Aeryn Rudel

Gorrus crawled on his hands and knees through the narrow halls of his house. His bedroom was the only room that could accommodate a giant’s frame only because he’d knocked down the walls of the adjoining rooms. He could almost lie down without bending his knees, but the ceiling was so low he couldn’t sit up, let alone stand.

He reached the stairs — tiny and wholly insufficient to hold his weight — and heaved over the second-floor railing and down onto the first story. He’d knocked out most of the walls here, too, and removed a large portion of the ceiling in the western wing of the house. This area had become his dining room. It allowed him to take his meals sitting up, the top of his great bald head poking through the hole in the ceiling.

Gorrus continued through the first story, which he kept as clean as he could manage. He had little space to keep his personal possessions, and most of the first floor was given over to dirty laundry, a stinking mound of sweat-stained shirts and trousers the size of a small hillock. He had to do his washing in the swimming pool—the first swimming pool anyway. He’d had a second installed so he could perform his necessary bodily functions. It didn’t flush like a proper toilet, and he had to clean it out on a daily basis or the neighbors would complain about the smell. The last thing he needed was another lecture from the Bureau of Fae Affairs about “fitting into his new life.”

He reached the garage, his knees and wrists aching from winnowing through his tiny house like the world’s largest rodent. He’d widened the interior entrance to the garage shortly before moving in, and the front door was now the garage door. Gorrus mashed the tiny button that raised it with one baseball-bat-sized finger. It took him more than a dozen tries to summon the necessary finesse to hit the button just right.

Finally, with a terrible rattle and squeaking, the garage door rose along its track. The full fury of the morning sun shone on his tired, bloodshot eyes. He’d recently found a brewery that would supply beer by the barrel. Last night he’d finished off six.

Gorrus crawled out through his garage and onto his driveway where he could finally stand. He rose from hands and knees to his full twenty-five-foot height. He winced as his knees popped like cannon blasts and his lower back made noises that sounded like every vertebrae was slipping its moorings. He glanced around the street, looking at the other houses on his block. Most were similar to his—two-story jobs with what he liked to call “faux fairy finish.” Another attempt by the good ol’ BFA to make their residents feel like they were still living in the enchanted forest. His own house looked like it had been set atop a massive tree stump—if tree stumps were made of concrete with plastic and stucco bark.

Grumbling, Gorrus glanced around for his morning paper, locating it in the gutter. He bent down, snatched the paper between thumb and forefinger, and shoved it into his shirt pocket. Now it was time for his morning confirmation of failure and misery. He turned to the west, to the wealthiest area of town, where his old house towered over the city, nestled atop the viny spire of an enchanted green monolith. His beautiful house in the clouds, with halls and rooms and, oh, god, toilets designed for giants, with ceilings even he could not reach without standing on his tiptoes. His beautiful house, his mansion in the sky, now owned by that idiot Jack and the puny little bastard’s wretched spawn.

Gorrus stared at his old home, thinking about the giant-sized axe in the garage and trying to summon the old giant-sized rage. Then he remembered the giant-sized restraining order the BFA helped Jack file against him and he just felt old, tired, and beaten. He unleashed a heavy sigh that bowed and shook nearby trees, got down on his hands and knees again, and crawled back into his house. The groaning shriek of the garage door lowering might have been the world’s most pathetic death knell.

AERYN RUDEL is a freelance writer from Seattle, Washington. He is the author of the Acts of War novels published by Privateer Press, and his short fiction has appeared in The Arcanist, The Molotov Cocktail, and Pseudopod, among others. Aeryn occasionally offers dubious advice on the subjects of writing and rejection (mostly rejection) at www.rejectomancy.com or Twitter @Aeryn_Rudel.