Heather’s expansive hand edged closer along the surface, closer to her miniscule target. Tom remained in place, knowing now he just had to wait and let nature take its course, or rather his humongous and manipulative friend. It was like watching a storm cloud approach from on high. Nothing he could do to stop it but take cover and hope things didn’t get too wet.
Her thumbnail was more than double the length of his entire body, her hand in of itself comprising the scale of a flesh-toned UFO, stretching up a monolithic arm and toward a body so large it might have been said to only exist in imagination. There was no choice in the matter for him now, and already he was working through the “acceptance” stage.
“Well, thank God one of you is willing to let me play with you,” Heather sighed. She lifted her thumb and index finger, parting them ever so slightly as they advanced rapidly on Tom, who only lifted his arms obediently and allowed himself to be pinched between the two enormous, pillowy pads of his friend’s fingertips that threatened to swallow him up if she squeezed with just a little more pressure. A great deal of focus was concentrated in her eyes, like she was on the verge of splitting the atom. With him trapped in her practiced grip, she lifted him up from the seat with no more effort than allowing a fluttering dandelion seed to alight on her fingertip. He soared up dozens of inches up to the level of her soft eyes, now like clock tower faces to the shrunken lad.
Tom struggled to get a grip, finding he could fit his fingertips into the slight grooves of Heather’s spiraling prints but could do little else to aid in gaining ground. As expected, he had to rely entirely on the mercy of his mountainous friend. He wriggled awkwardly between the elongated walls of Heather’s firm digits and looked over to Jordan’s equally titanic face with a beseeching grimace. The defense he’d hoped for didn’t appear to be twisting itself into the statuesque countenance of the other frequent liar.
“Sorry, dude,” Jordan said genuinely, throwing his hands up and running them anxiously over his buzz-cut scalp, having learned several years before that it paid in the long run to not have hair get in the way while shrunken. “I tried to help you! I passed the quiz she gave me. What more do you want?”
Tom shook his head, and would’ve shrugged in agreement if Heather’s fingers weren’t beginning to press more tightly around his hips, constricting most bodily movement - he knew she liked to feel him squirm at larger sizes, but at his nearly insect-scale, it probably wasn’t quite as much fun. Jordan had a point there, and Tom wasn’t one to place blame where it wasn’t due. As usual, this was totally on him. And maybe a bit on Heather as well, but who was going to argue with a girl who was now big enough to suck him up into her nostril like a dust mite if she inhaled hard enough?
“I swear, someday this will get old, but it is most definitely not today,” Heather commented victoriously as her hand lowered toward her lunch tray. Once her pinched fingers were hovering just an inch over the pudding below, she parted them without fanfare, allowing Tom to tumble the short distance from her grip and into an inescapable lake of sugary goodness. He pulled his limbs into his body for the descent, praying for a soft landing as wind whipped past his cheeks. With a soft plunk so quiet it might’ve been drowned out by a pebble rolling into a still lake, Tom hit the whipped surface of his friend’s enormous dessert and became submerged.
“There’s no need to be a jerk about it. You already got him down that low,” Jordan noted begrudgingly. He moved his hand to try and scoop his crumb-sized buddy away from Heather, but she was prepared, instantly swatting him away and keeping Tom to herself. “Why can’t you just let him be, huh?”
“Don’t feel too bad, Tom-Tom. See, this is why you’re my best friend, and Jordan is just my best acquaintance,” she said earnestly as her hand departed, going to scoop up the spoon again. There didn’t appear to be a hint of irony in her tone, and as she didn’t lose a millimeter of height, she clearly believed it. Jordan, ignoring the denotation, returned to his own lunch again.
Tom, meanwhile, ensconced in the miasma of pudding, watched with his usual nonchalant regard for the things he couldn’t change as Heather’s rocket-sized spoon descended back toward the pudding. Not that there was anywhere to go, but as he sank deeper into the yellow food-dyed sea of his friend’s food, the liar noted he wasn’t even strong enough at this size to swim away from the inevitable. And sure enough, he watched as the spoon met the surface of the pudding and dove beneath, advancing below the surface like a cold metal shark. For a moment he caught his distorted reflection in the concave surface of its ladle, streaked with saliva and smeared pudding though it was, and blinked.
The uprising was swift and dramatic as Heather scooped her spoon back up beneath him. The earth seemed to tremble as the terrain itself was sponged from the uniform mountain of squishy yellow treat and collected into the crater of the utensil. Tom barely flinched on his ascent, sinking deeper into the pudding so that only his head could peep out of the gooey sea.
“Here comes the airplane,” the girl giggled as she parted her lips, giving Tom a broad view of the hot, glistening prison cell of her inner jowls that was about to become her friend’s habitat for the foreseeable future. The red walls of her cheeks undulated, dribbling with ropes of crystal saliva and excess moisture as the new tenant prepared to make his entrance. Exhaling heavily over the spoon and washing the miniscule boy in her stifling breath, Heather brought the spoon over her teeth and slurped Tom into the sticky valley of her titanic tongue.