Tension headache. Veronica walked quickly and with purpose, as usual, trundling away from the too-familiar hellscape of the campus gymnasium while yearning for her dorm. A blue scrunchie pinched back her green hair - looped three times around itself; tightly enough to keep it in place during drills, and tightly enough to leave her head throbbing by the end of the day. When she tugged it off a gentle breeze caught at the jade strands on release, flinging them behind her like serpentine dragon-heads. She was majestic.

Veronica wasn't your average college senior. A top level athlete, the woman had long since forgotten about shier days in high school, a nearly-buried past of nervousness belied by a late-blooming talent for volleyball. At seventeen her coach had told her that it wasn't normal to blossom so late; the towering teen, the laterally-prodigious teen, developed radically after years of mediocrity on-court. That was history. Now, she strode down the concrete pavement from one building to the next like she owned each one of them - which, she basically did. Never assertive or forceful, although with an air of superiority nonetheless, ownership was what like attracted to Veronica in the same way nectar accrues into flowers, nourishing them, brought toward her by the servitude life gave her for free.

That's not to say she was a college bitch. No matter how far behind her it was, Veronica could wistfully recall the passive, unmemorable kid she'd been, she's always been, never truly able to put it away and move on. This life didn't suit her. The glamor and prestige of trophies and a soft handshake and the repetition of like two-hundred congratulations in a single day, every day, was only a soothing salve in substitution of the self-respect she was still growing into. All this to say, the athlete at 5'11 could break shit but was still a pushover.

Sunbeams sliced across her bare arms like slashed wrists. Light outlined the toned crevasses of muscle along her deltoids. She was still sweating from drills. She was a strong girl, you did not fuck with her. The weakness inside of her wasn't represented at all by her appearance. Veronica knew that as long as she was big, no one in the world would try to figure her out. For now, at least, she felt like she could convince others that she wasn't the fraud she really was until she'd figured out the whole aforementioned "inner turmoil" thing.

So the point is that Veronica didn't expect what was coming today, not in a million years. Momentarily shutting her eyes to massage the headache straight out of her temples, her unaware stride made her clip the shoulder of a much smaller girl and it sounded something like thwapacccrunch.

"Sorry," the other girl gasped. Her voice was timid and meek. Veronica's eyes shot open and she spun back to check on the tiny thing she'd knocked into. Whoever it was, she didn't look like much at all. The younger, mousey woman had black locks that ran half-way down her back, resting on a scarlet cardigan. Her book bag was on the ground, papers and pencils all over the sidewalk, one pen rolling away. The girl's hand tapped toward it as she tried to catch the thing before she tumbled forward and fell from her knees onto her tummy. Not the best first impression at all, an embarrassing thing to see.

For such a pathetic little freshman, the bitch's bony shoulder had hurt like hell on impact. "Fuck..." Veronica said, rubbing her forearm while watching her, not helping at all. "Watch where you're going." She knew that, eyes closed and all, it was probably her own fault they'd bumped into each other, and shit, the freshman had fallen to the floor, but the athlete wasn't in the mood for empathy, what with the headache and all.

Fuck it. She knelt down and picked up the girl's bag for her, at least, and snatched a couple of books up while she was at it, cramming them back into the bag, crumpling up the looseleaf papers that filled what was obviously the unorganized belonging of a stressed freshman. The shrimp was still pitter-pattering at the concrete trying to collect looseleaf sheets. Veronica wasn't the type to think much of her schoolwork anymore at all. Amused, she momentarily imagined emptying the bag onto the ground. Oh, but wouldn't that be a little bit too cruel? It was just an intrusive thought.

Something caught her attention. "Hey," Veronica finally piped up, "You forgot this." She squatted over a cookie that had rolled from the bag, still in its plastic wrap but looking a bit beat up. It was a gingerbread man. The poor thing hadn't fared nearly as well from the fall as Veronica had, its leg snapped off, sitting limp and broad along the bottom of the baggie in a pile of crumbs. The dollop of icing composing its left eye was more like a sugary skid mark than anything. When the freshman stood up, brushing dust from the knees of her black denim jeans, she nodded and reached out for the cookie.

Veronica didn't quite fork the thing over. She looked at it and smirked, remarking, "I remember eating these as a kid. Aren't these usually sold around, like, Christmas?" The freshman stared at her blankly, sheepishly. There was like an entire awkward pause before Veronica chose to continue. "And it's like... September?" She dryly intoned, bending toward the little freshman.

"Aren't you Veronica?" The girl quietly responded. "Veronica Neumann?"

Apparently around campus, her name rang bells. Veronica didn't feel particularly surprised to be recognized, even by the new girl. She smiled, and wordlessly handed the gingerbread man back to its owner. She didn't have time to talk to the runt, plus she'd helped her with the bag and all that anyway. The freshman watched as Veronica, without even apologizing, walked away, like it didn't even matter at all.

