Glenn clutched himself to Wanda as closely as he could, their heartbeats synced in terror, as they watched the titanic fist of the teenage girl collide with the glass wall of their cage.  Again, and again, the freckled strawberry-blonde ShrinkSmart customer pounded her gigantic balled-up hand against the containment unit, a self-satisfied smirk spread over her lips and a curious glow emanating from her irises.  Every impact rattled the couple’s entire world, from the reflective boundaries of their prison to their highly fragile bones.

            And they were the so-called “lucky ones.”  They had both stopped shrinking at five inches, a size which automatically gave them far greater odds of survival than a large percentage of the population.  Many who possessed the shrinker gene would dwindle down to one, or even a half an inch.  It was a well-established eventuality that those who reached such a pitiful stature usually didn’t stick around for long, either because their owners and former family members found the prospect of caring for something so helpless to be too cumbersome when they could so easily flick them into a trash bin, or because shrinkers who did reach the minimum height were highly sought after by certain underground restaurants catering to clients with unusual appetites, though this was thankfully just a wretched rumor.

            All they had now was each other, and frankly, that was a tenuous reality at best.

            The girl opened her fists and slammed her palms against the glass again, the flesh appearing smushed and discolored from how hard she was pressing against it.  It elicited a particularly violent shake from both Glenn and Wanda inside, as they cowered lower and tried not to tremble too visibly.  Quaking with fear was an offense generally answered harshly by the store manager in ways the victims were often too traumatized to try relating afterward.

            “MOM, come look at these two!” the girl gasped excitedly, thumping the heels of her hands a few more times against the glass, and her lips curled into a coo.  “They’re adorable.”

            “I’m coming, Sherry, I’m coming,” her parent promised with a laugh, and leaned closer to the glass, squinting with some disdain at the sight of the tiny man and woman inside.  The discerning mother adjusted stylish eyeglasses on the bridge of her nose and patted a tight bun on the back of her head, as though afraid her composure would come undone by glancing at such lowly life forms.  “Well, they certainly look healthy enough, at least.”

            “Yeah, but look at them hugging each other.  They must be in love!” the girl exclaimed dreamily.  “So cute.”

            “I suppose anything’s possible if you stick two things in a container for long enough,” the woman sighed with a barely contained sneer, and shrugged.  “Do you want to have the manager open up their box so you can take a look?”

            “Yes!  Yes, yes, yes!” the girl squealed, and the man shuddered at the sight of the young shopper’s tongue lapping quickly out of the corner of her mouth.  As soon as the mother had marched out of sight to fetch the manager, Sherry had pressed her nose to the glass, another grin on her lips.

            “Hello in there, little ones,” she whispered.

            Fighting through the fear, Glenn worked up the courage to raise a hand and wave at the young teen, which earned another eek of delight.  He didn’t like it, but if this girl really had taken a liking to both himself and the only support system he had in the world, it would be in their best interest to make a good first impression, particularly if this Sherry had the wheedling power to get her mother to purchase both, because if she did, he and Wanda would be spending the rest of their lives in the girl’s questionably capable hands.  A show of friendship was probably in order.

            “Yes, it’s these two she’s interested in.  Right, honey?” the woman said at her elated daughter, pointing at Glenn and Wanda’s case as she reappeared from around the corner with the manager in tow, the sight of whom caused the pair of shrinkers to flinch yet again.

            Even though they were fairly good at keeping to the rules, the hard-edged woman who commanded ShrinkSmart took absolutely no resistance from any of her living merchandise, and frequently adopted the strategy of pre-emptively nipping potential problems in the bud.

            Which, for Glenn and Wanda, meant more than enough occasions of being left naked in the staff refrigerator until hypothermia was about to set in, usually for answering one of her questions with “an inappropriate tone.”

            “Ah, yes, them.  Your daughter has a good eye.  They’re both very well-behaved and in their prime,” the manager said as she pulled a key from a ring and set about opening the glass prison up.  Her steely eyes shot Glenn and Wanda a furtive glance that instantly ordered them to plaster fake smiles on their faces, which they did against their better judgment as the barrier between themselves and their oversized admirer was removed.

            “How old are they?” Sherry’s mother questioned.

            “Glenn, the male, is twenty-four and Wanda, the female, is twenty-three.  So, they’re both spry and filled with energy for interacting with their owner.”

            “Ooohh I like them already,” Sherry chuckled as she leaned closer to the opened cage, her silky locks trailing around her ears.  She smiled at the pair, and despite her continued show of aggressive interest in getting her hands on them, there was no maliciousness in her gaze, something Glenn and Wanda weren’t used to seeing on the faces of potential owners.  They waved again, hesitantly, without letting go of one another.  If their togetherness was a package deal selling point to this authoritative teen, it would be vital to keep up the image, even though there wasn’t much acting involved for the pair who’d grown so close in their frightful confines.

            “Can I pick them up?” Sherry asked of the manager without taking her eyes off the little five-inch prizes, cowering silently before her in their bright red underwear toned to the color of the ShrinkSmart logo.  The question came at a normal volume, completely uncaring of whether or not the tiny subjects heard or understood.  Her pale hands rose up to the level of the cage, her fingertips alighting on the rubber rim where the glass door had swung open, and tapped impatiently in a rippling pattern.  The youth bit her lip softly.

            “Of course,” the manager assured with a smile and a wave of her hand.

            “They’re not gonna try to run away when I do, are they?” the girl added.

            “I would hope not!  They’re ShrinkSmart pets, after all.  We seek only to provide our customers with the best trained specimens,” the manager said with a snicker in her best advertiser’s voice.

            “Cool,” Sherry breathed, and with this assurance, her hands pounced forward into the glass cage, fingers outstretched to receive.  Glenn and Wanda at last let go of one another, well-acquainted now with the sensation of being scooped up by the rough hands of an immature potential buyer and had learned a while back that the best course of action was to just prepare the body individually with tensed muscles for lift-off.

            The impact with Sherry’s palm was indeed forceful, though Glenn was surprised to discover the girl seemed to have some degree of reverence for his personal safety and Wanda’s as well in her other hand.  Her slender fingers coiled around his back firmly with enough strength that snaking out of the teen’s clammy fist would be a virtual impossibility, but nevertheless, he wasn’t going to come away with bruises.

            In fact, as she lifted him out of the cage in her right fist and Wanda in her left, Sherry seemed to be testing how tightly she needed to hang onto the pair to keep them secure without squeezing at all, and Glenn was shocked yet again to find he was fairly comfortable being compressed against the interior of the girl’s cushy hand, the warm flesh of her palm caving intimately against his bare body but without causing discomfort.  She even allowed his arms to freely rest atop her fingers, rather than pinning them hard against his sides, like he so often experienced when being picked up by kids.

            He glanced Wanda’s way in Sherry’s other hand, happy to see his mate was similarly positioned, and they exchanged looks of silently reassuring contentment to let the other know they weren’t in pain.

            It wasn’t a look they frequently had occasion to use.

            “Well?” the manager asked pleasantly.

            “I like them,” Sherry replied resolutely, nodding her head and lifting both hands higher until the heads of both shrinkers were level with her glowing eyes.  “I like how they just let me hold them without moving.”

            “Like I said, only the best here at ShrinkSmart.  Are they your choices, then?” the manager asked, grinning at Sherry’s mother.

            “Please, Mom?” the teen whinnied.  Idly, her thumb slid its way up the crook of Glenn’s neck and onto the side of his face, kneading his cheek gently against the smooth curvature of her fingerprint.

            Even for such an admittedly intrusive act, it wasn’t unpleasant, as she wasn’t even pressing against the young man’s head.  Despite all the unknowns of this moment, he allowed himself to enjoy being petted, and he noted that Wanda seemed to be doing the same thing in Sherry’s other hand as a different finger stroked itself gently through the woman’s long, tangled hair.

            The girl seemed to make note of Glenn’s positive reaction to her impromptu finger massage, because her digit began working more vigorously, but still without nudging the shrinker’s head too hard.  In spite of himself, the hapless shrinker found himself feeling legitimately relaxed under the control of this strawberry-blonde stranger as he savored the gentle touch of smooth flesh that had no intention to harm him as it rubbed his shoulders and face.  It was a novel sensation, to be sure.

            “I don’t know, honey,” the parent sighed, leaning a fist against her chin to contemplate.  “You’re not going to let them make a mess around the house, are you?”

            “No!  I’ll get them a nice big cage like this one so they can run around and stuff, and I’ll clean up after them whenever they need it,” the teen promised, then looked down at the two shrinkers who were obliging the caresses of her firm thumbs.  “Look, they like me too.  See?  They’re so, so precious.  I gotta have them, Mom!”

            “Okay, hold up, let’s just… talk about it a little more.  We’ll let you know, okay?” the woman said first to her daughter and then to the manager, who didn’t even let her dejection at not sealing the sale yet show through as she gave them a knowing smile and marched off to other parts of the store, leaving Sherry and her mother alone again.

            Glenn took a deep breath, his eyes darting over to Wanda across the expanse of Sherry’s shirt in her other massive hand, and could make out a bead of nervous sweat on the tiny woman’s brow that neatly matched his own.  Out of unknown boldness, he chanced a treacherous glance up at the looming face of Sherry’s mother, but regretted it in the same second as his eyes fell upon that feminine monument of reason and power that obviously had almost no patience for life forms such as himself and Wanda.

            A knot was twisting itself ruthlessly into the pit of his stomach.

“C’mon, Mom.  Can’t I please have them both?  I’ve been working super hard in school lately, and I’ve been doing all my chores now and all that stuff,” Sherry wheedled, taking a step closer to her mother and tapping her foot anxiously against the colored tile.  The teen’s warm fists grew clammier as they remained coiled around the nearly nude bodies of her five-inch-tall potential pets.  “Pleeeeease?”

            “Honey, you don’t have to remind me about what you’ve done recently, your dad and I are very proud of you, but these… these things-” her mother continued.

            “Shrinkers, Mom.  They’re alive, you know.  They’re not things,” Sherry interrupted to correct, much to the surprise of Glenn and Wanda, who stole another glance of hesitant joy at one another.  This was a recognition, at least in part, neither had experienced in years, since they’d begun to shrink back in their teenage years, when they were just a matter of months older than this girl was now.

            “Mhmm, honey.  The thing is, though, that they’re… a couple of the more expensive ones in the store, see?  $99.99 apiece.  That’s… quite a bit for a couple of shrinkers,” the woman complained, tapping a finger on the plastic price tag that hung above the glass cage.  “Now, if you wanted two of the cheaper ones, we could talk about that.  Did you see at the front?  There were some that were only $49.99.  They were younger, too, so they’d last you longer.”

            “You mean the ones in the cages by the window?” Sherry snorted, wrinkling her freckle-dotted button nose in disgust.

            “Yes.  Something wrong with them?” her mother pressed, adjusting the rim of her glasses again.

            “Um, yeah!  They were all just screaming and running around their cages and making noise.  Imagine if they did that once I had them in my room.  I’d never get any sleep.  No, they were all just little monsters, not like these two,” Sherry continued.

            Glenn immediately knew what the girl was referring to.  As the shrinker gene took hold sometime during the teenage years for about 95% of cases, many of the newcomers to ShrinkSmart were in this age range, and as they were recently reduced in size, hadn’t taken kindly to being sold off by their former families to be marketed as pets.  It was always a sad thing to see a fresh batch of adolescent arrivals, even for those who’d been locked up in cages for a long time.  The manager wasted little time in snuffing rebellion out of even the youngest dissenters by depriving them of clothes, water, and sleep to teach a lesson.  Glenn and Wanda had the benefit of growing up on a farm until a year before, where they’d learned one of the most vital skills a shrinker could possess: silence.

            It made him feel guilty to imagine all those teenage shrinkers at the front of the store who didn’t realize how impossible they were making it for themselves to find a good owner by throwing tantrums like that, and how increasingly probable it was that they’d eventually move on to a location with significantly hornier clientele, or even a medical testing facility, but it was every shrinker for him or herself in this world, and both Glenn and Wanda were well-aware of that.

            “They do seem well-mannered, I suppose,” the mother relented with a drawl, then shook her head again.  “But I still don’t think we can do it.”

            Glenn gave Wanda another glance, tilting his head at an angle and nudging his right elbow so subtly only his mate picked it up.  She blinked as a form of nodding, understanding the signal, and both wrapped their arms in an embrace around Sherry’s thumbs.  It was now or never to make the sale.

            “Oh my goooosh…” the enamored teen cried, and her eyes actually seemed to have welled with tears of joy as she trembled with glee at the sight of the two shrinkers obediently hugging her fingers with all of their strength.  “Mom, look!”

            “Oh, for Pete’s sake…” the woman chuckled, rolling her eyes, then groaned with playful defeat.  “So are you gonna throw in some of your allowance money toward them, then?”

            Glenn couldn’t help but feel a little wave of goose bumps roll over his skin, and knew Wanda must’ve been experiencing something similar.

            Had they succeeded?

            “Yes!  Yes, I will!  However much you need,” Sherry vowed excitedly to her mother, spitting out the words in rapid-fire once she realized she was on the verge of getting what she wanted.  “Every dollar I have!”

            “Mhmm, I’m sure,” the woman answered sarcastically, and crossed her arms.  “Seriously, honey, we better see those grades stay right where they are if we’re gonna do this, okay?”

            “They will, Mom, they will!  Call Dad if you want and tell him they will.”

            “I’ll take your word for it, honey.  Just remember, though: if I trip over one of them out of their cages, on the run in my house, well…” she said, and then, lifting her right foot off the ground clad in a black clog, stomped onto the tile with a threatening clack, twisting her heel against the ground.

            “Mom!” Sherry gasped in horror, and both Glenn and Wanda were reassured that the woman was not joking in the least.

            “Just kidding, honey.  That would only make a bigger mess.  Now, I’ll go ahead and find the manager again to see if there’s anything we have to go over, and then we can go ring them up, okay?” she said with a loving pat on her daughter’s shoulder, and then sauntered off out of the long aisle again, leaving Sherry alone with the shrinkers again.

            “Thanks so much, Mom!” Sherry called after her, and then brought her gentle fists back to eye level to more closely examine her two new pets.

            “Hi there, cuties,” she said, her voice lowered to a throaty whisper, and she brandished the pair close enough to her chin that they could feel her warm breath, scented of a sticky cinnamon gum, wafting in steamy clouds on every exhalation.  “You’re gonna be mine now.”

            Glenn and Wanda both coughed as they adjusted to the stinging scent of the girl’s spicy breath, but quickly recovered and put smiles on their tiny faces, even nodding their heads to add confirmation of their contentedness with this fact.

            “Does that make you happy?” Sherry questioned quietly.  The pair shook their heads “yes” more emphatically this time, causing the teen to beam even brighter.  She even let out a few bursts of girlish giggles that released larger puffs of the cinnamon cloud.

            “I’m so glad.  Trust me, you guys are gonna like being my pets so much.  I… might have to save up for a little while again before I can get you that big cage like I said, since I kinda have to give Mom my money just to buy both of you, but once I do, it’s gonna be so great,” Sherry explained breathlessly, clearly full of grandiose plans to make life for her charges into a mini lifelong resort.  Her rosy-tinted locks bounced against her shoulders as she rambled.

            All Glenn and Wanda could do was nod continuously.  Anything to keep this ideal situation alive and at peak positivity.

            “So, do you two really love each other?” Sherry pressed with sudden seriousness.  The pair paused, surprised by this question, then truthfully nodded again.

            “Can you show me?” the girl pleaded hopefully, moving her fists closer together and unraveling her curled fingers enough that the pair could lean their faces in to one another.  Without any hesitation, Glenn and Wanda locked lips, hardly having to put on any kind of show, so happy were they to have not only managed to stay together, but to have had the good fortune to go to an owner who, it seemed, would treat them humanely and even with a dash of love.

            They smooched for a solid ten seconds, and particularly near the end, they could feel Sherry’s hands shaking with excitement again.  Once they pulled away, and the girl’s fingers wrapped themselves back around her new pets again, they were treated to the single most adoring coo their ears had ever experienced.

            “Oh Gooood you guys are so adorable and perfect,” Sherry sighed.  The teen’s gargantuan fingers set about caressing the backs of Glenn and Wanda’s heads again, kneading at their shoulders with loving aggression that they once again couldn’t help but appreciate.  She brought the pair closer to her lips again, planting tiny, delicate pecks with her plush lips into their hair.

            “Honey, are you ready?  She says all the info we need is up at the register, so if you want to just carry those two and follow the lady to the front, we can get going,” Sherry’s mom called out from the end of the aisle, having retrieved the shrinkers’ tormenter, who looked beyond pleased to have succeeded in making the sale.

            “Okay, Mom!” Sherry gleefully answered, then lowered her voice down to an inaudible rumble of anticipation.  “I just can’t wait to watch you guys make a baby shrinker for me,” the girl whispered under her breath into the ears of her pets before darting off after her mother and the manager, keeping the pair gripped at chest level.

            And that was when Glenn, despite his continued gratitude to be remaining in safety with his beloved, was forced by this final nonchalant comment of the wide-eyed and innocent possessor of his very existence to peer into the potential challenges of the future.  Instantly he felt another sickening churning in his innards, and even as Sherry’s thumb set about caressing his weary body again with such adoring tenderness, he knew that this particular feeling wouldn’t be fading anytime soon.

            “You’re a perfect fit!” Massie sighed happily as she lovingly brushed her thumb along her three-inch-tall older brother Paul’s puny cheek, having secured him firmly to the rubbery insole of her slipper with a generous strip of electrician’s tape across his bare chest.

            She puckered her lips and blew him a whispered kiss, then winked, batting her long eyelashes playfully in the process.  Her thumb tapped impatiently against the lip of the shoe as she spoke again: “You’re gonna feel so good down there.  I just know it.”

            The defeated young man nodded meekly as he glanced out at the looming visage of his younger sister’s beaming countenance, framed by the dark and well-worn walls of her shoe that had become a hollow prison to him.  It wasn’t a very deep piece of footwear, but all the same, given his newly finger-sized stature, and the emotional weight of his new life, it could’ve just as easily been the deepest pit of hell.

            His morning hadn’t been so horrendous, at least until he’d actually woken up.  He’d been enjoying a dream about the time before he’d realized he carried the shrinker gene: riding the bus to school, eating lunch on the park benches, meeting his friends at the movies.  It felt so distant, back when he was still treated like a normal human being, and yet he’d only been discovered to possess the gene five months ago, when he’d started experiencing the early symptoms, of weakness, nausea, and headaches, aside from the steady decrease in standing.

            Paul’s was one of the faster cases.  Most took around a year to reach their final diminished height, so he’d had even less time to savor his remaining days as a full citizen, before he’d been deemed property by the entire free world.

            Of course this dream, like his liberty, had to come to a rude halt once he’d been awoken to the sensation of Massie’s gargantuan fingers curling firmly around his sides and entrapping him into the cushy center of her hand, already clammy with anticipation.  The girl’s palms generally took on a layer of excited sweat just as soon as she had her toy-sized sibling gripped into it, and the effect had only been expounded the smaller Paul had shrunk over the past months, until he’d finally been small enough for her to hold in her hand: something she’d been checking for daily with gleeful anticipation.  He could tell she enjoyed this, and whether or not that was a good or bad thing was a terrifying toss-up, though right now he was leaning toward “bad thing.”

