Dec. 17, 2024: "Write about a giantess who has found a keepsake left by a tiny admirer—something small, something delicate, something that could so easily have been overlooked or lost."
Maeve sat down at her kitchen table, looking into one cupped palm. A breeze from the window above the sink stirred the lacy sheers, and outside, birds complained at a squirrel that was hogging all the seed. Sun shone on the sink and a rack of clean dishes, spraying the room with arrows of light. She noticed none of this, brow furrowed and eyes trained upon the center of her palm.
In her palm rested what appeared to be a strip of silvery fabric. It was soft and impossibly light, polished to catch the light, and that’s what told Maeve it wasn’t fabric at all. What it was, was incredibly fragile. She didn’t want to tear it apart before she could figure out what it was intended to be. It had been lying out in the open, in front of the sink, where an errant beam of light happened to catch it at just the right angle to seize her glimpse.
When she pinched it between thumb and forefinger, that’s when she realized how light it was. And when she laid it out in her palm, glinting among the wrinkles of her flesh, that’s when she realized it wasn’t fabric. She adjusted her glasses to peer at it; she switched to the micro setting on her smartphone’s camera. Eventually she discovered that it was aluminum, like hundreds of tiny loops of aluminum, all interlinked to form a band of chainmail, but filigree chainmail. She wasn’t sure if that was the proper use of “filigree,” she only understood it to be the finest, most intricate silverwork in jewelry, and surely no one outside of Celtic myths about the fae had ever seen filigree this fine, this superfine.
But what was it supposed to be? That little quantity of aluminum left the finished piece completely weightless, and that lack of mass brought out a defensive, protective instinct in her. The last thing she wanted to do was ruin something so small and fragile, especially since she had no idea what it was for or where it came from.
It could’ve been the filter to some appliance, the rings would have been fine enough to catch anything larger than a drop of water, but it was impractical as a material. It felt like it would’ve torn under the slightest pressure, even from water flowing through a hose. And it wasn’t dirty—far from it. It was polished to a gleaming sheen, but there was no reason for that, beyond esthetics. But would have bothered? If it was a labor of love, surely the crafter would have been very possessive about this masterwork. So how did it end up in the middle of her kitchen?
Maeve tilted her hand and let it spill over her wrinkled palm, like a swatch of fabric but made of mercury. It stayed together, pouring over itself to make its way over her skin. In fact, it seemed to be a loop … Her breath caught. It was an endless loop of tiny rings, holding its form while flowing like water, but there was no beginning or end to it. It was a circle, a metal circle.
Her jaw dropped. If it weren’t for the fragility of the item, she would have slid it over her finger in that moment.
She did that later, after another minute of letting it slide and roll around in her palm. There was a way, she theorized, to let it spill in such a direction that it would practically open up to her, and she might be able to slip her fingernail into it—which she did, and then it slid down her pinky as though it were made for her. It settled around the bulge around the first digit of her pinky finger, flowing over the tiny, glassy hairs, until it wrapped around her finger like a thin coat of chrome paint.
Maeve hardly dared to breathe as she examined it, as though a wild sniff or a slight cough could sunder it into pieces. Slowly she turned her hand before her disbelieving eyes, watching light from a clean glass hit the filigree ring and splinter into a mist of light, just for a second before the slightest twitch of her large, clumsy hand dispelled it.
It could have been a ring. It fit her like a ring—it fit her perfectly. But who would have made it, and why?
Pursing her lips, she upended her hand over the table, her fingertips resting upon its surface, as she carefully waggled her pinky to encourage the metal band, the chainmail ring, to give up its hold and slide to the table, which it eventually did. It lay there, crumpled and yet elegant in its absolutely fluid composition. It never kinked or caught, not even on her tiny pinky hairs, just lay there as though she’d traced a drop of water around in a circle with the tine of a fork.
Maeve stood up slowly, keeping an eye on the ring. She slowly skidded her chair back under the table, wincing at the grinding whine it emitted, and took a step back. Now she was standing near where she found it in the first place, and she knelt slowly. For some reason, she didn’t want to make any more loud noises or any sudden movements. She lowered herself, conscious of the strain of her thighs and an emerging pain in her left knee, and then she rested upon the Pergo flooring, and then she sat down and crossed her legs, catching her breath.
She held there for a moment, sitting up straight, breathing deeply. Her denim shirt hung, softly aged, over her shoulders and around her chest and back, with an almost ticklish lightness. Still heavy and clunky compared to that amazing ring. She straightened up, feeling the tension she’d been storing in her back as she’d hunched over the strange little ring. She rolled her shoulders and bent her head to the side, stretching a slight cramp. After a couple minutes of this, she rolled from a seated position to a prone position and began to survey the lowest few inches of her entire kitchen, from the floor to the base of the cupboards.
She could hear a child screaming outside, distantly, briefly. That was how they played these days, shrieking like they were being stabbed or kidnapped. It was funny to them, their parents did nothing about it, and she’d had to learn to stifle the urge to call the cops every time it happened. She lowered herself to her floor and caught a whiff of dust; quickly she pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth and mashed her nostrils shut with her index finger, but there was no urge to sneeze. Relieved, she resumed examining the perimeter.
