The sunlight passes through the businessman’s ears like stained glass, ears that protrude so far and stretch so long that they flap in the warm breeze, despite his best efforts to still them with his hands. He moves shyly with his morning coffee, walking as he does by the teenage boy with arms and legs so spindly that they spread out across the pavement, root like, causing him to tumble forward like a stick insect. Eyes lowered, the boy tumbles past a bench; on it, a woman is gripping her phone with her left hand and the armrest with her right, her weary face stricken. The narrowness of her hips beneath her skirt threatens to send her falling between the wooden slats, and she curses her traitorous body under her breath for refusing to fill out or soften its angles even after years of hormonal encouragement—everyone must be staring. Briefly, mercifully, her face is obscured by shadow as a bus passes them all, its side emblazoned with an advert that promises vaguely to cure these odd folk, each blighted with a case of hideousness. Its driver, one of the hideous, is wearing sunglasses to cover the monstrous, plunging pits of her eye bags.

From the bus emerges a pack of teen girls, each uniquely burdened in her grotesqueness—one with a cavernous nose that swamps her face (much to the disgust of her small-nosed grandmother); another with thin, thin hair that scatters like a sneeze on her scalp; a third with knees so knobby that she rattles as she walks along the pavement; and, amid them all, a chatting friend who tries to ignore the acne that is puckering her own face into one swollen, pulsating sore. She can hear it throb.

At the end of their group, the fifth and final girl blinks in and out of visibility. In moments where she can be seen, she wraps her arms around her hulking form, her every step prompting tremors in the pavement, her vast shadow engulfing her friends in cold darkness. That evening, over dinner, the giant girl will shriek at her mother for denying her gargantuan size, grow tearful at her father’s betrayal for offering her dessert as if he can’t see his daughter’s colossal hips spilling over the sides of her chair and down onto the linoleum floor, her belly expanding to push her away from the wooden table with every bite. 

Two years ago, on a Tuesday afternoon in the school library, a boy approached the girl. He sat beside her at the computers with a smirk, his teeth pushing out through his lips as he shuffled into his wheelie chair, which he then scooted a little closer to her. 

Have you done the Spanish homework? he asked her with a grin. 

Yeah, she replied. Her tummy felt strange.

Can I copy? he pushed, and she couldn’t think of a reason why not—after all, boys didn’t usually talk to her. It felt like when a tiger had approached the glass in front of her at the zoo—she didn’t want to scare it off. 

Sure. That was the subject of the homework, as it happened—zoos—and, as she quietly watched him copy down her answers onto his sheet, the sweat from his clammy hand smudging her neatly-printed words, she felt like she was crossing some kind of important milestone into maturity. Here she was, sitting next to a boy, who was now pressing his leg with increasing pressure against hers under the desk in the school library, probably feeling impressed by her answers to the Spanish homework. She’d always been good at Spanish.

            Huh, ‘whale’, he smirked as he wrote. Look, you’re in the homework.

            In a flash, she felt a shame like none she’d ever known. It wasn’t that she’d never noticed that she was a little taller, a little wider than some of her friends. But now, as he said those words and she looked down at herself, she realized how stupid she’d been. She saw the vast pooling of her thighs against the desk chair beside his slim ones, the way her stomach forced itself through her school shirt and across her lap, her trunk-like arms so broad and long that her hands rested against the navy blue carpet, dragging along like two pillars supporting her enormity. The shame was overwhelming.

Eve Lytollis is a writer from the North of England, now based in London. Her comedic play, Paperboy, was performed at various London venues in 2021. Now, she's balancing a day job in TV with writing odd, little stories.