            All he could do then was wait in the darkness of her warm fist, ensconced in the sweet haze of flesh and perspiration, and listen to her trouncing joyfully across the tile of the kitchen, where he spent his nights now.  Paul heard the telltale clack of his hamster cage being shut and locked again as soon as he was plucked from his makeshift bed amongst the wood shavings, where Massie had found him so easily, given the utter lack of privacy he had inside.  He’d hardly received a hearty good morning from her before she had him balled into her fist, cut off from the right to sight and sound.

            His makeshift new “home” was a fairly chintzy metal cage that sat on the kitchen counter.  It was intended for pets, purchased for $5.50 at a nearby Goodwill by his parents, who in their crushing shame to have parented a shrinker, had put the minimal required effort into ensuring their former “son” had somewhere to stay.  Letting him have his own bedroom anymore, of course, was out of the question, particularly once he’d shrunk small enough that he couldn’t climb into bed on his own.  The faint odor of dried hamster urine was still stained to the plastic base of the box, as nobody had cared enough to bother giving it a thorough cleaning before dumping Paul into it.

            This morning, the diminished teen didn’t have much time after being freed from his little sister’s caged fingers before he was plunged back into equally dim lighting and poor breathing space.  The next two solid hours were spent with Massie spread out on the couch, munching on a granola bar, thumbing through messages on her cell phone, and flipping through the TV channels.

            Her tiny sibling, of course, saw very little variety during that time aside from the most intricate spiral patterns laden in the flesh on the ball of Massie’s left foot, which had been pinned authoritatively down onto the shrinker’s body without ceasing.

            Occasionally, the girl would give her foot a lithe twist, kneading her brother down into the bouncy give of the couch cushions before relenting just enough that he was buoyed up by the fabric and pounded right back into her bus-sized peachy appendage.  This was always the most unpleasant part.

            Eventually, though, Massie got around to rolling Paul under her wrinkled sole, an admittedly more inviting prospect, as the surface of it was far softer and easier on Paul’s body.  Ironically, the young man’s discovered identity as a shrinker had done wonders for Massie’s skin care, as it prompted her to begin utilizing a variety of lotions on her hands and feet in order to ensure Paul was “as comfortable as possible,” as she put it.  Of course, this had still come after the non-negotiable decree that he’d be spending quite a bit of time at his new size under the mercy of both appendages, so it was a bittersweet gift at the absolute best.

            Despite himself, though, Paul had started begrudgingly looking forward to the inevitable occasions when Massie would deposit him in the plush center of her arched foot.  Her beauty store products had indeed ensured her skin was like kissed velvet, almost baby-soft, and generally scented strongly of citrus or summer flowers.  Once he’d gotten into a rhythm of taking breaths as her titanic foot rocked to the side, relieving the pressure momentarily, it wasn’t the worst possible place he could end up, not by a long shot.

            After all, he’d heard plenty of horror stories of others who’d taken to storing their shrinkers, sibling or not, in a very particular and sensitive place a bit higher up on their bodies.  Hell, he’d known people who tried it, and never thought anything of it.

            Luckily, his sister had insisted on trying to maintain his safety as best as she could while standing on her three-inch brother like this, and truth be told, with the doughy ceiling whomping itself purposefully over his small frame, he could convince himself it was like an aggressive full-body massage.  Frankly, he had to attempt mind games like this, because to deny such a prospect would force Paul to confront the fact that his younger sister now had the right to pin him under her cold soles whenever she pleased like some discarded piece of lint, and that would’ve been a bit too much to handle.

            Massie was one who habitually got bored with a single activity, however, and after zoning out on the couch for so long, with her only major movements coming from the practiced caressing of her miniscule brother’s quivering form under her powerful foot, the girl had reached down and snatched him back up into her palm from between the crevice of carpet fiber and feminine sole.  This had immediately been followed by her retreating to her room again and jostling him roughly in her fist along the way.

            And minutes later here he was, taped to the base of her slipper.  She’d at least taken her time, ensuring her brother was positioned in the safest possible place, beneath where her arch was deepest and most forgiving.  Even when pinning his limbs down at first, she hadn’t used the force she could’ve to fully restrain him, knowing he was cognizant enough at this point in this new life to know when a decision had been made for him.  The tape had been carefully placed to avoid bubbles, and she’d spent a couple minutes afterward stroking the layers of adhesive across Paul’s torso to ensure they were tight enough, and it actually relaxed the teen just a little.

            In spite of the grim spectacle of having to look out at his sister’s face beyond the walls of the shoe, probably the only other sight he’d be seeing for a while before the quick flash of her toes and then sudden, sweaty darkness, Paul couldn’t count himself as afraid.  After all, for the past month, the girl had taken to pinning her brother under her toes and soles as often as she had free time around the house to watch TV or do her homework, and had become fairly skilled at doing it without harming him in the slightest.  That, at much, he had to be grateful for, amidst a new world wherein there was precious little to be grateful for.

            “Oh, I almost forgot!” Massie sang in a voice that reverberated off the inner walls of her slipper as she held it closer to her mouth, near enough that her rank morning breath could cloud warmly into the black hovel and prompt her brother to cough.  Her brown curls bounced merrily against her shoulders as she trembled with glee.

            “What?”

            “I have a surprise for you, Paulie,” she murmured enticingly, and licked her lips from one corner of her mouth to the other.  Her tongue left a glistening trail behind it.  “You wanna guess what it is?”

            “Not really,” Paul hacked, still recovering from the throaty stench wafted from the girl’s unclean tongue.

            “I know my birthday’s not for another two weeks, but Mom and Dad already told me what they’re giving me, and… I think it’s probably the best present I’ve ever gotten… or am ever gonna get, ever,” she continued with a cheesy grin plastered victoriously on her pink lips, obviously having easily ignored her sibling’s hum-drum spirit.

            “Yeah?”

            “It’s you,” she whispered meaningfully, keeping her lips pursed for several seconds afterward to let this final syllable resonate for all it was worth.

            Paul’s mouth hung open, and a creaky rattle managed to escape his throat as he gazed into his sister’s gargantuan, unblinking blue eyes as they peered cheerily at him.

            “What?” he gawked distantly.

            “Yeah!  They said cuz I’ve been so responsible with you while you’re tiny, that it shows I deserve you the most.  So I’m gonna be your new owner!” she declared happily.

            The shrinker had to hold back a snort.  He knew damn well his parents couldn’t have cared less how Massie decided to treat her reduced brother.  This, he suspected, was just a fiscally-minded ploy on their part to save on buying her a birthday present this year, as she clearly had taken such a shine to possessing her miniaturized sibling.  Obviously, this possibility had flown right over her youthful and occasionally naïve head with the pure excitement of being able to actually own her older brother, and it almost made him want to laugh.

            After a few seconds had passed, though, his heart sank all the same, though in being honest with himself, he couldn’t quite understand why.  His own parents had disowned him and basically turned him into an indentured servant once he’d started losing height, and then a house pet as soon as he was small enough to live in that hamster cage.  He had a sheet of felt for a bed, water from an inverted bottle, food scraps sprinkled in through the grated roof, and a medicine cup to do his business in.  No friends, no time outside alone, and no entertainment aside from when someone accidentally left the TV on.  He hardly received a word of human acknowledgement, let alone a single glance, from his current keepers.

            Could Massie actually be any worse?

            In truth, Paul knew that, no, she couldn’t be.  Sure, she adored being able to squash her brother beneath her bare soles, or plunk him into a brightly colored sock.  Sure, she’d spent each morning of the past five months pinning him to a door frame with her newfound strength advantage and measuring him, noting the distance he lost every day until he passed below her head, then her chest and waist and knees until it seemed futile to bother using the frame as reference.  Even those things didn’t make her as bad as his parents.

            No, what really was troubling him now was the resolute act of being passed along like an object by his parents, or at least the people who would’ve once allowed him to call them his parents.

            Becoming Massie’s birthday present, even if he was the most treasured one of all time, still was a definitive declaration that he was no longer a person, but property, fit to be gifted to whoever his current owners wanted.

            He was two-and-a-half years older than Massie.  He was smarter, more experienced, more mature, and half a year ago, taller and stronger.

            And precisely none of that meant a single damn thing now.

            He was hers, totally and absolutely.  To be toyed with, tormented, and cherished in whatever ways she chose.  She could stuff him into the toe section of her slipper and wear him continuously until he expired from the heat and crushing weight of her squirming digits, and at most, Massie would be reprimanded with a pitiful chuckle from somebody who thought she’d wasted a perfectly good shrinker, when she could easily have squeezed more slave labor out of him with slightly less harsh treatment.

            Idly, Paul wondered if he’d be allowed to choose what color wrapping paper he’d be presented in to his sister, then had to stop himself when it occurred to him just how foolishly optimistic a concept this was.

Evidently, Massie could detect the dejected look on her miniscule brother’s face as he remained fastened to the center of her rubber insole, nearly swallowed up by shadow.  She furrowed her brow and tilted her head piteously, adjusting her grip on the shoe as she gazed inside at his pathetically entrapped and soon-to-be-hidden form.

            Apparently, the shrunken lad wasn’t taking the news at all well that he was to be her birthday present from their parents.

            “Don’t look so sad, Paulie.  This is a good thing,” she assured in a gentler voice.  “Y’know, I wasn’t gonna say it, but… I sort of asked Mom and Dad for this.  To have you, I mean.  I was hoping they’d give you to me as soon as you started getting smaller, actually.”

            “Why?” he sighed darkly, too resigned given his train wreck of a new life to be any more put out by this than was necessary.

            “I dunno.  I just know some people at school whose parents bought them their own shrinkers from the store.  It just seemed… so awesome.  Getting to have a little person of my very own.  And when you started getting smaller, it was like… it was like you were made for me.  To be mine,” she described dreamily, then scrunched her face up adorably once she’d emerged from the reverie.  “The cutest and funniest and best little person I could want.”

            “Uh-huh,” Paul grunted, unable to help himself from feeling oddly flattered to be spoken of so positively after such a long time of being downtrodden, though the effect was nearly undone to hear his sister simultaneously speaking so naturally of owning a person she’d known - shared genealogy with - for her entire life in an ostensibly equal context.

            “So see, you don’t have to be all grumpy about this.  I’m not gonna treat you bad like a lot of other shrinkers get.  We can… help each other,” Massie explained earnestly, nonchalantly twirling a swirly lock of hair around her index finger.  “I know there are things we both want.”

            “Yeah?” he answered, nerves rightfully reinvigorated.

            “Sure.  Y’know, like… how I wanna put you in my shoes, and in my socks.  And my stockings.  It feels good,” the girl explained matter-of-factly, pressing a finger to the corner of her lip.  “You just… feel good.  Under me.”

            “So I’ve heard,” Paul mouthed to himself under his breath.  If that wasn’t the rallying cry of shrinker-owners, he didn’t know what was.

            “But then for you… well, I bet it’s no fun living in that crappy cage Mom and Dad got you, so in two weeks you’ll start living in my old doll house.  With your own bed, and table and chairs and car, and everything!” she posed happily.  Her fingers snaked their way back into the shoe’s opening, partially blotting out the view of her face, though Paul could still easily make out her cheekily grinning lips, plush and primed.

            “Oh,” he groaned as his sister’s huge fingertips roughly nudged at his sides around the tape in an attempt to pet him, which in turn caused the adhesive to dig with even itchier fervor at his skin.

            This was probably the thousandth reason Paul had discovered that made him bemoan the fact that most shrinkers were just given enough clothing articles to cover their private areas, as yet another symbol of separation between them and true “humans.”  He knew there would be a very particular brand of sting to look forward to when his sister finally peeled him out of the shoe.

            “That’s not all, though.  I can make little foods just for you, and stitch new pants for you to wear.  Plus, I bet for my birthday I’m also gonna get a pair of those shrink-rider shoes where your little person fits at the bottom, cuz I was telling Aunt Carol about them, and she said she thought I deserved a pair.  My friend Kristy has ‘em, and she wears her sister in them all the time and she says it doesn’t even hurt her at all!  And then sometimes, y’know, if I don’t feel like using you in my shoe, you can sit in my purse and go to the mall and the movies and stuff,” Massie rambled before finally taking a final deep breath.  “Won’t that be great?”

            A good deal of it was still a terrifying omen on the horizon in Paul’s mind, particularly in the case of those shrink-riders, but given the vast and mortality-threatening alternatives, that all actually sounded incredibly livable.

            “Yeah, sounds okay,” he mumbled truthfully.  He’d learned to take his victories where he could get them, no matter how little like victories they actually appeared.

            “I knew you’d agree!” she squealed softly, and the world around her as well as gravity seemed to shift as she lowered herself down into a chair in her bedroom.  The shoe didn’t stop, and landed with a delicate thump on the carpet.

            Though his view was upside down, Paul was treated to an intimidating view of his younger sister’s slender left leg, winding up and up and up like an alabaster pillar holding up a hallowed structure until it reached her tight dreamsicle-orange track shorts.  At this distance, looking up at the girl’s massive body in all its towering magnificence, the teen had to remind himself with a painful gulp that his sister only stood at around five-foot-five.

            “Anyway, I just wanted to let you know, so you’d have something to look forward to until I let you out of there later,” Massie said with a shrug, and Paul’s heart jolted at the sight of his younger sibling’s bulbous toes gripping the edge of the shoe, as though they were their own entities just itching to crawl inside with him.  She snickered at his bracing reaction and shook her head.  “Don’t be scared.  We’ve done this so many times before!”

            “Y-Y-Yeah,” the teen said with a hard swallow, rapidly mulling over a last-ditch effort, then blurted as he saw her dexterous digits cresting over the lip of the shoe: “MASSIE!”

            “What’s up, Best Birthday Present Ever?” the girl addressed with a giggle.  “Is the tape not tight enough?”

            “No, no, it’s… it’s tight…” he confirmed pitifully, realizing with every passing second how futile this was.  “I was just wondering if… maybe you… don’t wanna do this?”

            “Don’t wanna do what?” she pressed.  “Don’t wanna use you down there?”

            “Yeah.”

            “Oh, c’mon, it’ll only be for a few hours while I’m out with Callie and Kristy, and besides, you feel sooooo good down there,” Massie moaned pleasurably in a voice that startled her brother with its intensity.  Frankly, it was a voice far more satisfied than he preferred to hear with reference to his muggy torment.

            “But… wouldn’t you… rather hang out, instead of…” he sputtered, clawing for alternatives.  “I… I w-wanna hang out with you, sis!”

            “Awww, that’s so sweet!  Don’t you worry: we’re definitely gonna hang out later.  Just you and me.  You’re gonna help me pick out what color you’re gonna be painting on my nails, and then we’ve got some Netflix to catch up on.  That ‘chick flick’ queue has like six movies with our names on it, so that’s basically the whole weekend there,” Massie promised, then quickly added: “But first things first!”

            “Of course,” he muttered under his breath again, shutting his eyes in wait for the inevitable.

            “There’s no need to make a big deal, y’know?  This is just something that’s going to happen to you sometimes, cuz I like it,” she stated calmly as she leaned down closer to the carpet again.  “Besides, I’m so used to doing this now, I bet it feels… kinda good for you, too.  Doesn’t it?”

            It made the teen hate himself more than almost anything, but now more than ever he couldn’t look his sister in the eye, because he knew, at least in part, she was right.

            “Bye-bye, Paulie,” she crooned with a princess-like wave of her fingers, before pressing the tips of her digits to her lips and blowing him another gentle kiss.  He didn’t even have to acknowledge her assumption; they both knew the answer to her humiliating question.

            Massie’s toes dove into the shoe, blocking out the light, and then she set about working the rest of her foot in until her heel popped into the back of the slipper with the aid of her thumb and a soft fwump.  She dug her grooved heel against the carpet, ensuring it was on tightly enough to keep her three-inch passenger fully secure, and then rose up.

            Paul fell back into his learned pattern like a seasoned pro the moment his gigantic sister and soon-to-be-owner started walking again.  When Massie’s foot would touch down, her flesh firming up like a punching bag, he would expertly tense his muscles and settle his shape into her skin like he was making a snow angel.

            When the foot would ascend to take a step, however, the pressure alleviated, the give of her skin softening as an infinite pillow, the teen could allow himself to relax for just an instant and take a deep, nourishing breath.

            Once he had this dance down-pat, it all became a blur of smooth skin and caressing wrinkles that loomed above in the black, capable of squelching him into extinction, but stopping well short of this, and instead offering a larger-than-life working over of his tired body with more skill than the most assertive masseuse.

            She was right.

            It wasn’t so bad.

            After all, Massie had indeed taken the time to ensure her brother’s stint below her wasn’t too hellish, as the air reeked not-altogether-terribly of wild berry and rose.  Her sole was cold to the touch, pressed against his chest and stomach, but still oddly pleasant, and Paul knew that over time, with enough walking, it would become snugger, probably in tandem with the return of the staler smell of his sister’s salty sweat and flaked skin, but it would undoubtedly be a slow enough process that he’d hardly notice.

            It was all an unknown void.  His whole meaningless life seemed to stretch before him invisibly into the dark distance, just like the fleshy expanse of the girl’s sole, undulating above as a harbinger made of human clay and mashing him down into the smelly rubber below.

            In two weeks, he’d be fully inherited by his younger sibling.  This was officially his entire existence, contained in one thought.  According to the law, this bondage was binding until one of them perished, debt required her to surrender assets, or she simply decided to gift him to another.

            Which, in Paul’s tortured mind, suddenly felt like a tangible and mortifying possibility.

            What if she grew bored of him?  What if she gave him away as a present to a close friend, or as a consolation prize to a social rival?  What if she made him an heirloom someday when she had a child of her own and his remaining years were spent as a pet for a niece or nephew?  What if she, one day, decided she was sick of looking at his face and simply neglected to ever untape him again from the bottom of her shoe, only acknowledging his existence by the act of grounding him into the earth on every alternate step until his insignificant molecules simply melded into the very foundation of her body?

            No.

            No, she would do none of those things.  He could hear it in her voice like an unwritten sacred promise.

            He was Massie’s, forever: an idea that, six months ago would’ve filled him with doom and dread, but now, was simply a fact.  No longer depressing, or infuriating, or even necessarily scary.

            It just… was.

            And at last, amidst that insanity and the sensory overload as Paul found himself once again painlessly buried under his sister’s titanic foot for the first of many times as her property, her cold, doughy flesh molding tenderly over his frame, he discovered something else inside.  Something he didn’t expect to ever feel again.

            Relief.

            “Shelly.  Hey, Shelly,” Kaye called down to her friend from the end of the cafeteria table over the dull roar of feasting students.  “Over here.”

            “What?”

            “I got a couple new ones.  What do you say?  Can we talk about it again?”

            Shelly tried not to roll her eyes too visibly and groaned piteously.  “Uggh.  Really?  Again?  What makes these any different than the last ones?”

