Patronage, Part 1

[6 word request: worldwide size and muscle swap]

[This is DEFINITELY going to be a series]

Liunch rush was dead. The Bent Nickel was empty until 2 PM. Wallace was happy to see anyone show up, even if it was a 12 foot tall Gulliver. Wallace was unsettled by the way the bottles rattled on the shelves as the enormous stranger approached, but after steeling himself, he walked out to the new deck area to give him some service. Gulliver’s money was the same size as everyone else’s.

“A beer,” the gulliver said, rolling up his own cigarette. Wallace marveled at the size of his suitcase-sized tobacco pouch. Normally Wallace would ask what size or what type of beer a guest wanted, but for Gullivers there was only one size, and at the Nickel, there was only one beer they had enough kegs of to serve in the 3 gallon buckets the giants liked to drink out of.

“Hope you like IPA,” Wallace said, setting the bucket of beer at the giant’s feet. Months before he would have struggled to move the bucket more than a foot on his own, but now he carried it with ease. It still surprised him when he hoisted something hefty off the ground (or when the other bartenders asked him to change a keg). The journey from weakling to hulk occurred in a single instant, and he still hadn’t fully accepted the reality of being a 300 pound musclehead--or what all that mass meant when it came to heavy lifting.

Wallace shielded his eyes as he looked up at the Gulliver, who puffed on a baseball bat-sized cigarette and sipped his bucket without acknowledging the muscular man at his feet.

“So we need a credit card to start a tab,” Wallace explained, “or you can cash out for that one right now.”

The man rubbed a hand across his bald head and smirked. “You can’t just take my word for it?” he said, snorting phlegm into the back of his throat and hawking it at the street. The splatter covered the hood of a car parked nearby, setting off its alarm.

Wallace shook his head. “Sorry, man,” he said, shrugging his big shoulders. “Rules are rules.”

The Gulliver reached into the back pocket of his jeans with a sneer, shaking his head. He tossed down a credit card as big as a menu. Wallace caught it with both hands.

As Wallace headed back inside the bar, the Gulliver whistled. The sound made the hair stand up on the back of Wallace’s neck. “So, BIG man,” the Gulliver taunted. “How’d you get all those big muscles?”

Wallace smiled as he glanced back up at the giant. “Same way you got so tall, I’m guessing.”

“Yeah, I figured,” the Gulliver said. He spit at the sidewalk again.

“No spitting,” Wallace ordered. The Gulliver’s eyes lit up at that and he shot back a mischievous grin.

Back inside a couple more patrons had shown up. One, a portly gentleman with thinning hair, stared out the window at the smoking giant with a look of disgust on his face.

“You serve people like that?” he said. Wallace shrugged as he swiped the giant credit card through the new terminal they had just gotten.

“Money’s money,” Wallace said. “What’ll it be?”

The TVs had been on news when Wallace turned them on that morning and since no patrons had shown up yet, he hadn’t thought to change them. As he poured another shot for the businessman and brought a couple menus to a young couple who had sat at a table, Wallace suddenly overheard the news story.

“While scientists conjecture that the event was extraterrestrial in origin, new evidence has been discovered that may disprove that theory. Experts are left with more questions--”

Wallace just swapped the channel, much to the businessman’s dismay.

“You aren’t one of those guys who believe that shit, are you?”

Wallace raised an eyebrow at the heavyset man, glancing outside at the building-sized 22 year old surveying passing traffic as he got to the end of his beer. “Pretty sure it happened, man,” Wallace said.

“You’re telling me,” the businessman said, roling his eyes, “that some glowing alien just appeared and spoke to everyone on earth at the same time? And then, BOOM, some people get giant and some people get tiny?”

A young man with a skateboard over his shoulder had a seat and entered the conversation. “I remember when it happened,” he said. “I hadn’t spoken tagalog since I was a kid, but that’’s the language I heard that alien’s voice in. Then--BOOM--my brother, who was an MMA fighter, just turned into a scrawny little shit like half my size.”

The businessman snorted. “Fake fucking news,” he said.

“You calling me a liar? My bro was like 280 pounds and 6’5” tall, and then, POP, he was so small, I could bench HIM.” The skater ordered a hard cider. “I tell ya, a lifetime of getting bullied by my big bro ended in one second.”