"Wait," she called out to Veronica, "Wait!" Veronica really, really didn't have the time for this. She turned back and looked at the freshman boredly, an expectant look on her face.

"What? Look, I already said sorry," (she actually hadn't, the freshman noticed) "and I have shit to do. Do you want, like, an autograph or something?" Her expression was indignant. She was playing up the whole jock thing too much, probably, but at these hours she was generally considered by many as not-to-be-fucked-with and the attitude of this squirt was pissing her off. The tiny girl didn't really respond at all, just making a spooky expression and muttering. "Hello..." Veronica was appalled at the girl's silence. She sighed. "...Seriously?"

The freshman's expression was somewhere between the catatonia of a schizophrenic and a totally stoic master of zen. She was blank-faced but mumbling. Veronica wasn't having it. "Alright, whatever," the athlete said. She continued the long walk back to her dorm, her headache a bit worse and the overall vibes dour and diminished. People could be hella disrespectful at the shittiest of times.

Hanging behind Annie watched the huge woman, the seriously wide woman, recede from her vision. Her fingers were wriggling through her bag as she thumbed at the crumbling bits of her gingerbread man. It's not like she was super hurt over the thing, but today had been another miserable day at college. Like was it too much for a girl to get a damn cookie to enjoy after class? The poor little thing... a leg had come off and its expression was uneven and mangled now, looking a bit slower and goofy.

It just wasn't the same! It was not the same. With five fingers clutched at the corner of the plastic baggie and avoiding smearing any icing even worse, hey eyes focused on Veronica's back, up and down her tall figure, eventually settling on the back of her head as a ringing grew louder and louder in her ears, and then...

-

Every muscle in Veronica's body was rock solid. It was a soreness only experienced by the most physically disadvantaged, like the seriously deformed. V felt her rigid arms extended out side-to-side and both legs splayed, spread eagle as if affixed to a crucifix. Paralysis prevented any movement whatsoever. It was so dark that she couldn't even be sure if she had gone blind or not. It was a darkness that looked the same, eyes open or eyes closed, but Veronica couldn't shut her eyes anyway. One was in godawful pain that would have pulled a scream out of the girl if her mouth didn't feel glued shut.

She really couldn't move at all. When she put every ounce of effort into twitching even a single limb, it felt less like the absence of movement and more like fighting against a force pressing into her at all sides that kept her completely locked in a single position. Her shoulder blades had to be literally rubbing against one another, what with how flat she was spread out. She imagined this was how it felt to be encased in a block of cement - it wasn't even binding, it was complete physical entrapment.

Still forcibly frozen, she focused on the sensations around her. Even beyond her own body was pressure. Her face was rubbing against a rock-solid wall, but she seemed so rigid that even flat against it there wasn't pain in her nose. It wasn't bending, she realized, and she could even breathe fine. Weird. Behind her was vacant, probably air. Gravity wouldn't free her body to let her tumble into the pocket though. She was totally stuck in place.

Veronica Neumann, 5'11, wide and proud, was finally reminded of her fear of vulnerability for the first time since she was a teenager. Anxiety hugged her stomach like a boa constrictor that slithered through her guts to wrap around her heart. Her tongue, if she had a tongue, was pierced with pain. The darkness did not let go.

...Until it did, all at once. A crevice of ethereal white grew from a strip in the skyline into a waxing rectangle that stroked beyond the edifice Veronica was flat against, the plain now evidently multi-colored. Her surroundings literally exploded into vision but remained obscured by the wall. Her eyes still moved with an uncanny absence of the muscular strain around her eyeballs, more like a panning camera, running up and down then fixating on a white engraving far above that read something like RLD HISTORY 1.

Where the fuck was she? Veronica felt panic surging through her chest. When she inhaled in fear, she couldn't even feel her lungs inflating. Is this really what paralysis was? What had even happened? She was just walking back to class, she bumped into a freshman, and, and...

Mid-thought, a pallid tan hydra with four armored basilisk-heads slithered into sight and drummed against the wall, sending earthquakes through Veronica's body. She would have screamed if she could. The beast slid down like gravity was nothing until a fifth limb, a curved tail capped by the same flat, white-tipped plate wrapped around Veronica. Five pressure points pushed into her and under their power for the first time since she was a teen made her feel soft again. It was like being swallowed into the maw of a monster - the teeth would have their way. Something smelled eerily floral, but the distinct humidity of an exhaling mouth cut through it and washed over her.

Then it snatched her up. She imagined screaming in her brain. For the first time she realized the horrifying fact that her leg was broken. She couldn't see it, but it was limp below her, and it was, oh God... The way it moved left and right was like it was hanging by a thread. It went ways she couldn't believe a limb could move unless severed... Was it severed? It scraped around below her and she could now hear an obscene and crinkly rustling, the plastic sound of a compressing and inflating bag that contained her and pressed with a molded uncomfortable intensity so much worse than anything the wall had put her through. And the wall, as she scanned it during her ascent she finally caught sketched into its corner the full title of the very same textbook she had used her freshman year for history class - WORLD HISTORY 101.