            “You’ll see.  These are some great ones,” Kaye assured her, waving her hand.  “C’mon down here.  I’ll show you.”

            “Fine.  But don’t be surprised if I start laughing cuz you got cheated again,” Shelly agreed begrudgingly as she rose from her seat to move further down the line.  Standing up straight, she ruffled her wild golden locks through her fingers and pouted her lips for good measure as she sauntered over to Kaye’s seat, drawing the instant attention of a couple dozen pairs of eyes around her.  “Okay, what?”

            “I really think you’re gonna like these.  I bet you’ll want to trade for them,” Kaye said with a grin as Shelly slid into the empty chair next to her.

            “Fat chance.  So let’s see already,” Shelly grumbled disbelievingly, unable to keep a victorious little smile from crossing her lips as well.

            “Here goes,” Kaye said as she lifted her purse up onto the table, shoving her half-eaten lunch into the center to make room, and began rooting through the contents with wide, hungry eyes.  Then, removing a small padded jewelry box and laying it on the table, she opened the top to reveal two male shrinkers sprawled inside.  Both were stripped down to a pair of underwear and were in fairly good shape, though both had fear practically dripping from their eyeballs.

            “You’re kidding, right?” Shelly snorted condescendingly as she raised an eyebrow at the pair of four-inch-tall living toys.  “You wanna trade me those two for literally the greatest shrinker ever?”

            “Did you even see the muscles on these little guys?” Kaye gasped in annoyance.  Reaching into the box, she plucked one of the shrinkers up by his hips and held him between two fingers in front of Shelly’s eyes.

            With the tip of her index finger she stroked along the tiny biceps to show them off.  Then, bracing her middle finger against the pad of her thumb, she flicked the shrinker in his toned abs, eliciting a small grunt of surprise from him, but no further response.  “Seriously, you could grate cheese off these dudes.”

            “Uh-huh.  Yeah, I’m pretty sure Raoul could kick both of their asses in about two seconds,” Shelly droned with dramatically drooped eyelids, and brushed a hand back through her tresses.

            “Okay, maybe he could, but he’s also, what, seven inches tall?  That’s not fair to compare them like that,” Kaye said, then brought the shrinker close to her lips, extending the tip of her tongue against his chest.  The tiny man froze up, but didn’t flinch as the teen’s titanic muscle slimed its way across his shoulders provocatively.

            “Whatever.  So what exactly can these two even do that makes you think I should give you Raoul for them?”

            “Well, Pecs is a mean tongue wrestler,” Kaye responded, then glanced down at her shrinker dangled in her fingertips, at last looking him in the eye.  “Aren’t you?”

            Feebly, the four-inch shrinker nodded, obviously far more horrified to have his teenage owner looking him in the eye than when she’d simply been licking him.

            “See?  Now let’s give Ms. Shelly a show, little guy,” she ordered.  Her lips parted, her tongue extended to accept its prisoner, and she deposited the shrunken individual atop it, forcing him to awkwardly grapple with the slimy beast for support.  Then, with a hearty slurp, she pulled him in up to his calves so that only his feet hung out.  Her cheeks undulated as she set about sucking on his body, her tongue obviously going to work as well in tubing itself around him.  A gooey drop of spittle escaped the corner of the girl’s lips.

            “You called him Pecs?” Shelly chuckled, prompting Kaye to slide the spit-coated shrinker back out of her mouth.

            “No, no, he’s got another name.  I think it was… John?  James?  I don’t know, it was something boring that started with a J, so now I just call him Pecs cuz his are a little bigger than the other guy’s,” Kaye explained indignantly, waving her hand around while keeping Pecs pinched securely between her thumb and pointer finger, then plopped him into the center of her palm, where he froze up again.  “So, what do you think?  I’ll let you try him out if you don’t believe me.  It feels great, and I know you couldn’t be able to get as much of Raoul into your mouth as you could with this guy!”

            “Yeah, umm… I’m gonna go ahead and pass.  He looks all… uhh…” Shelly grumbled, wrinkling her lip in disgust as she observed the saliva-drenched shrinker in her friend’s open hand.  “Plus, he’s got all your…”

            “Oh.  Crap, yeah,” Kaye said apologetically, realizing that discolored bits of lunch mush from between her teeth were now strewn stickily over Pecs’ previously pristine body.  “I guess I should’ve rinsed out before I did that, huh?  What do you want from me, it’s just food, who cares?”

            “I wouldn’t put any of Raoul in my mouth after I’d been eating.  Not with what I do with him, anyway,” Shelly whispered discreetly as she smiled again.  “I like him looking his best for when I need him.”

            “Oh come ooooon, Shelly!” Kaye pleaded.  She lowered an upside down Pecs toward her glass of water on her lunch tray and dunked him into it, holding him just below the surface and letting him thrash around in drowning terror for a moment before removing him sputtering and thrashing.  “See?  Clean as a whistle now.”

            “I don’t think so.  You’re not really selling these two very well to me, for someone who supposedly wants to trade for my very favorite toy in the whole world,” the teen queen answered, digging her pinky finger delicately at the corner of her mouth and sighing.  “So what’s this other one’s name?  Gluts?”

            “No!” Kaye said immediately as she laid Pecs back in the box, adding under her breath: “I already traded Gluts away…”

            “Let’s just see what you can do with him, whatever he’s called,” Shelly giggled, crossing her arms and leaning back in the chair.

            “Okay, I can’t exactly show you what he’s good at…” Kaye mumbled as she scooped the other equally muscular shrinker into her palm.  Her eyes darted below the table and between her legs.  “Let’s just say he knows his way around the basement.”

            Shelly rolled her eyes again and blew out a puff of air.  “First of all, nobody calls it the fucking basement, and second of all, Raoul does too, and he’s got way longer arms, so he can get in deeper.  How’s whatever-this-one’s-called supposed to compete with that?”

            “Oh, he does.  He… knows the sweet spots,” Kaye answered dreamily as she brought her cupped palm closer to her chin, exhaling heavily onto the shrinker’s body.  He cringed at the sultry heat wave.

            “You don’t… put him in your mouth, too, with what he does, do you?” Shelly posed with revulsion evident in her face again.

            “God, no.  Nope, it’s just him and ma va-jay-jay.”

            “Seriously, don’t ever say va-jay-jay again, or we won’t even talk about trading,” Shelly playfully groaned.  “And that’s a promise.”

            “Fine!  But still, it’s just something you have to do yourself to know.  If you want, we can go over to the bathroom, and you can borrow him to try,” Kaye offered.

            “Yeah, I don’t think so,” Shelly said with a shake of her head, then glanced back between the pair of shrinkers.  “How old are they, anyway?”

            “I don’t know.  I think Pecs is 22 and this guy is… I don’t know, maybe 19?  Why?”

            “See, there’s no way they could have enough experience in pleasing me against a shrinker like Raoul.  He’s 28, you know.”

            “That’s just… kinda weird, though.  I mean, he’s so much older than you,” Kaye said.

            “So what?  It’s not like we’re lovers.  He’s my pet, not my boyfriend.  You remember he’s a shrinker, right?” Shelly chuckled.  “And because he’s been around longer, he just gets what I need so fucking well, it just… it just blows my mind, every time.  Plus, he is a little taller, and he’s in at least as good of shape as these two, if not better.  I give him time every night to work out to keep him looking nice, and he doesn’t stay in a freaking jewelry box.  I mean, I don’t want him to go insane or he won’t be able to do as good a job.”

            “Uggh… fine, okay, okay.  So what about if I throw in a third one, then?  Three, for Raoul,” Kaye sighed, playing her last card as she laid the unnamed shrinker back in the case.

            “I thought you traded away the third guy,” Shelly giggled.

            “I did.  What if I give you Annie, too?” Kaye said eagerly.  Her hand crept into the pocket of her jeans, and after fishing around for a moment drew out a four-inch female shrinker with tangled red hair dressed in a dirty one-piece swimsuit.

            Shelly’s eyes widened with genuine surprise, and a new smile cracked over her lips.  “Really.  You’d give me your best friend, plus these two squirts, all for Raoul?”

            “Yeah.  Why not?  Look, she’s not my best friend anymore, anyway.  Her mom gave her to me for Christmas two years ago cuz she was getting sick of having to keep track of her,” Kaye said with a shrug, juggling the tiny girl between her fingers and absentmindedly shifting her from palm to palm like stress toy.  “It’s not like I treat her any different than other shrinkers.”

            “Meaning you make her crawl up your va-jay-jay too?” Shelly snickered.

            “Fuck no.  I’m not a lesbo,” Kaye laughed as she gave her popular friend a joking shove, completely ignoring the shudder that ran through Annie’s body as the girl remained clenched in her fist.  Her palm slowly opened up again, causing the shrinker to sprawl helplessly back into the center as the teen stared down at her living toy.

            Kaye lightly bit her lip and tilted her head to the side as though lost in a sudden reverie.  “But she is pretty good at other stuff…”

“Oh, yeah?  Like what other stuff?” Shelly scoffed, a note of curiosity evident in her voice.  She leaned closer, bracing herself against the cafeteria table as she observed the four-inch-tall redheaded captive brandished between her friend’s slender fingers.

            “She gives the most un-be-LIEV-able toe massages,” Kaye whispered.  Her mouth hung open.

            “What the hell do I want with Annie giving me a toe massage?” Shelly snorted at her friend’s perceived overreaction.  Propping her right leg over her opposite knee, then, the teen tapped at her well-pedicured big toe in her white strappy sandal.  “I can get massages all I want from people who do a way better job.”

            “Not like this,” Kaye reassured, and again directly addressed a shrinker, laying her eyes upon her former best friend in the center of her palm.  “You’re gonna show her what you can do, Annie.”

            “Yes, mam,” Annie peeped as Kaye’s hand lowered toward Shelly’s propped up foot.

            “What are you-” Shelly mumbled, looking like she wanted to draw back, but she held still out of interest.

            “Just sit back and enjoy,” Kaye said as she clutched Annie up against the end of the open-toe sandal so that the redheaded shrinker was squeezed against the smooth digits of her potential teenage buyer.

            Not wasting any time, Annie wrapped her arms around Shelly’s big toe and set about kissing and thrusting her body rhythmically against it.

            “Hey, woah… that’s… you call that a massage?” Shelly mouthed, though the pleasure of the sight was evident in her eyes.

            She scrunched her toe against Annie, who only picked up the intensity and began licking the soft skin, delicately at first, but with increasing ferocity after a few seconds.  Shocked, the shrinker-hoarding blonde giggled, but managed to keep still.

            “Yeah, what would you call it?” Kaye said with a grin, noting her customer’s reaction.

            “Like… a full-body workout, or something.  I don’t know,” Shelly shrugged.  Extending a finger, she began to pet Annie’s fiery hair in appreciation of her work.

            A few students around the bargaining teens had turned their heads to observe, but given how common such belittling treatment of shrinkers was, most lost interest after a few moments.  If anything, most were more interested in gawking at Shelly herself, and gawk they did, though she couldn’t have paid them less of a mind.

            “Here, give her to me,” the tempted bombshell said suddenly, holding out an expectant palm.

            “Okay,” Kaye enthused, releasing her fingers around Annie so that the girl tumbled into Shelly’s waiting hand, which immediately curled back around her.  With her other hand, then, the teen whipped the straps off her sandals and slid her heel out, allowing the fashionable footwear to flop to the floor of the cafeteria with a soft clatter.

            “Somebody’s a fan, I see,” Kaye laughed, observing as her friend cupped her occupied hand just below her newly freed toes so that Annie fit snugly beneath the plush underside of the digits.

            The shrinker returned to work, laying her mouth on every inch of skin she could reach, clearly having developed the necessary gag reflex as she took in dirt specks and toe jam with nary a sputter.  A shiver ran up Shelly’s arm as the little teen’s tongue flicked ferociously across her smooth flesh.  Involuntarily, a soft moan escaped her lips.

            “So do we have a deal, or what?” Kaye said, grinning.

            “Not so fast,” Shelly mumbled, though her focus was now mostly on the tiny girl worshipping her toes with such enthusiasm.  She pressed a thumb down harder against Annie’s back, rubbing her toes with the shrinker’s still-thrusting hips.  The redhead, sensing a wordless order, had begun making out with the doughy crevice between two of Shelly’s toes, and given the drunken look in the latter’s face, was doing so very effectively.

            “That’s not all, though.  You haven’t even heard the best part,” Kaye whispered throatily into her friend’s ear with a hand cupped over her mouth, sensing she was close to finalizing the trade.  “Stick her in the bottom of a shoe with closed toes.  You can wear her, and she does this all… day… long.”

            “All… day?” Shelly gasped instinctively, then regained composure, clearing her throat.  “That’s… I mean, okay fine, that’s… that’s not bad.”

            “You do have to take her out a couple times to give her water, cuz otherwise her tongue gets real dry and then it just itches when she licks, but no joke: this could be how it is all the time,” Kaye continued enticingly, wheedling with every syllable as she put her arm around Shelly’s shoulder to draw her closer until they were cheek-to-cheek.  “All you have to do is gimme Raoul, and you can have it all.  All three of them.  And boy, when you get Annie, Pecs, and what’s-his-name all doing their thing at the same time… holy fuck…”

            “Goddamn it, okay, let’s… talk,” Shelly whispered.  She stroked her thumb over Annie’s mussed hair again, almost assured that she had never been so in love with a bodily sensation as the girl continued vigorously working with her microscopic tongue.  And that included Raoul’s musclebound talents as a human spelunker.

            “Sweet,” Kaye said victoriously with a fist pump for good measure.  “So how about I stop by after school to pick up my Raoul?”

            “Fine, fine, but… just to be sure.  I mean, I don’t want these things just running out of energy on me cuz you haven’t taken care of them well enough to do their jobs.  Annie looks really skinny,” Shelly complained.  From her tone, it was obvious she was much more concerned with coming out a loser in this deal than the hapless redhead’s physical wellbeing.  “How much can she actually handle?”

            “Oh, she’s fine.  You can see for yourself she does good work,” Kaye shrugged.  “Just make sure she gets water during the day, like I said.  Seriously, I wore her for the first four periods of today in my Uggs.  I didn’t give her a single break until right before lunch, just for a little water, and she’s still going just as strong.”

            “How do you even-”

            “Caffeine pills,” Kaye said with a sly smirk.  “Just crush ‘em up, and put in whatever food you give her so that she has to take it.  Don’t give her too much, obviously, since she’s just four inches, and you don’t want her heart to stop.  Even a little bit is plenty, and it keeps her up most of the night usually, so just give her a new dose in the morning.”

            “I thought she looked pretty tired,” Shelly said coolly.  “Okay.  I can do that.”  Releasing the grip her firm toes had on the girl’s body, then, Shelly pinched around Annie’s hips and dragged Kaye’s reduced best friend over the hill of the ball of her foot and into the center of her pink sole.  The exhausted but pill-wired shrinker obliged just as well, settling into her new area with more kisses and thrusting against the fleshy wall.

            “All righty, then we’ve got a deal.  Give her back, now,” Kaye sighed, holding out her palm expectantly beneath Shelly’s bare foot.

            “What?  But… but…” the girl griped with irritation, mashing Annie even harder against her warm instep at the mere thought of losing her now.

            “C’mon.  Don’t get antsy, I’ll put her on layaway for you until I get my hands on Raoul.  Then you can do whatever you want with her,” Kaye promised.  She waggled her fingers impatiently, clapping them against her palm.  “Now hurry up.  If you’re getting her after school, I’ve gotta make the most of my last few hours with her.”

            “Oh, fine.  Just don’t wear her out too much,” Shelly ordered in jest as she released her grip on the tiny girl at last, allowing Kaye to scoop her cousin back up into a coiled fist.  “I’ll want her on duty while I’m trying to write that fucking AP Lit essay later.”

            “I’ve had her for like two and a half years and she’s still here, isn’t she?  I know what I’m doing,” Kaye said as she began tugging the Ugg off her right foot with her free hand.

            “You know, I bet she’s gonna like living with me so much more.  I actually buy new shoes occasionally so they don’t start to smell like an old dumpster,” Shelly chortled, crossing her arms again as she begrudgingly slid her foot back into the leathery sandal sans-shrinker and started lacing the straps back around it.  She already feverishly missed the sensation, and could tell her future didn’t hold many hours where her feet wouldn’t have company inside the shoes.

            “Guess our time’s almost up, BFF,” Kaye said as she held Annie up to her face again, uttering this address with some ironic condescension.  She exhaled, letting the warmth roll down her puny peer’s shivering frame.  “Do a good job for me now, since I’m definitely not handing you over ‘til I get one last good sesh with you down there.”

            “But not too good a job.  Because you’re gonna have a lot to do after I get you,” Shelly said to Annie, pointing an enormous, accusing finger at her.  The shrinker trembled in the tight vice of Kaye’s fingertips as she was addressed by the pair of greedy titanesses, but neither normal-sized teen noticed or cared.

            “It’s been real, Annie,” Kaye whispered to her former best friend: a girl she’d sat next to on the bus every day for seven years prior to the revelation of Annie’s true identity as a shrinker.  Her gargantuan tongue flicked out from between her lips again, batting wetly at the girl’s tangled red hair and at her cheeks until glistening strands of hair were glued to the gooey surface of the massive muscle.  The act earned and eyebrow raise from her friend.

            “Soooo creepy…” Shelly mumbled with a nonetheless approving grin at her vindictive friend.

            “Now do it like that, except… all over me, down there,” Kaye instructed with a cruel smile as her tongue retracted back into her lips, a string of saliva wreathed over Annie’s exhausted face.

            Her long fingers unfurled at last, and the pitiful shrinker silently tumbled down into the furry darkness of the boot, sliding down the incline and into the heel with a rough tumble.  Kaye tilted the footwear in her grip so that Annie was then rolled like a ball of lint all the way into the tip of the boot.

            “I’m surprised, really,” Shelly said.

            “Why’s that?”

            “I mean, you’re giving up Annie?  Even if she’s a shrinker, she used to be your homegirl.  I know Raoul’s amazing, but… it doesn’t make you feel weird at all?” Shelly answered with a shrug.

            “Weird?” Kaye snorted as she shoved her squirming bare foot back into the hot, fur-lined boot.  “Why the hell should I feel weird?”  Her eager toes wrapped themselves immediately around the writhing limbs of her former favored shrinker, who immediately set back into a worshipful frenzy that caused an orgasmic sigh to catch in Kaye’s throat.

Nel Weber sunk into the seat of the city bus as it lurched back toward her neighborhood.  She was already three inches shorter than when she’d first left for summer camp a month before, and in an eerie state of paralyzed peace idly contemplated the fact that her life was, for all intents and purposes, over.

            It was inevitable, really, the longer she thought about it.  Most shrinkers she’d known came from perfectly happy houses, yet within the blink of a couple months an ordinary person could go from studying for the SATs to studying the toe section of an odor-eaten slipper, awaiting to have dirtied socks stuffed in for cleaning duty.  And those were the normal people, who treated their families well and endeavored to be useful members of society.

