She woke to a ceiling that didn’t belong to her.

Her first thought was rescue. Her second was a childish, bright hope: giantess.

From this vantage, the world was sudden and overwhelming. Every fold of the giantess’s shirt read like geography; freckles were topography. When she bent, the light around her face haloed, and the smaller woman felt like an insect under the moon.

“Please,” the small woman croaked. “Help—don’t—don’t—”

Loneliness explained nothing and everything. The giantess had found, in the small, a way to rewrite her solitude into companionship. There was compassion—one gentle finger that stroked a cheek with the care of a mother cradling a newborn—and there was possessiveness, the slow tightening of a grip that had never been exercised.

Without warning, the giantess blinked. There was pity there now—an almost scientific curiosity edged with a slow, steady hunger. She set the tiny woman on the countertop, a cliff of laminated wood. From this new vantage, the apartment’s appliances were hulks of metal, the sink a basin wide as a quarry. The giantess reached for the phone. Her nails traced a line the width of a highway. The small woman ran.

“Why are you doing this?” she shouted into the cavern between them, the words useless as paper boats.

The giantess’s answer was a whisper, barely audible over the storm: “I’m lonely.”

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