“Mom, are you sure we can’t shrink him any smaller?” Becky pleaded as she gazed with bright eyes into the cushy center of the palm of her hand, where her older brother was curled into a defensive fetal position.

            “Honey, he’s already just three inches.  Isn’t that small enough?” Joy Roberts responded with an approving chuckle as she reclined in a kitchen chair.

            “No, it’s not.  I like him better when he’s even smaller.”

            “There will be time for that later.  But first we have to make sure you’re clear on safety,” her mother said as she crossed her arms, observing her children with a keen eye.  “Handling him is a big responsibility, and it’s important you understand how to act carefully.”

            “But Mom, you’ve been making him tiny for like three years.  I’ve held him a bazillion times when he was only one inch, and never messed up,” the fourteen-year-old protested, batting her light eyelashes as she glanced briefly up at her mother before returning her rapt attention to the tiny subject in her hand, who refused to respond with eye contact.  “Isn’t that right, widdle brudder?”

            Ignoring the adoring pet name that his sister decided for him whenever he was reduced in size, Mark still refused to look up as he nestled his cheek awkwardly against the soft give of the teen’s titanic pad of palm flesh.

            Even if the name wasn’t meant to come off as condescending from his sister, whose well-documented penchant for all things small extended comfortably into the realm of shrunken siblings, it burned a little too much to answer it directly.  He still had his pride, after all.

            Or some of it.  Probably.

            It was hard to tell sometimes.

            “C’mon.  Aren’t I always sooooo nice to you when you’re all little and bitty and cute?” Becky whispered after a few seconds of silence, her mouth a matter of inches from her miniscule brother’s head so that he could soak up every syllable.  The index finger of her other hand dug gently against his stomach and rocked back and forth, tickling him.

            “Yeah,” he relented, knowing it would probably be easier in the long run to cooperate.

            “Awww,” she cooed again, and puckering her lips, planted a soft peck on her sibling’s head that compressed his face harder into the doughy terrain of her palm again for a moment.  Then, as though this act of affection had confirmed it for her parent, the green-eyed short-haired blonde looked back up at her mother.  “Please?  Please-please-please can you make him one inch for me?”

            “Tell you what, honey.  Just pay attention and do what I ask while he’s at three, and then afterward, you two can spend some time together, and I’ll make him whatever size you want him.  Deal?” Joy offered cheerfully.

            “Deal,” Becky nodded, a goofy grin crossing her lips as she raised her eyebrows playfully at her tiny sibling.  Everyone in the room knew precisely what she’d choose.

            “Wonderful,” her mother answered, clasping her hands together over a crossed knee as she settled in.  “Now, I just want to make sure we go over everything, even if you think you know how to do it already.

            “Aw, Mom.  Don’t you trust me with him?” Becky wheedled, biting her lip as she drew her cupped palm closer to her stomach.

            “I do.  And I’m sure he does as well.  We just don’t want any accidents around here, do we?  Things are different now, especially since he’ll be staying at this size for at least seven weeks.”

            “Eight,” Becky corrected quickly with a smirk, clearly having been paying very close attention to this wonderful detail during her brother’s sentencing.  “The seven was just after the trial week.  And that’s only if the review goes okay.”

            “It will.  We all know it will.  Don’t we, sweetie?” Joy queried pleasantly as she leaned forward to peer at her son in the center of her younger child’s toasty palm.

            “Yep,” Mark said in agreement.

            “Of course we do.  Now, first things first: why don’t you go ahead and close up your hand over your brother?”

            “Okay!” Becky chirped.  Immediately, her fingers folded downward, pinning the tiny sixteen-year-old into her palm and shrouding him in darkness and the oppressive embrace of her soft fist.  He flinched at the sudden move, but he was clasped into a tunnel of her warm skin before it had the chance to be seen.

            “Gentle, honey, gentle!”

            “I am being gentle, Mom.  He knows it.  You feel good, don’t you, widdle brudder?” Becky asked as she brought her fist before her blinking emeralds to examine the tiny berry-sized form of her brother’s head poking out of her fist for air.  And indeed, despite the speed of the girl’s reaction to Joy’s request and the sudden immobilization Mark experienced, there was zero pain felt.

            “I’m fine,” Mark grunted, more out of embarrassment than effort.

