Size Me Once

My name is Lorelei Butterworth, I'm 52 years old, and I've been a mail clerk at the central post office for nineteen years. I'm single, never married, and the most exciting thing in my week is the Thursday stop I make at the Hollow Bindery after my shift. It's a cramped little bookstore three blocks from work. Old paperbacks stacked everywhere. A back room that smells like leather glue and dust. I go in, I dig around, I buy something I don't need.

That's how I found the note.

It was a Thursday in October. The book was a 1987 manual on modular mail sorting, which sounds boring but I collect them, don't ask me why. I flipped through it in the aisle and a folded piece of paper fell out and landed on my shoe.

Handwritten. Blue ink. It said:

"Whoever buys this book, if you are a woman with an open mind, call me. Melinda, 555-0142."

That was it. No last name, no explanation. I stood there in the aisle with paperbacks digging into my hip and read it about six times.

Now, a sane person throws that away. But I'd just turned 52 that summer and my sanity had been running low for years. Also, I remembered the name. Melinda. The woman who ran the restoration desk in the back. Ren Schwartz, my friend from choir, had mentioned her once. "Melinda Gill, she does rare books, you two would get along." Ren had been saying that for about ten years, pretty much, since I joined the choir back in 2015. I'd met her maybe twice. Tall woman. Quiet hands.

I walked to the back counter. She was there, hunched over a cracked spine with tweezers.

"Melinda Gill?"

She looked up. Thirty-something, maybe 39, dark hair pinned back with what looked like a paintbrush.

"Who's asking?"

"Lorelei. Butterworth. I bought the mail sorting book." I held it up. "There's a note in it."

She set the tweezers down very slowly. "You called already?"

"No. I'm calling right now." I pulled out my phone and dialed the number while standing four feet from her. My hands were shaking. Not fear. Curiosity, mostly. Curiosity does that to me.

She answered on the second ring and I heard her voice come through the phone from across the room. "Hello, Lorelei."

I hung up. "That was rude of you, putting a note in a book."

"That book's been on the shelf two years. You're the first person to buy it." She smiled a little. "Also, Ren told me to stop being a coward and just invite you to dinner, so consider this the clumsy version."

"Ren's been telling me about you for ten years."

"I know. He told me the same about you." She wiped glue off her fingers. "Dinner. Friday. My apartment. I'll cook. And I have something to show you that you either will or won't believe."

"Is this a cult?"

"God, no. Cults have better budgets."

I said yes. Obviously I said yes.

***

Friday evening, her apartment over on Delancey. Third floor, big windows, books on every surface including the kitchen counter, which I respected. She made a chicken thing with lemon. We opened a bottle of red and she asked real questions about my life, and I asked real ones about hers. She told me she'd dated a guy at 21, back in art school, two years, and nobody since. I told her about my thing with a co-worker when I was 25, how it ended friendly and just sort of evaporated.

"So we're both rusted," she said.

"Seized solid. You could put me in a museum."

She laughed, then went quiet. Then she got up and walked to the bedroom door and stopped with her hand on it.

"Before dessert, I want to show you the thing. And I need you to hear me out before you laugh or run."

"Try me."

She led me to the hallway and pointed at a tall cupboard I'd taken for furniture. Dark wood. Brass lock. It looked older than the building.

"I'm 39 years old," she said. "I've spent my whole life restoring small, delicate things. Books, maps, letters. I sit hunched over fragments all day. And for about the last six years I've had this thought that won't leave me alone. I want to know what it feels like to be big. Actually big. Huge. The kind of big people stare at."

She turned the key.

"I built something. Myself, over three winters. No partner yet, no audience, nobody's even seen it. I measured and sewed and welded and I did it all alone because I was embarrassed. And then Ren said, 'You know Lorelei, right? Just ask her,' and I put the note in the book like an idiot."

Inside the cupboard hung the strangest thing I've ever seen. A dress, enormous, like a tent for a circus giant. A pair of boots with soles thick as phone books. Padded shoulders, a corset-looking rig, gloves.

I stood there with my wine glass and felt something in my chest go light. Because here's my secret, the one nobody knows. All my life, I've wondered what it would feel like to be small. Tiny. Pocket-sized. I used to dream about it as a kid, and the dreams never stopped, I just stopped mentioning them.

"Melinda," I said. "You want to be a giant."

"For one evening. That's all I've ever wanted. One evening where I'm seven and a half feet tall and the whole room rearranges around me." She took a breath. "You'd be my guest. My tiny guest. And before you say anything, that's it. Dinner, conversation, maybe dancing if the boots allow it. Nothing weird."

"That's already extremely weird."

"Fair."

"I love it," I said. "I absolutely love it and I want to see it on you right now."

She stared at me. "Really?"

"Really. Get in the costume."

***

She told me to wait in the living room. Fair enough. I refilled the wine and paced and listened to the sounds of a woman wrestling with buckles in her own bedroom. It took a while. I heard her grunting, then a thump, then a word I won't repeat.

The bedroom door opened.

I want to describe this right, because I've thought about it every day since. Melinda came out of that doorway and filled it. The boots added a solid foot, and the padded torso and shoulders took her up past seven feet, broad as a doorway. The dress was dark green velvet, floor-length, and it moved like a ship's sail. Her real face sat up top of all that mass, small and flushed and terrified.

"Say something," she said. Her voice came down from up there, and she'd changed it too, dropped it low and slow. "Well, little one. The doorframe looks shorter than it used to."

I had to sit down. I sat right on the arm of her couch and put my wine down because my hand wasn't trustworthy.

"Oh my god," I said. "Oh my god, Melinda. You're enormous!"

"Come here," she said. That low voice again. Command, but a teasing command, the kind with a smile folded inside it. "Walk to me. I want to see how you look from up here."

I crossed the room. My neck was cranked all the way back. Up close she was a building. The velvet hem of that dress brushed my knees when she shifted her weight.

"Lorelei Butterworth," she rumbled. "Fifty-two years old. Standing at my boot."

"How do I look from up there?"

"Delicious. Tiny. Like I could pick you up and put you in my pocket." She crouched, slow, the whole rig creaking, until her face was level with mine. Her real face, this close. "Is this alright? Tell me now, because I got carried away and I want to be sure before I do anything stupid."

"It's alright," I said. "It's more than alright. Ask me the real question, though."

"The real question. Can I kiss you?"

"Yes," I said. "Ask me again in the giant voice."

"May I kiss you, little one?"

"Yes."

She bent the last few inches and kissed me, careful as handling a first edition, and I got one hand flat on all that velvet padding to steady myself. Her hand came up and cupped the back of my head, huge glove and all, gentle as anything. When we broke apart I was grinning like a fool and she was too.

"Well," she said. "Six years of building and the first thing it earns me is a kiss."

"You'll earn worse," I said. "The evening's young. Help me up, giant. I want to be at eye level with you at least once."