That afternoon presented the most harrowing ride home Renata had to date experienced. It wasn't the constant squirming of the tiny little man in her butt that distracted her: her body weight was usually enough to compress him into place, but if he found an inch of wiggle room, she could adjust herself in the driver's seat enough to clamp down on him once more. She was long past the weirdness of storing a living person between her cheeks and now more pragmatic in coping with that situation.

The other situation was the newly opened portal to the realm of tiny, horny men. As creepy as this had been in her cubicle, it was outright life-threatening on the streets. It was readily apparent she had to stay off the highway, what with the writhing mass of bodies swarming over her windshield, flooding her dashboard. But even in sticking to the residential streets, she had to pull over occasionally to allow her panic attack to subside, or just to draw a deep lungful of air (covering her mouth from invaders) and issue a huge, infuriated screech of banishment. The discharge of her force of will worked to cast the antagonizing little people away, but only for a while: after she calmed down or her attention was diverted elsewhere, they began to creep back in from their dimension, like so many gnats temporarily shied off with a swipe of an arm.

Plus there was that unnerving squelching noise, as tiny men materialized beneath her car, only to be immediately ironed out by the tires. Disgusting at first, it gradually became a source of comfort to her, imagining scores of the incessant pests being wiped out and relocated by the dozens.

She reached her modest rambler, with its pristine monocropped yard, in its homogeneous neighborhood. Normally a sight of respite from a hard day in the office, the approaching home filled Renata with a little sickness: she didn't want to ruin the safety of her home with an infestation of measly fuckbois from another dimension. But there was nothing else for it. She had to go home and find a way to relax, then research what all this mess was about.

The tiny man in her butt—whom she'd named "Oliver," for no reason known to herself—squirmed excitedly as she walked around her own home. Little beings formed around her like snowflakes, dropping heavier to the ground than snowflakes, then disappearing behind her like especially ephemeral snowflakes as she went down the hall to her bathroom. There she fished Oliver out of her underwear and informed him of his name as she scrubbed him brusquely with a cake of French soap.

"Oliver!" she chirped. "Oliver! I love that! What does it mean in your world, my sweet goddess?"

Her brow furrowed as she pummeled the minuscule man with the soap. "No idea. It sounds like 'olive,' I guess. Probably comes from that."

"And what are olive, my illustrious goddess?"

"What is an olive. It's like this small fruit with a large pit in it. It comes in green or black and it tastes salty. You eat it or people put it in drinks."

Oliver invited his succulent goddess to devour him any time she cared to. Renata merely blasted him with cold water and jostled him in a scratchy hand towel. "Knock off all the worshipping, already. It sounds disgusting when you say it."

The little man's face contorted with pain. "My sincerest apologies, my most ravishing goh−... uh, sweet mistress! I only live to serve you and cause you every conceivable delight!"

She pursed her lips and plucked him up by one scrawny leg. "Now that's a fucking lie. All you little horndogs want to do is get yourselves off using me as a tool. Not a single goddamned one of you has shown the remotest curiosity about anything going on inside my head."

"Oh, but my delectable mistress! My entire, wretched being is fully absorbed with craving to know exactly what goes on... inside you..." Upside down, his lecherous leer was even more disturbing than usual.

Sighing, she pinned him to the cold mirror with one heavy thumb. "I'm serious, Oliver. Knock off all your disgusting smut-talk right this second, or I'll smack you against the vanity with all my force, and you'll be reincarnated very, very far away from me. Got it?"

The miserable little man looked as though he were going to cave in on himself with sadness.

Renata witnessed her own exasperated expression in the reflection behind the tiny naked man. "Or you can behave as my extra-special little guy," it sickened her to say, "because I need you as my guide for this. I needed you to explain how your dimension worked with mine, and now I need you to solve this bizarre-ass porn riddle with me. Okay? Can you hold your shit together long enough to be of some use to me?"

Tiny arms and legs flailed excitedly from around her thumb. "Oh yes, my goddess! I mean, my mistress! I mean, Madam Benjamin! I can gather all of my shit and contain it for as long as you require!"

She peeled him off the mirror and set him on her shoulder, setting aside a lock of hair for him to hold onto. "How do you know my name, again?"

"We know everything about you, Madam Benjamin. We're around you all the time, we see all the things you see." Oliver's voice rang clearly, just outside her ear, as she made her way to her home office. "We learned English by being around you. Few of us survive the wonder and spectacle of being around your deliciously destructive body, but we learn in shifts and trade notes."

"But you don't know about olives."

"If olives were your favorite food, we would know all about them. You don't care about them, and so they don't exist for us."

Renata thought about this as she pulled out the chair from her desk and fired up her old tower computer. "Do you know all the people I work with, in the office?" There was a crew of tiny, naked men on her computer chair, waving and cheering at her. She tried not to think about them as she swiveled her hips over the cushion and let herself drop with undue force.

