A Little Blackmail 5: Shrinking Pains by Jacksmith
Summary:

A brother, haunted by the years of shrunken captivity he spent beneath his younger sister’s foot, struggles to confront his demons and, ultimately, the demented girl who stole his humanity.


Categories: Growing Woman, Teenager (13-19), Young Adult 20-29, Adult 30-39, Mature (40-49), Entrapment, Feet, Gentle, Growing/Shrinking out of clothes, Humiliation, Incest, Instant Size Change, Maternal, Mouth Play, Odor, Slave, Violent Characters: None
Growth: Titan (101 ft. to 500 ft.)
Shrink: Minikin (3 in. to 1 in.)
Size Roles: F/f, F/m
Warnings: Following story may contain inappropriate material for certain audiences
Challenges: None
Series: A Little Blackmail
Chapters: 20 Completed: Yes Word count: 59576 Read: 279300 Published: June 24 2015 Updated: May 13 2016
Story Notes:

Welcome back to the insanity.  So, here it finally is: the continuation of my twisted series about the world’s most dysfunctional siblings from just three oh-so-short years ago.  It’s been a long time coming, but better late than never, right?  Right, guys?  No, please, put down the blunt objects.

My focus for this kind of writing has shifted over the months and years to other subgenres and characters, but I promise I hadn’t forgotten this one still calls for a resolution.  I’ve received plenty of feedback asking about the snail’s pace progress of Carly and Jack’s return, so I wanted to say I appreciate the support and I’m glad people have as much fun reading these gleefully foul tales as I do writing them.  This one is set more than a year after the events of A Little Blackmail 3.

As always, if you’ve got a spare minute, I hope you’ll drop me a line and share your thoughts.  And without further ado, enjoy!

1. Chapter 1: Life After Carly by Jacksmith

2. Chapter 2: Littlest Sib by Jacksmith

3. Chapter 3: Post-Sister Stress Disorder by Jacksmith

4. Chapter 4: A Prison of Her Own by Jacksmith

5. Chapter 5: Chloe's Keeper by Jacksmith

6. Chapter 6: Into the Mouths of Babes by Jacksmith

7. Chapter 7: Opening Up by Jacksmith

8. Chapter 8: Friends in Low Places by Jacksmith

9. Chapter 9: Just a Little Foot Rub by Jacksmith

10. Chapter 10: Very Little Blackmail by Jacksmith

11. Chapter 11: A Sock in the Closet by Jacksmith

12. Chapter 12: Mother to Son by Jacksmith

13. Chapter 13: Her Sex for Science by Jacksmith

14. Chapter 14: Freak in the Sheets by Jacksmith

15. Chapter 15: Star of the Show by Jacksmith

16. Chapter 16: Foot Phile Phobia by Jacksmith

17. Chapter 17: Sophie's Pet Cousin by Jacksmith

18. Chapter 18: Heart and Sole by Jacksmith

19. Chapter 19: Sister vs. Brother by Jacksmith

20. Chapter 20: Her World by Jacksmith

Chapter 1: Life After Carly by Jacksmith
Author's Notes:

Interested in commissioning me for a custom story? I can write your ultimate macro fantasy, from a wide range of genres and lengths. Read details here: https://www.deviantart.com/thejacksmith/journal/Story-Commissions-Are-Open-Again-698491757

I also have a side-shop for miscellaneous pre-written & discounted goodies, such as flash fiction, unfinished tales, and deleted scenes from series like A Little Blackmail and Time-Out. Check it out here: https://www.deviantart.com/thejacksmith/journal/New-Special-Stories-Shop-802615692

My Patreon for early-access stories and exclusive tales is now online! Hope you'll give it a look: https://www.patreon.com/JacksmithShrinkStories

You blink, wishing you could just close your eyes and descend safely into an untouchable abyss of your own fractured consciousness, but you can’t.  Not now, and not ever.

            She won’t let you.

            You can feel your heart pounding savagely in your chest, your shins stinging sharply as you sprint as fast as your legs will propel you through space.  Your lungs are on the verge of collapse, your fists growing clammy from clenching, your temple throbbing in agony, begging you to stop running, but you won’t.  If you do, you’ll be as extinct as the last peaceful thought you enjoyed.

            It feels like you’ve been throwing yourself through the air for hours, dragging your weary body down into the earth, and as you look around, your surroundings melt curiously into place.  The kitchen.  The living room.  The dinner table, the countertop, the fridge.  All there.

            All normal.  Like none of this had ever happened.

            Like the past six years was just some fleeting nightmare you could awake from with a relieved smile and a serene sigh of relief.

            The seismic roiling in the ground vibrates more potently with every pace, filling up your consciousness again and threatening to fling you from your feet, effectively extinguishing any remaining hope you have of survival.

            You throw your arms over your head and slam through the front door, crashing outward down the patio and into the yard in one breathless leap.  Your shoe snags on a dip in the ground and you’re nearly surrendered to gravity, but flailing wildly, you manage to keep your balance as the desperate momentum continues.

            “WHERE’S MY LITTLE BRO?” resounds a voice from far overhead that threatens to blow out your eardrums.  Birds scatter in a blind panic over the horizon.  You cry out in shock, realizing how close the sound is now, the rumbling in the ground causing the pebbles to skyrocket from between the blades of grass as the footsteps get louder and louder, closer and closer, advancing on your very being.

            Just as you make it to the street, you misstep wildly at the curb and topple over, your speed betraying you now as you trip headlong onto the concrete, smashing painfully onto your back.  You try to push up from the street, but it’s too late: the thundering crashes of the ground are too much to allow you to get up now.

            “I’m disappointed in you, Jackie-Poo,” rumbles the feminine voice again from behind you, not quite as earth-shattering as before but just as worthy of your terror.  “Soooo disappointed…”

            Summoning the resolve, you glance over your shoulder just in time to watch the house violently exploding, wooden confetti and brick shards spiraling out, a massive cloud of dust and smoke billowing like black fire.  You shield your face as the rolling wave cleanses you in its destruction, bathing your body in dirt and clogging your throat with sawdust and powdered plaster.  Loose stone clatters as it sprays outward across the block.

            Hacking for air, you crawl to your feet and gape in awe at where your home stood moments before, a few defiant chunks of wall still clinging to the foundations.

            Glass crunches.  Wood buckles.  Mortar crumbles.

            A smooth, slender bare foot the size of an earthmover ascends regally from the wreckage as the smoke clears, debris raining from between the shapely toes as they writhe mightily in midair, cutting a path through the oppressive fog of filth.

            You stare into the glaring sunlight, following the seemingly endless silhouette of the arching, athletic form rising into the air, so high that all you can see above is shrouded by darkness from the sun’s blinding power.

            Suddenly, everything comes back into focus as you realize the raised foot is bearing down, casting an ominous shadow over you and your life.

            Just as it always has.

            “No matter where you run…” comes the proud battle cry of her voice far above.  The foot arches proudly, the creamy, wrinkled sole hovering threateningly above you, tiny scraps of the house still clenched in the fleshy crevices.  “No matter where you try to hide…”

            The rounded toes wriggle, powdering the remaining bricks stuck between them as if they were clumps of dirt.  The swollen pink heel smashes downward into the dirt, drilling a hole deep enough to be your grave.  It might very well be.

            The ceiling of omnipotent flesh hangs over your head.  Close enough for you to reach out and touch as you cower helplessly on the ground underneath it where you’ve begun to understand is your prophetic calling.  The toes inch closer and closer, parting expectantly.  Waiting.  Itching.  Yearning to have your fragile head wedged between them, your face squeezed into the doughy skin, your body pinned easily under the ball of the colossal foot.

            “…I will ALWAYS find you!” laughs the echoing voice of your sister Carly as she looms like a valkyrie over your hapless neighborhood.  Nothing in sight capable of stopping her.

            Least of all you.

            Carly slams her foot down with a stomp that rips a genocidal earthquake for miles around, leveling the houses for blocks in a destructive display of godlike power, her girlish giggling echoing over the hillsides, her digits crunching downward into the malleable broken ground, sandwiching you between them.

            Your body liquefies instantly into the soft crevice between your sister’s toes where you’ve always belonged.

 

            Your eyes tear open, your body gasping meekly for oxygen and soaked in frigid sweat.  It takes a minute just to catch your breath again, feeling the absolute exhaustion of the sprint you experienced in your dream still wracking your distressed body.

            Running a hand through your hair, your fingers still shaking, you curiously prod at your heaving chest.

            The feelings were so authentic.  The pain.  The adrenaline.  The fear.  The acceptance.

            You’re almost surprised to find your entire body still intact, rather than mulched into paste on the smooth sole of your sibling’s catastrophic foot, so tangible was everything you experienced.

            Rising slowly, careful not to trip as you walk your way down the rolled-up washcloth you use as a pillow, you step onto the sanded plank inside the refurbished birdhouse.  The looming expanse of the yard beyond the protective chicken wire stretches out to the sky-high fences seemingly miles away, pointing toward the massive glass door leading back into the house, where you so long ago stepped through and into your own personal hell.

            It occurs to you that you should probably mention this tormented mid-slumber reverie to the psychologist later today when you go to see her for your therapy session.  She’s been walking you through your nightmares recently as they grow more frequent and vivid, hoping to help you finally unwind the PTSD you have coiled so tightly around your nerves they may well be a part of your brain now.

            Somehow, you doubt dream analysis is going to help you get over the five years of torture you endured at the hands of your sister, but Dr. Felton is the professional, the staggering distinction of your particularly fantastical case notwithstanding.

            Approaching a bottle cap full of cool water, you dip your head and brush refreshing splashes over your cheeks and eyelids, trying to reinvigorate as best you can and put the murderous imagery aside for the time being.  There will be plenty of time to chew into those kinds of sickening thoughts later on in the doctor’s office.

            Next, moving carefully to the circular mouth of the birdhouse and into the honeyed light it yields, you clamber over and make your way down the plastic staircase your cousin Sophie fashioned for you.  Letting your gaze drift toward the clouds, almost cosmic in their distance, your eyes adjust to the overwhelming glow of the sun again.  Overhanging branches of the towering tree above partially blot out your view with its sashaying leaves.  Sometimes when you stare at it for long enough, you can almost feel again the ghostly trickle of a shock shooting through your body as the final nail in your coffin was electrified through your body courtesy of a metal rake and Carly’s idea of a joke.

            No time for that now.  You’ve got to learn to stop associating your every sight, sound, and taste with your formerly giant sister.  At least, that’s what the doctor’s told you.

            Much easier said than done, though.

            Instead your eyes lock to the wooden perch secured safely to the side of the birdhouse and, taking a deep breath, you latch on, pulling yourself higher so your chin just passes the bar before lowering yourself back down and repeating the process.

            Rising and falling.  You huff and puff, trying to maintain steady breathing and return your body to some kind of equilibrium after the rush you experienced in your sleep.

            It might’ve once felt peculiar to exercise to slow your heartrate down after napping, but then again, there are a lot of things about you that are a peculiar, namely the fact that, at the age of twenty-three, you’re just shy of three inches tall, just like you have been for more than six years, only the final year of which was spent wearing clothes like a civilized person and dedicating yourself to a life beyond licking the bottom of your normal-sized totalitarian sister’s toes whenever she ordered you to.

            Or, at least, your sister who used to be normal-sized before falling prey to the very same chemical cocktail and electrical catalyst that rendered you a naked, shrunken, enslaveable freak of nature more than half a decade ago.  You have your cousin Sophie to thank for that.  Despite how little you had in common with the now-eighteen-year-old before that fateful day that turned you into your little sister’s secret living toy for so long, Sophie has quite literally taken you under her wing, becoming the closest thing you have to a friend as you try to readjust to this brave new world where the threat of accidentally being smushed under the rubber heel of somebody’s sneaker is uncomfortably real.

            Your lungs pump oxygen in rhythm with the controlled thrusts of your arms.  You pick up the pace, daring to imagine you might pull yourself up beyond the tree and into the stratos with enough of these motions.

            You can’t help but wonder how your dad is doing right now.  With all the work he’s been doing in Washington, you know he’s probably not getting much more sleep than yourself.  Still, you know you can rest easier once the world is a little safer from the evils that indescribably powerful chemical compound is capable of bringing onto a person, and this time, you’ve got people backing you up.  There’s something undeniably inspiring about seeing a bunch of politicians come together on something for once.  If the media is to be believed, there hasn’t been such a unanimous conciliation of opinion in several decades.  With any luck, the danger of anyone else being put through a fraction of what you’ve survived will be quashed forever.

            In and out.  Burning in your biceps, but you press onward, clenching your teeth.  You’re no stranger to soreness in your life, nor excruciating torture.  This is a cakewalk.

            Your mind reaches for more distractions.  Something, anything.

            Homework won’t be too bad today.  Hell, you’re looking forward to it, like you have been for most days that don’t involve tests.  The five years you spent in captivity put you a little academically behind, where you would’ve graduated from college at this point if not for the treacherous hands of fate and science, but thanks to your own fiery intellect and an unrelenting thirst to make up for the knowledge drought of the past years, your tutor’s assured you you’ll be ready to start graduate-level work within two years, a fact that made you positively elated: a feeling you haven’t experienced in so long, you almost forgot what it felt like.

            Your fingers are starting to go numb now, so you grip the bar tighter as you continue.  Your arms are quivering.  Your stomach is tightening in on itself.

            This is nothing.

            You reach your goal with an arduous grunt and let go, slamming down between the foliage of grass, just as you hear the creaking seal of the back porch door being slid open.

            Panting quietly, trying to catch your breath as you clutch your hand to your chest, you peer up between the wispy blades and witness a pair of lithe legs tiptoeing toward your birdhouse, obviously being careful not to stomp.  You watch the tanned feet slapping against the familiar pink flip-flops, the toes scrunching down into the rubbery base.  Sophie’s benevolent shadow falls over you, toned arms arched, hands on her hips, and her dark blonde hair tied back in a tight ponytail.

            “Hey there, Jack,” she muses cheerfully down at you, slowly kneeling down into the grass with an inviting smile on her soft lips.

            After the terrifying rush you experienced in your dream, for a moment, as you gaze up at the pretty, grinning face and laughing blue eyes of your cousin and now, thanks to the bizarre set of circumstances that led to your rescue, your closest ally, you feel the urge to scurry away through the greenery and find an anthill for refuge, but you halt yourself before you have a chance to move. 

            Sophie has always looked and even sounded remarkably similar to Carly minus two and a half years, which is why it’s so unsettling, but even so, with how often your cousin worries about you, there’s no sense in ever explaining such a thing to her, especially not when she’s so unrelentingly kind to you.

            “Hey,” you pant sheepishly, still catching your breath.

            “Geez, did you just take a lap around the yard?” she giggles.  “I thought you were trying to sleep out here!”

            “Well, I was…”

            “Are you sure you wouldn’t be comfier letting me hold you instead of laying on that rag in there?” she suggests earnestly as she scratches the back of her neck, non-too-subtly showing her affinity for carrying you around.  Which you’re not one to fault her for, considering how gently your cousin knows how to wrap her fingers around your body, allowing you to drift off against the plush creases of her palm before you’ve gotten the first yawn out.  Still, she dotes on you plenty already, and from time to time, it’s nice to have some solitude.

            “Maybe next time,” you promise.  “Anyway, I didn’t run around the yard.  It was just a few pull-ups.  I felt some extra energy.”

            “Oh yeah?” she says, raising an eyebrow playfully.  “Well, you’re gonna have even more once you see this!”

            “What?”

            Smirking with the effort to avoid blurting out the answer, Sophie lowers her hand into the grass, laying it flat, palm-up, on the dirt in front of you.  After five years of being scooped up without permission, it’s still taking you time to get used to having a choice in the matter.  Like your opinion is worth a damn to someone.  Wordlessly, you hop aboard, and she skillfully raises you up, bringing you into the sunlight and holding you at chest level.

            “Seriously, what?” you ask again as you take a seat on the cushy heel of her hand, but the only answer you get is another eager snicker as Sophie saunters back through the sliding glass door and into the house.

            Your cousin passes through the kitchen, cupping her fingers protectively around you as she bounds into the brightly lit hearth.  Every time you’re forced to cross that spot on the hardwood where you were first discovered by a skyscraper-sized Carly in a puddle of piss and rain, your spine tightens as though a vertebrae might jerk out of place, but you’re steadily learning to relax about it.  Of course, there’s not long to dwell on that nice little shred of emotional upheaval, because suddenly Sophie is by the marble countertop where you once were forced to scarf down your sister’s masticated bites of spit-slogged peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  Your stomach seems to swell at the mere memory of it with equal measure of revulsion and hunger pang.  Keeping your eyes ahead and your hands atop Sophie’s comforting digits, you don’t allow it to consume your thoughts.

            Focus.

            Sophie moves next into the living room and takes a seat on the couch that once served as the altar of your first worship service to Carly’s feet, where you were continually ground into the cushions, bathed in her grass-stained musk and beaten under powerful toes until the muscle memory of their doughy heft was ingrained in your skin.

            This too you force out of mind.  You’ll be damned if you’re going to let traumatic recollections impede the good mood your cousin is trying to impart to you.  The television affixed to the living room wall proudly bellows an advertisement for some unpronounceable mouth wash.

            “It’ll be back on in a minute.  It’s been running for like an hour,” your cousin squeals, hardly able to hold in the excitement.  Her hand trembles beneath you.

            Clambering overtop Sophie’s fingers, you give your attention to the TV just as the commercial break returns to the morning talk show.  Your heart swells before a word is even out of the anchor’s mouth as the breaking news banner rolls triumphantly across the bottom half of the screen.

 

End Notes:

Next chapter we'll see what Carly has been up to since A Little Blackmail 3. Please comment!

Chapter 2: Littlest Sib by Jacksmith

            “CHEMICAL COUNTDOWN: ANOTHER ARTON VICTORY IN THE WAR ON SHRINKING”

            Carly closed her eyes as she laid back again on the miniature cot in her glass prison, peering up to the tiled ceiling far above and inhaling the stagnant air of the government facility she’d been housed in for the past three months.  The clunky bunny ear TV aimed toward her translucent cell had been going on about that headline for almost an hour now from its desktop perch, and she was just about ready to scream if it meant she could somehow drown out the anchor’s blasphemous prattling.

            She supposed it was a “victory” for the people out there that her dad and whoever the hell was helping him had finally managed to, with some unexpected corporate funding from multiple sources, outlaw and slash from the market the innocuous chemical combination that she now understood was used to shrink Jack and herself not so long ago.

            It didn’t matter.  No one could change anything.  Not the chemical companies, and not the two people who once called her their daughter before disowning her at the discovery of her favorite hobbies a year and a half before.

            And certainly not her tiny brother, helpless and broken without her, wherever he was now.

            The diminutive twenty-year-old ran her fingers through her shaggy dishwater-blonde hair, her once-glorious locks having lost their opulent silkiness from months of apathetic neglect.  She slid her palms next down her slender neck, over the hills of her chest, and down to over her flat stomach, savoring the tactile tingling in her fingertips for all she could.  It had taken a toll on her body and mind like she’d have never thought possible to be without him in her hands for so long.

            Sometimes when she let her dreams take a deep enough hold, feeling his little naked body pressed against her palm and cradled in her fingers, it felt real enough that she could convince herself it had all just been a nightmare, and Jack was still hers.  In those surreal reveries, she’d squeeze him to her stomach and guide him up to her chest, through the soft valley of her breasts, and feel his precious heartbeat accelerating to be so close to her again.  Hers would pound with equal speed, and everything would become correct and beautiful again.

            Carly’s vision stippled as she realized distraught moisture had welled in the few seconds she’d spent in darkness just imagining beyond the bounds of her vile reality.  So much time had passed without seeing anyone she used to know, but the pain was just as sharp as it had been in that cataclysmic moment when her entire world was stolen away from her.  A world that, by rights, had been hers and Jack’s since birth.

            Of course, Carly knew she’d been happy as soon as she found her miniscule older brother huddled on the floor in a puddle of rainwater and terrified urine, stripped of clothing and reduced to a size more befitting his place on the planet.  In fact, nothing had ever felt so aligned with her vision of perfection as she scooped him up and was able to see a new life for the both of them stretching out before her, full of promise.  As she’d pinned his meek little frame beneath her toes, watched him struggle to pay homage to her soles with passionate kisses, and then slurped him between her lips and onto the altar of her tongue, every act only confirmed it further.

            Still, something was missing.  Things were never fully as they were meant to be, as Jack fought for almost five full years to avoid seeing the truth about where he belonged.  Carly had been patient with him, playing with his body in all the ways they both desired, pleasuring him and herself, but still he refused to come around to her way.  He’d never been willing to understand he was finally where he was destined to be: not on equal footing with his sister, but beneath her, where he could serve her and, in return, be shown the love of his personal goddess.

            Until that moment when she’d swallowed him, feeling his tiny soul squirming down into her esophagus, made everything clear at last.  When he’d emerged from her throat, as though being reborn in a baptism of her saliva, everything had finally fallen into place.

            Carly’s happiness then transformed into a kind of ascendant euphoria as Jack proved his devotion to her once and for all, and the pair were entwined together at last.  Her entire body had throbbed from head to toe with the need to consummate the new bond of deity and subject, and she knew he wanted it just as much.  They were so close to having everything they’d ever wanted but never fully realized until then.

            And then Sophie burst through the door of her college dorm room and brought it all crashing to the ground with a spritz of classroom chemicals and an overcharged taser.

            The ensuing hours had faded into a stoic haze for Carly as both shrunken siblings were transported back to the house by the sixteen-year-old homewrecker to face judgment.  As she and Jack had been placed upon the kitchen table while Sophie explained the situation as calmly as she could, with visual aids from the three-inch pair, everything in existence had more or less ceased to matter for Carly.  Mrs. Arton’s howling shrieks of disbelief and eventual fainting spell, nor Mr. Arton’s rage and despondent shock, could summon a single line of defense from their newly reduced daughter.  She’d even nodded in solemn confirmation when her hyperventilating parents, tears streaming down their quaking faces, had demanded to know if Sophie’s claims were true: that Carly had, in fact, faked her brother’s death in order to keep him as her personal toy and slave for the past several years.  What was the use in denying it then, once everything had already been taken from her?

            The tears were trickling along her own cheeks now as Carly allowed herself to experience the same emotions for the thousandth time on the bed of her tank.  Her hand trembled as it stroked up to her chest again, aware now of the hammering of her heart, and felt the hollowness of her fingers curling inward with no life between them.

            Everything was so wrong now, especially after tasting what could have been.  She’d achieved her own brand of nirvana with Jack, for however brief a time.  Though it was over in the blink of an eye, Carly knew it’d been perfect, because it was the best ten minutes of her life to believe her little brother finally accepted her as the one who possessed him and could make his reality have meaning.  They needed each other, she realized, now more than ever.  No matter how often she dreamed it, the grief over that loss never became any less raw, and she knew she’d give anything in the world to have that feeling back even for a few breaths.  Anything.

            Blinking, Carly wiped the collected tears from her rosy cheeks.  She peered through the opposite wall of the glass cell out at the security guard seated at a desk just across the tile canyon of the holding office, where the waspy bureaucrat was typing away on a keyboard and paying no attention to his shrunken charge.  Scrappy and unfocused, he looked unfit to guard a rambunctious test rat, let alone the girl who had rapidly become one of the most nationally recognizable criminal faces in the past decade.  Even in her depressed state, she couldn’t help but snarl at the sight of that sniveling human garbage out there, garbed in uniform and working to keep fate in a state of eternal perversion by preventing Carly from regaining her property again.

            Stifling a cry of rage, she instead allowed her depth of field to drift back inside the confines of her glass cage as her vision settled on her reflection.  Her blue eyes, cold and steely as ever, deadened as she gazed at herself lying humbled in the box.  Even at this distance, she couldn’t recognize herself in the dim mirroring.  The life and light her irises once held, crackling with electric desire, had been drained away, along with any shred of joy that remained.  Her body, formerly sculpted and tanned by intensive training for basketball, had slimmed, her skin turning paler in the stale glow of this whitewashed hell.

            Unable to look at herself either any longer, Carly lifted her leg, splaying her dexterous toes in the air, and smashed her foot hard against the glass, defiantly blotting out the echo of her body.  For a moment she only sighed, tapping her soft digits along the smooth wall, and stroked the ball of her foot along the glass.  It squeaked as she applied pressure to the surface, and though it seemed foolish, she imagined she could smear away both her powerless reflection and that costumed coward seated at the desk.  From this far off, if Carly closed one eye, she could imagine her foot was large enough to crush the visage of the pitiful guard.  She flattened her other sole against the glass, pressing with all her might, half-hoping that if she could just summon her former strength back into this damning finger-sized frame of hers, she could smash through these walls, throttle the life out of that twig of a man, and set out on a warpath to reclaim what was hers.

            If only.           

            “You can go ahead and take lunch now,” a voice boomed, shattering Carly’s momentary illusion as another guard lumbered in, not bothering to soften her boot-clad footfalls as she entered the room.  The windows of Carly’s prison rattled with each distant impact as her most hated overseer made an early appearance, ruining the meager girl’s morning even more than it already was.

            “Really?  It’s not even noon,” the man replied as his burlier coworker approached.  The middle-aged woman slapped him on the back hard enough that he almost face-planted onto his keyboard.

            “Don’t worry about it.  I’ve got her covered,” the woman replied, chuckling with deep percussive chortles.  She shot a seething glance to Carly as she wrapped a meaty forearm around the man’s shoulders and helped him to his feet, encouraging a hasty exit.

            “Okay.  Um, thanks!” he muttered as he was all but tossed out, his uncertain steps no match for the purposeful march of this leviathan of a warden.  As soon as he was out the door, the female guard’s already imposing stature was dawning over Carly’s box, her broad shoulders as wide as the cage itself.

            “Looks like you’re having a restful morning in there, Little Miss Sunshine,” the guard commented huskily as she glowered at the little prisoner, planting her leathery knuckles on her hips and tapping her pink-painted nails impatiently against her belt.

            Carly had already shut her eyes, deciding her life was far less unbearable if she limited the number of seconds she had to acknowledge that giant bitch’s existence.  She crossed her legs comfortably and laid her head in her hands, settling into the bed as though sunning on some distant beach beyond the reach of the law and preferably with her tiny brother straddling her tongue where he belonged.  She even dared let a smile cross her lips, however false it was.

            “Hey.  Talking to you,” the woman barked, rapping a fist against the glass and vibrating the cage’s contents, from Carly’s bed over to the miniature spigot that served as a shower.  “You’re gonna look at me when I speak to you, you little freak.”

            Carly smacked her lips together and ran her tongue along her top row of teeth, groggily lifting her eyelids at her own leisure to find the massive sneering countenance of the woman who’d spent the past months unsuccessfully attempting to tame the little criminal into civil obedience.

            Whether she was six feet or three inches, Carly Arton wasn’t easily persuaded to yield.

            “That’s more like it,” the titanic woman spat.  Her bulky claw descended into the cage, her thick fingers unfurling as they neared their vulnerable target.  Carly, by now more than used to this kind of treatment, only yawned as the guard’s fingers flicked her out of the bed.  She rolled over several times before plopping to an unceremonious halt in the center of her glass cell.  Undeterred in her new life’s mission of not giving a solitary shit about what anyone tried to do to her, Carly barely paid half a notice as the powerful palm, scented strongly of motor oil and cheap wine, closed itself around her body.

            The guard held a comparable lack of affection as she clenched Carly into her fingers.  Balling her prize into the warm center and tightening the iron grip of her vengeful digits, she lifted the prisoner from the box.  The story of Carly’s torment of her brother for all those years, public as it had become now, had affected the nation at a variety of emotional levels.  As the youngest Arton had discovered, this beast of a woman in charge of monitoring her doll-sized penitentiary had not taken particularly kindly to hearing about the sordid tales.  Much as the media had sensationalized the parts of the story that were leaked, to Carly’s quiet amusement, most of the truth of her five-year TLC with Jack was still unknown.

            She could only imagine how tightly this woman might squeeze if she were to discover even half of the games Jack was actually forced to play under his sister’s foot.  Carly doubted she’d still have intact ribs, were that the case.

            “Did you see the tube?” the warden demanded, repositioning her hand so that her thumb propped under Carly’s chin, forcing the girl to look at the television while her limbs remained pinned into the guard’s palm.  The news was still flashing variations of the earlier headline.  “You understand what that means, right?”

            Exhaling with bitter irritation at the discomfort imposed on her neck, Carly nodded as best she could with the giant pad of a thumb, callused as it was, squeezing hard enough into her throat to cut off the flow to her windpipe.

            “It means no one can try to copy you and whatever goes on in that fucked up little head of yours,” the guard whispered as she drew her fist closer to her lips, flecks of victorious spittle flying into Carly’s face as she was brought under the awning of the guard’s tacky frizzed tresses.  “I guess there goes your last chance of being famous, huh?”

            Carly, still wrestling her way into a position between the muscled fingers where she could breathe regularly, heaved her leg over the guard’s thumb.  Trying not to cough as an oppressive fog of the woman’s coffee breath settled like a disease into the shrunken girl’s lungs, she at last granted her petty tormentor the honor of eye contact.  The enormous orbs of the caretaker’s eyes, wrinkled around the corners from stress and caked with poorly applied black liner, narrowed in on the toy-sized young woman in her best attempt to intimidate.  Carly knew it must’ve worked on countless full-sized prisoners before, but her own heartrate still hadn’t risen any higher since she laid down for her siesta earlier that morning.  With a giant finger poised over her chest, she knew this was what the guard was vying for: despair, in any measure.  She would not be receiving it this day, or any.

            “Actually,” Carly sighed with childish disdain, casually batting her blonde locks and resisting the strength of a hefty index finger as it shoved into her shoulder.  “I think I’m still gonna be pretty famous anyway.”

            The guard’s lip curled, revealing yellowed teeth as her tongue lurched forward for a scathing rebuttal and, more than likely, a bruise-inducing constriction around Carly’s hips from a palm that had undoubtedly single-handedly crunched a vast number of shotgunned beer cans in its day.  Her exposed bicep bulged into a rocky hill beneath her skin as her entire hormone-riddled body tensed, unable to fathom her lack of effect on this slender little psycho.

            Utterly unfazed, the diminished prisoner let herself go limp in the woman’s hand, a smile on her face, reveling in how easy it was to push buttons.  The power she was able to exhibit even now was more than worth whatever questionable policing tactics were about to be used.  Tightening her wiry frame, Carly huffed with unshakeable resolve, prepared for retaliation.

            But it never came.  No fingers squeezed around her until her back cracked and no glob of spit expelled from the guard’s throat, as had happened in the past weeks.  There wasn’t even a boot coming unzipped for Carly to be inserted, as had been threatened so many times by her charmingly uncreative warden.  Instead, a moment of cumbrous pause settled in as the pair glared into one another, ignorant of the sterile space around them.  A creak of the door and a barely audible zap were accompanied by the pungent scent of burnt flesh.

            The guard’s lips drooped, drool spilling from the corners, and suddenly the room seemed to be collapsing in a spiraling rush of wind and gravity.  The baritone amazon crumpled toward the floor in a heap of over-tanned skin and tight fabric.  They were falling.  Carly wriggled free from the closed cage of fingers, tumbling down for part of the journey at complete peace with herself as the ground rapidly approached.

            Rather than meeting a skull-shattering end, though, the girl instead collided with the leather padding of a black glove that seemed to materialize from out of the ether, or even perhaps further beyond than that.  The dark fingers coiled instantly, trapping Carly in and cradling her with the tenderness of someone nursing a live grenade.

 

End Notes:

If you've read Toy Teacher, you may have some idea of what's happening to Carly at the end there.

Please comment!

Chapter 3: Post-Sister Stress Disorder by Jacksmith

You shudder, feeling the cold of the tile floor traveling into your feet and up through your body as the equally trembling ground vibrates you to the marrow.  Clenching your fists together to quell the tremors, with courage you tilt your head up, past the tabletop and counters towering far over your head like the concrete canyons of a major metropolis, and watch the doorway.  Light beams softly from the space beyond, creeping into the silent hall, and suddenly you’re no longer alone.

            “Oh, there you are, little bro,” Carly croons lovingly as she pads into the room, stepping lithely on the balls of her naked feet.  Her thighs slide together as she advances on tiptoes, one leg in front of the other, across the floor.  Her hair illuminates in the soft glow behind her, the light rounding the firm curve of her arms and shoulders.  Those lips, curled to one side in curious contemplation, broaden as she nears you, her glistening pearly whites on display.

            “I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” your colossal sister intones, stroking a thumb down the side of her cheek with a sigh.  She comes to a stop at last mere inches from where you’ve been rooted to the ground.  For a moment your eyes inescapably are pulled down to the burly toes, bouncing joyously against the tile, but your crane your neck back up to Carly’s beaming countenance with every ounce of willpower you have left.

            You can’t allow her to win.  It’s not just your body you’re fighting for now.

            “You already know what I want, don’t you?” she giggles.  Her right foot arches slightly off the ground, pivoting on her heel.  Gulping, out of the corner of your eye you catch the creamy underside of her sole, the wrinkles rippling in anticipation as she points her toes at the level of your head.

            “I can guess,” you mumble, too quietly to be heard, though somehow the sound reaches her ears all the same.

            “Come on.  Do you really have to guess?” she teases.  Her toes slap back down to the floor, sending another rumble through the ground and up into your body, but quickly rear back up again.  Pointedly she strokes the ball of her foot along the surface of the tile in winding circles as though writing something in loopy letters.  “Look at my foot.”

            “I… I, uh…” you mutter.  You have to be strong.  Your keep your eyes forced up to your magnificent little sister’s smirking face, painful as it is.  Giving in now means being dragged that much closer to defeat.  You open your mouth, coughing up the required syllable.  “No.”

            “Little bro,” Carly whispers imperiously, bewitching you as she always does.  Her heel rises from the ground and pounds back into the floor with an impatience that rattles your bones.  “Look.  At.  My.  Foot.”

            As though the muscles under your skin are no longer your own, you snap your gaze back down to the floor in time to watch your sister’s massive foot lifting off the ground again, rising above you.  Her toenails, pink and clean, glimmer as the light travels between the mighty pillars of her legs.  The sole arches, curving into a valley you could almost get lost in before scrunching again and revealing the deep fleshy canyons of her wrinkles.  Carly’s toes part, stretching as far as they can to allow air into the warm crevices as the entire appendage descends on your meek form below.

            “Don’t run,” she murmurs as the familiar shadow of her foot expands around you.

            “I…” you utter, your throat having gone dry, and spit out the only word you can manage.  “Yes.”

            “Good boy.”

            Your body refuses to budge as your sister’s mammoth sole reaches you with a powerful thud, blotting out all else you can see.  The pillowy flesh rams softly into your body, but you brace, standing your ground as Carly rests the underside of her athletic foot into your face.  With your chest pressed to her tender skin, you think you can feel her pulse pounding calmly beneath the peachy ceiling, and your heart obediently lowers to match her pace.  Even the automatic functions of your brain don’t have to question who’s in charge here.

