Carmen, after the apple fell

we've known Carmen for more than 10 years. She actually introduced Sharon and me, back in the days when Sharon and I were a little more artistic and political. She's a dear friend to all of my family, but something of a commanding presence. In her plush, red, knee-length caftan and bare feet with polished toenails, she seemed to fill our spacious kitchen. She was a big, sometimes loud woman before 2000, and afterwards, nearly 11 feet high in the eyes of a guy like me, she blossomed even more, becoming even more outspoken and uninhibited -- something I wouldn't have dreamed was possible. Carmen was and continues to be a Rubens-esque woman, with a plumpness that wasn't very fashionable in the last decades of the 20th century, yet as one of the many ripples of the Gaea Effect, has made a comeback. Voluptuous, rounded and big-boned, with long fingers and long feet, she was a giantess among giantesses, as proud of her body as she was her brash personality.

The event that took place during the first week of the new Millennium is now popularly known as The Gaea Effect. As of this writing, scientists have yet to posit even a partial explanation as to what happened, physiologically speaking, and what its origins were. Since the event qualifies as the most "miraculous" documented event to occur in human history, the debate still rages as to whether the so-called Gaea Effect had a magical source or a scientific one, whether it was of earthly or extraterrestrial origin.

"Making calculations after the fact, scientists determined that at the stroke of midnight Greenwich Mean Time, January 1, 2000, the entire male population of Earth began to shrink. When the famous apple fell in Times Square the populace still hadn't noticed, but by dawn the next day, men all over the world began realizing something was wrong. And not just men: boys, male infants, any human with an XY chromosome was undergoing a constant, inexorable reduction in height."