The air was cool and the grass slick beneath her feet. She felt like Frankenstein’s monster, a mess of how a human being should look.

Eddy remembered falling asleep on the trail, and she had awoken in pain. Hard, swelling pain. Her blood had raced through her veins. She thought she was having a heart attack, but the muscles of heart attack victims never swelled up to the size of genetically augmented watermelons.

Eddy’s body had been on fire, her body and bones a damn heavy metal concert of crackling and swelling. She’d had rings on her fingers and watched as her fingers snapped each one, to say nothing of when her arms tore open her sleeves or the widening of her hips ripped through the closed zipper and denim of her pants. She had felt her wallet and keys flatten and press into her skin as her thighs went from chicken thin to cow thick.

Eddy had to be taller now. She was bigger, stronger, and her pigtailed hair had burst and run down to her butt. Her brain pounded between her temples, and all she really wanted was something cool to drink. She had stepped on her canteen and crushed it when she was growing. Gosh… she wished her feet hadn’t transformed into size fourteen monstrosities and blown apart her hiking boots. It had felt liberating, but now she didn’t know what she was stepping in.

Noise to her right. Eddy looked. A bear looked at her from underneath a log. Small and black, it reminded her of something she would hug when she was little. If it was that size… goodness, how big was she?

Eddy grunted at it and the bear bolted. She kept on walking, unsure of the way and never tiring.

In her right hand Eddy carried her cell phone which had survived her transformation. She had tried dialing with it but her fingers were too big for the buttons. Nevertheless, she kept it in case she found someone who could dial for her.

She wanted to find a doctor. She felt great but she didn’t know if there might be something fundamentally wrong with her. Something in the water, maybe.

“Hey, don’t push!”

Edy stopped in her tracks. She suppressed the urge to hide. It wasn’t evening yet, and the air was very cool. It had been a little girl’s voice she heard. She gulped and headed towards it.

“I’m not pushing! I wanna see it!” A little boy said. They were just ahead of her now. Edy tried to move very quietly, but with her bulk it felt next to impossible.

Then there they were, just past a wide trunk where she could almost hide. By a small brook lined with reeds played a girl and a boy. The girl, in overalls and brown pigtails, had cupped something in her hand and was keeping from the boy. The pudgy boy kept trying to see, reaching around to pull off the girl’s hiding hands.

“I found her, so she’s mine!”

“Let me see! Let me see!”

The boy began lightly rapping on the girl’s back and she began to yelp. Next the boy grabbed her pigtails— “Ah! Stop it! It hurts!”

“Hey!” Edy stepped out where the children could see her. Both stopped like tiny statues. They looked rooted to the ground, their terror obvious. “Just leave her alone, all ri—”

“Monster!” The boy took off, splashing in the brook and breaking through the trees. In seconds he was gone and the little girl and Edy were alone.

The little girl began to cry. Edy’s heart leapt in her chest.

“There, there,” she said in her best motherly voice. “You’re safe here.”

“M-m-my mommy said never to talk to st-st-strangers.” The girl kept what she had found close to her chest as Edy came toward her.

“It’s okay, you stay there and I’ll stay over here. I’m Edy.”

The girl did not sit or move, but fear remained evident in her.

“W-why are you so big? And where are your clothes?”

Edy took one look at herself and shrugged. “You got me. I was sleeping and I woke up like this.”

“You must’ve had some dream,” the little girl said.

“I beg your pardon?”

The girl looked at the dirt, bashful. “Daddy always says you dream about what happens when you wake up—”

“GET AWAY FROM MY KID!” a man shouted. He was running fast at her from the other side of the little river, baseball bat in hand. Eddy trembled. She didn’t want to cause trouble.

“Please, I—”

Without hesitating (or hearing her) the man ran up to Eddy and slammed the bat across her midsection. Eddy looked at her stone abs. It might’ve been a Nerf bat for all the good it did.

Next he clocked her on the back of her head. She swung around, took the bat in hand, and deftly snapped it like a twig.


“Waaaaaah!” the little boy was back too, bawling. “The monster broke my bat!”

“I think everyone needs to just calm—”

But again, no one was listening. The man scooped up his daughter against her protests and dragged his son behind him.

