Nov. 22, 2024: "Your protagonist—a tiny man—works at a library, and one of the regular patrons is a towering, soft-spoken giantess who comes in every week to borrow books. One evening, as the library is closing, he finds her struggling to reach a book that’s been placed on a high shelf—high even for her. This leads to an unexpected interaction, one that begins to bridge the gap between them."
The very tall windows glowed in gold, salmon, and orange, and the beams they cast had slid nearly to the far wall. For anyone who didn’t want to pull out their phone or hunt around for a clock, this served as a nostalgic reminder that the library was about to close. College students packed their bags and the staff straightened up behind the front counter, bracing for the ten-minute rush before the close of another day.
Bryn peeked out from between two books and surveyed the vast canyon of the stacks before him. No other staff member was as tiny as he was, measuring just under three inches tall, and no one else had worked here as long as he had. His cuteness was therefore tempered with gravitas, and though he couldn’t actually lift a book, he was a treasured fixture of the library.
Distant thunder pounded behind him, and he turned toward the windows to see their ambient light blocked out by an imposing, curvy shadow. “Hey, Fiona,” he called out. Her profile was unmistakable to him for two reasons: she came here at least once a week, and she was over twelve feet tall. Twelve feet was the height of the Reference section’s shelving, and the top of her head just cleared it. That’s how he knew. However, they were both in the stacks, which stretched up to imperious heights. Call it an Irish sense of humor, or perhaps a Gothic ideal, causing seekers of wisdom to reach ever upward in their quest for enlightenment.
She didn’t hear him, of course. She’d just rounded the corner and was two bookcases away, and where he was working placed him about level with her midsection. As her heavy footfalls trod closer up the mottled carpeting—today she was wearing engineer boots that he could’ve gotten lost in—Bryn scrambled up the narrow alley between two shelving units, crawling up like a crab, until he accessed the shelving that would put him face-to-face with her.
Her shaggy head slowly turned as she read the LOC labels, murmuring a sequence of numbers to herself, and referred to a slip of paper in her large hand. This was a confusing section to be in, where their QH section went on for a long time, three-digit numbers stretching out interminably. The titaness paused right in front of him, by coincidence, and her heavy brow slowly tracked the titles upward from where he had been to where he was now.
Her large hazel eyes—with a ring of green and flecks of gold, he noted—widened as she picked him out on the shelf. “Oh, Bryn! Nice to see you. Were you saying something to me?” She drew in a long breath and snorted, kicking up a little dust around the tiny man and tossing his hair back. “Sorry, I’m kind of my own world right now, oblivious to anything going on around me.”
He nodded sympathetically. “Midterms, isn’t it.”
“No, actually, this is personal. I’ve got a beautiful old tree in the front yard that’s not doing well. I’m trying to figure out how to diagnose it, like whether it’s a blight or I need to treat the soil, or something.” Her huge eyes rolled again, reading the tags that eventually ran behind him.
“You could reach out to Agriculture at the uni, couldn’t you? Likely they’ve got some students who could help you out, or some retiree who’d like to check it out for herself.”
She shrugged. Today Fiona was wearing a large, heavy flannel shirt in a Rob Roy sett, unbuttoned to show an old black T-shirt promoting Manic Street Preachers; over all this was an infinity scarf the color of the cappuccino Bryn liked to take each morning. It was knit by Fiona herself, and as she liked to point out, you could see where it started crappy on one end and became more refined by the end.
“But … you do know what ‘infinity’ means, don’t you,” he’d quipped once. Her huge palm slammed playfully close to where he stood. Playfully, to her, he’d hoped.
“Four-hundred ninety-two, four-hundred ninety-three …” Her humid breath washed over him, redolent of peppermint, as she scanned the numbers, then looked up a shelf, then up another, until she’d exposed her throat to him. Unconsciously or not, her huge body weaved gently, only slightly lurching closer to where he perched.
Bryn held his breath. He could see the gentle pulse of her jugulars on either side of her larynx. Her throat slowly rolled up and down behind a thick curtain of flesh as she counted to herself. And breathed. All over him.
Was today going to be the day? How many times could he run into her like this and not say something?
