“Why aren’t Amazons called ‘Bigs’, instead?”
I opened my mouth and shut it almost immediately. Shit. I hadn’t thought of that. “I…don’t know.” I finally answered.
“Because the Amazons are invaders. They’re not from here.”
I propped myself up on an elbow. Now I wasn’t going to sleep. “Maybe not here-here, but archeological evidence suggests that Littles and Amazons lived in different parts of the world, and now we’ve just mixed to the point where every place has Littles and Amazons. Hell, that’s where we get Tweeners from.”
My wife was still staring up at the ceiling far above us. Amazonian scaling. Some days our bedroom felt like part of a mansion. Other times, it was a deep dark cave. “There are still a few countries where Amazons aren’t allowed. Places they haven’t gotten to yet.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But there are Amazon only countries, t-”
“No there aren’t.” Catherine cut me off before I could finish the thought. “There’s just places where Littles have no rights at all and they don’t need an excuse to snatch us up and mind numb us. We can exist without them,” she said. “Not the other way around.”
I had nothing in reply, but Catherine wasn’t done… “Why are we measured in pounds?”
“As opposed to kilograms?”
Catherine was sitting upright again. “No I mean, why is our weight measured in pounds instead of glorbitz?”
“Glorbitz?”
“Made up word,” she clarified. “Why am I a hundred and twenty pounds instead of…I dunno…twenty-something glorbitz? Why are most Amazons damn near ten feet instead of…I dunno…five to six remulons or whatever?”
I sat up, too. So much for sleep. “You’re losing me, hon.”
“It makes sense for us to measure things in inches and feet. The scale is relevant to us. Made for us.” There was a weird, almost manic excitement in her tone. She was having a brainstorm and wouldn’t be able to sleep until it had run its course. I’d seen it before, usually when she had an idea for drawing or painting something. “Not counting really small or super gigantic quantities, our everyday units of measurement tend to be sized for us; for Littles. Right?”
I had no idea where she was going. “Sure…I think.”
“Like would roaches have the same scaling units of measurements for their furniture?”
“Did you just just compare us to roaches?”
“Stick with me, Clark.”
My head was beginning to hurt. “Okay okay. I get it. But there ARE other units of measurement that people use.” I said. “Metric doesn’t exactly scale with us, either. I sound much taller and much heavier in metric.”
“Exactly! Metric!”
“Why do I feel like you just agreed and disagreed with me at the same time?”
“Why isn’t there an Amazonian unit of measurement?”
The wheels were finally starting to turn. “Because then they wouldn’t seem as…big?”
“Exactly!” Catherine sounded like she’d just solved a murder. I was half expecting her to magically break out a pin board and bits of yarn.
“But if Bigness or whatever is so important to Amazons,” I countered, “why don’t they call themselves ‘Bigs’?”
“Because then we wouldn’t seem as little to them. We’d all be on more equal footing.”
“Losing me again.”
“They call themselves Amazons. What are we?”
“Littles…”
“Little what?” She paused for me to answer. I couldn’t. I didn’t know. “Little Amazons. They’re the default, everyone else is just the spin-offs.” The edge in her voice was getting more pronounced by the syllable. She was getting angry and telling her to calm down would have had the opposite effect. It didn’t help that I agreed with her on that one. Amazons thought of Littles as babies that wouldn’t grow up. Baby what? Baby Amazons of course.
My eyes were adjusting to the dark. I could see every little jerk, every agitated movement, every little flick of her wrist while she talked with her hands, working herself into a frenzy. “They came here,” she said as much to herself as to me. “They invaded. And they labeled us Littles, and when they…they…when we had kids with them, they got called In-Betweeners, but it was always about them.”
