“Why are you still screaming, little boy?” Grace questioned quietly as her palm loomed with outstretched fingers over the picnic table and the quarter-inch-tall teen again, bathing him in menacing, moving shadow. “Nobody can hear you but me.”
“JUST LEAVE ME ALONE!” he squealed at the top of his lungs, still at a full sprint as he hopelessly watched the titanic young witch’s hand lower toward him like a fleshy storm cloud covering half the sky.
There was zero hope of getting away from it if she truly wanted him back in her clutches, but he tried all the same. He had to, for his dignity, or what was remaining of it, at least.
“All I wanna do is share some of it with you, though,” she said with a lithe giggle, eyeing the sticky residue of peanut butter on her digits licked off a few seconds before. “You might as well stop running. You’re gonna tire yourself out so fast. That’s why I made you this small. So you’d know it was pointless to try.”
Suddenly, the girl’s hand ceased lowering like a UFO toward Jay and hovered, inflicting just enough surprise to give him pause to catch his breath with a disgruntled pant.
Maybe she was giving him a break?
In the flash of an interim, a finger the size of an office building barreled toward him, glistening with slick saliva for what seemed like miles from the last few bites the girl had sucked away, and a blob of nutty spread clinging to the tip of it, nearing him like a salty missile.
“And anyway, since I’m sharing some of my snack with you,” she drawled uncaringly as she struck terror into his tiny heart. “…it’s only right you share a little of… you… with me.”
He only managed to take a few frantic steps backward before the wall of peanut butter wrapped around the tip of his monumental tormentor’s index finger collided with his quarter-inch body, instantly losing him partially into its gooey mess that clung to him like flypaper.
She had him. And then he was rising, higher off the picnic table and out of the shadow provided by Grace’s hand. He soared past the cliff-sized face of her bright yellow tank top that nearly blinded Jay with its immediate sheen.
There was no time to even feel vertigo or become aware of the fact that he was comparatively shooting up taller than several skyscrapers stacked atop one another. Were it not for the thick warmth provided by the gooey substance, the cool air would’ve nearly whipped him into hypothermia. Everything was a blur as he struggled to regain control of his limbs in the messy trap the girl had so easily cornered him into like the flea-sized being he was.
Grace’s towering index finger, with the beige blob and its unfortunate passenger at the summit, halted at the level of her mouth, just an inch away. Even from this distance, he could feel the hot exhalations billowing from her nostrils above, but of course this wasn’t what entranced him by necessity. She’d brought him close enough that Jay was forced to observe every detailed line and curve in the pink lips he knew he’d soon be venturing between, no matter how hard he prayed to any god.
Or, indeed, no matter how hard he prayed to this young witch, who surely would listen with even more apparent disinterest in his desires than a true deity.
“Your m-mom and dad wouldn’t let you d-do this!” he cried out after a fearful gasp, trying not to get lost in the pattern of watching his massive captor’s skin shifting with every twitch of her lips. “They’d t-take away y-your-”
“Well, lucky for me, my mom and dad aren’t here now, are they?” she interjected with a snicker. “But there’s no need to worry! When I made you this small, I also made sure you have extra protection. It would barely even hurt if I sneezed you off the table right now. You know I wouldn’t let anything bad happen to my precious little guy, right?”
“Stop fucking calling me that!” he shouted indignantly, fighting uselessly against the thick miasma of peanut spread. It was yet another struggle he hadn’t a hope of winning.
“What was that?”
“STOP FUCKING CALLING ME THAT!”
“Hmm-hmm,” she chuckled throatily, letting a warm mist emanate out from her lips as she grinned, displaying her glistening pearly whites for him in all their titanic glory. Every breathe released a heavy fog, sickeningly redolent of the salty substance as well as a few other foods she’d sampled earlier in the day, and it was nearly enough to put Jay’s senses over the edge. “Naughty-naughty, using words like that. Didn’t your mommy teach you better?”
“Damn it, just let me go,” he grunted meekly. His volume registered like that of a petulant ant whose crumbs had been swiped away by a hawk.
“I think you should say sorry for using words like that,” her voice boomed.
“I’m sorry!” he yelled, rapidly trying to switch tactics, all the while knowing how little it would actually do. “Please stop calling me that.”
“You might be older than me, but since I can make you whatever size I want, whenever I want, I think this name fits you better, don’t you?”
