Finding that he had only a few small bruises was indeed good luck. He set off under the bed, thinking he could cut some traveling time off the trip to the dollhouse, which was where he had decided to go. It was half way across this shadowed expanse that he heard it. Human voices.

            What? Why were there people here? Melanie had eaten all the people in her room. He stole closer to the sound of the voices as covertly as he could. The carpet muffled his footsteps and there wasn't much light to give him away. He listened intently.  

            "...away from here before it's too late. If she finds us, were done for." said one voice.

            "And how do you suggest we make our escape? She's closed the damn door and the crack below it is not big enough for us to squeeze through, even at our pathetic sizes," said a second voice

            "Well we can't just stay here! She's sure to find us and eat us," said the first voice.

            "Then we go on the offensive," said a third voice. "Have you all read the Odyssey?" There was a murmuring of acknowledgement. "Well," the third voice continued, "we follow Odysseus's example. We jab her eyes out."

            “How Sandy? With what?” asked the second voice.

            “With this!” said the one called Sandy. David got the feeling that Sandy was producing something.

            “A toothpick!? You’re joking,” said a woman’s voice.

            “Not joking. We blind her in her sleep. Then we run for it.”

            “Hmm. Maybe it could work,” said the first voice.

            “Yes it could,” Insisted Sandy. All we have to do is break the toothpick in half. Then we have two spears to stab her with at the same time. It will be easy”

            “Don’t you realize that we’re talking about blinding a young woman here? She’s simply misguided. Imagine what she would be capable of with the proper humanitarian instruction! Just because she shrink people and eats them now doesn’t mean she’ll always be that way.”

            “I for one am not going to sit here and wait for an inconsistency in her pattern of swallowing people alive. I’m taking the offensive,” stated the one called Sandy. His comment was met with murmurings of agreement.

            David had been paying such rapt attention to the conversation that he had forgotten to draw breath for several moments. He inhaled deeply when he became aware of this. Something, it must have been the dust under the bed, got into his nose. He tried to fight it but there was no stopping the sneeze that came a few seconds later.

            “What was that?” said a voice.

            David inhaled and drew more dust in. “Ah-CHOO!” There was a scuffling of feet and then someone was grabbing him and thrusting him forward towards where the voices had been coming from.

            “Well, well, well. Looks like we’ve got the giantess’s favorite,” said a voice.

*  *  *

             Melanie had begun a nice tandem bike ride to warm up, when out of the blue she heard someone calling her name.  She turned around out of curiosity and noticed a young black kid waving to her.  She knew him from somewhere, but couldn’t quite remember who he was.

            “Yo, Melanie is that you?” questioned the familiar stranger.

            “Yeah, my names Melanie, but who are you?” Melanie asked somewhat perplexed.

            “It’s me, Joe, don’t you remember we used to go to elementary school together. How about a friendly bike run Melanie, think you can beat me?” asked Joe with a snicker.

            “Oh my Gosh, now I remember you.  Sure why not, I’m up for the challenge,” Melanie said with full up confidence.

            The two peddled together for a while, talking of this and that. Both were competitive so they kept up a good pace and eventually ran out of breath to speak, concentrating on not being the one to slow down first. It was a simple game but a fun one. Melanie had good endurance from running and swimming and it was twelve miles before she succumbed to fatigue and slowed her bike to a painless velocity.

            “Whoa, that was some workout,” said Melanie, panting.

            “You said it,” said Joe who pulled off his water bottle and squirted himself in the face to cool down. “Good job Melanie.”

            “Thanks. Not too bad yourself. What do you say we head back to my house? It’s closer than yours and we could get some juice and cookies.” This sounded good to Joe so together the two of them slowly returned to Melanie’s abode.

            Melanie was downstairs fixing the snack when Joe wandered into her room.

*  *  *

            David heard footsteps. His captives did too. Everyone became nervous. No wonder they had escaped Melanie’s notice, thought David. They always lie low under her bed when she’s around. The man holding him had just loosened his grip to kneel down in the dark. That way he would be less visible in the off chance that she looked under the bed. David thought he might be able to break of the man’s grip. Then he could run for Melanie. There would never be a better chance. 

            He broke free. The man hissed “Hey!” after him but David was already up and running. The dark helped him. It was hard for the conspirators to give chase.

*  *  *

            Joe walked into Melanie’s room and looked around. He had come in here for a movie that Melanie had told him he could borrow. Thinking on it now, he probably should have waited for Melanie to show him exactly where it was. When he had asked, she had simply said “in my room,” absentmindedly as she looked for cookies for them.

            He wandered further into the room and that’s when he noticed something on the floor coming out from under the bed. Stealing closer he suddenly came to realize that the movement came from a miniature person who was running towards him. He bent down for a closer look. 

            David and Joe looked at each other. Both were quite shocked to see the other. David was wondering where Melanie was and Joe was understandably bewildered by the presence of a seemingly live miniature version of an acquaintance of his.

            “What the hell?” declared Joe. 

            “Where’s Melanie?” screamed David. At that moment, Melanie rushed to the doorway to her room. Her eyes were wide and her mouth opens in an expression of worry.

            “Joe!” she shouted, making him jump. 