            “All right, that looks okay then, as long as you’re careful.  Now, why don’t you show me how you’d hold him if you were carrying him somewhere?” Joy posed.

            “Moooom, I know how to carry him safe, I’m not a dummy like Grant.”

            “Honey, I know you wouldn’t do anything on purpose, but all the same, I don’t want to see anything like what happened with your classmate.  That was easily preventable, if he’d been holding his sister upright instead of upside down.”

            “Fine,” Becky groaned, impatiently tapping her bare left foot against the tile with a fleshy slap.  Her hand adjusted its position until her arm formed a ninety degree angle, her fist perfectly upright so Mark could stare ahead from his clamped perch between his younger sister’s controlling fingers.  In spite of her whining, she had the know-how to back it up.  “See, I can do it!  Is that all?”

            “Not just yet, honey.  Now we need to practice something else, so you’re prepared for situations where you’re not quite so aware.”

            “What do you mean?”

            “Like if you ever don’t see your brother, down on the floor, and you’re walking toward him.”

            “Why wouldn’t I see him?” Becky snorted.  “And when I see him, I’ll just pick him right up.  Problem solved.”

            “I know you would, but if you don’t happen to catch him out of the corner of your eye, and he happens to be right in front of you… well, we wouldn’t want that, would we?” Joy continued, obviously sugarcoating the horrible possibility as much as possible with a tilt of her head and another hopeful smile.

            “Mom,” Becky gaped, her jaw hanging open, and she cradled her occupied fist back against the fabric wall of her t-shirt.  “Are you saying I’d step on him?  I’d never, ever, ever, ever in a million years ever-”

            “I’m not saying you’d do it on purpose, sweetie, but it pays to be prepared, to know what it would feel like, and that way you’ll be able to recognize immediately when it’s time to stop,” Joy interjected, knowing perfectly well the reaction this would get from her overprotective daughter.

            “To… know what it feels like?” Becky questioned with a little less distaste, regaining her composure as she slowly took a seat in a kitchen chair next to her mother’s at the table.  She rested her forearm on the wooden surface, still keeping her fist upright, but her fingers remained possessively clamped around her three-inch sibling.  There was no point in him standing on the surface himself when she had a perfectly functioning limb to hold him, after all.

            “Yes, honey.  It’s no big deal, and I’ll be here to make sure you’re careful, but you need to know what it feels like to…”

            “To what?”

            “…to have your brother under your foot.”

            “Mom?” Mark drawled quietly with a frown, piping up on his own now.  He could feel his sister’s muscles in her palm and fingers tensing around him, though whether from nervousness or curiosity he couldn’t say.

            “Don’t worry, sweetie,” Joy immediately said in address of her little son.  Her right hand reached forth, her pinky finger extended, and she stroked tenderly along the top of his head.  It was a loving attempt at comfort, though all it really accomplished was momentarily burying Mark under the might of another family member’s gigantic finger on the last remaining body part not being squeezed by one.  “We’re just taking every precaution to keep you safe and sound, all right?”

            “Yeah but… but can’t she just… I mean, can’t she just know to watch where she’s walking?  Nothing like that’s ever happened before, she…” Mark rambled with increasing desperation, speaking more of his own free will than he had in the days since he’d been sentenced to two months of shrunken house arrest for his participation in the radical “redesigning” of the local high school’s auditorium.

            Though he recognized things were different now that he was going to be shrunken for the foreseeable future rather than just for an hour of discipline, Mark’s internalized shell of stoicism had been broken through by his mother’s casual statement.

            The household policy in years past had always been for anyone under the PMRD’s cursed shrunken effects to stay off the floor to avoid this very scenario at all costs.  For this reason, he’d never had occasion to be anywhere near someone’s enormous feet at this size, let alone his sister’s, which even at normal scale usually displayed the telltale signs of someone not particularly concerned with militant toe hygiene.

            A lump formed in his throat at the mere thought of being close enough to touch them himself, and now they’d be doing the touching, and more-than-likely near-smothering, if Becky took to stepping on her brother with anything near the vigor she used when holding him in her hand like a treasured trinket.

            He managed to add after a stunned pause: “…she doesn’t need to know what it feels l-”

            “I think it sounds like a good idea,” Becky offered softly, cutting off Mark’s protest and gently shrugging her shoulders.  She lifted her fist off the surface of the table and brought her brother back before her chin.  “Like Mom said.  It’s all about you being safe.  And you know I want my widdle brudder to be safe and happy.”