No gaps. No erosion or cracks. No Tom-and-Jerry-style mouseholes. Not in this room, anyway. That was her theory: that a tiny person lived in her walls, developed metalworking skills, and crafted this ring for her. He left it in the middle of the kitchen floor, right where he knew a sunbeam would work its way toward it, striking it just about the time he knew she’d come down for a snack after two solid hours of working from home on her company laptop. A tiny man who knew her whole schedule, someone who had been observing her for weeks, maybe months, learning to anticipate where she’d be and when. That was a creepy thought.
But it could have been worse. He could’ve left the ring on her nightstand, knowing she’d see it before she went to bed. And that would have meant he had access to where she slept, could potentially have crawled up her nightstand to watch her sleep … or climbed her sheets.
Maeve planted her palms upon the flooring and pushed herself up. But he didn’t, and that was a good sign. Or else he knew that it would look like a good sign and distract her from the realization that he’d been spying on her in her sleep. “Layers upon layers, truly,” she muttered, dusting off her shirt, and her two thoughts in that moment were whether her belly was getting larger and wondering when was the last time she’d swept and mopped in this place.
With a start, she snapped back to stare at the ring, almost expecting it to have disappeared. It remained where she dumped it, in the same liquid pile. It went nowhere, no one had reclaimed it, she hadn’t waken up from the dream. Sighing heavily, she turned to the fridge and got a can of mineral water, then carefully plucked up the mesh ring and brought it into her personal office—a large, emptied-out closet with her laptop on a vintage secretary—and placed it just above her mousepad. Taking her seat, she popped open the can and stared at the ring.
That explained the material, anyway. A tiny man could’ve gone through her recycling and, if he could’ve worried the pop-tab off a can, that would’ve been more than enough metal to work with. She leaned back and stared up at a corner of the closet by the ceiling, where a couple dark spots suggested the beginning of a web. But even if he had the strength or tools to pry the pop-tab off, how could he have heated it enough to melt it into the materials he needed? She smirked. That would require a lot of online research, and gods knew she loved research, especially when it took her away from the work she should’ve been doing.
But that was just one question, how he melted it down, among many other questions, some much larger. Like, if there were a tiny person living in her home, why would he do such a thing? Was this gift meant to appease her? He had to know she was going to begin searching for him now, and if there’s only one of him, he had to know that it probably wouldn’t end well for him. Maeve frowned. No, she’d never hurt someone like that. The idea of him brought out her defensive, protective instincts, but he couldn’t know that. All he knew of her would be her stomping around, making the floorboards shake with each heel-strike, and the loud, baleful keening she called singing. Why on earth would he think that giving her this intricate ring would enhance his odds of survival?
She rolled her head to the right, then to the left. Her hair bunched up against her neck and tickled her skin lightly. A loud car driving by outside made her turn her head slightly, suddenly conscious of how empty her house was, wondering whether she’d left the front or back doors unlocked.
There it was. Maybe he was lonely. Maeve was the only person in this house, earning enough from her writing to afford an unglamorous rambler in not-a-terrible part of town. Not married, not dating, and only one or two of her girlfriends came over for a bottle of wine and gossip maybe once a month. Largely an empty house with no other people, and she didn’t always feel unsafe, but more often she felt a little lonely. So maybe he was lonely too, and maybe that loneliness was of sufficient mass to drive him to contrive a peace offering like this.
Why would he think she wanted a ring from him?
Well, what else could he make? A daisy-chain? A poem on a scrap of paper she couldn’t read without a jeweler’s loupe? Spelling out “I LOVE YOU” in grains of rice? She pursed her lips and rocked slightly, thinking that she really should be writing this down. There was something in it, it could be a good story eventually. Her hands rested on her keyboard, her bare pinky not far from the ring that once dressed it up.
Could loneliness really drive a tiny, vulnerable person to take a chance like that? She snorted. Absolutely it could: just look at all the dating apps she tried last year, and two of those encounters were huge red flags. People could do stupid things, just to assuage the bite of loneliness, and if the tiny little man really was the only one of his kind, if he had no options other than the thunderous, stumbling, tone-deaf giantess who got up in the middle of the night to heat up a leftover meatball sub …
She looked at the ring, then reached over and traced her fingertip around it. Was he watching her right now? Could he see that she liked the ring? Was he encouraged to try something else?
She woke up her laptop and opened a Word document, then got up and carefully padded her way back to the kitchen. In the fridge she tore off a chunk of meatball, got a little saucer for it, and set it on the floor where she found the ring, then theatrically backed out of the room. She was being stupid, she knew. This gesture was only going to invite a platoon of ants. Shaking her head at herself, she sipped the can of water and started typing—loudly—to record all her thoughts. If he knew anything about her, he’d know she’d be at this for a while, leaving him plenty of time. For whatever.