When the confines of the bookbag Veronica had been so unceremoniously shoved into receded from under her the full scale of the world made itself very clear. More than clear, actually, as her single functional eye, even at drastically reduced capacity, absorbed the full scale of a dingy and grey dorm with awe and complete disbelief. Half of her vision was a blurred smear of scattershot colors far too disparate to understand or interpret. Her other eye - that is, if she had an eye, since it felt more like a floating presence buried within her head now, her strangely flat-feeling head - would have been bulging out if she wasn't still totally paralyzed. There was no smell to anything much at all, she noted with discomfort.

The true size of the dorm expanded as her mind adjusted to the realization of her diminished size. She wasn't the normal and absurdly tall Veronica she'd been since her growth spurt at eleven. If what she was seeing was real, she couldn't have been any bigger than a doll, although her damaged eye could have deceived her. The bad leg rustled left and right and produced a sickening crinkle under her that sent a shudder up her stiff back. What a nightmare!

What she had thought was a serpent was really a hand. An enormous one, improbably huge, totally dominant. The fingers still pressed into her, hard enough that she felt like her rigid form could shatter. This was entrapment! It was unbelievable, the sudden weakness she was now thrown into, as if while walking to her dorm she'd simply collapsed on the spot to her knees, out like a light, now unconscious and within the surreal confines of the worst nightmare she'd ever experienced. Veronica, for the first time since she'd learn to use her size to cope, felt terror and uncertainty.

The fingers prodded at her face, unintentionally, but enough to drag whatever liquid remains composed her eye into a long streak. The blur on her left elongated into strips and her field of vision followed with it, providing a wider mosaic of the room around her that was indistinguishable through the impressionistic distortion of a splattered icing-eye. But Veronica didn't know what she was yet. Another hand wrapped behind her back and the thumb pressed into her face slid away and between those palms she was being held by that supersized, mousey little freshman that she'd thumped into moments ago and sent away sniveling and crying with a broken cookie.

A voice boomed out, quiet but more confident than the two's initial meet-cute. "Wow..." the freshman said, "I didn't know if the spell would work but..." Annie's fingers traced up and down the sides of the ugly little cookie, "I can just feel it. I can feel you in there! I just know it."

Veronica couldn't responded if she wanted it. And believe it, she wanted to. The plastic around her made the freshman's face unclear and hazy. Sweet trails of her eye were smeared across the wrapper, mangled and forced to look back at herself, but the thin mashing of her own eyeball across parts of her crumbling body made it more like a panoramic of indeterminable brown and white than the extra-spective view she wished she'd had of herself. Oh God, she bemoaned, what the fuck was she?

"You're a cookie!" Annie blurted out. A wild grin came to her face. "Oh, sorry, I can hear your thoughts in that teeny little gingerbread head of yours now. It wouldn't be as fun if I couldn't." Annie offered herself with a bit of politeness, "I'm Annie. You know, the girl you clobbered into with your big stupid body?"

She wasn't stupid, although big would be an accurate descriptor of pre-cookie Veronica. Annie snorted. She'd heard that. "You are stupid, actually, otherwise you wouldn't have been such a bitch to me. And I can see every insecurity you like to hide too! Like, everything you're thinking and feeling... it's all running up my fingertips."

The freshman couldn't stop herself now. This wasn't power she was used to. "God, wow, I can't believe this worked. Just... look at you! Don't you love the new look?" Annie flipped the gingerbread man-girl in her hands toward the vanity she sat at. A mirror leaned gently against the wall revealed a sight that would fuck with the stomach of anyone who actually had a stomach i.e. not V.

A cookie was bad enough, but what Veronica saw was the saddest little gingerbread man she could imagine. Past the colorful smears of icing bled out onto her wrapper was a pock-marked and bent body. She shrieked in her head at the sight of her leg fully severed, laid on its side at the bottom of the wrapper in a pile of her own dust. Like staring at your own wound you'd been ignoring, a surge of unimaginable agony rocketed up her leg. Her eyeball now more than ever felt like a melting goo that could see everything and nothing, brown and white and blue and literally fucking nothing. Every crumb pressed into the confines of plastic was alive; it felt, it was conscious, and it was all on fire.

"Hey, hey..." Annie's voice was suddenly gentle, with a lilt that indicated her growing sense of superiority. "Don't worry, you're kinda cute in a way. Like, a bit like the rejects a bakery would throw away... so, ugly-cute, I guess." Veronica tried to shudder. All of her life she had wanted to be something, to be strong outside if not inside, and now it was all shrunk into the pathetic microcosm of this shitty cookie with a busted leg and a...

Annie snapped at her, "You think the leg is bad? You're the one who fucked it up! Think about how my cookie felt before you had to go inside of him. That's probably a lot worse." What terrible words! These words were not helpful.