            “Becks, you know what I feel like already!” Mark gasped.  “Please, you don’t have to-”

            “I wuuuv woo,” the girl bubbled.  She thrust her sibling’s head back against the pillowy surface of her billowed lips, causing his words to be lost in the smack of her smooch that left a dab of moisture globbed across his face and hair as her hand descended from her face and down toward the kitchen tile.

            “I still don’t see how this is gonna help!” Mark shouted.  He became conscious as his sister gently opened his fist and allowed him to be deposited on the ground by her chair leg that he wasn’t so much afraid of his mother’s lesson as just positively mortified with humiliation and disgust.

            Who knew when the last time was that Becky gave her peds a thorough washing?

            “That’s it,” Joy said, looming above the now-semi-petrified three-inch convict.  “This is all part of learning to keep you safe, sweetie.  It’ll be over like that.”

            “Just hold still, and I’ll be suuuper gentle on you,” Becky instructed pointedly as she leaned over the chair and gazed down at her hapless soon-to-be victim.

            “N-No.  C’mon, this… this is…” Mark mumbled meekly in a last-ditch effort, knowing the argument was already lost before he’d had a word in.

            He jerked to attention as he watched his sister’s bare foot rise up from where it had been resting against the cool surface of the floor, her toes wriggling expectantly as it hovered a few inches above the ground, its shadow running along underneath it.  She lifted her knee up, until her appendage was poised above the nearly trembling little teen, her squishy digits squirming close enough that he could’ve reached up and pressed his fist into their doughy curvature.

            “Just… just give me a little warning before y-” Mark uttered, his throat dry, but was cut off as the fourteen-year-old’s titanic foot plopped and plastered him against the floor under the supple weight of her pinkish sole in a half second flat.

            A final “eep” escaped his lips before he was buried alive beneath his sister’s warm flesh.

            It didn’t take more than a second for Mark to realize this test of his sister’s bodily awareness was worse than he’d already been anxiously anticipating.

            Being pinned spread-eagle to the tile beneath the overwhelming terrain of Becky’s doughy foot skin, speckled with a few dots of sock lint and dirt granules, was a veritable cesspool of savage sensations that he sorely wished he could escape from.  Unfortunately, with the titanic teen’s foot pressing down so authoritatively, this was entirely out of the question.

            Mark puffed his cheeks and stiffened his chest, willing himself not to inhale for as long as he could, but after a few seconds under the boulder-like compression of the ball of Becky’s foot, there was no avoiding it.

            A starchy grass stain.  A sour ball of toe jam mashed inescapably to her flesh.  The bittersweet salt of her sweat.  The muggy musk of skin cooped up and roasting in a cottony sock prison for half the day.  It all came together in a horrendous mélange of his sister’s more unpleasant and least desirable productions.  Coughing did little to aid in the assault on his synapses.

            “There you go, honey.  That’s it.  Go ahead and put a little more weight on him, though,” Joy suggested softly to her younger child.  She laid a hand on her daughter’s knee and gave an encouraging little press downward.  The pressure being applied through the raw power of the ball of Becky’s foot nearly doubled, and she felt her brother’s fists slapping aggressively against the thick ceiling of her skin.

            “Mom!” Becky scoffed, swatting her parent’s arm away and relenting slightly again, though she still kept her tiny sibling firmly pinned beneath her foot.  “I’ve got it.  I’m putting enough weight on him, okay?  I don’t wanna put too much.”

            “Honey, you need to know what it feels like to suddenly have a lot more weight than that on him, so you can recognize it and pull off of him the second it happens.  You can’t even think about it.  It has to be an instinctive reaction.  Now don’t be nervous, I’m right here.  Nothing is going to happen.”

            “Okay, okay, so what do I have to do?”

            “Go ahead and… carefully… stand up on him.”

            “Mom!  I’m not going to… to…”

            “This can’t be part of a discussion, Rebecca,” Joy informed, her tone becoming serious as she reverted to her daughter’s full name.  “Now.  Just keep your balance on the table, and stand up.  You don’t have to change the pressure too much, but you do need to know what it feels like.  All of this is to keep him safe, remember?”