"We know the ones you joke around with and the ones that cause you emotional distress. We know those very well, and we take action against those in your realm who cause our goddess the least discomfort."

Her eyes widened. "What do you do?"

She felt Oliver stirring on her shoulder. Wanting to see him, she plucked him off carefully and set him on a beer coaster beside her keyboard. He seemed very proud. "We do everything within the range of our capacity, I promise you, Madam Benjamin. It takes supreme concentration on our part, but in large groups we may  manifest long enough to tie shoelaces together, disable a part of a circuit board, or defecate in someone's lunch."

The sound of that alarmed Renata, until she pictured Joe biting into a sandwich with a secret parcel of dookie embedded within. She smiled unconsciously, and Oliver looked as if he might burst with pleasure. "So you have your uses after all," she muttered, opening her browser. Referring to her scrawled note of websites, she began looking up what appeared to be message boards for writers, most of which looked very old-school and badly in need of renovation. She executed a search for her own name and found several titles by someone called...

"AlucardSpiegel? What kind of dumb name is that?" She grimaced at her little helper.

"Well, have you ever watched Watercolor Princess?"

She blinked repeatedly at him. "Why have words suddenly stopped meaning anything?" To her tremendous surprise, the tiny man pulled a deep breath, opened his mouth, paused, then waved the air in front of him.

"As my magnanimous goddess says, it is a stupid name." He flinched. "Sorry, Madam Benjamin."

"You can't just call me Renata?"

"I would sooner die than so presume!"

Shrugging, she opened several stories in tabs and leafed through them. In the corner of her vision she noted Oliver shifting his negligible weight from foot to foot until, to alleviate the distraction, she plucked him up and rubbed his chest thoughtfully with her thumb. The deep, rumbling purring that resulted from this somehow pleased her. "So this AlucardSpiegel, he's really detailing my entire work life, here." Her eyes flicked down the screen, reading line after line. "He's obsessed with my boobs, it looks like. I would never... I would never do that!"

"Do what," Oliver murmured dreamily.

"I would never pick up one of my boobs and slam it down on a tiny person! That's ridiculous! Who thinks of this crap?"

"You could do it to me if you liked." Two tiny men popped from around her monitor and volunteered as well; Renata plucked them up and tossed them over her shoulder.

"I don't like!"

"Just to see. For science."

She sighed exasperatedly. "No boob-slammage, Oliver. It sounds painful to me." Reading on, throughout several texts, she pieced together the complete image of how she appeared to this anonymous writer. "He sounds like he's attracted to me, but he's wrong about everything. My breasts aren't that big, and no one's attracted to my fat ass."

Oliver shook with laughter in her palm. "You could not be more mistaken on that point, Madam Benjamin."

"What would you know?"

One thin arm pointed at the monitor. "For one thing, it's almost all AlucardSpiegel thinks about. For another, my people are with you every second of every day! We see how people look at you when your back is turned. You have to know by now that Ray and Joe each glare lasciviously at you as you pass by."

She winced. "Joe makes sense, but Ray, too? Dammit." Three tiny men crept up on her right, sneaking up on her hand on the mouse as though it were prey; when she spotted them, she swept them away violently. They struck the far wall and vanished.

"It's a good thing, my enticing mistress!"

"It's really not, Oliver. It's not flattering to know that those two creeps stare at me and think about what they'd like to do with me."

Oliver tilted his tiny head. "But you sounded disappointed that no one would find your luscious hindquarters appealing."

"Hell of a word choice there, little guy. Anyway, there's a huge difference between feeling unattractive and feeling attractive to scummy, creepy men." She paused and looked off to the side. "Actually, not much of a difference."

"You're saddened that no one finds you attractive, but you're disgusted when they do?"

Renata leaned back in her chair and pressed the pad of her thumb upon the little man's entire face. "You know what, I don't feel like breaking it down for you. I just want to know who this freakin' AlucardSpiegel is." She leaned in to study the stories again. Yet another tiny man brushed her skin, this time attempting to climb up her ankle and into her pant leg. Almost thoughtlessly, she crushed him with her other leg and continued reading.

Something caught her imagination. "In three... no, four of these little stories, he actually walks by my cubicle. He describes the interior: in 'The Whispering Canal' he talks about the photos of my family, and in 'Magnificent Cradle' he mentions my postcards. Where the fuck does he come up with these titles..." She continued. "In 'Planet of Butts' he's described nearly my entire wardrobe, everything I wear to the office." She looked pointedly at Oliver. "'Planet of Butts'?"

"Yours is pretty magnificent, goddess, if only you could wrap your mind around it." The tiny man shrugged tiny shoulders. "I would happily live to an old, ripe age on yours, given the chance."