            Carly’s sole is a roadmap of rippling flesh, constantly shifting in hue from a deep blushing pink to a cool pale as she gently flexes her titanic foot against you in an almost overwhelming embrace.  The valley of each wrinkle for an instant becomes a river in the terrain of her expansive sole as you imagine water flowing through, down the landscape of your sister’s foot and into some unseen ocean beyond. 

            “Touch me, little bro,” Carly insists firmly from above, her voice sweeping in under the noise-dampening obstacle of her foot as it descends just a little lower over you, forcing you to drop to your knees.

            The instruction was hardly necessary.  Right now her foot is everything you can see, feel, or smell - your every sense locked to it.  You were probably seconds away from prostrating yourself, just because of where you are.

            Reaching out, you flatten your palms against the vast undulating plain of your sister’s gorgeous foot, and curl your fingers into the nearest wrinkle as it furrows into Carly’s sole.  Kneading as hard as your thin digits will allow, you begin to work the skin, digging your nails against the slight ridges of the rubbery instep.  Though you’re hardly a speck against the monument of her foot, like a practiced sculptor, your tiny hands glide over your sister’s warming sole with speed and plenty of force, as though you could do it in your sleep, and probably have before.  You know how she likes it, and it feels more than natural to do it.  You’re hardly aware now of your own desire to stop and flee from underneath here as you rub even more fiercely than before.

            Carly responds in kind to your contact by flexing her foot even more feverishly, massaging it against your puny body.  She, too, knows just how to manipulate your every delicate muscle from head to toe with just a few slight vibrations and caresses with her foot.  You can’t deny it feels good, no matter how much you want to.

            “Don’t be so shy,” your sister says with a flighty chuckle.  “Let me feel you.”

            If she insists.

            With nothing left to lose, you bury your face into the doughy center of her sole.  Her skin, often salty, gleaming with fresh sweat and speckled with squishy toejam, is clean now.  Pleasantly sweet, even.  Past the downy scent of carpet and grassy outdoor flavor you can make out the fading aroma of her favorite fruity soap intermingled with lotion, globbed thickly over her skin to maintain its silky texture.  Every flex of her foot releases a new burst of wafting perfumes and strawberries, inflating balmily inside your skull.

            By now Carly’s foot has lowered enough that it’s pancaked you onto your back.  You’re forced to completely submit beneath the weight of it, but it’s a familiar position for you, and your heart still doesn’t waver from keeping pace with your giant sister’s. You trust that she’ll yield just enough to let you keep breathing.  One of many gifts.  Why the hell would you have wanted to run again?  The thought is a half-remembered echo in the back of your brain, like something from a childhood dream, distant and incomprehensible.

            And without even being questioned, as if the order was already implanted in your mind beyond the need of physical encouragement, you pucker your lips together and plant them against the pliable wall of luscious skin, experiencing the fruity body odors in tenfold strength.  Like it was waiting for this, a wrinkle in your sister’s sole clenches together and meets your lips almost exactly, plush and pleasing as you lay a kiss on her supple flesh.

            Though the gesture was slight and probably lost amidst the all-consuming mass of her foot, Carly giggles lovingly, her joy ringing in your ears.  She felt it.

            “My foot loves you too, little bro,” she confirms sweetly.  “Now how about you give the other one a kiss?”

            “Jack,” Dr. Felton whispers in that soothing tone of hers, lightly snapping her fingers to regain your attention.  “Jack, we’re going to exit the visualization now.  Start to imagine your environment fading back into the familiar.  Become aware of what you can see with your own two eyes again.”

            Your eyes snap open rigidly as you let your limbs flop down on the bright blue pillow laid atop the psychologist’s oaken desk.  Emerging from your doctor’s guided mental tours through the most damaged parts of your psyche always takes a few minutes to accomplish.  In the years past, you would’ve only scoffed at such goofy imagination games, but your mind’s been abused for long enough that it hardly takes any effort now for your consciousness to descend fully into these déjà vu journeys.  The bespectacled woman herself sits like a serene sentinel in her leather chair just past the surface, her manicured hands folded neatly near the edge of the cushion.  Her office, lined with several framed degrees and painted imagery of hummingbirds, melts back into your vision.

            There’s no Carly, certainly not one that can tower over you any longer like a self-appointed deity, nor is there a humongous bare foot bearing down on you and lovingly squashing your body beneath its fleshy padding.  Despite this remembrance of reality, though, as you squint up at the eggshell-painted ceiling of the psychologist’s office high above, your eyes struggle to believe you’re not still admiring the wrinkled, peachy canvas of your little sister’s truck-sized sole.  You can still feel the mild fruity flavor of her skin on your lips from that dreamed kiss.

            It’s probably safe to say you failed.  Again.

            “I’m sensing you had some trouble staying focused that time, Jack,” Dr. Felton suggests calmly.  “Would I be right about that?”

            “Yes,” you say begrudgingly, unable to look her in the eye out of embarrassment.

            As the present moment overtakes you again, you’re flooded with self-loathing and disgust to have flunked what now seems like it should be such an easy task.  It’s pretty simple, really.  The doctor helps you to integrate yourself into a controlled fantasy where you’re found by your sister, sets up a scenario where you can refuse to bow to Carly’s whims, and then you simply have to follow through.  In theory, it sounds like it should take no more than a few angry rebuttals and a stomp of your foot.  In practice, you nearly always fall back into the mindset of being your sister’s shrunken slave, no matter how much control you should have over your own dreamscape.  Subconscious expectation of your place in life has been bent far too much to do anything else but give yourself back to Carly.

            “Don’t get down on yourself,” the doctor insists, knowing how hard you can be on these failures.  “We’re still just trying to explore here and find ways to work our way back.  If we were to rip you away from what your mind is used to, like a band-aid, it wouldn’t stick.  What you’re attempting now is a long-term process that will eventually allow you some rest from everything you’re going through.  Do you understand?”

            “Yes,” you say, wanting desperately to believe it.  She’s rephrased those lines to you thousands of ways over the months as you’ve tried again and again to break free of Carly’s mental grasp.  You know Dr. Felton believes it herself, which is the only glimmer of hope you have that you can reach that point someday too.  As of now, though, success feels awfully distant.  You slump deeper into the pillow, collapsing your arms over your chest and finally daring to look the doctor in the eyes.

            “I mean it,” the woman says, smiling good-naturedly.  A glint of sunlight catches the rim of her glasses as she adjusts them behind her ear.  She leans forward a few more inches over your pillow, careful not to make any sudden moves.  You’re not exactly skittish after spending so many years at this size, but it’s clear she herself is still not entirely used to it even after a year of seeing you, and prefers to err on the cautious side.  It’s something you’ve appreciated deeply even though it’s not required, and was one of the major factors in the making the decision when your parents and Sophie were helping shop around for mental health aid.

            While the brunette medical professional still seems unsure at times of how to act physically around a patient smaller than her thumb, she at least adjusted very quickly to speaking to you in a normal tone as though you aren’t made of glass.  That’s far more important to you, because it’s something that only she and Sophie have truly mastered so far.

            “I know,” you say.  “I’m… trying.”

            “Of course you are,” she says.  “Maybe we just need to take a break from that for now.  We’ll try again later on if you’re feeling up to it.”

            “Okay,” you agree.  “So what now?”

            “I’m sure you saw the news about the chemical companies, considering it was on every headline and news bulletin,” the psychologist says.  “How did you feel when you saw it?”

            “Good,” you say, nodding your head emphatically.  “G-Glad.”  There isn’t quite an adequate word to summon up your relief at this notion, so this is all you can do for now.

            “I see,” she says happily.  “I was glad too.  Maybe this will help bring some closure to all of this someday.”

            “I hope,” you say.  Certainly it’s a tremendous source of calm to know the world is safe from the chemicals that were used to render you down to a height below a quarter of a foot.  Oddly enough, you suppose everyone was already relatively safe from them, as the leaked formula had quickly spread across the nation with only unsuccessful results, as shown in a variety of YouTube clips where people attempted to shrink their cats, their parents, or even unsuspecting passerby.  Apparently the mixture didn’t have the same effect on a humankind-wide scale.  Still, you suppose you’ll be able to sleep just a little better tonight knowing the matter is definitively closed.

            “I also thought I’d ask if you wanted to talk about your mother again,” Dr. Felton poses gingerly.  “I know you were going to try to have a conversation with her last week.  Did that end up happening?”

            “Yeah… I mean, sort of,” you partially lie.  “She’s… well, it’s still hard to talk to her.  It’s kind of a… well, it’s complicated.”

            “Why don’t you just start at the beginning, then?”

            “Sure.  Two days ago, I was on the coffee table.  Sophie put me there but got a text from her sister and had to go pick her up from somewhere.  So Mom came in to read, and was going to sit at one of the chairs further away, but I asked her to come sit at the couch in front of the table instead,” you explain.

            “Good.  And?”

            “I, uh… I asked her if she could take a minute from reading to talk.  And she said of course and put the book down, and it… looked like she wanted to put a hand down and pick me up, but then didn’t,” you continue, gulping uncomfortably.  “She’s still… well, you know.”

            “She’s still having a hard time getting past that threshold,” Dr. Felton says knowingly.  “It’ll come in time.  Don’t worry.  So what did you say?”

            “I said I wanted to talk about how she was… handling things,” you say.  “And I just wanted to know if she was ready to hear… any of it.  And she said yes, but I could tell she was already… well, her eyes were turning pink and getting wet.”

            “All right.  Go on.”

            “I didn’t tell her any of the big things.  Any of the things that would… really set her off.  I didn’t go into details, either,” you say, wringing your hands together.  “But I told her about… the day I was declared dead, and Carly celebrated by, um…”

            “Yes?”

            “Sticking me in a cupcake and eating me out of it,” you report blankly.

            “Right,” Dr. Felton says with a firm nod, having heard this particular tale before in far more excruciatingly moist detail.  By this point, nothing you could say to the woman about your time in Carly’s hands could shock her.

            Well, almost nothing.

            “I know Mom doesn’t really need to hear a lot of that stuff, but I just… I just need to be able to put back together that time somehow.  You know, piece it together.  And I need someone who was there, even if they didn’t know I was.  Dad’s in DC, and Sophie can only do so much,” you say guiltily.  Speaking to your mother about your years in secret captivity still hasn’t gotten much easier, even with Dr. Felton’s coaching, which you admittedly can understand.  After all, your parents had assumed you were dead and Carly wasn’t a psychotic monster, both of which were proven incorrect in one fell swoop.  It probably takes some adjustment.  “That makes sense, doesn’t it?”

            “You want to be able to level with your family,” the psychologist says softly.  “Even if you can feel safe with them now, if they can’t begin to understand what you went through, there will always be that distance.  It’s perfectly natural to need to connect in that way, even if it hurts one or both of you.  But remember, Jack, you’re not there to protect your parents.  They’re there to protect you.  And from the talk I had with your mom and dad, I know they’d move heaven and earth to make things right for you again.  So don’t try to soften things on their account.  Okay?”

            “Okay,” you say with relief, though a part of you still stings with the complex stew of sickened emotions swirling around your synapses.  “I guess I… just need to ask for a hand sometimes.”

            “It’s only human,” Dr. Felton adds with another encouraging smile.

 

End Notes:

Please comment!

Chapter 4: A Prison of Her Own by Jacksmith

            Carly leaned over the polished surface of the kitchen counter and took a deep breath, letting it inflate her lungs, and then exhaled softly.  Her right hand fished down into the shallow pocket of her cutoff shorts, wrapping around the wriggling legs of her tiny sibling to soothe him into motionlessness.  For a moment she just allowed him to be cupped into her palm, feeling every detail of his exposed body plastered against her closing fist.  Stroking her pinky finger along his back and down his inner thigh, she at last relinquished the grip on her favorite toy and placed her hands back on the marble.

            “Mom?  Daddy?” the teen called out earnestly, tucking a blonde lock behind her ear as she put on her widest and most persuasively gleaming smile.  “Can we talk, please?”

            A moment later, her parents trudged forlornly into the kitchen from around the corner, their arms around each other for support.  Both looked lost in their own home despite having lived in the place since before the birth of either child.  Though months had passed since Jack’s disappearance, they had kept up this practice even after the grieving had stopped being quite as apparent, if only for the comfort it provided.  They reached the countertop across from Carly, attempting to read her expression and emerge from the tragic cloud that clung to them in a murky haze.

            “Yes, honey?” her father said, trying his best to put on a happy face at the sight of his daughter’s always-optimistic countenance.  The girl’s constantly sunny disposition had been a great source of hope for the couple after the loss of their son, and they were certain it was only through Carly’s resilience of spirit that they were able to make it through the unbearable hell of not knowing.

            “I… wanted to show you both something,” the girl said innocently, her eyes darting from one bereaved parent to the other.

            “What is it?” Mrs. Arton said, tilting her head slightly as she laid her hands on the counter.

            “It’s Jack,” Carly said simply.  Reaching back into her pocket and coiling her hand softly around the target, she brought her arm back out into the open and opened her fingers.  In the center of her palm, naked and wrapped into a defensive fetal position, was her brother. No further explanation was offered.

            Rather than jolting, fainting, or otherwise reacting like normal members of the human race, however, both Mr. and Mrs. Arton paused, only briefly raising an eyebrow at the miniaturized sight of their son who they’d presumed dead only weeks before after months of searching had passed without luck.

            “Wow,” Mrs. Arton said at last, breaking the silence.  She leaned forward over the counter, index finger advancing on Jack’s huddled form.  Nudging him, the woman forced her finger between his defensively crossed arms, and splaying his limbs out into Carly’s hand.  She quickly withdrew, nodding her head.  “It certainly is Jack.”

            “I remembered him being taller,” Mr. Arton said nonchalantly.

            “You… you mean you’re not mad?” Carly choked, having dreaded this moment despite her cheery demeanor.  She gazed down at Jack, struggling to ball himself back up into his sister’s palm after the intrusion by his mother’s massive fingertip.

            “Of course not,” Mrs. Arton said.  “We thought he was gone, and now here he is.”

            “It’s just a surprise,” her father said.

            “I’m so glad!” Carly sighed.  She casually laid her thumb onto Jack’s stomach, kneading his abdomen and rolling him over in her hand like a living stress ball.  “I was afraid you wouldn’t be happy.  You know, about me keeping him like this and not telling you.”
            “I suppose you could’ve told us sooner, but it looks like you’ve taken good care of him yourself,” Mr. Arton commented, in spite of the fearful position his eldest child had taken in the girl’s expansive palm.  Jack still made no reaction to everyone around him, lying still like a miniscule trained mouse in his sister’s hand.

            “He does seem to be behaving much better than normal,” Mrs. Arton said.  She reached forward, fingers clawed expectantly, and plucked her nude trinket-sized son out of Carly’s hand, which remained willingly in place.  The woman dangled the shrunken seventeen-year-old over the counter, bringing him in closer to her face for examination.  “You’ve had him this whole time?”

            “Yes,” Carly admitted.

            “Where have you been keeping him?” she questioned.

            “Oh, all over the place.  Usually in my sock drawer, but sometimes in my workout shoes if he’s not being good.  Or sometimes inside my clothes while I wear them, if I feel like,” the girl shrugged.

            “So it only took you a few months to get him to act like this?” Mr. Arton said, impressed, as he witnessed his wife idly prodding at their miniaturized offspring’s exposed body.

            “Yep!” Carly said proudly.

            “That’s amazing.  We’ve spent his whole life trying to get him to be nice, and you turned him around in a fraction of that,” Mrs. Arton said with the same level of admiration.  She poked Jack in the side, then lowered him into her other palm and steadily closed her fingers around him, squeezing his body into her palm.

            “It wasn’t so hard,” Carly said, trying not to brag, but still doing it anyway as was usual for her.  “I just had to teach him his place in life.”

            “Quit squirming,” Mrs. Arton instructed her son, pressing her lips to the opening in her fist between her thumb and index finger.  She exhaled a puff of hot air into the balmy pocket in an effort to extinguish his struggles.  “I’m just trying to see what you feel like.”

            “He’s pretty fun to play with,” the girl said.  “Especially after you figure out what he likes.”

            “You mean he… he likes this?” Mr. Arton chuckled.  “That’s pretty sad.”

            “Maybe, but I like having fun with him, so I want him to like it, too,” Carly answered, placing her fingertips against her mother’s closed hand.  “Mom?  Can I see him again to show you?”

            “Sure, honey,” Mrs. Arton said, relenting on her grip at last.  Inside her palm, Jack had remained completely motionless, not uttering a peep of protest.  “Incredible.  If only he’d shrunken sooner.  I could’ve been teaching him myself all this time.”

            “Carly just has the magic touch,” Mr. Arton said.

            “I guess so,” she answered cheekily, scooping up her brother out of her mother’s hand and gripping him by his arms so he hung awkwardly from her pinched fingers again.  She swept her golden hair out of her eyes for full concentration.  “Now watch this.”

            With intense focus, Mr. and Mrs. Arton witnessed their daughter bringing Jack up to her mouth.  Her lips parted as her saliva-slathered tongue lashed out of the darkness and pressed itself flush to Jack’s body.  He wriggled lightly at the sticky contact, but made no further struggles as Carly’s massive tongue proceeded to slurp up the length of his body, coating him in frothy spit.  Again and again she licked him, wrapping her tongue around his thighs and up to his chest, eventually settling over his crotch, where she proceeded to lap the gooey red muscle against his package.  Jack winced with surprise but quickly settled in, gyrating lightly as Carly’s tongue pumped between his legs.  After a few moments, the shrunken teen was breathing heavier as the monster tongue, lubricated by steam and fragrant goop, ravaged his junk with expert precision.

            “Well how about that,” Mr. Arton said with apparent interest as he witnessed his children engaging in spit-drenched intimacy as though he’d accidentally stumbled onto a particularly fascinating program on the Discovery Channel.

            “Looks like he really does like it,” Mrs. Arton giggled, reaching across the counter and ruffling her saliva-covered son’s hair with a fingertip as he continued receiving a particularly messy blowjob from the voracious tongue.  “He’s even got a tiny little erection to match his tiny little body.”

            “I guess Carly would know what he likes, especially since she’s going to be taking care of him from now on,” her father stated, crossing his arms.

            At this, the girl immediately pulled her pulsing lips away from her titillated toy and sucked her tongue back into the cavern of her mouth, her attention diverted immediately to Mr. Arton.  Jack, meanwhile, so near to climax, hung with painful sexual frustration between his sister’s spit-greased fingertips and grunted in an attempt to work through a bad case of blue balls.

            “You… you mean it?  I’m keeping him?” Carly gasped.

            “Well, of course you are,” Mrs. Arton giggled, delighted to see her daughter so pleased.  “What kind of parents would we be to pull you two apart when you’re finally getting along so well?”

            “What are we supposed to do with him now anyway?  He’s useless for anything but what you want him for, honey,” Mr. Arton snorted with derision.  “Plus, if we told people he was still alive, we’d probably have to give back all the consolation presents from the funeral.”

            “That’s true,” Mrs. Arton agreed.  “So consider him a present for being such a wonderful daughter, Carly.  Your brother is ALL yours.”

            “Forever?” the girl squealed.

            “Forever,” her parents confirmed in unison, robotic smiles spreading over their faces as they nodded.

            “Wow,” Carly uttered, shuddering with arousal at the very idea.  The cerulean pearls of her eyes sparkled as she returned her attention to the squirming little life between her fingers, human putty for her to use, abuse, and pleasure as she saw fit.

            Wanting to keep their shared climax private, Carly winked at her miniature sibling as she parted her lips and deposited him with victorious finality inside her mouth, tucking him into her cheek for a final slobbery fondling against the slimy underside of her tongue.  Her hand was already digging down into the front of her pants and fumbling with the waistband as her breaths came shorter and shorter.

 

            With a smile on her lips, Carly emerged groggily from the rapturous dream.  She’d experienced it innumerable times over the months that she’d been alone, the surreal declarations of her parents occasionally altering, but for the most part, her subconscious knew exactly what she wanted.  Often she’d take naps in the middle of the day in her glass cage at the facility, not out of exhaustion, but simply with the hope she could fade into this wonderful fantasy yet again.  Imagining it while awake only went so far; it was far better seeing it play out inside her head as she slept, where everything felt so convincing she hesitated to believe it was all a dream upon waking.

            Her vision swam as she struggled to regain full consciousness, and as the pleasant sensations of the dream faded, the shreds of memory before her forced slumber began to come back to her out of chronological order.

            The TV.  Her glass box.  The guards changing shifts.  The giant bitch snatching her up.  The electric crackle of a taser and the plunge toward the ground.  A black glove, breaking her fall and caging around her, the fingers like stygian tendrils.

            How long had she been out?  Scrambling awkwardly to her feet and scraping her knuckles against the floor, Carly looked down at her body, realizing she was no longer wearing the customized beige jumpsuit she’d been sporting for the past year.  In its place was a simple white cloth, draped over her body with barely enough of an opening to allow her neck and limbs through.  Apparently someone had taken it upon themselves to give her an even bigger fashion downgrade while she was asleep.

            Though the space was dusky, as Carly’s eyes gradually adjusted, the walls knitted themselves into existence from the black.  A drab olive hue, the metal siding didn’t seem all that distant, even to someone of Carly’s diminutive stature.  If she didn’t know any better, she would’ve guessed she was inside a bunker.  The surface she stood upon was black, absorbing any stray light that made its way from under the crack of a door just ahead.

            After the girl had taken more than a few cautious steps forward, she smacked into a sheer surface so clear she hadn’t even seen it, save for the spiraled smudge of her fingerprints.  Nearly toppled from her feet, Carly placed her hand against its cool surface, gasping out shallower breaths by the instant as she gazed up the length of the wall, which reached too far up into the shadows above to detect any viable way out.

            Things were so much simpler when she just had a bunch of overzealous vigilante security guards spitting in her food or flicking her around the cage.  Carly could handle them, put them in their place even if she wanted.  This, now, was completely uncharted territory.  For the first time in a very long while, the girl felt powerlessness in its rawest form.

            A door in the center of the adjacent wall swung open with a lumbering metal clang, flooding in just enough merciful light for Carly to make out the boundaries of her new tank.  Though admittedly roomier than her previous lodging with its own miniature bed, toilet, sink, and what looked like a playground jungle gym, the circumstances of this particular situation made the girl long to be clenched back in the grubby fingertips of the steroid-enhanced president of her fan club.  She stumbled back, instinctively looking for a place to retreat, but knowing already there was no way to avoid whatever was coming.

            A silhouette materialized in the narrow doorframe, advancing on the cornered Carly in her glassed entrapment.  It was a woman, her slender hips belied by a militaristic march, though her boot-clad feet fell near-silently on the cold ground, and as the glow of a lamp behind her reflected off Carly’s cage, a face composed of porcelain skin seemed to paint itself into visibility from out of the harsh shade of the bunker.  Her incendiary red locks, tied in a ponytail behind her head, bloomed even in the dimly lit room, her raven sweater swallowing up just as much color as the floor of Carly’s new prison.  Jet-black eyeliner tarred beneath her lids gave her sourly rigid expression a suggestion of tired starvation.

            “Well,” the woman sighed, crossing her arms and tapping her gloved fingers against her biceps.  “Carly Arton.  Welcome to… the future, or something like that.”

            Frowning, the young kidnapped psychopath backed up several more paces, clutching her cloth tighter around her thin shoulders, well-aware that this woman could probably reach right in and strip her naked if such a thing occurred to her.  Withdrawal was only a delusion here.

            “I’m willing to bet you’re not in the mood to talk back to me just yet, seeing as we snatched you out of the lap of luxury in that hideous federal government building…” the woman continued uncaringly.  “…so how about I do all the talking for now and you just pay attention.  You know, in the name of speeding this process along.”

            Blinking incredulously, still unable and unwilling to drink the situation fully in, Carly nonetheless kept her focus on the woman, though she didn’t look her directly in the eyes.  The woman’s emerald irises were just a little too exacting to stare into for more than a few seconds without forming an onerous knot in the stomach.

            “Since we’ll be seeing a lot of each other in the near future, and I, along with the rest of America, already know so much about you…” the black-attired woman rolled onward, not bothering to check for confirmation in her capture.  “…my name is Claire.  There’s a little more to it, but for now we’ll just stick with that.  Right now you’re about three stories beneath the surface of the earth, and maybe… I don’t know, a thousand miles away from your hometown?  I say that just to save us both the time later of you trying to escape.  Not that you’d have an easy time of it, anyway.  You’ll find out soon this place is an absolute maze.”

            Stock-still, Carly took in the details, not allowing a single muscle in her face to twitch.  She crossed her hands behind her back, keeping her chin tilted upward as Claire took another step closer to the glass.

            “There will be plenty more to go over later as it becomes necessary.  Luckily for you, though, for your part in all this, there’s very little you have to do other than exactly as I tell you to.  From what I’ve learned about you, I doubt that’ll be acceptable to someone quite so… self-assured, but I’m just throwing it out there now so you can’t say I didn’t warn you later,” Claire continued, tapping an index finger against the glass wall, simpering with a gentle shrug.

            Carly bit her lip, steadily coming to grips with her reality, already sensing how very little she was going to like it.

            “Now, I’m sure this can’t look good.  Me just grabbing you up and everything, bringing you here, making threats.  I don’t want it to seem like I don’t admire you, little Carly, because I do.  You’re a woman after my own heart,” Claire said genuinely, placing a hand over her chest.  “And because of that, it seems only fair to offer you the chance now to ask any questions you have.  This is a limited time offer, though, so I suggest you take advantage instead of playing the stoic martyr.”

            Nodding, the tiny twenty-year-old boldly stepped nearer to the wall of her cage, advancing on her captor, and felt the words swelling into her throat with very little difficulty.

            “Why did you bring me here?”

            Raising an eyebrow, Claire actually let a smile fracture the line of her lips.  “Oh, I’m so glad you asked something like that instead of something stupid like trying to offer me money or whatever to let you out.  That’s what a few of our other little friends tried, and trust me, it did not go how they wanted it to.”

            “Why?” Carly commanded.

            “All right, eager beaver, all right,” Claire chuckled.  “It’s nothing much, really.  You’re here to help us advance scientific knowledge into the twenty-second century.  And who knows?  Maybe even a little further than that.”

 

End Notes:

Really appreciate the response to this one, guys. Keep 'em coming!

Chapter 5: Chloe's Keeper by Jacksmith

The grassy incline leading up to Sophie’s house between the blossoming flower beds and whirling neon pink pinwheels appears even more arduous than the last time you were staring up at that brick fortress of a place.  Of course, it probably has something to do with the fact that the last time you got a real good look at the outside was when you still stood at more than six feet tall, but that’s neither here nor there.  Now, as you gaze up at the dappled walls and curtained panes, technically not much different from your own home, it’s somehow far more intimidating than you could’ve imagined.  Assuredly, it’s not just because there’s a veritable jungle of domestic garden wildlife between you and the front door that could so easily strand you for days if you happened to find yourself on the ground now.  You’ve only just emerged from the tangle of belts and foam pads comprising your specialized seat in your cousin’s car at the curb of the residence, and already your stomach is starting to babble in ways that suggest your entire consciousness might not be fully in support of this operation.

            “Jack, are… are you sure you’re ready for this?” Sophie questions tenderly as you perch cross-legged in the center of her warm palm.  It’s almost as if she read your mind.  Half the time, you’re pretty sure she’s able to do just that, judging by how often she guesses your exact needs before a word can even leave your embarrassed little lips.

            Having taken a few steps up the slope already, padding through the leafy greenery in her strappy maroon sandals, she pauses in the grass for a moment, clearly intent on remaining as a statue here until she’s more than one hundred percent certain she can’t convince you not to let her turn around and drive you straight back home.

            “Nobody would blame you if you wanted to put this off.  Or… not do it at all!” she suggests none too subtly.

            “Uh…”

            Your cousin bites her lip, clearly far more uneasy about this than you are.  The past month has seen you make several important strides in your time with the psychologist, though, and much of this success has come from your willingness to face what once would’ve scared the daylights out of you.  And what you’re about to do scares the daylights out of you like little else, so it’s the obvious choice.  You have to do this, as much for yourself as anyone else.

            “Yes,” you say at last after a healthy pause that probably does nothing to assuage Sophie’s concerns, nodding resolutely.  You blink in the blaring sunlight, bowing your head into the shade created under the arch of your cousin’s soft fingers.

            “It’s just that you already have your appointment in a few hours with Dr. Felton.  I don’t want you to feel… overwhelmed today,” she says.  “There’s no need to take on too much at a time.  You know?”

            “I’m fine.  Seriously.  I promise,” you assure repeatedly, knowing a full three resounding rounds are required to temporarily convince your adoring cousin that you aren’t made of papier-mâché.  You give her a pat on her thumb just to completely sell your contentedness.

            “Okay…” she sighs as she moves beyond the yard, taking the final steps up the cobblestone stoop.  Passing by your mother’s van, already parked in the driveway, her knees sweep by some drooping lilies as she ducks under the branches of a lemon tree and grasps the front door’s brass knob.

            It’s been well over a year since you first met at this size, after all, and ever since you first began relaying your experience back to Sophie in those early days after your rescue, she’s dedicated a great deal of attention to ensuring this particular scenario never had cause to play out: something your parents and aunt were fully on board with.  As it happens, though, you’ve now requested it yourself, against your mother’s wishes, and as your cousin tends to do her best to accommodate you within reason, she’s begrudgingly allowed the both of you into this situation as she steps across the carpeted threshold and into the house, where Chloe is waiting to see you again.

            You haven’t had a need to be here in quite a while.  It’s always so much easier for Sophie to come to you, especially given the fact that she’s tall enough to work the gas pedals of an actual car, but there are other reasons to have stayed in the sanctity of your own home.  The last time you visited this place, things didn’t exactly go your way.

            Sophie turns the corner into the well-lit kitchen, passing by the brush of a couple violet-blooming flower pots and approaches the breakfast nook, where both of your mothers are seated, hands folded neatly together.  Immediately your parent’s gaze falls to you, a little alarmed and filled with concern steep enough that you imagine she might be on the verge of tears if she hadn’t already dried her ducts out from all the crying of the past year.  Her lips part as though to say something, perhaps a final protest against this meeting, but the words seem to have become stuck in her throat, so instead she just runs a palm down the side of her face.  Of course, it’s tough to focus on your mom at all given the remaining occupant of the room who still has yet to raise her eyes to you.

            Next to your aunt sits none other than Chloe, Sophie’s sister and your fourteen-year-old cousin who, through a course of insidiously unlucky circumstances, attempted to keep you as her personal pet two Christmases ago and then swallow you alive to cover up the evidence.  Her blonde hair, lighter than her sibling’s, has grown out further than her shoulders, a little wavier than you remember it.  Her lime-green skirt with the straps laced loosely over her tanned shoulders already draws enough attention, and even from this distance, those inquisitive baby blues of hers dance in the kitchen’s effulgent glow.  Though you can’t be sure, they seem to glisten, almost twinkling as they square to you at last.  Her cheeks suck inward at the sight of your casually seated form in her sister’s hand.  She chews her lower lip thoughtfully but makes no further move.

            A shiver spurts along each link of your spine at the sight of the girl who very nearly made you her lunch eighteen months ago, but there’s no turning back now, not with the promises you’ve made to your mother, your doctor, Sophie, and perhaps most vitally, yourself.

            Still, it’s damned difficult to keep your eyes off those lips of hers.  You’ll never be able to look another person in the mouth quite the same way for perhaps the rest of your life, given how many times your sister forced you inside of hers for some roiling tongue-wrestling and near-drownings in strawberry-flavored saliva, but being able to see the only other person in the world to have passed you between her teeth certainly delivers a more potent gash to your trauma-addled brain.

            “Well, we’re… here,” Sophie mutters nervously, approaching the counter and taking a seat steadily enough on a leather bar stool that you aren’t jostled in her palm.  She rests her elbow against the surface to ensure you have a steady base.

            “Hello, Jack,” your Aunt Selina says sweetly, gratitude evident in her tone.  She grimaces in that way that reminds you of your dad’s face when he’s at one of his frequent shortages on conversation; the woman’s obviously harboring a great deal of blame for something that isn’t even her fault.  It must be something hereditary she shares with her brother, you suppose.  “How are you?”

            “I’m okay.”

            “Thank you so much for coming.”  From the way her eyes dart to your still-silent mother, you can tell you’re not the only one present to whom she’s attempting to offer remorse.

            “S-Sure,” you manage.

            Your watchful cousin’s fingers curve in even closer to your legs, shielding you from her stock-still sister, and you can’t help but wrap an arm around her pinky, hugging it to your body for security.  She obliges you, of course, squeezing it comfortably against your chest, promising to keep you right where you are.  You trust the feeling, swallowing hard, and make full eye contact with Chloe.

            “H-Hi,” you say simply, lifting your free hand and giving your adolescent cousin the slightest of waves.

            For a moment, you can’t read the young teen’s blank expression as she fixes on you.  Her lip quivers, crimson in the corner where she apparently bit too hard while observing you.  Blinking, she slaps her hands palms-down on the tabletop, at first sending your heart into overdrive at the thought that she might reach out and snatch you from the protective embrace of Sophie’s loving fingers, but the thought quickly fades as hers digits halt their progression across the glossy surface.

            And then she bursts into catastrophic tears.

            You freeze, unable to react as you watch this girl who once tried to digest you now melting into a puddle of emotions and salt.  It’s as though Chloe had been employing every muscle in her body to withhold the deluge of tragic, moist melancholy up until this moment, and finally lost the strength to keep up the dam.  Quivering over nearly every inch of her body, she bows her head to the tabletop, sobbing from the back of her throat as her rosy cheeks are soon stained.  Your aunt lays an arm around her, supportively rubbing her back and massaging her neck.  Clearly, this has been building up for some time, and your physical presence just unleashed it.

            No one speaks for several minutes.  Your mother shifts closer in her chair to lean in your direction, but she doesn’t appear to know where to look.  Her thumb rises to her earlobe, fidgeting with the gemstone stud of her earring.

            Sophie, clearly not as surprised as you over this dismal display, sinks further back into her chair, but keeps her fingers locked securely around your shoulders as you look on, unable to keep your jaw from hanging slack.

            With the benefit of hindsight and explanation from your highly apologetic eighteen-year-old cousin, you were able to ascertain that Chloe had been undergoing a personality crisis of some kind in the months before your existence first came to be known.  In the oddest of ways with this girl who so nearly ended your life inside the spit-clogged depths of her esophagus, you feel a sense of solidarity to know she, too, required some therapeutic reconstruction, and never more so than after you appeared, severely damaging her perception of reality and throwing her from merely off-kilter into a state of emotional breakdown, leading to her extreme reaction to your discovery.  This, at least, is how the story was related to you by Sophie in the intervening months as Chloe underwent varying forms of mental healing under psychiatric supervision, culminating in this opportunity for the pair of you to meet at last.  Still, none of that information could’ve prepared you for seeing her before you now: not the terrifyingly carefree and playfully selfish kid she was not so long ago, but a vulnerable, hurting young girl who just happened to cross your path at the worst of times in both of your lives.