The businessman shook his head. “Exotic disease,” he said. “Big liberal coverup, because it’s immigrants who brought that disease in. Pretty sad you people would rather believe in an alien than the fact that other countries have diseases that can fuck people up so bad.”

Wallace changed the channel, then slammed a big fist down on the bar. “Look, guys, in this bar we either talk football or we talk nothing,” he asserted. He put both hands on the bar and flexed his lats and his shoulders, a trick he had learned after an hour of practicing it a month before--it made him look enormous, with his massive traps and neck as wide as his head completing the intimidating stature. He watched the two average-sized men’s eyes bug out at the display of musculature, knowing he had their attention.

Aside from the fact that buying clothes was such a chore nowadays, there were actually a few perks to being built like a mac truck.

“Good,” Wallace said, the topic settled. Nothing would have made him more satisfied than grabbing the fat bigot by his sweaty suit and tossing him out the door, but his boss had said, “One more complaint and I’m gonna have to fire you.” Turns out that, atop 300 pounds of muscle, Wallace’s resting bitch face intimidated and offended every third guy who came in. Insecure fucks never said a word back when Wallace was skinny.

Despite the lack of tips, Wallace was thrilled when Kennedy came in to relieve him of his shift. He warned the much smaller man of the Gulliver outside, promising not to leave until the giant had left.

“So what, I gotta pay up now? Just cuz you’re leaving?” the Gulliver snapped.

Wallace shrugged. “That’s the way it goes.” He handed the big clipboard and the oversized pen to the huge man.

“These fucking prices are a way of discriminating against big people,” the giant growled as he signed the tab and slammed it at Wallace. A smaller man would have been knocked off his feet. Even at his size, Wallace was bumped backward a bit.

“You’re twice the size of everyone else here and you drink five times as much,” Wallace countered.

“And keeping us outside? That’s horseshit too. Just another way to discriminate against us. We should be allowed inside!”

Wallace gestured to the door. “You’re welcome to try to squeeze through the door. We’re doing what we can.”

The Gulliver tossed the bucket aside. Wallace caught it after it bounced, just before it smashed through the window.

“You’d like that, you little shit, wouldn’t you?” the Gulliver sneered, stomping away. He paused and spun around, poking a big finger at Wallace’s massively muscular chest. “Just cuz you’ve got muscles doesn’t make you big. I take shits bigger than you.”

“Honestly? So do I,” Wallace said. “I eat a ton now.” He gestured down at his bulk. “Probably as much as you do.”

The Gulliver walked away, right down the middle of the street, not even flinching as passing cars veered out of the way, tires screeching as his big boots stomped the pavement.

“Not every Gulliver is like that,” Wallace said to Kennedy after the entire bar witnessed the altercation. “Imagine what it’s like, being so big all of a sudden, and everyone treats you like a freak.”

Kennedy smirked down at Wallace’s imposing bulk. Despite all of his muscle, Wallace was still 5’8” tall, appearing large simply because of his mass, not because of his height. All that size on such an imposing frame made him look like a brick of solid flesh, nearly waddling as he walked around. It had been so long, most people didn’t even remember what skinny Wallace used to look like, but Kennedy remembered.

Wallace turned sideways as he left, the only way he could get through most doors.

*

One day a man of golden light appeared in the sky, speaking to every human in every language in existence, explaining that the path of man had veered wildly off course and something had to correct its trajectory. After the oblique speech, the golden light grew in intensity, then faded. In an instant, the lives of millions were changed.

The unidentified being had clearly been very literal in its use of the word “man”--only men were affected by the shift. Some found themselves suddenly rocketing toward the ceiling, exploding out of their clothes, literal giants in an instant. Others found themselves falling into their own clothes, climbing out of a sleeve or a shoe to find that the world around them was enormous--or rather, they were tiny, only around a foot tall at their biggest.

Of the giants and the “micros,” there was one constant: all the shrunken men had been large before the shift, and all the giants had been scrawny and short.