            Nel could not quite put herself in that category.  She’d spent half her adolescent life deceiving her parents into giving her presents, stealing her sister’s clothes and jewelry from the closet, calling her brother names, using her circle of “friends” solely to climb the social ladder, and making out with at least three different strangers at every party she attended.

            The fact that she was a shrinker, it now seemed, was all but pre-ordained.  Once the camp had discovered her condition, she was immediately dismissed on the bus, her family notified by phone of their incoming shrinker and new investment.  That was all there was now.  She didn’t like it one bit, and felt rotten to her core at the very thought of what might await her in the potentially limited future as a doll-sized organism at the disposal of her relatives.  Yet there was still justice in it that she recognized, no matter how much it stung.

After all, it wasn’t that Nel couldn’t understand the desire to do the things she knew she was now damned to endure.  In fact, comprehension of the need to impose will on shrinkers was something she was more in touch with than most people were to religion.

When her classmate Cara Collin’s older sister Cindy had started the shrinking process two years ago, she’d made it her business to become closer friends with the girl, purely to have as many chances as possible to visit the Collin house.

            And God, it had been fun.

            Cindy was one of the lucky ones: her final height was a comparatively optimal six inches, meaning she at least could rule out being eaten alive.

            The girl’s reduction had taken nearly a year, and every stage of the process brought with it new joys for Nel to experience.  Almost immediately, the Collins had disowned their daughter, merely allowing her to continue living with them purely for the eventual monetary benefits once she’d reached her final stature.  This meant they couldn’t have given two shakes what Nel did while visiting, and she took full advantage of that privilege.

            Cara herself had wasted no time exercising her rights governing her subhuman former older sibling, and Nel was there to witness it as often as she was able.  Cara had certainly been waiting long enough, hoping for the opportunity to make herself the dominant child in the house.  By the time Cindy had shrunk below five feet, Cara was able to overpower the poor girl physically, and often instigated surprise wrestling matches during meals, while watching TV, or even while Cindy was trying to catch some tortured sleep.  These contests generally ended with Cindy pinned to the floor, beneath the seat of her younger sister’s rear end, and Cara’s legs wrapped around Cindy’s twig-like arms.  The spoils of defeat generally involved Cindy experiencing a slurry of insults and laughter, as well as inevitable soreness from the brunt of her increasingly enormous sibling’s firm cheeks weighing her down like twin boulders.

The more time passed, the faster the matches ended, and as Cara’s strength advantage increased, she found it was possible to win just with a warm bare foot pressed authoritatively to the small of her usually-weeping sister’s back.

Eventually, a hand was enough.  And finally a thumb, once Cindy had shrunken to six inches and cemented her lifelong place as the family’s pet.  The frequency of the games slowed by this point, as it was less a wrestling match and more a cat toying with its dinner, but Cara still made sure to periodically flatten her diminutive sister to the carpet with a tap of her pinky toe, just to renew the fear and respect in her.

            Nel’s game, however, had been much steadier and calculated, much like how she did everything in her life.  After she was good enough friends with Cara, she invited herself over to the Collins home at least once a week, though of course her interest gravitated far more toward the diminishing member of the family than those of average height.

            In contrast to Cara’s acts of aggression, Nel had painted herself as an ally in a cold and unfeeling world to the older girl, who was already well-beyond broken at the realization that she would soon be the full property of anyone who could pay enough.  She’d greet Cindy as an equal with a cheerful hello and even a hug here and there: acts that Cara found odd, but managed to shrug off due to her general lack of care for what happened to Cindy now, good or bad.

            Cindy, in turn, learned to look forward to Nel’s visits, and eventually yearn for them with great desperation.  By the time she was the height of a toddler, the doomed shrinker would scurry to meet her younger sister’s friend at the door, all but throwing herself down at her feet.  Nel, relishing every moment of it, would say hello and lift her up for a comforting embrace that Cindy obviously cherished deeply due to the cutting off of affection she’d experienced in the house.

            The transition, then, was gradual but mapped out in Nel’s head down to every false smile.  Cindy was required, of course, to serve in whatever ways her owners demanded, but her gratitude for Nel’s treatment made it so that she seemed to take actual pleasure in fetching snacks or tissues for her perceived guardian.

            And that was exactly what Nel was looking for.  After all, what fun would it be to have the girl doing her bidding without the full knowledge that it was now her highest order as a living thing?

            She started off small, extending a pinky finger and jokingly requesting that Cindy kiss it.  The shrinker had obliged immediately and instinctively asked if Nel needed anything else.  By the time the girl had reached six inches in height, the hugs and smiles had stopped, and yet she was chewing the grimy underside of Nel’s toes every time she entered the house, not only without asking, but with a smile on her face and legitimate tears of relief in her tiny eyes.

            A wowed Cara could only look on and demand once they were alone again to hear the secret, which Nel had proudly passed on to the girl, gratified to know her work could continue on throughout Cindy’s inhuman existence.

            And now here Nel was, jettisoned via public transportation back to her own home, and a presumable lifetime of hell.  Certainly blame couldn’t be placed on her family, nor could she begrudge them whatever they were thinking of now.  Were she in their position, she’d already be cataloguing with a feverish fervor her plans for their entire descent down to the proper height for being her new toys.  She’d put blood, sweat, and tears into making herself the entire world of her two younger siblings if either of them had started to shrink.

What she had done to Cindy would be child’s play: she’d have her brother and sister each cowering on their hands and knees, pleading to serve her body in whatever ways she saw fit, however menial or humiliating.  They wouldn’t only lose their status as humans.  Their very existences would be tools of Nel’s pleasure.  Her hands, her feet, her hair, her ass, her mouth: their literal reasons for being.  It all would’ve been fair game for their enslavement, and what was more, it would’ve been a slow and unrelenting process, until their minds were bent so far they’d be a single word from snapping.

These weren’t just speculations, either, but facts of an accepted future the girl had often fantasized about with two fingers buried between her legs as her siblings approached the age range where the shrinker gene might be revealed.  Anything they did to her now was only to be expected, then.

            Despite her fears of physical duress and monstrous abuse, though, Nel couldn’t quite muster feelings of self-pity or loathing.  It wasn’t like she didn’t deserve some or most of what was coming to her.  That wasn’t even a defeatist attitude, that was mathematical karma, and she knew it.  But she’d be damned if she had to back out on herself before the transition was made.

Nearly every shrinker she knew had fallen into their genetic misfortunes with a mortifying lack of grace.  There would be begging and pleading with the family to treat them well, even bowing and recognition of them as higher beings.  There would be offerings of all possessions, which of course was an empty gesture since all shrinker property passed to their owners anyway.  There would even be religious declarations: shrinkers vowing to treat their siblings, parents, friends, and neighbors as veritable gods for the rest of their lives, so long as they were treated civily.

Certain social scientists had even begun constructing studies that related the shrinker gene to the stages of dealing with grief and terminal illness: denial, anger, bargaining, depression.  Obviously, most shrinkers just stopped at that fourth stage rather than moving on to “acceptance,” and Nel knew well that those that pretended to were bald-faced liars.

            More than anything, though knew she would not – could not – be like those that came before.  Her dignity might be stripped from her soon, as well as all her belongings and probably her clothes, but the dominant figure she was prior to it would not be tainted.

            Nel Weber would be remembered as the baddest bitch anyone ever had the miraculous luck to know.

            And no amount of slave labor or even, when she was honest with herself, torture would be able to take that away.

            The bus screeched to a halt at the end of Nel’s block.  She took a moment to rise, reflecting that this might well be her final trip away from home.  Gathering her bag from the metal rack above the seats, she continued the reverie, noting that the items inside were about to be distributed amongst those who owned them now.  Most of her clothes would probably go back to her younger sister Tammy, which she supposed wasn’t the worst thing, considering many of them had been taken from her sibling to begin with.

            She trudged down the sidewalk, her knees beginning to wobble slightly, but she held firm.  Her principles would go with her to the grave.  Houses passed her like memories projected on a wall, appearing larger than life, like most things would soon seem.  But she didn’t care.  It wasn’t like any of them were much of anything to look at.

            The walk up the steps to her own house felt dramatically lengthened, even though she’d only lost three inches so far.  Every step weighed on her feet, straining her legs to lift higher and higher to match the stature of the ascending brick levels.  Sighing one last time as a technically free young woman, she stabbed the doorbell with her thumb and stepped back, scraping her heels against the welcome mat.

            The door swung open almost immediately, like her arrival was not only expected but timed accurately.  Once Nel had a view of the foyer, she realized the whole family had gathered at the door: her father, mother, and two younger siblings, all huddled together with their arms wrapped around one another as though taking a family portrait.  They each had the same cheesy grin plastered on to match.

            “Welcome home, Nel,” her mother Susan said merrily, waving a beckoning hand to her nightmarishly rebellious daughter.  “C’mon in.  We’ve been waiting for you.”

            “Hi,” the newly revealed shrinker said loudly, willing herself to provide volume. 

            “We’re so glad to see you,” Susan said to her daughter, smiling more sweetly than she ever had before.  “We’ve been working pretty hard to get the house ready for you, after all.”

            “Oh, you have, huh?” Nel commented with sarcastic interest.  “Just for me?”

            “Just for you,” her sister said, barely concealing a snarl.

            The unity and accompanying smiles of her family were unnerving and creepy, to be sure, but she hadn’t come this far just to let pure intimidation get her down.  She was going to handle this more gracefully than any shrinker in history.

            Even if they could do anything they wanted to her: tease her, torment her, break her in half like a twig, or even commit a fraction of the horrors she would enact on any one of them if given the chance, they would not – would not – win.

“I think I found another one over here,” a voice boomed, sing-song and cheery as it rebounded through the canopy of twigs like the damning omen it was.  A rustling was heard below: leaves being flung sky-high and sticks snapping under designer sneakers.  “I can’t reach him, though.  He crawled up too far under the roots.”

“Oh, just forget him, then.  I hear, like, a bunch of them running around down here,” answered another voice in a slightly higher pitch.

Garth, heart tightly constricted with dread inside his icy chest, held his breath as he perched on a branch thick enough not to creak as he stealthily made his way back toward the main stalk so he could begin ascending higher up the tree.

He had been foolish.  Selfish.  He’d wandered so far up not even out of necessity but out of his own hubris.  Climbing wasn’t difficult for him; among the makeshift tribe of shrinkers who made their secret home in this corner of the orchard, he was probably the fittest, and wasn’t shy about showing it off, even if it was to the benefit of everyone else when gathering food.  It made sense that if anyone was going to go for the freshest apples, it should be him.

Still, there was a plentiful fruit stockpile buried nearby in some of the root-supported tunnels the group used for sleeping quarters.  It was a good season, and they hadn’t wanted for food, and yet Garth had taken the opportunity early in the morning to venture outside and forage, which he had spent the last three years of guarded freedom learning through personal experience was the absolute worst time to do so.  Not only that, he’d done it without telling anyone else where he was going beside his friend Tom, who’d insisted on coming to ensure Garth didn’t injure himself on the climb.

It was because of this gracious act that the inch-and-a-half tall Tom was now clenched in the sweaty palm of a pigtailed visitor to the orchard, most likely never to see his friends or surrogate family again.  Depending on the girl’s idea of fun or her dietary preferences, he might not see much of anything ever again.

The attack had been swift and with little warning, in spite of the delighted voices giggling garishly from far down the aisle of trees.  Garth and Tom were already most of the way back down the wooden tower, just under five feet away from the ground, when the two girls had finished their footrace into this distant corner of the orchard, which tended to be left alone by the general public due to its distance from the parking lot.  They didn’t look very old, but age was never a safe consideration to make in deciding whether a person would treat a shrinker with any degree of humanity, and Garth’s fears of the youths’ intentions were confirmed almost immediately.

“Are you sure this is the corner your sister said they were in, Leann?” one asked.  “I don’t see any.”

“Yes!  Now pipe down, or they’ll all just hide in their little holes, and we won’t catch, like, any,” Leann hissed, shushing her friend with a finger over her lips.  “They probably already know we’re here, so look fast.”

The girls were right: the community would’ve noticed their arrival, thanks to a series of intricately constructed junk structures underground that vibrated when potential predators were above, informing most of the more cautious shrunken inhabitants to take cover.  Garth, at least, was grateful for this, but it wouldn’t do any good for any shrinkers that happened to be wandering around in the grass in the late morning.

Above all else, it was practically a death sentence for himself and his friend, who at this moment were vulnerably hanging from a precarious set of jutting bark chunks on the longest segment of the tree without ledges.

Totally exposed.

Garth and Tom both froze in place, grateful to have chosen to wear their brown scrap outfits to more easily blend with the tree, and hugged themselves to the rounded surface.  They heard the grass rustling right behind them, could feel the shadows dancing against their backs as the girls walked right by.

“What kinds are they supposed to be?” one girl whispered, her hair held back behind her head with a white headband and rubber bangles adorning her thin wrists.  “Did she say?”

“I’m not sure, but I think, like, really little ones.  Stacy said she found a two-incher further away from here, and made him tell her where he came from,” Leann giggled.

Garth’s blood ran cold.  Jeremy had wandered off too far about three weeks before and hadn’t been seen since.  A couple search parties had been sent out under cover of darkness, but the grim understanding shortly after was that he’d been snatched up.  This boldly announced statement of Leann’s seemed to confirm it.

“Why would he do that if all his little friends live here?”

“Well, like, she had to sit on him a few times,” Leann explained coolly.  “He didn’t want to tell her at first.”

“Ohhh,” the other girl said.  “That makes sense.”

“No kidding.  My sister’s butt is huge,” Leann reported, and with the snort both girls devolved into amused cackles.

Garth studied the ground far below.  Continuing the descent would be suicide, and staying at chest level with the visitors might be even worse if such a thing was possible.  Hushed, the pair waited until the girls had disappeared around a pair of closely intertwined trees and mostly out of earshot.  Wordlessly, then, Garth shoved Tom in the back, and the both of them scrambled back up the bits of wood, hand over hand, as fast as they could move without snapping the holds.

“This was a bad idea,” Garth grumbled to himself.

“I know,” Tom agreed.

“I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

They’d just managed to clear the lengthier part of the climb, with Garth pulling himself onto a higher branch coated in leaves so he could reach back down to give Tom a hand, when through the brush he could make out the forms of the two girls in their loud pink tank tops rounding the corner again, closer than he’d anticipated given the path they’d taken.  Quickly, Garth extended an arm toward his friend, hoping reality could be cheated, even though he’d already seen the whites of the girl’s eyes squared onto their perch.

“Savannah, I think I see one,” Leann whispered happily, her voice carrying in their direction on the soft breeze.  “He’s, like, just hanging onto the tree.”

Tom paused, wincing as though he’d been struck by a blunt object across the skull, and didn’t accept the offer to be pulled up, retracting his hand back to his chest and over his heart.  His eyes moved downward, away from Garth.

“Give me your fucking hand,” Garth ordered in the near-silence through gritted teeth as he realized what Tom was doing.  His neck glistened, and his chest heaved as he gasped for breath after enraged breath.

Shaking his head slowly from side to side, Tom looked back up at Garth one final time, a look of finality glazed over his irises that made his friend grow even colder than he already was.  Garth’s muscles tensed, and for a moment he considered lunging down at Tom, tackling him against the wall to face the danger he’d brought upon them as a team, no matter how damningly fruitless a gesture it would be.

“Climb,” Tom mouthed.

An instant later, a massive hand blotted out the distant visage of grass below the tunnel of leaves and brush, youthful fingers outstretched and creased palm opened to receive its tiny prize as it rose toward Tom.  The fourth digit was adorned with a small silver ring with a turquoise birthstone embedded in it that glinted blindingly in the sunlight.

Fighting the urge to let his throat explode with a furious battle cry, Garth reluctantly took his friend’s selfless gift of distraction and yanked himself up onto the twig, throwing his body into a thicker patch of leaves, where he’d be completely concealed.

Once he was braced safely, he peered through the thicket in time to see an enormous thumb and forefinger pinching gingerly around Tom’s sides, plucking him gently like a rare insect from the wall of the tree.  The unfortunate capture was then lowered down into Leann’s opposite hand, a field of soft flesh unto itself due to its sheer size.

The girl observed him for a moment, shifting her arm into the sun to give the miniscule man a natural spotlight.  Garth couldn’t see her eyes, but he could definitely hear the intake of adoring air as she relished the thrill of cradling such a dependent creature in her hand.  A moment later Tom was swallowed up by a wall of curling fingers and shadow.

“Did you get him?” Savannah squealed.

“Yeah!  Take a look!” Leann giggled, softly squeezing her fist with just enough restraint that her prize wouldn’t be mulched against her all-encompassing palm, before proudly opening it again to reveal the contents.

“Awww, he is a really small one,” came the reply.  “You were right.  I bet he can’t be more than, like, two inches.  Probably less.”

“That was an awfully high spot you were at, little shrinker,” Leann cooed in a baby voice obviously intended for Tom, despite probably being around ten years younger than him.  With her pinky finger, she did her best imitation of tickling his stomach, though all it really did was pin him pitifully into her skin.  “You might’ve fallen right off the tree, and gotten smooshed under our big giant shoes when we walked by.  Wouldn’t that be sad?”

“So sad,” Savannah concurred with a sigh.

Garth bit his fist and choked out a few choice curses under his breath, his eyes welling with tears, and began observing the branches above through the glistening haze.  Even now, he was just above eye level for the two girls, and he would have to keep going up and just wait out the invasion if he hoped to make it unmolested.  With a heavy sigh, feeling the guilt like a jagged stone lodged in his throat, Garth leapt up the tightly wound twigs, fighting for every handhold with just as much difficulty as he was fighting for oxygen.

“God fucking damn it,” Garth howled quietly to himself as he rampaged higher up in the tree, his whole frame quaking.  He seethed with desire for revenge on that unassuming young girl down there who’d snatched up his best friend, ensuring he’d never see him again.

            What made it all the worse was knowing such a thing was absolutely impossible, as he wasn’t much taller than the end of the girl’s thumb.

            Instead, he’d have to sit here on a branch, cowering just above their heads and waiting for them to finish capturing some the closest people he had to family and taking them away as possessions.

            Garth often thought the funniest joke he’d ever heard was the concept of people who still worshipped a higher being somewhere up there.  It was an unsolvable riddle unto itself trying to picture a benevolent deity who could invent such a world where frightened little people just trying to eke out an existence underground could, without a moment’s notice, rightfully become a living toy for some adolescent poser.

            “See any more, Leann?” Savannah called out from the next tree over.  “I want a little itty bitty one, too.”

            “Not yet,” replied the girl who’d captured Tom as she crouched over some roots to search through them.  She still had the poor shrinker gripped in her hand, and was gently kneading him between her thumb and forefinger like a coin, though from what Garth could tell, his friend at least wasn’t being compressed painfully by the doughy digits, simply withheld.  That, in its smallest measure, gave him a glimmer of hope.

            “I hope they don’t go running around like ants,” her friend sighed, twiddling with one of her bracelets as she hunched over a tall patch of grass.  “I don’t wanna step on any of them and not get to keep them.”