            “Oh.  Well, I… I guess so,” Becky said with a nod, steadily seeing the logic in her mother’s remarks, and pressed her palm to the table for support as she rose reluctantly to her feet.

            Unable to make out much sound due to the sheer amount of smelly skin and shadow blocking his view of the area above, Mark felt a twinge in his gut as the pressure began mounting harder.  But how could that be?  She already had him under here, in this sandwich of musk and dead skin between the hard tile and the crushing power of her foot.  Surely there couldn’t exist a logical reason to put more weight on him than this.

            “I’m sorry, widdle brudder!” the apology came from above as Becky stood back at her full height of five-foot-four, her bare foot carefully grinding down with enough pressure to fully understand the sensation of the unthinkable.

            What the hell was she doing?

            “Hey…” the tiny teen whimpered, pitifully coming to realize the mounting stakes as well as the mounting pressure from his girl’s feminine sole.

            “Don’t be nervous, Mark,” Joy called down to her son, clearly anticipating his reaction.

            “W-Why is Becks st-”

            “Now, honey, as much as we have to do to keep you safe, you can do your part too.  Go ahead and start moving as much as you can.  Hit her as hard as you want.  It’s not like it’ll hurt, after all,” Joy interrupted loudly, leaning closer to the floor so her minute eldest offspring could make out the instruction from beneath his prison of foot flesh.

            “Mom, Becky, please stop this?” Mark requested in a hollow grumble, as the weight of his sister’s skin had squeezed most of the viable air from his lungs.  His limbs were hardly available to move, but with what little room he had, he began to squirm against the malleable ceiling of skin.

            “He tickles down there,” Becky giggled, then covered her mouth, as though she’d made a faux pas.  She quickly switched to encouragement to cover it up.  “That’s GOOD, widdle brudder!  I definitely feel you trying down there.  Are we done yet, Mom?”

            “Not just yet, honey,” Joy said.  “Come on, Mark.  Harder.  I need you to take this seriously.  This is of the utmost importance.  Fight.”

            “Please get off me already!” the boy sputtered.  By now, the mid-August heat that had been seeping steadily into the house all morning had begun to take its miserable toll.  Flattened against the floor, with only her tiny brother’s body as a buffer, Becky’s foot was beginning to work up a glistening glaze of summer moisture, gleaned from every pore.

            The slick surface of the girl’s skin multiplied the already pungent aroma into a humid fever pitch, and what little clean air was able to make its way under was lost.  Mark’s clothes were beginning to dampen and cling to the sticky behemoth of his sister’s foot, and yanking himself away did little to help, as a fresh batch reapplied the salty adhesive almost immediately.

            He was throwing his fists ceaselessly into the firm ball of Becky’s naked appendage and pounding his knees up and down against the wrinkled plain of sole flesh.  He was delivering blows as hard as he could into the buoyant beast of Becky’s foot, hard enough that his knuckles were getting sore, and he was thrashing as though he was being tied down for a bathtub kidney theft.  Still, nothing.

            His insignificant actions went totally unacknowledged, and despite how many times in his life the shrunken young man had been easily scooped up into his sister’s expectant palm and swallowed up by her coiled fingers, being so completely and utterly beneath her in this moment made him feel exponentially more powerless than he had in all his life.

            “C’mon, Mom, I get what it feels like already!  I wanna pick him up again.  Can I stop now?” Becky pleaded playfully, biting her lip and picking absentmindedly at the corner of her mouth with a fingernail.  “I get it now, really!  I totally know what it feels like to have him under my foot.”

            “All right, all right.  For… now, that’s enough,” Joy sighed with a shrug.  “Your dad should be home in a little while, and then there will be more we can talk about together.  Go ahead and stand up.”

            Gratefully, Becky arched her foot upward, and with a gleam of adoration in her eye witnessed her brother’s meek three-inch frame unpeel itself limply from the now clay-like mass of her sweat-glazed foot.

            With a defeated flop, he remained flat on his back as the monstrous appendage lifted away and padded back onto the tile with a self-satisfied slap that seismically rattled Mark to his bones.

            He shivered, suddenly keenly aware of the comparatively cooler air charitably kissing his skin.  His arms, shins, and face clung briefly to a flushed hue, as well as the warmth, and a scented faintly of his sister’s unwashed skin and dank day socks.  Though this “instructive” precaution for the supposed wellbeing of everyone in the house hadn’t been a contest in the technical sense, Mark almost certainly had emerged the loser.