But Annie was practically beaming. The ugly state of affairs w/r/t the cookie situation now seemed to be a flawless stroke of luck. Through the pads of her fingers little flares of electrified ether tickled her and translated the suffering fired up Veronica's severed cookie-leg. The pain wasn't just at the point of severance, actually. It was felt in both the shattered limb and the stump, two searing tears of crummy brown bits, pieces of eyeball and other matter now so roughly smeared throughout the bag that at least a few particles were buried within every inch of Veronica's spongiform texture.

"I swear, I can almost feel how afraid you are. Have you really never been this afraid? It's literally like, like," Annie felt a rush, a clear, clinical rush of adrenaline. It was even starting to bud between her legs with the early floral rosewater of her arousal. To feel someone so weak in her hands, and know just how in control she was. "...Like you'd never, ever expected to end up like this. Well, I wouldn't either, but, I can just tell you were sooo certain you would never in your life get shown up." Annie sneered then laughed with scorn. "Well now you're a sadm busted-up cookie. How do you like that?"

She didn't! And while she laid flat and rigid in her cold and crinkling confinement she did not expect the perverse cruelty that would come in the form of three fingers - their movements gentle enough to avoid Veronica's attention and make sure she didn't expect what was to come - three fingers that hooked under the folded flap sealed by a single band of tape that detached with a slick rrrrrrip before uncomfortable air filled the vacuum and hugged each cookie-limb with fingers of oxygen just surprising enough to fire up the signals of neurotic pain in the detached leg again. The fingers slid in and relieved her with a perverse sensation of warmth. Fingers she once regarded as basilisks drummed at her back teasingly. "Yummy," Annie grinned, watching the unmoving gingerbread man-woman like a predator. Her heart fluttered.

Veronica felt incomparable pain as her body was pushed deeper into the bag. The icing on her was ingrained with her anatomy the same as every loose crumb below her, and now it slid off onto the plastic like molten flesh dripping away from the bone. Her torso felt bulbous when it bulged forward under the fingers crammed deeper below her, threatening to snap in two. As the tight embrace of the plastic moulded against her face, the tacky little smile the cookie wore sloughed right off and clung to the bag even when the fingers finally slide away from behind her, a white crescent blotted in front of her that stung and bled and shifted and it was agony, agony, agony while the bag returned in place after the fingers disappeared. The mouth broke in two and split apart along with a separating crease with the sensation of a knife being dug into V's lips, sawing them apart. Annie had felt it all.

Flecks of oozing icing looked more like tears streaming from the bad eye. Her gaze followed the hand as Annie fished her leg out of the bag. Crumbs of cookie clung to her fingers, some of them smeared into icing that had come loose. Imagine pieces of your body, your energy and life, being scraped away but remaining alive and animate - dimensional pain that signaled a burning sent through spacetime itself. It all flowed back into that one pathetic cookie that sat there, helpless and afraid.

"Sorry about that, but you know, it's still my cookie and all." Annie felt smug. "I mean, you're in it now, but... oh well." Her lips curled into a pert grin before she casually popped the leg between them and began to chew.

Annie nearly dropped Veronica as a crackling sizzle ran into her fingers. Every imaginary neuron in Veronica's consciousness fired off in pain. She screamed internally. A crushing pressure, jagged but wet, pounded up and down and ground her sugary flesh into bits. She could even register how saliva pooled up within the incline of Annie's teeth and mixed with the developing bolus of basic carbs and empty calories. It was magma-hot. Spittle flowed in, then the teeth came back down and squeezed it right out. The cookie was so delicate and finely made it literally like melted between Annie's teeth and turned into cookie-concrete. "Mmmmm," Annie vocalized, a tremor not unfelt by the athlete-made-confection.

The freshman dug her tongue between her teeth to squeeze out the wet goo and crumbs. It felt like V's masticated flesh was being scraped away by the razored tongue of a feline as A ran the muscle up and down her molars, sucking at her cheek a bit to free the last remnants of dough. The bubbling ooze all combined at the blade of her tongue before Annie moaned in satisfaction again, swallowing it down with a dramatic flair to pull one last sizzle of torment from Veronica's regressing brain.

The poor athlete was nearly catatonic; feelings had escaped her. Even when Annie opened her mouth (and did the whole 'aaaaa' thing, tongue out and all, clean but stained brown with remnants of Veronica), she could still feel the tight constriction of a powerful esophagus pounding up her leg and bringing it lower and lower into a chamber snuffed out the pain like the wick of a spent candle. This was eternal suffering. Annie scraped a few crumbs from the corner of her mouth and licked it from her thumb while looking at her mirror. "Not bad," she said, "Not nearly as bad as I expected from a busted up little thing like you."

