Big Girl (Outspoken Authors) Read online

  Meg Elison

  Winner of the

  Philip K. Dick Award

  Twice nominated for the

  Tiptree Award

  on The Book of the Unnamed Midwife

  “A strikingly powerful story … An apocalyptic page-turner that picks up where The Handmaid’s Tale left off.”

  —Jackie Hatton, Tor.com

  “An honest novel, both in the way it depicts a postapocalyptic world and how it recognizes that human sexuality and the need to fuck and feel pleasure will stay with us even as the human race falls into darkness.”

  —Ian Mond, Locus magazine

  “One of the most utterly absorbing books I’ve read in a long time … Grim but lots of pockets of warmth. Really interesting protagonist, an unnamed midwife, who begins to create a written history that will survive her for generations. Loved this novel.”

  —Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist

  on The Book of Flora

  “An urgent, ferociously readable warning about the power of belief to maim—or heal. Readers will find this a powerful conclusion to a fascinating series.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  on her stories

  “I could talk about female empowerment, body positivity, and gender flexibility. But those terms are wholly inadequate for Meg Elison’s clear-eyed satire in the guise of fantasy and science fiction. Powered by rage, incandescent with a deep understanding of injustice, angry for all the right reasons, yet still essentially optimistic, these are the stories I need to keep me warm through the long dark night. Compelling and fierce and unstoppable.”

  —Pat Murphy, World Fantasy Award winner

  “Meg Elison’s work is visceral and compelling. A voice that doesn’t so much demand attention, as it 100 percent deserves every ounce of it.”

  —Elsa Sjunneson-Henry, Hugo-winning writer and editor

  PM PRESS OUTSPOKEN AUTHORS SERIES

  The Left Left Behind Terry Bisson

  The Lucky Strike Kim Stanley Robinson

  The Underbelly Gary Phillips

  Mammoths of the Great Plains Eleanor Arnason

  Modem Times 2.0 Michael Moorcock

  The Wild Girls Ursula K. Le Guin

  Surfing the Gnarl Rudy Rucker

  The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow Cory Doctorow

  Report from Planet Midnight Nalo Hopkinson

  The Human Front Ken MacLeod

  New Taboos John Shirley

  The Science of Herself Karen Joy Fowler

  Raising Hell Norman Spinrad

  Patty Hearst & The Twinkie Murders: A Tale of Two Trials Paul Krassner

  My Life, My Body Marge Piercy

  16. Gypsy Carter Scholz

  Miracles Ain’t What They Used to Be Joe R. Lansdale

  Fire. Elizabeth Hand

  Totalitopia John Crowley

  The Atheist in the Attic Samuel R. Delany

  Thoreau’s Microscope Michael Blumlein

  The Beatrix Gates Rachel Pollack

  A City Made of Words Paul Park

  Talk like a Man Nisi Shawl

  Big Girl Meg Elison

  The Planetbreaker’s Son Nick Mamatas

  “El Hugé” was originally published in Catapult, 2017 (catapult.co).

  “Gone with Gone with the Wind” was originally published as “How I Bought into Gone with the Wind’s Mythology of Whiteness” in Electric Literature, 2018 (electricliterature.com).

  “Guts” was originally published as “My Friends Would Rather Have Their Guts Cut Open Than Be Like Me” in The Establishment, 2019 (theestablishment.co).

  “Big Girl” was originally published in Fantasy & Science Fiction, November–December 2017.

  “The Pill” and “Such People in It” are original to this volume.