“Hey, wait!” Eddy called after them, but then they were gone. She watched them disappear. “Aw crap!”

An uneasy feeling settled in her gut. She saw the bat she had broken. The man was just trying to protect his children, but that bat had really been annoying. And then there was the rush she’d gotten when she’d felt the wood splinter in her hands. Still, the bat had been someone’s toy…

She wanted to apologize. She had been plodding along very well, but she had yet to try running or… hmm… Eddy looked down at her thighs which resembled mutant drum sticks, her hips and legs wrapped in flexed bands of veined muscle. She wondered.

Eddy got a running start and jumped. The ground beneath her sunk a foot as she sailed into the air. She could have been flying! Cold wind lanced her skin. The earth’s pull had nothing on her. Below her and all around she could see the tree tops.

“Woohoo!” she screamed.

She hit the top of her arc and began coming down. She landed with a big thud that sent grass and dirt flying. A tree fell over and a squirrel scrambled from the debris. Eddy gave the little fellow an apologetic smile. “Sorry,” she said.

She twiddled her fingers and looked around. The boy’s bat. The little girl. The dad afraid of her. It nagged her, and she wanted to do something about it, but what?

The simplest thing would be to go to a toy store and buy a new one. That was back in the city though, and not out here, unless…

Soon Eddy was jumping through the air back to the big city. Her nakedness troubled her a little, but she felt primal and alive as she sailed through air. She loved it. God how she loved it.

When she made it back to the city limits, Eddy tried to move around a little quieter. She had one consolation. No one looked up when she was midair. It was when she landed that people noticed.

“Hey, Dad, look! It’s the Hulk!”

“Dang! Hulk’s got a bigger chest than your mom.”

Somehow, she made her way home. She didn’t have her keys, so she chanced that Yolanda was home. She rung the doorbell. No answer. She rung it again. No movement or anything.

Eddy shrugged and turned the door knob, breaking the lock with her bare hand. She’d replace the lock later. The door frame was too small for her so she had to duck and turn sideways to enter.

A dog bounded out from around the living room couch, barking his lungs out. “Hey, Wilford!” Eddy bent down to pick him up and discovered her hands neatly fit around the wiener dog’s entire body. Upon seeing her face, the dog ceased his yapping and wagged his tail and rolled out his tongue. “That’s a good dog!” Eddy rubbed her nose to Wilford’s, and the wee dog licked her face.

His bowl was empty she discovered, and she promptly filled it. With Wilford happy, Eddy turned her attention to why she really came here. Get money. She had some stashed in her pillow upstairs. The wooden stair planks creaked when she stepped on them. She didn’t know how much she weighed, but she was glad her new body hadn’t made her plummet through the floorboards.

Eddy opened the door to her room and screamed. The people she saw screamed too. Eddy hurriedly shut the door and stood in the hall. In seconds Yolanda was out in the hall with a sheet around her naked body staring up at her roommate. Her face was stuck between anger and worry.

“Eddy, I… what happened to you?”

“I don’t know, I just don’t, but what are you doing in my room!”

“We were… um…”

“HOLY SHIT! No wonder her bed is huge,” the brown haired young guy said when he came out in his black boxers. “She’s just big all over. I mean—”

“OUT!” Yolanda screamed. She pulled Eddy’s door shut and kicked him away.

“But my clothes--”

“Scram unless you want Eddy to throw you home.”

Eddy cracked her knuckles. The guy got the hint and thundered out of the house as fast as he could. When they heard the downstairs door shut, Yolanda looked up to Eddy again.

“You’ve got that big queen bed. I figured you’d be out hiking all day. I was going to wash the sheets so you wouldn’t know… I’m an ass.”

“Yeah… you are.” Eddy was trying to find words. It hurt, someone just invading her private space like that. Without saying another word, she went into her room and shut the door. There was no lock, but Yolanda still didn’t follow. It made Eddy feel a little happier.

Things had seemed simpler that morning. She had woken up, stretched out, checked her e-mail, headed out to hike. She had not planned on changing, or breaking someone’s bat, or—

She sat down on her bed, the springs straining. She looked beneath her to see the bottom of her bed scrapping the floorboards. Eddy laid fully on her bed, staring at the white ceiling. The pillow felt soft. Taped inside she pulled a twenty from her mad money reserves. How much would a nice bat go for?

