“Hi. My name’s… Cassandra. I’m seventeen, halfway through my junior year, and I’ve been under R&R for… four weeks now,” a teenage girl said as she perched at a modest six inches tall on her mother’s left knee.

            “Hi Cassandra,” droned her equally shrunken peers in unison from around the room as they all sat on the hand or leg of their legal guardians and/or wardens.

            The whitewashed group meeting room of the ARR Clinic swallowed up its inhabitants by more than just size. Pristine in its every detail from Bonsai trees on the floor-length crystalline windows to the spotless cream-colored chairs encircling the room, the place was almost too bright to look around. Eventually Scott’s eyes would adjust, but for the beginning, he felt as though he was being fried under the blinding interrogation lights of a new-age gulag.

            “Now, this is Cassandra’s first time with our group today,” said Val Richards, adjusting her ivory clipboard as she ran a finger down the attendance list. The curly-haired discussion monitor eyed the collection of shrunken outlaws in a round, her youthful freckled cheeks curving invitingly. “So we’ll have her go first for testimonials today and tell us a bit about herself. Is that all right, Cassandra?”

            The half-foot girl nodded meekly, having caught an expectant glance from her much-larger parent’s eye overhead. Satisfied, Val made a scribble on her accompanying note pad. Participation was optional, but especially for those present for therapy under court orders, it was greatly to one’s benefit to impress the monitor.

            Scott, now regrown to a respectable four inches and clothed in a miniature polo shirt and jeans, straddled his mother’s middle finger as she rested her folded hand atop her firm thigh.

            Scratching at a dried clump of Judy’s saliva in his hair, he shot a furtive glance over to the newcomer, as always intrigued to study the behavior of a fellow prisoner of society’s cruel joke of a punishment. Though tough to make out from a distance of several feet away, Cassandra’s arms were lined with tattoos of various flowers, and a few strands of crimson red dye coursed through her primarily dark brown locks.

            Looking especially reserved for her first time in group, Cassandra had folded her hands into her lap as her mother’s thumb descended on her, patting her shoulders, though whether it was for support or a reminder to stay good was hard to say. The woman, slender in the face with a few gray streaks in her hair, appeared to be focusing on Val and her directions for the group. As her fingers dabbed lightly at her tiny daughter’s back, the mother’s palm eventually opened up, wrapping around Cassandra’s back and plucking her up from the knee.

            Without taking her gaze off the next speaker, the woman spent a few moments brushing her shrunken child’s hair back over her shoulders: something Cassandra remained particularly limp for, hanging almost lifelessly in her parent’s grip as the job was completed. Clearly there was an expectation that she yield to any of her mother’s actions in public, even for something as trivial as having her hair brushed like a doll’s.

            The pattern of introductions continued around the room as each shrunken adolescent took their turn to speak up under the watchful eye of their colossal parent or in a couple cases, Scott guessed, older sibling. At last the circle around, and all eyes in the room fell to him, some with more apprehension than the rest.

            His story was well-known by now around the country, and he was aware of the vast range of opinions on him, especially by his reduced brethren. Those who had some idea of the measures Judy employed to tame her son looked on him with pity, while many seemed to be in a state of barely-contained fury, either for his drunken vehicular crime itself, or just for his association with the woman who had made all this dehumanizing madness possible.

            Scott didn’t feel that last one was a particularly fair reason, though, since it wasn’t exactly his fault he just happened to be birthed by a power-hungry matriarch hell-bent on building herself a litigious citadel atop the bones of the old ways. Still, he could understand their ire toward Judy herself, probably more so than almost any human being on Earth.

            “Your turn, Scott,” Val said needlessly, smiling again at him.

            “Right,” the four-inch prisoner said, coughing to clear his throat. As if to give him some extra prompting, Judy’s finger bucked him in the hips. Ignoring his mother’s unnecessary intrusion, Scott at least noted his gratitude for being allowed to wear pants into this meeting, and opened his mouth to speak.

            “Hi there. My name is Scott Stevens. Twenty-two. One year to go at university. I’ve been under R&R for… thirteen months now.”

            “Thank you, Scott,” Val said. “I believe that’s everyone, yes? Let’s go ahead and move into testimonials, then. Like I said, we’ll have our new participants go first, which I suppose is just Cassandra today. I’m sure we’ll all show her a warm welcome and listen very attentively to whatever she has to say.”

            This last mandate for manners was hardly necessary, given that every shrunken individual in the room was in such easy grabbing distance of their parent’s enormous, entrapping palms if great focus wasn’t displayed for every instant of the therapy. Nobody dared resist Val’s cheerily delivered directions. And those that did were often put in their place quickly enough to serve as an example.

            “Go ahead, Cassandra. Whenever you’re ready. Just start at the beginning and share whatever you’re comfortable with,” Val instructed gently. She folded her clipboard in her lap, devoting full attention to the tattooed teen.

            “Umm. Okay, sure,” Cassandra said, now seated in her mother’s palm and facing out at the group. “Well, I, uh… I started shoplifting when I was thirteen. It was just little things at first. You know, packs of gum, candy, movies. I guess that got boring eventually, so by the time I was… sixteen… I was taking bigger things. Universal remotes, phones, portable hard drives. I got caught like two months ago when I was, um…”

            The girl paused for a moment, perhaps collecting her thoughts, or maybe giving up on the account altogether. However, her mother’s thumb rose up once again, this time positioning the softly pedicured nail against Cassandra’s cheek. The girl visibly swallowed and continued on.