            You open your mouth, wondering if you should say something but knowing you couldn’t possibly summon the correct words to rectify this mess, when Chloe lifts her face up towards you instead.

            “J-Jack?” she whimpers, sniffling hard and wiping a soft knuckle across her tear-splattered chin, her neck still damp with trickled excess.

            “Chloe?  It’s… okay,” you say as calmly as you can, finding yourself even trying to soothe her, against all odds.

            “I’m s-s-so… s-so…” she croaks, choking through the words coherently enough to be heard, before laying her cheek back against the table, where a miniature reservoir of her soggy dejection has pooled.  Those frosty blue eyes narrow, looking directly inside of you, and you know you can trust that glaze of anguish if not her words.  “…so SORRY!”

 

End Notes:

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Chapter 6: Into the Mouths of Babes by Jacksmith

You’re at a total loss as you witness Chloe, the once-towering tween goddess who trampled you beneath her damp soccer socks and stuffed you between her cheeks like a post-game refreshment, fumble through another torrent of tears.  Despite having grown a full inch since that occasion eighteen months before, she looks smaller and more helpless now to you than she ever has before, even when the top of her head only reached your chest at full height.

            She wipes her wrist back across her streaked cheeks and flushed nose.  It seems like you should try to offer something else to help, but you can’t possibly craft a sentence coherent enough in the face of this stormy despair.  So you remain in silence, allowing her pitiful cries to fill in the increasingly awkward gap.  Finally your young cousin’s lips part again, uttering something so low that it takes a moment to parse it out completely:

            “I didn’t mean it, Kenny.”

            It’s as though you’ve had nitrogen injected directly down your spinal column.

            Your neck snaps up to Sophie’s face above you, looking for support, but her expression is unchanged, still intently focused on her sister.  You look to your mother, too, whose gaze hasn’t yet left you, but she doesn’t appear to have been affected either.  Sophie’s fingers didn’t even twitch around you at the mention of the nickname Chloe gave you during your brief stint in her spoiled clutches.  Involuntarily your limbs squeeze tighter around your cousin’s thumb, hoping to get her attention at this unexpected anomaly of bone-chilling seriousness.  Maybe she didn’t hear it.

            “I hope I can make it up to you,” Chloe whispers, her voice steadying at last as the ravenous spheres of her irises lock back onto you.

            “W-What?” you mutter.

            “I want to hold you again.  It felt so good the first time I had you in my hands,” Chloe continues, sitting up at last and placing her hands atop the table.  For the first time, you cringe, sinking deeper into Sophie’s palm for protection, your body tensed as though you’re staring down the barrel of a loaded firearm.  “Won’t you let your Princess Chloe hold you one more time?”

            “I… I d-don’t w-want t-t…” you stutter.  More than ever, you wish you could shrink just a little bit further, out of sight and into the shadows of your loving cousin’s hand, where no one could find you.  Where you could just sink into the balmy valley of the central crease in Sophie’s palm, ensconcing yourself in the vanilla effluvium of her favorite lotion and avoid the world’s entertained ogling forever.  You notice your mother’s forehead furrowing slightly at your mewled nonsense.

            “Awww c’mon.  Yes you do.  I know you do,” Chloe wheedles, leaning further across the counter as she breaks free of her mom’s embrace.  “You’ll like it, too.  I promise.”  Her eyes, still raw and pink from crying, have opened wider, a hungry glint flashing like a beacon in the remaining welled tears.  Her fingers drum impatiently against the tabletop.  She then overturns her right hand, opening her palm as she reaches out to her older sister’s protectively curled appendage.

            “S-Sophie?” you choke out.

            “Jack?” Sophie says, raising an eyebrow at your muttering at nothing in particular.  “Do you need something?”

            “All I want is to know what it feels like again for just a second.  To have an itty-bitty boy of my very own,” Chloe insists.  “And maybe… one more quick little taste.  If that’s okay…”

            “NO!” you screech, now actively scrambling backward in Sophie’s palm, but finding her fingers are actually impeding your progress, still wrapped snugly around your shoulders and waist.  As though she wanted you to stay put, with Chloe’s hand inching closer every second.  As though she was offering you up.

            “Mom?” you squeal.

            “Only a little one.  I won’t eat you like last time.  I promise,” Chloe giggles unconvincingly as her fingers walk their way up Sophie’s forearm, her palm closing overtop of your cousin’s hand and sandwiching you in between.  It takes practically no effort on her part to pry you from under Sophie’s thumb, which offers zero resistance to the theft.  Immediately you’re squeezed up against her plush palm, her firm fingers coiling tightly around your limbs, binding you to her skin.

            “N-No, no no no… SOPHIE!” you scream, thrashing uselessly in your younger cousin’s fist as she steadily draws it back across the table toward her face.  “MOM!”

            Your parent’s countenance appears as gloomy and unaware of her surroundings as she did when you first entered the room.  There’s clearly no help to be had there.  Sophie, rather than leaping across the table to retake you from her sister like you assumed she would, relaxes into her stool.  “Calm down, Jack.  All she wants is a little taste.  Why don’t you just try to be cool about this for once?”

            “Aunt Selina?” you beg desperately, turning toward your relative next to Chloe, who looks just as contented with the situation as both of her daughters.

            “Sophie does so much for you, Jack.  Don’t you realize that?  She hardly ever sees her own friends now because of how often she comes around to your house to take care of you,” your aunt notes with what you realize is legitimate irritation.

            “I… I-” you sputter.

            “She never goes on any trips, or to the movies.  No dates, even though she gets asked practically every other week.  She even skipped her prom just to sit with you when you wouldn’t stop crying over a bad dream like a wimpy little three-year-old!” Selina continues.

            “It’s true,” Sophie confirms solemnly.

            “I d-didn’t want you to,” you mutter, feeling an even sharper sting from this uncomfortable revelation about your cousin’s sacrificial priorities than the fact that your relatives are apparently content with you being manhandled by a carnivorous teen.  “I wouldn’t ask you to stop your life for me.  Ever.”

            “Well, of course you don’t ask, because you’re too scared to even talk to anyone about anything,” Sophie states calmly.  “What else am I supposed to do?  I just put up with you so you don’t go and jump under someone’s shoe to end it all and make me feel like a total bitch.”

            Air hisses from your lungs.  You feel as though your entire Adam’s apple might lurch down your gullet.  There’s no response to that one.  Sophie, seeing she’s got you trapped, leans back in her chair, arms crossed proudly.

            “Really.  It seems like the LEAST you can do is pass along the goodwill and let Chloe play with you for two measly minutes,” your aunt huffs.

            “WHAT?” you cry, now with your own tears pouring out from the shock of this entire ambush, and suddenly you feel muggy moisture fogging against the nape of your neck.  You crane your head around in time to watch Chloe’s pillowy lips spreading apart, revealing her glistening white teeth into a smug grin for just a moment before clacking the pearly rows together.  The grinding collision earns a terrified twitch from you on each repetition.  Satisfied, then, her fingers ripple around your body to adjust her grip, her thumb pressing up against your chest and under your chin to ensure you remain looking straight ahead at her cheekily triumphant countenance.

            Your kiddish cousin, bouncing her blonde locks against her shoulders, at last opens her jaws wide, releasing her writhing red serpent of a tongue from its humid encroachment.

            There’s no possible defense for you as you’re forcefully face-planted by Chloe’s powerful fist into the spongy surface of her bud-stippled muscle.  For a moment she just allows your flavors to be sopped up into the spit-slogged beast, the entire thing wriggling and flexing against your body.

            As your clothes rapidly absorb the hot liquid trickling in rivulets down the dell of your cousin’s tongue, you gasp awkwardly for breath, fighting to turn your head to the side.  You succeed, but still find your nose and mouth pinned unyieldingly into the slimy flesh.  With some determined exertion, you manage to pull your face away from the teen’s massive, throbbing muscle as it continues to sample and suckle at your body.  Gluey strings of her crystalline saliva dangle from your cheeks like tinsel.

            “HELP!” you gasp, nearly choking on a thick wad of phlegm that traveled down Chloe’s tongue from the back of her throat.  “HELP M-”

            Sophie, Aunt Selina, and your mother all remain still and silent as statues as your young and clearly still half-crazed relative presses her thumb against the back of your skull, plunging your helpless head back into the river of her gummy saliva.  With the fleshy pad of her fingertip held over you, there’s no fighting your way out for a breath this time.

            You can hear it all churning inside the moist cave like the inner workings of an industrial turbine.  Glistening rivers of tropical slop, froth formed in foamy clusters, and globs of sickly mucus.  Everything.  Chloe’s cheeks slosh as clean floods of spit come rushing down from the roof of her mouth, all flowing toward a singular spillover point right over your gasping face.

            Several agonizing seconds flow by as your cousin tastes you, as promised, but as you feel her adhesive spit congealing along your skin and into your hair, you can feel her sticky fingers loosening around you.  In the next instant her palm has released its unrelenting grip on you, leaving you spread-eagle and glued to Chloe’s tongue like a hapless gummy bear.

            It’s like being melded into a glue trap.  No possible twitch of your body involuntary or not could hope to free you.  Your clothes are already starting to peel off, stripping you back down to the inhuman little freak you had imagined yourself to be for so long.  Truly the only thing separating you from brave survivor and mealy morsel are a few scant layers of fabric thin enough to be husked away from your vulnerable skin after just a few vigorous licks from a broiling red muscle.  The shirt goes the easiest, as it’s already been dredged like tissue paper from your back by a quick sweep of Chloe’s thumb.  Your pants are quick to follow, sliding hopelessly off the end of her guzzling snake of a tongue.

            You open your mouth, wanting to cry out for help again, or at least something to cover up your humiliatingly exposed body before the prying eyes of your extended family while Chloe has her apparently deserved fun, but find yourself out of things to say.  Once again, you hear no roars of dissention from your beloved kin.  Not even a peep.  Not from Aunt Selina, who just spent a year and a half helping to mend a daughter who so nearly resorted to human savagery.  Not from Sophie, the spitting image of a crazed goddess who gave up her whole life to make sure you could rebuild yours.  And not even from your mom, who now has to live with the knowledge that you were tortured for half a decade under the same roof as her.  Like you’re the only one who’s not in on the maddest practical joke of all time.  Instead of words exiting your lips, a fresh wad of bubbly froth sloshed up from Chloe’s uvula passes into your mouth.

            Perhaps it’s just inevitable that you’ll find yourself in these places again and again in a continuous cycle.  Maybe the freedom you thought you clawed your way toward after five years in your sister’s sock drawer was just a mirage.  Why should anyone listen to someone like you, anyway?  A timid little toy boy, not even three inches tall, that the world had already learned to live without, and now is forced to begrudgingly accommodate instead.  What are you to them?

            Right now, clearly, a snack.

            Your cousin’s stubby fingertips pinch at your butt, shredding your underwear away from your trembling and now-nude body at last as a cataract of flecked spittle and spiteful giggles erupts from her esophagus.  Her thumb presses into the small of your back one last time, ensuring every last inch of your body is dragged through the garden of squirming taste buds to quench her voracious curiosity.

            A victorious moan gurgling up from the darkness of her digestive tract, Chloe slurps you into the swampy chasm of her mouth, her tongue pancaking your useless frame to the roof of her mouth as a fresh moat of slobber floods into your darkened world.

            “Jack, what’s wrong?” Sophie gasps.  Her voice cracks in a desperate panic as she continues holding you in her quavering palm, which you haven’t left for a moment of this visit.  Your mother, aunt, and Chloe all watch in stupefied awe.

            “Honey?” your mom croaks, too petrified to do anything other than twitch.

            “JACK!”  Your cousin chokes out a helpless wail as you release the protective grasp on her fingers and fold into yourself, shrieking and sobbing at the ghostly visage of Chloe’s gaping throat imbibing you down into the slimy purgatory of her gastrointestinal tract.

 

End Notes:

Please comment!

Chapter 7: Opening Up by Jacksmith

A few minutes of uncomfortable silence have already rolled by as you sit cross-legged in the center of Sophie’s palm, a little clammier than it was earlier.  You twiddle your thumbs in your lap and avoiding looking up at her pleading eyes at all costs.  The ceiling fan hums quietly from on high over her impressively clean sky-blue bedroom as she reclines on the mattress, cradling you in dire desperation to comfort after your violent outburst downstairs with her sister.  She whisked you away almost as soon as you started crying, leaving your shocked aunt, weeping younger cousin, and near-catatonic mother in the kitchen, but by then most of the anguish was already inflicted on all parties involved.

            You, of course, haven’t left Sophie’s hand for this entire trip to her house, despite the hyper-real nightmare of a few minutes ago that invaded the darkest corners of your skull.  The sensations were so convincingly authentic you doubt you could’ve known it was just a hallucination even if someone had been screaming it into your ears at the time, repeating some therapeutic mantra about separating reality from fiction.

            Chloe’s monstrous fingers entrapping you into her fist, her tongue slaking over your face, and her gooey saliva trickling down your thigh as you were gulped into her maw: none of it happened, and no harm has come to you under this roof.  At least, no physical harm.  Your sickly brain, though, is an entirely different story, and no amount of benevolence from your mother and best friend could’ve protected you.

            “Jack?” Sophie presses gently at last in a whisper so low it almost doesn’t register.

            “Hmm?” you grunt.

            “Are… are we going to talk about what happened down there with my sister?”

            You shrug, still not looking up.  “I know it didn’t look good.”

            “It really didn’t,” she says, biting her lip.  “I’m sorry I made you come here today.  I’m sorry I didn’t listen to your mom.  I… I just-”

            “You didn’t make me do anything, and you know it,” you say quickly, wanting to cut off your cousin’s penchant for guilt as soon as possible, knowing she’s going to lay some on herself regardless.  “You would’ve let me stay home if I’d even made a peep about not being ready for today.”

            “I know,” she sighs, hanging her head shamefully.  “But I still feel bad.”  A few of her silky locks cascade into her palm, drifting in their golden splendor against your shoulders.  Comforting, in its own way, and simultaneously haunting for its similarity to being cupped in Carly’s hand this near to her face.  Sophie’s hair is darker than your sister’s by a few shades, but with only a couple strands weaving together against your cheek from above, it’s awfully hard to distinguish.

            “Don’t,” you request, knowing she won’t heed you.  “Really.  It’s just that I… well, she…”

            “She’s come a long way.  Really.  Just like you have,” Sophie reassures sweetly.  She brushes her thumb along your shoulder.  “She’d never think of hurting you now.  She talks about you a lot, even though she hasn’t seen you since… since that day you told me about.  Wanting to know if you’re doing okay.  How much she wants you to know how… how sorry she is.”

            “I know,” you say truthfully.  Indeed, you’ve heard of these developments throughout the past months as they took place, and despite still being a little too on-edge to personally encounter Chloe even under your family’s supervision, you’ve been proud of the strides your apparent comrade in mental health disorder has been making.

            “You know if something had gone wrong, though, that I would’ve gotten you out of there.  The same with my mom and your mom, too.  If she’d so much as reached over for you.  Nobody would’ve touched you,” Sophie continues to explain in her most soothingly hushed tone, the same she uses to help lull you to sleep in her hand on the occasions you’ve had trouble finding nonviolent slumber.

            “I know that, too,” you sigh.  “It’s probably hard to believe, but… this isn’t about Chloe.”

            “I would understand, though.  Everyone would.  Your parents, my mom, my sister… I mean, she… she tried to… to…”

            “…eat me?” you finish calmly, aware that your cousin is far too sensitive on the subject to even fathom such a concept, let alone vocalize it.  You can feel the skin of her hand quivering beneath you at the mention, but she quickly steadies again.

            “Yes,” she swallows guiltily.  “That.”

            “I promise.  It’s really not about that.  I wasn’t afraid to come here.  And I’m still glad I came,” you say, again without lying.  You pat Sophie’s thumb, hoping to return the assuaging favor, and feel her finger stroke back up the length of your arm in answer.  After all, if you can’t go anywhere without having your consciousness invaded by terrifying hallucinations, you might as well go someplace you can do some good, right?

            Though, now that you’ve completely broken down before Chloe into tears and screams after she attempted to make amends, you suspect you’ve only succeeded in piling on to her already substantial shame.  That’s probably something you’ll eventually have to make right, even at the risk of once again vividly imagining your teenage relative deciding to dissolve you into her saliva as a pre-lunch appetizer.  Through the walls, you’re pretty sure you can hear her whimpering guiltily in her bedroom, accompanied by her mother’s comforting counsel.  You still can’t hear your own mom’s voice, though.  Where did she go?

            “So if it’s really not about Chloe…” Sophie says.  “…what is it?”

            “I…” you utter, too meek and humbled in the face of all this potentially misguided goodwill from this girl who might as well be the mirror universe manifestation of your sister.

            You’ve told Sophie a great deal about your years-long ordeal.  Probably more than you should’ve, judging by the amount of crying you’ve seen her do, often with you cribbed in her hands to experience the pooling sorrow soaking your ankles.  Yet she always insists on hearing more, resolved to push through the heartache in order to provide you with a confidante.  It’s something you’ll be eternally grateful for, as you can only hold some of those harrowing events in your poisoned cranium for so long before they threaten to gestate into tumors.  Still, there’s just as much your cousin doesn’t know, and can never know, for her sake and yours.  You decided it was best to tone down the tortuous explanations of all the times Carly wore you in a sock, nearly drowned you in her spit, or tucked you into the back of her jeans and flattened you under her toned cheeks during class.

            And certainly Sophie doesn’t know about the literal hundreds of molestations your sister perpetrated on you, some of them even with your sickening consent.  That’s something you’ve only had the guts to divulge to Dr. Felton, given that it’s her job to professionally wade through the psycho-emotional museum that is your brain.

            Of course, no one: not your mother or father, not Sophie, and not even Dr. Felton can ever know about the ten-minute window a year and a half before between the time Carly swallowed you and when Sophie burst through that flimsy college dorm door.  You yourself will never be completely sure of what happened in that fog of personal transformation and sexual surrender.  Whatever it was, it’s something you intend to take to the grave.

            “Please, Jack.  Let me help you,” your cousin entreats, patting your leg with her finger again after you go more than a minute without responding.  You can see her eyes are glistening already, the tears welled and prepared to tumble if she’s put any more over the edge.  “Why won’t you let me help you?”

            “You do help me,” you promise, giving her thumb a squeeze.  “Seriously.  You’re like the last friend I’ve got.”

            “That’s… not true,” she comments clumsily, probably having trouble believing it herself.

            “Yes it is, and you know it,” you say with a shrug.  “You were there when they all came to see me after it happened.  Everybody I’d ever been close with was there.  But none of them even knew how to talk to me anymore, you know?  Like I’d died and turned into some other species.  Which, I mean… I kind of did.”

            Sophie shakes her head, whipping her blonde locks about, and bites her lip to keep from cringing.

            “Don’t say that,” she pleads.  Her fingers go back to work stroking up your back, pressing you against their plush warmth.  “You’re still you.  I know I didn’t ever really know you that well before all this, or… or treat you very well, but… I know it’s you.  And only you.”

            “I’d like to think so,” you say.  “But they don’t know that anymore.  It’s just you here now.”

            Your cousin nods, accepting this explanation, and parts her lips again: “If… if you can’t talk to me about what’s going on, though… please… promise me you’ll talk to the doctor about it.  Please, Jack?”

            “Okay,” you relent.  Lowering your gaze back into the sanctity of Sophie’s angelic hands, you watch a glistening tear plunge from above and splash into a crease in her palm within arm’s reach of your shoe.

            Though you don’t yet have the gumption to breathe a word of the real explanation to your adoring cousin, you know it’s a fact you’re going to have to face eventually.  For months now your night and naptime dreams have been tormented and often, even worse, teased by visions of your tremendous sister.  Once Dr. Felton started up the remedial visualization, the morbid fantasies migrated into your moments of most intense focus, but up until this day, you were safe in the confines of your daily waking life.

            Now, it seems, you don’t even need to be focusing to descend into partial madness.  Your mind, evidently, is going to make sure you comprehend your current place in the world even if it kills you first.

            “Thank you,” she breathes, swiping her thumb over each eye to wash away the mournful moisture.  She sniffles a few times, getting ahold of herself again.  “I just want you to get better, you know.”

            “I know.”

            “If you… do ever want to talk.  About any of it.  You know I’m here for you,” she swears.

            “Yes,” you say.  She’s repeated this fact to you in countless ways over the months, hoping it’ll eventually get through to you and earn your tortured words.  “Thanks.”

            There’s a knock on Sophie’s bedroom door before either of you can say anything.  Cautiously, your aunt twists the handle and pokes her head in.

            “Hi Jack,” she murmurs apologetically.  “Listen.  I hope this didn’t-”

            “It’s fine, Aunt Selina, really,” you lie.  “I’m just trying to work through some stuff still.”

            “All right.  If you’re sure.”

            “Is… Chloe gonna be okay?” you follow up.

            “She will be,” your aunt says, her eyes drifting to her elder daughter next.  “Are you two doing okay in here?”

            “Yes,” Sophie sighs, her fingers curling in closer around you.  In her tone of voice, you suspect she partially blames her parent for how this encounter went, though there’s no good reason to.  “Do you need something, Mom?”

            “It’s Leah,” Selina reports.  “She wants to talk to Jack.”

            “Oh,” Sophie says, looking down to you in contemplation.  “If you want, you two can have the room and I’ll leave for a second.  For privacy.”

            “No, it’s fine.  You can stay,” you answer, looking to your aunt as she opens the door wider, revealing your mother standing behind her with a cell phone clasped in her hand.  “Mom?”

            “Hi, honey,” she says gently.  Your mother pockets the phone again as she brushes past her sister-in-law and enters the room, leaning down closer to the mattress to try and level with you.

            “I’m sorry about that back there,” you gasp.  “I… I just… um…”

            “We don’t have to talk about that if you don’t want,” Leah Arton says, gratefully cutting you off.  You know she’s not any more eager to dive into that dysfunctional abyss than you are.  “It’s about something else.  I… just got off the phone.”

            “What is it?”

            “It’s about her,” your mother says somewhat anxiously, not needing to utter a word to communicate the impact of your sister’s reputation.  Her hands fold into her lap, quivering slightly.  “You… might want to prepare yourself.”

 

End Notes:

Our good friend Carly will be back next chapter.

Please comment!

Chapter 8: Friends in Low Places by Jacksmith

Carly pumped both arms like pistons as she ran, her legs already rediscovering the familiar satisfying burn of powerful motion.  It had been so long since she’d had some real exercise, as she’d simply been allowing her body to pale and thin during the drought of agency in that godforsaken government facility fish tank.  She assumed sprinting would prove challenging for her lungs, but it wasn’t, at least not after she got the blood pumping.

            If anything, all the time she’d had in solitude, letting the emotions broil in her brain rather than in her arms and legs had allowed her to pen up the strength in reserve.  Her skin even seemed to glow a little closer to its more natural golden tanned hue, though she knew this couldn’t possibly be true in the cold darkness of the bunker.

            Regardless, as she settled back into a groove, bounding along and touching down to the ground on the balls of her feet, it was coming back easier than she might’ve imagined.  The girl’s body loved to be fed endorphins, and as she clenched her muscles, picking up the pace, it felt a little closer to the version of herself she’d once known before Jack was ripped away from her. Almost comforting.

            Though not quite, as she was currently running not toward freedom, but on the rubbery path of a miniature treadmill track as it whizzed by beneath her feet, in order to run some kind of test for whoever had imprisoned her.  Carly tried to let this fact roll to the back of her mind so she could just focus on the sensation of jogging, letting her heartbeat create its own percussive pattern to march to, but it was becoming harder and harder, especially with that girl standing over her obsessively tapping away on a laptop keyboard.

            At first, when the hefty metal gate had swung back open into her cramped quarters, Carly assumed Claire was returning for more ominous insinuations and cocksure tosses of her fiery locks, but as soon as the silhouette had entered the space, the shrunken twenty-year-old knew she wasn’t in nearly as intimidating a grade of company.  Quieter and far more composed, the figure that tiptoed meekly toward Carly’s glass cage looked like she hardly belonged at her meager stature of five-foot-four.  As the stranger stepped into the light, her short raven hair framing a doll-like face of porcelain skin and olive eyes that couldn’t even drag their gaze up from the cement floor below, Carly immediately looked upon the young woman not as the comparatively towering colossus that she was, but someone equal to her three-inch height.  Perhaps even a little lower.

            The effect of almost laughable insubordination continued on as the woman introduced herself as Michelle and actually gave a nervous hello to Carly, clearly lacking the apathetic social dominance of Claire, and lowered a hand into the tank, laying her palm out for the tiny blonde capture to embark of her own free will.

            It occurred to Carly that if she refused to climb on, more drastic measures might be employed that involved contorting her body between the iron fingers of a clawing fist, but the mere fact that she was apparently being faced with the “good cop” of this shadowy community made it awfully hard to respect them.  Fighting back a pitiful chuckle at this excuse of a person, Carly hopped aboard, clutching her rag around her body and letting her bare feet sink slightly into the plush padding that comprised Michelle’s hand.  As expected, the woman chose not to clamp her passenger into a closed hand, but kept her palm level and open for comfortable riding.  Good.

            Carly was soon transported a mere thirty paces down the metal maze of a place.  It was disappointing, as the miniscule prisoner had hoped for a broader view of this place she’d need to find her way out of eventually, but she supposed this short tour of the place’s tight architecture had been purposeful on Claire’s part to keep her from wondering too much about her options.

            All Carly had gotten a glimpse of as Michelle carried her out the door and into the adjacent area were a few stacked crates stamped in bold black letters with phrases in a language she didn’t recognize.  Walled in like sardines, even for someone of Michelle’s more modest height and willowy body type, it seemed like a maximum of maybe three people could pass through the tinny thoroughfare shoulder-to-shoulder.  The ceiling lights nearly blinded the girl as they passed beneath them, forcing her to bow a little deeper into Michelle’s palm, so used to the void had she become in her cage during the past couple of days of gratefully solitary confinement.

            Passing into the next room was just as dejecting for how little it offered in the way of usable clues.  Not quite as bohemian as Carly’s living quarters in design, the square box of a room housed a variety of testing implements and was wallpapered with extension cords snaking their way up from the outlets near the floor and into the ceiling.  Their surfaces were too sheer for an escape climb, even if she was in her best shape, and Carly knew it.

            Still, a vacation from her cage was more than welcome.  There would be time to scheme later.

            Twenty minutes later, here she was, warming her body and her mind with a run on what looked comically like a toy treadmill as Michelle, apparently a handler and data collecting-monkey of some sort for Claire, furiously tapped away at her notes.  Carly had been given some makeshift running shoes constructed from synthetic rubber probably molded out of a 3D printer, just to ensure she could run at her normal pace and gait.  Her wrists were strapped with soft padded cuffs and hooked up to the primary console of the machine to read her vitals, but were beginning to dampen as Carly ran faster.  She was enjoying herself more and more now.

            Glistening with a sparkling sheen of sweat, the miniaturized girl insisted on picking up the pace after Michelle softly and professionally suggested she let her know if the treadmill was going too slow, since this test was designed to push her up to her optimal heartrate for physical exertion, and she didn’t appear to be there yet.

            Carly’s chest and back were soaked with a sweet layer of perspiration, painting her entire sculpted form by now as it dripped along and splattered in minute droplets to the rushing runway of the treadmill.  It made the whole process easier to utilize as the landscape for one of her dreamed fantasies that, for a year and a half, only had memory and her own two hands as material.  The quicker she went, slamming her little shoes into the surface below and allowing another bead of gemlike sweat to cascade down the arch of her back, eventually she was able to fade into a pattern and focus on designing her universe how she liked it.

            Once she’d settled fully into the motion, running so naturally that she could’ve done it while asleep, Carly licked her sticky, partially dehydrated lips and let physical sensation become a moldable trick of the mind.  Already she could experience the feeling of a tiny lump of writhing limbs and huffed breaths so small they might have gone unnoticed by anyone who didn’t love it as much as she did.  The tiny form of pliable life materialized on her inner left thigh, taped soundly to her skin so that the protesting, imagined body of her brother couldn’t escape, no matter how much he cried or screamed or lied to himself about enjoying the ride just as much as Carly savored providing it to him.

            Each time her leg was thrust forward, warm and pounding with each pulse of blood through her veins, the entrapped Jack was propelled forth as well.  The tensile strength of the tacky adhesive strip was tested, his frail little body squeezing away and threatening to fly off ahead of the pillar of his sister’s leg in the tangle of the tape.  Just as quickly, though, Carly’s foot would meet the ground with a thunderous smash, anchoring her to the earth and allowing its partner to spring forward.  At this instant, then, Jack would be snapped back, slamming into the curvature of his sister’s muscular thigh again.  For a blink, he’d be coddled into the godlike flesh by the sheer impact tugging him so hard into the massive thigh it was as though the laws of motion desired for him to become one with Carly’s body, and suddenly he’d bounce back.

            Still squeezed into her skin, sopping by now in her sweat that lubricated his body and made it itch like hell even though he couldn’t wrestle free enough to scratch and end the irritating torment, Jack’s journey would repeat.  Carly’s other thigh would sweep by, chafing his face every so slightly against the brushing onslaught and ensuring he was pressed flat back against the inner segment of her leg, mere inches away from her now-moistening crotch just above as these images played through her mind’s eye.

            Everything was over in the flash of a fraction of a second, and yet each trip was a new chance to bludgeon and beat, always ending in a warm and sweat-slogged wash with her thigh: a kiss to her skin to match every blow to his skull. The jog wasn’t even thirty minutes in and already the runner’s high was about to be rivaled by the throbbing culmination of all these thoughts between Carly’s legs.  It was breathtaking, for both Carly and her projected mirage of Jack.

            To help pass the time and ensure her vision was cemented above the depressingly bland surroundings, the girl would allow her eyes to wander as she continued concentrating on the concept of a shrunken sibling attached to her leg.  More than once, Carly caught Michelle, who couldn’t have even reached thirty years old yet, peeking down at her charge a little longer than was probably necessary to check for progress, and always instantly returned her gaze to the computer screen when the shrunken Arton would shoot her an unabashed side-glance.  Smirking out of the corner of her mouth, Carly put this little quirk out of mind for the time being.

            Painfully, the run came to an end after forty minutes of blissful rush, as Michelle swatted a dial on the side of the treadmill and brought it steadying down to a crawl.  Once it was over, Carly detached the cuffs from around her arms, running her hands over the swollen contours of her joyfully exerted body.

            God, it felt good to be back in motion, and even better to do it with the closest approximation she could create of her favorite jogging partner tucked rightfully between her legs.  Absolute heaven.

            “That was good, Carly.  Thank you,” Michelle said quietly, speaking the longest string of words she had yet in this whole functional series of stilted exercises.  She laid a hand on the tabletop where the testing implement had been placed, tapping her fingers against the edge while Carly lowered herself off, taking a seat to catch her breath and let more gleaming trickles of sweat wind their way down her body.

            The rag by now hugged the angles of her body in invitingly complimentary ways, so dark and damp had it become in Carly’s effort to perform at the top of her game, and as Michelle set back to typing, it once again couldn’t help but be noticed that the woman was sneaking glances to her subject when she was clearly trying to appear busy with the typing.  Carly stifled a low chuckle that went either unheard or ignored out of what was apparently embarrassment.  It was enough to make the girl believe she could just sock Michelle in the nose, knock her on her ass, and march right out of here, so weak was she making herself appear.

            The next series of tests weren’t quite as engagingly gleeful for Carly to participate in.  Liquid samples were required from varying orifices and deposited with a needle practically as thin as a hair into tiny cylindrical bottles the size of bowling pins to the three-inch host and placed in a row next to the treadmill for collection later.

            First was a sweat sample: easy enough to provide, as Carly had just pushed herself near to her current limit given the months of inactivity and produced quite the deluge of salty excretion.  Michelle’s syringe with its eyelash-thin tip poked gently over the tiny girl’s skin, collecting just a few drops of liquid from different locations.  First Carly’s hair, next her arms and pits, then down to her back and legs, and finally her feet, which had probably created the most liquid as they emerged from the near-sopping printouts of running shoes in their own little haze of inflamed skin and spicy musk.  Samples were gathered from each miniature wrinkled sole, and placed into the little bottles.

            Next was a blood test.  Carly supposed this was going to be far less painful in the long run if she just went along with things for now in order to keep Michelle’s watchful eye calmed.  So, she took a seat, gripping the hem of her ragged dress and clenching her bicep to allow the hairline needle to pass into her skin.  Despite cringing slightly in anticipation of the possibility of having a blood vessel ripped open, Carly found the process was relatively painless as a couple scant drops of dark crimson were sucked up into the device and squeezed back into their own bottle.  Only two were filled up before this stage was completed, and Carly hardly felt lightheaded.  Michelle was apparently fairly adept at the practice of handling a shrunken patient with her dangerously thin instruments.  It was enough to confirm for Carly at least in part Claire’s declaration that she was by no means the first shrunken guest in these halls.  In some twisted way, it was a comfort to know she wasn’t going to be accidentally butterflied in the name of science, at least not until it was done intentionally.

            A tear sample seemed a little redundant to Carly after all the sweat, but who was she to argue when she had trust to earn in Michelle to make escape later easier?  Taking a seat in the respectful silence of her handler for a moment and tightening her eyelids, the girl allowed herself to imagine a parade of potential emotional images.  The death of her parents, the death of her friends, the veritable collapse of the planet earth.  None of it was particularly affecting, and left her eyes distinctly dry.  The one and only thought that could earn the few necessary tears for Michelle’s sample collection was the concept that she would never possess Jack again in her entire life.

            The stool sample had already been collected after Carly’s most recent bowel movement into her tiny steel toilet, but urine had to be taken in a form untainted by the tube.  Luckily, after chugging her way through a few thimblefuls of water post-run, Carly was more than willing to drain it away into a cup for this peon to take.  It was easy to feel a sense of smug satisfaction to be squatting over a jar and pissing into it purely so Michelle would be kept in Claire’s favor.  Again, she couldn’t help but notice a stray eye glancing her way and darting back just as soon as Carly paid her handler an unembarrassed gaze and a smile as the final sample was deposited.

            Once all this was completed, Carly presumed she was going to be invited into Michelle’s hand to be taken back to her cage.  And judging by the young woman’s cowering personality, she half-guessed she’d be offered a cup of tea and muffins on the ride there.  However, instead a final collection unit was produced and laid before Carly, and before a word had even left either’s mouth, she knew what it was for.