A knock on the door. Yolanda opened it, bearing a tray of tea and beer. “Tea’s for you, the beer’s for me.”

“Yeah, I don’t even want to know how much it’d take to plaster me now,” Eddy joked, indicating her massive frame.

Yolanda sat the tray on Eddy’s computer chair and pulled it up to them. They sat and drank and Eddy told her story. If Eddy had not been standing there with muscles and breasts each bigger than her head, she knew Yolanda would not have believed a word.

“I think we should get you to a hospital. See if you’ve had an allergic reaction or maybe it was a government chemical spill.”

“Maybe, but first I need to buy a bat for that little boy.”

Yolanda laughed. “Ed. You’re maybe eight feet tall and four feet wide with more muscle than an Olympic weightlifting team. That’s not normal. It needs to be addressed.”

“And I’ll handle it later. Right now, help me get these sheets around me.” Eddy stood up and Yolanda agreed, although she voiced concerns that Eddy had better get help. In a snap, they had Eddy in a makeshift dress stitched up with clothespins.

“How do I look?” Eddy said, twirling barefoot in her powder blue bedsheets. Yolanda drank her MGD.

“Like a princess,” said Yolanda. “Don’t flex.”



Eddy got some pretty nasty looks from people when she went to Habernathy’s Toy Chest. It was a family store and while she tried to dress nice, her musclebound appearance could barely be contained.

“That will be fourteen fifty,” the clerk said when she checked out, his only sign of concern a sweat bead down the side of his face. Eddy smiled and wished him a good day and he did the same. She resisted an urge to skip in the parking lot, feeling that if she did so she would set off car alarms.

Bat in hand, she decided to return to the woods. A few leaps later and she was back. Rips had formed in the back of her makeshift skirt as her thighs had expanded to propel her upward. She found the creek she had met the girl and boy at after a bit of searching from the air. Eddy’s eyes weren’t the sharpest but she figured that their camp couldn’t be too far away, providing that the girl’s dad hadn’t pulled up stakes to get away from the ‘monster’.

In a clearing away from some trees on even ground she found their campsite. A fire ring had been made but it was full of ashes and dead embers now. A cooler stood close by, and when she opened it she found packs of hotdogs and soft drinks stacked on top of half melted ice.

“Hmm…” Eddy sat the bat down by the cooler and looked around the campsite. No one was there. Had they all left? Their backpacks were still in the tent, and it was getting near dusk. Eddy lit some citronella candles left by the fire to keep the bugs at bay. She thought to cook the hotdogs but reasoned that it would be just as big an invasion of privacy as Yolanda had done earlier.

Part of her was still mad at Yolanda. When she got home, she’d have a nice chat with her friend—

Someone was coming. Eddy heard grass and leaves being stepped on. She called out, “Hello?”

“Who’s there?” The voice belonged to the dad she had met earlier that day.

“It’s me, Eddy. I, um… brought your son a new bat.”

He stepped out into the clearing and saw her standing sheepishly by the fire ring. It was getting dark so she could imagine how huge her figure had to seem. He had a flashlight which he shined all over her before finding her face and making her squeeze her eyes shut. “Hey, that’s bright!”

“Oh geez! Um…” fear was in his voice. “I don’t want any trouble.”

“And neither do I, okay?” Eddy said, trying to sound reassuring. This was all new to her too and even though it was a rush, part of being suddenly huge made her panic on the inside. She fought the urge to stand up, knowing it would make him flee. “I felt real bad about snapping your boy’s bat—”

“His name’s Pete.”

“Pete,” Eddy said, wincing as the flashlight traveled up and down her body. “I went back to town today and bought him a new bat.”

The man ventured closer. “I hauled my kids out of here as soon as I saw you.”

“I think I would have done the same thing. You see a woman mountain standing in front of you, you’re probably not going to stay calm.”

“You, heh, you got that right.” He cleared his throat. “Look, it was our last day anyway. Just do me a favor and stay there and let me pack up all I need.”

“I saw the Coleman lantern. I can turn it on—”

She stood up and the man immediately scrambled back five feet. “No no! It’s alright. I can get it.”