Still more men found their bodies deflating like balloons, while men like Wallace exploded out with muscle. Wallace had been in bed, finding himself suddenly naked, his bed collapsed on the floor. It took a massive effort just to roll his bulk onto its side, even more to get him up on his feet. He spent the first hour just learning how to roll his massive arms around each other, practicing walking with most of his immediate view obstructed by his chest.

A skinny man with a duffel bag leaving the gym paused as Wallace entered. Wallace knew what was coming before the man even spoke. The man, whose waist was smaller than Wallace’s leg, actually kicked Wallace in his massive glute. The bulky man turned around impatiently.

“That’s my body,” the skinny guy growled.

A priest from South Carolina had recently begun making popular the idea that the golden man was just a hoax to cover up biological warfare. His theory was that all the men who lost size that day, be it height or mass, had it stolen by someone else. Despite the fact that scientists weren’t able to corroborate a one-to-one connection between those shrunken and those amplified, many victims of the shift were regarding the theory as fact.

“No,” Wallace explained. “THAT’S your body.” Remembering the giant’s poke to his chest, he passed the gesture along to the skinny blonde without the wisdom to choose his battles.

“Those are my fucking biceps!” the man shouted. He had his phone out, pulling up pictures. Wallace reflected on the kind of day he was having--and the fact that most of his days had been like this lately--as the scrawny man showed pictures of a massive bodybuilder. He did have a point; he seemed to have been built very similarly to how Wallace was now.

To passersby, the skinny man getting in Wallace’s face probably looked brave--or stupid. But Wallace knew what emboldened this little guy: if Wallace were to flex his might, he would look like the bully most people suspected he was, and this skinny fellow would only believe that Wallace had personally stolen from him more passionately. And if Wallace refused to do anything, the man would be free to vent his hurt and rage while Wallace looked like an impotent beast. It was a lose-lose for Wallace, but he didn’t have time for that nonsense. He walked inside slamming the door in the skinny man’s face. Let him take his anger out on public property, Wallace thought. Make him someone else’s problem.

Wallace knew one thing for certain: taking away a big guy’s muscles certainly didn’t make any of them less of a lout, just like stuffing Wallace with mass hadn’t made him any less bookish.

All eyes in the gym turned toward Wallace as he walked in. He was used to being stared at, but at the gym, it was most prevalent: guys Wallace’s size didn’t go to the gym anymore. Wallace hadn’t lifted a weight since his muscles had first sprouted, but his physicality still hadn’t changed. It was like whatever force gave him his muscles was determined to make them stay.

Meanwhile, most of the guys filling up gyms nowadays were the size of the scrawny guy outside, either because they had lost their muscles that fateful day and were determined to build them back, or because some skinny nerd they knew had turned into a beast and they felt left out. Wallace knew to keep his eyes down as he walked by the front desk.

“Member number?” the waifish guy behind the computer said as Wallace walked by.

“Just picking up my roommate,” he said, nodding toward the back. He could tell the employee wanted to bark the rules at him but couldn’t muster the courage.

In the rear of the gym was a special section, installed after the great change. Originally, the area had been a coat closet, but it had been converted into a gym for micros. Wallace approached the mini-gym, scanning the 12 inch tall muscleheads for the man he had shown up for.

Every gym had an area just like this now, since many of their most dedicated members had found themselves barely as tall as the high tops they used to squat in. The area was separated into multiple “floors.” The glass front walls gave these new gyms their nickname: the “ant farms.” Wallace saw his roommate, Raymond, walking away from the tiny deadlift platform. He tapped his thick finger gently on the glass. Many of the micros started, but Raymond waved and headed for the elevator. Wallace placed a beefy hand on the ground as Raymond walked out, bracing himself with Wallace’s thumb as the hand raised up to chest level.

“You’re sweaty as fuck,” Wallace said to the diminutive man in his hand. Despite being 12 inches tall, the latino bodybuilder was even more solidly built than Wallace was. He seemed as heavy as a bowling ball, and was built so wide that he nearly resembled one.

“I think you’re going to have to start meeting me outside,” Raymond said as he stared up anxiously at the skinny average-height men looming around them as Wallace passed them by.

“Why? All these big tough guys threatened by little old me?” Wallace scoffed. He twitched as he realized his mistake: “My bad. Didn’t mean to use the ‘b’ word,” he said.