            “Just a discharge sample, from any kind of stimulation, Carly” Michelle said, eyeing her charge’s crotch and nodding.  Her cheeks flushed with some apparent anxiety over this request.  “Please.”

            Blinking, Carly stared down into the open ringed mouth of the container and for a second her vision swam as she pictured herself staring down into it from far above, about to do a swan dive into it.

            Everything else, including an invasion into her veins and her urethra, had been provided without complaint or rebellion, but suddenly this felt distinct.  For years, Carly had been able to keep this most sacred part of herself away from everyone: never allowing a boy to slide his fingers under the waistband of her panties, let alone even get a glimpse of the immaculate entryway to her nethers.  This she’d been saving purely for one soul and one soul alone in the world, and no magician or supermodel on earth could’ve persuaded her to gift it any earlier than that consummation which had failed to take place a year and a half ago in her dorm room.

            And now, being asked to provide it for a complete stranger, and not merely a complete stranger but one who obviously held some degree of fear and even begrudging revere toward the self-appointed little queen, was too much.  Far too much.  It made Carly gag, almost to the point of vomiting up into the jar instead of cumming, but she held firm.

            Not today.

            Ruffling the folds of her mealy gown to appear as though she might be about to comply, thus earning Michelle’s relaxed posture in the nearby swivel chair, Carly instead lunged forward, sweeping her leg out across the surface of the table and plunging her calf along the perfectly aligned sample jars.  In a tiny slosh of her collected bodily fluids and a humorously squealed gasp of surprise from Michelle, the bottles all tumbled to the ground far down below, shattering and intermingling all the blood, sweat, and tears in an unusable mix.

            Defiant, the tiny terror stood with her arms crossed and a sneer etched into her lips, staring down the still-shocked and evidently trembling Michelle.

            “Oops,” Carly snarled.

 

End Notes:

Please comment!

Chapter 9: Just a Little Foot Rub by Jacksmith

            “I heard about Carly’s disappearance,” Dr. Felton utters.  “Do you want to talk about it at all?”

            “Um.  All right.  I don’t know what there is to talk about, though.”

            “Do they know anything new?”

            “They thought maybe she escaped at first, but then they found the guard who was watching her knocked out and tied up in the basement, so I guess someone took her.”
            “How does that make you feel?”

            “I don’t know,” you say truthfully, too conflicted to try tackling the issue.  How are you supposed to feel, anyway?  You wish she’d just give you the answer this one time.  Happy?  Sad?  Enraged?  The sensations are coiled tightly around your synapses and it’s impossible to distinguish now.  “Maybe we should just go for the visualizing thing again, like you said.  I don’t know if I can talk about her… the real her… right now.”

            “If that’s what you want, Jack.”

            “It is.”

            “Then that’s what we’ll do.  Go ahead and lie back.”

            Shutting your eyes and letting yourself sink into the feathery terrain of the pillow atop the psychologist’s desk, you focus on allowing your corporeal form to melt amongst the fabric: the easier to let your mind take its walk around the PTSD-addled block.  Already you’ve lost spatial awareness of your hands and feet.

            “You can do this, Jack,” the doctor encourages soothingly, her words dribbling like warm honey through your subconscious.  “Just let me help guide you through, and remember everything we’ve talked about.  The most important thing: you are your own person.”

            “I am,” you mumble, hardly aware of the words coming out now as you fade completely into the visualization.  “I am my own person.”

 

            The walls knit themselves together from dusty memory as you find yourself on the buoyant cushions of the living room couch.  It takes a moment to readjust yourself, as it occurs to you you’re no longer the length of a human thumb, but instead returned to your full height of over six feet.  Grasping the pillows in your fists, you lay your head against the back cushion, relishing the instantaneous return of bodily security to your psyche.  You can hardly breathe from the sheer ecstasy of pressing your feet against the carpet from a seated position and looking up to the ceiling above, close enough that you could rise up and touch it if you jumped.  It’s as if the world suddenly isn’t so large that it might accidentally swallow you between the slats of a sidewalk crack.  Almost unfathomable.

            You become aware of a weight, dreamily light but nonetheless noticeable against your thighs.  Steadily, you peel your gaze from the ghostly visage of your house and down to your legs, where you discover a pair of lithe bare feet, crossed at the ankles, resting comfortably in your lap.  The feminine toes, slender and dexterous, sway back and forth, pointing up at you on each alternate wriggle.  The pale white soles scrunch, their wrinkles rippling down to the heels, which choose this moment to nudge provocatively at your crotch through the thin denim of your jeans.

            Following the svelte limbs to the other end of the couch, you find none other than your sister, sprawled happily across you at an equally normal height.  Despite coming in a few inches shy of you by comparison, even now, staring down the length of her athletic frame from the tip of her big toe to her dishwater-golden tresses, she appears larger than life.

            “Well, Jackie-Poo?” Carly drones, ruffling a hand through her wavy locks.  Lightly she bounces her heel against the bulge between your legs, ensuring she has your complete attention, as if she didn’t already.  “Are you going to rub them, or what?”

            “No,” you grunt, shaking your head to confirm this declaration to yourself.

            This is it.  This is what you’re supposed to do.  Resist.  Defy.  Become your own again.

            “Aww, c’mon,” she sighs, batting her eyelashes.  “Just a little foot rub?  For me?  For old time’s sake?”

            “No, Carly, I’m not going to do that.”

            “Are you sure?” she responds with a self-important smirk, nodding at your lap as her twinkling crystal eyes break contact.

            Frowning, you look back down and realize with a bracing start that your hands are already squeezed firmly around your sister’s insistent feet, as though an invisible puppeteer was tugging on strings dangled from the great beyond.  Expertly, your palms glide up the length of her tender soles, riding the soft curve of her instep with your fingertips.  Like a practiced sculptor, you caress over the balls of her feet, giving attention to the swollen remnants of blisters earned in pounding basketball drills.  Each toe crevice you massage with your thumb, digging at the pliable skin using ample pressure, just how you know she likes it.

            Reacting like putty at your touch, Carly sinks lower into the couch, stretching her legs out further and closing her eyes to fully savor your skillful handiwork.  A pleasurable murmur slips out, loud enough for you to get the picture.

            “Mmmm… that’s it, little bro.  Right there.  You’re so perfect at this,” she utters as another moan escapes her throat.  The longer you fondle her supple soles, the firmer her heels press down into your groin, not so much that pain is inflicted, but enough that you can already feel a few unwelcome synapses firing in your brain at the aggressive contact.  No matter how much your mind wishes her to stop, your body is reacting otherwise.

            With disgust at the inability of your psyche to follow through on its mission, you release the hold on Carly’s feet with repulsive force, slamming your palms into the pillows again and gripping them for dear life.  As long as you know where all of your limbs are at any given moment, she can’t use you like that again.  Right?

            Your body is your own.  Not your sister’s.  Not anymore.  Never again.

            “Done so soon?  That’s okay.  There’s more stuff we can play,” Carly says, opening her eyes again.  Her feet remain defiantly slumped in your lap where you left them.  She taps her finger against her cheek, studying you for a moment with amusement.  A thoughtful smile creeps over her lips.

            You’ve gritted your teeth and clenched every muscle you have into the couch as though it was about to be catapulted into the next county.  A bead of sweat rolls down your temple.  By sheer force of will, you manage to put aside the thought of Carly’s soft heels sweeping back and forth across your thighs, prodding incessantly at the guilty package inside your jeans.

            “Jack?” she questions at last, her mind clearly already made up about what to do with you next.  Gingerly she pokes her pinky toe into your stomach.

            “What?” you manage.  You know full-well you’re going to hear her whether you respond or not.

            “Don’t you feel funny wearing all those big people clothes again?”
            “NO!” you scowl.  Already it’s clear where this is headed, and you’re not letting it go that way.  Your knuckles turn white from the effort to hang onto the couch and your sanity.

            “Well, I think you look funny in them.  Like a little fish trying to fly,” she comments, brushing her bangs out of her eyes for a more thorough examination of you.  She wrinkles her upper lip and nods, ensuring her notion is correct.  “Maybe you should take them off.”

            “I’m not doing anything you say anymore,” you growl.

            “Oh, is that so?” Carly chuckles.  “Then why is it suddenly so cold in here?”

            You don’t even have to look down to know it; the damage is already done.  On the verge of surrendering, you bow your head and seal yourself behind shameful eyelids.  Indeed, there’s a chill tickling against your bare skin.  You can feel the cushions of the couch pressed on your back and legs, but most potently of all, you can feel Carly’s rubbery heels propped up against your inner thighs.

            “This is better, isn’t it?” she asks earnestly, watching you tremble at your newfound naturism.

            “No.  I… I don’t want it to be like this,” you mutter, not sure if you’re addressing the apparition of your sister or your own painfully naked self now.

            “That’s hard to believe,” Carly says, jerking you back to attention as she squashes her cold sole against your flaccid member.  You lurch, your throat going dry as you feel her silky instep stroking carefully against you, her toes fluttering along your skin.  It crosses your mind to try grabbing her feet and wrestling them off of you, but you know already it would only end with your limbs involuntarily continuing the earlier massage, this time with her heels resting treacherously on your stones.

            So, you only shudder and hang tight to what little ground you have left.  In almost no time you can feel yourself firming at her coaxing motion, and you hardly even have the energy to feel embarrassed about it now.  It doesn’t take long before Carly’s foot, with her digits scrunched for maximum effect, is jabbing against your full erection.

            “Good boy.  You’re almost ready to play again,” Carly whispers.  She lifts one foot up from your lap and traces her big toe up the bridge of your nose, over the ridge of your mouth, and down along your neck.  She pauses, returning to your mouth with her toe, grinding the squishy toeprint against your lower lip.  Rigid as you are already, you let her do it without rebellion.

            “Please,” you beg quietly, already grasping the inevitable but trying regardless to salvage what remains of your dignity.  Your own physical resistance wasn’t even enough.  This is all you’ve got left.  “Please don’t make me do this.”

            “But you want it,” Carly protests softly.  “We both know you do.”

            “It’s what YOU want.  You made me do it for so long, I just… I just c-can’t…”

            “That’s not true,” your sister snaps.  “For a few minutes, before Sophie took you away from me, you felt it just like me.  You knew you liked it then.  And you were happy.  Weren’t you?”

            “I-”

            “WEREN’T you?” she repeats more forcefully, ramming her heel against your genitals again and earning a cringe from you, though not due to busted balls.

            “Yes.”

            The word could hardly be said to have come from your own mouth for all the input you had on its release, and yet your body hasn’t betrayed you.  There’s not an ounce of fiction in that syllable.

            “Look at me,” she coos.

            You force your eyes open again, looking to your commanding sibling at the other end of the couch, awaiting your instruction.

            “Finish it,” Carly orders kindly.  In her left hand is a glass of bubbling liquid; in her right is a silver rod glowing with a luminescent blue from the crackling business end.

            Not having to spend another instant questioning your destiny, you accept the gifts from your sister and immediately pour the chemical compound over your head, letting it soak into your hair and trickle down your cheeks.  In the same breath you plunge the electrified prod against your bare abdomen, holding it in place as the volts are imparted with seismic intensity into your body.

            Oddly, you experience not even the slightest discomfort nor even a twinge of pain as the room churns around you again, your body drowning down into the expanding folds of the cushions until you’re stranded once again at two and three-quarters inches tall, feeling more natural now than you have for this entire surreal trip.

            The fleshy canopy of Carly’s sole hangs overhead, her toes causing the shadows to dance over you as it lowers.  You make no attempt to flee, just like the last time you found yourself in this position, as your sister’s titanic foot plops onto its tiny target.  Not even a twitch; there’s implicit trust that she won’t end you, and that faith is proven correct.  She knows exactly how to handle you, just like you handled her before at your incorrect size.

            The humidity increases, the earthy aroma of her flowery skin flooding your senses with every sweet inhalation.  Her luxurious skin kneads your little body greedily along the malleable valley of each sole crease, eventually rolling you into the arch beneath the row of her toes.

            For a few tantalizing moments she just grapples with you, squeezing you with rhythmic applications of pressure on the pliable underside of each toe.  You relax every muscle in your body, giving your motion completely over to your sister as she playfully slides your limbs into the doughy crevices between her digits, massaging herself and you with each delicate flick.

            Again and again your face sinks into the marshmallowy flesh, allowing you to sample the loamy flavor sweetened by her fruity lotion.  You allow your lungs to fully inflate each time your nose is pressed against her foot, taking it all in.  Taking her all in.

            Satisfied, then, she adjusts her grip, scooping you against the bulbous big toe and working your upper torso into the space between.  Of course you oblige, allowing Carly to embrace you between her largest and second toes, cramming you into the deepest bend of the crevice.  She works you in, smushing you gently against the skin.  There’s no resistance, either, as her heel pivots on the couch cushion, bracing itself to rise.  You let your arms flop against the soft ridge atop each flanking toe while the rest of your naked body dangles below, confident your sister would do nothing to risk even the slightest fear of falling.  And for perhaps the first time in this encounter, you experience no remorse or self-degradation at all.

            This is her show now.

            “I was right, wasn’t I?” Carly sighs mistily as she stares at you down the length of her smooth thigh and shin and up the slope of her arched foot, into the pitiful space between her toes where you’re pinched comfortably against her warm flesh where you belong.

            You gulp down a lump large enough to be your heart and muster a single nod.  It’s all you’ve got at this point.

            “Of course I was,” she giggles knowingly.  She piteously shakes her head for a few seconds in disbelief, probably for all of that fuss you made before.  Her toes hug a little tighter around your ribs, wedging your chest against her foot.  Instinctively you wrap your arms over each digit for extra support.  “Relax now, little bro.  And stick out your tiny tongue.”

            Obeying without question, you let it hang between your lips and look up to the girl’s gargantuan face beyond like a puppy awaiting the call to scarf down its treat.

            “Lick me,” she intones.

            You don’t have to be told twice.  Resting your cheek against the velvety curve of Carly’s toe, you begin to lap at her skin.  Starting off slowly, slicking up her skin with the tip of your tongue, it takes less than a minute before you’re making out with the pale flesh that surrounds you on all sides in a pillowy vice.  Alternating planting deep kisses and long, dragging licks up the inner curve of the toes, you can feel her familiar flavors trickling down your throat in that sweet-and-sour cocktail of citrusy soap and eager perspiration you know so well.

            From below, you can hear the top of Carly’s other foot sandwiching softly into the sole of the one currently making you its humbled servant.  Ignoring the sound at first as simply a move by your sister to keep her leg propped up, you wince pleasurably at the sensation of two massive wriggling digits nudging your legs as they dangle from between the toes.  With a little rummaging of writhing flesh, Carly manages to slide your miniature erection into the flush crevice between two toes, while the opposite foots remains pinched around your sides.

            Totally at her mercy, you lick more ferociously as you feel her beginning to grind tenderly at your groin.  You’re on the verge of sensory overload with her flavorful skin pressed against your mouth, the fruity sweetness of her lotion clouding the oxygen, and her mammoth toes stroking your member against her doughy flesh, but there’s no way you could possibly slow down now.

            Moving gently at first, Carly gradually builds up confidence and speed, fondling your body into the fleshy folds of her toes.  With your dick squeezed into the undulating crevice, it doesn’t take more than a few seconds to feel it firming again at the immaculately applied pressure, just strong enough to tug a reaction out of you without inflicting pain.  In fact, your entire body is practically floating in a state of ecstasy, your lips now smothered in Carly’s skin and the redolent spice of gummy toejam recently cleaned, and your entire lower body caressed against the twin mythic beasts of her bare feet.  She still knows precisely what she’s doing, and you can tell she’s getting just as much out of it.

            Your sister’s soft lips hang open as she gasps out more cloying breaths, savoring the feeling of your insignificant tongue paying wet homage to her toes, and you can see her hand creeping along her toned stomach and down between her legs to find some release.  It’s as though you’ve become part of some new organism now, given life through the pumping moisture and thrusting flesh of this toe orgy, perfectly in sync with the rhythm of Carly’s naked feet: a dance of pounding heartbeats and sweet sweat trickling from her pores.

            The mood isn’t tainted by even the faintest notion of embarrassment as you climax with squealing abandon, spasming and then falling limp into the cradling embrace of Carly’s toes, which hug you even tighter as your weakened form gives itself completely over to her.  Everything feels just as right now as it did eighteen months ago when you pledged yourself now and for all time to your sibling’s pleasurable and gracious whims.  She really was right the whole time.  You see that now.

            “Awww… see, little bro?  All better now,” the girl sighs happily.  She strokes her bulbous pinky toe along your member a final time that sends an orgasmic quiver through your limbs.  “I hope that wasn’t all you had in you.  We’re about to go again.”

           

            “Well?” Dr. Felton’s voice cuts through the haze, drawing you out of the visualization again.  “How did it go?”

            You’re doing your best to process the wild event you just put yourself through, but upon realizing the cumulative humiliation would probably put you into a state of vegetative shock, you instead resolve to blank out your thoughts completely.  Shifting your eyes around the room to anywhere but the woman’s gaze, you clench your hands together on your stomach and curl your legs into your abdomen in order to conceal the throbbing hard-on your dream-state sibling managed to coax out of you with just a few magic words.  Unfortunately, the stain spreading over the front of your pants may be just as incriminating.

            “Not… so good,” you admit.

 

End Notes:

Please comment!

Chapter 10: Very Little Blackmail by Jacksmith

“It may seem like I’m purely disappointed in you, Ms. Arton, but that would be untrue,” Claire Brookes commented sweetly as she grasped Carly into the center of her gloved palm for yet another bruising clench, contorting her fingers tighter and tighter on each repetition.  The entrapped girl groaned, taking her lashing without any complaint, having already guessed such a thing was coming the moment she kicked Michelle’s samples off the table.  It didn’t bother her, even if Claire was squeezing tighter than that overly tanned she-hulk of a security guard ever had.

            The redheaded tormentor continued in a drawl: “Don’t misunderstand.  I am still… unhappy with you after those antics.  But in a way, I’m glad we had this opportunity to be clearer with one another.  Some of the previous subjects just took my words at face value and, I think, never developed a proper respect for what I can do to you if I want.  Which really can be hurtful to a good working relationship.  Don’t you agree?”

            Wheezing as Claire’s leather-bound fingers wound their way back over her legs again, Carly nodded rapidly, feeling her bones creaking inside the vice of crushing digits.  She gasped, feeling a small puff of air refilling her lungs and surprising her as Claire’s fingers loosened again in preparation for the next round.  Her cheeks were flushed and her hair was matted by now with sweat after nearly half an hour of being entombed in the woman’s unforgiving hand, but Carly still held no regret for her actions.

            “Good.  So I guess there’s something we can agree on, at least,” Claire said with a self-assured smile, her thin lips tipping upward for the first time during this meeting.  Her fist pumped Carly again in six rapid motions like a stress ball, causing a few tiny flecks of weary perspiration to drip from the miniature girl’s neck and into the overheating crags of the glove.  “And let me be honest for a second, now that we’ve decided not to hold anything back.  I admire you.  I really do.  You’re not much like most of the other little friends I’ve made in here.  Though I’m sure you already knew that.”

            Grunting through the pain, Carly’s head cleared just enough to consider this.  Claire’s question didn’t really even warrant an answer.  The truth was pretty self-evident in this case.  Who else out there could possibly ever even touch the legacy Carly had created just by being herself?

            The thought was quickly choked back out along with another brief mouthful of air as Claire gave Carly a freshly smarting compression between her fingers, this time actually affixing her thumb to the girl’s stomach to ensure her abdomen was depleted of all life-giving air for just a few seconds.  The pair remained frozen here now as Claire’s fingertip pressed with increasingly vicious pressure into Carly’s navel.

            “Having said that, even someone like you eventually has to learn that, when you’re down to this size, someone else calls the shots.  And in this case, that someone is me.  Hopefully you’ve almost figured that out on your own by now…” Claire sighed, finally releasing her thumb away from Carly’s gut and allowing her capture to heave up just enough air to keep conscious.  Already her previously pink face had gone pale as her vision blurred from loss of air, slipping quickly into a forced sleep.

            “In a way, I blame myself for it,” Claire pontificated, opening her palm just wide enough for Carly to splay out and quiver as her numbed limbs refilled with oxygen and blood.  “I probably sent in someone to work with you too soon after you got here, when I should’ve given just a little more attention myself, seeing as you’re going to be the star of this show soon.”

            Carly coughed, her eyes watering, but even with her line of sight as wavy and wet as it was, she could make out Claire’s face above, still painted with that thick black eyeliner and, even more pronounced, sincerity.  If nothing else, the woman did believe every over-chewed word that passed between her lips and into the ears of her abused prisoner.  The shrunken Arton was unquestionably important to Claire, no matter what message her crushing fingers was providing right now, and it was beginning to become clear to Carly that she really was merely a link in the chain of something far bigger than herself, literally and figuratively.

            “But we’re here now, you in my hands and me with all the power,” Claire relented, rolling her palm from side to side and causing Carly to rock.  “So we’ll just work with what we have.  What do you say to that?  Fair?”

            Carly tilted her head up, blinking in a mostly failed attempt to refocus her gaze, and at last became satisfied with facing in the general direction of her tormentor’s monumental countenance framed by those flaming tresses.

            “It doesn’t matter though,” Carly spat, her lip trembling.  “I know you… won’t let me go.  No matter what I do.”

            “That’s true, but let’s not forget I can always make things significantly more painful for you if I choose.  Or I can make them comfortable.  It’s really entirely in your hands.  Well… mine, still, technically, but I’m willing to make it a collaborative effort if you are,” Claire corrected as those shadowy fingers coiled back around Carly like cobras.  She squeezed again, stretching the hair on Carly’s scalp and causing her to squeal under her breath from the strain.  “Aren’t you at least a little bit afraid of that?”

            “NO!” Carly growled loudly enough to nearly inflict a tremor through Claire’s body, setting back to thrashing and squirming as soon as her limbs were allowed the space in the crevices between the giant woman’s digits.  The black-clad operative paused the assault with her fingers again, reflecting quietly on the rabid little spitfire entrapped in her hand but no more demure than when she was loose on the world.  Her pale cheeks seemed to tighten as she regarded Carly and took a step forward in the dank habitat used to house her prize miniature’s tank, lifting her leg and slamming her right boot with a confident clatter onto the surface of a crate.

            “You’re a special little girl, Carly Arton.  You really are,” Claire said, actually allowing a chuckle to spill out, and lowered her fist down to her arched knee.  Unfurling her fingers as she scooped her palm into the curve of her joint, she nudged a now-lightly hacking Carly out of her hand and onto the summit of her bent leg.  “Sit tight.  I’m going to show you something.”

            Carly, not having the physical strength to do much else, sucked in a few precious gasps of air as she sprawled on Claire’s knee and looked down the steep descent toward the steel-toed boot below as the redhead’s porcelain fists lowered.  She clenched the taut fibers of the woman’s leggings in her clammy fingers, clinging tightly enough that she wouldn’t start to slip off in either direction.

            Claire’s fingertips pinched around the thin copper-toned zipper and drove it down the clicking teeth, allowing her foot to be tugged free.  The lengthy appendage unsheathed steadily, her skin pearly enough to be reflecting its own moonlight, her toes possessing the dexterity to curl independently.  It arched from its leathery confines and planted beside the combat-ready accessory with a hard enough impact to almost jostle Carly from her dangerous perch.  For a moment, Claire simply wriggled her toes against the crate, readjusting to their airy liberty, and then set to work again.

            It only took a flick from her knuckle into Carly’s thighs to rob her of her precarious grip.  Gulping but refusing to cry out, the three-inch prisoner toppled downhill, struggling to right herself on the near-sheer surface of Claire’s shin.  Her descent slowed momentarily as she rolled over the woman’s bare ankle and landed atop her foot, but she was in motion again soon as Claire lithely lifted off.  Bracing with her heel, she quickly swept her foot over the flopped end of the boot and slid it back into place, easily bucking Carly from her leather-scented bronco and allowing the girl to cascade into the pitch-black toe section.

            Her tiny mouth hung open from the brunt force enforcement as well as a more general existential crisis to fathom she was now facing the same situation she had placed her brother into so many times not even the most accomplished statistician could estimate an exact total.  Carly quickly found reason to shut her lips, though, as she felt the spongy undersides of Claire’s toes squashing down into her stomach and head.

            Lost in a tangle of toe flesh and the sour seasoning of sweaty skin stuck in an especially tall boot for too long, Carly held her breath for as long as possible as the entire tower of black footwear launched off the crate and set back to the ground.  Gravity threatened to swallow her up as she was bounced from the roof and back to the acrid insole on every other step, but Claire’s toes kept Carly anchored, wrapping her into their moist arch and ensuring what little of her wasn’t yet damp with her own sweat was made sticky with Claire’s.

            Feeling as though she’d been lifted from her own body and swapped into someone else’s, Carly numbly faded into the floating nightmare of being worn in a shoe.  It was almost too much to believe.

            Admittedly, the sensation was different than she’d been expecting.  Sure, it was a little revolting to be demeaned beneath this unworthy creature’s body, but Carly had experienced things just as sick back in the hands of some vengeful law officers with screwy moral compasses.  No, her wonderment came from an entirely separate realization of being kept under a human foot.  It was less physically painful in the immediate sense and more simply crushing for the constant incoming beatings from all sides, never allowing a moment to gulp down a full lungful of the tainted, rancid air.  Not that she especially wanted to sample the oxygen clouded so thickly with Claire’s foot odor that most of the oxygen molecules had probably been infected with microscopic toejam granules.

            Unfortunately, there wasn’t much choice if she didn’t want to pass out, and Carly was determined to see this exchanged played out to the end.  Her size still precluded overpowering anything larger than a mouse, but the girl knew she’d be damned if she allowed Claire to see an ounce of weakness now, even in the face of being literally trampled beneath the weight of her body.

            The hellish ride continued for more than a couple of minutes.  Carly decided to just focus on counting her own heartbeats, which had sped up initially but eventually settled back into a relaxed rhythm once she convinced herself that Claire wasn’t planning on snuffing her out just yet.  There seemed to be some effort to conserve her fragile limbs beneath the potential liquefying power of the woman’s peds, ironically with much more care than had been displayed when she was being teased inside her fist just before.  Once they were in a pattern of rising and falling, even, Claire’s toes seemed to relent their pressure as much as possible when they’d touch back to earth again, though there still seemed to be an effort to slide Carly’s arms and legs into the slippery crevices of skin between the toes.  It was even harder to get out once they had been wedged inside, as Claire appeared to have some skill at controlling her toy, though she was by no means perfectly adept.  With some effort, it was possible to worm out and retreat back under the doughy arch of the toes again.  Managing a grin in the dark, Carly wrestled to free herself from the woman’s grasp again.

            If the shoe was on the other foot, literally and figuratively, Claire would not be able to move a single finger in protest.  Carly would control every twitch of her measly muscles and every beat of her cowardly little heart.  That much was certain.  In fact, the very thought of this reversal fantasy was enough to soothe Carly into completely ignoring the pounding of the monstrous toes above her, so much so that she hardly noticed when at last the shell of her musty prison was zipped back open and Claire’s gloved hand entered the hazy hollow to retrieve her shrunken detainee/toe ornament.

            She was pretty sure she’d enjoy having Claire under her foot almost as much as Jack.  But not quite.

            The room was enormous.  Surely the largest she’d encountered thus far, and, Carly had to suspect, the most expansive that could easily be fit into this installation and still keep it as covert as Claire required.  The ceiling stretched so high she had to crane her neck to trace its winding rafters, but this wasn’t the primary thief of her attentions.  A source of light was flooding the walls with its blue luster, spilling it into every corner such that no shadow could remain untouched by its cobalt embers.  The glove had wrapped itself back around her abdomen, though, restricting her vision of its source to a slit between the cracks of two digits, making it impossible to get a good glimpse.

            “I’m trying to work here, Claire,” a voice groused from somewhere beyond the clawed fingers obscuring her view, sounding much younger than Carly was expecting.  Judging by the urban twang in his syllables, she might’ve mistaken him for someone who’d accidentally wandered into this metallic purgatory off the street in search of a hotdog stand.

            “Take a lunch break, Goodwin.  I’m giving our new guest the grand tour.”

            “The MRD isn’t really in shape to-”

            “No tests today.  Just trying to make a point,” Claire snapped, cutting him off with a jagged note of civility in her tone that instantly silenced the youthful employee.  “Please leave.  Now.”

            The shoes of whoever was apparently arrogant enough to openly argue with his boss dragged along the floor, the plastic tips of his laces ticking at the cold concrete.  A door slammed heavily behind him, leaving Claire and Carly alone once again in this spacious sanctuary that evidently housed the heart of the entire operation.

            “I’m hoping you’ll start to learn, Carly.  This is about something greater than you, or me, or anyone we’ve ever met.  With my masterpiece here, once it’s finished, we’ll be tapping into something never before seen by our entire race, and have it all for ourselves,” Claire breathed dreamily.

            “You mean you’ll have it,” Carly corrected.  She was quickly bored of trying to peek around Claire’s fingers at the light source, not wanting to give her the satisfaction of appearing curious.

            The redhead shrugged, with no effort to hide it as she kept her eyes dutifully glued to the luminous structure ahead, whatever it was.  She let the pause linger as she looked on with almost lustful zeal.

            “From what I’m asking of you, I know it may appear you’re in the middle of the biggest bad blackmail deal of your whole existence.  Your cooperation in exchange for your life.  To be fair, that’s not entirely false, but it’s so much more complicated than that, Carly, and I think once you have a better understanding of that, you’ll want to help me,” Claire insisted.  “Because if you do, you’ll find it can help you just as much as me.”

            “You don’t have anything that I want,” Carly hissed, wrapping her arms around her shoulders and dipping her chin down to the level of her knees as she leaned against the caged fingers.

            “Maybe not yet,” the woman said.  “But see, I have a feeling that once we get a clean sample set out of that little body of yours, it’s still not going to fill out the full roadmap for us.  Whatever’s locked inside of us… all of us… we haven’t been able to study yet, because none of the subjects have been related to each other.  Until… now, that is.”

            At this, Carly’s head perked up just a little higher, but she still didn’t look Claire back in the eye.  A cool breath caught inside her ribcage, webbing over her skin from the inside.

            “Something tells me your brother is the other half of the key to unlocking this entire puzzle, Carly.  And once we have him… have the samples we need, anyway… well, I won’t have much more use for him,” Claire explained, at last spreading her fingers open wide enough for Carly to take in the titanic machine in all its hypnagogic glory.  “But I imagine you might.  Won’t you?”

            Finally Carly was given cause to lift her head back to the totalitarian emeralds imposed inside Claire’s exacting eyes.  Her own had welled with tears.  Sniffling, she nodded solemnly, realizing there was no hope of concealing this deepest and fiercest of her desires.  After all, there was nothing left on this planet she truly wanted anymore, except to hold her brother in her hand and become his goddess once again.

            The girl, at last broken down to her essence, crawled forward in Claire’s cupped palm, turning back toward the walled fingers, which parted, allowing Carly to gaze on the prototypical Matter Reduction Device.

            “So you see,” Claire crooned lovingly as she gazed upon the bizarre sculpture of lead and copper crisscrossing over in entangled wires, reinforced casings, and glowing specks dotting the inside of a translucent orb that lit up the entire room in its luminescent glimmer like the most holy of Christmas lights.  “This isn’t me blackmailing you.  It’s me… giving you back the one thing you have left in this life.  And a chance to step into whatever is coming next for our world.  What do you say?”

            Carly felt herself nodding, a sublime warmth emanating from inside like it hadn’t in what felt like decades.

            Who gave a damn what was coming next for the world?

            Her world was about to come back.

 

End Notes:

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Chapter 11: A Sock in the Closet by Jacksmith

            If you were capable of being completely honest with yourself, you suppose you could explain why you chose to spend the past twenty minutes wearily dragging this parachute-sized knee sock out from the musty depths of the closet and out into the center of the carpeted space that once served as Carly’s bedroom.  But then again, it’s much less taxing to just sit here like you’re doing now, kneeling over it like holy ground and hanging tightly onto the bubblegum-colored fibers as though you’re about to be launched into the stratosphere.

            It’s impressive in the worst way possible, really, that you managed to find this sock: even more so than the fact that you managed to move it on your own.  This room has been cleared out of all your sister’s former possessions for the past six months at least.  Every item was categorically ripped from the house while your mother leaned against a wall and dry-sobbed.  Those sticks of frilly furniture and sequin-coated grade school scrapbooks served as yet another painful source of guilt for your parents, when your shrunken body and soupy mess of a trauma-addled brain are already doing plenty in that department.  As far as you know, most of Carly’s belongings were tossed into storage, to be picked through at the leisure of some hopelessly baffled servants of the criminal justice system.

            This lonely piece of footwear, faded from repeated washings and speckled with dingy dust specks, it seems is the final testament in the entire home to your sibling’s existence.  Like a tombstone. A soft, fluffy tombstone in which you can entangle your fingers and feel strangely at peace.

            And incidentally, a tombstone that has retained that signature aroma of pungent grass stains, salty-and-sour sweat, rubbery insole, and acrid strawberry-lathered flesh, all eternally coiled into every thread of that sock.  You would’ve once been revolted, maybe even choked by the sticky scent, but no more.  Now, it’s simply the many flavors of Carly, preserved in a time capsule shaped like a tube sock.  That’s probably what allowed you to track it down as you sauntered numbly through the old bedroom, suddenly picking up on its ghostly haze creeping from the back of the closet.  Of course, this thing has been lying forgotten in the dark for nearly two years, so the fact that you can still detect it like a well-trained bloodhound probably ought to be a tad troubling.

            Fortunately, you’ve decided not to let such humiliating technicalities bother you as you steadily lower yourself into the folds of the sock, plush and inviting in its warmth amidst the unfamiliar and sterile gray of this room.  It can’t hurt to rest for a moment, after you just exerted yourself so thoroughly to lug the massive cotton tube out from the dredges of memory.

            When you hold still enough to let your heartbeat settle down below normal, your ears practically trained to pick up on individual pellets of dust touching down to the carpet, the sense of clarity would be maybe just a little too eerie if not for the voice you’re able to make out echoing inside your cranium. Rebounding. Refusing to be forgotten for even a day. The exact sound of every syllable, every turn in sentence so perfectly tuned that your brain can reconstruct her so convincingly you surprise even yourself when you hear Carly’s imaginary words penetrating your brain.

            “That’s it, little bro. Give big sissy’s sock a hug. She made it nice and warm. Just for you.”

            What’s the harm in giving yourself a little break once in a while?  That’s what Sophie is always telling you, anyway.  Eventually your whole body is pressed down into Carly’s solitary basketball footwear, and just as easily you allow your face to sink into the wooly texture like sand on a beach.

            “Why don’t you give it a good smell? I want you to be able to find yourself home if you ever get lost. Like a puppy. My puppy.”

