. She had only seen the giantess through her computer screen, and hearing the words “one mile tall” does not compare to looking directly at that mile and not seeing clearly where it ends or it begins.
Visions of every weapon that had been used against that untouched body flashed before Maria’s eyes. Ese culo no tiene ni un rasguño, she thought as she looked up at unblemished hips that rose hundreds of feet into the sky, and almost turned in place to run away and keep running until there was no air left on Earth. She looked at her closed hand again and felt shame flood her heart. Maria looked to the left and watched the chain of mountains rise and drop. She figured that was the direction of the head. She took off at a steady pace, ignoring the stabbing in her shoulder and feet.
She wondered when she had lost her sensible shoes and shrugged, regretting the sudden motion with a wince. In the increasing gloom she wove in and out of crumbled architecture and prayed she would not plummet into a man-made sinkhole that was once a subway tunnel, or be swallowed by an avalanche of shifting wreckage as the rain came down harder. She forgot every dreadful thought when lightning struck the giantess. The bolt of electricity descended on her glistening skin, nailed in place as the blinding white spread with mad arms in every direction.
Coño, doesn’t she feel that? Maria wondered, and kept walking. As the storm continued, lighting bore down repeatedly on the tallest structure around, now the side of the sleeping giantess. When the sun set that pulsing light was Maria’s only guide in a path that would have only taken her five minutes to run, decades and a city ago. As it was, she lost track of time, and when she reached the giantess the storm dried up, and she found herself at the wrong side of the rising moon, in utter darkness, the light from an ocean of stars occluded by remaining clouds. When the wind changed, she was hit by the smell coming from the giantess, now unadulterated by wind or rain.
Madre mía, I’m probably about a block away and I don’t know if I can breathe through this! Keratin, BO and death filled her lungs with every breath, but Maria filled herself with the reek anyway, and shouted as loudly as she could.
“Giantess!” She waited, forced herself to stay in place, and listened to any change in the giantess’s breathing. At least she’s facing away, thank God. Maria tried again, the word a little like a song. “Giantess!” Nothing. No change.
“I’m going to have to do it. I’m going to have to sing, and I haven’t warmed up or anything. Ten years I’ve spent out of opera halls, and this is the performance of my life. Of every life. Here it goes.” Maria inhaled the weight of the world then, and when she belted it out, it flew from her lips at a deafening one hundred twenty decibels.
“🎵Giantess!🎶”
The giantess woke up and listened as Maria sang instead of speaking and maintained the same range.
“🎵Giantess, stop! You are frightening my tiny husband.🎶”
The giantess began to rise and turn, her free arm lifting from her side and her swinging elbow first into the air, the arm tucked under her thrusting upwards the mass of her. Maria gasped and panted, but bellowed melodiously again.
“🎵Giantess, stop what you are doing! You are killing my tiny husband.🎶”
The giantess finished eclipsing the moon as she sat up, and Maria found herself in its spotlight. It put her back in hair and makeup, back at performance level, and gave her strength. She pivoted slightly to face the giantess and shone in a stage of ruins as she extended her arm and opened up her palm, singing the last word. The giantess sat perfectly still and Maria stood perfectly still for exactly twenty seconds, during which Maria could hear—and feel—her breathing and thinking. When the giantess opened her mouth to speak, her lips clicked so loudly Maria’s ears rang painfully.
“You... have a tiny husband?” She asked.
Maria closed her palm just in time as those five words traveled down and hit her, individual gales that blew her back a few steps. The stench of catastrophe was everywhere, but she ignored it and took in air as though it was a spring breeze.
“Yes.”
Another twenty seconds went by until the giantess spoke again.
“I had a tiny husband once.”
Maria did not know what to do with that information except follow her heart.
“If you could speak softly so you don’t frighten him, would you like to meet my tiny husband?”
Only five seconds journeyed between them before the giantess whispered, “Yes.”
Maria extended her hand again, and her fingers bloomed like soft, long petals. At the center of them a tiny man, curled tightly into himself, stirred and moved limbs that sat and finally stood him. Maria’s arm was starting to cramp but she would die before she dropped him. She would die within a minute anyway. All the giantess had to do was swat. Instead, the giantess moved her head closer. Maria emitted a wretched squeal she hoped only her husband could hear as she watched features that had heretofore been unclear come into sharp convergence. She fought every instinct to scream and flee, and swallowed her fear in gulps until all that was left was the fierce love she felt for her husband.
In the pale light, the giantess sloped low, her head so close to Maria that she felt a pull, a gravitational displacement that made her think she could moonhop on the colossal body if ever given the chance. Two gigantic eyes were boring into her palm and she felt a strange warmth gather there. Maria looked at her husband—his silhouetted form seemingly at ease despite the incalculable perusal—and figured the giantess was not microwaving him with her eyeballs. Her arm trembled slightly and she became increasingly alarmed at the prospect of dropping him. As the humongous head looming over them started to retreat, Maria extended her free arm in the same direction as the other.
“Papi, switch hands. My arm is getting all creaky.”
The man did as he was told and took a few practiced steps until he could leap from hand to hand. When he did, the giantess giggled and rushed to suppress the gasps of her burgeoning laughter. She said, inaudibly to herself, but explosively to Maria and her husband, that her tiny husband had leapt distances the same way.
“Was he as tiny as my tiny husband?” asked Maria.
“Yes, he was exactly the same height.”
Maria was not going to ask how that had worked for them because she did not know how it had worked for herself, and it had. They had five offspring to prove it. Instead, she tried a risky question.
“Where is your tiny husband?”
Maria felt the wrongness of the question as soon as she asked it, but there was nothing left for anyone to lose.
“He came here, and they killed him. You killed him.”
Maria almost protested her innocence but did not. She did not keep her mouth shut either.
“Please, stop what you’re doing. I love my husband. If he really is from— the stories he tells— please don’t kill him.”
The giantess ignored Maria and spoke to the man only.
“Can you sing too?”
“Yes,” said the man in a voice only audible to bats, his wife, and the giantess.
“Would you sing for me?”
The man sang in his wife’s hand, in a tenor voice so beautiful the giantess cried tears of newborn joy. When the song was over, she sat in silence so oblivious Maria felt it was best to leave. She had done all she could. As she walked back home she kept looking back, and thought she caught a smile in the mist that surrounded the giant face. The next morning the world awoke giantess-free, and amid the devastation, hope emerged.