            “Are… you sure that wasn’t too much, Mom?  He looks all tuckered out,” Becky questioned pitifully as she observed her sibling sprawled on the ground a few inches from her casually scrunching toes.  With the utmost tenderness, she nudged her sibling in the side with a meaty pinky toe, earning no reaction other than a surprised little flinch.  “Maybe that was too long.  Or… maybe I should’ve been softer on him, or-”

            “Honey, believe me, it’s far better that he get a little tired out now so you know how to keep him safe,” Joy insisted, clasping a hand to her daughter’s shoulder to ensure the lesson’s value wasn’t overlooked.  “We’ll try a couple more times in the next few days as we get settled in to how things will be working now.  I think you’ll come to be glad you got this out of the way now, in the safest way possible, to prevent anything from happening to him.  Okay?”

            “Okay,” the girl concurred at last with a nod.  She nonchalantly brushed her hair over her ear and peered back toward the floor, her hand springing forth to collect the immobilized little teen and get him back where she much preferred him.  “Now hold still for me, widdle brudder.”

            Mark muffled a defeated snort as he watched his sister’s enormous palm rearing expectantly toward him.  Where the hell else was he expecting to go after all that?

            “Hold on a second,” Joy cut in softly, placing a hand out to catch her daughter’s descending upturned palm.  “We’re doing this right, with as much discipline from ourselves as we’ll be expecting from Mark.  So we’re not quite done.”

            “What?” Becky questioned, withdrawing her hand.

            “Meaning we all have to take this seriously.  I wouldn’t expect my kids to believe in the value of something without living it out myself,” Joy explained responsibly.

            Grasping the concept, Becky nodded approvingly and withdrew her hand, though now it was Mark’s turn to gawk disbelievingly at his monolithic parent instead.

            “Oh, come on,” he muttered under his breath.

            “Just hold still for me, sweetie,” the matriarch called out lithely to her son, placing a hand next to her mouth for the illusion of added projection.  Her toes, painted a deep red-wine hue, wriggled gleefully as they rose along with the rest of her slender foot from the tile and swept toward their tiny sprawled target.  “It’s my turn.”

            With no time to react, Mark’s eyes bugged at the grim visage of his mother’s bare foot racing toward him, the full and knowing intention of trapping him under it clearly on board.

            “What?  Mom, no- mmmff!” he screeched hoarsely, and with far better efficiency than the last time, he found himself pinned like a dead butterfly beneath the soul-crushing weight and musty effluvium of a family member’s enormous, naked foot.  At least his mother’s skin had the benefit of having been recently showered, so there was a bearable lilac haze that clogged his every breath, but other than this debatable luxury, the experience was just as trying, if not more so.

            Joy didn’t even allow him room to engage in pitiful combat with the bottom of her foot, as the entire hulking mass of it sunk heavily down over him like a sleeping whale.  Even breathing became a challenge, and the teen was forced to huff in delicate whiff after delicate whiff of plush padding of his parent’s skin that had caved against his head.

            “Mom, okay, that’s enough.  He needs a break.  I wanna pick him up now.  Please?  You promised after I practiced some stuff with him that you’d change him to whatever size I want him,” Becky complained, shoving with annoyance at her mother’s arm, though Joy was concentrated exclusively on melding the feeling of her son’s wormlike squirming into her mind for safety purposes later.  The woman had even closed her eyes and begun to hum a little in intense focus as though this was a yoga pose.

            “Mark, honey, I don’t feel you fighting me!” Joy sang sweetly.

            Is she kidding, the boy thought bitterly to himself as the doughy skin melded around his limbs.  He could hardly get enough leverage to write like a pitiful insect, let alone actually punch and kick in protest.  Becky’s hesitation when she’d taken her turn had allowed him just enough leeway to more or less make an attempt at the lesson, but his mother allowed no such thing.  She definitely wasn’t fooling around with making this exercise as realistic as possible.  Already Mark was feeling dizziness, his limbs giving way to numbness and shooting pins and needles, as though he’d been sitting on them for hours.