Through the agony of her melted leg sliding down a distant and indistinct tube behind her Veronica could only pray for release, for the end of this transfiguration. She'd learned her lesson, although Annie would have to disagree - she wasn't done with her yet. When the fingers returned, the sudden warmth and tickle against the cookie felt comforting through the veil of dissolving pain. They snatched up poor Veronica and an uncomfortably careless grip of round fingers pressed around the flat of her neck washed away any illusion of relief. The bag slipped from under her and drifted onto the table where it rested flat, still caked in Veronica's own sandy remains, whispers of the parts chipping away from her alongside her rapidly crumbling psyche.

Veronica would have pulled a whole performative oh-woe-is-me thing in her head right about now if it wasn't interrupted by a low burp from Annie, a grody and rude expulsion of gas vetoing her right to think. The freshman's hand clasped over her open mouth and she sang, "Embarrassing!" with a girlish lilt in her voice. Smell had returned at last. The transformation left Veronica with an olfactory menagerie that betrayed her own sanity. The sour but sugary-sweet aroma wafted toward her and for just an instant she inhaled the scent of her digesting leg. Being reminded of it cast fingers of consciousness into Annie's guts and she could briefly register a burning, bubbling grip grappling her remaining half-leg.

"I'm sorry, ugh, that burp killed my appetite. You tasted good and all, but that aftertaste ruined the vibe." She cleared her throat and wetly swallowed a few crumbs, an oozing movement not ignored by Veronica. She placed the cookie onto her vanity, facedown and ashamed. "Sorry, but, you just stay here for a second. I'll be right back."

The chair creaked before the mousey freshman scurried off and left Veronica in darkness, unmoving and in the throes of her echoing pain. She sat silent, bored and humiliated for a minute before a repetition of the creak was followed by a heavy and hollow thump. The light returned to her accompanied by a pinch at her forehead that lifted her back toward the mirror to see sad little her, and still beaming Annie, now with a glass of milk beside her.

As if to be consumed? "Yeah, uh, I figured this would go more smoothly if I at least had something to wash you down." A zap licked the underside of Annie's pointer finger and danced up her tendon in desperation. "Wait, you didn't know? Or, I mean, you didn't realize? I'm still enjoying my cookie, silly! I'm over the burp thing." Her face, clear as day, reflected the freshman's cruel sense of authority, the power inflating her big fat head. With the announcement, so unceremoniously as to be more embarrassing than aggrandizement, her fingers snapped back, levering the cookie against the desk and with a sharp sound breaking Veronica's head away from the body of the cookie that crumpled onto the desk and broke into multiple parts. "Oh shit, oops!"

Veronica's internal monologue jerked into a singular shriek, her screams gesticulating up and down to the beat of a police siren. With no lungs to limit her, she could scream and scream as long as the pain of each severed limb and broken matrix of gluten rang out in distress. The eyes didn't bulge, but her anxious panic made her vision expand around her and contract, peripherals turning into smeared lines of light as the cookie bits sprawled on the wooden table grew distant and disconnected - alien and unattainable. To lay her eyes on her own torso, now with its other leg severed and one arm half-torn, crooked and uneven, was like swallowing a bitter cyanide pill and wholly accepting every screaming fantod of pain her physical form could cram inside itself - an expanding Pandora's box.

Her pain was like ASMR to the underclassman. It was funny! Annie only registered pleasurable tickles coming from the tiny circle in her hand now, but could read every word written in the panicked annals of Veronica's mind. Poor her... A's cursory hushes and coos were no balm for the jock at all. "Shhhh, oh come on, don't be so dramatic." For the first time Annie even turned the smeared little head around to face her directly, a cold look of satisfaction as she analyzed the smeared eyeball and the white splatter that once constituted a mouth. The girl who once lorded over her, over everyone on campus, now lay flat in the palm of Annie's frail hand like a Promethean sacrifice on a pale cross, thumb and pinky spread out like the arms of Christ.

"You know, when you're just a head, you actually look kinda cute. Like, in a pathetically sad type of way." Annie brought Veronica closer to her. Through V's eyes now A's whole head blew up in size and proportion as it expanded to fill every inch of her vision. This nineteen-year-old girl felt improbably huge, now ironically occupying more space than the terminally insecure athlete could have ever occupied in her life, a life that in hindsight now felt much more hollow and unlived than she'd ever realized. Like imagine a life flashing before you, but the photostream of memories, xerox over xerox, only punctuated each pointless decision in your life, every mistake that lead you to the end.

Funny way to think. Was bumping into Annie really the mistake that sentenced Veronica to this? Has she done more, committed some great treason? She wondered if her life had been predetermined to lead to this, if for all of her existence she'd been as fragile as the shattered form she was now in, simply misplaced in a laterally-prodigious body, waiting for its inevitable correction through the fingers of this stranger she bumped into - placed into a cookie as battered as her fragile ego. Annie could feel it all, listening to Veronica as she begged for God to do something.