            “Melanie!” He turned to face her, his eyes as wide as saucers. “Good heavens Mel, there’s a two inch man in your room and he looks real!” Joe had expected disbelief or flat dismissal, or even perhaps curiosity. Melanie did not seem surprised to hear this news of what amounted to Lilliputians under her bed as far as Joe could tell. In fact, she appeared disappointed.  

            “Oh gosh Joe,” she said. “I never meant to have you find him.” With a delicate but rhythmic swing of the hips she entered the room, giving Joe an apologetic look.

             “I can do magic Joe. I can shrink people.”

            “Can you make them back to normal size again?” he asked. Melanie shook her head, her brown hair bouncing.

            “I’ve never tried.”

            “But this poor kid! Melanie you must try for his sake.”

            “It’s not like that. He wants to stay that way. It doesn’t hurt. Let me show you.” Whispering a few choice magic words she shrank him down where he stood. Soon Joe found himself no larger than David. 

            David was just picking himself up when Melanie’s shoe slammed into him. He flew in a low arc back under the bed, smacked his head on a baseboard at the peak of the flight, and was sent spinning to the floor where he landed, quite unconscious.

            Melanie had walked over to the two men but had taken a bad step and accidentally sent David flying while she was off balance. Oh dear.

            Well, she had made him stronger so he could take more damage than the average person so he would be okay. Right now it was time to focus on Joe. She picked up the tiny man. Joe was still having trouble believing that he was not dreaming. Unfortunately, his senses functioned with pristine clarity, very unlike a dream. Why he could even smell the mint breath of the girl holding him mixed in with the sweat of their bike ride.

            He had a thousand questions for her. Why had she shrunk him? Did she know of a spell to return him to his proper height? What other magic did she know? Was she a witch? Better start with a simple observation first.

            “Uh, Mel, I’m kinda scared of heights.” She looked down at Joe, slowly coming to balance on the palm of her hand.

            “Don’t worry. I won’t let you fall.”

            “Why did you shrink me?”

            “I didn’t want to. You found David and you would probably have told someone else. I’m sorry Joe. But I don’t just shrink people. That’s just what I do first.”

            “What else do you do?” asked Joe.

            “I eat them.” The panic that was slowly building in Joe’s gut took hold about then. He looked into her face hoping to see jocularity there but her expression was plain and serious. Her voice was flat and no nonsense. He could tell she wasn’t kidding.

            “Melanie why do you do that? Surely you’re not thinking of eating me are you?”

            “I can’t have you telling someone about my secret.”

            “I won’t. I promise.”

            “It’s an easy promise to make but a hard one to keep.”

            “But who would believe me. Who would believe that my friends shrinks and eats people?”

            “I just can’t take that risk, Joe. I’m sorry!”

            With that she brought him up to her mouth and tossed him in. She didn’t play with him. She didn’t want to prolong his fear. She briefly considered chewing him to kill him instantly but remembered the awful taste it left in her mouth yesterday. She tilted her head back and gulped the writhing man down.

            She didn’t take as much pleasure in it as she normally did. After all, this was not the way she intended on getting him. When Joe had reached her stomach she bent down and started looking for David. She knew she had kicked him somewhere under the bed, but where?

            After several hours of looking, she still had found no trace of David. She was crying slightly. She didn’t know what she would do without her dearest friend to talk with, laugh with. She wondered where he could have gone.

*  *  *

            David awoke and felt the tingling in his hands and feet that foretold that they were not getting enough blood. He tried to move and realized why this was.  The bindings on his wrists and ankles were too tight.

            “Ah, awake are we?” said a voice nearby. David looked up and saw a large man standing over him. “Well you won’t be running off to tell dear Melanie that we are coming to put her eyes out tonight will you?”

            “Mmph,” said David, unable to speak through the thin gag that allowed him to breathe through his mouth but muffled his voice. His head felt like there was someone hammering somewhere inside his brain.

            “Now, our ‘gentle’ giantess is asleep. She was pining for you for hours. It was sickening by the way. What the hell kind of relationship do you to have anyway? Giantess and shrunken man? She’ll probably just get hungry and eat you like she has everyone else.”

            The gag got in the way of David’s response. She already has.

            “Too bad you’re stuck here. I guess you’ll just have to wait for us to come back and set you free once we blind dear Melanie. Hmm. She doesn’t know where you are even though she searched for you. I guess that means that she won’t find you if our mission fails and we do meet some terrible fate. So anyway have a good wait David.”

            Snickering, the man left a glowering David to ponder his fate.

             Jordan walked up Melanie’s stomach towards her face. It was amazing how physically fit she was. Her abdomen was flat but he could tell by simply walking on that that it had a decent amount of muscle on it. He reached her breasts and marveled at their size compared to his.

            That’s when she rolled over in her sleep. The world went topsy-turvy and he was caught under her breasts. He was able to breathe but trapped between her and her mattress. Meanwhile, Sandy who had been traversing her stomach a bit behind Jordan had similarly been caught between her belly and the bed.

            Despite his best efforts he could not move an inch. He could breathe fine as well, but he wasn’t going anywhere either. Melanie’s stomach rumbled like thunder above him.

            “There’s no way,” he said to himself, “that Lila, Foster and T will be able to get me out from under here. No, the only thing to do is wait until she moves.”

            But Melanie did not move. She slept dreamless dreams and never stirred until the sun began to creep over the horizon. For all that time, Sandy was forced to endure listening to her body digest Joe.