He was wrong, of course. Renata knew how she looked in the mirror, in the shower. She could only think about her trips to TJ Maxx, once or twice a year, when she had to shop for replacement pants that fit her. Oliver wasn't there for her anguish when she'd get dressed for work, and the only slacks that matched her top suddenly split a seam or the zipper wouldn't go up without a fight. Or maybe he was, considering everything he'd told her. Maybe her heartbreak meant nothing to a little pervert who was into large asses. Of course, to him, even some young, hipless skinny-Minnie had a big butt. She laughed ruefully and Oliver gave her a strange look.

"But I can't just catalog every single person who goes by my desk. I'm in the middle of the office, probably everyone in Rural Massive has been by me at some point." She stared at her tiny companion thoughtfully. "What do I do, Oliver? Is there anything you can share with me to help me out?"

His entire diminutive being fairly glowed with pride, and he hugged Renata's thumb joyfully. "I can tell you everything about him, my pulchritudinous majesty! His name's Gerald Keller, he lives with his mother and baby sister in Hickok. He does data entry for finance."

Renata nearly crushed Oliver in her fist. "You little prick! Why didn't you tell me this in the beginning?" Three tiny men emerged from the shadows of her computer desk, saw what was going on, and quickly receded into obscurity again.

The tiny man strained to push her huge thumb off his fragile chest, his eyes bugging. Startled, Renata relented. "I thought you were enjoying the thrill of the chase, Madam Benjamin. You're so beautiful when you're digging around for clues, being analytical."

"I just wanted to find this asshole! And you knew who he was the entire time?"

"I've known for as long as I've been in existence! Longer, even!" He coughed and stroked the tip of her thumb consolingly. "We've been enjoying your splendid bodyscape for years. We became aware of him when his writing, and all the passion and sincerity he pours into it, began to breath the barrier between our worlds. So, yeah, I know exactly who he is and I could tell you a ton about him."

Renata leaned back in her chair and stared at the ceiling. "Next time you know something, Oliver, don't play coy. Don't hide it from me." She regarded the naked man in her hand, then rested him upon her left breast. He sprawled upon the red turtleneck, recovered, and clung to the massive sphere desperately. His upturned face was a huge question mark: she stared down the length of her nose at him for a long moment, then slowly nodded.

Oliver's jaw dropped. "Really?" he whispered.

"Before I change my mind."

Nearly weeping, Oliver buried his face into the fabric of her turtleneck and began grinding his hips into her swelling mound. She couldn't feel a thing, not a nudge, not a rustle. She watched him dry-hump her for a while, then brought up her hand and ever-so-gently began to stroke his bare back. Now he did openly weep, praising her name, thanking her profusely, choking on his own words as he gasped for the air to fuel his endeavors. Renata only marveled at his enthusiasm, how he threw himself entirely into such a futile gesture.

But what now? She knew who was writing these stories. The why of it was incidental. What was important now was getting Gerald, or AlucardSpiegel, to knock this shit off. She wondered what he looked like: the name wasn't familiar at all, so he was just some faceless nobody in the office, a data entry drone who clocked in, did his work, and went back home to... Hickok. Barely a town at all, a dot in the middle of struggling farmland. Dilapidated homes, rusted-out pickups, the very stereotype of coastal elitists when they thought of America's Heartland. And he lived with his mother and a sister, in some hovel, in the wasteland. He plugged away at mind-numbing data entry, brought home a paycheck, and in his free time he cranked out tale after tawdry tale about Renata.

She scrolled through the stories and contemplatively patted Oliver's tiny little butt. "He's fixated on my boobs and my butt," she said to herself. "But he's taken the time to study the details of my cubicle. He's walked past me a hundred times a day and I've never noticed him."

"He's the one who got help for you when you passed out," gasped Oliver. Tiny little eyes peered in the darkness behind her monitor, glinting with envy and hunger.

That surprised her. Either Gerald was luckily in the area, or he was always watching her somehow. Maybe he sat nearby? No, finance was on the other side of the office. She went from touched to skeeved-out in a matter of seconds. Was he spying on her? Could he hack the webcam on her computer? She swore under her breath.

Oliver grunted, expended himself, and collapsed in a limp heap upon her breast. "Is something wrong, my munificent goddess?"

She glanced at him, then back at the screen. "I'm just trying to figure this guy out, I guess. Is he going to give me trouble? Can I intimidate him? Is it enough to get the stories taken down? I mean, I could email the site admin and make a complaint, but I guess it's up to their sense of honor whether they'll act on it." She hummed and tapped her teeth. "But even if I get the stories taken down, what's to stop him from writing more?"

If Oliver had any answers, they were locked within his slumbering little head.