He reached out his hand to me—he was taller than I remembered.

I felt the strain in my shoulder I stretched up on my tiptoes to brush my fingers against his. The beat that ran through my body was like a volt of electricity, pulsing from my fingers to my chest, resonating into my toes and behind my eyes.

But wait: this was too much. He wasn’t supposed to be this tall. My veins ran cold as the connection between our fingers broke, leaving my arm reaching limply upward.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. He was stretching, growing. It was like something had grabbed ahold of his head while something else clung to his toes and they were playing tug-of-war. But it wasn’t a smooth stretching, it happened slowly, in different cycles and patterns. First his face would stretch until it was almost the length of his torso, then it would stop abruptly; next his feet and his legs stretched out, looking almost two-dimensional, until the rest of his body caught up to scale. Then, as I watched, transfixed, he filled out so his width was proportional to his height. These events hadn’t seemed to faze him—he still looked down at me with a slight smile, cocking his head as though asking me what was wrong.

He towered over me, casting a huge shadow and causing me to shiver. I hadn’t realized until this moment how cold it is. I break my gaze from his massive stature and glance around myself. Where am I?

There is only grass as far as I can see. The sky seems gray, covered in gloomy, although not sinister, clouds, some seeming to stretch across the entire horizon. I fall to my knees, suddenly feeling trapped. I turn around and hear a rumble that seems to resonate from the ground below me. The earth begins to shake, and I can’t find any hold, the grass shorn short.

When the shaking stops, I look up to him again, and realize that the earthquake had caused the ground beneath him to buckle and rise, and now I can barely even see his face. His shadow is cast even larger around me now, and I shiver involuntarily. I don’t know what to do, but I know I can’t be here anymore.

I walk and walk and walk, and I never find anything different. I think I’ve been walking for days now, but it’s hard to tell time because the sun doesn’t move. In fact, I don’t think the sun is even here, just those pessimistic clouds and the filtered light coming from somewhere behind them.

Occasionally I see another earthquake-made mountain with another stretched person perched on top, but other than that, I can’t see anything. At this point, I’m not even sure if I’m walking in a straight line anymore.

I don’t know what I’m looking for, and I don’t know how to find it. So for now, I will just keep walking.