            Your nostrils constrict, obeying a voice that you created just to retake some control in this moment, ironically by handing control over to your distant and possibly no longer living sibling.

            “Deeper, Jack. You won’t get it good enough like that. Breathe deep.”

            Inhaling stronger than before, you let the weaker scents leftover from her overworked flesh and pounding sneakers rise into your skull, tickling the recesses of your brain and setting off a spark inside along with the warm voice itself.

            “How is it, little bro?”

            God, you can get it all now.  Mud smeared into the doughy crags of her sole.  Gooey toejam compressed between every tanned digit.  It’s all there, as recognizable as though you had your face pressed into the actual skin of Carly’s workout-moistened foot once again, your heavy breathing timed perfectly with the beating of her pulse felt through the pink flesh.

            Goosebumps roll down your body from the nape of your neck to the tips of your toes.

            “Lie down, Jack. That’s it. It’s okay to use my sock. You have my permission to sleep, little bro.”

            Resting.  That’s all you’re doing now.  Resting.  Maybe taking a nap.  Maybe getting a little warmer.

            “You have my permission to dream about me.”

            Can you help it that this sock happens to be laid out where you chose to prostrate yourself?

            Well, yes, it definitely can, but this isn’t the time to be arguing with your subconscious.  You huddle your limbs in closer to your torso, rolling over and cocooning yourself in a fold of the stale fabric.  As you dip your face back into the sock, lush with that balmy tang that’s been melded into your synapses countless times, something else occurs to you.  For that sock to be back there, so deep in the corner of the room and your mind that it was without a partner, that probably means it missed the dirty laundry basket when Carly tried to toss it in after a tough scrimmage so long ago.  And that means it hasn’t been cleaned: its last purpose was to be snugly wrapped around the powerful contours of your sister’s arch and heel, conforming to her shape and dutifully absorbing her essence drop by zesty drop, storing it away as though through divine intervention for you to unlock its putrefied ambrosia at this moment.

            You weren’t really aware until now that your jaws had been hanging open, your tongue limp on the dank cloth floor.  But now that you’re thinking about it, you can feel the pleasant sting of noisome salt in your throat.  All those tastes you were bred on for five years come flowing back in.  Your teeth clamp back together, gathering as many of the pink fibers into your mouth as you can wad.  Chewing proves difficult for a moment, but the fabric is still mealy enough to make it possible to bite in and savor the sweet acidity contained therein: a homey blend of bitter grunge and shoe-baked flesh.  It’s almost as if you’re closing your mouth over the firm toeprint of Carly’s pinky, cushiony and plenty tough to handle your biting and desperate samplings.  Drool is practically dripping from your lips at the thought.

            Following with this pattern of barely keeping up with your body’s baser instincts, you realize your hand is already halfway tucked under your stomach and working its way down into your pants.  There’s plenty of room, of course, as you’ve already adjusted your awkwardly sprawled stance to account for the sore erection you’re now sporting.

            “Jack?” your mother’s voice croons with calculated gentility, yet it still catches you by surprise as your hungrily focused trance is shattered.  You flinch and regret it immediately, knowing you’ve probably just given the poor woman cause to lie awake half the night overthinking the fact that she startled you.  “Are… you all right?”

            “Y-Yeah.  Yeah, Mom.  Sorry,” you say soothingly, knowing full-well she’s the one that needs to be calmed down now as you turn to look up at her and see her eyelashes batting faster than normal.  She’s descended onto her haunches and even leaned in closer to the carpet, putting herself as near as possible to you.  You know how acutely she hates to tower over you, and with a twinge of embarrassment, you realize she must’ve been in the room for a minute at least, carefully stooping an inch at a time so as to avoid causing an earthquake with her footsteps that might frighten you even worse

            “What are you doing… in here?” she asks.  Her eyes dart furtively to the sock you’re still lying atop, but to your undying gratitude, she’s apparently decided to skip over questioning why you’re cuddling with a used piece of your crazed sister’s footwear.  Thank Christ you’re wrapped up in fabric to conceal the fact that you were not only sucking on the reeking sock but on the verge of humping it.  Perhaps the saddest part of all is that if that little piece of information were to come to light, your mother probably wouldn’t even try to admonish you, and simply shower you with nauseated pity.  It’s almost enough to make you feel sick.

            Sighing, you stare blankly up at her, weighing your admittedly poor options for answering the question.  Your mother’s looming face is a canvas painted with the complicated emotions she’s been carrying around ever since your resurrection.  Those irises, a more metallic blue than Carly’s, are cold and devoid of the laughter they once held.  Her lips are pursed, tighter and pinched.  Deeper creases in her skin have formed around her eyelids and lips from stress and long nights standing outside your bedroom door wondering if she would awaken you if she entered and stood guard while you slept, despite the fact that you’re of course already lying hopelessly awake and listening for her footsteps.  A few silvery hairs you don’t remember seeing a year ago have sprouted in the golden tangle of her often-unkempt locks that hang down past her shoulders.

            You’ve already let almost a full minute of awkward silence roll by, and this exchange isn’t doing anything to resolve itself as your mother gazes down at you, her hands splayed out on either side of the sock.  It’s only going to get rougher if you don’t cobble together some kind of repartee now.

            “Just… walking. I thought, um… I mean… Dr. Felton thought…” you sigh, steadily gluing this lie into place. “…she thought it could be… good sometimes to, you know… revisit places I have certain, um… associations with.”

            “Oh,” your mother says, trying to sound understanding but clearly concerned and suspicious as a few furrows etch into her soft brow. She brushes her bangs out of her eyes as she dips her head lower toward the floor, tucking a tuft of those silvery-blonde locks behind her ear. You can tell she wants to intervene, but still doesn’t know the first thing to say to you now. You’re practically a stranger. For once, it’s a relief. “I’m sorry if I’m interrupting.”

            “No, it’s okay. Um, actually… I’m… glad you’re here, I…” you continue, hoping to shift the subject away from your current activity as quickly as possible. Feeling your erection dejectedly wilting inside your pants, no longer incriminating you, you stealthily unfold yourself from the sock fluff and clamber back to your feet. You feel your own heels sinking softly into the fabric, kissed by the memory of Carly’s odiferous aura. Every step, just for an instant, makes you consider the possibility of the threads unbinding themselves and sewing you into the pink cottony beast, entombing you in this rancid relic of your sister’s lasting power. Perhaps awaiting the sheer impossibility of those toes eventually winding back through the mouth of the sock, the sole filling up the space between the fibers bleeding rose-tinted sunlight, the skin pressing itself into you as though coming home finally. Would you even want to fight back?

            “Yes?” your mother whispers after your lengthy pause. She folds her fingers together, so slowly her nails don’t even clack together. Her palms have flushed together as they near you, a soft monument before you on the carpet as she patiently waits out your stumbling transition.

            “…Dr. Felton… I mean, me too… thought it might be good to, um… you know, t-talk… just talk with you. For a little bit,” you manage, realizing your previous evasion tactic has turned into a genuine desire. “Since we… haven’t really. Yet.”

            “I know,” Leah Arton breathes. Though the monolith of your weary mother remains still before you, given the privileges of a bug’s eye perspective, you can make out the veins shifting in her arms, the sinewy muscles tensing, and the lines under her darkened eyelids tightening. She’s just as anxious as you are. You watch a lump travel down from her jawline and down the nape of her neck, pressing out against her skin, challenging the sounds to flow past it and escape her lips. “Do you… want me to hold you, sweetie?”

            “Yes please,” you gulp, at last taking a step off the altar of Carly’s ratty sock and onto the bedroom floor. Your parent’s fingers shakily unfurl, but quickly stiffen protectively once you’ve placed the tiny sole of your foot onto the cold spiral of her fingerprint. The rest goes surprisingly easily as you take a seat in her palm before she dares move another inch, lifting you off the ground and rising back to her full height with her opposite hand cupped around you in a fleshy shield. Certainly she’s held you plenty of times in the past year and a half, but when you think hard about it, it can’t have numbered more than in the multiple dozens total.

            “Maybe I should… sit on the mattress?” she offers, her face immediately twitching and practically stretching in her somberness. “No. I’m sorry. I… we can go somewhere else, honey. I didn’t mean to-”

            “Hey, no it’s… okay. You know, I’ll kill two birds with one stone,” you say, throwing in a shrug and a forced chuckle for good measure. Your mother frowns, returning your gesture with an uneasy smile and a nod of her own before carefully lowering onto the stripped bed, easing onto its cushy white surface an inch at a time, always ensuring you haven’t budged in the padded center of her hand before making her next motion. A few stray hairs have fallen over her forehead, and you can tell she wants to wipe them away, but doesn’t dare do it and risk giving you the slightest possibility of falling from her hand, let alone breaking this quavering eye contact.

            Whatever’s about to happen, you’re here for the long haul. Shakily you wrap your hands around your mother’s thumb and hug it to your chest.

 

End Notes:

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Chapter 12: Mother to Son by Jacksmith

If the awkward silence was deafening before, it’s definitely ear-piercing now. You study another few lumps lurch down your mother’s throat in the interlude, her lips pursing tighter and tighter until you can tell she’s chewing it on her lower teeth, probably on the verge of breaking the skin. That might be an indication it’s time to act, for better or for worse.

            “Mom,” you utter softly, nearly startling her. “I know I haven’t done much talking… to you… about what, um… you know… all of everything.”

            “It’s all right, honey. You should be able to take all the time you want,” she says, clearly having been coached by Dr. Felton. “I’m here for you if you want me to be. When you’re ready.”

            “I think I am,” you say, and you can tell this revelation is far more painful to her than it ever was to you. “Ready, I mean. If you… are…”

            “Please, sweetie,” she sighs. The tears are already glazing over her eyes, building up in a water wall over her irises and on the verge of tumbling down if she blinks. God, and you haven’t even started yet. This is going to be rough. Not that you didn’t already guess that. “Please let me help you. Talk to me.”

            Your throat, dry and sticky, seems to catch on itself as you open your miniscule jawline again to begin spitting up some ugly truths. She knows the basics, of course. Some of the milder forms of torment you sustained in Carly’s “care.” Most of it made her cry. Some of it made her disappear into her room for the night, sobbing as quietly as she could to try not to keep you awake even though you were already lying there in your state of self-pitying insomnia. But you also know that if you have to keep some of this inside you much longer, you’re going to burst like a tiny balloon, overinflated as though Carly herself had those massive lips of hers pressed hopelessly against yours, blowing puff after puff of warm air and dizzingly traumatic recollections into your throat.

            “I… don’t really know where to start.”

            “Anywhere you want. How about… how it… happened,” your mother says, fighting through with more gusto than you would’ve expected. The emotional training from your doctor is probably all that’s keeping her glued together right now. “Just let it out.”

            “Okay.”

            The next twenty minutes pass in a haze as you detail the very beginning as excruciatingly as is necessary. Some of it you thought might be more difficult to peel apart in exact terms given the time differential, but you’re shocked at how simply much of it comes out as though the whole six-year affair began just a few hours ago. The fateful trip outside to gather the yardwork tools, the thunderstorm, the surreal trek back inside at your new height after your clothes had fallen around your diminutive naked frame, the sensation of pissing yourself before the towering, writhing mass of your little sister’s bare toes. You aren’t able to get much past the point where Carly first picked you up at less than three inches tall and swore to teach you a lesson before your mother’s eyes begin seeping the salty deluge. Frankly you’re shocked she made it this far. Some of them splash down into her palm, splattering your shins and shirt, but you have to keep moving. Your own knees have begun to wobble as you stagger down against her warm skin.

            Next comes the real meat of a story that stretched on into the oblivion of half a decade’s time: the first time Carly exposed you to a now-very familiar form of training as you were pinned under her toes, molded to her soles, forced at first to fill your lungs with her rank efforts, which as it turned out was only a warm-up act for the true act of degrading patronage to come.

            “S-so… t-then what?” your mother warbles, her cheeks stained with tears and practically sparkling. She’s putting a great deal of effort into keeping her wrists from quivering, so much so that she has to root her palms down against her thigh and pull herself higher up on the bed, crossing her legs beneath you for added stability. It’s not really helping. You can tell more than anything she wishes the story would end now, but knows just as much she has to allow you to continue. Has to allow these wretched visions into her brain in full.

            “M-Mom, if you… want me to stop, I-”

            “No!” she almost shrieks, causing you to flinch, and then herself as a repercussion. “Please, honey. Let me in. I just want to be able to understand everything you need me to. Help me help you.”

            “Okay.”

            “G-go on. Then what?”

            “Then she, um… she came back from being outside again. She’d… done more work. And, um… she put me back at the end of the… bed,” you continue, your eyes flashing to the edge of the mattress, able to instantly recall your exact position on the sheets, and more specifically even, what Carly’s feet were doing as they drew closer to you like hungry jungle predators in all their filth and animal attraction. “And she put her… feet out in front of me…”

            “Like this, you mean?” your mother intones more confidently than before, sniffling to fight back the receding tears. She unfolds her leg out from under the other, propping her heel up, as her hand lowers down toward it and tips, giving you greater incentive to disembark the fleshy gangplank.

            “I… um…”

            Blinking, you find yourself face-to-sole with the bare, wrinkled, mildly leathery foot of your mother, not quite the towering beast of Carly’s basketball-suited dogs, but still possessing enough of the same hereditary information that if you squinted, you might convince yourself you’re staring at the feet of your sister again twenty-five years in the future. If you hadn’t been rescued when you had, that might very well have been a conceivable vision in your later life. And after you’ve made that revelation, it’s hard not to gaze at the fleshy contours with the idea that this is no longer your parent but your owner, decades down the line, if you simply hadn’t divulged anything to Sophie and allowed the madness to unfurl for a quarter century more. Before long, it’s impossible to believe anything else.

            This is Carly. As she might’ve been.

            “Well? Like this?” your mother softly questions, growing more imperious with each syllable, the quivering emotion of before turning to curiosity. “I just want to make sure I understand, honey. Like I said. No need to be nervous.”

            “Oh. Right, right. Um… y-yeah, kind of like that, yes, she, um… propped them up. And laid back” you breathe. Unconsciously you reach out, tapping your minute fingertip at a deep wrinkle in Leah’s tanned heel but retracting just as soon as you make contact with the textured flesh as though an electric charge was delivered through her skin cells from a wall socket. The sensation is so painfully familiar it’s hard not to come within range without the same instincts kicking in.

            “Okay. So she laid you in front of them,” your mother sighs, readjusting herself on the bed and stretching back, mirroring your loose description of the scene until she’s laying back in the same position that your teenage sister did for the first of many times those years ago. The images of past and future are melding by the instant. “What happened next?”

            In another second you find yourself staring up at the twin soles of your older sister… no, no, your parent, her toes bouncing and wriggling with much the same fervor as her daughter’s often did. Clearly, any tension that was keeping your mother’s body in a state of semi-paralysis during the earlier portion of this conversation has dissipated.

            You suppose that’s not something to lament. The more relaxed you both are, after all, the easier this will be. Even if it is making you feel increasingly strange to be standing so near to your mother’s feet for perhaps the first time at this size. Though not, as you come to realize, uncomfortable. Certainly you’ve learned to get over feelings like that.

            “Um… then… then she asked me to… told me to kiss her foot. To show her I respected her,” you utter. The words come more easily than you expected, too. Even easier than they came when you first detailed the account to Dr. Felton or even Sophie. Why is that? Is it just that you feel bizarrely more at home in this instant as you stare up at a gigantic pair of a family member’s feet?

            Not merely a family member, though. Your future. Your lost future. What might’ve been.

            Happiness?

            “Kiss it?” your mother repeats back, at first sounding like a questioning attention to reason out Carly’s logic, but then the words reach your ears a third time, softer, and more self-assured. Not a question anymore. Not your mother’s words anymore. “Kiss it.”

            “Y-Yeah. That’s what she… said.”

            “Why don’t you show me, sweetie?” Leah says naturally, not a syllable out of place or a single crack in her tone.

            “What?”

            “You heard me. I said I want to understand. That’s what you want, too, isn’t it, Jack?”

            “W-Well, yeah, but… is it… really n-needed to… to, um…”

            “No, it’s not,” she sighs, her feet swaying slowly from side to side and regaining your full attention at every tiny motion of her muscles or flick of a toe, such that her words start to sink directly into your subconscious, only flowering fully there as you study every intricate flex and fold of her sole, the constantly drifting colors of her flesh from a pale white to a flushed pink and every shade in between. “But… you wouldn’t mind showing me, would you, little boy?”

            “What did you say?”

            “I said you wouldn’t mind showing me, would you, sweetie?”

            “N-N…” you choke out, at this point not even dedicating much more than sensory recognition to the sentences dripping like warm honey out of the woman’s lips, sultrier than you’ve ever heard her speak in her your life. Those toes, slender and more dexterous than you’ve never noticed before, bob and weave, curling together and allowing cool air to sweep between the weathered crevices.

            “Come on. Don’t be shy. Just give me a little kiss,” she insists innocently. “Kiss Mommy’s foot nice and sweet like you did Carly’s. And then I’ll finally understand. Won’t I?”

            “Yes,” you agree, braindead and attuned only to the fleshy walls resting so peacefully before you, in need of a connection only your lips can provide in order to bring this madness full-circle. The logic fits. It has to. Nothing has felt so right in weeks, even. Why should it be wrong? Who’s even asking? Who?

            The scent is light, something you would’ve have distinguished from the normal carpet fibers and dust particles that collect into underside of the feet of every giant in this massive earth you now inhabit, but it’s there. The creamy, intoxicating balm of Leah’s lotion thunks against the back of your skull, the lotus-tinged aroma of your mother’s freshly washed feet flooding your nostrils and seemingly distributing to every part of your body, filling you up and allowing you to almost float on the balls of your feet as you advance closer to your pillowy fate.

            The texture comes next, of course, as you brush a knuckle against your mother’s skin. The tanned exterior lacks the almost buttery, rippling consistency of Carly’s sun-kissed soles, given the doubled lifetime of experience out in the light contained in these weather-beaten insteps speckled with dry skin and porous former blisters, but it’s still comforting in its earthiness. Besides, it what you’ve would’ve had to look forward to in the future. Placing your palm flat against it, digging your fingers into the grooves of each wrinkle and curve, you allow its motion to guide your own like a waltz. The surface is constantly reforming as your parent moves under your touch, egging you on. Deciding you’re not one to stand in the way of compassion and emotional catharsis, however it’s delivered, you close your eyes and lean in.

            Lush flesh meets your lips, inviting your tongue out from between your teeth seconds later as you slake your tiny muscle and its meager volume of saliva over the infinite wall of matured skin and calloused contours. Feeling that old familiar hunger cloying its way back out of your stomach and to your jaws like a plague putting you through its nauseous paces, you alternate puckering your lips against the firm sole and dragging your tiny tongue in between every curved valley of her sole.

            “Thank you, Jack,” she coos, euphoric relish evident in her throaty tone as her entire body loosens into the mattress, relaxed by your moist gestures. “I think I finally understand now.” A second later her foot lowers over top of your body, gently pinning you beneath its weight, but it does absolutely nothing to impede your aggressive progress in messily kissing every square inch of skin you can get your mouth on.

            You wish you could respond, but all you can manage is a pitiful peep in between breathless pulls of your lips against the humid wall of luscious release disguised as a feminine sole. When your eyes flash open again, just for a blink, you’ve transported yourself years into the unknowable and impossible beyond that you’ll never be able to live, the goddess laying before you no longer bearing the compassionate countenance of your mother but Carly’s, just as radiant and mighty as ever. She hasn’t changed a bit in twenty-five years.

            “It’s good to have you home, little bro.”

 

End Notes:

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Chapter 13: Her Sex for Science by Jacksmith

Carly latched herself into the metallic void above as she perched at the edge of the lab table, studying the opaline fingertips belonging to Michelle as they pressed and sealed the transparent rim of the containment tube. It held the small, sloshing sampling of urine she’d once again offered up after Claire’s most recent demonstration of physical aptitude for making the three-inch prisoner’s life a living purgatory. The pale flesh compressed at the lid, briefly losing even more color, if such a thing was possible, as Michelle’s fingerprints were smeared along the plastic curvature.

            Eyes falling back to the jet-black plain of the tabletop, the miniature titaness of mind and spirit watched a last bead of sweat trickling down her bust, having just made the ticklish journey along the soft incline of her neck. The salty bead disappeared beneath the fabric of her makeshift jumpsuit, dissolving into the fabric and melding with the circular stain collected around Carly’s breasts after another half-hour of intensive treadmill pounding to work up enough sweat for a fresh sample. Swiping her thumb over her upper lip, Carly’s finger wound its way across her cheek, offering the cooling remedy of her digits momentarily to her balmy skin before finding a loose tuft of her dishwater-golden locks and twirling dreamily into their silken folds.

            “Thank you, Carly,” Michelle said uneasily, not having easily gotten over the unrepentant rebellion of her finger-sized charge after the way the previous sampling session had ended.

            Carly didn’t quite care enough to offer eye contact at this show of timid gratitude, but she could perceive a modest quiver in the young woman’s lip as they ejected the words. The slightest of tremors that inflicted undulation on each sound. For what reason, Carly didn’t know, but she couldn’t help but savor the sensation of another human being expressing a lack of confidence in her presence. It was affirming in a way she hadn’t been able to experience after all these months of belittling abuse.

            “Now, um…” Michelle rotated back around in her chair to the opposite counter, fumbling quietly with an assortment of beakers and implements neatly laid out in a line on a white towel, then returned with a fresh container pinched between her willowy fingers, setting it on the surface again a few inches from Carly. Wisely, the woman had elected to stow the completed samples well out of the miniature hellion’s reach once they’d been filled with her blood, sweat, tears, and piss. “Now we just have one more.”

            The sexual discharge. Again saved for last. Eventually Carly gifted the woman with a glance, even going so far as to withhold blinking despite her post-exercise dehydration. Her lips steeled and arms folded behind her ramrod-straight spine, she betrayed nothing in the glaze of her crystal irises, and she could see Michelle was just as anxious of the test going poorly again, which intrigued the youngest Arton.

            Michelle could easily snatch Carly up in those expansive, pale palms and commit any number of atrocities with the tools spread out on the opposite table, anything from inducing an orgasm herself with a swab to jamming a needle into Carly’s nether region and sucking out the necessary fluids. And judging by the newfound presence of large and potentially frightening hardware displayed in obvious view behind Michelle, more-than-probably at Claire’s request, Carly knew her kidnapper must’ve authorized more effective means of completing the test if she didn’t comply this time.

            Yet in spite of this insurance, in spite of her massive strength advantage and complete immunity to consequence now, there was something there behind those raven strands of hair that dangled over Michelle’s olive eyes. Nervousness, curiosity, and maybe even fear.

            All of which were traits Carly knew how to mold like putty, no matter how small her hands were now.

            “Yes,” Carly said, the velvety musical note of her potent voice apparently startling Michelle, who all but flinched at this heretofore unseen gesture of engagement. The tiny twenty-year-old had to fight back a satisfied grin from creeping over her lips.

            “I think you already know what it is,” Michelle said, recomposing quickly and straightening her back against the chair as she leaned back in over the table, resting the heel of her hand against the corner. “We need a sample of fluid from your vaginal canal.”

            Carly suppressed a hearty giggle at this last bit of phrasing, taking a few steps toward Michelle’s rigidly positioned fingers still curled around the miniature container. Steadily she worked a falsified stumble into her step that felt oddly foreign to her, a girl who couldn’t remember the last time she hadn’t placed her feet upon the earth without self-assuredness oozing from every pore.

            “Yep,” she said, lowering her head again, taking a deep breath as she settled into the full act. “I… I know.”

            “There’s no need to be upset. It… won’t have to hurt,” Michelle said, flashing a glance to the steely toys glistening behind her in the dim iridescence. Her free hand brushed through her dark bangs, trembling slightly as those ivory fingers threaded between each follicle. The wheels of her swivel chair squeaked as she pushed gently off the floor on her bunker-wear boots, creating grateful space between herself and the miniscule actress perched on the table. “I can’t leave you alone in here, but I can give you some room if it helps you.”

            Nodding, Carly sunk down to her haunches and slid her hand inside her tunic, clasping her palm to her distinctly unmoistened nethers. Huffing another gasp of theatrically anxious oxygen, she set about squirming her arm every which way while her hand remained relatively still inside. She knew she really had to sell this.

            The rhythm was easy enough to find. Like a familiar dance that, tragically, no one on the planet had yet demonstrated they deserved to witness.

            Except for one, of course.

            “We just need enough to fill up to the bottom line on the vial,” Michelle explained, wincing at the obvious effort the three-inch girl was displaying after so much silent stillness.

            Grunting, Carly spilled onto her side, curling into the fetal position as she worked even harder to perjure masturbation. Her toes curled into the balls of her feet, whitening and furrowing her tiny bare soles as she established a pumping pattern.

            Burying her chin into her chest, out of Michelle’s sight, she allowed herself a smirk. Carly knew if she was allowed to continue much further in this fashion, it would be enough for just about any ordinarily hormonal human being on the planet to pop a boner or wet themselves, respectively - for Michelle, though, she could tell it was becoming agonizing. She really had to congratulate herself.

            “Anything yet?” Michelle asked.

            “N-No. No. I’m sorry.”

            “It’s all right. Just concentrate.”

            After several minutes of continued dryness, though, it had apparently become too much for Carly’s overseer, who had taken to pinching at the bridge of her nose so she could hide behind a hand, her vision darting from one dank corner of the cell to another.

            “I could turn around if that helps you,” Michelle said, shifting to thumbing at the button of her jacket.

            “I’m sorry,” Carly lied, swallowing loudly enough to send a message. “I really am.”

            “Don’t be,” Michelle insisted.

            “I don’t want you to use the things on that table.”

            “I know. I don’t want to have to. I… won’t. But Claire will if you can’t cooperate.”

            Carly chewed the corner of her lip, maintaining the same vacant expression of sorrow and helplessness, even though the gears were turning rapidly enough to generate sparks just inside her cranium. There was her opening.

            “Can you help me?”

            A hollowing quiet as devoid as the bunker itself followed as Carly locked with those massive olive eyes again, refusing to stutter view of her baby blues for even a heartbeat.

            “What do you mean?”

            “Please.”

            Michelle seemed to withdraw into herself, shrinking before Carly’s eyes as her arms folded over her stomach, her lips pursing and paling to the same tone as her icy skin.

            Despite the crane in her neck required to stay engaged with the massive face above, Carly felt more as if she was watching Michelle reduced down to a sniveling miniature at her feet, ready to be curled into her toes and rolled beneath her sole. And effectively, she was.

            “I can’t,” Michelle said, her voice dropping to a wispy shell of Carly’s. “I know it doesn’t seem fair to you… whoever you might have been before being gone, I don’t know… and… but… but the work… it’s too important. We can’t… not until we’ve found out… how.”

            “What do you mean?” Carly intoned, a pure note of innocence fused into the syllables as she tilted her head like a confused puppy - not for an instant betraying her glee over the setting of the terms. Meager as the information was, it was plenty to satisfy the girl for now. “I meant… can you help me… finish?”

            “Oh. You… you mean…”

            “Yes,” Carly sighed demurely. Wrapping her fingers into the folds of the clothing, she slid it off her shoulders and over her head, letting it pile up around her ankles until she was left bare before Michelle, who immediately shuddered but kept her cool, and this time, Carly thought she could comprehend why.

            So simple. So weak. It was like playing with a doll again. One far less interesting and fulfilling than she used to, but still, Carly was prepared to work with what she was given in these vile conditions.

            “I… I could get an, um…” Michelle muttered, her free hand rummaging on the adjacent table for a cotton swab in a glass box next to the industrial tweezers, though her attention remained paid in full to Carly. Her pupils dilated, drinking in the miniature blonde madwoman.

            “No,” Carly said, hovering somewhere between opinion and commandment, the latter of which was instantly followed by Michelle, whose gargantuan hands, now having developed a mild twitch, returned to alight at the edge of the table by her plush fingertips.

            “Then how-”

            “Can you do it?” the girl whimpered, lowering down to her back and spreading her legs wide, careful to maintain the same comically fearful shaking as before to keep up appearances for the entirety of this grimly humorous show. “J-Just you? I… I don’t think I could with… with one of those, it might… hurt too much, I…”

            “I understand,” Michelle said, almost on autopilot as her index finger extended softly from a loose fist, descending reverently above Carly’s prostrate form, the shadow of her digit cast between the tiny breasts, until the center of her fingerprint’s spiral was proffered just above the delicate lips of the patient’s holy region.

            “Go on,” Carly said. “Please. I don’t want Claire t-to… I, I mean… p-please… don’t let them hurt me. Michelle.”

            The utterance of the young woman’s name seemed to spur her into action, as though the sounds themselves were drops of honey poured from Carly’s lips and into the center of Michelle’s brainstem. Her fingertip lowered onto the shrunken girl’s flower and set to work massaging the cusp of her lips with the care of one trying to pet a sleeping butterfly’s wings.

            Almost immediately Carly released a genuine moan, a trail of sticky reactionary juices dribbling from between her legs and into the grooves of Michelle’s fingers, which only increased the vigor of the aid, but of course the youngest Arton’s mind had drifted to a more ideal location the exact moment Michelle’s hand made contact.

            She wasn’t locked in Claire’s maze-like fortress any longer in underground God-Knew-Where.

            She was back in the paradisiacal solitude of her bedroom, her every muscle melted into the hot-pink comforter draped over her mattress. Her panties and socks were kicked daintily to the carpet as she cupped Jack into her palm just above her chin after a thorough exploration of his precious body under the writhing might of her tongue, a light glistening of perspiration glazed over her chest from the sheer anticipation of it. It was time.

            For the moment. The one she’d been having wet dreams about for six years now.

            Her legs curled in closer, wrapping around Michelle’s finger, which only encouraged the girl further to sink into the minute passions of this wild act. Carly’s tiny soles clasped to the flesh, a marriage of sweat and pre-cum, squeezing together until every other sense was focused in the epicenter of her pleasure, where her hand was now moving, the ghostly memory of her brother still peacefully perched in her hand, lovingly awaiting his reward for so many years of servitude to his rightful owner.

            Orgasm arrived much more rapidly than Michelle was probably expecting, though for Carly it was an inevitability. Pearls of ejaculate squirted across the tender underside of Michelle’s finger, providing the towering woman with a surplus of sample and an even greater supply of emotional embattlement, but these facts were miles distant in the diminutive girl’s subconscious as she passed Jack’s imaginary frame through her fleshy barrier and deposited him inside her body, feeling his legs thrashing to bring her just as much joy as he was receiving by being invited into her being, and she knew then beyond a shadow of doubt that she couldn’t give up hope until it was made real.

            Suddenly the kindling Carly had felt in her heart while bathed in the artificial glow of the Matter Reduction Device was requited with reality. Claire was offering partial salvation with the return of Jack, something Carly was willing to move heaven and earth to see come to fruition, but now through Michelle, she could see the possibility of a complete renewal.

            Everything she wanted. No compromises. No bowing to the monsters that had wrenched her away from her birthright, and Jack’s birthright as well.

            The flame inside was growing, its light revealing a departure from this seemingly infinite hell where the world could pretend she wasn’t the goddess she knew she was. An exit, previously locked away to her.

            And this pathetic little woman was going to be her key.

 

End Notes:

Apologies for the delay between chapter posts. Life gets in the way sometimes. Please comment!

Chapter 14: Freak in the Sheets by Jacksmith

            “Jack? Honey?”

            Your mother’s words echo so distantly in your skull she might as well be a continent away. In the vaguest sense, you’re aware of the feeling of her fingers pressed into your legs, cradling you in her palm as you tip over the edge toward the bedspread not so far below.

            Is that what you’re reaching for? Earth, ground? The safety of the world below that you can actually recognize?

            Your lips part, exhaling a warm puff, and dragging your mouth against the desiccant hill of flesh that constitutes the ball of your mother’s foot.  It’s at this particular moment you realize that, in the traumatic flash toward a lost future, your subconscious took hold as it so often does, puppeteering the invisible strings hooked to your back muscles and dragging you over the edge of her hand and closer to the slender, plump-toed feet that have crossed into your vicinity as Leah Arton did her best to break down the emotional barrier still, evidently, caked over your brain.

            “Jack. Jack, please, sweetie, talk to me?”

            “Mmm…” Words feel impossible to shape in your throat as your tongue rolls out over your teeth and flicks at the landscape of tanned femininity, inviting that flavorful combination of sun-weathered skin, stale lotion, and floor lint into your cheeks. Like a distillation of Carly’s own flavors that your taste buds have become so versed in over the years, but matured like a fine wine. A tingle rushes through your digestive tract: the sensory shiver of one who hasn’t eaten in a long time. Subtly, a rumble emanates from inside your stomach, vibrating your thin torso and probably your parent’s hand as well. If your mother’s ped happened to be adorned with even a shred of toejam or grit, your jaws would’ve already lapped it up by default.

            “Jack?”

            The voice quavers every time it repeats the syllable of your name with increasingly indistinguishability, filled with salty remorse and befuddlement as she simply tries to keep you from tumbling out of her hand in your semi-drunken haze. You feel her thumb sliding under your knees and pinning into your tiny hips, trying to ease you deeper into the plush plain of her palm and protect you from yourself, but your every constricting muscle forbids it, tensing tighter at her touch. So, you feel her retract just as quickly, Leah’s thumb brushing back along your pants and resting at your ankles for safety.

            For several more minutes of numbed silence, your top half drapes over the curved ridge of your mother’s titanic hand, your cheek rested against the supportive surface of her foot. She shifts it steadily, hoping to prop you higher up in her hand without disturbing you, only serving to sidle a longer portion of her wrinkled instep along your face.

            Hungrily, your tongue lulls back out of your mouth, savoring the tour of this massive object your spirit still firmly believes to belong to a futuristic Carly, even as you linger tentatively back at the entrance to the present moment. It’s savory, a little spicy, and most of all, comforting. Your subconscious won’t let you make the return to your mother’s palms just yet. Not until you’ve recharged.

            Your miniscule taste buds ride the curvaceous waves of the paled sole, monumental and bulbous as an incoming tide formed of human flesh. Every wrinkle reveals a new shade of the flavors and textures, creamier in the deeper ridges of each but firmer and weathered where she walks the most often.

            God, it’s been so long. Where even are you anymore, and in the scheme of the universe, does the answer have even an iota of impact?

            Eventually you feel your whole body squeezed into the buoyant terrain of Leah’s foot, having finally tossed yourself over the curved edge of your parent’s defensive hands. Away from those fingers restricting your access to your rightful location in the world, beyond the need to question issues of superiority and humanity, and basking in a moment where you’re safe in a big dangerous planet, plastered on the sole of a goddess, with the tang of her foot flesh coating your throat.

            On either side, you spot the expansive width of her palms flanking you, cupped in case you slide off. Though it’s totally unnecessary. Your every bone is dedicated to keeping you centered atop this altar of female flesh and blood.