She moaned in satisfaction, calling out a number he could barely hear despite the nearness of her chin, and as if it were possible she grew even taller. One huge arm in red and black swung mightily upward, almost crashing through the atmosphere, as she reached up into the heavens. A wave of perfumed heat washed over Bryn’s tiny frame as her armpit loomed even closer to him than her angelic, sculpted face had a second ago. “Fiona …” He weaved on his heels and had to grab hold of Forest Microbiology, Volume 2 to keep from freefalling down to those imperious boots.
Her eyebrows knitted. “Are you kidding me?” Her cheekbones swelled, as he studied her, and her jaw worked silently before releasing an uncharacteristically cute little groan. It sounded as though a kitten were locked in a round of tug-o-war about 30 seconds beyond her threshold. The massive branch of her arm swung down, and her head bobbed as she bounced on her toes. “Here’s something you’ve never heard me say,” she commented.
His mind flooded with all the things he was hoping she would say, most of which he would enthusiastically agree with.
“I’m too short.”
A psychic blast of cold water assaulted his cognition. “Wait a second,” he stammered. “I did not hear you just say …”
The titaness smirked, tilting her head to the side, amused with the vagaries of a chaotic universe. “Can you believe it? Why do you guys need these shelves so high?”
He craned his head upward, stepping as nearly to the edge of the shelf as he dared and mumbled something about the Goths. This satisfied nothing in her head and she said words to that effect.
“It’s up in the late 400s, is it.” Stepping closer to the book spines for safety, he swept his gaze up and down the aisle. “Sorry, I don’t see any step-stools in the area. You could ask at the front desk.”
“They’re about to close, though. I don’t want to be a bother, you know, one of those jackasses who comes in at the last minute, and …” She stepped back, and his tiny heart nearly broke. “I mean, I did, but you know.”
Not for the first time, Bryn regretted the genetic lottery that birthed him at fun-size candy bar dimensions. If he were even normal-sized, half of Fiona’s height, he’d be capable enough to resolve this. Now, however …
“Hold on.” He refrained from cartoonishly snapping his fingers at the rudiments of an idea. Before she could spit out all of “what are you going to do,” he’d wedged himself into the alley between bookcases and was shimmying his way on up to the late 400s section. And though his mass meant he’d fall slower than any other object and pr-r-robably not hurt himself when he hit the carpet (assuming Fiona didn’t reach out and grab him first), he still had to distract himself from an entirely unhelpful sense of vertigo. He asked her how else her day was going; she mentioned something about going out for coffee and watching the leaves turn. The idea of his giantess meandering through autumnal hues of russet and Panama brown and ochre made his heart pound, and in the good way, not like his mad scramble up the wooden walls, taking him even higher than his unreciprocated crush.
He made the stupid mistake of turning to ask her a question, and the combination of her astounding height with the absolutely empty space around her … well, it made him weak. Fortunately, it made his palms sweaty, as did she, so he didn’t lose his grip. He asked her the title, she told him, and he hustled himself around the edge of the bookcase and stalked very closely along the spines as he read the titles.
And in finding her title, he did another little shimmy between the book the giantess wanted and its neighbor. Once again his sweaty palms served him as he wedged himself between the plastic book covers to crest the top. The dust was really bad here, a thick layer of it on a row of books about tree health that nobody wanted (or else they preferred the titles they could reach). Dust stuck to his pants, built up around his shoes until they looked like moldy muffins as he walked to the backs of all the books.
“What’re you doing?” she called out. Fiona’s voice ranged somewhere between mellifluous and it’s-three-in-the-morning-what-do-you-want.
It would have been pointless to explain, as Bryn dropped behind the books, when his voice would have been lost by the wall of literature he now found himself confronting. “I think it was this one,” he said, and he set his shoulders against the compacted pages and began to shove.
Nothing happened for a long time, except that he got tired.
And that the PA tinnily advised everyone that they were closing in two minutes, so please bring your materials to the front desk or auto checkouts.
“Please, you big, stupid book,” he groaned, his dust-furry feet slipping on the shelf. “Please just move, just this once. For my girlfriend.”
With a soft crackle, the cellophane on this book of tree health snapped free of its aged adhesion to the books around it, and he fell on his butt as it slid forward.