  Big Girl

  Meg Elison © 2020

  This edition © PM Press

  ISBN (paperback): 978-1-62963-783-9

  ISBN (ebook): 978-1-62963-810-2

  LCCN: 2019946142

  Series editor: Terry Bisson

  Cover design by John Yates/www.stealworks.com

  Author photograph by Debbie Reynolds, Libre Images

  Insides by Jonathan Rowland

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Printed in the USA

  CONTENTS

  El Hugé

  Big Girl

  The Pill

  Gone with Gone with the Wind

  Such People in It

  “Sprawling into the Unknown” Meg Elison interviewed by Terry Bisson

  Guts

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  El Hugé

  WHEN I WAS FIFTEEN, I slew a giant that had done me no harm. I had to do it. There was no other way. I lived in the kind of town that nobody believes exists anymore. An hour from any freeway, we were surrounded by oranges on one side and cows on the other, with tumbleweed traversing the valley when the wind kicked up. This wasn’t Oklahoma, it was southern California.

  In a yearly culmination of a fall harvest festival—because Halloween is pagan and somehow a harvest is not—farmers from all over the valley brought in the biggest pumpkins they had grown. There were no prohibitions on performance-enhancing drugs in this squash Olympics; people tried everything from Miracle-Gro to burying their gently radioactive Fiestaware in the dirt. The pumpkins grew monstrous, sloping and misshapen, formless under their own mass. Their coloring was like cancerous flesh. They had no beauty, only bigness.

  The biggest one that year was El Hugé (hugh-gay); over twelve hundred pounds of pale, ghoulish, inedible pumpkin. The farmer took a blue ribbon and the paper got his picture. The gourd sat out in the Indian summer heat on public display.

  In the purpling night, long after school had ended, I sat forgotten at the edge of a parking lot. I was debating whether to give up and try sleeping at a friend’s house, or to keep waiting for someone who was likely never coming. My indecision was broken by a guy named Cole, dangerous and sexy at seventeen, with a scar like someone had dripped hot candle wax out of his eye socket and onto his cheek. He drove a beat-up black pickup truck with red duct tape playing understudy to taillights. I didn’t think twice when he told me to get in.

  I was the kind of girl who would have slept with him for a smaller kindness, but that wasn’t what he was after. We picked up two of his friends, black-leather types, who crawled into the jump-out seats wedged behind us in the cab of the truck. One friend carried a swollen backpack that Cole referred to as “the supplies.”

  “Supplies for what?” I asked, hoping that I was at least going to be subjected to peer pressure over drugs and alcohol. My peers had something else in mind.

  “For El Hugé.”

  The pumpkin had not been named by the farmer or the newspaper. It was one of those things that just arrived one day, like an urban legend that everyone knows but no one can trace. Bad Spanish is a badge of honor among poor whites living in what was once Mexico, and so El Hugé was his name.

  I didn’t protest. I didn’t suggest that this might be a bad idea. When the boys lined up long pieces of lumber to build a ramp and began to push the pumpkin into the bed of the truck, I jumped out and put my back into it.

  Somehow, we loaded the thing. The truck groaned and the shocks were compressed. One of the tires scraped in its wheel well as we crept out of the larceny lot. But we got away.

  In a dry riverbed, miles out of town, we shoved our vegetal hostage back out onto the ground. It settled malevolently on its flat side.

  I don’t know how we came to this conclusion because not a word was said, but we hated El Hugé. That pumpkin’s existence was somehow inexcusably offensive to us. Cole outlined a crude jack-o’-lantern face on its g
host-orange skin, and one of the other boys stabbed the sappy adipose flesh with a long knife he had stolen from his mother’s kitchen.

  We couldn’t cut a face. It took our combined strength to sink or remove the knife, and we were soon exhausted.

  Cole looked over our handiwork and said that surely if we punched the face out with a dotted line like a coupon, we could blow the cutouts from within. We who had been instructed in almost no science reasoned the idea would probably work and set about stabbing a pattern into the widest side of El Hugé.

  Cole made an incision near the stem with a shovel, standing on the mountainous pumpkin and flailing a little for his balance. When he had dug a hole, he motioned for the backpack.

  Night had fallen for real and the butane perfume and flare of his Zippo were a shock in the cool air. He lit a handful of M-80s and thrust them down into El Hugé’s brainpan. He leapt off the top, rolling on the gravel. We ran and took shelter behind the pickup truck. We waited.