            “C’mon.  I know it’s hard, but you have to try,” his mother instructed gently.  She pivoted her foot slowly, twisting the flesh atop her entrapped offspring

            His face, buried in a smelly crevice firmed by the more advanced age of its owner, was the only thing he had at his disposal.  The ceiling of skin, more leathery in its texture, was resistant to some of the effects of Becky’s sweat-buttered foot, but in this heat, even the freshly cleansed Joy wasn’t immune, and Mark had a steadily increasing duct of lightly salted oxygen and moist flesh to contend with.  A few stingingly spicy hints wafted about as the woman’s sole bore down even harder, effectively putting an end to any squirming Mark was doing.

            “Mom, don’t you think you’re standing on him too hard?” the teenage onlooker asked with concern, though it less out of fear for her brother’s immediate safety and more for the terrible possibility that he might not be as entertaining to play with afterward.  She leaned down closer to the floor, pressing her cheek against the surface, to observe the one-sided fight beneath her mother’s bare foot.  She couldn’t even clearly make out her shrunken sibling as he accepted his inevitable defeat.

            “I probably am.  Anything is too hard, Becky.  That’s why we’re doing this,” Joy explained calmly, giving her foot another twist over the plastered young man beneath it.  She bounced her toes patiently against the floor, already feeling a light glaze of sweat beading between them from the focused effort of this practice.  “We’re trying to learn.  We’re doing it safely now so we don’t have to find out the hard way.”

            “But you’re gonna make him all tired, and then he’s just gonna lay there while I carry him around,” the girl pouted.  “That’s no fun.”

            “Just another few seconds, honey,” Joy relented.  She slid her foot a few inches forward, dragging Mark along beneath its fleshy heft.

            “Mom!” Becky squealed.

            “All right, fair enough.  I guess we could all use a break from this,” the mother said with some obvious hesitation, removing her heavy sole from her disgruntled child at last, who wasn’t even making an attempt at flailing his arms to regain feeling in his compressed limbs.

            A sweet smile on her lips, she leaned closer to the floor next to Becky and stroked a towering fingertip along Mark’s cheek.  “That was a good job, sweetie.  A really good job.  But you need to fight me harder.  I could barely feel you.”

            “I tried,” Mark murmured awkwardly.

            Joy nodded.  “I know you used up a lot of your energy for your sister, and that’s good, but you have to be ready.  And don’t worry, I know you’ll do better the next time we practice.  Both of you.  Okay?”

            “Okay, okay, okay, we geeeet it, it’s all good and set and everything,” Becky mumbled uncaringly as her hand descended quickly to claim her prize, having really only picked up the gist of what was being said.

            Her fingers expertly dipped under her three-inch brother’s prone form and she had him cradled into her soft and waiting palm a half second later, her fingers already closing protectively around him in an overly cozy fist.  The familiar heat was immediately infused back into his body.  “Now Mom, you promised.  Can you go get the thingy?  Please?”

            Clearly more than a bit uncomfortable with the past couple minutes, the girl already looked more at home to have her sibling wrapped snugly in her fist again, where he fit far better than under the expanse of her lint-flecked sole.

            “I did promise, didn’t I?  And you two deserve a break.  I’ll be right back,” Joy agreed as she rose from her kitchen chair and began sauntering toward the home office where she kept the PMRD stored in its case.

            “Mom, are you sure, like absolutely positive, there’s not some rule that says I can do it myself yet?” Becky called out as she leaned comfortably back in the chair, refocusing her efforts on petting the top of her brother’s mussed hair while shifting the squeezing power of her digits around his body.  “Since I’m so super-duper responsible with him like this?”

            “Honey, we’ve been over and over this.  Fifteen is the minimum age, no exceptions.  I asked about loopholes, remember?  Twice!”

            “But I don’t turn fifteen for five freaking months, and by then he’ll probably be big again!  I wouldn’t even get a chance to make him whatever I want him whenever I want!” Becky pleaded sadly at the mention of this unbearably awful prospect.  She uttered the word “big” with the kind of ire most people would say the word “pustule.”

            As this conversation continued, obviously completely unconcerned about Mark’s presence, the fourteen-year-old’s fingers tightened more firmly as a subconscious response to her disappointment around his body, though still without inflicting harm.

            “I don’t make these shrink laws, honey.  Leave that to people like Judy Stevens.  Besides, cooperate like this all the time, and I’ll let you help decide how tall he’ll be more often, all right?” her mother responded as the sounds of the silver case being snapped open reached Mark’s ears painfully, like an execution blade being unsheathed.   

