Adam’s headlights lit up the dark , winding, two-lane road, surrounded by pine trees on all sides. It was steep, and the sound of crickets came through the open windows.
“You’re driving slower than my dad!” Aparna laughed from the passenger seat.
“There could be a deer around every curve! And did you not notice how fast those rednecks were going in their pickups 5 miles ago?”
“You’re a testament to that popular claim that young men don’t deserve those high car insurance rates,” Aparna replied, looking at the printed Mapquest directions. “We’re almost at the turn, that was just Pine Lane. There – Huguenot Drive.”
Aparna pointed at the street sign for the road that their vacation rental was on. Adam turned his Honda Civic towards it, and they started going up an even steeper, and narrower, route. He slowed down, and opened all the windows, and the moon roof, to fully enjoy the sound of the crickets surrounding them on all sides. Aparna stopped worrying about speed, and breathed in the smell of the pine trees.
“This is beautiful. I didn’t know the forest actually had a smell.”
“You are such a city girl,” Adam laughed. “My family used to go to the forest for camping every August when I was a kid. Boston is just so noisy. I had to get back to this quiet.”
A moth the size of a tea saucer flew into the car. Aparna shrieked, and flailed at it wildly. Adam stopped the car, put it into park, and gently wrapped his fingers around the insect’s abdomen. It continued flapping its pale green, scaled wings in a panic. They shimmered in the moonlight.
“Beautiful,” he said quietly, as he let it go out of his window. It flapped away into the forest. Adam closed all the car windows again, and continued driving.
“Maybe to you,” Aparna replied, wiping her hands on her shirt reflexively.
“Thanks for coming with me into bug country, dear, I know it’s outside of your comfort zone.”
“Those things don’t bite?”
“No. It’s a luna moth. They’re harmless, and rare.”
Aparna heard the way he talked about this disgusting creature, and felt kind of bad for her reaction to it.
“Thanks for handling that. I’ll put up with the bugs, country bumpkin, as long as you’re around to rescue me from them."
“I’m happy to be your personal bug bodyguard.”
Aparna and Adam had been in a playful, but promising, relationship for a year. They met at MIT, where they both were PhD candidates in the physics lab. They really let their hair down around each other.
That night, after a rich meal of steak and wine, Adam and his girlfriend blissfully fell asleep in their shared bed in the rental cabin.
Adam dreamt about what happened at the beach house in 2006. In this dream, his family wasn’t at the concert when the growth happened, and he had burst through the roof, crushing them all. That night had been a narrow escape from killing people by crushing them like he was a walking disaster, or maybe it was a narrow escape from being blown up by a Navy fighter jet out at sea.
Since then, he had accidentally enlarged to 12 feet once, in 2008, after his grandpa died. Nobody saw it, he just had to buy new boxers again. The itch on his hand from the laser burn had worn off in 2009, so Adam knew that it was all over now.
Adam woke up with a start. What if the fact that it happened a second time in 2008 meant it could happen again at any time? What if it happened while he was next to someone he loved? What if he got to his maximum 10 story height again? Adam was currently spooning his favorite person. He closed his eyes. He wouldn’t let a panic attack start. The panic attacks were what started the growth.
He heard the rushing in his ears. He closed his eyes against it. He could stop it, if he just tried hard enough. He told himself, “Don’t grow. Don’t panic. You’re fine. You won’t hurt Aparna, who is right next to you. You’ll protect her. There’s no safer place for her to be than in your arms.”
He felt his boxers tighten, and the mattress get shorter. He felt Aparna stir, and get smaller against his arm and chest. His hand that was under her while cuddling now held a waist half its normal size, then a quarter. He sheltered her between both of his arms and his chest, right next to his heart. The bed underneath them crumbled and groaned. Adam’s boxers were squeezing him until they tore into pieces in a rush. It was the wedgie from hell. He vowed to sleep naked for the rest of his life.
Aparna screamed.
“Stay still,” he whispered to her, through the sound of the exploding house. She obeyed.
Adam sheltered her between his two hands as she got smaller and smaller, and the cabin around them shattered in stages, becoming clouds of dust and splinters, sprinkled with glass shards. Aparna was still in his hands, but she was now small enough that Adam couldn’t feel her breathing anymore. The two of them were half buried. Adam was grateful that the rental was only one story tall. It was now even shorter than that. The sounds slowed down, and mercifully, stopped. The cabin was as destroyed as it could possibly be from this size change.
“Aparna? Hold your breath, you shouldn’t move or breathe,” he cautioned. “I’ve got you.” Adam held her close to his chest, guarding her with his bulk from the debris as much as he could, as he turned onto his back, filling it with broken glass and house splinters, and then onto his other side, before scooting forward, a few inches for him, a few dozen feet for everyone else.
He ignored the fact that most of his skin was now filled with broken glass and splinters from the house, and that his legs below his knees were now completely surrounded by the remnants of prickly pine trees, which his explosive growth had knocked over. The broken tree trunks had bruised him, and filled his legs with splinters.
The only thing that mattered was that Aparna was now in a safer place, away from most of the debris. She was staying stock-still. He feared the worst.
“Dear?” He asked, and looked down at his hands, still tucked next to his heart. He lifted the top hand away, and saw her laying in his hand. In the moonlight, she looked like a fairy laying on his mattress-sized palm. But she wasn’t moving.
“It’s safe to come out,” he whispered.
That’s what she was waiting for. She took a deep breath, and opened her eyes, before she yelped in terror. She scrambled out of his huge fleshy hand like it was red-hot.
“Thank god, you’re alive! I was so worried!”
She looked up at him, trying to recognize her boyfriend’s familiar features when none of the angles or proportions between him and her made any sense anymore.
Horror dawned on her face.
“WHAT ARE YOU?” She yelled. Still barefoot, in her plaster-covered nightgown, she ran through the lawn full of broken glass to his car, and drove it away.
The tone of her voice had told him everything. This would be the last time he ever saw her.