  There is something in the soul of mediocrity that seeks to stomp down anyone or anything that stands out. There is something in us small-town kids that makes us lobsters, pulling each other back into a bucket so that no one gets out. We weren’t going to be outdone by a pumpkin. We weren’t going to outdo it, either. What could we do but destroy its beauty in the crudest, most fumbling form we could muster? We were children, and we were unremarkable and unloved. That beloved pumpkin had to die.

  The explosion was muffled, yet sizeable. To our surprise, a neatly punched face did not pop prettily free to reveal a jack-o’-lantern as tall as our shoulders. Instead, El Hugé collapsed, a giant hole at his top and another at his bottom. Hot seeds and guts rolled out along the underside, as if we had disemboweled an ungulate. The top was a mystery to us until flaming pumpkin chunks began to rain down, slapping into the black truck and coating us with hot, stinking gourd innards.

  We were filthy and terrified, but we had won. No one ever found out what became of El Hugé; the papers casually remarked upon its theft, blaming the perennial scourge of teenagers. Years later, I went back to that riverbed and found a wide patch of stubborn, ugly pumpkins growing on surly vines.

  Big Girl

  THE GIRL WOKE UP with a sore neck and three seagulls perched on her eyelashes.

  As her eyes fluttered open, the startled gulls flapped away. They squawked in alarm, but continued on in the gray predawn light.

  She shook her head a little, still not fully awake. She blinked a few times, and the men on the fishing boat saw a chunk of yellow sleep-crust the size of a bike tire fall from her eye and splash in the water beside them. As she stepped into the water, the boat rocked as if it were passing through the wake of a much larger ship. She blundered forward, slipping and falling to her knees. The impact registered as a 3.1 on a nearby seismograph, and the wave pushed the boat out to the end of its anchor chain.

  Her dark hair hung over her face, but when she began to wail her disorientation, it blew out in front of her mouth like black banners caught in the wind. The fishermen pulled their anchor in a panic. The girl stood up to her full height, towering over the Richmond Bridge. Apparently realizing that she was naked, she covered herself with her arms.

  She was still standing there with her arms crossed tight over her breasts when the first helicopters arrived.

  SFGate.com

  Reports are coming in that a huge inflatable sex doll has been spotted floating near the Richmond Bridge. Tweet sightings or pics to @SFGate.

  San Francisco Chronicle

  Early reports of an inflatable woman or large art installation near the Richmond Bridge this morning have been confirmed via independent footage acquired by the Chronicle today. The drone video shows that the object is animated, some speculate by radio control. The object resembles a human female and is approximately 350 feet tall. The figure is nude and has no obvious brand logos or other marks identifying its provenance.

  Video and still photos indicate that the object is anchored or perhaps confined to the area immediately surrounding Red Rock Island. There are reports from boats in the vicinity that the figure is broadcasting sound, though it is unknown whether it is issuing music or recorded statements.

  So far, no artist or corporation has claimed ownership of or responsibility for the appearance of the phenomenon. This may be due to the controversial nudity of the figure, which appears to be very lifelike and anatomically correct.

  More on this story as it develops.

  @kindnesskillzzz: I saw the #baybe this morning, there’s no way it’s inflatable, too lifelike.

  @3librasalad: hey @USCG is approaching #baybe right now. Image: a U.S. Coast Guard vessel pulls in front of a light-brown calf, kneecap visible above ship’s antennas.

  @USCG: All vessels and individuals steer clear of #baybe phenomenon until further notice. We are assessing the safety of the situation.

  @SFExaminer: The #baybe is a real girl! Sources have identified Bianca Martinez of East Oakland, age 15. sfexnews/lgt5hjY

  It took a couple of hours to corroborate the Examiner’s scoop. No one believed their claim that the girl was human and assumed the headline was a hoax or a hack. By the time the truth hit the news, thousands of pictures had been taken of the girl huddled beside a Coast Guard boat, goosebumps as large as Canada geese all over her blue-brown skin.

