No one liked giants back then. They still don’t like them, but back then it was pretty bad. It wasn’t bad for giants because they were giants, but I want to say it was bad because the hatred running rampant on people’s minds was open, and the things people did to manifest that hatred were extreme. Within the law, people couldn’t do anything about them except hold protests and meetings, sometimes even marches. That was all. Back then the giants went anywhere they wanted and if someone got on their nerves… splat, you know? It was pretty rough.
Despite that dislike, when Mount Gomery (yes, that’s his name—if he’s still alive) showed up at the corner of 8th and Chulo with a truckful of whitewash, all the girls in the tenements across the street went nuts. I don’t know what they saw in that big galoot, but they just started parading themselves in their fanciest clothes. Back in the 80s that meant loud pinks and turquoises and hair as big as they could make it. I was embarrassed for them even though my hair was coiffed something awful back then too, mulleted right and proper.
The only one that didn’t make a fool of herself was Rosie Kowalski, the plumber’s daughter. Mount settled himself to whitewash the dingy walls on that entire intersection, and it doesn’t take them long to do that, not long at all. One day, two at the most if they have to carry another tank to the location, but he’d been there a whole week, coating and recoating the dingy bricks with that brush of his, or was it a tarp? My memory fails me, and it was probably both because you can’t dip a tarp in whitewash and not have it fall apart very quickly, no matter how thick it is. Now they have those fancy sprayers, but back then polyester still looked like shit, and natural fibers didn’t last in giant hands.
That’s another thing: The nuns over at St. Francis did a pretty good job of keeping the giants covered up back then, before that au naturel law passed and they gained the right—by law—to run around naked as they wanted… not that they didn’t before. There was no way to enforce anything with them. They did whatever they wanted until the Big War took care of most of them… but Mount wasn’t like that; he didn’t wear the shirt everyone knew he owned, but Mount covered his privates well enough, and didn’t pay any attention to the girls that pranced around his feet and got doused with whitewash as he worked. No one knew he was working hard at seducing Rosie.
___
The giant everyone called Mount was writing white on white, but she didn’t follow the wet brightness on the wall to read what he was writing for her eyes only; she followed the motion of his hand.
This is so rad. A whole giant for myself. I wish I could tell Lucy, but then she’ll tell Giselle and Mary, and Mary will for sure tell her dad… a… t… e. Oh, my god! A date? He’s asking me out! Shit!
Rosie knew the giant would turn and look into her bedroom, as he’d done from the moment he arrived. The first thing he painted on the wall had been a word, a single word made of two letters longer than she was tall, that changed everything about the way she saw the world.
“Hi.”
Mount had written the word, and then he’d turned to glance at her through the glass of her windows, his eyes burning a path in the air like a beam of fire. It hit her right between the legs the very moment she’d been staring at the sinewy muscles of his back and thinking what a curse on Earth these giants were, even the ones with windswept brown hair and muscles that stretched and contracted like symphonies written on bone, with loincloths that barely covered an enormous, swinging, turgid—
“Hi,” she exhaled with the force of an orgasm, and Mount blinked with one eye. When Rosie realized he’d winked at her, she felt she’d been punched and doubled over with a moan, thinking she’d wet her panties. That was the first time he made her cum with the touch of his eyes. Every day after that, she woke up and ran to nursing school, she sat through lectures and learning that sounded like biological plumbing to her, except far less interesting than actual plumbing, and definitely nothing to Mount’s plumbing.
How would we even… oh, my god! We couldn’t! He’s too big. I could wrap my arms around his thing… but what would he do to me?
Every day she took the subway home and hoped to see him working at walls that were already blindingly white, and every day she was rewarded with the same sight when she made her way up the artificial tunnel that had brought her home. Without looking back, he painted Hi every day. Every single day. She was half a block away, and he said hi to her, smelled her in the air, something, she didn’t know how he knew she was there, but every time he turned just a little to look her half a block’s worth of buildings and tenements, to wink at her and make her cum virgin orgasms in her pristine panties. Every day she walked home wanting to get closer.
Right after he spelled out d-o-y-o-u-w-a-n-t-t-o-g-o-o-u-t-o-n-a-d-a-te-? with the invisible ink of whitewash on whitewash, he turned to look at her. The sun was bright in the sky, and normal eyes could not have seen anything in her room, the contrast from light to the darkness in her home too much for human sight to behold, but he was a giant, and he saw her clearly when she nodded once and came when he winked. That was the last day anyone saw Rosie alive. That was the last day anyone saw Mount.
