Chapter 5: Miss Piggy

It was Saturday in mid-October. Andy had just gotten out of the hospital, and Sherry was taking him to see his cousins in the neighboring county. The change of scenery might do him some good. I could use a change of scenery myself, so I went out to the garage to work on replacing some fence posts out back. There in my man-cave with my tools, my weights, and my Corvette things made sense, and I could take my mind off of the homicidal, muscle-bound lesbian seductress up the street. For about a minute.

I heard the back door to the garage open and close. “Hey Mishhhter Parker, what are you doing?” a tiny voice called through a retainer.

It was Becky Finklestein, standing four feet tall, wearing white Keds and a pink sweatsuit. Becky’s frizzy hair was up in pigtails and her coke-bottle glasses were slipping down her nose. She popped a pink bubble. I turned my stool to face the girl and took a deep breath and told myself that she was just another pain-in-the-ass neighborhood kid. “I’m working on some fenceposts,” I said. “You’re Rachel Finklestein’s duaghet Becky, aren’t you?”

“You know who I am,” she giggled. “After all, I’m the neighborhood bully. The one that kicks the crap out of your shhhkinny wimp of a son.”

“It’s not good to be a bully,” I said sternly.

“But it feels shhho good to be in charge,” she said. “But I talked with my mom and I’m not going to pick on Andy anymore.”

“That’s very mature of you, Becky,” I said.

I smiled down at the tiny pre-teen, and she smiled back. I could see her mother’s features in Becky’s face. Especially when her smile turned into a bitchy little smirk. “I’m going to pick on you from now on,” she said.

I felt a brief flutter of fear in my stomach. I remembered Joel Carson twisted up like a pretzel on my lawn. But then I remembered that I was over twice as big as Joel, and that unlike them I knew how to deal with misbehaving children. “You know, Becky, I used to be a bully too. But over time I learned-”

“Shhhtop talking,” the smirking brat interjected. “We’re going to fight.”

I shook my head. “Becky, I decided a long time ago that I was too mature to hit girls, people with glasses, or people who are smaller than me.”

“Smaller than you?” Becky spat. Her smirk turned into a scowl. She spread her legs out so that her tiny white shoes pointed outward and put her tiny hands on her hips. It actually looked like she had a pretty skinny waist for a fat girl. But then she began to raise her arms, and as the folds of her sweatsuit began to tighten around her limbs, and I realized that she wasn’t fat at all. “Smaller!?” she growled.

Slowly, the wrinkles and creases of Becky’s baggy sweatsuit began to disappear as her arms, legs, chest and shoulders began to swell. The cuffs pulled up off her wrists and ankles as the pink fabric began to stretch tight over her body. The bottom of the sweatshirt pulled up as her nascent bustline inflated, revealing a ridge of abdominal muscles so intensely hypertrophied that it made her mother’s midriff look soft and sloppy. I felt light-headed. I had seen this sort of thing in the cartoons that I watched with Andy. Mighty Mouse or Popeye would flex their muscles up so big that they would burst out of their clothes. But this wasn’t a character in a cartoon. This was a middle-school girl in my garage, glaring at me as the fabric of her sweatsuit began to tear away around the unstoppable swelling of her muscular body. The sound of cloth ripping grew loud in my head as Becky Finklestein brought her arms up into a double-biceps pose while squatting down to inflate her thighs and calves. Finally, her sweatsuit burst into strips of pink fabric that fluttered to the floor of the garage.

I used to fight other guys two at a time, and I broke up fights in the mill where guys came at each other with fresh steel, and I even had to wrestle Gary Ross to the ground once or twice. But this was the first time in my life I can remember being scared.

Becky Finklestein stood up straight and let her arms hang at her sides, her pale, orange-freckled skin covered only in her white Keds and a set of pink underoos with Miss Piggy’s face on the front. Except that the underoos couldn’t cover very much of her, because she was bulging with the biggest, hardest, most sharply defined muscles that I had ever seen in my life. Each muscle bulged out in sharp definition against its neighbors, as if the little girl’s body was too small to accommodate the massive brawn that rippled under her freckled skin. She popped a pink bubble and turned slightly to the side, cocking her legs just a bit.