            “…when I was taking a car. And I was kind of already… in the car. Driving out of the show room,” she concluded.

            Scott couldn’t help but raise an impressed eyebrow at the girl’s reckless abandon. Cassandra had probably barely earned her driver’s license and already she was operating at the level of broad daylight heists. Knowing it couldn’t be condoned, he nonetheless admired her apparent conviction to whatever moral code she followed.

            “Holy shit!” a small but insistent voice called out in response to Cassandra’s story, echoing the silent thoughts of most every other shrunken listener. Scott didn’t even need to look over to know the owner of the voice was Derrick Tate, an especially outspoken commentator who’d earned his place in the group by diverting a week’s supply of sewage into the piping of a local Techilogic legal firm.

            Therapy had apparently been doing very little to improve his attitude or his vocabulary.

            “Derrick,” his mother snapped under her breath. Instantly her hand was around the eight-inch body of her son, scooping him up from her knee and up to her intently frowning countenance. Her fingers appeared to be squeezing into his stomach, perhaps hoping to limit his next response down to a meek apology. “What do you say?”

            “It’s just fucking impressive, that’s all!” he gasped with enthusiasm, obviously not giving two shits how he spoke in front of his mother or the professional responsible for reporting on his improvement.

            Val cleared her throat.

            “That’s enough for now,” Mrs. Tate reported curtly. Running a hand through her short hair in exasperation, the woman flattened her feet to the ground and slipped her right foot out of its foam clog. A deep, grit-encrusted imprint revealed itself in the well-worn footwear as she lowered her child down toward the floor.

            The loudmouthed teen made no further objections as his body was handily slid across the squishy insole of his mother’s clog, where his head fit snugly under the big toe strap like a dog collar.

            There was a very particular and threatening reason many of the parents wore slip-ons or sandals to these meetings, just in case some more forceful encouragement was needed for their child. Scott had yet to be turned into such a demonstration by his mother during these meetings, though that didn’t stop her from crossing her leg and rocking her foot from side to side whenever his discussion answers occasionally veered toward the liberal spectrum.

            Right now, it looked like Derrick’s mother was going to give the whole group a helpful reminder about what awaited even the slightest rebellion.

            “Yes, yes. Moving on now. We’re sorry about that, Cassandra,” Val said. She turned away as most of Derrick’s body disappeared beneath his mother’s somewhat pudgy appendage. The woman had to use a bit of extra force to cram her foot in when a shrunken inhabitant was already taking up some of the room, but she eventually made it work, sandwiching Derrick between heavy sole flesh and a spongy clog pad.

            The boy was given just enough wiggle room so that his eyes could peep out from under Mrs. Tate’s big toe as it mashed aggressively against his mouth and nose, ensuring he stayed silent from now on.

            After all, there was no reason why he couldn’t still listen as he was forcibly kissed again and again into the underside of his parent’s foot.

            “No, it’s all right,” Cassandra uttered, her bulging eyes still affixed down to Derrick across the circle as his dangling limbs were squashed beneath his mother’s hefty appendage.

            Scott held back a knowing nod as he straightened his legs across the length of Judy’s fingers. It was now clear the girl’s prior exposure to the “rehabilitation” part of R&R had been limited to being groomed like a living toy by her mother. While demeaning, certainly, it didn’t quite compare to watching a human being shoved into a shoe and stood upon like it was nothing.

            If Scott had to guess, this was the first time Cassandra had ever witnessed such a sight, and he couldn’t blame her for the shock. Even if his own experiences had made these kinds of acts fairly pedestrian for nearly half his short life. Frankly, he felt the urge to yawn as Derrick was mashed beneath the ball of his mother’s foot, though that seemed a little on the rude side, especially with Judy hovering so closely.

            “Would you like to continue?” Val encouraged.

            “S-Sure. Yeah. Yeah, I’ll, I’ll… um, anyway,” the girl muttered. She forced herself to tear her eyes away from Derrick’s mother, who was now casually bobbing her overstuffed clog up and down against the floor, egregiously compressing her son’s body and grinding her toeprint into his nose on every bounce. “Yeah, I, um… was going to go to juvy, but… this… thing with the Shrink Act came up, my parents and I heard it was working for some people, so I… went through it.”

            “And now?” Val pressed softly.

            “And now I’m just, uh… trying to learn, I guess,” Cassandra said, sounding more rehearsed now than she had yet. Scott couldn’t help but suspect a bit of pre-therapy coaching from the girl’s mother. It sounded like reading off a script. “Trying to… get into a better place… so that I can stop doing those things… that were hurting me… and others… once I’m back to normal size. That’s all.”

            “Wonderful. Thank you for sharing, Cassandra,” Val said. She flipped her notepad back over and scribbled some lines with a smile on her face. The woman loved being fed back those kinds of glossy garbage lines about “learning” and “getting to a better place” almost as much as Judy herself, so Scott stuck to these answers whenever possible.

            He hoped, for Cassandra’s sake, she’d pick it up just as quickly.