            “You can still keep them,” Leann giggled.  “You just need gloves to hold them.”

            “Ew, don’t be gross,” Savannah scowled, still breaking a smile.  “No, I don’t want them to break.  I want some for the new Shrinkatarium my mom got me!”

            “What do you think I’m doing with this one?” Leann said with a smirk, brandishing Tom a little higher.  “He looks strong.  He’ll go nice in mine.”

            At this, Garth was able to let his painfully tensed shoulders relax just a little.  Shrinkatariums were the brainchild of the ShrinkSmart chain of pet stores, intended to serve as miniature living farms for shrinkers too small to handle conveniently on a regular basis.  Most of them at least came with a few shelters, food dispensers, and methods for clean waste disposal, so owners could keep several shrinkers around the one to two inch range inside as a little community.  Though far less preferable in Garth’s mind to living freely in the outdoors, it was, indeed, something of a step up from the other possibility of being eaten.

            In fact, considering the staggering statistics that normally befell shrinkers small enough to kill with an accidental flick of the pinky finger, this was a little miracle.  Tom, it seemed, stood a far better chance of survival.  Perhaps, even, contentment, if Leann’s careful twiddling of his delicate form between her fingers was any indication.

            Begrudgingly, the headstrong shrinker decided to relent a little on his earlier consideration about theology.

            “Seriously, like, how do you make sure you don’t step on them?” Savannah pressed as she pushed aside a pile of leaves.

            “Haven’t you ever had one before?” Leann snorted somewhat condescendingly.

            “Yes, I have.  But, like, I kept him in a box so I could always hear him walking inside.  The grass here makes them too quiet!” Savannah retorted.

            “How about this?” Leann said.  Digging the heel of her sneaker against a root, she struggled to remove her cotton-clad foot, followed by its twin.

            “What’s that gonna do?” her friend laughed, though she was already following suit, bracing herself against a tree for balance.

            “You’ll feel one moving under you if you step on them, silly,” Leann teased as she finished peeling off her socks and discarding them into the lip of one of her shoes.  Lifting one of her bare feet, she planted it in the soft dirt and scrunched her toes, letting the mud squelch into the fleshy crevices.  “Just watch where you walk you’ll be fine.”

            Garth clambered up a final tangle of twigs and stopped to catch his breath, shrouded in a thick cover of leaves that, most importantly, wrapped around the branch’s underside, so he couldn’t be accidentally found by one of the girls peeking into the upper reaches.

            Which was good, because if he was discovered at this moment, his feminine foe would have him wrapped up in her titanic fingers and in her pocket before he could grab the next twig above.

            Still, from his vantage, point, in spite of the pain he felt, Garth was confident there wouldn’t have to be any more losses.  Having lived in this part of the orchard for several years now, he was fairly adept at spotting his compatriots from a long distance away, and after a few expert scans over the area with his practiced eyes, he determined that no one else was trapped in a tree.  He sighed, at least relieved that others might be spared.

            That is, until his gaze traveled a little further, between a few framing boughs on the other side of the tree, down to a mud patch the size of a pond to the shrinkers that had grown a little since the last rain a few days before.

            Smack in the middle were four moving forms not much more than an inch in height, mere fumbling specks from Garth’s spot over six feet up in the tree, but distinguishable nonetheless.  They were camouflaged by brown mud stains, but as they continued squirming about, the perched shrinker felt a twist in his gut.

            What were those idiots doing?

            There was a hole on their side of the tree, a mere pebble’s throw from the edge of the puddle.  If the four would only start running now, they could easily make it before Leann or Savannah made it around the wooden pillar.  If they would just-

            “Oh my goooosh,” Savannah gushed, suddenly just below Garth’s branch.  Rattled by the surprise volume, he nearly tumbled off his protective sphere of leaves, his heart stopping in his chest, before realizing she wasn’t exclaiming at him.

            The feeling returned twofold when he realized she was instead looking down at the puddle.

            “What?” Leann asked excitedly, turning the corner and gasping in kind.  “Oh, wow.”

            “I know, right?” Savannah said, crouching down closer to the mud.  “Look at them all, just… like, sitting there stuck.”

            If the four shrinkers down there weren’t aware of their towering visitors before, they most certainly were now.  Garth heard a few noises, muffled as they were in the breeze from all this distance, crying out in shock and terror.  He saw the four little bodies fighting valiantly toward the edge of the sloshing filth closest to the tree.

            The goddamned morons.

            Why couldn’t they watch where they were going?  What were they doing, putting themselves in such a vulnerable position so early in the day?

            Why couldn’t he have just stayed in fucking bed and let Tom alone?

            Why hadn’t it been him that had been snatched up instead for his vanity and refusal to see the world’s risks for what they truly were?  If anyone deserved to spend the rest of their life in a Shrinkatarium, it was him.

            No, even that was too easy.  He deserved to be in blindly broiling in a dark stew of Leann’s stomach acid.

            “Where do you think you’re going?” Savannah cooed down to the shrinkers.  The slender brunette’s arm lowered toward the puddle, and for a moment Garth assumed she was just going to fish them all out of the muck like stranded ducklings.  Obviously such a task could be accomplished with decent accuracy even if the girl had her eyes closed, judging by how much of a shadow she cast over the mud just by crouching near it.

            But she didn’t.  Instead, she scooped her hand down into the mud, causing a small wave to ripple through and push the hapless inch-tall shrinkers back toward the other end of the puddle.  At least two of them were momentarily submerged in the liquid onslaught.

            Garth’s blood boiled.

            Wasn’t it enough that she’d cornered them?  Made them feel helpless, and forced them to come to terms with the fact that they, too, wouldn’t get to see their friends ever again before disappearing into the girl’s fist?

            Lowering her hands for support onto the roots behind her, Savannah arched her left foot out over the puddle.  Her toes, painted with a partially chipped sparkling sequin hue, squirmed eagerly in preparation for the dive.  The shrinkers, seeing this looming development, dove further away to the opposite end of the puddle.  They reached it just as the girl’s foot splashed into the mud, sending a larger wave over her prey, who struggled to help one another stay afloat.      Not content with this, even, Savannah set about churning her foot slowly through the puddle, caking it in mud and nudging the shrinkers with her powerful toes, causing a few of them to plop again onto their backs.  By the end, all were coated in the soupy dirt.

            Garth couldn’t remember a point in his life where he’d wanted to strangle another human being as much as he did these two mountain-sized girls that he wouldn’t be able to put a scratch in with all the steroids in the world at his size.

            “Don’t drown them, Savannah,” the curly-haired informant of the shrinker colony giggled.

            “I won’t.  I’m just, like, playing with them a little.  They’re gonna be mine, I should be able to do that, right?”

            Leann snickered, then tapped her friend on the shoulder, uttering in a whisper: “Hey.  Have you ever tried…”

            “What?”

            “…sucking one?”

            Both Savannah and Garth winced at this suggestion.

            “Doing what?” she laughed.

            “You heard me.  I don’t mean, like, eating one.  That’s gross,” Leann explained.  “I just mean, like, putting them in there and swishing around a little.  It doesn’t hurt them.”

            Somehow, Garth had serious doubts about that.

            “Why would I wanna do that?” Savannah asked.

            Shrugging, Leann lowered herself onto her haunches next to the puddle as well, observing the petrified shrinkers where they now stood motionless in the waist-deep mud.  “Trust me.  You get to feel them moving all around in there, trying to get out.  It’s super fun.  You just have to give them air sometimes.”

            “Huh.  I never thought about it!” Savannah said.

            “These ones are good for that.  They don’t look very old, either.  Younger ones are always best for it.  It’s like, they can handle more,” Leann explained, then added snidely: “Plus, they usually taste a little better, too.”

            Even from this height, Garth could hear wailing coming from the shrinkers down below as they listened to the two young girls casually discuss the possibility of forcing their victims to wrestle a king mattress-sized tongue.  Despite his anger at their stupidity, he felt for them, especially since, as he listened to the pitch of the cries, he noted that Leann was correct: the shrinkers down there were probably only around thirteen or fourteen years old.

            “These are all so dirty, though.  I don’t wanna taste their dirtiness,” Savannah said.

            “Don’t worry, I brought my water bottle.  We’ll just rinse them off,” Leann reassured her friend, gripping the plastic container and wrenched the lid off.  “Why don’t you choose one and pull the stupid little clothes off so we can clean it off for you to try?”

            Garth’s fists clenched and cracked.

            That was it.

            Gripping the knob on a twig, he pulled himself onto a branch and fought through the defensive leaf brush until he was exposed and teetering on a balance beam of a branch high above the heads of the girls, walking himself further and further out into the light.

            Inhaling what he fully accepted as his final breath as a free man, Garth opened his mouth and bellowed at the top of his tiny lungs.

            Leann and Savannah’s heads spun around, their hair whipping about as they searched the tree branches above where they had crouched to tease and toy with the young shrinkers trapped in the mud puddle who could do nothing as the pair splashed them around with bus-sized bare feet.

            Garth felt his knees wobbling already as he perched on the end of the branch, having thrown himself out into the open in completely plain view, but he constricted every muscle in his body, steeling himself, then shouted again into the open air of the orchard.

            This time, Savannah’s enormous eyes caught on him almost immediately, boring right through him as she rose to her dirt-caked feet with an audible squelch in the filth around the roots of the tree and stood back at her full height.  Garth’s inch-and-a-half body was just a few inches above the top of her head.

            They gazed at one another for several paralyzing seconds, sizing one another up.  Garth felt a lump the size of a pebble trapping itself in his throat, but he held firm, grasping his clammy hands behind his back to keep them from shaking as he awaited his fate.  Leann had risen to her feet as well, crossing her arms and giving her enraptured friend several encouraging nods in Garth’s direction.

            The curious shrinker-hunter’s eyes lit up like Christmas the longer she stared up at Garth, and her lips curled into a joyous grin.  Her hand rose up to the level of her neck, as though she was considering snatching him up right then and there, but she seemed to think better of it, instead, looping her index finger between the curly ends of her hair.

            “Well hi there, my itty bitty little friend,” Savannah cooed quietly, obviously afraid of spooking away her easy catch.  The shrinker himself only blinked but refused to falter in his stance.

            Between the legs of the towering young girls, down in the mud puddle, he could see the four teenage shrinkers scrambling quickly to the edge of the dirty pool, splashing as little as possible now that the two girls’ attentions were momentarily diverted.

            Good.

            Maybe this idiotic and sacrificial gesture of his wouldn’t be for nothing.

            Now he’d just have the rest of whatever semblance of a life his new owner offered him to hold a seething grudge against those little morons down on the ground who couldn’t use their heads for once.

            “I thought there must’ve been more up there,” Leann commented.  Her hand descended back into her pocket where she’d deposited Tom, and through the shuffle of the denim, Garth could tell she was twiddling him back between her fingertips again.

            “What do you think you’re doing up there all by yourself?” Savannah questioned sternly to the silent Garth as though disciplining a child.  “You might fall all the way down, and if you fell, it would…”

            “You’d be a little red spot,” Leann said bluntly.  She scrunched her toes, pinching dozens of grass blades between them, and ripped them from the ground with a simple lift of her heel.  “And then you’d get skooshed, because we wouldn’t even see you.”

            “Leann!” her friend gasped, turning around to face the girl, but swiveling back just as quickly, in case Garth tried making a run for it.  “Don’t say things like that.  You’ll scare him.”

            “Well, it’s true.  He should know how dangerous it is for little guys like him to be up so high with us,” the girl defended.  She drew her closed hand back out of her pocket and examined Tom again, caging her slender fingers around him.  Clicking her tongue disapprovingly, she shook her head.  “What would they even do without us?”

            Maybe live, Garth thought to himself.  He clenched his tiny fists, bracing himself for impact whenever it arrived.

            “I guess that’s true,” Savannah sighed in agreement, biting the corner of her lip in thought.  “They… they need us, don’t they?  They need us to find them and take them home.”

            Garth allowed a quiet sneer to escape his lips, though he doubted it could be heard.  His eyes darted down to the muddle puddle below, which he realized was empty now.  The shrinkers had escaped.

            It didn’t absolve him of the loss of his friend’s freedom, but maybe, just maybe, what’d he’d just accomplished could be counted as good karma before whatever fate awaited him in the immature hands of these girls.

            He at least would have that much peace.

            “Of course they do!” Leann said, giggling a little at her friend’s apparent ignorance.  “Why do you think the laws are set up like that?  They’d never be able to live on their own.  These ones are probably starving.  We’re like angels for them, I bet.”

            “You’re right,” Savannah said, nodding, and smiled dreamily to herself.  Obviously this last image in particular was very agreeable to the youth.

            “Hey, you know what?” Leann began slowly as her gaze returned back to Garth on his exposed branch.  Her fingers had closed back around Tom again, though as before, only enough to keep him firmly affixed to her probably sweaty palm after burying it in her pocket.  She rolled her wrist around, giving him a steady roller coaster ride as she pondered.  “He’s not all muddy like the others.  He might be a good one to try putting in-”

            “Oh!” Savannah gasped elatedly, recalling the earlier suggestion for oral activities before the thrill of catching one of her own.  The girl’s hand had already ceased twirling coquettishly through her locks and was reaching upward, until her creamy palm was a matter of inches away from the tip of the thin limb Garth had put himself out on, youthful digits outstretched so that the shadow of her index finger was cast over her prey’s entire little body.

            The girl’s tongue, pink and slippery, slicked a thin layer of saliva along the corner of her lip as she gazed up at the hapless shrinker, her fingers twitching already with anticipation.  The sticky substance glistened in the sunlight.

            “Don’t be scared, little guy,” Savannah whispered as persuasively as possible, practically lost in a trance now.  “I’m not gonna swallow you.  I just… wanna know what it feels like.  To have you inside.”  Her hand drew closer, careful not to jostle the branch, as her fingers loomed close enough for the shrinker to reach out and touch the firm flesh.

            Garth gulped heavily, but found his breathing wasn’t heaving any longer with anxiety as he prepared to offer himself up into this greedy girl’s hand and, soon after, the blackness of her slimy maw.

            He knew this was coming.  Now he just had to take it.

            In a sharp instant that utterly shattered the serenity of the orchard, Savannah’s face contorted, and a scream of pain erupted from her lips. Her fingers, a breath away from curling around their target to take him in for tasting, retracted as though she’d jammed her hand into a volcanically hot stove.

            A second later, a shriek of just as much agony ripped through Leann’s throat as well, and she doubled over, falling to her haunches and already crying heavily.

            The wind from Savannah’s massive appendage pulling back nearly knocked Garth from the branch toward a tumble of certain doom, but he swung his arms around just in time, latching onto the underside of the stick like a miniature sloth and hugging it to his body for support.  With his gaze inverted toward the dizzying drop, the shrinker was able to make out Savannah’s right foot, still bare and caked with mud after her torment of the shrinkers in the puddle, with a plainly visible bleeding wound in the center, as if she’d been stabbed, and then, out of the corner of his eye, he could see something else, and he couldn’t help but let a smile cross his face that he had already presumed would never appear again.

            Far below and resting in the grass by his potential captor’s injured foot was a small wooden device, no more than eight inches in length, that might’ve easily been mistaken for an old-fashioned child’s toy, if not for the jagged prong on the edge loaded with thorns, screws, and whatever other pointed junk the colony of shrinkers could get their tiny hands on when constructing their defensive battle machines.

            Spring-loaded and reinforced with metal clips, the makeshift shrinker weapon was already being yanked back into the hole under the tree from whence it had ejected via pulley system. A similar one was visible on the opposite side, right behind where Leann was now cowering on the ground and weeping, clutching where the spiked arm had smacked into the top of her foot with the force of a striking cobra.  Small bloodstains were painted across the tips of each where they’d accurately hit their mark.

            As each machine disappeared back into the hole, Garth willed himself to pull back up, swallowing his fear and letting adrenaline take over as he hurled himself back down the length of the branch and into the relative safety of the foliage before Savannah could recover.  His hands and feet, moving as a single unit to traverse the jungle of twigs and sprouts, didn’t allow him to stop until he’d burrowed himself in an opening in the wood just wide enough to squeeze his body in and hide.  A small crack in the bark allowed him a partial view of the scene below.

            “Oh my GOD!” Savannah screeched as she, too, lowered herself down, though she obviously didn’t trust the area in the grass enough to sit down as her friend did, despite the blood already trailing down the pale skin of her foot.  It clearly hurt too much to even put partial weight on her leg.  “Where’s your Mom?”

            “Back… at the parking lot…” Leann wailed semi-coherently, obviously handling the pain far less capably than her friend.

            “We should go.  Now,” Savannah urged fearfully, holding out a hand for her friend to accept and stand up, but it was ignored.  “P-Please, Leann?  It hurts.”

            “Why did they do that?” Leann gasped mournfully.  She had been thrown for a serious loop by the rejection of her benevolent intentions for the tiny captures.  Her eyes darted around the trees, obviously expecting further perils to emerge from between the leaves at a moment’s notice.  “WE JUST WANT TO KEEP YOU SAFE!” she cried out.

            “Put the other one back,” Savannah hissed with terror.

            “What?”

            “I said put him back!  Let him go!” her friend demanded with increasing terror.

            “B-But he’s m-mine!” she protested sadly, cradling Tom in her still-open hand and gazing at him with forlorn longing.  The tip of her tongue, like her friend’s a moment before, lapped at her lower lip.  “He needs me to p-”

            Her words were cut short by a swift whizzing, followed by another yelp of pain from Leann and a shuddering wince in her opposite arm.  Even without needing to see it clearly, Garth recognized the sound from numerous test runs he’d been present for.  The girl had just been hit with a sharpened nail fired from a rubber band inside the tree.  He doubted it had hit its mark accurately enough to remain lodged in her limb, but it had to have at least broken the skin, and judging by the dramatic uptick in her carrying on, the shrinker guessed it had.

            “LEANN!” Savannah cried, tumbling backward in shock at the additional assault, but pulled herself back to her feet just as quickly.  “Let go of him - now!”

            “Okay, okay, okay!” Leann squealed, finally convinced, and opening her hand next to the mud puddle to let Tom to roll out to the ground.  It was hard to tell from his height, but Garth felt fairly certain his friend was cautiously standing up after his release, and unhurt from the fall, which he’d apparently been protected from by Leann’s soft grip on her new pet.

            The towering girls both stood now, snatching up their discarded shoes as fast as possible, and twitching as they limped out of the shrinker colony’s patch of apple trees.  Only their whimpers of pain could be heard as they made the long trek back toward the parking lot.

            Garth was already scrambling back down the tree, using a series of thin stems he’d discovered laced together for easy shrinker usage to descend even faster than before.  There would be little time to get things together.

            After all, this discovery by the girls had already ensured they couldn’t remain in this area any longer.  Especially after the colony had caused bodily harm to two “innocent” girls who were simply going in search of new pets, they’d practically condemned this part of the orchard.  It wasn’t difficult to imagine that within a matter of hours, someone from the farm would be out to these trees to smoke all the shrinkers out: many would be plucked out and probably sold or even used as stress toys if the orchard owners were in a bad enough mood.  The rest would be flushed out of the trees with whatever combination of cats and pesticides would be necessary.

