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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/HistoricalKick4658 on 2024-12-22 19:06:09+00:00.

Hi, my name is Alina and I wanted to describe my brother’s story. It’s hard for him to do it himself, his fingers don’t fit on the keyboard. A cold wind is blowing, people are dressed in black, a priest is speaking, I don’t listen.

But let’s start from the beginning. Johnny was born a normal child, pink, loud and normal-sized, and he developed normally until he was 5 years old. I remember going to the playground with my younger brother, Johnny was holding a balloon with helium on a string, which his parents had bought him at an amusement park the day before. On the way he mentioned to me that a few “friends” from kindergarten were teasing him. He was running around the playground with his balloon, and I noticed my friends and went up to them to talk, I took my eyes off him for barely a minute. Suddenly I looked in his direction, and there the balloon was floating high into the sky, and Johnny was on his knees surrounded by a group of boys. I ran there as fast as I could, I may be a girl, but I quickly managed to chase the bullies away. On the way home Johnny didn’t say a word, he limped slightly and cried quietly. At home, my mother disinfected his knee, put a plaster on it, and we thought that at that point the matter was closed.

The next day when he came down for breakfast something about him didn’t seem right to me, I couldn’t understand what was going on until it dawned on me, he’s now my height, and yesterday he was half a head shorter. I alerted my parents, who didn’t believe me at first, but eventually they put him under a frame, where they marked his height with a knife as he grew each month, and there it was, silver on white - half a head, in one night.

At that point, the pilgrimage to doctors began, there were many theories, the most common was gigantism, caused by excessive production of a hormone by the pituitary gland, but the rapid growth did not fit, and subsequent tests did not show any chemical anomalies in his body. After a week, Johnny was already the size of his father, but he did not look like his father - a grown man, but an enlarged child. My brother was brave, despite his strange disease, he did not complain.

When Johnny grew again, we were returning from a winter walk when the same group of rascals appeared again. “Oh, he’s here,” shouted the gang leader, “let’s go for Godzilla!” and four of them ran and tried to jump him, but they bounced off him like dwarves from a dragon, and then they lay in the snow and cried. And it served them right.

Some time later we were eating milk soup for breakfast, the spoon in his hand looked like a match, his hair was scraping against the ceiling and his blond hair was turning white. “I’m worried Alina,” he said, “I’m slowly running out of room here, our parents are going bankrupt just on food, I recently tripped and fell through a partition wall and again expenses, because it has to be rebuilt.” My eyes were glazed over because he had revealed his plan to run away from home, go to the mountains, eat trees. I wasn’t allowed to tell my parents anything. Before we said goodbye I only asked him, " Johnny , why did you get so big?" “Because I wanted to be big enough not to feel pain,” he replied.

Some time passed again, as promised I didn’t say anything while my parents and half the city were looking for him. They wondered how such a giant could simply disappear? There were a few reports from the mountains near the city, but nothing certain. Then the news broke that a child had been found in a mountain forest, dead. I didn’t see any connection with our case, they had found a child, not a giant. But it was him, he had shrunk to normal size, a strange disease left no trace, he didn’t die from it, apparently his heart simply broke. And now I’m standing in this cemetery, watching a white box go into the ground, a coffin the size of a normal child. My parents were still in shock from all this, my mother stopped by me and asked the space rather than me “I wonder why he got smaller?” I replied “because he grew so he wouldn’t feel pain, he doesn’t feel it anymore”.