“Hey there, little boy,” Grace said as sweetly as possible, brushing a curl over her ear.  She was garbed simply in a pink tank-top and white shorts that hugged her slightly curvy upper thighs with a degree of appreciative display.  “Whatcha doing here all by yourself?”

            “I’m, uh…” the half-inch-tall Allen mumbled, stricken dumb by the unblinking gaze of those humongous blue irises.  “J-Just doing my homework.”

            “Ohhh,” she drawled with revelatory feigned interest.  “Homework, huh?  Such a good little boy, getting good grades and stuff.  You’re pretty smart, aren’t you, Allen?”

            “I d-don’t know.  I guess I try,” he said, placing his own hands on his knees to steady the wobbling he could already feel in them.

            “You don’t have to be so humble.  You should be proud of yourself, knowing so much, even for a human,” she declared with what sounded like genuine enthusiasm.  Her right hand suddenly began to move forward, slow enough that Allen wasn’t startled, but with purpose all the same.  “You know, I’m pretty smart too.  The thing I just did to you?  I learned how to do that two years ago.  Most people can’t do it for another year after that at least.”

            “Oh,” Allen mumbled, hardly managing words now, as his attention was primarily focused on the girl’s enormous hand and soft fingers, parting tenderly as they neared, reaching out for him like an invading spacecraft.  He’d never had to examine a body from this close at such a pitiful stature.  Roxy’s fingers used to intimidate him when they were his same height.

            Grace, however, despite being on the shorter side for her age, now towered over her ungrateful host with a hand seemingly expansive enough to grip a house in her palm, with powerful, peachy fingers each wider than an oak tree.  Her index finger extended, the tip of it drawing ever-closer until she tapped Allen in his tiny stomach with barely any force.  Of course, the mere shock of coming into contact with a portion of her pliable digit was enough to send a visible tremor down Allen’s spine.

            A low rumble drummed in the back of the young witch’s throat: a barely concealed chortle of pure delight.  Her thumb, which had previously been curled into her palm, extended as well, nearing until both chubby-tipped fingers were within reaching distance of their presumed prey.

            Allen fought to swallow the lump in his throat as he stared at those massive fingers, each one far larger than him and capable of flinging him to his doom if either one flicked into his torso.

            This was, of course, a thought that never crossed his mind when his sister’s gigantic hand neared, but somehow this situation seemed to call for a revised understanding of himself as a vulnerable and entirely breakable organism.

            “I bet your sister couldn’t shrink you back then, could she?” Grace questioned after another silence.  The curved pads of her thumb and forefinger inched themselves to Allen’s sides, still not squeezing with enough pressure to pick him up, but patting his sides, as though testing his resilience.  The boy winced with every touch from the titanic digits.

            “I guess not,” he answered, unsure of how to proceed, but at last formulating the closest thing he could create to a plan in the face of this mighty teenaged enchantress.  “Listen, I don’t mean to sound funny or anything, but, um… do you think you could make me big again so I can keep working?  It’s just that I’ve got a lot to get done this weekend, and well, you know… can’t exactly change myself back, can I?”

            He laughed nervously, and earned a pity grin from his visitor, whose fingers showed no intention of growing him back to normal, or of removing themselves from his personal bubble as she continued tapping his hips.

            “Wanna see a new trick I’ve been learning, cutie?” she whispered, obviously resolving to completely disregard any statements that weren’t of spellbinding interest to her.

            Miraculously, her fingers drew back from Allen’s sides, leaving only her pointer, which hovered borderline-threateningly over his head.  He shuddered as it touched down, pressing the tip against his hair, and held just firm enough to ensure he couldn’t try to walk away.

            Grace closed her eyes and sighed deeply, and suddenly Allen felt an alien sensation, as though he was having cool water poured into the center of his brain through an invisible spigot.  It wasn’t painful or even necessarily frightening, but given its novel quality, even worse than having the giantess’s fingers playfully stroking at his legs, he knew he wanted it to end immediately.

            It lasted less than a minute, and then Grace opened her eyes again, pulling her finger back as though repelled from Allen’s body.  She nodded knowingly, parting her soft lips to speak again.

            “I guess you couldn’t tell what I was doing to you, huh, little boy?” she suggested, placing her hands back on her hips, where Allen much preferred them, though he still wasn’t remotely comfortable with his position, staring roughly at knee level with the towering teen.