The response that her Goddess gave her was to lift the ex-jock to her face and open wide, a humid bog washing over the head of the cookie and polluting the air around her with the smell of her own melted remains. A rotten bitterness reeked beyond it, something distinctly digestive and characteristic only to the internal flora of a human body that no average person would be dishonored to indulge in. While overwhelmed by the horrifying sight of a gaping throat opening up to accept her, Veronica was too shocked to realize that what she thought was her forward movement was instead Annie's tongue slithering out to meet her, unnoticed until with a disgusted internal shudder V saw the wet snake run over A's plump bottom lip like a ooey-gooey waterfall that tidally bent upward and wrapped behind the girl's severed head to form a wet divot that cradled the edges of the head and melted away at basic carbs like tissue paper.

Slowly, the twitching pink mass slurped away Veronica's remaining eye and the broken mouth. The searing pain could only be compared to two thumbs being driven deep into her orbits, popping open her eyeballs to drain away the white fluid.

The sound of her own internal screaming wasn't enough to drown out the slick squelches of spittle.

But with a sickening pop two fingers pulled her away from the tongue and back into Annie's hand. She couldn't see anything, not anymore. The icing that composed her eyes was now a admixed with twirling saliva descending down the freshman's throat. All she could see was undulating pink, and if she couldn't feel the cold air around her and the doughy calluses of Annie's palm, she'd be convinced she was swallowed whole. A pitchy voice dragged her out of her head into reality. "Ugh, yeah," she sounded slovenly, "That hits the spot after a rough day."

No longer afforded the privilege of sight, Veronica now could only navigate her situation with her own feelings. As Annie plucked up a disembodied arm from the table and snapped it in two, V only understood the ungodly sensation of bones splintering then being ripped at the tendons, strands of her nerves being shredded into buzzing webs of flame.

"I deserved this. You know, after a giant lumbering moron sent my ass on the pavement. What a bitch, right?" Annie dipped the arm into her milk and popped it in her mouth with a crunch. As flesh turned into brown goo between her teeth, the jock felt every bit of her body grind and crumble into mince. The soothing cold of the milk became torturous as it rushed over the remains, contrasted with the lava-like spit. Eventually even that relief was snuffed out and replaced once again by the all-encompassing heat of Annie's salivating gob before it all disappeared with a swallow.

Unfortunate Veronica Neumann wasn't anything more than a melting head, severed from the remains of a body that was merely a bisected torso with one half still connected to her remaining arm and leg. "Gosh, you sure do look stupid with all that smeared icing. You can't see yourself, but all that's left on your head is a few little streaks of white. It's actually kinda sad, well, it would be if you weren't such a huge bitch and all." A placed her thumb flat against V's head. The pressing digit would have drawn a shudder if the quadriplegic impromptu amputee wasn't locked in a broken gingerbread man. Instead it sent more zaps through Annie. It was a pleasurable tingle. It provided her a paradoxical sexual pleasure derived inversely from the worst torment any human or you could say cookie could experience. She wished she could do this everyday, but not many people deserved as cruel a treatment as this.

The saddest, whimpered thought Annie felt in Veronica's head was her desire to crawl away and retreat into the plastic baggie she'd been pulled from, to protect herself in its cold embrace and never move again. "You really are stupid, you know," Annie muttered lowly, her arousal growing as she saw an image in the athlete's head of every trophy she'd ever won being melted down. The aluminum and alloyed metals flowed into a big mould and solidified and above the fragile block of has-been-awards stood Annie - now inappropriately but fittingly enormous - and in her hand was a hammer that she smashed down onto the block over and over. Sparks flew everywhere as she beat the malleable metal down until it was as pathetic a heap as the collapsing mess Veronica had become. Veronica's day-nightmare showed Annie laughing hysterically as she smashed even the hunk of slag into pieces. The freshman snorted at the vision, her giggling filled the room with careless mirth.

For some reason, the warmth of Annie's thumb retreating left Veronica feeling hollow. That momentary emptiness disappeared when a disconnected pain shot through her again. The dorky girl picked up the last of her body and dropped it into the milk, smiling as she watched it begin to buckle and crumble in the liquid. It was freezing cold, especially uncomfortable from the contrast of her body's frigid immersion against the ambient warmth around her head. The coldness was replaced once again with pain, like cold hooks peeling away her skin, the milk melted off more and more of the cookie and parts of her settled at the bottom of the glass and stained it all brown. "How does it feel, Veronica?" Annie knew exactly how much pain the bitch was going through, and she couldn't stop reveling in it.

Finally Annie gently pulled the soft remains of the body from the milk. Half of it wetly slid right away from the upper half, plopping back into the milk. Veronica's brain fizzled and popped in complete shock and unimaginable agony, a quasi-digestive suffering she feared would be so, so much worse if she could feel herself in Annie's stomach. The idea of all of this ending in the stomach and intestines and (shudder) toilet of the bitchy little rat who had shrunken her was mortifying, but as the upper half of her remains were pressed onto Annie's tongue (which produced a long and mocking "Mmmm," from the girl) that terrifying prospect only crystallized more and more in the flickers of her dying imagination.