Jay observed the mighty lips, smeared uncaringly with stray butter from earlier bites as Grace sucked her fingers and the heel of her hand of every gooey scrap of the stuff, lifting and pressing together with every smack, spitting blaring syllables out at him with godlike precision.
It wasn’t fair. It simply wasn’t fair.
He’d started developing his own powers even younger than Grace had, until he’d turned seven, and it was discovered a curse lingering in the bloodline would probably stunt his powers for his entire life. He could still perform simple levitation and self-healing acts, but he was unlikely to advance in his abilities any further: a damning sentence for anyone in the magical community, particularly one so young.
Grace, meanwhile, was a bona fide prodigy, performing spell-casting feats at a level at least ten years ahead of her actual age. Frankly, even when Jay was around her at his normal person-sized stature, he felt anxious and unfathomably weak. She was just a small child when she was able to match his abilities, and had just been improving exponentially in the time since.
The girl had mastered size manipulation at the humble age of fourteen, and had taken an immediate shine to it, despite being capable of several far more complicated tricks, which let Jay know she at least didn’t do this out of hubris.
She truly just… enjoyed it.
Grace had held a fascination with Jay since his curse became known. Her acquaintance started as a mere annoyance to him when she first started playing magical pranks on him at a skill level he was unable to match, forcing him to ask her politely to free him from iron-strength vines or other hazards she had conjured.
That irritation over the past few years had developed into legitimate intimidation as Grace’s abilities heightened, coupled with her warped sense of the world’s order.
Her actions were never performed out of malice, as she had never physically harmed Jay or even allowed him to be put at risk while toying with him. The power had simply been going to her head since the first time she shrunk him as an experimental gag that ended three exhausting hours later with Jay dangling stickily from the end of her tongue at a half an inch tall, and she’d only been testing his limits even further ever since.
He was powerless. She wasn’t. And that was all there was.
She never tired of it, and Jay’s own bitter embarrassment and stubborn pride at being manhandled by the girl ensured he’d never ask for help from his family or hers, no matter how bad it got. He knew it was foolish, and recognized that it could be put to an end if he’d only humble himself enough to speak up to someone with the power to stop her, but he just couldn’t. It was an endless cycle.
There was so much power lurking inside this girl who wouldn’t have looked out of place on the cheer squad of the local high school where the humans attended. A girl who wasn’t bothered by the mess of peanut butter spread over her mouth and hands, too immature to think or care much about the effects of her mighty actions, too young to have experienced more than a fraction of her life. And how did she choose to use that power?
By shrinking him to the size of a grain of rice, embedding him in an asteroid-sized ball of peanut butter, and setting him adrift in the frothy tide of her saliva.
“Relax. Just let me have this one last bite, and I’ll make you bigger again before the picnic, okay?” Grace offered brightly, grinning as cheesily as possible. A tiny bead of saliva to flicked out from her gums and plopped wetly onto Jay’s chest, punching him deeper into the ball of peanut butter globbed onto the end of the girl’s titanic finger. “Now try not to make a big deal about it once I put you inside, okay? If you move around too much, I can’t keep track of you, and then who knows what might happen?”
This, too, was just a tease. They both knew Grace was fully capable of transporting Jay back outside her mouth with a snap of her fingers no matter where he ended up in her throat or even lower, but it made him feel incredibly nauseous all the same, and the protection spell she’d placed around him ensured his oxygen wouldn’t run out, either.
Such knowledge meant the girl had no qualms about not only letting Jay thrash about in the dank and cavernous hall of her mouth, but actually descend into her esophagus, the ribbed walls steadily squeezing him down into her digestive tract to a rumbling symphony of gastrointestinal gurgles.
In fact, she hardly was required to swallow to do the deed: at his current size, a churning river of spit awaited him inside, and he would be passed into her gullet with nary a passing gulp of air. He’d go completely undetected, like a lost crumb that had become lodged in a back molar for most of the day and then finally dissolved into the digestive tract while she slept, completely unaware.
Certainly, if it weren’t for her concentration while toying with him, this would be the case, and this was something she loved teasing him about, too.
All she’d have to do would be to place him under the shade of someone’s lettuce leaf in a sandwich, or too deep in the frosting of a cupcake for him to crawl up the slimy slope. A friend, a sibling, one of his parents. No one would think to check. The next thing he’d hear would be the shredding apart of crumbs and tender terrain, followed by the squelching of hot saliva and teeth clacking together as the bite, and Jay along with it, were sent screaming down into the acidic void.