Eddy sat back down and watched the man work. He looked anxious and sad and shot Eddy nervous glances, to which she only smiled back in the dark. Methodically, he took down his campsite. There were too many packs and things for him to carry alone.

“Hey, if you like, I can take some of that.”

“You sure?” Not out of concern for her wellbeing. She could hear that he didn’t want her help.

“Yeah, it’s no biggee. I think I could lift just about anything.”

The man (she still didn’t know his name) gave her room. Eddy grabbed the towering bundle and hoisted it off the ground, the bat poised on top. She would have tucked it beneath her arm if she wasn’t afraid that she’d break it.

They walked back to the man’s vehicle with only the crunching of leaves underfoot to break the monotony. The parking lot had two cars in it, and the man didn’t seem the jeep/mountainbike kind of guy. They went to the minivan and opened it up, its lights burning bright.

“Set it down, I can get it from here.”

“You sure—”

“Yes, thanks. I’m sure Pete will love the new bat.”

Eddy wondered. “You’ll tell him who it’s from, right?”

The man stopped, looking at her. Eddy was curious how she looked in his eyes.

“Sure. I’ll say the girl who broke his bat got him a new one. Okay?”

Eddy smiled. “You okay?”

“I’m fine, alright? Just had a long day, and I didn’t expect…” he waved in her direction as he loaded the cooler. “You were unexpected and I probably over-reacted.”

“You called me a monster.”

“I’ve never seen a woman bigger than my garage. I wasn’t going to think you were a lady. My mistake.”

Eddy cocked her hips and planted her hands on them. She thought it was the most feminine pose she could make, daring him to still think she wasn’t a woman.

“Geez, you got a full blown twelve pack going there,” he observed. “I’ve tried working out. Couldn’t ever lose this.” He slapped his gut.

“I just woke up like this today. Yesterday I was shorter than you.”

“Get out of here!”

“I’m serious! If I had a picture I’d show you. Or if I still had my wallet…”

“You lost your wallet?”

“Yeah…”

“Huh…” the man closed the doors of his car so he didn’t drain the battery. “Any idea how you’re going to explain how you lost your credit cards and ID?”

“Um… I don’t know. Maybe I should go in person when I tell them. They might not believe me if I said over the phone that I had turned into the Hulk today and lost my wallet.”

“Which makes me wonder, what does the Hulk do with his wallet when he, you know,” the man mimed puffing out his chest and flexing. Eddy laughed.

“I’ve got an idea,” she said.

“What?”


“He swallows it!”

“No no no… his whole digestive track would probably eat it raw.”

“So what do you think he does with it?”

“What any man does when he thinks he’s about to lose something as vital as his wallet. He shoves it up his butt.”

“Eww!” Then Eddy was laughing so hard she had to clutch her sides. She stamped her feet and the minivan shook.

“See, now I know you’re a girl. Only girls make that sound.”

The man opened the driver’s side door and got in.

“I’d give you a lift, Miss—what was your name?”

“Eddy.”

“Eddy. I’d give you a lift, Eddy, but I don’t know if my minivan import could handle the combined weight of this camping gear, and, well…”

“That’s alright, I get it,” Eddy said and curtsied. “I used to drive a teeny tiny used hatchack and I don’t think I can fit in it anymore.”

The man nodded. “Hopefully you can find something better. You take care of yourself, kay, Eddy?”

Eddy waved goodbye but then the man cast a despairing look at his dashboard.

“Aw crap.”

“What’s up?”

“I was in such a hurry to get my kids out of here and get back I didn’t keep an eye on the gas.”

Eddy leaned in. The gauge was on E when he turned the key.

“I can give you a lift into town,” Eddy beamed.

“That’s real nice of you but I can’t leave my van—”

“No, I’ll give you a lift into town.” Eddy flexed her bicep and watched as its peak rose above her shoulder muscle. So much mass and veins…

She looked and saw the man’s glaring at her tremendous arm. “Uh… sure!”

“Alright, let’s get you home to your kids, Mister…”

“Danover. Brandon Danover.”

“Hold on, Brandon. I’ve never lifted a car before.”

Eddy walked behind the minivan, braced herself, and slowly raised the vehicle over her head.