            “T-This… this is what h-happened to you, isn’t it? All… all those years…” By now she’s as paralyzed by shock as you, or perhaps just terrified of snapping your mind too violently from a waking daymare and wounding what remains of your fractured reality. “This is what she did to you, isn’t it? What she m-made...”

            Your only response is to continue slurping, sinking deeper into a self-constructed void as you spread your thinning saliva to every sole wrinkle you can stretch toward. Given enough time, you’d cover them all a hundred times over and then do it again.

            “Oh, my poor, poor baby,” your mother cries from on high as she watches her last remaining child debase himself on her naked foot. Her tears splash against your back, going completely unnoticed. “What did she do to you?”

 

            “Your mother told me what happened,” Dr. Felton reports from above, having waited as long as she could from a professional standpoint for you to pipe up from your pillow perch. She seems to be catching on that you’re not in much of a talking mood today.

            Who could blame you?

            “Oh.” It takes a lot to muster that syllable without your stomach folding into itself in mortal humiliation. You only agreed to come to today’s session after your mother expended all the tears in her body begging you to talk to the doctor about the zombified regression you experienced the day before. Still, it’s tough to recline on this pillow atop the woman’s desk, where she can observe you in your shameful entirety with the knowledge that you drunkenly slobbered across your parent’s giant bare foot.

            At this point, you’d be content divulging that, immediately prior to your outburst, you dragged one of Carly’s old socks out of the closet and jammed your nose into the hot pink fibers in the hopes of dredging up a sensory museum of your sister’s sweat. Just about anything would be less embarrassing to cover, come to think of it.

            “I understand why you wouldn’t want to talk about it, Jack,” the doctor offers gently. “But in a way, I’m glad this happened. I know that must sound confusing. But there is a reason. I promise you.”

            You perceive the soft tap-tapping of her fingers alighting on the edge of the desk, still well-distanced from your pillow. Concentrating, you can feel the subtle change in the air temperature as her lukewarm exhalations sift down over you. Like always, it’s relaxing, but you doubt it’ll be enough to help you this time.

            “Mhm,” you grunt.

            “Just try your best to answer, Jack, even if it’s difficult, and I’ll show you why you could use this occasion to your advantage. When it happened… before… you were telling your mother about some of what you experienced with Carly, yes?”

            “Yeah.”

            “And while you were telling her, you started to go through what you have when we try our visualizations, yes? A feeling of false reality, invading?”

            “Yes.”

            “I see. I believe, then, that being in a physical situation that allowed for you to act on those visualizations prompted you to do so. I know that’s frightening, but you’ve been through a lot, and it only means your body is doing whatever it can to survive, while your mind does the heavy lifting. Which means we just have to retrain your mind to allow you to sit in the driver’s seat, and you’ll be on your way. Does that make sense?”

            “Y-Yeah.” You wish with all your heart you could believe that.

            “Then I want you to try something new for me, Jack. I’d like to help you enter another visualization, like some of the others we have before. Confronting Carly.”

            “Oh.”

            “Just hear me out, Jack, please,” Dr. Felton wheedles. You can hear the click of her glasses being adjusted on the bridge of her nose. “Before, we’ve concentrated on trying to build up your courage in imagining her. To show you that you don’t have to be afraid. But now, I think the most important thing is to prove to you that you can not only stand against her, but resist, physically. By doing that, you’ll take back everything. You’ll… take back yourself. Does that make sense?”

            “S-Sort of.”

            “I know it’s a lot to take in. All you have to do right now is decide if you’re ready to try. Face Carly. Tell her you don’t belong to anyone, you belong to yourself, and show her that you’re strong enough to fight back against anything she can throw at you. You know all of that’s true now, don’t you?”

            “Yes,” you lie, at last allowing yourself a brief glance up at the mountainous doctor as she spouts so many things you can’t help but doubt with every microbe of your being.

            “Good,” Dr. Felton beams, clasping her long fingers together as though saying a prayer. “Now, lie all the way back, close your eyes, drown out everything else around you, and focus on only my voice…”

 

            Even more speedily than normal, the wispy shards of your reality in the psychologist’s office are traded out brick by vision-sifting brick for darkness, and then the stark opposite: a blank, rippling canvas of a sky, shaded at jagged intervals like ocean waves stained a deeply blinding white, and dotted occasionally by cartoonishly designed pink flowers.

            Then you recognize it. It doesn’t take more than a few seconds of looking around to realize you’re under the sheets of your sister’s bed: a location you recognize well after many a night spent taped to Carly’s toes as she slept, the sheets above creating a makeshift night sky as you struggled to find rest in the humid cave of unwashed linens and even more egregiously unwashed basketball flesh.

            Of course, this realization is confirmed beyond the slightest chance for wonderment once you regain control of your senses and note that five wriggling, squirming toes, drenched with salty excrement and caked with soggy sock lint, are currently jammed inside your weakening jaws and dominating your tongue with their muscular grasp. Toes that are, incredibly, the correct size of toes rather than the towering, meaty spires you’ve known them to be for six years, but toes nonetheless that are deposited inside your mouth.

            They can only have one owner; you don’t even need to see a face. You know her by the flavor as you dutifully suck her mealy digits.

            A distinctly normal-sized Carly’s soft heel rests comfortably at the side of your head, her sole embracing your cheek, as she enjoys your pampering services. Her toes flex to touch your molars and spread your filth to your every taste bud. You know she’d happily pinch your uvula between her toes if she could reach it. Following the slender, toned leg up along the bedsheets and beyond your vision in the billowing sheets, it occurs to you that most of your own body rests on the bed as well, returned to its former height of over six feet, but still consigned to the exact same location in life: the end of your sister’s bed, with some part of her foot filling your mouth.

            The visualization went off the rails nearly as soon as you arrived inside it, making Dr. Felton’s guidance all but useless now and marooning you inside your twisted mind, but you do manage to remember some of her tips. It’s now or never.

            Gathering all your strength, you part your lips and wrap your hands around Carly’s royal ped, prying the ball of her foot off your teeth and her curled toes off your tongue, long-ago dried of saliva after spending so much in service to her skin. It takes some effort, as you feel your sister’s powerful calves pulsing and resisting against your rebellion almost immediately, but you manage to thrust your sister’s foot out of your mouth.

            Was that all there was to it?

            It surely can’t be that easy.

            Wait, how do you wake yourself up again?

            A flash of sunlight through the window meets your dilated pupils as the sheet is flung off your concealed body, revealing all your well-informed suspicions were correct as you huddle at the end of your sister’s bed like a lapdog while she reclines on the pillows at the opposite end, a complimentary yellow sundress hugging her athletically-sculpted form. It’s certainly not an outfit you’re used to seeing her in, given her affinity for more casual wear, but you’re not going to start questioning the setting when, more importantly, your sister is wearing a noticeable quantity of liquid fury in those crystal blue eyes of hers, glazed over with just enough passion to let you know she’s enjoying it too.

            “Well, little bro, what have you got to say for yourself?” she demands instantly, crossing her arms over her chest, and flipping her dirty-golden locks to one shoulder. Before you can even begin crafting an explanation, a pale left sole, wrinkled and bursting with sprinting muscle, clasps down over your neck, impeding your airflow and most of your capacity to speak.

            “Uh… guh…” you gasp, letting your arms fall to your sides meekly at Carly’s other foot hovers menacingly over your face, letting the sunlight flicker between her dancing toes. Frankly, you’d probably prefer having her sole flesh hugging the curves of your head again rather than continue to drink in the disappointment in her face. Guilt hits you immediately and with unforgiving vengeance.

            “I don’t mean literally talk, not yet anyway,” she scoffs, rolling her eyes, but a smirk quickly creeps back over her lips. “I’m sure it’s hard to keep track of time down there, with that cute little head of yours getting mushed up, but I told you you’d be sucking my foot for two hours, not one and a half. And last time I checked, one and a half is not the same as two. Is it, little bro? You can talk now.”

            “No it’s not,” you report.

            “Good boy,” she simpers, patting your lips with her heel, then swiping her big toe along the tip of your nose, granting you another fleeting whiff of their pungently sweaty zeal. The tickling sensation almost unhinges your spine. “Now, I’ll forgive you this one time, cuz you’re my favorite brother in the whole wide world.”

            “Uh-huh.”

            “And who’s your favorite sister?”

            “You.”

            “You got that straight, cutie,” she says with a wink, drawing her fingers through the cascading yellowish locks as she tilts her head to the side. She releases a sigh and begins to massage her sole along your Adam’s apple. “I get why you went against me. I expect a lot out of you, after all. But you have to remember, little bro, we had a deal. Didn’t we. You remember the deal, don’t you?”

            “Uh…”

            “Let me refresh your memory, then” she says, politely steepling her fingers in her lap. “I promise to take care of you, for the rest of your life, feeding you, protecting you, loving you… giving you a reason to get up in the morning. And all you have to do is listen to every word I say and devote every breath you take to licking my feet. Now, I think that’s a pretty good bargain, don’t you?”

            “No.”

            The word is a surprise for both of you. You can almost perceive the false bedroom walls shivering at this break in the norm.

            “What did you say?” she chuckles.

            “I said it’s not a good deal. And I’m done being under you, I’m done being… yours. I was never… yours. I’m mine.” With that, you grab hold of your sister’s bare feet once again, shoving them away from your face and throat with explosive aplomb.

            This act of defiance turns out to be much simpler than you expected, as your sibling is currently weakened by throes of uncontrollable laughter: belly cackles so deep that tears are already streaming down her face while you wait patiently, still curled up at the foot of her bed, clinging desperately to some invented shred of dignity.

            “Oh, that’s so cute, Jackie-poo, it really is. I love that you decided to come up with some jokes to entertain me,” she coos, her head sinking back into a purple pillow for support. “That’s a good new job for you. Whenever my foot isn’t in your mouth, I want you telling me funny, cute things like that. Which, I know isn’t a ton of the time, but-”

            “It’s not a joke,” you fire back, finding the improbable ability to rise to your haunches, actually putting you at eye level with this mad goddess of a twenty-year-old. It’s a tad sobering for a moment, but you stand your ground, even sidling off the bed in the process. Carly, meanwhile, remains relaxed as she melts deeper into the sheets, observing you with serene amusement.

            “Why’s that?”

            “Don’t you see?” you utter, hardly believing it yourself. “I’m… beating you right now. I CAN say no to you. It’s possible. I see that now. I’ve… already won.”

            “Oh, sure you said no in a dream, little bro,” Carly mocks loudly. Her booming, sugary voice floods your eardrums. “Try it in real life and you’ll bend like a little piece of gum. And fit right back inside my mouth. Like always.”

            The walls of the bedroom vibrate again, more violently this time as the bitter truth strikes at your soul. Any distinguishing features of your sister’s nightmarishly girly personal space has faded away, until the walls are stretching outward, brightening and shading as though the entire room has been covered in her flower sheets again. As if you never made it off her bed in the first place. As if you still have her foot blocking your voice and stamping out your will.

            “I know you’re not afraid to try and fight back, Jackie-poo. That’s how you escaped in the first place. But that doesn’t mean a thing. Not when you’d come back to me in a second if you had the chance.” Your sister’s voice echoes louder and louder, reverberating and filling in with the same tenacious force it always had when you were her three-inch pet and she was your Everything.

            You can’t even be sure she’s the same size as you any longer. Every time you blink, the space seems to bend between an average bed and a monumental throne serving its behemoth of a blonde so huge that she could now bury you under a single greasy toeprint. Some fragmented part of you even wishes she would.

            “That’s not true!” you spit, turning on your heels and marching away toward the distant doorway as fast as possible to close the distance.

            “Just come back whenever you decide to remember that you don’t even exist unless you’re under me, where you belong, little bro,” Carly sings out sweetly, so potently she might as well have her lips pressed to your ear, her tongue flicking at your skin. “No matter how far you wander, no matter how many people lie to you about the truth to turn you against me, there will always be a place for you in my shoes.”

            Meanwhile your own footwear, leaden and painful with every new step, finally deliver you to the bedroom door, which you crank open by the brass handle with far more force than should be necessary. Gasping for air in the suffocating counterpoint of your subconscious, you step out of the visualization, your old doubts now replaced with new ones.

            “After all…” your sister giggles after you, pointing her foot to the ceiling like a ballerina, flexing her shapely limb and letting the sunlight fill in the milky wrinkles of her divine sole. “…SOMEBODY’S gotta suck these toes for me!”

 

End Notes:

Please comment!

Chapter 15: Star of the Show by Jacksmith

            “Okay, people. Let’s look alive.” Claire Brookes stood before the Matter Reduction Device, bathed in its prototypical lunar glow that radiated almost as brightly as her emerald eyes. Behind her was a row of several technicians with their bespectacled pupils bowed to the ground, not allowed to embrace as much of the light. Though the woman’s spine was ramrod straight, she kneaded her gloved knuckle between each finger, cracking and popping the joints, her lower lip etched just a little shorter than normal.

            The machine, drawn from someone’s most fantastical science fiction nightmare, hummed with rebellious life while the dazzling blue orb powering it crackled louder by the minute. Flanked by the curved edges of the machine’s casings and bound in a million multicolored wires connected to every possible outlet without threatening a fire hazard, the invention that held the potential power to shrink and grow its subjects held attention of all like a newly arisen idol. However, it wasn’t the light upon which everyone’s gaze was fixed, but the singular white square in the center of the room shielded behind translucent blast shields, all affixed beneath a dimly lit rectangular grid aimed squarely at its epicenter.

            In that epicenter sat a three-inch tall girl: blonde, slender, and rigid as a miniature Buddha statue. Her legs were folded, her hands placed in her lap. Carly looked even less nervous than Claire as the pair of them held an unblinking staring contest from a twenty-foot distance, though Michelle, who huddled on a chair at the end of the line aggressively studying the device’s every move, looked more anxious than any.

            “Cross your fingers,” Goodwin muttered at his superior, his fist already around a lever as he inched it forward, the fingers of his opposite hand dancing across a touchpad keyboard.

            “Why?” Claire asked abruptly.

            “I don’t know. Luck?” he said, stifling a chuckle and rummaging at his disheveled hair once the device’s settings were optimized.

            “There’s no such thing as luck,” the redhead snapped. “And anyone who thinks so has no place on this staff.”

            “Okay… touchy, touchy,” Goodwin murmured, not particularly bothered by this thinly veiled threat given his necessity for the job. “Everyone ready?”

            “Yes,” Claire said. Her eyes narrowed in on Carly through the glassy barrier. “What about the star of our show?”

            Her lips remaining unbudged, Carly nodded her head a single time. Her fingers slid down the side of her calves and wrapped slowly around her bare heels in anticipation.

            “Star, huh? You want me to say lights, camera, action?” Goodwin piped in.

            “Just pull the damn lever.”

            “All right. Let’s get the show on the road, or whatever,” he said. Hand hovering over the panel for another second, he planted his thumb into the center of the screen.

            The orb throbbed with color and energy. Everyone surrounding the clear encasement protectively posted a hand before their eyes. Even Carly was moved to blink as the grid above lit up with the same azure light and flashed in a singularity of the thunderous mechanism’s power.

            When everyone’s pupils had readjusted to the low luminosity of the makeshift lab, there was a palpable exhalation of disappointment as a collective unit, none more potent than the one expelled between Claire’s lips.

            Carly remained peacefully seated in the center of the expansive size alteration field, still the size of a thumb, a tiny smile curled into her mouth.

            At least one victory was experienced in the room. As much as the diminutive girl wanted to regain her former size, glory, and toy, that wish was currently dwarfed by the desire to see Claire thoroughly distressed over her own failure. It was too satisfying not to smile.

            “Well?” Claire’s clawed hand was already clenched into the scruff of Goodwin’s food-stained excuse for a lab coat. The woman, in her combat boots and towering black-clad leggings, gazed down at the considerably shorter man, her green eyes on the verge of flaming into a pyre. “What have you got to say for yourself?”

            “Me? You’re the one who told me to go ahead with a first trial even though I’m still missing six-three terabytes of necessary data to align her DNA signature with the… look, I’m not going to spend another four hours explaining Step One to you,” Goodwin grunted, making a meek attempt to wrestle free from Claire’s gloved hands. Her knuckles only seemed to tighten as her other arm braced against his neck, catching him at the back of his skull and pulling his unkempt locks into the leathered creases of her digits.

            “Why don’t you try?”

            “Ow, fuck! The point is, the chances of that test working out were about one in eight-hundred-septillion… all right, maybe a little better because I’m so much further of ahead of everyone else in this room, but it really sort of evens out once you factor in Johnson over there almost overloading the entire machine last week because he put a decimal in the wrong spot.”

            One of the technicians coughed into his fist, but Claire’s penetrating gaze never deviated.

            “I think you’ve spent enough time trying to tell everyone how much smarter you are. I’m just waiting on some results to back it up. Just like you,” Claire said, parsing every word through gritted teeth. Her biceps bulged through the skintight stealth suit as she tested Goodwin’s footing on solid ground. His heels left the floor momentarily.

            “Look, if you want results, you’re gonna need to help me close that gap. Because it’s either gonna take odds so good they’d hit big at Vegas every night for their whole life, or…”

            “Wait,” Claire grunted, placing her thumb over Goodwin’s flapping lips. She nodded in the direction of everyone behind her without turning. “Give us the room. Take the rest of the day… no, the afternoon off. I want everyone back to review the results of the first trial by 1700 hours.”

            Steadily the half a dozen bodies filed out of the room, keeping their chins continuously pointed to the floor, the air of defeat hanging amongst them as they shuffled.

            “Should… should I…” Michelle questioned, taking a few steps closer to Carly’s testing square. Her limbs still appeared to quake from the stress.

            “No. Leave her here. I’ll take her back myself. Go take your break too,” Claire ordered.

            “Oh. All… all right,” Michelle answered. She gave a nod and the most reassuring smile to Carly she could muster, though the shrunken girl’s gaze was still intently trained on the two far more interesting people in the room, before the raven-haired employee exited through the reinforced steel door as well.

            “Or what?” Claire demanded at last, her breath hot on Goodwin’s scalp.

            “…or I’m gonna need the boy. The other one.”

            “Right,” Claire said. “And remind me exactly why you do?”

            The man rolled his eyes, ruffling his facial hair between the tangle of Claire’s accusing fists still clinging to his person. “Look, the kindergarten version of it is that I can’t unlock the universal method for matter control until I figure out what it is that’s inside them… both. It only worked on them and no one else because they share genetic material, that much is clear. But I can’t plug into the variables until I know what they all are. Otherwise it’s just a bunch of fancy-looking bullshit.”

            Claire studied the pitiful man and his blubbering face for a few more moments, her own pinched countenance nearly atrophied from tension, until her cheek muscles and knuckles simultaneously released. Goodwin toppled awkwardly onto the swivel chair positioned in front of the touch panel, missing and crumbling to the floor before Claire’s firmly planted boots.

            “So what you’re saying is, you’re absolutely goddamned useless until I risk bringing even more attention to our operation than I already have, is that it?” Her right foot rose up, the iron base of the boot teasing along Goodwin’s stomach and tracing up to his chest, full capable of collapsing it if she were to shift her weight with enough speed.

            “What I’m saying is, if you want me to keep blindly guessing with what you’ve given me, we’re either gonna die of old age before we crack it, or this girl is gonna accidentally blow up, and then you won’t even have half the equation. Is that enough incentive for you?” Goodwin muttered, somewhat unnerved by the presence of the powerful sole positioned above his fragile organs, but his defiance remained in full force as he fired a fleck of spittle onto the leather gloss of Claire’s footwear.

            Rather than responding, Claire provided a small shove into Goodwin’s abdomen with the toe of her boot and wiped the spit away on his coat, earning a last sputter from the man as she sauntered around the control panel with a single smack of a button that lowered the blast shields tick by tick. By then, the only thing separating the ginger commander from her miniature prisoner was the blank ivory space of the testing floor.

            “Do you hear that, Carly?” Claire said, her hands fastening to her hips. “Big brother is coming to visit you.”

            Heart fluttering faster than it had even during her remarkably potent orgasm under Michelle’s fingers while she dreamed of a far more appealing reality, Carly ascended to her full height of under three inches, though she didn’t bother looking up to meet Claire’s emerald gaze.

            “Are you going to keep that deal?” the girl muttered, the expected answer already evident in her leaden tone.

            “That depends on you,” Claire said genuinely with a shrug. “As long as we get what we want, without making a big mess, we won’t have use for him anymore. Either of you, in fact.”

            “So what does that have to do with me?” Carly scowled quietly. “I did what you asked me to.”

            “Yes you did. And I think that’s worth rewarding. But I need more. I’m not going to risk losing my investments just because you want to fuck your big brother.”

            Carly’s every muscle, bone, and tendon seethed with nuclear vigor, but she remained still, save for her lower jaw, which pierced her soft lip in focus of keeping herself from shredding her throat in unbridled screams of pure rage. She tasted a metallic droplet of blood on the back of her tongue.

 

            “Look,” Carly gasped, drained of air, her heart railing inside her ribcage. Her skin steamed with sweat and pheromones that tingled on every pore. She’d returned to normal. The room around her no longer expanded at an unknowable scale. It was small, private, conquerable.

            Like the world around her.

            “Yes. I see.” Jack’s tiny voice sounded out from the dizzying ground below as he stood a mere inch away from the altar of his regrown sibling’s marvelously sculpted toes, which she tapped softly at the floor, alternately flushing pink and pale as she drank in the sight of him down there at his rightful scale. Cardly could hardly get enough oxygen, her vision had swum into such a vortex.

            God. She wanted him everywhere. Feeling his helpless limbs flailing under her almighty capability, his mouth fighting to sample her, his adorable cock squeezed into every surface it could reach in gratitude. His whole being melded into the oily wrinkles of her sole, coiled around her uvula while her taste buds explored his taut frame. Then pass him between the hills of her breasts and all the way down into the sacred crevice of her ass, where she could take him as a throne, and mark her return to power for absolute certain. And then, finally, pull him just a little further forward, between the pulsing lips and inside her, where he’d be safe forever.

            “Are you all right?” she crooned as she stooped down closer to the floor, keeping her foot perfectly fixed in its pre-ordained position on the ground. She savored the sight of her shadow swallowing him up, like she so longed to. “Did they hurt you?”

            “Y-Yes… before. They did,” he sniffled. “They told me things. Made me believe… wrong things.”

            “Oh, little bro,” she cried, feeling the warm moisture gush from her eyes as she reached down to him, stroking her pinky finger along his tender cheek. A shock ran through her arm at the mere privilege of touching her property again, the hierarchy reordered to correctness again. It was almost too much to bear. Within a minute the tears were splashing down atop her writhing toes. “I’m so sorry.”

            “Why did you let them take me, Carly?” he whimpered, his own voice cracking as the miniature naked boy at her toes broke into his own sobs, which only intensified his sister’s. He was so powerless. So nonexistent without her. “Why did you give me away?”

            “I didn’t. I never would. They twisted you, turned you against me and everything we had,” Carly vowed bitterly. Her finger continued teasing along her shrunken subject’s cheeks, working the pad of her swirled digit down his back and along his thighs, eventually seeking into the crook under his crotch and massaging his dick, which immediately began to firm. She smiled affectionately, her cheeks glowing rosily. “But that’s all over now. I have you now. And you’re not going anywhere.”

            Nodding in comprehension, Jack instantly dropped to his haunches. "Please. Keep me, big sissy. K-Keep me. I'm y-yours, forever. Please. It's all I've ever w-wanted." Crawling forward the remaining distance, Jack pressed his face squarely into the puffy pad of Carly’s monumental big toe. His lips aligned with a ring of her unique print, the clean air he’d previously been poisoning himself with at last replaced by her earthy aroma and salty excretion. Already she could feel his tongue gnawing and suckling at the greasy, ridged skin, taking in as much of her essence back into his body as he could to make up for lost time. Her finger only continued tickling along his junk, even as it nudged him forward and increased the pressure between his delicate face and her heavenly foot. It was a lot of weight, but he could take it. She knew he could. And he would.

            “I love you, little bro. I love you so much,” Carly wept as she cradled his miniature erection in the curve of her fingertip, the stirring inside her quickly transforming to a hormonal stampede that had been held inside her feminine flower for so long, unrequited and unbloomed. It only amplified as his microscopic tongue and teeth fought to service her toe, so weak and so incapable of protecting him from anything, yet willing to risk every heartbeat just so she would know he understood he was back beneath her, where he was needed, and where they both learned to find space in the universe.

 

            “Sophie,” Carly spat out at last, surprising Claire and almost inducing a flinch from the monolithic redhead. “Sophie is how you have to do it.”

            “What do you mean?” Claire said. “That’s the cousin, isn’t it? What about her?”

            “She’s how you get to him.”

            “What makes you say that? You haven’t even been around them for a year and a half. I’m not looking for blind handouts here, Carly. I need good information that minimizes risk to my work going up in flames, or you don’t get to have a boy-shaped dildo by the end of this. That’s the deal.”

            “She’ll do anything for him. And he’ll… do the same,” Carly testified hollowly, a vengeful fury flooding her veins at the very prospect of whatever psychological torments Sophie had utilized to redirect Jack’s mind into some poor estimation of an average human being. As someone who had experienced firsthand the violent and revolting measures to which Sophie was willing to go to protect the poor, frightened boy, then Carly was willing to bet the relationship ran both ways.

            “So you’re saying…”

            “Take them both,” Carly followed up. “And you won’t have any problems.”

            A fresh protest resting on Claire’s lips, the woman nonetheless kept it to herself, noting the finality emanating from the miniature mouth of the shrunken dirty-blonde victim below her. Rather than countering again, she merely marched into the testing field, stamping a boot onto either side of Carly’s exposed body like twin obsidian pillars, railroading her between.

            “I’m willing to trust you, Carly. One last time,” Claire said as her gloved hand lowered, engulfing the light and air around the tiny girl as her fingers clutched Carly into the padded palm. “You don’t get a third chance.”

            “And I don’t want one.”

 

End Notes:

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Chapter 16: Foot Phile Phobia by Jacksmith

You should be relaxed.

            That’s what you tell yourself.

            With Leah off to Washington to support your dad and the continuing battle to protect the human race from being reduced to the size of a thumb, you’ve been left at your aunt’s house alone with Sophie as your sitter, and a quiet weekend stretched before you to glue your fragile emotional state back together. You won’t even have Chloe around to induce your more traumatic personality traits.

            You should be relaxed, but you’re not.

            You know this feeling all too well. Creeping just under your skin, across your muscles and between your bones, cascading over your teeth. It always finds you, no matter how peaceful you are, no matter how calmingly low your heartrate has descended as you recline in your gigantic cousin’s upturned palm as she lays on the living room couch with her hand rested solemnly on her jean-clad thigh.

            It’s the trembling you find pricking and pulling at your skin from time to time, most often in the evenings when you’re faced with the blindness of a night sky through a window and your own stinging memories.

            Tonight is different, though. And you suspect it will be after the bittersweet realization of your previous visualization with Dr. Felton. She felt highly positive after your report that you did, indeed, manage to outclass your visualized sibling for the first time. Still, you’re burdened by that burning question of whether you could ultimately stand up to your fears of ownership like you could in the confines of a warped imagination. It’s all starting to overcome, but before you can break into full convulsions at the possibility of Carly owning you for the rest of eternity no matter how hard you fight back, you feel Sophie’s fingers moving in closer around you.

            Previously her fingers had just been acting as armrests and stools for your weary limbs, but in the blink of an eye those bronzed pillars of such unending generosity become something else entirely.

            Guardians. Your guardians.

            She’s merciful enough, as usual, not to mention your residual shuddering as her thumb and pinky clasp gingerly into your sides, ruffling at the hem of your t-shirt in the way of a hug until you can feel the warm skin of her hand pressed into your hips. For a moment it provides a sense of bizarre déjà vu in its most foreign form, watching tanned fingers curling around your bare sides until you can experience the tingle of every pore on the girl’s flesh.

            Much like the care Carly used to display when plucking you from any given surface that was, uniquely, not a part of her body. And usually just before jamming you into the rank hovel of a recently worn sock, succinctly followed by the mass of her foot and potentially unending darkness.

            It still sits like a half-forgotten childhood melody in your brain. Haunting, yet relentlessly present and somehow impossible to move on without.

            “Jack?”

            The musical ring of Sophie’s voice hangs in your eardrums. There’s no need to trouble her with any of this. Miraculously, you avoid flinching, instead curling your arms tighter around her fingers, encouraging her to embrace your frail form more tightly.

            She obliges, of course, furrowing the pads of her fingers against your exposed sides and stomach, letting you savor the delicate sensation of the ridged pads of her fingertips grinding with a velvet smoothness on your body. It’s soothing like little else to be wrapped protectively into Sophie’s hand, though the wretched irony of this fact is not lost on you.

            “Sophie.” At length you say her name back to her with the same tone of voice, hoping to cut her concern with some lightly feigned humor.

            You hear the low rumble of a chuckle inside her throat from up above, though she doesn’t let it escape her lips. She doesn’t like to let you off the hook too easily when she fears something’s wrong. Finally you crane your neck almost backward to see up to her face, upside down and fraught with worry as it so often is when she has you in her palm and physically on the verge of a minor breakdown.

            You could get lost in it. That face, and its features that share so many similarities with her cousin. They were clearly carved on the same day and by the same deity with a cruel sense of comic timing. Her hair descends around you in flowing cataracts of silk in varying degrees of amber and gold, framing those curious blue eyes.

            “You all right?” She doesn’t wait long for an answer before her hand begins to ascend, her knuckle tracing up the length of her sky-azure top, over the hill of her right breast and up to her chin.

            “Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Just a little cold.”

            “Oh,” she says, eyes narrowing momentarily as they zero into your vulnerable form swaddled in her fingers, but they quickly reopen to their normally friendly width. “I can help with that, then.”

            Her thumb winds further around your side, meeting the tip of her pinky and effectively pinning you down into her palm under the soft digits, and you’re completely at ease, turning to human putty beneath Sophie’s tender expertise. You allow the pad of her thumb to cover over your stomach, kneading at your abdomen and rapidly turning your tensed infrastructure to liquid. Splaying your limbs fully into Sophie’s control, you allow her to initiate a practiced pattern, every finger hard at work rubbing along your hips and shoulders.

            “You sure you’re fine?”

            “Yes,” you say, finally able to tell some shred of truth, once the tremors are completely banished from your body. “You’re just… warmer than the shirt. It surprised me.”

            “Oh?” she repeats, a sly smirk crimping the corner of her lip in a way you’ve witnessed happen many hundreds of times. It’s usually at this exact same proximity and often before you’re tossed head-over-heels between that fleshy barrier to have your head teased against spit-shined molars and your junk suckled by that muscled serpent of a tongue. Of course, a split-second of staring allows you to remind yourself this is Sophie above you and not the hijacking return of your dream-sister.

            “Y-Yeah.”

            “So… hold you tighter, then, huh?”

            “Sure.”

            “Under the shirt, probably.”

            “I… I mean…”

            “Well, I guess that’s the best way to keep you happy, then, isn’t it?” she responds instantly, allowing that hint of a smile to spread fully over her lips. The left eyebrow cocks playfully as she leans in closer to monitor your satisfaction. “I’m just joking around, Jack. You don’t have to look so worried.”

            Her exuberance often doesn’t reach these heights for weeks at a time, as you know how fearful she is at the thought of reminding you for even a second of your powerlessness, but she seems to detect how thoroughly relaxed you’re becoming under her affirming fingers.

            “Uh-huh.”

            “Is this okay?” No sooner has the question left Sophie’s pursed lips before her thumb is prodding further up your shirt, filling up the fabric with the girth of her gentle fingertip and bestowing fractional ounces of pressure from her flesh onto your chest, massaging you from just below your neck and back down to your navel, repeatedly sliding back and forth until a calming sequence is established.

            “Y-Yeah.”

            “Good,” she whispers now that her lips are close enough to you that even the softest utterance will be picked up. “Feel warmer?”

            “Yes. Thank you.”

            “You’re welcome,” she says with a smile, supplying you with a wink and a bat of those long eyelashes before her hand lowers back down toward her thigh, though she keeps up the rhythm of exploring your chest and stomach with her thumb. Her attention gradually returns to the low hum of the TV blazing with the scandal some late-night reality rerun, but yours remains centered on your body and the tactile metamorphosis steadily taking place. The subtle reactions, snapping inside your spine and throughout your nervous system that cause your corpus to willingly surrender in every way possible.

            You’re not sure whether it was owing to fear or just plain common sense, but you haven’t experienced contact like this in a long time.

            Where you’re narrowed down to your essence, fragile as you can be, with a much mightier being’s hands responsible for every aspect of your wellbeing, ensuring your safety, including from your own foolishness. It’s been a year and a half, in fact, as closely as you can estimate it, judging by your memory of the final time Carly cradled you in all her fingers and seemingly limitless power, dredging your will and committing your very soul into her ownership, right before the door burst open and your freedom was returned to you in a flash of chemicals and a crackle of ozone.

            In ways you’d hate to have to explain to Dr. Felton, your parents, or Sophie, let alone yourself, the feeling is undeniably comfortable. Correct, somehow.

            It’s at this particular moment your gaze drifts down the harrowing stretch of Sophie’s slender denim-wrapped leg, over the hump of her knee and the gulf between the couch and the coffee table where she’s propped her ankles, and for oddly the first time in the past few hours the pair of you have been vegetating in front of the TV with cold popcorn and lemonade, you realize she isn’t wearing socks or shoes.

            Puzzling, really, that such a thing could’ve slipped by your notice, given that both of her freshly tanned and svelte peds have been positioned in the foreground between you and the television for the better part of two hours, even standing tall enough that the tips of her bulbous toes poke over your visage of the flat screen’s frame.

            Several more intensely passive minutes of bodily comfort and increasing warmth tick by as your cousin’s fingers sweetly pet you into a blissful state of half-consciousness. You become aware that you’ve been gawking, even without blinking, judging by the watery refuse dammed in your eyelids, at Sophie’s bare feet for this entire time.

            Snapping back to reality, you will yourself to watch the flapping lips and screaming matches playing out on the TV, though now that you’ve noticed those toes bouncing merrily just below the visage of the screen, it’s almost impossible to tear yourself away.

            Why?

            You know you don’t really have to wonder.

            It occurs to you that your primary impulse at the most subconscious level was to watch them. As if this was the expectation. Her assumption, given your lower stature. The complete and total devotion of your senses pointed at Sophie’s feet, idly resting within your sight while her fingers break down barriers of arbitrary privacy, her thumb stroking nearer and nearer to your beltline, probably without her even realizing.

            For a painful split-second you catch yourself tingling with some distant desire for her finger to pass just a few decimals of an inch lower until she has your manhood pinned rightfully beneath her thumb.

            Like a wallop to the skull, that’s when you realize you’ve got to pull yourself together and stop this before it goes any further. It probably already has.