            So, they would run.  Again.

            Already below, Garth could hear his friends moving about beneath the cover of the tree roots, gathering up supplies they’d need before the emergent exodus.  He rappelled down the final portion of the wooden wall with deathly focus, narrowing the distance to the ground in a time no one but he could’ve pulled off.  Then, as the shrinker reached the base of the apple tree, sliding down the last smooth root, he came to a stop before the muddle puddle, as a petrified but nonetheless miraculously unharmed Tom was dragging himself from the dirt.

            The pair made eye contact, simultaneously addressing and forgiving all sins at once.  And then the two shrinkers, toughened by unbearably difficult lives and underground existence to the point of discarding most emotions, threw their arms around each other and shamelessly allowed tears to roll down their cheeks.  Garth pounded his friend and blood brother on the back, receiving the same treatment, then helped him up the final mud slick as they scurried toward the nearest tunnel to help with the packing.

            The future was frightfully unclear, as it always was for their kind, and there were going to be even further dangers lying in wait as they searched for a new home in the deeper woods beyond the edge of the orchard.  But Garth knew that after the events of this afternoon, he’d be damned if he was going to let the big hostile world out there take him just yet.

 “Awww Mom, can we get these ones?  Please?  Please?” a girl squealed with delight as she skipped along the shelves of stylish shrink-rider shoes in the brightly lit department store.  All along the way her hand was tucked into her pocket and wrapped snugly around the squirming body of her three-inch-tall twin sister, keeping her firmly affixed in the warm palm.  “She’d look so cute at the bottoms!”

            “Oh, Sally, I don’t know.  So many of these are just so expensive.  Are you sure you can’t be fine just wearing your sister in your normal shoes?” her parent groaned as she eyed the hefty prices on the specialized footwear and tapped the rim of one with a well-manicured finger.

            “But Moooom, that’s so booooring,” the teen droned desperately, twirling a thumb through her curly locks with the hand not holding Amanda.  “Plus she gets tired out so fast when I do that.  I tried it once and had her in there for school, and she wasn’t even moving by lunchtime!  I had to go wake her up in the bathroom.”

            “Honey, you know that’s just how it is at first.  Once she gets used to being under your foot, she’ll last longer, as long as you give her enough break days,” the woman said knowledgably.  “Why do you think I let you practice with one of my toys when we found out your sister was a shrinker?  I knew you’d want to be ready to use her once she was small enough.”

            “I know,” Sally sighed.  “But these are so nice.  They’re super comfy, and they’ll even mold a spot into the sole so your shrinker can fit!  That way, she’ll have room to sit without me standing on her too long, and then I’ll be able to feel her moving for more of the day.  Tara let me try the ones she uses to wear her cousin, and oh my gooooosh they feel so good.”

            “You know, when I was your age, I wore both of my sisters and my cousin in normal shoes for several years, and I didn’t complain once about it!” her mother insisted in a mockingly strict voice, a smile on her pursed lips.

            Sally rolled her eyes dramatically.  “Mom, I don’t want to be sporting twenty-five-year-old styles!  Besides, your sisters hardly talk anymore.  All they’re really good for is massages now.  You said so yourself.”

            “I suppose so,” her mother sighed, beginning to relent.  “And I guess you are still… attached to your sister, aren’t you?”

“Of course I am!” Sally gasped defensively.  Rummaging in her pocket for a moment, she balled up a fist around her half-naked sibling, a girl who just six months ago would’ve been considered a human with equal rights to her twin sister.  Drawing her hand out of the pocket, then, Sally allowed her tiny sibling to sprawl into her palm and get some fresh air.

            “You certainly have tried hard to keep her in one piece,” admitted her mother.

            “She’s the only one I’ve got.  And she’ll always be special to me, more than any other shrinker you or Daddy gets me!” Sally stated.  Bringing her occupied hand up to her chin, she puckered her lips against her miniscule sister’s back and pinned her into the massive palm with a loud kiss.  Immediately after releasing the pressure, then, her fingers were curling playfully back around the little writhing limbs and gently squeezing the girl’s body against her peachy palm like a stress ball.

            “Oh, all right, honey, you’ve made your point.  Let’s find a salesman and get your sister measured for your shoes,” her mother sighed, crossing her arms and shrugging.  “But I better see you taking good care of these things!  They cost even more than my shoes.”

            “I promise, Mom.  The best care,” Sally vowed, bringing her tormented sister up closer to her lips again as her fingers continued squirming over her meek body.   “Isn’t that right, widdle one?”

            Rather than waiting for an answer to what was an apparently rhetorical question, the girl buried her shrinker’s little face against her puckered mouth in another kiss, and even pressed her head between the plush threshold of her lips like a lollipop.  She savored her sister’s flavor for a few fleeting seconds before popping her back out and running her tongue up the length of her lips for the hapless pet to witness in full.

            Their mother only shook her head.  “You’re such a sweetheart, Sally.  I honestly don’t where you get it.  It certainly wasn’t from me, and you could probably confirm that with any of the shrinkers I’ve ever owned.”

            Sally giggled.  “Well, it’s easy when she’s so sweet too.”  Her tongue flicked out from between her lips a final time at this repetition.

            “She’s lucky to be yours,” her mother opined, then turned around at the sight of a passing salesperson.

            “May I help you folks with anything?” the vender asked with a pleasant grin, her eyes falling on Amanda hopelessly wrestling against her sister’s gigantic hand.  The woman’s smile widened with recognition of the situation.  “Are we taking a look at some shrink-riders today, by chance?”

            “Uh-huh!” Sally confirmed with an emphatic nod of her head.  She brandished her tiny sibling up a little higher for the woman to examine.  “I really want something comfy to wear her in.”

            “Wonderful!  I’m sure we can find the perfect pair for you.  As I’m sure you’ve heard, shrink-riders are the choice for accessorizing with shrinkers.  Their unique design allows you to keep your precious property with you at all times without causing damage to them, effectively allowing you to “wear” your shrinker as part of your outfit,” the woman said, clapping her hands softly with delight and taking a step forward.  “What kind are we thinking today?”

            “I suppose we didn’t really know there were different kinds,” Sally’s mother said.  “What are the options?”

            “Oh, there are quite a few.  We have shoes to fit just about every taste.  You can wear your shrinker below your toes, under your heel, on top of your foot closer to your ankle.  Depending on size, we can even create a strap that allows you to affix the shrinker between your toes, though I think your shrinker may be too big for that option.  To start, though, how about you just show me where you’re planning on keeping your…” the salesperson began, squinting at the shrunken twin of the young customer.  “…twin sister?”

            “Yep!” Sally said.

            “Thought so.  The resemblance is remarkable,” the woman answered knowingly, lowering herself onto her haunches near a black bench adjacent from the mountainous shelf of shoes.    She patted the surface of the seat invitingly.  “Why don’t you have a sit-down here, and show me where you’d like your sister to be when you’ve got her in your shoe?”

            “Okay,” Sally agreed happily.  Lowering herself onto the bench, she braced her feet against the carpet, and with her unoccupied hand began undoing the buckles of her strappy maroon sandals, kicking them off a few seconds later.  Her bare feet newly freed, she scrunched her doughy toes against the floor for a relaxing moment, then crossed her right ankle over her left knee to prop it up.  With Amanda pinched between her thumb and index finger, then, she brought her in closer to her peachy, wrinkled sole and pressed her flush against the wall of warm flesh.

            “Ahh, I think I see.  Is this where you’d like her to be in your new shrink-riders as well?” the saleswoman said as she observed the miniscule teenager thrashing uncomfortably against her sister’s titanic foot, her face buried in what could be surmised as a particularly pungent fold of skin, raw from several hours of walking around the mall already.

“Uh-huh!” the Sally answered.  As she nodded, she adjusted her grip to be more comfortable by wrapping her fingers around the side of her foot, which immediately sandwiched Amanda between the pad of her palm and the meaty surface of pink sole.  The smell was beginning to become apparent.

“Sorry if they’re stinky…” she apologized to the vender, wrinkling her nose at the musty scent.  “I don’t think I washed ‘em real well this morning.”

“Oh, don’t be silly, you’re perfectly all right,” the saleswoman said with a chuckle.  “Now, from what I’m seeing, I think you’ll want a pair of shrink-riders with a custom sole that we can mold to your sister’s body, allowing her to be integrated directly into the base of the shoe.”

“Yes, yes, that’s it!” Sally said excitedly.  “I’ve tried on a pair before and I really liked them.”

“I’d say that’s the best bet, then.  Mam?” the woman said, cheerily addressing Sally’s parent.

“If it’s what she wants,” Sally’s mother said with a smile, leaning against the bench.

“Excellent.  Now, you have the option of making several molds, so that if you own different shrinkers, you can change them out and have a custom fit each time you want to wear someone else inside.  Is that something you’re interested in, or do you just want the one of your sister?”

“Nope!  These are gonna be just for her,” Sally said lovingly, cooing downward at Amanda loudly enough that she could hear.  Of course, she kept her sibling plastered against her sole just as firmly as before.  “Something special.”

“I understand completely,” the saleswoman said.  “You know, back before they made all these custom shrink-rider options, I got my neighbor when she became a shrinker and carved out a spot for her in the bottom of my track shoes.  Those were just for her, too, and I still think of them that way.”

“That’s so sweet,” Sally’s mother said genuinely, some nostalgia flashing in her eyes.

“Tell you what.  If you’re set on this style of shrink-rider, I’ll go ahead and grab a piece of the mold material from the back to make a custom insole for your sister’s body.  How does that sound?”

“Awesome!” Sally enthused.  At last she released the pressure on her sibling and allowed Amanda to tumble into her palm.  Her little body heaved a few times, obviously deprived of fresh oxygen after being plowed for several minutes straight into the plump sole.

“You bet.  By the way, my name is Joann,” the saleswoman said with a wink before turning and heading for Staff Only door near the back of the store.

“Aren’t these gonna be so cool, Mom?” Sally gushed, kicking her bare heels rapidly against the carpet in eager anticipation.  She balled her sister back into her fist, though ensured not to squeeze too hard, only closing her fingers tightly enough that Amanda was pressed in on all sides by cushy flesh.

“They do sound awfully fancy,” her mother responded, obviously impressed.  A sly smile crossed her lips.  “Who knows?  Maybe I’ll want to borrow yours sometimes.”

Bugging her eyes, Sally pulled her hands protectively against her chest, ironically tightening her hand around the three-inch Amanda.   “No!  Mom, your feet are sooo big, you’d probably break the back of the shoe trying to put it on.”

“Watch your tone, honey.  I haven’t paid a cent for these things yet,” the woman said with a raised eyebrow, though she was clearly just being facetious at her daughter’s extreme reaction.  “I may eventually have to look into getting my own custom sole, though.  I’m sure that would be just the thing to give me some more quality time with my own sisters.”

“Back!” Joann called as she approached with what looked like a thick pad of white foam in one hand.  “I have a new piece of the material here that we use to create the mold, as well as an ID card so we can pair it with your shoes.  Mam, maybe you can fill it out?  All you have to do is press your sister into it as well as your foot and we should have an insole made for you within the week.  Do keep in mind, though, that this material is meant to simulate the base, so you have to decide: when you’re wearing him, do you want your sister facing the insole or facing your foot?”

“Facing my foot,” Sally said without hesitation, a smug grin on her face as she opened her palm for just long enough to glance at Amanda before trapping her between her firm fingers again.  “Definitely.”

“Ah, facing your foot.  Certainly a popular choice,” Joann said with a wink, holding out the white foam pad to her customer.  Sally’s mother, meanwhile, was scribbling her daughter’s information onto the card.  “Go ahead and lay your sister on her back here, then.  I can help you get the right depth for her.”

“Does it matter where her arms and legs go?” Sally asked, furrowing her brow as she toyed with her sibling’s tiny limbs under her thumb, even flicking lightly at them.

“It varies, but we find that having the shrinker’s arms and legs spread out as if they were making a snow angel is the best way to preserve consistent blood and airflow.  Already, shrink-riders make it possible to keep your shrinker conscious inside your shoe for somewhere in the neighborhood of eight hours, while the more classic method of just keeping them in a normal pair of shoes without bracing can knock them unconscious in half that time.  Essentially, this will allow you to wear your shrinker for even longer without taking a break: maybe more like twelve hours.”

“Oh, perfect!” Sally gasped.  “That’s so cool.  Hey, widdle one, spread your arms and legs out nice and wide for me.”

Her tiny expression numbed, and her body still reeking after being fused with the stench of Sally’s foot, Amanda spread her arms and legs out in the center of her sister’s giant palm, just as she’d been instructed.

“Awww, that’s my good girl,” Sally sighed, opening her hand as wide as she could to allow Amanda to stretch out.  “A little hand angel.”

Both Joann and Sally’s mother snickered.  Pinching her fingers around the shrinker’s sides, then, Sally plucked her underwear-clad sister from her hand and plopped her gently into the foamy surface of the pad Joann was holding up.  She sunk in slightly such that her body leveled off with the surface.

“That looks pretty good, actually,” Joann commented, pressing a thumb to Amanda’s stomach and instantly knocking the wind out of her without noticing or caring.  “Let’s just check to make absolutely sure she’s placed right.”

“Okay,” Sally said, releasing both hands from the pad to let the woman do her work.

“This will do nicely.  And now, to make sure we have a good reference point for the mold…” Joann said, placing the small tray containing the white foam onto the floor next to Sally’s discarded maroon sandals.  “…go ahead and stand on her on the spot you want her, using the foot you want to wear her under.”

The teen smiled broadly, peering down predatorily at the floor, where Amanda was immobilized in the thick material like a trapped fly between the titanic feet of her twin sister.  After savoring the image of her sibling shrinker so far below for a few more seconds, Sally lifted her right foot from the carpet and cast a shadow over the pad, hovering three inches above Amanda to give her a looming view of the massive sole as it continually arched and wrinkled back up.  Her toes squirmed feverishly.

“That looks like it’s lined up right,” Joann said approvingly, guiding Sally’s ankle with her fingertips in midair as she examined the foot-shaped shadow that shrouded the entrapped Amanda in the sea of foam.  “Go ahead and step on her now.”

Chuckling lightly, Sally obeyed.  The ball of her foot met the white pad with a tiny squelch, her sole arched as high as it would go to ensure she was still aiming right.  Satisfied, she lowered the rest of her tender-skinned appendage, burying Amanda beneath her sole and ramming her even deeper into the customizing material.  She ground her foot from side to side ever so slightly, just to make sure everything had settled in right.

Tiny puffed breaths of terrified air were tickling the wrinkles of Sally’s foot as Amanda gasped for oxygen, now caked in the molding foam as thickly as her sister’s enormous appendage.  Sally could feel her sister’s body clasped to the contours of her sole like never before, and recognized once again what a fantastic decision it was to purchase these shoes.

Ordinarily, the weight of her sole, often soaked with sweat and sock fibers after a long day at school, would mash her sister so thoroughly that she could hardly feel her fighting at all.  In fact, she often forgot she was there for long stretches of time in class until she’d feel Amanda’s chest meekly rising and falling in a desperate bid for clean air.

This, however, allowed Sally to feel everything in incredible, tantalizing detail: Amanda’s limbs swinging against the unforgiving ceiling of her feminine foot skin, her abdomen inflating and deflating at the whim of each step, and her face sputtering for air and accidentally smooching Sally’s sole wrinkles in the process.

Perfection.

She tried not to twitch at the tickling sensation, knowing it could affect the shape of her custom fit, and she wanted it to be absolutely flawless, for herself and for her beloved shrinker.  There would be time enough to play with her down there once she had the shoes in her hands and, more importantly, on her feet, with Amanda’s powerless little body an integral part.

 “Great.  Just great,” Joann said, nodding, as Sally pressed her foot down deeper into the customizing pad, sandwiching her three-inch-tall shrinker sister between the doughy flesh of her sole and the foamy molding material.  The saleswoman pressed down one final time on the top of the teen’s bare foot, just for good measure, earning a spasm from the spread-eagled Amanda.  “That should be all we need to make your custom insole for the shrink-riders.  Go ahead and lift straight up.”

“Okay!” Sally chirped.  Guided by Joann’s hands on her ankle, the teen plucked her foot from the pad.  It left behind a perfectly formed mold of her foot, accurate down to the swirled patterns of her toe prints, and in the center was the insignificant shape where Amanda’s body had been trapped.

The shrinker herself, of course, had absorbed enough of the gooey material that her half-naked body had glued itself to the fragrant flesh that had been bearing down so thoroughly on her, and gone right up into the air as Sally lifted her foot.

Mother and daughter giggled at the pathetic sight, as Amanda’s knees nudged awkwardly at the deep wrinkles of her twin sister’s skin, caked in the white adhesive foam.

“Whoops.  Looks like she didn’t want you to step off of her just yet!” Joann said with a chuckle as she slid the foam pad away, careful not to jostle the footprint.  This caused Sally’s mother to laugh lightly as well.

“I guess not,” Sally snickered.  She crossed her foot back over her opposite knee, ensuring Amanda still had nowhere to go but down if she tried to unpeel herself from the foot, though the stringy bonds of the foam ensured she wasn’t going anywhere.  Sally wriggled her toes, savoring the funny sensation.

“This is a very good print.  We’ll have an easy time making your custom insole with it,” Joann reported as she stood back up, keeping the pad steady.  “Once you have it in whatever shoe you choose today, all you’ll have to do is fit your sister’s body into the opening at the base like a puzzle piece then put it on.  The material is breathable and ensures enough pressure relief so that she can stay conscious for hours on end under your foot.”

“Sounds like a great thing,” Sally’s mom said, impressed.

“It really is.  Now, would you like to go ahead and wipe your foot off and then take a look at some of the shrink-rider designs?” Joann asked as she pulled a small towelette from a packet hooked to her belt.

“Hold on.  I wanna get this.  It’s just too good,” Sally giggled, sliding her phone out of her pocket and opening the camera.  Aiming it squarely at her white-speckled sole, where the pitiful Amanda was still mashed against it in a forced embrace, she snapped several images and uploaded them before stuffing the phone back in her pants.  “God, I bet that gets like fifty likes before we even leave the mall.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Joann said cheerily as Sally accepted the wipe from her.  Curling her soft fingers around Amanda’s side, the girl picked her off her foam-encrusted skin and cradled her lightly in her palm before going to work on cleaning up the sole with the fruit-scented moist towelette.  “I have to say, I’m impressed with how well-trained you have your sister to hold still like that.”

“You must see a lot of shrinkers who haven’t quite learned their place yet, huh?” Sally’s mother laughed.

“You have no idea!” Joann said.  “Just earlier today, I had a woman come in who wanted a custom flip-flop strap so she could attach her nephew to it.  Let me tell you, he was kicking and screaming the entire time I was trying to put him into the slot.  And he was a half-incher, so it was tough to handle without damaging him.  I got him in eventually, though, and they looked fabulous on her.”

“Awww,” Sally cooed.  She said it not out of pity for the boy, but out of admiration for the happy ending to the story.  In her tone, it was evident how much she regretted that her sister wouldn’t fit between her toes on a strap.

