Dec. 5, 2024: "So, if I were to ask you to teach me, to guide my hands through the making of one of these sandwiches, would you do it? Could you help me bring that same care, that same love, into something I could share with you?"
The giantess woke up slowly, finding herself on her side. Her down arm was stretched out in front of her, fingers lightly curled. She looked at her hand for a moment, balled it into a fist, and rolled backward to sit up and climb out of bed.
Her living quarters was a miracle of nature and controlling it, but that was the giantess’s specialty. The floor spread out in concentric rings, the stump of a 2,000-year-old tree, polished to a glassy sheen, and the walls all around her were the rest of the tree, still living and growing, obeying the shapes she cast in. Across from her bed was the hearth, to the right of that was a large wooden chair before three inset shelves of living wood, holding books, skulls of large animals, huge crystals, and other souvenirs of her many lives.
To the left of her hearth was the entrance, which never needed a door as few living creatures larger than insects felt a need to explore her domain, and to the left of that was the dining nook, a counter with simple, multipurpose implements for meals. From the foot of the bed she picked up what could have been mistaken for a large afghan but turned out to be her linen tunic. This she pulled on while her heavy feet plodded to the entrance, and outside she would relieve herself and commit her toilette. We shall respectfully afford her privacy.
When she returned, she stood before the dining nook. Her noble, fleshy face was turned down in a frown as she contemplated something in her massive skull. Jerking away quickly, she went back to the shelves across the room and looked through them. There was the unreasonably large tourmaline, a rare find among minerals, and the skull of a woolly mammoth, which apparently the smaller races mistook for the skull of a unicorn. That was a funny story, one that she heard from her …
She shook her head roughly, setting two long, thick, brown braids bouncing against her chest. Instead, she reached for a book, but without looking where to guide her hand. Her fingers rested upon the leather binding of a book smaller than all the others, like something she might stick in a pocket. Idly she opened it, as though momentarily forgetting from where it came. But when her eyes landed on the page and read the runes there, she slammed it shut and turned toward the hearth, arm drawn back.
There she stood for a long moment, the book clutched in quivering fingers. Eventually she drew a deep breath and returned the little book to its shelf. All her books were hand-lettered, of course, but the hand that made those little runes was especially precious.
She looked around her abode, angrily, upset, daring the room to show her that which she was lacking. She looked at the messy bed where he hadn’t taken up much room at all. There was the red leather book on the shelf, smaller than the rest, which nonetheless required him to kneel on the pages as he limned a story in her language, and how long had it taken him to learn that? Even the pool outdoors, where she cleaned herself, that was the site of many happy, languid hours of letting the little man crawl over her shoulders and scrub the back of her neck, letting him lay upon one of her breasts like a floating island. And that one awkward day when he found a pimple on her butt! He insisted on popping it and cleaning it out, and though it was terribly embarrassing, it only drew them closer.
Her hand reached back to pat her buttock, where the blemish had healed rapidly under his care … and her fingers knotted themselves in her linen garment as anguish drove her nearly to tear it from her body, to feel something weak crumbling in her grip, feel something else fall into ruin.
“Enough! It wasn’t my fault!” Her voice broke the still air like thunder, and all the trees around her home shuddered with the flight of alarmed birds. “I never … you know I’d never … why did you have to …” It was almost ritualistic, choking out the same sentence fragments each day, the sharp edges of memories she couldn’t allow herself to hold in their entirety, neither the many, many good ones nor the one bad one. That part of her life wouldn’t go away, and she couldn’t permit herself to hold onto it.
The giantess turned toward the dining area. Food was what she needed, that would settle her. She visited the hearth, lined with a cantrip to prevent the shaped wood of the hearth from catching fire. She blew the last few embers into a sufficient blaze to start working on a few sticks, then piled a couple logs on and returned to her cooking area. She knelt and opened the trap door to the cool storage, retrieving a chunk of dwarven cheese, the egg of a roc, and the spiced meat of a dozen oxen. Hanging on the wall by the counter was a bag with half a loaf of sourdough bread she’d been working through. She sliced off a couple sheets of this and set them to toast on an iron grid in the hearth.
“It’s important to keep them off-heat, only let them turn golden brown over a longer period of time,” she told herself. “You can cook the rest while they’re toasting.”
She found two scraps of parchment and mashed the spiced meat flat between them, under her knuckles. For a moment she forgot the next steps, until she saw the little man knotted in her braid, nearly to the end, resting on the curve of her breast. He smiled up at her, immobile and cozy in her hair. He insisted he loved it, but she was pretty sure she loved being so close to a gigantic boob. “Get your littlest skillet,” he told her, “and start frying the sausage. The grease from it will cook the egg next.”
It all fell into place after that, with him to guide her. The dwarven cheese, a boulder to them, was sliced into sheets and set aside; she took up a stoneware plate and collected the sizzling patty into that. She expertly cracked the egg with one hand into the skillet next, lightly scrambling the yolk across the albumen but without tugging the frying egg up, “or it would stick to the pan,” she murmured. She loved a nice solid disk of fried egg, but he always loved a slightly runny yolk. That’s why she flipped the egg over too soon, bringing the skillet back to the counter and letting it cook in the fading ambient heat.
The toast went on the plate, the sausage went on the toast, the cheese went on the sausage and the egg on top of that, mashed under another piece of toast. There it was, a hearty, savory, aromatic breakfast sandwich, just like he taught her. “It looks perfect, you did it again,” he told her, and she simpered at him as she brought the plate to a small table, a ledge of living wood in the cooking nook.
Just as she always had, the giant woman tore off a little pinch of the sandwich for him, making sure to get all the ingredients in it. From the moment her incisors crunched through the golden toast, she was transported. The grease was not good for her but she loved it as it trickled around the back of her tongue. The cheese melted immediately, carrying notes of grassy cream to go with the seasoning in the sausage. And that runny yolk, she was even getting a taste for that. It was nutrient-dense, so maybe her body was just learning to appreciate it.
“How is it?” he asked, now kneeling in her plate beside his portion.
“Perfect,” she mumbled around the lump in her mouth. “Perfect every single time. You’re a great teacher.”
“And you remembered the secret ingredient, right?”
Her cheeks swelled with her huge smile. “I make it with every ounce of love you share with me, every time. That’s what makes it so filling.” Her tongue swiped around the corner of her mouth, mopping up the yolk. “I feel you in me all day long when I make one of these.”
He smiled up at her, his tiny dark eyes glittering. “It’s like I told you, I will always be with you when you make my recipe for breakfast.”
liquid gold ran down the outside of her palm. She refused to look down, where the portion she tore off lay untouched, by itself, with no one to eat it. Her chest swelled with a long, deep breath, her nose filled with the spices of the meat, and she took her time finishing her sandwich with methodical deliberation, staring out the window at the sunny day waiting for her.