___
Mount smelled her willingness before he turned away from the too-white walls to look at her. He perceived her awareness, small as it was, and he knew she thought this was only a date. Below the makeshift belt of his flimsy loincloth, there was a greater awareness. He wanted her forever, and he wasn’t going to play fair. He filled the air with pheromones aimed at the signature of her, and of no one else. At his feet, silly girls kissed his toes and promised eternal stroking and pleasures they were unable to deliver. Far above them, his hand crashed through her window and claimed Rosie as glass, brick, and cement rained down on the street and on silly girls that pivoted right into hatred when it came down to playing witnesses to what happened.
Far above them, Rosie felt wrapped in utmost safety when Mount pierced the film of her bedroom and pulled her out of nursing school, of a plumbing business, of sisterhood to her five young siblings, of servitude to parents that delegated every responsibility to her, fairly or not. Mount pulled out her life and into his, and he smiled at the feeling of her small life in his hand, pulsing with a need that matched his. Against every regulation, he abandoned tarp and remaining whitewash, and strode away with Rosie in hand, his cock making a cigar-shaped shadow on asphalt and cement, full, throbbing as it was. In his hand, Rosie laughed and gave herself fully to an entirely different destiny.
___
“She’s a good girl, Krupkey! You know that as well as I do. Just find her!”
“I know she is. I’m just telling you… no one heard her call for help. They all scream when a giant makes a grab, but—”
“Jesus fuck, are you telling me my little girl wanted to get away with that giant fuck?”
“No, but—”
“Find her, or I swear I’ll work them up to a froth, all of them, the entire neighborhood! Find my little girl, and I don’t care if all you bring of hers is the bones that big fuck he couldn’t digest. Just bring her back to me.”
Officer Krupkey had gone to school with Kowalksky for over two decades. They’d been friends and poker buddies for slightly less than that, but he’d never tell him the truth. Giants digested bones, and there was nothing left of Rosie by now. Mount Gomery was blacklisted, and that meant nothing. Law-abiding giants would be on the lookout for him (and his small quarry), but that meant nothing. Once a giant decided to disappear, he or she was gone, and no efforts he made would avail to a single god-damned fuck. Rosie, the little girl that had played with his badge every time he popped in to clink beer bottles with the guys or play cards… she was gone, consumed by the gleaming teeth of a giant that had seen her, and had decided she was a fitting snack.
___
“I’m Rosie.”
“I know.”
“You’re Mount.”
“That’s the name your people gave me.”
She loved him then, when she knew he was about to tell her his real name.
“It’s easy to pronounce.”
“It’s not my name.”
“What’s your name?”
He told Rosie her name, and when he did, it sounded like thunder to her and felt like lightning through her body as electricity ran through her body, the kind that only feels good. When the waves of it were over, she couldn’t look at him even as she sat in the cubby of her palm, coated with the scent of his sweat, dying to be lowered somewhere pungent.
“Don’t feel shame, not with me,” he said, and Rosie lifted her gaze until her nape met her back, and the muscles surrounding her throat stretched as she spoke.
“I can’t help it! I can’t help anything I feel about you. I’m a good girl. I should be fixing dinner for my family, and instead, I’m here with you, and I don’t know where here is. You asked me out on a date, and I assumed you’d pick me up on Friday night, and we’d go somewhere and dance, or eat, or see a movie.”
“Is that what you want?”
Rosie trembled in his hand, the skirt of her dress soaked with issue he renewed almost every time he spoke. She struggled to think, to beg, to do the right thing, and all she wanted was to stay with him forever.
“No. Please... just keep me in your hand and talk to me. I don’t want movies, I don’t want restaurants. All I want is the grooves of your handprint leaving prints on my back when I look up at you.”
“Shh... my tiny Rosie, I’ll give you a first date. I’ll take you with me, and you’ll eat and laugh, but when it’s over, I won’t drop you off into the safety of your bedroom. You are mine forever, little one, and I’ll never return you. I’ll keep you in my palm, and I’ll fill your life with dates. Some of them will make you laugh, and others will make you cry, but you’ll stay with me forever.”
Rosie blinked, thoughtful as she burned with desire, and nodded once, simply, happily.
“I’m yours, giant with a name that sounds like thunder. Please, keep me with you. Don’t take me back! I don’t want to go back.”
___
That’s when the riots broke out. Rosie’s disappearance was highly publicized, and there was no containing it. A couple of giants came forth and revealed that Rosie was fine, uneaten, alive, and in the power of Mount. No giant lifted a finger to return her, but we got kind of a moratorium for a while. No one got eaten or stepped on for some time. I hear tell Rosie’s children were born tiny, I mean small, but that doesn’t make any sense, does it?