“I suppose he’ll just have to learn eventually.  We’ve made sure to teach Amanda how to conduct herself well,” Sally’s mother commented before taking another look at the shelf and addressing her daughter.  “I like this one, honey,” she said, pointing to a pink and violet shoe design on the rack.

“Ugh, Mom, you have no idea what’s in right now, do you?” the teen groaned semi-playfully as she plopped her somewhat cleansed foot onto the carpet next to her sandals and handed the used wipe back to the saleswoman.

“You have a look at our options, and I’ll go ahead and take these to the back for now,” Joann said, accepting the filled in card back and attaching it to the side of the mold pad as she marched back to the staff door of the store again.

“Thanks again!” Sally’s mother called, then rolled her eyes at the daughter she still considered to be a human being.  “Honey, believe it or not, I once was pretty cool.  Everything I wore, I ended up seeing on the other girls a week later, and by then the fashions had moved on.   Believe me, I’m with it!”

“Uh-huh, maybe like twenty years ago, but not anymore!” Sally groaned.  She nudged Amanda and flipped her onto her back, realizing there was still quite a bit of the foam clinging to the girl’s body.  “Oh, I guess I shouldn’t have given her the wipe back yet.  Mom, do you have any in your purse?”

“Sorry, I think I used the last one up during lunch, honey,” her parent said, chuckling at the memory of the need for it.  They’d grabbed some cobb salads and breadsticks at a nearby bar and grille, and during the meal Sally had decided to put her sister out onto the table to feed her.

This of course had quickly devolved into an amusing game of mother and daughter taking turns depositing Amanda into the center of their salads and watching her stumble over the slippery dressing-slicked lettuce in an attempt to escape the bowl.  Whenever she’d get close to making it to the rim, generally some kind of accident would occur that resulted in her being knocked back to the center, like a crouton being kicked with a fork over her head, or Sally’s straw from her Shirley Temple firing a distracting spray of sugary ginger ale and cherry flavor into Amanda’s face.

By the end, the exhausted shrinker’s whole three-inch body was greased with dressing and tomato juice as she lay in the center of the table, humbly munching a hunk off a buttery breadstick Sally had offered her as a reward for putting in effort to the game.  As soon as she’d finished it, though, the woman she once could’ve called “Mom” had picked her back up between a thumb and forefinger and dunked her into an ice water glass to rinse off.

Once Amanda was cleaned, though, getting her out was a bit more difficult.  Her mother first tried simply tilting the drink over her glossed lips and letting Amanda cascade down onto her slimy tongue where she might easily be retrieved, but the ice blocked her descent.  Ultimately the woman had to fish Sally’s tiny twin out by pinning her to the cold wall of the glass with a straw and sliding her steadily up the side until she could plop wetly into an enormous palm again.  Sally’s mother had squeezed her long fingers back around her former daughter in order to prevent her body temperature from dropping too low, but all the same, the event had ended with raucous laughter on the part of mother and daughter, and even the waitress joined in heartily.

“Maybe we shouldn’t have played as messy,” Sally said contemplatively as she observed her sister in her palm, still coated in the foam, then shrugged.  She bit her lip, considering the cleaning options without a towelette.  “But on the other hand, it was pretty funny.”

“It definitely was,” her mother agreed.  “I used to try games like that with my sisters when we were younger.  Putting them in cereal was always my favorite.  But they’d always give up so quickly, and I’d just have to leave them in there for a while and slurp them out once the milk got too sludgy.  I suppose this is what comes from treating your sister so much nicer.”

“I guess so,” Sally agreed, furrowing her brow with intent, then lit up with sudden realization.  Gulping a few times in preparation and undulating her cheeks, the girl inhaled deeply and then spat a precise ball of saliva into the center of her palm, directly onto her sister’s chest.

The spitball swelled from between Sally’s soft lips and plopped with a quiet, sticky splash onto its intended three-inch target, right in the center of the teen’s open hand.

Amanda flinched at the gooey impact and visibly shuddered as her sister’s spit flooded warmly over her abdomen, though already it was allowing the foamy residue to break up more easily.

“Honey, please don’t do that in public.  You couldn’t at least have waited until we were back in the car?” her mother sighed, placing a hand over her face in frustration.

“What?  She’s dirty.  I wanna keep her clean,” Sally defended.  Licking her thumb for good measure, she began rubbing her fingertip vigorously over Amanda’s body, spreading her spit across all exposed skin and chipping steadily away at the foam.  “You’re the one who said she’s fun to play with cuz I take care of her so well.”

“I know, I know,” Sally’s mother groaned.  “Maybe just don’t do it like that in the store anymore?  Your dad and I raised you with better manners than that.”

“Okay, fine,” the teen agreed, finishing rubbing the filthy shrinker down, and noticed that Amanda’s miniature underwear was still soaked with the foam.  “Gosh, this is messy.  I hope this goop comes out of her little panties.”

“Oh, don’t worry about it, honey, you can just throw them out later.  Trunks, especially for three-inchers, you can get in packs of a dozen for a buck or so at the dollar store,” said her parent.  “God knows I went through enough of those sets for my sisters.  I used to have to buy a few extra packs, too, for when I’d go to camp in the summers and take them both along.”

“Really?” Sally giggled, stroking a curved fingernail precariously along her miniature sister’s stomach to ensure all the foam was cleared away.  “How come just for camp?”

“Well, the way I hiked, by the end of the day I had an awful lot of dirt on me.  And if the showers weren’t free, I had them to clean me up.  By the end it looked like they’d been trekking through the mud instead of me, especially if they didn’t do a great job and I had to just start using them to get it done myself,” the woman said warmly, reminiscing once again.  “I had to throw away a lot of their little leotards.”

“I just don’t want Amanda getting the gross stuff all over the inside of my purse,” Sally affirmed resolutely.  “And I think I brought a spare pair of undies for her anyway.”  Sliding a well-trimmed fingernail into the waistband of her sister’s tiny panties, she slid them gently down her legs.  She quickly followed suit with the bra, stripping the shrinker down to absolutely nothing in her peachy palm.

The naked shrinker, clearly used to such cavalier theft of the very few things she owned in the world, remained motionless despite the increased cold of the air as her titanic sibling pinched the stolen foam-crusted clothing between a thumb and forefinger, grimacing with disgust at the sight of them.   Her eyes darted to the side and located a small trashcan with a swiveling door next to the bench, intended for the disposal of used pantyhose.  The girl flicked the soiled articles into the receptacle and then set about rummaging through her purse for the spare set.

Finding nothing, though, Sally thought back to three days prior, and realization dawned yet again.

Her friend Maria, while in the process of smacking on a rather large wad of hours-old bubble gum, had found Amanda while her sister had left her on the classroom desk during a bathroom break.  Seeing an opportunity for a gag, the girl had immediately plucked up the shrinker and shoved half Amanda’s thrashing body between her sticky lips and blown a fresh bubble around her.

When Sally had returned to the classroom from the bathroom, she nearly doubled over with laughter at the sight of her sister dangling awkwardly from Maria’s mouth, a pink bubble curling around her limp arms and shoulders.

Of course, the thing had popped seconds later, and the gum was almost assuredly never going to come out of the fabric.  This necessitated Sally stripping her sister yet again, much to the cackling amusement of Maria and a few other classmates.

“Actually, I think I used up the other pair of her undies, too,” Sally said as she removed her hand from her purse and looked back up to her mother.  She wrinkled her nose and swiped a thick spit bubble out of Amanda’s tangled hair.  “Maybe I shouldn’t have thrown those away before I checked.  Now she’s stuck all naked and cold…”

Her mother shrugged, picking up another shoe from the rack and looking it over.  “So she’ll be a little chilly on the way home.  It’ll be okay.  Just find a way to keep her warm for now.”

“That’s easy,” Sally said.  Placing her other hand over her cupped palm, she sandwiched her sister between the two pads of pink skin and began gently kneading her between them.  She rocked her hands back and forth, locking her fingers together, ensuring plenty of heat was generated where her sister was now pinned without putting any painful pressure on her.

“That’ll work.  And… honey, would you please make sure you clean her up with actual soap and water when we get home?  She’s been in our salads, in that foot mold, up against your toes…” her mother catalogued, wrinkling her upper lip.  “She’s probably just covered in germs by now, and I don’t want anyone forgetting and then getting sick from touching her too much.”

“Yeah, I’ll clean her up,” Sally promised.

“Thank you.  Now let’s take a look at some of these choices, hmm?” her mother said, now picking up a green and yellow shrink-rider shoe.  “How about this one?”

“Eww, Mom, don’t be weird,” Sally gasped as she rose to her feet and examined the shelves.  She still kept her hands pressed together, mildly cooking Amanda between the lotion-scented heat of her soft palms.  “Green and yellow?  Pleeeeease.  I’m not a Christmas elf.”

“Sorry about the wait.  I had to get in line to put in the order for the custom insole.  We’ve had sixty-eight orders for customs, just today!  Imagine that,” Joann said as she reappeared next to the pair.   “Seeing anything you like yet?”

“Not yet,” Sally said slowly, squinting at a pair of black and purple shoes before shaking her head.

“C’mon, honey.  I think we’ve taken enough of this woman’s time.  Let’s pick them out.  Which shrink-rider do you want?” Sally’s mother said, kindly presenting an ultimatum.

“I just don’t know,” Sally sighed.  “A lot of them do look pretty cool.”  She looked down to her fist, uncurling her fingers.  Her sister, now well-heated from being squeezed against the damp skin of the girl’s palm, sprawled into the center and realized with shock that her giant sibling was actually making eye contact with her.  “What do you think, widdle one?  What color should I get for our shrink-riders?”

Our shrink-riders.  The phrase sounded so bizarre, and yet so fitting.

After all, by the time the things were worn out in a couple years, Amanda would be far more intimately familiar with the sights, touches, and most prominently smells of the footwear than her sister could ever hope or indeed want to be.  Amanda, who’d been on a robotic autopilot for roughly the past forty-eight hours since her sister had last requested any kind of coherent thought from the shrinker, stared blankly at the massive wall of shoes.

It took the tiny girl a solid thirty seconds to even regain the mental musculature necessary to make decisions.   In her new life as a miniature toy for her twin sister, any decision she got to make was usually limited to something like “which color bra do you want to wear today,” or the ever-popular “which stocking do you want to be worn inside today?”

But this.  This was something real: something that would actually have an impact on the existing world, or at least her sister’s social circle once she started proudly wearing the things to school, with Amanda firmly affixed to the base under her sole and a mounting moat of toejam-flecked sweat.

And as much as the shrinker yearned in the back of her mind to make the choices of a real human being again, Amanda knew the way of the world and had come to numbly accept her fate.  Her parents chose to toy with her on many an occasion, but her true owner, Sally, always ensured she was never in true harm’s way, because as the taller twin often expressed with finger hugs or moist kisses, she still cared for her as one might care for a beloved pet.

Who in Amanda’s position could possibly ask for anything more?

Sally deserved to be happy.  Maybe she even deserved Amanda, here, beneath her?  It was the shrinker’s duty to choose well for her, and she did not take that responsibility lightly.

“The red and silver,” Amanda said, her voice coming out as a croak since she hadn’t spoken aloud in two days, but she said it firmly.  It was rare for shrinkers to have a reason to feel proud of anything, but she felt it in this moment.

For this instant, she mattered as something more than an accessory for her sister’s toes.

“Red and silver,” Sally repeated thoughtfully.  She raised an eyebrow, chewing the possibility over, and then slowly shook her head.  “Nope!  I choose blue and white.”

Her fingers curled back in, cocooning her three-inch sister back into the warm, doughy skin of her fist before Amanda had even had an instant to register the disappointment.

            Richard tapped his foot on the polished surface of the kitchen table, his arms crossed, and his patience growing continually shorter.  The five-inch-tall shrinker glanced over at the clock on the oven timer yet again, just to confirm for himself it was as late as he thought.  He’d been posted here for the past two hours past midnight, waiting for the girl who was technically the daughter of his “owner” but was just as close if not more so to his own daughter than any blood relative in the world.

            Grimacing, he endeavored to remind himself that it wasn’t worth getting as worked up as he already was.  If nothing else, it was a good thing for the girl to be out, apparently working her way up the social ladder like she had been in these previous few months when Richard had seen less and less of her.

            After all, Julie certainly didn’t come from a background that afforded her many easy friends.  She had been the result of her mother’s drunken escapades at age eighteen; the father had run off before legal responsibility could get its mitts on him, and Carol had raised Julie alone for the first five years of her life, until Richard had entered the picture.  A runaway shrinker who’d been in his brother and sister’s cruel custody for the past eight years, he was mortified to be captured in the garden by Carol, until their respective vulnerabilities, and Carol’s kind heart, allowed their love to blossom.

            Julie, still too young at the time to have formed notions of the hierarchy of humans and shrinkers, grew to love Richard as her father, learning to hold and care for him with all the delicacy he required.  In turn, he taught her to treat all living things with gentleness and generosity, always encouraging her to do her best.  Carol, with Richard’s help monitoring Julie at home, had managed to graduate college and get a job in a law firm while working toward a higher degree.  In spite of the overwhelming odds, they had made it.

After six years together, Carol and Richard had been more-or-less married in a Las Vegas chapel that didn’t discriminate amongst mixed size unions, with an adoring Julie as the flower girl.  It wasn’t recognized by their state as an official coupling, nor would it have in any other, but none of the little family cared.  They had each other, and that was all that mattered.

            Finding the balance was certainly tricky since mixed size couples were looked on with unholy disdain by the majority of the free world.  Many people outright refused to interact with such abominations in any social context; many companies refused to hire anyone involved.  Carol and Richard had worked hard to find the most liberal district in the city, which after a great deal of hunting, allowed them to build up a little network of accepting friends and acquaintances, a few of whom had adopted the lifestyle as well.  Once Carol, a newly minted lawyer, had found work, they even had financial stability as well.

Of course, this didn’t mean things went entirely smoothly, and despite the rampant challenges faced in his own perilous existence as a shrinker, the thirty-nine-year-old Richard was able to recognize this fact.  Julie, now eighteen years old, had spent her entire school career dealing with harsh bullies who mercilessly teased her for having an inhuman doll-sized pet as a father.  One girl in particular had made a point to confront Julie in front of a hallway full of people, calling Carol a “shrinker whore” and Richard “a walking-talking excuse for life.”  The exchange had ended with the girl laying on the ground and Julie’s nails clawing into her face in retaliation, and enraged cursing pouring from the latter’s lips.

It took Carol pulling quite a few strings at her firm to ensure Julie wasn’t expelled after the incident.  The school, though uniquely supportive of the humane treatment of shrinkers, had to draw the line when a student was having the bridge of her nose nearly scraped off.  Neither able to condemn his daughter’s defense of him nor condone the violent reaction, Richard truly came to realize the worlds the girl was trapped between, and he sincerely wished there was a way he could alleviate the strain on her.

The clock hit 2:14 AM.

Richard grumbled, cognizant of the balance his daughter was striving to achieve in her life, but there eventually had to be a limit.  A soft curfew had been placed a few years ago for her to be home by midnight every weekend, and up until now, it hadn’t been broken.  He supposed she deserved the leniency to bend the rule now and again, but this was really pushing it.  She hadn’t been answering the texts he’d been sending her by punching letters into the smartphone on the countertop.

He wished Carol was here at home instead of in the next county for the weekend on a case.  She was usually better at handling these types of situations.  Despite her love for her father, Julie tended to respect her mother’s commands more readily, even if she didn’t realize it, possibly because Carol was able to look at their child eye-to-eye rather than Richard’s comparative eye-to-ankle.  Usually Julie was good enough to pick her father up and hold him up to her face if he had something to say, but all the same, there was something subconsciously disempowering for the man when he had something to discuss with his child and he was forced to get her attention by tapping on her pink-painted toes, which wriggled instinctively at his tickling touch before a palm lowered to collect him.

Suddenly Richard heard the garage door creaking open, and his heart flooded with relief. At least something hadn’t happened to her; she was home safe.

He had resolved over forty minutes ago to save the lecture for the morning, after they’d both had some sleep and clearer heads.  As soon as Julie was inside, he could simply request that she carry him up to his room for bed, and then say good night to her.  No matter the issue, they could talk it out in the morning, like they always had, usually with Richard perched lovingly in Julie’s hands as she reclined in the backyard hammock.  At least, that was how it had been before she’d started spending more and more time outside the house, to her parents’ bittersweet approval.

The door into the kitchen from the garage swung open and Richard puffed up his chest, hoping to look authoritative without condescending.  However, rather than seeing Julie saunter inside, he watched a clustered trio of teens he didn’t recognize stumbling up the step and into the house: two girls and a boy, all appearing to be about Julie’s age, with professionally maintained hair and dressed in fashions that looked like they came from stores at least two socioeconomic levels higher than Richard’s family.  Their eyes were all foggily unfocused as they gazed around the kitchen, dumb grins frozen on their lips, and it occurred to the five-inch-tall shrinker that they were all at least a little bit tipsy.

That was when Julie appeared, pushing past the three and stepping into the kitchen.  She was wearing a leather jacket Richard didn’t recognize, possibly a new purchase from earlier in the day.  More noticeably, her blond hair was streaked on one side with fresh pink dye.  Richard did a double take, but forced himself not to mention it.  She was eighteen, after all.  What was the harm in changing her style a little?

By now, the trio was leaning against a wall for support.  The boy was intimately embracing one of the girls, his hands cupping around her denim-clad butt, and the other girl was picking at something in her teeth with a white-painted fingernail.  All three had set their sights squarely on Richard, however, and their amused smiles were curling into something bigger and potentially more sinister.  The boy and girl, clearly a couple or at least bang buddies, chuckled openly at him.

Swallowing hard and forcing himself to ignore this fairly common occurrence in his life, Richard instead focused his attention on his daughter.  Julie’s hands were buried in her pockets and she seemed to have shifted her slender weight onto one foot so that she leaned with just a little attitude.  Studying her face, the shrinker realized she was wearing more make-up than when she’d left earlier that night as well, but this too he resolved to ignore.

“Julie,” he said at last.  The semi-drunken trio all flinched at the sound, as though previously unconvinced that Richard was sentient, and then snickered again, this time joined by the nail-biting girl, who set about twirling a finger through her hair instead.

Richard’s daughter blinked, a stoic expression locked on her countenance, but at last she gifted him with eye contact.  Her gaze was different, not the compassionate and cheerful one he was used to.  It lacked something, but he couldn’t place it.

“Daddy,” she answered after a pause.  The dulled response was merely a statement of identification.

“Julie, it’s… two in the morning,” he said, more hesitantly than he meant.

“So?”  This word was even more cold and unfeeling.  It chilled Richard to the bone.

“I don’t mean to make a big deal of it in front of your… friends, but in case you’ve forgotten, your curfew is midnight,” he said, placing his hands on his hips for courage.  “We don’t have to talk about it right now.  I really just want the both of us to head to bed.  Your mother will be home around noon tomorrow, and we can have a little talk.”