Grace’s tongue, a monstrous pink serpent of a thing to the miniscule boy, slaked a gummy river of spit along her lips as she licked them back and forth several times for dramatic effect.
The young warlock, in his intensive academic studies to in some part make up for his debilitating curse, had witnessed a number of hideous bloodthirsty beasts being handled with chains and powerful hexes: wolves the size of horses, two-headed predatory birds that spat venom, even untamed dragons that could scorch ancient rock with a single puff. Still he’d harbored no fear in the face of these risks.
Grace’s taste bud-coated muscle was a different story.
“PLEASE!” he screamed, his voice going hoarse, as the familiar trembling settled in again. Tears welled in his eyes, far too tiny to be observed by this titan of a witch. “P-Please d-don’t?”
“You’re being such a baby, little guy, you know that?” Grace sighed with the kind of piteous indignation one might use to address a misbehaving toddler. Indeed, this probably would’ve been a promotion in her mind. “You’ll never have any fun when we play together like this until you learn to calm down a little.”
“It’s not f-fun. I h-h-hate it,” he whimpered as loudly as he could, voice cracking, and closed his eyes, unable to keep staring into the massive maw that loomed before him. “P-Please, Grace. Please d-don’t put me in there.”
“Such a scaredy-cat,” Grace sighed, shaking her head in disbelief. “You’re lucky I’m such a cool friend to you. And that you go so yummy with my peanut butter. Otherwise, I wouldn’t keep you around.”
And that was that. With a final tap of her teeth, the girl parted her soft lips and drew her index finger into the black, muggy space. A final wail of terror erupted from the diminutive boy inside her mouth as she dragged her digit along the rippling rivets of her tongue and through a snaking trail of hot saliva, detaching the salty glob from her finger and leaving it, as well as the entrapped Jay, to remain there, framed by the massive undulating cheeks.
“Ahhhh…” Grace sighed with deep satisfaction in the taste and her own might. She kept her mouth open as wide as she could, providing Jay with a final tantalizing look at the sun above. She gave her tongue a final press with her finger to ensure every bit of the peanut butter had made it inside her maw.
Jay watched, tears pouring anew, as Grace’s massive finger, having delivered him into spit-dribbling miasma, abandoned him atop her tongue. The lips followed quickly, sealing together and leaving him to roast in the blackness, oven-like heat, blistering moisture of the nonexistent air, and balmy breath haunted by peanuts and bubblegum toothpaste.
For a moment it crossed his mind to attempt a counter-spell. Something. Anything. Transporting himself out, making himself larger, or conjuring foul-tasting objects to encourage Grace to spit him out.
All of these had been attempted in past games, with Jay putting several minutes of concentration into pulling them off half-decently, and Grace countered them all with hardly a blink. In fact, these rebellions were generally rewarded with a finger-wagging scold and an even longer time spent inside the squishy, nigh-infinite prison.
So with a sigh and an awkward wiping of his damp eyes, Jay accepted his lot, like he always had to eventually.
He could feel his feet sinking through the rapidly melting peanut butter and touching into the rubbery animal that composed Grace’s mythic muscle of a tongue, could feel the heat wrapping around him like a coiling cobra, could sense the undulating beads of the taste buds sampling his flavor, however insignificant.
Another earthquake of satisfaction roared gently over every inch of the girl’s pink skin, fresh saliva bursting forth from the tongue and dribbling in generous cascades from the roof at the first taste of him.
He was small, but Grace wasn’t just talking to make her dominance clear: she could taste him. Wanted to taste him. Needed to. Inside, to know for herself just how above him she was.
And who knew? If the universe truly was content with handing him this curse, stripping him of all personal worth in a world of metaphorical (and sometimes literal) giants, then maybe he needed it too, and just couldn’t tell. Nobody had all the answers, and least of all him.
After all, what was he, in the scheme of all being, besides a pathetic joke of a warlock? An amusing game to pass the time? Something for a powerful witch to snack on? A speck of dust to alight on her fingertip and respectfully kiss her skin, grateful that someone so mighty as her would keep him safe in exchange for her pleasure?
Swallowing hard, Jay resignedly nodded to himself as he slid down the gummy slope of the magnanimously powerful being’s monumental tongue on a fever-inducing river of peanut butter froth toward the bubbling abyss, for what was assuredly not the final time.
He should be so lucky.