“Yeah, they are,” Raymond said. “And anyway, you’re just being stubborn, insisting on coming in here,” he said. “It wouldn’t kill you to just wait outside, and if it makes everyone feel more comfortable, why not?”

Wallace swallowed his retort, preferring to pout instead. He remembered the first day Raymond had been chosen to live with him; unlike the Gullivers and the Twiggies, Micros had been deemed unable to live on their own. Each one was paired up with a Hulk. That whole first day that Raymond had been dropped off at his place, Wallace had meekly scurried around in service of the tiny bodybuilder who barked his shrill, chirrupy orders up at him.

Barging into the gym, despite the fact that it bothered everyone within (and especially Raymond) was one of Wallace’s recent attempts at establishing dominance in the relationship. But no matter how hard Wallace tried to be the tough brute he looked like, he still found himself wilting every time the overdeveloped action figure in his hand raised his helium-high voice.

Outside, Wallace gently set Raymond on the roof of his car as he fished for his keys.

“Heads up,” Raymond squeaked, throwing up a thick arm to point at something behind Wallace. “Some dude’s coming.”

Wallace rolled his eyes. Raymond’s overreactions lately were getting out of control. He would accuse at least three average-sized people of being suspicious or threatening every single day. It was getting tiresome.

“Don’t sweat it,” Wallace said, turning to see a moustachioed man with wild silver hair rapidly approaching.

“Excuse me,” the man said with a hefty accent. “Can I ask you something? You’re a Hulk, right?” He wore a trenchcoat and had one hand tucked inside.

Wallace sensed Raymond’s apprehension, grabbing his tiny roommate and holding him against his chest with the palm of his hand to still him. “Yes,” Wallace said, “but… I’m actually just trying to get home right now.”

“And that man in your hand--goodness, he’s a micro!” said the old gentleman. His fascination wasn’t surprising: men like this gentlemen, who seemed to be too big to have grown but too small to have been shrunk, were most often fanboys to those who had changed. Wallace had the driver’s side door open already, and gently plopped Raymond in the modified Micro-seat on the passenger side.

“Yes, but we’re both tired,” Wallace said, “and headed h--”

The man had pulled something out of his trenchcoat--some sort of device--and fired a greenish light at Wallace. All of a sudden, the world was spinning around him, and he found himself hitting the pavement so hard it knocked the wind out of him. He was thankful that all of his muscle had acted as a cushion--but when he felt something soft piling down on top of him, like a tent collapsing, his stomach went cold.

He couldn’t see light. He was tangled in something. Where was his car? Why was he naked? He heard the old man’s voice, but it seemed to be coming from above, booming like it had come from a speaker.

He had heard details like this before, when Raymond opened up about how “the change” had felt for him.

Just as Wallace realized that the white fabric all around him was actually his collapsed t-shirt, a huge hand suddenly burst in. Wallace beat against the fingers as they closed around him. He actually was strong enough to resist, causing the old man to cry out, but could’t prevent himself from being yanked off the ground by one massively muscular leg. He dangled upside down in midair, naked and so high above the ground that a fall would kill him.

His car loomed unfathomably huge behind him. Wallace swung his huge arms as the old man’s wrinkled face examined his body.

“So just to dispel any confusion,” the man said, reaching in and grabbing Raymond with his free hand, “I’ve been researching the energy that was released the day of the change and I’ve been able to harness it. It seems it’s been absorbed into each of your bodies, and is still present.”

He tossed Wallace casually on the cold hood of his car. Raymond tumbled down next to him. Wallace stared, wide-eyed, at the muscular man who could now look him in the eye. Raymond shook his head.

“This… isn’t possible,” he said, realizing that he was now about the same size as his Hulk patron--and both of them were tiny.

Each of the little musclemen stared up at the shadow over them as the old man pulled on gloves. “It seemed at least one of my theories is correct!” he said, his eyes wild. He pulled out a small canister and released a puff of gas that caused Raymond’s body to go limp. “I can’t wait to test the others!”

Wallace turned, his massive legs pumping as he tried his best to sprint across the car hood away from his attacker, but a sickly sweet smell overcame him and he found himself going limp, fading to black.