            “N-No…”

            “Well, I guess I’ll just tell you so you’ll believe me,” she shrugged.  “I can see into people’s heads if they hold still enough to let me focus.  Memories, feelings, things like that.  Most people can’t even do it, but I’m already trying it.  I’m not great at it yet, but then again, I’m never great at stuff until I’ve had at least a couple times to practice it.”

            Taken aback by what was probably the closest thing Grace could manage to actual humility, Allen flinched again, feeling more violated than if the girl had simply decided to forcibly peel his tiny clothes off his body and stare at him naked.  It certainly was scarier to comprehend, and that was saying something.

            Could she really see inside?

            “Roxanne just doesn’t give you a break, does she?  Making you play hide and seek when you’re trying to work,” the witch observed in remembrance, answering Allen’s unspoken question for him.  It chilled him to the bone.  “Then making you watch her weirdo geek movies and sleep in her hand, like a little baby pet mouse?”

            Allen had no response.  He wrapped his hands together as tightly as he could manage.

            “I guess I’m not the only one who thinks you’re so much better when you’re itty bitty, huh?  It looks like you had a fun morning, too.  Going for a little swim in Roxy’s cereal, huh?” Grace giggled.  “It looked pretty fun.  Well, for her, anyway.  To be doing that to someone.”

            In his unease from Grace’s words, Allen had hardly noticed her hand creeping back down from her hip and onto the chair again, her fingers parting slowly as they returned to his sides, this time pinching together just enough to pick him up.

            He flailed for a moment on the rapid ascent, trying to focus his attention on the creased wall of Grace’s palm flesh just ahead, even as the world around him whipped by in a flash of colors, until he seemed to be floating over a carpeted canyon between the mountainous teen’s supple body and the swivel chair.

            “Easy now,” Grace shushed, pressing a finger to her lips even though Allen hadn’t spoken.  “I’d think you were used to this happening by now.  I could feel your little feelings, too, remember?”

            Allen gulped, squirming uselessly between the thick pads of flesh that contained him on either side between the girl’s greedy fingertips.  He certainly hadn’t forgotten this idle comment from earlier.

            “I could tell you aren’t… afraid of being tiny.  Even being this tiny.  Or afraid of magic.  Normally, anyway,” Grace said contemplatively.  “But I could see how you feel about me, too.  That you’re… afraid of me.  And you are, aren’t you?”

            The boy didn’t feel the need to nod in confirmation since Grace had obviously seen this fact for herself, though his muscles had atrophied in terror already, so it was a moot point as he got lost in the searching blue eyes of the girl’s billboard face.  Allen mentally cursed himself for leaving the call stone all the way downstairs: his only means of contacting his parents, wherever they were on the other side of the planet right now.  Though he knew that even if he’d left it on the desk, it wouldn’t have made a difference as he fell down to this insignificant height.

            “Now tell me, little boy, why…” Grace sighed dramatically.  Her tongue slipped from between the cushy seal of her pink lips, gliding precariously from one corner to the other, before slurping back inside her mouth.  “…would you be afraid of little ol’ me?”

            Allen’s trembling jaws were far beyond the point of an easy response.

            “I guess I can’t blame you for feeling nervous, can I?  After all, I made you itty bitty, and… neither mommy or daddy or big sissy is here to help you out of a jam, huh?” Grace said in a measured pace as though explaining the situation to a toddler.  “So maybe we got off on the wrong foot.”

            “Maybe,” Allen managed dryly.

            “See, you’re telling the truth!  We’re being better friends already,” Grace snickered cheerfully, her tongue lapping at the side of her mouth again demonstratively.  “And I think I know a great way to make us even better friends.”

            “W-What?”

            “I think you humans have something sort of like it but less fun called… a trust fall?” Grace hypothesized as though she hadn’t already planned out this entire conversation to her satisfaction.  She tilted her head, pretending to ponder.  “But that would be tough since you’re so little.  I’d probably just squish you even if I did trust you to catch me.  And anyway, people like me don’t really do stuff quite like that.  We do things called trust swallows.”