  East Bay Express

  In the first few days after the Baybe (Bianca Martinez, a fifteen-year-old Oakland girl) appeared in the water, misinformation ruled.

  Between reports that she was an inflatable art project, a publicity stunt, or a pre-Burning Man exhibition of an animatronic sculpture, the truth remained elusive.

  Yet, as Joel Rabinowitz at the SF Examiner first reported and the Coast Guard later confirmed, Ms. Martinez is a human female. More than that, she’s a minor. Once positive identification was made and her DNA was matched with that of her parents, publishing or selling photos of the nude colossus became illegal.

  Photos have been surrendered to and seized by local police and the FBI, but the Internet is keeping the images alive in an echo of the Fappening back in 2014. Far from being leaked or hacked, however, most of these photos were taken by legitimate journalists and printed in nationally circulated newspapers, on TV news, and on Twitter. Getting this unexpected tidal wave of child pornography under control is now as difficult as housing or feeding the Baybe herself.

  Alameda County Child Welfare has stepped in, attempting to help Martinez’s parents provide for their child’s gigantic needs. The struggle to clothe her attracted donations of sailcloth and large nautical tarps, but the girl still appears to be only half-clothed and constantly shivering. Food banks claimed record donations as people banded together to feed Martinez, but county officials struggled to find her somewhere to eat where people cannot crowd around to watch. The solution thus far has involved Martinez wading into the Bay to eat out of her hands in relative privacy.

  Experts have estimated Martinez’s height at somewhere around 350 feet and her weight at almost 100 tons. Her passage across the Bay has disrupted ferry and fishing boat traffic, and the Coast Guard has issued a ban on all sailboats and small craft for the time being.

  Martinez was seen only two nights ago batting dozens of drones out of the air around her, sweeping them into the sea to avoid their lights and cameras. In the carefully cropped picture that ran on the front page, pixelated starfish dotted the edge of her pubic hair like deliberate decoration. The East Bay Express attempted to find out where the Baybe sleeps, but our search came up empty.

  BuzzFeed

  Is San Francisco’s giant mystery girl human?

  Human rights organizations around the world are struggling with this question now as government officials on all sides hesitate to offer the girl, Bianca Martinez, any kind of aid.

  “She’s just so damned big,” Oakland mayor Laney Schiff remarked. “It’s difficult to think of her as a citizen of Oakland when Oakland can’t begin to meet her needs. And as she’
s taken up temporary indigent residence on various beaches and islands, I’m not sure it’s strictly Oakland’s issue.”

  A representative from the Department of Human Services said the organization was unclear on their responsibilities in this case. “She is fifteen, and she was a completely normal-sized girl a week ago. But today, tomorrow, who knows? We’re waiting on a decision as to how we should deal with this.”

  Samuel Sapporo, one of Martinez’s former teachers at Oakland High, offered another point of view, saying, “Imagine if this was your kid. She’s terrified and exposed and there’s nowhere safe for her to go. She’s homeless and naked and practically starving, and we’re going to argue whether she’s a person anymore?”

  Oakland Police are concerned about Martinez’s superhuman strength and abilities. One officer, who asked not to be named, said, “What if she decides to walk home one day? She might flatten Chinatown, maybe knock out the MacArthur Maze while she’s at it. She could destroy some BART tracks, and we couldn’t do anything to stop her. That’s not a person; that’s a threat.”

  Martinez’s parents are reported to have limited English proficiency and have thus far refused to speak with the press. The Coast Guard arranged for them to visit their daughter on a boat last Monday, but the boat reportedly never left the dock. A source close to the family said the parents are struggling to cope. Martinez’s father is a plumber and her mother is a homemaker. The family attends Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church, but have not been spotted there in recent weeks.

  Representatives of the Oakland diocese declined to comment on Bianca Martinez’s humanity.