Winter

Hey there Starlight,
Jaspercat here to leave you a review.

It's his second winter with a loving family--and his first winter since becoming a Giant. I would recommend taking away the dashes in this sentence. Right now it looks a little weird and it disrupts the flow of the sentence. If you really need to keep a form of punctuation then you should change it to a comma. However I do believe that the line would be just fine without any form of punctuation. He's not sure how to feel, honestly. I'm not sure how he feels either. So far the writing is very transparent and I would love to see some depth. He's glad to be free of the basement. But every time he looks in the mirror, he wants to scream. He hates his new body so much…

A hand on his arm. This is honestly written a little weird. He looks down at Thea.

"What's wrong?" she asks.

"I'm f--"

"Sam could tell you're not fine." She looks at him steadily. Maybe it's just me but I don't think the word 'steadily' works here. "He felt your pain from the other side of the house." I think it's interesting that this Sam character can feel the pain. Makes me wonder how he is able to feel the pain.

And suddenly he can't hide it anymore. The truth spills out in a rush:I would get rid of the colon here. he's scared of his own strength. He feels sick every time he steps on the scale. He still sees Opal in his nightmares. Try to either combine these last three sentences or find a way to write them a bit different. The repetition of 'he' at the beginning of each is a little tiring.

Thea listens. He can tell she doesn't fully understand, but she listens.

After a moment she opens her arms. And he hugs her without fear for the first time in months. Take away the period and make this into one sentence.

"You won't break me," she's often told him since it happened. Ok is this something she's telling him now or is it something that she has said that he's remembering. Right now it seems like the later and so if it is I would take away the dialogue tags and change the text to italics. If it is something that she's currently saying then I would indicate it a bit better.

Finally, he lets himself believe it.

One thing that you do very well in this piece is allowing the reader to infer. This scene obviously happened after something big, but I think you did a good job at providing enough information to let the reader understand what's going on without being confused, and also didn't put too much in that it reached the point where you were explaining rather than narrating.

On the actual content: I think it was a very good story! It obviously takes place in some sort of magical/supernatural/sci-fi world, given the mentions of someone feeling someone else's pain and a kid who becomes a giant. It's surprisingly poignant, for such a short piece. I could really feel all the emotion. Part of it comes from your writing style; it's quite eloquent and lovely.

My only complaint: there isn't more!! Hehe, just kidding. But I think you could really go somewhere with this. I was curious if there was another work prefacing this, or if it just sort of flowed out of you. I want to know the details of what happened before.

Thank you for this lovely and touching piece!

Hey there, starlightbandito, I'm WaterSpout, your reviewer.
When reading this, I could not find any grammatical errors, so good job on that.
I haven't seen many stories like this one, short and simple, yet with a lot of backstory.
Speaking of backstory, there is obviously a lot going on. This seems like the prelude of a much bigger story. There seems to be more characters, those of which have not been explained in this, for example, Sam and Opal. Unless this is from a book I haven't read, but that would be impossible.
Overall, good story, and I hope you create a second part.

With caution,

WaterSpout