There was another icy pause.  Julie bit her lip and wordlessly frowned at her father.  Suddenly, the boy and girl behind her detached themselves slowly and leaned forward.

“Shit, I thought you were kidding, Julie,” the boy said, clearly shocked.

“So crazy,” his significant other breathed.

“Excuse me,” Richard said, more loudly now.  “I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m trying to have a conversation with my daughter here, and-”

At this, the trio burst into laughter, and a smile cracked over Julie’s lips.

“Holy fuck.  He… he even talks like a real dad,” the boy cackled, slapping his thigh.

“That’s hysterical,” the hair-twirling girl commented, shaking her head in disbelief.  “Julie, how’d you get him to do that?  Do you give him treats?”

“All right, that’s enough,” Richard snapped.  The force of his voice momentarily conjured stillness from the three visitors.  Julie remained as she had been for several standoffish minutes.  “I’m not going to try to talk you into looking at me a certain way right now.  You’re obviously very set.  I’m far too tired, and I have some personal matters to discuss with my daughter.  If you don’t mind, I would appreciate it if the three of you showed yourselves out now.”

The three pairs of eyes behind Julie all bugged, startled beyond belief at this command from a man smaller than each of their hands.  Instantly then they split up into riotous peals of laughter, bending over and holding one another for support.  It went on for at a full uninterrupted minute as Richard stared them down, feeling increasingly powerless by the second, and witnessed the girl with the bored tics actually crying from guffawing so hard.

Julie herself only seemed to twitch at the onslaught of laughter, but her face remained expressionless.

“Julie,” Richard said.  His voice was softer and more forgiving now.  At this point, he was willing to look past quite a bit, if only the three would leave his and Carol’s house and allow him to peaceably end the current conversation with his daughter.  “Please.  Ask your friends to leave.”

The teen took a step closer to the table, wrinkling her lip into a sneer, and pulled her hands from her pockets so she could cross her arms across her chest, mimicking the stance her tiny father held in an attempt to demonstrate some parental dominance.  Instantly Richard’s limbs felt like they were made of jelly, in a way he never thought he could feel while his gigantic daughter stood above him.

            “No,” she said matter-of-factly.  The chill had endured in her tone, and it was so alien to Richard he had to remind himself that this was the same girl who had once written him a poem about daffodils and read it in the most lovingly singsong voice to ever emerge from a child.

            “What?” he uttered.

            “I said no.  I think I want them to stay for a little while,” she continued.  She unfolded her arms and lowered her right hand onto the table, tapping the surface with her fingertips just a few inches from where Richard stood.  Like never before, he felt intimidated by the sight of his daughter’s hand, where before he only felt comfort and closeness to her.  She had fresh French tips gleaming on each fingernail.

            “Now, Julie,” Richard said.  His throat had gone dry.  “I see that you’re just trying to fit in.  Believe me, I… understand.  But I am your father, and you will listen to me.”

            “I will, huh?” the girl posed quietly, tilting her chin pompously up toward the ceiling.  Her entire frame stiffened a little, again distant from her normally relaxed stance, as though she was steeling herself for something and didn’t want to have to stare directly downward.

Suddenly her hand was rising back up, fingers outstretched, and tangling themselves around Richard.  She flattened him to the surface of the table with great ease, particularly as the shrinker was too shocked by this show of force to resist.

Her palm broke his fall, preventing any pain in the takedown, but as she pinned him to the wooden surface with just her thumb and index finger, Richard gasped in shock.  Even the trio had fallen silent.

“It sure doesn’t feel like I will,” Julie announced icily.

Richard laid on the kitchen table, held down by the might of his daughter’s massive fingers that easily kneaded her five-inch father’s body.

Never had Julie ever used her size and strength advantage to impose her will in any but the most innocent of finger wrestling games as a young child.  For a moment, the now-distraught Richard was taken back to those times, watching as the young girl learned how much force she could use without harming her tiny parent, and then immediately releasing the pressure and scooping him up to bring him in for a kiss on the top of his head.

Somehow, this didn’t fall into the same emotional category.

“Julie,” he uttered, his voice a gentle whisper now, almost like the lullabies he used to sing to her.  “Please don’t feel like you have to do this.”

“I don’t have to do anything, Daddy.  That’s the point,” Julie informed him, keeping her fingers pinned to his chest.  They didn’t hurt, but they were certainly firmly there, and the man wasn’t going anywhere unless she wanted him to.  “And I definitely don’t have to do anything you say.”

The trio of garishly dressed and immaculately combed teenage onlookers snickered, still heartily under the influence of whatever they’d been drinking before stumbling inside the house in front of their new friend.

“Tell him, Julie,” one of the girls commented encouragingly.  The guy had wrapped his arms back around his mate’s back and hugged her into him, and looked like he was considering nibbling at her neck, though his eyes remained on the family drama unfolding at the kitchen table.

“He’s so fucking small,” the girl laughed as she allowed the guy to explore her skin.  “Shouldn’t it be the other way around?”

“Maybe he should start doing what you say instead,” the other girl said, petting the underside of her chin contemplatively.

“Yeah,” Julie said, somewhat uncertainly, but forcefully nonetheless.  The idea was obviously new to her.  She leaned in closer to the table, casting her shadow over Richard and blotting out the dim light of the small glass lamp over the table.  Her lips curled upward.  “How about that, Daddy?”

Richard gulped, saddened, but remained defiant.  He’d had a damn rough life, especially before he’d escaped his brother and sister’s torment years before and been found by Carol.  There had been numerous challenges all the along the way, both to his personal safety and his honor as an organism.  Right now, Julie was obviously in the midst of some kind of social crisis, spurred on by her new drunken friends.  It pained him deeply to imagine the sort of mental twisting that had to have occurred to bring her to the point where she’d pin him down just to impress some well-dressed strangers.  He had a duty as a father to not crack under the pressure and do whatever was necessary to bring her around.

“Make him say he’s a dirty little shrinker,” the boy suggested before he locked lips with his girlfriend and ran a hand through her hair.

“Yeah,” the other girl agreed.  “Do it, Julie.”

“Daddy?” Julie drawled.  “Why don’t you say you’re a dirty little shrinker?”  She blinked as soon as she’d said it, entirely unaccustomed to such verbal abuse, but remained focused.  Her hot breath, lightly redolent of lemonade and vodka, clouded around her father’s face, causing him to cough.

“This isn’t you, Julie,” Richard said softly.  “You don’t have to prove anything to anyone.”

“Are you gonna say it or not?” she pressed.

“No.  I won’t say it,” Richard responded.

The trio let out a few sarcastic “ooohs” before splitting into more drunken chuckles.

“Okay, then,” Julie said.  “I guess I have to teach you a lesson now, Daddy.”  The words were robotic, almost scripted, like she’d thought them through before entering the house: certainly not her natural, carefree voice.  Her fingers lifted up from his body at last as she let her arms hang at her sides.

“Or you can stop now and ask your friends to leave, and then we can talk about this,” Richard offered as he pulled himself to his feet and massaged the sore spot on his abdomen where Julie’s fingers had pinned him like a pair of fallen telephone poles.

“I don’t really feel like talking right now,” Julie commented.  “You know, it’s not cool of you to treat me like a kid.  I’m not a little girl any more.  Especially not to you.”

You’ll always be my little girl, Richard thought to himself.

“Show him your new boots, Julie,” one of her friends commented, peeling her face away from the boy’s.  “I bet he’ll like them.”

“Yeah.  Especially the lining,” the other girl said slyly.

Julie stiffened again, then bowed her head a little, mulling.  Next she was kneeling on the ground and digging her thumbs into the opening of the nearly knee-high leather footwear, working her heel out.

“You’re in over your head, shrinker,” the boy said with a snicker as he turned back to his girlfriend and kissed her neck.

“You don’t intimidate me, son,” Richard said boldly, which to the dismay of the attention-receiving girl, earned the focus of the teen right back.

“Why not?” the boy asked.  “You’re a shrinker.  You’re the kind of thing we fuck with on the weekends for fun.”

“Maybe I am,” Richard said.  “But that doesn’t mean you scare me.  My body may not be mine, but my mind is.  And that makes you powerless.”

The boy frowned, looking like he was considering walking over to the table and taking a swipe at the loud-mouthed thirty-nine-year-old, but quickly thought better of it after he took an unbalanced step and slid back into the waiting arms of his hammered beau.  “Whatever,” he grunted.

“What do you think of them, Daddy?” Julie questioned as she stood back up with one of the boots in hand.  Scented of fresh leather and colored like milky coffee, the empty footwear was slammed onto the surface of the table hard enough that Richard almost lost his balance.

“What happened to your other pair?” he said.

“I stopped caring about everything being pink.  That’s what,” Julie snapped.  She tilted the boot onto its side so that the leathery tunnel formed a hill laid out before her five-inch father.  “So you can have one more try now.  Say you’re a dirty little shrinker.”

Richard took a deep breath, composing himself as best he could, even as his heart rattled inside his ribcage.  “No, Julie.  I’m not going to say that, and nothing you think you can do to me is going to change that.”

Julie puckered her lips, weighing her options again with fire in her eyes, and then exhaled heavily.  “Wanna bet, Daddy?”

Her clawed fingers descended again, this time forming a cage around Richard’s abdomen as she bungled him into a fist and lifted him off the table.  She hadn’t picked him up like this since she was six years old at one of their first meetings, before she’d learned to think about his safety or comfort.  Richard squirmed awkwardly in her grip, at least reassured by the placement of her fingertips that she had a secure hold on him.  It was awkward to sit like this, and scary like it had never been before, but even now, he could tell she had the experience to prevent harming him.

The trio kept quiet, fighting back giggling.  Richard looked down to see his legs dangling over the black mouth of the boot, which Juliet had propped open with her other hand.  Suddenly he was dropping again, still buoyed by his daughter’s fingers as a quick breeze whipped by his cheeks.  A moment later the kitchen disappeared and all he could see was the winding darkness of the boot’s furry lining as his child reached her arm deeply into the boot.

Julie’s fingers at last released Richard once he felt his feet kicking into the narrowed toe of the boot.  At this depth, the heat immediately became apparent, and was already at work cooking the air tainted with the aroma of worn-out socks and fleshy grime.  It was a scent the shrinker was well-acquainted with due to the time he’d spent on the floor around the feet of normal-sized people, though he’d never sensed it in such concentrated form, where every breath filled his lungs with the sour stench.  He gagged but kept strong, huddling his arms against his body and waiting as he felt the shoe dangling in the air again, refusing to shout despite his desire to do so.

He would not turn on his daughter with a monstrous rage during what was quickly becoming apparent as her greatest hour of need.

The light spilling in from the opening, already feeling so far away, was squelched away as the boot made rocky contact with the kitchen floor.  Richard rolled over onto his side and struggled to crawl forward in the tight space, but immediately found himself disoriented in the pungent darkness.  A last few rays made their way in around Julie’s descending ankle and heel as she slid her foot back into the boot.

What little air remained was immediately boxed in as the eighteen-year-old’s bare foot slid forward across the soft surface.  After a second of nervous anticipation, Richard was bumped by his daughter’s curled toes and shoved onto his stomach, where he became pinned into the pointed crevice of the tip by the sweaty, faintly violet-scented digits.

Only a few seconds passed with Richard trapped under his daughter’s enormous toes before Julie got to work.  Her digits gripped her father’s body as best they could, fumbling with the shrinker in the damp darkness.  The flesh, greasy after a night out, ruffled his hair and clothes and pinched at his arms between the digits.  Yet even as Julie mashed him down into the foul-smelling insole, Richard could tell she was using restraint, if only subconsciously, like when she’d picked him up.

High above through the wall of leather and fabric he heard laughter and clapping from the trio as the stunt was completed.  Julie’s toes set about squirming awkwardly over his body,  as the entire act was obviously wildly foreign to her.  Frankly, the girl was in the minority to have never tried putting a shrinker in her shoe by this age, yet Richard could sense her newness with the concept.  He certainly had the experience to know when someone was handling him with authority in quite possibly the most dangerous location on their wardrobe.  His mother, his brother, his sister, several of his cousins and even a neighbor: all had tried wearing him several times in his youth, and each had picked up a style for corralling him under their filthy toes and grinding him into the insole until he was literally begging for mercy.

But not Julie.  Sweet Julie, who only wanted acceptance from a world that would never fully accept her just because of her inhuman father, couldn’t pull it off.  Her toes prodded at him curiously, unsure of what to do with themselves, and her entire foot was braced back to give him as much room as possible.

She wasn’t the dominating monster she wanted her friends to think she was.  She was a girl so desperate to be liked that she was blinded to what was most important.

Apparently this location had grown boring for the group, because suddenly Julie’s boot was lifting up, her toes suspended in midair for just a moment that caused Richard to nearly slide under the slick ball of her foot.  The living room, immediately attached to the kitchen, was the apparent destination.  The shrinker only experienced about fifteen compressions under the doughy, sweat-laced skin of his child, and he could sense the care with which Julie was walking on him.  Shuffling was heard as everyone took a seat in a chair, and weightlessness took over momentarily again as Julie crossed her boot over her opposite knee.

Meanwhile, the discussion up at normal eye level carried on.  Richard heard more laughter, and struggled to wedge himself as comfortably as possible under Julie’s toes.  He tried more than once to slither on top of her foot and try climbing toward the opening again, but given the angle she had crossed her leg, it was impossible.  Luckily, the girl noticed her tiny father’s attempts to reposition and quickly curled her digits around his limbs again, hugging him down against her foot and ensuring he couldn’t slip in another direction.

Richard, aware now that he wasn’t going anywhere, resolved to lie peacefully in the overheated hovel of salty feminine flesh and swampy air.  This was just the price he was promising he’d pay to help Julie find her way back home.

In the darkness, with his daughter’s toes resting gently on his back and tapping occasionally on his legs, Richard began to cry, not for himself, but for his child.  It was slow at first, but soon the man’s chest was heaving up against Julie’s toes, the pouring moisture of his tears intermingling with the sticky sweat caked over her skin.

At first, the toes only twitched as Richard’s liquid sorrow dribbled onto her, but soon it was almost overwhelming as the shrinker fought to choke back deep sobs.  Bowing his head, the downtrodden parent felt his neck slipping accidentally into the tender crevice between his daughter’s big and second toes, his tears filling in the soft wrinkles and cleansing her filthy flesh in some small measure.

“I can’t do this,” Julie’s voice boomed suddenly from far above as though awakening from a fever dream.  Richard halted, gasping for breath as Julie’s toe cradled the side of his face.

“Can’t do what?” laughed the voice of the boy.

“Can’t listen to you pieces of shit anymore,” she scowled back.  Already the boot was slipping off her foot, the toes at last releasing their sweaty grip on Richard’s body.  With relief, he tumbled freely against the tilted insole again.  The action outside was now more clearly heard.

“Uh, excuse me?” one of the girls squawked.  “Don’t be fucking rude.  We bought you vodka.”

“You’re just drunk, Julie,” the other girl commented.

“No,” Julie fired back, her voice cracking.  “I’m just not going to let a bunch of rich fuckers turn me into one of them.”  Richard turned around and saw his daughter’s hand sliding back into the opening of the boot, her fingers fishing for him in the darkness.  He reached out a hand, meeting the girl’s fingertip, and felt it shiver at his touch.  Soon her palm was gathering him up in the same way it normally did, cupping him carefully against her soft skin to ensure he was comfortable as she lifted him at last out of the boot.

Richard sputtered for fresh air as he emerged into the living room, guarded behind his daughter’s fingers.  He looked up, his face reddened and wet with tears, and realized Julie’s eyes were already welled deeply with glistening moisture.  She’d managed to hold it together for a few seconds while she told off her new friends, but at the sight of her father, roughed up by her own body and weeping bitterly, she broke down completely.

“Ugh.  I told you she was still a shrinker-lover,” the boy groaned as he rose with his girlfriend from the couch.  “C’mon.  Let’s get the hell out of here.  I’m sick of looking at them both already.”

“We thought you were cool, Julie,” the other girl said as she followed her friends.  “We thought you were different.”

Now ignoring the trio as they stumbled out the kitchen door and back to their car outside without closing the garage, Julie’s raw eyes were locked to her father, cribbed in both hands, as fat tears cascaded endlessly down her cheeks.  As soon as the door had closed behind the intruders, Julie’s quivering lips opened up and she screamed.

The scream rattled her entire body and shredded through the walls of the house, and Richard felt as though the sound was echoing inside his own chest too.  In spite of the pain his daughter was clearly in now as she fought to return to being the person he knew and loved, the shrinker managed to stop his own miniature floodgates and dry his eyes.

She was fighting.  She could make it back.

Julie drew in air for breath but carried right on, roaring with passionate sorrow and horror at what she’d done.  By now, her tears were spilling down the crook of her neck, staining spots onto her shirt and plopping onto her father, in turn rinsing his ravaged body.

“Julie,” Richard croaked, his small voice that somehow cut through the anguish bellowing from his child’s throat.  He lifted her limp thumb and hugged it tightly to his chest.  “Julie.”

Amidst her strife, the girl heard her father’s words and looked down at him, big blue eyes strained around the edges.  Her mouth hung open, unable to come up with a response, and her breaths came loud and heavy.

Richard was looking up at the titanic face of an eighteen-year-old girl with pink streaks in her hair and uncharacteristically heavy eye shadow that had spilled down her cheeks in silver cataracts, but this wasn’t what he saw.

Instead, he saw the tear-stained face of Julie at five years old on another night when Carol was out of town.  A thunderstorm was raging outside, and Richard had woken to the sound of his daughter crying into her pillow in the next room.  Minutes later he’d climbed down the makeshift ladder attached to his pillow and made his way into her bedroom, where he found her sitting up, eyes puffy and tired as tears descended into her sheets.

Once she’d scooped him up into the bed and cuddled him to her cheek, Julie had proceeded to describe the nightmare she’d just woken up from: the slimy, tentacled, hellbound creatures that had crawled over walls and up from vents to take her into the night.  She’d barely gotten through it before the sobbing continued.

The twenty-six-year-old Richard, soaked in Julie’s tears, had wasted no time in vowing to protect her from those beasts with his bare hands, and swore nothing would ever touch her as long as he was around.  And after a few minutes of reassurance, the girl had believed him whole-heartedly, agreeing to try sleeping again as long as he stayed.

Held gently in the warm dark between the child’s hands for his protection as well as hers, Richard had hugged himself to her finger then, too, humming a lullaby as loudly as he could until he heard her breathing slowed down at last.

“Julie,” Richard whispered as his vulnerable, grown-up little girl held him in trembling palms on the living room chair.  “It’s all right.  Don’t cry.  I love you.”

The tears continued flowing, but Julie managed to press her lips back together and cease the shouting.  She lowered her head, her long blonde locks passing over Richard in a silky jungle, until her cheek was pressed against her five-inch father’s body.

“I love you t-too, Daddy,” she sputtered weakly.  “I l-love you so m-much.  Oh my G-God, I’m s-so… I’m so s-sorry.”

“I know, honey,” he shushed, kissing his child’s wet cheek and stroking it delicately to soothe her.  “I won’t let the monsters get you.”