            You regain muscular control of your limbs, gently resisting the pull of Sophie’s fingers still snaked possessively around you at every angle and under some of your clothes, and part your lips, ready to make the declaration that you’re certain your cousin will obey without pause.

            And in the same instant those words are sucked back into your throat, unable to escape, as you feel the seismic activity of a shift in Sophie’s right leg. Her hand adjusts for the movement of her limb as it bends at the knee, curling inward and crossing over the left as she draws her foot in nearer to her body, closing the distant by the millisecond and literally enlarging your view of those peds that could so easily pass as the twins of Carly’s own great and terrible pair of soul-crushing, sweat-and-floral-scented titans.

            A flash of your cerebral confrontation under your sister’s bedsheets.

            The feelings return in full force, and with no way to stop them.

            Sophie’s toes part, airing out and displaying her sole at its full length: a pure landscape of alternately pinkish and sun-kissed skin. Completely independent of your presence and existence as your cousin simply readjusts, and yet you’re glued in every way except physical, since your body is still tangled in your cousin’s commanding hand instead.

            You stare, startled and then gob-smacked beyond recall as you watch Sophie’s free hand reach toward her exposed sole, wrinkling in anticipation as her toes curl and pop at the joints for a stretch. Her fingertips sink into the doughiest ridge of her sole, testing the plush strength of them and easily yielding into the instep, kneading at it and scratching at an itch between the folds of feminine flesh as the underside of her foot is carefully eased along her leg, closer and closer to you.

            It hardly registers until the yelp has fully swelled and spilled out of your lips, and despite how quickly you snap your teeth back together to quell the reverberation, the damage is done, and only worsening as you feel your body beginning to shake again. In the same moment Sophie puts the pieces together in entirely the wrong way, her eyes snapping to you from the television. She slams both feet out of sight and down to the carpet, her hand rising at near breakneck speed up to her already trembling chin.

            “Oh my God, Jack,” she huffs breathlessly, her voice quavering in that telltale manner. You can see the glisten in her eyes beginning to move with the same fervor as her words. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my G… I… I didn’t even think about, I… I’m sorry.”

            “N-No, no… wait… it’s fine. Really. I’m sorry.”

            “Don’t say that! Don’t try to cover it up just for me. I can’t believe I was so stupid to not even think about you and your… fuck…”

            “I’m not… covering anything. I swear, Soph. Honestly.”

            “What was that, then?” she begs. A fat tear trickles down her cheek in record time and plops onto her shirt, staining it a darker blue. “Tell me how that wasn’t my fault.”

            What could you possibly say?

            In what reality would it be acceptable to tell her that it wasn’t, in fact, terror and PTSD broiling in your gut at the mere sight of a rapidly advancing bare foot?

            How could you ever look her in the eye again if you just laid out the truth: that you were so shocked by the return to an at-once familiar reality that your body reacted in the only way it knew how with a cry of relief, bordering on elation? That if you’d allowed your basest animal instinct to take over, you’d have hurled yourself through the air and plastered into that wall of rosy, marshmallowy foot flesh, never to let go?

            And that’s when you feel the seed of an idea planted in the back of your mind. Perhaps the one chance to prove to yourself, the world, and Carly, wherever she might be, that you are your own and no one else’s.

            “Sophie,” you breathe. “I need you to put me on your foot.”

 

End Notes:

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We're nearing the end here. Expect this story to round out at 20 chapters.

Chapter 17: Sophie's Pet Cousin by Jacksmith

What did you say?” Sophie croaks, her words devolving quickly into residual weeping by the syllable after she nearly triggered your post-traumatic-sister-disorder. You can feel her palm trembling beneath you, her fingers quaking as they aggressively try to stroke your legs into calmness again.

            You’re fighting just to maintain focus on your cousin, as your eyes are magnetized toward the carpet below, where you can just make out the image of her toes grasping at the fibers to recuperate after the trauma she believes they caused you.

            “I… I need you to… put me down there with them.”

            “Why?”

            Your heartrate is picking up, a film of sweat has formed on your upper lip, and an involuntary trembling is rippling through every muscle of your body, despite the girl’s best efforts to corral you back into her palm under her soft and now-clammy fingertips. God, they look so much like Carly’s.

            “Dr. Felton was talking to me. About… facing things.”

            “F-Facing things?”

            “Yeah.” Your windpipe has become so thick it feels like the words are cementing along the roof of your mouth before you can even choke them out.

            “You mean… like… Carly’s f…”

            “Y-Yes. Not just being able to… avoid everything forever, but resisting what I’m afraid of,” you offer, carefully selecting each syllable, as you watch Sophie’s broad blue eyes digesting every hurtful sound. This has to be perfectly parsed or you won’t be going anywhere. You swallow a lump nearly as large as the one currently lodged in your cousin’s significantly more massive throat: no small feat. “So I think I have to go for it. Just try it. To see if I can.”

            “Why me, though?”

            “Because I trust you.”

            It’s not a lie in the strictest sense. After all, you’d trust Sophie to stand on you in spike heels without even puncturing the skin. Somehow, though, in this moment, it seems counter-intuitive to mention the fact that she could pass for Carly’s twin and therefore is the best possible surrogate to stand-in for the tangible amalgamation of all your dreams, loves, and terrors.

            Every toe curve, every nailbed, every fleck of dry heel skin, and even every wrinkle are in identical place, and you should know, because you’ve counted. Those feet planted down there on the ground are, save for where they happened to be during the timeframe of your capture, the physical manifestation of the messianic force that’s been controlling your whole being for six years now, and perhaps even longer than that.

            “I’m… glad you do, but…” Sophie sighs, stroking her fingers along your hips and shoulders, her eyes darting about her living room in anxiety. She’s still nibbling her lower lip. “I… I just don’t know if I can… after everything you’ve been through, I…”

            “Please, Soph. For me. I’ve… I’ve got to start fighting back. Or I don’t know if I’ll ever be the same again.”

            You can tell that did it.

            She’s clearly in just as much conflict, though, because whatever part of her conscience that’s finally joined your side has prompted a shift in the slender landscape of her body. Below her you can see her thigh muscles beneath the denim surface flexing, bending inward as she draws her right foot back up toward the couch cushions.

            Breath catches in your deflated lungs as your cousin’s titanic naked foot crests over the soft edge, heel first, followed by a swooping sole tracing and mashing the buoyant terrain, and finally her toes, lightly dipping along the pillowed curve until the entire bared ped is propped up on her opposite quad, tilted toward the ceiling, and providing an incline upon which you could stand.

            “Okay,” she gulps, taking another three separate swallows of heavy air and saliva before proceeding. Her voice has shrunken almost as low as your body. “Okay. Just… for a few minutes. I won’t… move unless you say something. And I’ll be right here, to… catch you, or…”

            “I know.”

            “Okay,” Sophie repeats again in the same defeatist tone. It seems to be the only thing allowing her to move forward, so great is her fear for you and your wafer-thin psyche.

            You arch your back, maintaining a courageous posture as her hand steadily inches across the plain of her jeaned leg and closer toward the exposed sole and heel, looming ever larger in your miniature sight. You have to do this for Sophie. For your parents. For the doctor. For Carly, even if she never knows it.

            For yourself.

            Sophie’s cupped palm nudges into the base of her doughy instep, tanned and brimming with lean muscle not quite as weathered by years and athletic suicide drills as Carly’s, but nonetheless powerful and convincing.

            A narrow of your eyes and an opening of your throat later, the only thing separating you from the brink of virtual reality is distant knowledge that this is your cousin, not your sister, clasping you nearer to her massive bare foot. It’s so much greater in comparison to your hapless form that you’d be easily buried in the center of that creamy, ridged sole if she was so inclined to turn her hand into the ball of her foot and create a sandwich of foot flesh and her mewling family member. Somehow you’d nearly forgotten it after being away from everyone’s feet for so long, for fear of you being accidentally kicked or smashed or suffocated by stale stench, but habitual memory quickly returns.

            Your body shifts easily into a crouch, or more accurately, a bow. Your tiny fists press into the peachy, spongy surface of Sophie’s nude sole, sinking easily into the layer of skin after your triceps tighten. It’s soft, like you remember, but capable of so much worse, especially once you’ve pushed your body weight into your wrists and can experience the tactile proof of raw muscle able to hold up the entire colossus of your five-foot-something cousin.

            Your head is swimming, but your heart is steady. It’s time to test yourself.

            And so begins the ascent. Planting your knees next into the cushioned ground, you begin to ease your way up, grinding by shin and forearm up toward the summit: the ball of her foot. Your fingers slide easily into the stippled ridges of clay-like skin, glazed with the lightest layer of humid perspiration, that clings to your palms in a sticky residue.

            “Everything… okay?” Sophie queries in a deathly hush, her hands hovering desperately around you, ready to grab you back up into her fingers at the first sign of trouble.

            “Yes.” Breathier than you wanted to sound, but there’s no going back now.

            “Positive?”

            “Yes.”

            Despite how short the distance is, you force yourself to take your time, and mentally wrestle with every new sensation, first accounting for and then rejecting it as truth of your being. One step at a time, you tell yourself. That’s all you need to do.

            Acquainted with the feeling of her skin on yours, you find the strength to push this aside first, at peace with the realization of gummy summer sweat binding you down to Sophie’s foot, forcing you to pull yourself away just a little harder on each new step. Nothing new. Carly used to sweat geysers of rancid saltwater that coated your body just as thickly as hers in that slick sheen, marking you as hers, and marking her sweat as yours as you lapped it hungrily up for hydration. But it doesn’t have to mean anything to you now.

            Next you inhale deeper than before, allowing your face to prostrate closer to the folds of flexed flesh. Careful, of course, not to let Sophie hear you smelling, for fear of what she’d assume - this is among the most vital tests, after all. The aroma enters your body immediately, mingling with what little clear air remains and replacing it instantly with Sophie’s brand of casual, lint-speckled, fruit-washed odor. Lacking the notes of rubber, grass, and soil that once occupied Carly’s peds at a molecular level as a result of her frequent physical activity, you’re instead greeted by a fresher and unspoiled sensation of lilac and melon. The scent clutches your brain in its talons, transporting you back years, to a day in your teens when Carly stomped into your room, smashed your homework up beneath her sole, and within a minute had you offering to snort her toejam up your nostrils directly from the slimy source. No history tied into that pilfered oxygen, just downy cotton and the gentlest note of human salt seasoned in that tanned skin.

            Your nose touches Sophie’s sole and drags gently up to the ball of her foot, taking in the cleanest sample it can. Just to be sure. This, too, must be put aside. And it is. Your face rises away. This is all still voluntary, of course. Not an accurate measure of what lies inside you, if anything, capable of taking control of your soul. But it’s a start.

            Through your pants, you feel your loosely dangling member tipping along each deep and valleyed wrinkle of Sophie’s sole, sending a tremble through your body, but you ignore it.

            Of course, that one’s just a little more difficult to ignore. Your body’s not going to easily rework its hardwiring after half a decade of training to exclusively devote your dick’s attention to the wrinkled, creamy underside of your sister’s foot, and sometimes her tongue, if she’d gotten bored after jerking you off into her sweat-lubricated toes three or four times in a row.

            “Is… that all, Jack?” Your cousin’s voice nearly shatters your concentration.

            “N-No.”

            “No?”

            “No, I… I need something else. I don’t know if…”

            “Just… tell me what it is, Jack. I want…” Sophie chokes out, shaking her head and clenching her baby blues shut with a last bat of her eyelashes. You feel her thick fingertips trembling at the small of your back. “I want to… help.”

            “I need you to… push me into it,” you utter, feeling the words hang awkwardly above you in midair for long enough for Sophie’s entire body to constrict, including her sole, tightening into itself and letting her muscle press closer to the layer of pinkish, pillowy skin surrounding it.

            “I f-figured…” she sighs painfully. “Jack, are… are you completely totally one-hundred-percent sure this is-”

            “Yes.” There’s no hesitation now. “Please, Soph.”

            She doesn’t have to confirm it, or maybe doesn’t have the willpower. Either way, the hand that was previously poised to scoop you back into safety, with her fingertip already halfway crooked around your leg, is suddenly flattening against your back. It’s with an uncommon tenderness that you doubt even your own mother would be capable of enacting. However, given the warmth radiating from Sophie’s palm now clasped to your entire backside, the artful blush of her skin, and the innocent odor ensnaring itself into your senses and teased on your lips which are now being raked along the lightly moistened surface, it’s easy to disappear back into unreality.

            It’s getting easier to access now. Every memory, every feeling, ever fear and doubt and adoration you ever experienced while Carly was putting you through the paces of your tiny human limits. Sophie doesn’t press hard enough to truly melt into the past, but it’s enough, as your entire face and body are flush into the curvaceous slope of her sole, fully extended and pristine in its alternately porcelain and bronzed majesty. You’re almost there.

            “You have to do more, Sophie. I need to see that I can do it. P-Please. Please help me.”

            And God help you, she seems to be onboard now, because you can feel her palm sliding away with a final thrust at your back that momentarily adheres you to the sole, which by now is shaded a deeper pink and beginning to sprout a glistening gloss of nervous sweat. In the interim you cling to her skin, grasping at sole wrinkles, squeezing your facial features deeper into the plush skin until you’re sure there’s at least some kind of imprint left, and grinding your groin in to a particularly soothing wrinkle such that it might act as an anchor point. A shift takes place, a grand motion of denim and thigh muscle below, but you’re hardly aware now.

            Before you can unpeel from Sophie’s sole, you feel something heavier, mightier, and far more authoritative at your back. It’s soft at first, as it always is, testing its mettle on your thin clothing that’s already partially sopped with her moisture.

            “That’s it, Soph. You’re doing well. I know we can do this.” The words mostly get lost in a sea of sole flesh, but you can tell they were head anyway.

            “Jack. I won’t let anything happen to you. Understand?”

            “Yes, I do. But I need it tougher. Please. Don’t be afraid. Give me all you have.”

            Fully with the program now, Sophie brings her left foot to bear with greater strength against you, effectively sandwiching you between her twin soles that feel frightfully like going home after so long away from Carly’s own personally constructed cave of foot skin. Parts of your rear end and legs are going numb under the weight, the bulbous flesh all but altering the very geometry of your body.

            Now, at last, you’ve arrived back in familiar territory. Where nothing was certain except the threat of your body squelching beneath the power of a foot, and the even worse threat of giving yourself over to it in the process.

            She’s trembling, but keeps up with the control of a practiced yogi, concentrating controlled strength with you between her velvety insteps like a pressure cooker. Sophie’s feet effectively adopt your frame and life force, cradling but also mashing you between them in the same florid act that couldn’t possibly be categorized to benevolence or malevolence alone. It’s far, far more, and Sophie seems much more capable of slipping into this role than you ever thought. Another a reminder that you’re never more than a question away from the brink of enslavement and godhood. You are the underling, the precious nothing that exists to be here with your lips forcibly collided with a giant’s foot, and right now, Sophie is the substitute for your necessary deity counterpart that Carly once served with such transcendent honor, carrying the size and power and all that it entails except for the singsong demand that you deliver your spirit into her deserving ownership.

            But it’s damn close enough.

            It’s not too long before Sophie begins to twist her feet, slowly at first, but with more confidence once she senses your determination. A corkscrew pattern, and then a parallel sweep, smushing the marshmallow wrinkles along one another, erasing them on every motion but keeping you at the center of it all. With this, of course, comes friction, greater heat on that buttery skin, and an increased film of sweat leaking from her pores. Every fresh bead of the stuff plinks against your lips, flavoring you in the likeness of your cousin’s lowest body part and repeating the process of what now feels like half a century ago, not half a decade.

            Because now comes the last bastion.

            You can feel your tongue poised against the back row of your teeth, pressing so hard you’re wondering if you’re going to break skin or knock out a molar first. A second slip and soon it’s only the barrier of your clenched lips keeping your small red muscle from launching out of your mouth and implanting itself onto the hallowed plain of Sophie’s sole, perhaps permanently as you allow yourself to fade into a previous life of becoming property, and with it, surrender what remains of your being. It’s merely that shred of selfhood that keeps you from opening your jaws now and descending into a licking frenzy.

            And you honestly have no idea yet which side of yourself will win: the half that dares to dream of existing as a human being again, or the half that willingly gave itself over to be smashed and fondled under Carly’s toes for the rest of eternity.

            “I’m done being under you, I’m done being yours. I was never yours. I’m mine.” You repeat the words to yourself from the visualization, hammering them against every lobe and wire of your fragile nervous system.

            “Oh, that’s so cute, Jackie-poo, it really is.” Carly’s voice repeats back in kind within your skull, much louder than your own voice, of course, but you don’t give up.

            “Don’t you see? I’m beating you right now. I can say no to you. It’s possible. I see that now.”

            “Oh, sure you said no in a dream, little bro,” Carly repeats again, as if she was tonguing at the very fibers of your brain, dribbling saliva into your bones below. “Try it in real life and you’ll bend like a little piece of gum. And fit right back inside my mouth. Like always. I know you’re not afraid to try and fight back, Jackie-poo. That’s how you escaped in the first place. But that doesn’t mean a thing. Not when you’d come back to me in a second if you had the chance.”

            “Jack?”

            You hardly register Sophie calling out your name as you feel the blood rushing to your head, threatening to pop an artery as you feel yourself engaging in the last war of yourself, struggling with the specter of your omnipotent sister inside your body. Everything stings, because it has to. This, right now, will answer everything. You feel the giant feet on every square millimeter of your body, and Carly’s words swallowing you whole. And you feel the part of you still not ready to give up.

            “JACK!”

            As if your synapses finally managed to reorganize the arrival of sensory perceptions, Sophie’s scream, the crunch of the porch door falling to the carpet, and the seismic impact of forced entry all arrive at once in your head. For a moment you can just make out a figure in black standing in the doorway, hand fixed to a trigger, and then everything goes white.

 

End Notes:

Apologies if that chapter title gave you false hope for a twisted turn. I've got much bigger plans in store for Carly and Jack in the upcoming finale.

Please comment!

Chapter 18: Heart and Sole by Jacksmith

            For the longest time you didn’t think anything could get scarier than the inside of your own skull, trapped all alone with your own existential doubts and the billboard-sized visage of your sister, perhaps lost to the world forever, stomping around and jamming you into the canyon-sized crevice between her jammy toes.

            This metallic box of a compound you’ve been trapped in for the better part of six groggy hours is making a case for a new top position, though.

            Of course, nothing about its damp olive walls and tinny floors that clank under every footfall is actually frightening to you. You’d easily agree to spend a week in here rather than an hour with your imaginary giant sibling clomping your self-worth into mulch.

            But with Sophie here too, the one person who’s watched over you and your fragile psyche more than anyone else in the past painful eighteen months, you feel a new kind of dread rising. The prospect that you’ve dragged her into trouble too, from which there may well be no return, is eating at you more than Carly ever threatened to.

            “Just drop a piss in here, honey bunches,” the towering redhead demands in a soft tone that nonetheless rebounds off the narrow walls of what you’d guess to be a testing and medical chamber, though its meager resources suggest it would be more appropriately used as a bunker latrine. Her menacing fingers approach again, pinched around one last tiny glass vial for you to empty the last remaining bodily fluid they haven’t yet extracted.

            Sophie is seated in the corner, rooted to a chair, her dirty golden locks glued to her forehead by terrified sweat. Tears still stream passively down her flushed cheeks after earlier when the strange woman took a sample of your blood with that incredibly thin needle that nonetheless prompted a shocked yelp from you when it pierced your skin.

            No ropes are necessary to bind Carly’s doppelganger there in the corner on her metal seat, as your black-suited captor in her steel-toed combat boots and victorious smirk has made it perfectly clear she can mash you into a fine paste in half the time it would take Sophie to leap up and make a rescue dash toward you. Your cousin, bless her heart, seems dead-set on keeping you in one piece, and so remains there, shooting you glances as comforting as she can muster, though her fingers are trembling hard as they hover over her neck.

            You’d be lying to yourself if you said you didn’t believe someone out there like this had their eye on you ever since you and your sister’s shattering of known biochemical laws. Frankly, part of you is surprised it took so long to happen. But you’re not at all surprised to realize all your anxiety is over Sophie’s safety rather than your own.

            Truth be known, you’ve been just a tad dead inside already ever since you came home from Carly’s sacred dorm room, your old life leveled and literally stuck up your cousin’s butt.

            “Ahem. A piss. Come on, I’m sure you’ve been itching to take one ever since we nabbed you up,” the woman repeats, snapping her massive gloved fingers so close to your tiny head that it nearly perforates your eardrums. Just for good measure, she prods you in the gut with her index finger, nearly knocking you over, but clearly with enough gentleness to avoid damaging you just yet.

            “Leave him alone!” Sophie shrieks at the woman’s intrusion against your abdomen, gripping the edges of her chair but restraining herself from leaping forward across the silver cell of a room. A fresh well of tears bursts and trickles down the crook of her neck.

            “Feisty, that one, isn’t she?” the woman chuckles to you, stroking her finger down your back. “It must be nice to have the kind of family loyalty you have, huh? I probably wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it up close, but I can’t say I’ve ever seen it so strong. And across the board, really.”

            Your heart folds into itself inside your chest. What does she mean “up close”?

            “And as such, I’d hate to have to make an example of one of you,” she continues, her free hand hovering at her utility belt and any number of diabolical methods of convincing.

            “It’s okay, Soph,” you call out, your throat cracking slightly. “She didn’t hurt me. And she won’t hurt you, either.” It sounds like a lie even to you, but at this point, there’s no sense in squandering what meager hope remains.

            You turn your back on your cousin, tugging your pants partially down, and urinate into the translucent opening as it’s offered before you by the ginger giant’s stock-still digits. A sigh of relief escapes as soon as your bladder is clear and the woman is drawing your stolen pee away with a grin. Every muscle in your body has been anxiously contracted since you were grabbed inside your aunt and uncle’s house, so taking care of vital bodily functions wasn’t really in the cards until it was necessitated by Sophie being threatened.

            “Good boy,” the redhead says once the final sample is sealed tight and loaded into a metal tray. Her thumb alights at the top of your head, petting you like a miniature puppy and earning another flinch from Sophie. The stranger seems to savor your cousin’s reaction, patting at your scalp several more times in quick succession, not even hitting hard enough to inflict pain, but plenty to inspire worry in Sophie again. Perhaps to remind her what’s at stake. It makes sense, in some terrible way.

            “Please. L-Let me have him b-back. Please?” your cousin sobs, cupping her hands around her tear-stained cheeks and rocking back and forth in her chair.

            “Mmm, I would, but you see, I’m a woman of my word, and all I really promised you is that I won’t hurt him so long as you cooperate. The same goes for him.”

            “He did what you wanted,” Sophie protests quietly, twiddling nervously at her matted golden locks. She’s fighting back hiccups after the aggressive tearfall.

            “Yes he did, and for that I’m very grateful. The two of you have become part of a scientific breakthrough the likes of which the world has never seen,” the woman declares, no ounce of irony present in her velvet voice. “But like I said. I’m a woman of my word. And I promised my word to one other. Which, in this case, means I promised him to one other.”

            “What?” Sophie cries, trembling on the edge. “NO!” The woman snaps her fingers twice again, thankfully further from your ears, and a balding man in full-body kevlar passes through the door, yanking Sophie by the arm up from her seat with nary a twitch and dragging her back into the hallway by her grease-stained shirt. She thrashes every inch, but clearly is no match. Your cousin claws desperately at the doorway, sound lost from her voice as the tears splash down to the ground far below.

            Your mouth hangs open, too petrified to summon a word or a croak of comfort for your hysterical cousin.

            “Now come on, hon,” the woman says sweetly once Sophie’s been taken away. “You’ve got an appointment.” Her fingers sidle in around your hips, pinching you closer into her leathered palm and sweeping you off the tabletop. You hardly realize it as you’re bundled into her soft fist, nor conscious of your surroundings as she whisks you out the door and down past several iron-barricaded entryways, before stopping in front of one last door at the end of the tube.

            “What are you doing with Sophie?” you manage to say.

            “Putting her away for safekeeping. I don’t intend to get rid of her unless one of you makes it necessary,” she answers, drawing her hand up closer to her face as her opposite appendage fiddles with the lock below. Strangely, as her relaxed breaths waft down over you, they land cool, even against the material of the glove as the air collects around you. A shiver ticks along your bones.

            “Tell me something, little Jack,” the woman says. The sound of the lock clicking away echoes off the walls. “Your concern for your cousin is very sweet, but you don’t seem afraid for yourself. Why not?”

            “Why should I?”

            “You strike me as smart enough to know when you’re beat,” she says, twisting the handle of the door and curling her fingers in closer around you, blocking your view of the new room.

            “Yes.”

            “It’s just a question,” she chuckles. Her boots seem to hang in the air just a little bit longer than before as she marches into the room, punctuated on each step by the clang of her treaded soles. “To tell you the truth, I’ve just been curious how a mind doesn’t break after all you went through. I thought it might be useful to know someday. Depending on what happens here today.”

            “Why’s that?”

            “Oh, no reason,” she sighs, flashing you an obvious wink. “I suppose it’s been an exciting few hours for you. Maybe you’ll feel more talkative later on, especially if I’ve got dear, dear Sophie poised on some kind of conveyor belt moving slowly toward a rotor.”

            You wince, but make no more attempt to respond as the woman comes to a stop at the far corner of the cramped room, warm lights from above flooding the leather cracks in her gloves as they coil closer around you.

            “Just a little humor, hon,” she says, her hand already descending after one final cold exhalation around your shivering shoulders. “I’ll be back for you later once we crunch the last set of numbers, and then we’ll all find out if this really is one giant leap for mankind.”

            Mired in puzzlement and mounting panic for Sophie’s safety, you remain clutched into yourself like a mewling rodent even as the woman’s jet-black gloves unfold around you, depositing you onto your back in the basin of what you now realize is some sort of walled-in glass containment unit. You don’t even bother trying to rise, instead resolving to focus your pupils directly on the featureless ceiling so far above.

            Not bad. Much more spacious than Carly ever gave you to live in, anyway.

            “Play nice,” the stranger booms a final time from on high, tucking a red lock up over her ear and turning on her heels with a militaristic efficiency. “Whatever that may mean for you.”

            The last snap of the locking mechanism falls into place behind her, granting you the briefest heartbeat of silence and solace in this twisted world of yours before any semblance of peace you’ve scraped together comes careening down, washed away into oblivion again.

            When you first see Carly’s face coming into view, it doesn’t register at first as reality.

            How could it? So much of your known universe has bled together in the past year and a half, especially where it regards your sister’s tanned face and gleaming golden hair, her pearly whites flashed triumphantly above your whole being, the oceans of her crystal-blue eyes boring through you and whatever remains of your soul.

            As you’re sprawled on your back and looking up to her statuesque visage where it now stands above you, each leg on either side of your hips, partially bloomed out by the bright white luminescence flooding the glass cage, it takes a full minute of staring to realize this isn’t the goddess-sized Carly you’ve come to see in your vivid memories and most potent daymares alike, but the one who once stood just a matter of inches shorter than you, or rather, has been reduced to a matter of inches total just like you.

            “Heyyyyy…” she croons in a delicate whisper that penetrates your bone marrow with its instantaneous command of your attention. She leans in over you, hands to her knees, the white piece of fabric that roughly translates as clothing cascading gently down her athletic curves. It’s like the clock has been reset. “How’s the homework going, bro?”

            The words land in your brain, immediately coloring in the blank spaces where Carly left off the last time you were in the same room, but you can hardly process them.

            Homework? Has she lost her mind, just as you have?

            “Hey. Just trying to be nice here. How’s your homework going?” she repeats, still in a loving murmur. Carly’s head tilts to the side, shifting the dishwater-cataracts of her tresses over to the opposite shoulder. The azure rivers around her pupils widen.

            Your mouth opens softly, but you dare not try to speak. The words are becoming more familiar, like a distant childhood story. Is it actually possible she’s-

            “Hey. Answer me,” she says a final time, her declarations barely escalating. Bracing herself against her right side, your sister’s left leg ascends lithely from the cold floor below you, her bare foot arching over your hip and up along your chest, casting a gentle shadow on its journey toward your face.

            You understand the dance now.

            You’ve been here before.

            “Carly… I’m… trying to… work. Get your… fat feet… out of my face,” you muster, unsure if you’ll be able to remember the words, but they arrive just as easily at your lips as Carly’s own toes, which by now are pressed in a doughy line along your lower lip.

            You see your sister’s smile quaver and upturn even higher at the recognition that you remember these words just as well as her: to see that for you, too, this was a significant moment in your personal histories, even if neither of you realized it at the time. The first point in this insane chain of events where Carly, even in some small measure, made some part of you hers, and you both came out content with it.

            “Aw c’mon, Jack, I don’t think they’re… fat.  They’re mostly just… big.  Yeah, big.  Are they… bothering you or something?” Carly continues, following the script, though it’s getting hard to keep the joy from showing between every other syllable. Her toes wriggle along the skin below your mouth, alternately pressing each marshmallow digit into your lip.

            Goose bumps shoot up your body both ways at least three times. You feel as if you’re being baptized. It’s like a dream you don’t want to wake up from.

            But it’s not a dream. Not anymore. You can see that. Almost taste it for yourself.

            “Y-Yes,” you lie.

            “Well, I’m sorry.  Here, I’ll… move them,” she says, fighting back a shrill giggle. The ball of her foot, resting against your chin by now while her heel digs possessively against your Adam’s apple, scrunches in nearer to your jaws. Her toes flex, cresting over the hill of your lip and dipping into your mouth. You feel the girth of her big toe easing along your teeth.

            Another few minutes of abject silence pass as Carly’s hands find their rightful places at her shapely hips, her smirk teased dominantly to one side of her dimples as her left foot fishes deeper into your open mouth. The pink ball of her foot rubs incessantly at your lower lip, prompting a forcible kiss. Parting her big and second toes, she finds your tongue quivering against the ribbed roof in wait, and a second later your sister has your muscle clenched between her powerful toes.

            You can tell it’s been a while since she was bathed by your captors. A noticeable buildup of caked sweat, flaky dried skin, congealed oil, and bitter filth meets your taste buds and is immediately washed down toward your throat by your rapidly building saliva. Wrestling to keep the choking down is difficult as the flecks of porous leakage and general waste courtesy of Carly’s body slides down into your esophagus. It’s undoubtedly the most pungent taste you’ve ever experienced on the underside of your sibling’s godly foot.

            “It’s good to see you, little bro,” Carly offers, snapping out of the script at last as she yanks her foot from your aching jaws with one last pinch of your tongue. Dropping to her haunches above you and planting her toned ass into the center of your stomach, she leans in, her hot, sticky breath clinging to your neck as her lips pass over your chin and meet your cheek with a sloppy impact before dragging her tongue up the length of your head. It immediately calms the trembling still rattling your spine as she marks her territory once again, licking the sides of your face with the full width of her rippling tongue.

            “You too,” you utter, unsure of whether you’re telling the truth or not.

 

End Notes:

Just two chapters left. Expect big things headed this way.

Please comment!

Chapter 19: Sister vs. Brother by Jacksmith

            “Oh, little bro,” Carly sighs wistfully as she crouches over you, her fingers tracing along the features of your face, probably to convince yourself you’re real. You’re having trouble believing the same about her, so it’s nice to have the confirmation of those grooved digits traveling without pause to every corner of your countenance. It’s a little startling to be experiencing them at the size of actual fingers instead of the muscular pillars they normally are in reality and dreams, but you wouldn’t mistake the soft touch of her skin for anything.

            “Been a while,” you mutter. It’s impossible to know what move to make next, so you resolve to just wait until general instinct gives you some pointers. With any luck, it’ll be soon, because your heart is fluttering so fast it’s getting difficult to pick out individual beats.

            “Yes,” she coos, and despite the blaring light above, you can make out the twinkle of twin teardrops welled in her eyes. “I never thought I’d see you again.”

            It gives you an immediate sense of bizarre déjà vu, after the fit Sophie put up over your handling by the diabolical redhead, to see precisely the same blue eyes ready to burst with aggressive saltwater over you.

            “I thought the same,” you answer, devoid of emotion.

            “Have you been all right without me?” she demands softly, tucking her fingers under your chin.

            “I don’t know,” you answer, finally able to cough up some definitive truth.

            “What am I saying? Of course you haven’t,” she croaks, clenching her eyes shut and releasing a cascade of hot droplets that plunk immediately down to your cheeks. “I’m so sorry about what happened, Jackie-poo.”

            “Me… too,” you say. You’re perfectly aware that Carly is reading you much differently right now than the maelstrom of confusion you’re actually experiencing, but for now, it can’t hurt to play long. In many ways, you’re staring into the eyes of a wounded deity. And if the limited mythology you studied in high school was any indication, it would be unwise to test her without a substantial backup plan.

            “I didn’t want them to take you away. I… didn’t want anything to change,” Carly warbles, now freely allowing the tears to flow from her eyes and doing precious little to stop them from trickling to your face. “But I couldn’t stop her. Sophie, she… she turned you against me, what we had, twisted you up and made you do things for her and… it was too late. You have to understand that.”

            Shock envelopes you like a warm blanket. She clearly doesn’t blame you for a single act of agency you pulled off in your escape. You’ve gone through this possible meeting every which way in your head before, imagining what Carly might say to you in vengeance for all you did to destroy her self-contained empire, but it was all wrong. All of it.

            “Do you understand, little bro? I wanted you. I always wanted you… all of you, for my own, forever and ever. I just wanted you to be happy… with me. Do you know that?” she questions violently.

            It’s getting harder to come up with words as you lay beneath your sister’s shuddering form, the overhead light glowing like a halo around her dark-golden head, but not out of fear or doubt any longer.

            You just can’t quite remember seeing Carly this low before. It’s too strange. If anything, you have to convince yourself you’re not still looking at Sophie, whom you’ve seen cry on at least a weekly basis in the very difficult past year and a half, though considering you just had this girl’s toes in your mouth, you know there’s only one person it could actually be.

            Sure, you’ve seen your sister cry over boys, cry over unfair treatment by your parents, pretend to cry about your pretend death, and be literally jammed up your cousin’s every orifice, but this is different.

            In her own mighty, unstoppable, inhuman way, she’s become like you. Vulnerable.

            “This is all so wrong, isn’t it? This isn’t how it’s supposed to be,” she continues, probably half-demanding these answers of the heavens themselves as she continues leaking tears into your eyes. She shuffles around, pressing off your chest with her soft hands and rising back to full height. Not much, but from a purely objective standpoint of the kind of attitude she throws around, an improvement. “I’m supposed to be big. Above you. Like we had before, for so long, like we might’ve had. Where I could take care of you, everything you needed, and you could be my… my… mine. It… it was so… beautiful.”

            You can’t help but feel your heart break.

            “But it’s not like that anymore,” you hear yourself say in the aching silence.