Once again the crushing and pounding, the effortless maceration of her corporeal form. When the freshman swallowed, her throat bulged cartoonishly, exactly like you'd imagine it happening in movies. As the slurry slid deeper into Annie's anatomy, V felt the burning again, able to trace every piece of herself as it squeezed between mucosal tissue. Sugary webs pressed through the constrictive valve past the epiglottis and ran between tight crevasses like jam squeezed from a bottle, matriculating into the sea of vomit below where sensation sizzled into an unceremonious blorp, a popping bubble that erased the pain, a blank filled in with the shame and horror of knowing her own essence had disappeared into another person's body.

"You know," Annie made herself look silly by raising her lip to show her tongue pushing chewed cookie out from between her teeth before she swallowed again, all of it felt by V, "I figured you would have more fight in you. I mean, you can't literally, like, fight back, but I just expected more anger." Her finger returned to V's expressionless smear of a face, pressing down, the soft dough moulding to her touch. "All I feel is..." she ruminated, "You're scared. Just scared of me."

Annie laughed, the sneering snicker sharp in Veronica's ears. "Wow, well, I guess I got what I wanted. You're just a scared girl now, and," her finger pressed harder. The thumb's caress grew forceful until it slowly opened a crack in the center of the round head of the gingerbread-man-woman, sending tingles of an unrestrained agony transmogrified into pleasure from V to A. The jock's head literally tearing open was a pain that transcended all others, crescendoing into a loud ringing just as she imagined her imaginary skull popping open into brain slime. But then it disappeared, and the ringing subsided back into the even worse torture of Annie's nasal voice: "...Can't believe you got knocked down a peg. I bet you thought this would never happen, right?"

Her only coping mechanism was to tune out the sound and ignore it, to try to forget all about it. Her only release was to focus on the horrible pain still disconnected in the glass of milk beside her. Annie noticed the absence of thought in the cookie, before she too remembered the remains that were disassembled in the glass. "Oh yeah," she quipped, and with a smirk, she picked the glass up by the rim and peered into the brown, creamy soup. "I love milk and cookies, it reminds me, like, of being a kid." She took an ambivalent sip to gage the poor girl's reaction. Fear and self-loathing bubbled from face to finger. "Don't you love them too?"

Then she slammed back the glass. Tilting her head back, Annie chugged the entire thing, gulping loudly enough to inform blind Veronica Neumann of a sight so profoundly painful for Veronica to consider that it broke her poor head and sent her into a positive spiral of catatonia. The crumbs that remained of her, sufficiently cold and like silt and sediment, rushed into the humid cavern of Annie's mouth and felt like rocks tossed into the mouth of a volcano. The hot surface of the freshman's tongue lit her on fire and melted what was left down into sugar-spit. Within seconds it was washed down, where it disappeared like all the rest of her.

The last embers of pain slid down Annie's lip in a drooling rivulet of milk. It, too, was lapped up by the lazy swipe of her tongue across the plump surface, left to run down its dimpled slope into her throat, where every piece of the cookie girl belonged.

What remained was pathetic. Maybe some crumbs clung to the bottom of the glass of milk like human dregs, but the majority of her was left within the tiny round head of the cookie, licked clean of icing, now just a brown circle imbued with the final fragments of consciousness of an entire human mind. A reasonably successful girl, but someone whose life was evidently as disposable as the poor gingerbread man she'd had the misfortune of ever sending hurtling to the ground to break its poor leg. A single miscarriage of her own weight and direction, her only real sin being bumping into the wrong nerdy little bitch, and it had left her as this. But was this punishment enough?

"I gotta say, that was a good-ass cookie." Annie pumped herself up with her newfound confidence and power. It felt good. It was amazing to make the stupid athletic girl so weak. "Like even on its own... yeah, great cookie. But I guess it was a little better because, well... y'know..." She smiled down at the head then levered it up off the table again. It slid off, adhered by dried saliva and icing.

Veronica begged in her mind for release. She signaled complete submission, a total sacrifice of all autonomy to put her life in the hands of the freshman. Far beyond words, she could only gesture the vaguest of images in her mind through the fingers around her, the mental image of herself, the wide, the lateral girl, now a groveling speck at the feet of Annie, prostrated before her Goddess where she prayed for forgiveness but would find none. The freshman picked up the plastic baggie with a crinkle and casually deposited the rest of Annie. "I don't really have much of an appetite anymore, though."