            “Oh, fine,” Becky sighed under her breath, at last returning her attention to her coddled sibling.  “Sorry if it was kinda gross down there, widdle brudder.”  Cupping him back toward her face once again, she planted another of her frequent pecks on the top of her sibling’s head with a wet smack of her lips, then slid him toward her cheek to nuzzle up for a few accidentally abrasive sweeps.  “I bet big feet are always gonna be gross for you, but if I’d known we were doing this, I’d have wiped them better or something.”

            “It’s fine,” Mark answered groggily, leaning his weary cheek down against his sister’s pointer finger as it remained clenched gently around his chest.  He was still feeling emasculated beyond belief after the double event under his sister and then mother’s bare feet, carried out like it was the most natural thing in the world, so it didn’t seem like his pride could be much more damaged to appear so docile in her grip.

            “Tell you what,” Becky whispered with a wink.  “Before we have to practice again next time, we’ll both make sure they’re extra clean and nice for you to be underneath.  I’ll wipe them off real good with a washcloth, and then you can help me pick out the little bits that I miss.  And then you can help me put some really yummy-smelling lotion all over ‘em, so you only have to smell strawberries and fruits instead of stinky stuff when I stand on you.  Okay?”

            “Uhh…” Mark drawled, appalled at how unattractively humiliating an activity that sounded, despite how it would probably benefit him in the long run.

            “Maybe we can go to the store, and you can tell me which one I should get?  Since you’d probably be getting more of it on you than me, anyway.  We’ll pick whichever smell you want, as long as it doesn’t cost too much.”

            “I…”

            “It’ll be a fun thing for us to do together,” she responded cutely without waiting for what was an assumed consent, then immediately perked up again at the sight of Joy returning to the room, PMRD switched on and brandished like the weapon of justice that it was.

            “Well, I promised you.  Hold him out, and I’ll make the switch,” the woman declared.  “What’s it going to be?  Seven?  Ten?”

            “Mom, you’re funny,” Becky snickered at the absurdity of this suggestion, opening her palm to let Mark sprawl vulnerably onto the platform of her fingers, where he’d make an easy target for the device.  “Just make my little brother my littlest brother, please.”

            No more words were exchanged as Joy happily squeezed the trigger and reduced her son from three down to a single inch in the center of his sister’s palm, which trembled slightly from pure glee at the sight of it.  All he could get himself to do now in this moment and, indeed, this entire seemingly innocuous yet hugely confidence-draining event was study the intricate lines in the roadmap of the peachy surface that made up Becky’s now considerably larger hand.  What else was there to do, after all?

            He wasn’t even surprised to feel the pair of bulbous lips, now large enough that it seemed they might suck him between them on a hard inhale, squeezed together and puckering against his entire person for another smooch.  At this miniscule size, the affectionate gesture left enough sticky residue on his clothes that it felt like he’d vigorously licked by a large and hungry wild mammal.

            “Guess it’s time to try out one of Mom’s lessons, huh?” Becky boomed, biting her lip sheepishly as she observed him nonchalantly trying to clean a smear of her saliva out of his hair.  Shaking it off, she marveled at the tiny life sitting so precariously and weightlessly on her soft skin, and goose bumps ran along her skin.  “We have sooooo much fun stuff to do now, widdle brudder.  I bought a bunch of new stuff with Carey last week for school and you’re gonna help me decide which outfits go together best!”

            “Uh…”

            “Then we’re gonna take some new selfies together to add to our album.”

            “W-”

            “So I’ll let you out in a couple minutes.  First, you’re gonna help me pick a different charm to wear on my bracelet for every day of this school week, okay?”

            “Let… me… out?” Mark repeated back in a bitter whisper, but the question was answered well before he could finish as his sister’s youthful fingers, fleshy spires that hung above his head at a level of power he was incapable of comprehending, curled downward like a tidal wave of pink terrain and swirled prints approaching him inevitably.

            The teen’s titanic fingers descended and arced overhead, meeting the heel of her hand a short distance behind him, and a moment later he was being softly yet still forcibly flattened to the darkening surface of Becky’s palm and watching with an eerie sense of defeated resolution as his little sister clamped out the last strain of light, sealing him inside the sweet-smelling warmth and blackness of her almighty fist.