Her tiny feet led to slim ankles that enlarged into calves the size of footballs. Her thighs were as big around as soccer balls, and so massive that the underwear couldn’t begin to cover them and bunched up around her tensors and adductors. Her abdominals bulged out like baseballs and looked impossibly hard. I tried my best to ignore her impressively developed pubescent bustline, which stretched the face of Miss Piggy until it was barely recognizable, but I couldn’t ignore her pectorals, which swelled up so large when she breathed that their striated enormity nearly reached her chin. And her arms ... Becky laughed and reached up into another double biceps pose. Her biceps were as defined as her mother’s but they were as big as softballs, so big that she could tap her fingers on them as she glared at me and popped another bubble. “Tell me again who’s smaller?” she sneered.

She was impossible. She was too big to be real. How could she move? How could her tiny feet and growing bones support the hulking, throbbing mass that she continued to display in one bodybuilding pose after another as she slowly moved toward me? Soon she was right in front of me, her green eyes burning holes in me from behind her glasses as I looked down on shoulders the size of tetherballs and traps like bowling pins. I could feel myself shaking.

“Tell me. Again. Who. Is smaller?” Becky demanded.

“I am,” I said, trying to remain calm.

Becky turned around and walked back to the center of the garage. Her back and glutes would have been big on a grown woman, or a grown man for that matter. She tried to strut, to imitate her mother, but she was so massively muscular that she couldn’t quite pull it off. As I saw her calves bulge and bunch I remembered what her mother’s legs did to the Carson brothers. Her mother’s legs, which looked like pipe-cleaners compared to Becky’s hypertrophied limbs. When Becky reached the center of the garage, she pointed past me to the workbench. “Bring that measuring tape over here,” she barked. “We’re going to see who’s smaller.”

I obeyed her. I don’t know why. I wasn’t thinking, I was just obeying. Maybe this was what it’s like to be scared by a bully. I grabbed the old cloth carpenter’s tape of the workbench and walked out to the center of the garage.

“Now give me that, get down on your knees and flex your muscles.”

I got down on my knees and handed her the measuring tape. I was looking through her thick glasses at her piercing green eyes and I rolled up my sleeve and flexed my arm. Her tiny hands wrapped the tape around my bicep. “Shhheventeen inches,” she said. “That’s pretty good, actually. I’m impressed, Mr. Parker.” Then she handed the measuring tape to me. “Now you measure this muscle,” she said.

Becky slowly pumped her right arm. My knees were shaking as her pale skin stretched, her incredible bicep slowly bunching up into a massive ball of flesh. From up close, I could see the split peak fight against the bulging of her triceps and shoulders on one side, and the colossal, ropey mass of her forearm on the other. “Hey!” she shouted. “Stop shhhtaring and measure!”

My fingers trembled as I wrapped the tape around the small girl’s enormous arm. It felt impossibly hard, like the ingots at the steel mill, except warm. And bigger.

“How big?” she demanded.

I didn’t say anything. I was looking at the door to the house and the door to the back yard. But Sherry and Andy were gone.

“No one’s going to help you!” Becky shouted. “Do what I say and tell me how big my arm is!”

“Eighteen and a half inches,” I stammered. This little girl with coke bottle glasses and dental work had arms bigger than mine. A lot bigger.

“What!?” Becky pulled her arm back. “That’s a joke. I haven’t been that shhhkinny since I was ten!” Then her eyes fixed on my weight bench. “I’ll be right back,” she said.

I watched in silence from my knees as Becky went over to the weight bench and climbed up onto it. She examined the bar. “What is that three hundred? That will work.”

I told myself that this was a dream, and that this is where I would wake up. Muscles or not, that was too much mass for the tiny girl to move. There’s no way that little Becky Finklestein was going to lie down on my bench and press three hundred pounds.

And she didn’t.

Instead of lying down for a bench press, Becky wrapped her tiny finger around the bar and hoisted it off the rack. She looked at me as she slowly curled it up to her massive chest. She paused with the bar at its apex, long enough for me to see Miss Piggy’s distorted face staring at me from under the weight bar, the biggest forearms that I had ever seen in my life framing either side of the cartoon pig. This couldn’t be happening, I told myself. Becky popped a bubble and let the weight down. Then she curled it again, smiling down at the slow, fluid contraction of her herculean arms. Then again. And again. With each rep she popped a bubble, and with each rep the sound of the bubble popping sounded louder and louder in my fear-addled brain. Minutes later, Becky Finklestein, now gleaming with sweat, replaced the bar and climbed down off my weight bench. I wiped tears away from my eyes. I felt cold all over as the diminutive hulk came face to face with me again.