-

The sun had recessed behind the mammary of a green knoll across the horizon. Campus had a liminal feel this late at night. Annie was focused more on the cool air, the stroke of a soft breeze across her cheeks, than on the head of Veronica Neumann tucked away in her book bag. With wind behind her step, this freshman felt alight, her movement forward like ascending a staircase toward her own supremacy. A prorector slowed near her to remind the freshman of curfew. "Oh, uh, I'm on my way," she dismissed him with a wave of her hand and a blush. He disappeared long behind her, eventually consumed by the long trailing shadow she left as the sun cast light-spells through moist cotton clouds.

Soon she was at the place. She leaned over and pulled the baggie out and knelt down. Darkness exploded into unclear brightness in Veronica's smeared eyes until that too dissipated into the honesty of twilight. Her blindness spared her the smug expression on Annie's face as she looked down onto the sad little brown circle and chuckled.

"Alright, I'm done with you, so I'm just gonna leave you here. Like, where I found you." She had to whisper to keep herself from looking like a lunatic to the sparse passerby. It seemed she was looking intently at an ant-hill, as far as anyone else was concerned. "I'm probably the only witch on campus. Unlucky you, right..."

Her expression lit up playfully. "Maybe I'm wrong though! I mean, we do usually keep in touch, but..." She grimaced sarcastically. "Ugh, this is so awkward! How do I say goodbye? Look, I hope you get found soon, like, real soon. I'm sure someone can change you back out there." Annie popped the bag right open and shook out the cookie with a few crumbs. As it tumbled onto her palm, the crease across Veronica's face collapsed and the little head snapped right in two.

Veronica's horrible reaction made itself clear through Annie's hand. Savoring the final tingle running up her spine, she allowed that to fade out before, with a whispered incantation, she willed it away and cut off all communication with the jock. "Sorry, can't hear you anymore. But I'm putting you somewhere suuuuper safe."

And so the athlete was left with her thoughts, totally unawares as Annie snuggled her deeply into the ant-hill, pressed into the dirt. Of course she wouldn't let the little bitchy jock go.

A few of the curious insects immediately spurt up, stepping over the cookie and stroking across it with their antenna. The creepy-crawly feelings told Veronica exactly where she was. Her screams echoed in the isolated chasm of her consciousness as Annie gave a cute, "Bye-bye," and walked off, her final footsteps like the banging of a gavel for her judgment.

With that, the first nibble came. Then another. Little pieces of her were suddenly snipped off and latched between the jaws of dozens, then hundreds of ants. They came in a flood, thousands of little exoskeletal appendages trodding over her to get a piece. Her pain fractured into fractals of endless bits of scattered agony, each crumb carried in the mouths of the ants where it disappeared below, into the dirt. The poor girl's death would be in slow motion, sans funeral, but at least she would end up six feet under.

In those final hours her cohesive internal monologue faded into the gurgled screams and firey, burning ripping of every piece of her remains, all thoughts muffled by the drumming and throbbing of the crumbs dispersing and being nibbled at by the tiniest and weakest jaws possible. To die in a human's stomach was one thing, but ants? As a person she wouldn't have even balked at fucking ants yet here they were, sealing her to an ungodly demise across the scattered insectile bellies of thousands of now all-powerful bugs. And she was powerless to stop it, to even save herself from them. The colony would appreciate Annie's offering.

They worked tirelessly and efficiently. Annie's sarcasm proved itself true: no one would possibly locate Veronica Neumann by the next day. Across one cold night she was reduced into a heap of brown crumbs and sugar that defied recognition mixed with dirt. Still they broke her down, some of her stored deep into the hive for young larvae, others fed to the queen. Young Veronica, just semi-successful in life, found success in nourishing a total stranger of a magical freshman, and even more in the appreciative digestive systems of thousands of ants.

Even when every thought degraded into a single shrill scream into an abyss, resonating through every little cavern running into the ground like a conscious circulatory system that echoed through chasms, up into dirt, and back down into the jaws of ants and larva, the ex-jock would suffer until every piece of her head was depleted from the organized reserve at the deepest depths of the ant hill. Until everything was processed through the several generations of ants that lived and expired in the weeks before, at last, the final crumb disappeared into a squirming larva and it all disappeared with amongst the pre-programmed, routine movements of an ant colony. Her final thoughts were of unexpressed shame and humiliation, the prospect of being bug food far more concerning than all the anxieties in life she now knew were never, truly, a big deal at all.

And as her anxiety slipped into acceptance of her ignoble fate, there was darkness. Weeks ago most of her remains had vanished into Annie's dormitory toilet, an ignominious disposal, but at least the last of her would be buried... just, embarrassingly, as dropping and frass throughout the tunnels and walls of the colony that their legs would tread on. She was ant shit. The waste would vanish under their constant traffic until the sandy feces, too, was dirt, and Veronica had returned to the earth.

Veronica's accomplishments disappeared, but studious Annie had got to enjoy her broken cookie, and, even better, thousands of ants were waybetter off. Maybe a bit underwhelming an exchange for one whole life, but it wasn't that bad... at least, if you're a hungry ant. As far as the universe was concerned, it was probably the best use of her life anyway.