            Grace snapped her fingers in the morbid silence that followed, and the puny human realized a bubble like an astronaut’s helmet had formed around his head.  Breathing became easier, despite the claustrophobia inside the translucent little magic bulb, and in bittersweet horror, he realized its functionality as a breathing apparatus qualified her playfully spoken words as more than just a joke.

            He couldn’t be certain, being privy only to certain elements of the magical world, but Allen would’ve been willing to bet his life savings that “trust swallows” weren’t quite the fad Grace was making them out to be.

            The fingers drew ever nearer to the girl’s lips, which puckered slightly as if preparing for a kiss, before curling into a broader, teasing smile that seemed to stretch on too far for the boy to make out without rotating his neck.

            Allen struggled to come up with the impossible words that might get him out of this rapidly deteriorating situation, but the longer he looked at the young witch’s gently contorting mouth as it prepared to receive its snack, the less convinced he was that there existed a single phrase in the English language that could convince the prodigy to stop doing something she had set already her mind to.

            And, indeed, as her tongue licked a final time across her lips before they began to part, displaying the spit-coated oblivion that was the cavern of her gaping red maw, she seemed firmly set on putting her powerless prey inside regardless of whether his rhetoric was up to snuff or not.

            “Grace?” Allen muttered, too sapped of courage to manage anything about a tiny muffled syllable.  The vice of her fingers slowly passed between her lips, leaving only the gateway of her glistening white teeth for him to bypass before he was fully inside.  The air grew hotter, stickier, even as the magic bubble around his face continued offering oxygen.  “G-Grace?”

            “You don’t have to be nervous, little boy,” she uttered without fully closing her lips again.  “All I wanna do is show you that you can trust me.  That bubble is all the air you need, and I won’t let you go too deep on the first time.  Just a little down into my throat.  After that, you’ll see how easy it is, and then we’ll go further.”

            “I… I d-don’t w-” he sputtered, pleading in his tiny tone.  He felt the cold sweat forming on his back, his limbs practically disconnected from his body in the adrenaline-surging fear high.  The powerful fingers squeezed into his sides began to loosen as he felt his miniscule feet touching down on the slimy terrain of the girl’s monstrous, slippery tongue.

            It writhed about in the saliva-pooled base of her mouth as she took him in.  An instant later it tubed possessively around his body, caking him in her gooey juices and binding him down to the surface of her taste buds as her fingers parted at last from his body.  Grace’s fingers slurped a final time against the walls of her mouth as they exited, as though she were some kind of theatrical gourmet, appreciating her newest morsel to the fullest extent.  Her lips began to close together, sealing out the light, and trapping in her victorious giggling, along with the half-inch human himself.

            “N-No…” Allen sputtered meekly beyond the point of being heard, lost in a haze of confusion, terror, and the warm, palpable air that he could feel literally consuming him as he careened down a miasmic, rippling serpent of a tongue and toward the shadow of Grace’s waiting uvula.  He struggled to move his limbs, to fight toward the molars for something to grab onto, but he soon was almost entirely submerged in the girl’s generous saliva that weighed him down like bubbly quicksand.  The final destination was only just below, and already the boy could feel his feet sinking down into the undulating tunnel of the teen’s eager gullet.  “NO!”

            The boy had already partially resigned himself to this torture, but it seemed as though the universe had heard his final appeal for aid, because in a flash, he was rocketing back toward the entrance of Grace’s cruel lips.  Light flooded in, and saliva sprayed outward as Allen was launched like a post-Heimlich projectile into the air.

            A nauseated cry erupted from the witch’s lips as she hacked up bile from her throat, stumbling to the ground immediately after her treat was expelled, but this was lost on her intended treat as he soared through the air.  For a moment, Allen’s stomach twisted inside itself as he watched the distant ground spinning below, spelling instant extinction if he continued on this trajectory.

            Instead, he felt himself plopping onto soft and familiar ground, warm and vaguely scented of fabric softener and ratty Converse laces recently knotted.

            The newly returned Roxy closed her titanic palm tenderly around her half-inch nearly-trust-swallowed brother, while her other hand remained clawed in Grace’s direction and spurting with strobing orange light as she completed a particularly potent vomiting spell on the intruder.

            “Sorry, Gracie,” the older witch snarled as her victim cowered on the ground, yucking up the contents of her last meal.  “But that joke’s only funny when I tell it.”