            Carly is yanked from her reverie. Her hair clings to her sopping cheeks as she trains those crystal eyes onto you, leaning in again until her shadow engulfs your head completely, and you can see her features with newfound clarity.

            “I know,” she moans. Even as her feet are planted on either side of your reclining body, her legs cast up as high as they can above you with regimented strength, you detect a tremor running through them. “But it could be.”

            “They’ve been trying to reverse this all the time I’ve been out there. No one knows how.”

            “They can,” she says, pointing off into the metallic blackness beyond your shared glass tank. “They almost can. That’s why you’re here. They needed… you. To finish it.”

            Your chest almost atrophies at the realization that, as you feared, your own scientific value as a specimen has dragged Sophie to her probable doom. Of course that’s why you’re here now.

            “Where are we?” you manage, nearly choking on air.

            “I don’t really know,” she says with complete conviction. “It’s underground somewhere. A desert, I think, or near it. It’s not our state. I’ve heard them say things. It’s far away from most people.”

            “Who is that woman that… took us?”

            “Her name is Claire Brookes. She’s a cunt.”

            “How… how could we get out?”

            “I don’t know that,” she says, again truthfully, though her attention has mostly shifted down to her right leg, which she casually sidles along your ribs before unpeeling her naked foot from the cold surface and lifting it up toward you again. Her toes dance in diagonal patterns, shifting the flow of the fleshy wrinkles in her peachy sole from one extreme to the other. Flecks of earth cling to the rosy valleys of her silky instep, and by instinct, you feel a tingling inside your cheeks at the assumed prospect of sustenance, given what the expectation would’ve been in years past when Carly returned home with dirt encrusted to her princess-like peds.

            Despite the fact that you’re having what is technically the most normal conversation with your sister you ever have in her twenty years of existence, it’s hard not to pay attention to the appendage currently hovering like a specter overhead. Like what happened on Sophie’s couch, only exponentially more insistent in its draw, the slender underside of Carly’s exposed foot begins to take up stock in your brain.

            “You, uh… you must’ve… seen… heard something we can… use… to get out,” you stammer, blinking rapidly in hopes the image of your sister’s playfully arching and flexing foot will disappear from view, but you hold no such power in the real world outside Dr. Felton’s office.

            It’s happening again. Just as it always does. Like clockwork.

            “The machine they’re making, it’s supposed to be able to make us… well, make me… big. Normal again,” Carly admits dreamily. Her foot approaches, descending above your compressed world like a UFO. Come to claim you. “They promised me I could have you. After all this is over, once they get it to work. They’ll let us go, and we can… we can get out of here. Go run and hide, do whatever we have to.”

            “On our… own?”

            “That’s how it was for five years. Did you forget that, little bro?” she lullabies. She clasps her sole down against your cheek, massaging side to side, working the grit of her wrinkles and oil of her pores into your own skin. “We don’t need anyone else. You know how I am. It won’t be hard to get what we need. I can find work, and when I can’t, people will give me things. That’s just what they do.”

            This final statement, at least, is awful damn hard to argue with. You’ve seen your sister in action, both from afar at a height of six feet and later while peeking out from between her toes in a sticky summer sandal.

            Carly Arton gets what she wants, one way or another.

            “Don’t you want that back, little bro?” your sibling wheedles. Her tears have mostly dried by now, the confidence rising in her voice in tandem with the way she holds her chest high again at the revelation of the promise. “Don’t you want to live like that again?”

            “I…”

            “What have you been doing for all this time without me? Sitting at home, scared of everything, trying to pretend like you can live a normal life like this, letting people poke you and ask you things, never really knowing what’s happening inside your cute little head? Never really understanding you?” Carly rambles in a symphony of painful logic. “Feeling alone?”

            Your mouth seals shut at this catastrophic destruction of your current status, despite the tanned bare foot so near, the big toe extended to mere millimeters away from your waiting lips.

            “Please,” Carly begs. “Just think about how it was again. One more time, for me. And you’ll see.”

            “I’m… thinking.”

            “Imagine,” she whispered, just as her foot squeezes down harder onto your skull, forcing your head to its side on the floor. It’s sudden, but she gives you enough warning to follow her lead without pain, and as she shifts her weight again above, her left foot crawls closer to your face, her toes bouncing all the while. “Are you imagining it with me, little bro?”

            “Yes,” you answer breathlessly, your senses devoted to processing the pair of divine feet re-entering your world, one with its sole wrinkles smeared warmly to your cheek and gently smashing you into the earth below her, the other shifting nearer and nearer, those dexterous toes aimed for your lips again, the doughy crevices in between parting continually and releasing the unwashed stench of stale BO and feminine grime.

            “No more people looking at you funny, feeling sorry for you all the time, telling you things will be normal again when you know they won’t,” Carly explains steadily, measuring each word for perfect accuracy. Her toes splay into your hair, spreading her filth and making it yours again, while her heel clamps down harder on your jaw, but no more than you can handle. And you can handle quite a bit. “Doesn’t that sound good?”

            “Y-Yeah.”
            “Instead, you get to live with me. You never have to worry about another thing. We eat together, we sleep together, we… wash together,” she mentions slyly, just so there’s no mistaking her meaning. On this mention of cleanliness, Carly’s left foot finally reaches your face at its creeping pace. Her big toe leads the charge, her digits lifting and passing the barrier of your open mouth slowly gasping for air. You have no choice but to accept them into your jowls if you want to keep breathing, and so you feel Carly’s toes literally in your head again, exploring your molars and cheeks, scraping her curved nails against your skin, the width of her bronzed ped testing the limits of your stretched lips.

            “And most of all. I will never, ever let you feel alone again,” Carly declares triumphantly as her feet continue dominating your skull, her right one scrunching at your scalp and continually shifting more of her body weight onto your head, while her left foot slakes itself continually on your exhausted tongue, inviting more saliva to leak from your cheeks and lubricate the wrinkles of her sole.

            “Mmmhf.” You can’t help but sigh, and not just from the emotional release of having your tongue pressed to your little sister’s foot again.

            “You’ll be with me every second for the rest of your precious little life, Jackie-poo. You won’t even have to leave my body,” Carly says. “When I sleep, I’ll just put you next to my heart. When I eat, I’ll get to eat it right off of your body just as much as you eat it off of me. And when I go to work and earn money for us, you’ll work for me, down inside my socks, licking and cumming and licking and cumming until you fall asleep again.”

            Your reality is being squeezed down into a space even smaller than your physical head is currently. The impossible imagination of your mad sibling stretches before you, becoming more believable by the second. The forked road you always knew you’d come to in person, even if you didn’t want to believe it.

            “But I need us together on this, little bro,” your sister whimpers. At last her left ped is extracted from between your jaws with a final suckle of her toes and one more pass down the length of your tongue with the ball of her foot. “I need to know you’re still ready to be saved, ready to be… in your place again.”

            “I…”

            “Please, Jack. Please. Listen to me,” Carly sighs. Following suit, her right foot lifts away from your head, leaving you momentarily floating in a void where you can’t touch the towering blonde and therefore can’t be certain she’s still real. Before you can even have time to question it, though, she’s lowering back to her haunches, planting her firmed ass onto your stomach as before and flanking your head on either side again by those squirming soles with their spongy ridges and blooming shades of white, tan, and fleshy pink.

            “What?”

            “I need you,” she whispers as she leans in closer, her hair draping around you, interlocking your eyes on a golden path. Your mouths align. “I need you… to say it. One last time. For me.”

            “Wh-”

            “I need you to say…” she breathes, pausing for an instant before wrapping her bulbous lips around your own chapped ones, sucking a kiss and possibly what is left of your being right out of your body. She releases you only when she’s finished, her tongue having traced one lap around the rim of your mouth, a single bead of her saliva dipped into your throat. “…that you belong to me.”

            You can feel it ascending, from your ankles, through this godforsaken body of yours, and toward your lips in answer to Carly’s gesture as much as her tearful request.

            Your will. Or what little remains. Whatever amount you had left to offer to Sophie right before the existential decision was made for you for the second time in your life by a door bursting open. It hovers at your palate, threatening to fire out of your mouth and back up into your sister’s, for her to consume and keep inside her belly forever.

            Your self.

            “NO!” You roar far louder than is necessary, almost feeling it rattle the glass walls of your temporary cell as your sister is thrown back and off your body, in a way releasing you, despite the fact that you could’ve thrown her off on your own already. At last summoning the courage to command your own muscles, you leap to your feet, backing away from your sprawled sibling.

            “W-What?” she croaks from the ground, gazing pitifully up at you through sweaty blonde locks strewn over her forehead. You can see the glistening tears starting up all over again, splashing against her trembling hands, but you don’t feel the same crumbling inside your chest that you did before.

            You’re taking it back, right now. All of it. Yourself, above all else.

            “You heard me,” you bellow. “I’m not yours. Not anymore.”

            “You don’t know what you’re saying,” she squeals, flinging herself back up to her full height, which you at last are able to compare and remember that you still have several finger widths over her in superiority. It’s been a long time since she wasn’t able to reach out and grab you when you weren’t following her rules, and it’s clear she doesn’t quite know what to do with her body in response. “They turned you against me, Jack. They told you lies.”

            “Nobody else had to tell me anything,” you snap. “I’ve known. I’ve… always known. You used me, messed with my head, you’re the one who made me do things, not them, that-”

            “For your own good,” she sobs, stumbling closer to you. “To show you what could be, if you’d just accept it.”

            “You used me for your own sick games. We both know that.”

            “Please, Jack, PLEASE! They’re inside your head, they’re… they’re hurting you like this. Let me… let me make it go AWAY!” she weeps, oscillating between a scream and a caw. She reaches out for you, her fingers tracing along your arm again, but you bat her lightly away, prompting her to tumble toward the ground, as if gravity suddenly snatched her by the throat and pulled her out of the clouds and back to earth.

            She’s unraveling faster than you ever imagined possible for someone who once stood as tall as your sister. Like watching a god come unspooled. Somewhere inside, you can feel a deepening sting for her that quickly turns to internal bleeding, but you push it aside.

            “I had a hard time believing it myself, Carly. I’ve gone through a lot of shit… because of you… a lot of things I can’t ever get over. But the one thing I can get over is you, thinking you control me anymore. Because you don’t.”

            “Just a little bit longer, Jack, p-please,” your sister bargains in a voice that’s half garbled by water. “Just a little longer, then they’ll m-make me bigger and I can… I can hold you again… for real… make you s-see… make you s-see how it used to be, h-how it will be…” She’s hardly recognizable now, crouched on the floor, face flushed red with tears and horror, her fists gripped clumsily into her messy hair for support. In a way, she’s been reduced to the bratty young child you once saw her as, not the omnipotent goddess with the power to make you happy for every instant of your forthcoming existence.

            “I know I can’t control what those people out there do to me. And I don’t care,” you say. You can feel yourself adopting the same ramrod posture your sister held mere minutes ago as she stood above you and inserted her foot directly into your sense of being. “Maybe they will make you big again. Maybe they’ll give me to you. But don’t you think… for a second… that it means you own me. And if it does mean that to you, well… you might as well just stick me under your fucking shoe and be done with it.”

            “But Jack…”

            “No,” you say with lasting finality, standing above the broken husk of your power-hungry little sister as she sinks into infinite wallowing. “I’m done. We’re… done.”

            You turn toward the semi-reflective wall of the glass cage, remarking internally on how strangely human you appear to yourself for the first time in months, and maybe years. Clearly timed somewhat concurrently, though, the door of the cell beyond swings open with a metallic clang, and the redhead re-enters at a brisk gait.

            “I hope family time has been going well,” Claire sings as she power-walks toward you, easily closing the distance and looming above in all her black, though somehow you find yourself even less afraid of her now than you were when she first carried you in here. “I don’t mean to interrupt the fun and games, but it’s time for a miracle or two, and you’re coming with me, hon. We’re gonna stack a few more inches on you.” Instantly her fist opens up above you, caging you in the shadow of her leathered fingers as she reaches down.

            Resigned to whatever fate awaits now that you’ve finally beaten your sister, you remain peacefully cooperative as she collects you again.

            “No… w-wait,” Carly says from below, staggering up to her feet. “Aren’t you… taking me? To… to get bigger?”

            “Did I say your name, Carly? You’re going to stay here like a good little girl until I decide I have another use for you,” Claire says, twiddling you idly between the pads of her gigantic thumbs. “No offense, but I don’t even trust you at that size not to get into trouble. Do I look like an idiot to you?”

            “But… but you promised that I… I would be the first one t-”

            “I make a lot of promises, Carly. I’m a woman of my word, but I’m not God.”

            “I… I need l-longer with him. You told me I-” your sister sputters.

            “I told you you’d get to talk to him again. I’ve upheld that.”

            “What about…”

            “This is the end, Carly. You had your time. And now he’s mine. To finish the work we’ve all given so much to see finished.”

            “NO!” Carly cries, reducing herself to the most barbaric and stripped-down creature you believe you’ve ever witnessed. Her hair whips about her head in frazzled golden arcs, her fists pounding into the ground, growing louder on each blow. “NO! NO! NO!”

            Your sister rises again, sprinting at the glass and leaping at it so hard with her full weight, for an instant you believe she’ll break through, dash across the floor, and sock Claire upside the chin and into the center of the moon. Then probably fly into the sky and do the same to any celestial beings that may or may not exist but have nonetheless engineered this cosmic calamity of the world she believed she could own.

            Claire begins marching back toward the door, leaving you at enough of an angle to the side that you and your sibling can still make each other out across the gap. You watch your sister between the creases in the massive gloved fingers, threatening to tear out of herself as she yells and foams and throws her trembling hands repeatedly into the glass, stomping the ground, perhaps trying to summon a dark guardian angel to her aid. It’s just about all she’s got left to hope for.

            Even as the iron door slams and locks behind Claire, you can hear Carly’s clamoring scream flooding in the void beyond, the awful din coiled around a fragile wail of yearning and exquisite pain at its center like the eye of a storm.

 

End Notes:

One chapter left to go. Don't count Carly out just yet.

Please comment!

Chapter 20: Her World by Jacksmith
Author's Notes:

Last chapter!

            Carly’s forehead was pressed to her trembling wrists like a prayer as she huddled into herself against the furthest corner of her glass prison: the best chance for refuge, though such a thing was impossible to find here. By now so many tears had been spent down the crook of her neck and sopped through her makeshift jumpsuit that a glistening puddle had formed between her legs and even begun to trickle past her toes.

            Before she had her tiny brother back under her feet, Carly realized she’d become listless. Not just a girl who’d lost her way, but a goddess without a world to rule. Nothing had particularly mattered to her for the past eighteen months, and why should it?

            Whatever flame that had burned low until the age of fourteen, then ascended into a blazing inferno within her full heart for the next half-decade as she claimed the part of existence that belonged to her, had dimmed down to its last dying embers. And she didn’t care in the slightest.

            But now that he was back in her orbit, and back in reach of her soft and gracious fingertips, even if he couldn’t appreciate the significance of it yet, something had reignited inside the girl. The light was rising higher again, searing behind her eyes, with a fury like none other she’d felt before.

            Carly couldn’t surrender now. Not when he was out there somewhere, alone, poisoned by hollowing years of lies and vile fantasies of importance that everyone else had planted in his head. Much longer and he might never be brought back to her side. It made her want to vomit imagining him returned to the height he so wrongfully held in his youth. And as a final deluge of tears gushed down Carly’s cheeks, her eyes at last dried of all sorrow and stung only by the congealed rage at the basin of her soul, her sweat-soaked palms recoiled into fists.

            She was getting out of here, one way or another, tracking Jack down, and gluing the status quo of the universe back together.

            No matter how much time, no matter how much teaching it took, no matter how many walls she had to break down, she would regain her little brother’s heart and mind for her own.

            And he would come to love her as his personal savior again.

            “C-Carly?”

            There was little room for Michelle’s prodding squeak of a voice inside the pounding supernova currently swirling inside Carly’s golden head, but the stuttered call made it in nonetheless. Batting the last flecks of strained moisture from her eyelashes, the miniscule girl steadily began to unfold her limbs back out again, nearly slipping in the collected pool of tears surrounding her, and stumbled to her feet, looking up to the raven-haired assistant, standing earnestly behind the glass, concern etched into her tight features.

            “What?” Carly mouthed, though no sound came out.

            “I… I made you something,” the woman said. Her left hand came into view of the glass cage, demonstrating a hand-stitched baby-blue top and skirt scaled perfectly for a nearly-three-inch-tall girl with a slim, athletic build. She brandished the ensemble proudly between her thumb and forefinger.

            “Why?” Carly questioned numbly.

            “I wanted you to be… more comfortable,” Michelle offered. She mechanically reached over the translucent wall and deposited the clothing in front of Carly, retracting her hand immediately and blinking between her charge’s face and the peace offering.

            “Is that… allowed?”

            “S-Sort of. You can’t wear it if we need to test you for something else, but you’ve been cooperative, so a few days ago Claire told me I could… you know, if I wanted to, make you… something. To wear,” Michelle coughed. “Do you… want to try it on?”

            Shrugging, Carly tugged the itchy beige excuse for a garment off her back and let the it land at her feet, instead snatching up the blue top and skirt. She noted the towering joke of a petite woman before her flinching and pretending not to gawk at the sight of the shrunken prisoner stripped down to her skivvies.

            The outfit was some mildly impressive work, considering how small it was. It even matched the color of her eyes, Carly realized. A detail only Michelle would’ve been able to pick up on given their time together, really. Once she had it pulled over her head, she graced Michelle with another glance, running her hands along the fabric. It was mercifully less reminiscent of a crusty sponge than what she’d been wearing before.

            “Thanks,” Carly said nonchalantly.

            “Does it feel all right? I tried to go off the measurements she had me take, so I thought it would…” the woman mumbled, placing a hand cautiously over her mouth.

            “It feels fine.”

            “Good,” Michelle sighed, crossing her arms over her stomach and bowing her head.

            “What?” Carly asked softly, slipping easily back into placation mode. She allowed the residual twinkle in her eyes to work to her advantage as she stepped daintily across the span of the tank, eventually pressing her hands to the glass and looking out on the metallic landscape with greater purpose.

            “Carly, we have… an extra test to run,” the woman said. “Nothing painful and it won’t take long.”

            “That’s it?”

            “Yes. I’ll tell you about it on the way.” With that, the woman’s olive-skinned hand swept back into the tank, palm upturned before Carly, pausing just short of scooping her up.

            Puzzled and already engrossed in deconstructing the woman’s hyper-anxious façade, Carly hopped easily into the cool hand and rose up out of her cage.

            The exit from the room and into the bunker tunnel was brisk, more businesslike than any Carly had yet experienced in Michelle’s hands, though the door was shut with such care it hardly made a sound. Carly assumed it couldn’t be that she’d fallen out of her good graces, though, since Michelle had just spent apparently all of her recent free time in this moldy hellhole making doll accessories for her not-so-secret admiree. Raising an eyebrow, Carly watched the testing room approach and then pass them by as Michelle turned a corner she hadn’t yet during the youngest Arton’s stay here.

            “Where are we going?” Carly whispered. “What are you-”

            “I’m doing the right thing for once.”

            “You mean you’re going to-”

            “I won’t let anything happen to another one of you.”

            “Another one of… what does that mean?”

            “Just one more minute, I swear,” Michelle hissed, cupping her other palm over Carly’s body and shrouding her in darkness and heat for a few more moments before elbowing her way through another door.

            Peeking between the enormous pale fingers, Carly could make out a cot and set of drawers: Michelle’s quarters. The woman was finally seeing the light. A smile bulged over Carly’s tiny lips, out of her handler’s view.

 

            Your sky has become human.

            Human flesh, to be exact: spiraled like ripples in an endless pool of peach and amber, dotted by the odd speckle of filth crusted into the ever-shifting pink muscles and billowing wrinkles. Every huffed breath you take fills your lungs with the earthy and oily aroma leaked from a thousand feminine pores across the undulating sole. It constricts your chest, every second replacing the damp, aluminum-flavored oxygen of this underground bunker with Sophie’s skin, defiantly dragged down the hallway and glossed with anxious sweat long-dried and re-dried over the hills of her instep. On the outside, partially closed off by the heat-consuming seal created by your cousin’s flesh sticking and unsticking from the cold white floor, you can hear her teardrops plunking just beyond your reach.

            But it doesn’t matter. At least not for you. Even as Claire forces your beloved best friend to hover her sole above you, just as a final warning of the consequences for dissension at this stage of her scientific crusade, your shoulders remain light, untethered to the fears of a mere half-hour ago.

            You’re free. You’re finally free.

            Physically, of course, you’re still just shy of three inches tall. You’re still trapped in God-Knows-Where, America, about to be used for god-knows-what purpose by god-knows-who, while your comparatively titanic cousin, just as physically imprisoned as you, is forced to pretend-stamp you with as little body weight as she can conjure.

            But Carly is finished. No matter if she gains back her nearly six feet of former might, receives your hapless body as a gift, strips you back to your inhuman bareness, and spends every hour of every day for the rest of your probably concurrent lives with you wedged sweatily under a sopping, humid, flowery sole in the black hell of her favorite flats. None of that means a thing inside your head, and you know inside hers as well.

            You win.

            “For shit’s sake, no need to give yourself a hernia, dear,” Claire chuckles to Sophie as she leans against the keyboarded workbench just beyond the square white field you now find yourself encased in, within what you presume to be a testing facility, if it can be called that in this meager garbage pit of a lab. “I’m just trying to make a point.”

            “I… t-think I… know n-now… c-can I p-please stop this?” your cousin begs, wrenching your guts a little harder at the pain in her voice, muffled as it is by the shifting ceiling of foot flesh currently occupying your whole worldview. Light seeps in between the plush cracks of her sole on occasion, but for the most part, it’s just you, flush against Sophie’s foot. Two years ago, and probably a day ago, were you in this exact same position, you would be playing kisses upon every curved surface, violently jamming your tongue into the deepening rose wrinkles in gratitude for her choosing to trap you beneath it.

            But no more.

            “Hey, it’s not for my benefit I’ve having you stand there, hon. I just want it absolutely positively crystal-clear what’s going to happen to the both of you if one of you tries anything silly on me here. Because there’s no need for it,” the redhead continues.

            You hear her pause, followed by something muttered to the lab coat-clad cronies in thick-rimmed glasses you spied upon being brought to this room from Carly’s containment room. You didn’t have much time to get a feel for the layout of the place beyond its railed-off technician’s station and short flight of stone steps before you were forcibly deposited under Sophie’s sole, of course, with most of your senses suddenly devoted to the exact base of her body and nothing else, but it was enough.

            Most important was the massive machine itself: a mess of wires, tubes, and casings, whirring with energy and blue luminescence, and occupying the entire backside of the expansive hall. You can’t be certain, but you have a loudly sneaking suspicion that it has something to do with you and your abnormally low current height for your age or anyone else’s.

            “P-Please… let me s-stop,” Sophie weeps. You feel her foot shuddering all around you, rocking you from side to side by seismic sympathy, and it’s hard to tell how much of it is muscular exhaustion from holding one foot less than an inch off the ground for so long, or sheer watery-eyed terror for your wellbeing. Knowing your cousin, it’s probably the latter, but you can’t discount either.

            The hefty bulk of the ball of her foot eases further down against the top of your head, momentarily drowning you in dense prints and the balmy creaminess of her skin. Another desperate gasp of that sharp flavor is sucked down your throat as your lips are rammed against the all-consuming globe of it, washing sweet grime and flaked sweat down your gullet, but you feel nothing.

            No weakness. No magnetism. No regression into a toy or even a slave.

            It’s just you.

            The moment ends more quickly than you can process it. A rustle of clothes above, a snap of fingers, and barked orders you forget to comprehend. Sophie’s skin unpeels from your overheated body, briefly clinging to your limbs and lifting you from the ground before you plop onto your back again in the square center of this platform, which is quickly walled off by automated rising plate glass.

            Once the same balding body-armored guard in all black has dragged your cousin off the blaring white stage and toward yet another metal chair in the corner, the gridded lights above you become more apparent. Despite their sizzling heat, it’s comparatively cooling to feel it on your skin after having Sophie’s nervous sole flesh crammed against your every body part for several minutes.

            “Everyone ready?” Claire calls out in a dangerously singsong tone. “Because I sure as hell am.”

            There’s some random clicking and clattering across the control panel beyond, but it’s hard to distinguish through the distorted glass wall separating you from all the normal-sized giants. All you can know for certain is that the machine behind you is blooming brighter with its omnipresent blue. You can’t dare yourself to turn around and look at it, instead trying to focus on Sophie, still sobbing off in the corner.

            “We’re at full power now,” a voice reports from near Claire. “Should I throw the switch, or-”

            “Obviously,” the woman scowls. You can see her general amorphous shape heaving forward against the panel, and suddenly the blurry visages you could sort-of make out a moment before are flooded out of existence: lost in a rush of colors blended together from over your head, spiraling around you, and combining into one beam.

            Despite the near-white cobalt like the center of a flame that radiated from the monstrous belly of the size-changing machine itself, as you clench your eyelids shut in anticipation of doom or something even worse, you can’t help but notice a flash of green in the darkness. Like the aurora borealis contained inside your skull. Strange, to say the least, but you don’t have time to think it over in the increasing expectation that at any moment your entire body will be splintered into microscopic specks and splattered across all four plates of protective glass. Warmth pervades just under your skin to every corner of your body, exponentially greater than what you felt while being gently pulverized under Sophie’s sole a moment before.

            This could be it.

            And you couldn’t be more content with it now.

            When the roar of the machine finally fades away from its ping-ponging echo between the high walls of this cavernous place, you chance a blink, just to confirm whether you’re in purgatory or not yet. The white floor would certainly seem to support that idea, until you realize that the central platform of the testing room has an edge, and what’s more, it’s far closer than where you remember it.

            Far, far closer.

            The green still hangs in your darkened sight, suspended like the memory of looking into the sun, but as your swimming vision finally settles back into a solid place, you crawl onto your haunches and, with a shuddered sigh that nearly shatters your already delicately taped-together reality, you discover everything has shrunken back to its familiar size.

            Or rather, you’ve regrown back to yours.

            The cheering and clapping that fills the room somehow feels disingenuous, since you know it’s not actually for you but their own accomplishments with your science-project of a living meat-sack, but you don’t care at all. In fact, as you clamber up to your full height of over six feet for the first time in more than six years, the celebrations of your kidnappers are drowned out by Sophie’s cries from beyond.

            “JACK!” It’s a squeal of delight unlike any you’ve ever heard, except maybe one belonging to a very similar-looking family member of yours. Given how much smaller Sophie actually is than you now, with at least a six-inch differential, it would’ve been tough to immediately identify her, but you’d know that voice anywhere.

            Incredibly, you see Claire indicate in your direction with a wave of her hand, and the burly bodyguard follows the order, dragging your cousin up by the wrist from her chair. She appears only too happy to comply, skipping forward and down the stairs faster than her gruff caretaker is allowing until she’s spilling onto the white platform, her cheeks stained with both distraught and joyful tears as she literally leaps onto where you lie, wrapping her legs around yours, her arms over your shoulders as she cradles her face against your neck.

            “Good work, everyone,” the redhead balks to her henchmen and other employees, cutting over the noise of their euphoric glee. It only takes another snap of her fingers to regain control. “There will be time enough to cheer and dance and fuck each other in happiness later on. For now, I need every diagnostic on God’s green earth taken on that test. I want triple copies of every last line of code, and I want that kid there tested for… I don’t know, mumps, or anything else that might’ve gone screwy. We’ve never pulled this off before, after all. If it sounds like a stupid, impossible idea, test him for it. And Jones, go ahead and go with them.”

 

            “Please,” Carly wept with all the dramatic luster she could summon, somehow dredging up fresh saltwater to seep despite having used up most of her lifetime supply on real tears over Jack’s loss. Seconds in Michelle’s room had easily turned to minutes and then hours once Carly had this woman in the palm of her hand, metaphorically at least. Who needed physical size and strength when you had oceanic eyes deep enough to maroon any target, plus a composer’s artistry for beautiful-sounding words? “Please, Michelle.”

            “Carly… I know you’re afraid, but-”

            “She’ll kill me if you just hide me in here. She’ll find out!”

            “Carly, I can’t just l-let you go out there, out in the world on your own. In here, I can bring you food, take care of you, but out there… I don’t know if you’ll… s-survive.”

            “How do you be sure?”

            “I had… someone else. Here. Her name… her name was June.”

            “What happened to her?”

            “We couldn’t get anywhere with her. Three years of testing, and nothing. She’d already tried to escape twice, and almost made it the second time. So Claire, she told me to… to…”

            “Kill her,” Carly finished for her, experiencing the wince beneath the padded floor of Michelle’s palm. “Just like she’s going to tell you to do to me. You know that.”

            “I didn’t do it!” Michelle blubbered. “I believe in what we’re d-doing here, I honestly do… but… she begged me to let her go, so I… did… I put her right out the front door. On her own. No bigger than you. I have no idea where she ended up, or if someone else found her. If she’d been discovered, I know Claire would’ve done to me what I was supposed to do to June, but…”

            “But she wasn’t. I can make it, too,” Carly wailed, coiling each of her limbs around Michelle’s fingers. She fragmented her breathing, letting the woman sync with the anguish vibrating out of her against her flesh. “I don’t want to die. Please. M-Michelle, I… I know you’re a g-good person. Not like the others here. Not like Claire. G-Give me a chance.”

            “There’s no way at this size that you’d make it. I couldn’t live with myself.” The woman’s fingers closed in tighter around her mewling charge’s falsely quivering body.

            “Then make me a different size. My real size,” Carly sobbed, letting loose another downpour down her cheeks with such effort it caused physical pain. “I need you.”

            “She’ll know the machine was used. She won’t let me-”

            “Then come with me,” Carly demanded lovingly, planting a kiss on the woman’s thumb pad. She broadened the circular windows into her crystal blue irises, knowing the woman was almost pulled fully inside. Now she just needed to drown her. “We can make it. Together.”

 

            You pull Sophie’s cheek away from yours for a moment in the quiet of your shared cell, brushing a halcyon lock of sweat-matted hair off her forehead. After the onslaught of medical exams you just went through, needles poked into your veins and bones, continually discovering zero side effects in your return to proper stature, it’s vitally soothing on your aching form to have this time alone, even though you know the door could fling open again at any minute and tear you apart from your cousin again.

            Sophie leans in closer, her legs wrapped over yours. She casts another gaze up toward your face and drinks in the sight of your head resting above hers, probably still not quite believing it. The young woman’s fingers rise up, threading gracefully through your hair and letting every individual strand cling in the soft creases between her digits for just a moment before releasing them again. She shuts her eyes and leans in again, depositing a warm, wet kiss on your chin.

            “Thanks for everything, Soph,” you whisper under your breath and into her ear. “I mean it.”

            “Oh, Jack,” she utters. “What’s going to happen to us?”

            “I don’t know yet,” you admit. “But if I can do anything about it, you’re not going to stay here. I’m going to get you out.”

            “Why did all of this have to go like this?” she moans, a slither of a cry left in your eardrum. “It… doesn’t even seem real. None of it.”

            “I know,” you say. “I’m so sorry you got dragged into all this.”

            “Don’t you apologize again,” she wheezes, her throat now sore after a day of nonstop tears. “I just didn’t want you to feel alone or scared anymore. And now…”

            “It’ll be all right, Soph. Somehow.”

            As if to punctuate your uncertain promise, the telltale wrenching of the metal lock rings in your ears, followed by the creak of the ancient hinges and a squat face appearing past the jamb.

            “C’mon. They got another med test to run on you,” the balding grunt evidently named Jones grumbles, stooping and snatching the both of you by an arm each. Sophie is pulled in close to his chest, probably to make a point to you. His sausage-esque fingers are, seemingly, made at least partially of iron. Even at your height and level of athleticism, it’s too risky to make a move right now. He’s definitely not going to offer many opportunities to break free, especially while he has Sophie drawn so near, his hand next to her neck.

            They may not be able to blackmail your cousin into crushing you underfoot any longer, but you have a feeling Claire has some gruesome alternatives in mind involving long metal poles or pointed tools.

            Nevertheless, your begrudging tramp down the tunnel toward the next steel-reinforced door feels among the most empowered of your stunted lifespan. You made a promise to Sophie, and you intend to keep it, even if it kills you. With every step, you feel your consciousness re-growing to befit the six-foot frame you now repossess, filling in the spaces again. It’s like moving back into an old house. Despite the imminent danger to yourself and the dearest person you have left on the earth, you can’t help but dare the universe to stop you from calling yourself a human being again.

            For the first time in a very long time, you allow yourself the luxury of belief.

 

            With a final crackling fizzle, the great machine swallowed the remainder of its blue light back into its alloy bowels as Carly, bathed in light and returned to all five-foot-eleven-inches of tanned, toned, twitching glory, laid in the center of the white stage, her fingers trembling around the hem of her newly gifted skirt, as if she briefly thought she might be flung into the stratosphere. She made no attempt to move, only letting the smile play across her mouth a little longer in the corners.

            “Wow… it…” Michelle gawked as she shoved away from the control panel she’d been running. She sprinted down to the testing floor, taking the steps two at a time. For an instant she only processed the sight of the lanky siren stretched out in snow angle formation upon the white floor. Snapping quickly out of it, though, the woman wrapped her hands around Carly’s shoulders and hoisted her up. As her face passed along the ascending Arton’s cheek, she couldn’t help but inhale a little harder, savoring the girl’s amplified scent.

            The disheveled blonde subject herself made no further sound, her arms hanging limply at her side, a portrait of uncommon weakness, inviting Michelle to shift more of her weight against Carly’s hips for support. It worked.

            “Carly, I’m sorry, but… they could come in at any second,” the willowy woman urged, eyeing the distant metal chair dragged beneath the hammer of the door handle to keep it from twisting. A temporary solution, at best. She shouldered Carly up the stairs, unable to help but feel a mounting rush inside at the sight of the girl now possessing a good eight inches in superiority over her, and set about on a three-legged race toward the door. “It’s time to go. Now.”

            “I know.

            Michelle felt Carly halt in her defiant tracks and swiveled back around, but it was too late. In the subsequent breath, the woman’s vision faded into a corkscrew of all-encompassing obscurity as she sunk into unconsciousness on the floor, the back of her head already swelling magenta from where Carly had snatched her by that midnight hair and slammed Michelle’s skull down into the countertop with an authoritative crack of her fist.

            There were already voices outside the door, accompanied by batons railing on the frame in rage, keys jangling uselessly on hooks, but Carly didn’t hear them. Nor could she truly see her fingertips working feverishly across the backlit screen Michelle had left running on the Matter Reduction Device’s console, indicating the desired percentage increase in mass and volume upon the testing platform. She hardly felt the cold of the floor on her soles, her skin hot enough now to melt away the chill, as she pounced down the steps again and dove into the path of the machine’s impending rays just as they shown out from the grid above with the blinding capacity of a newborn sun.

            None of these rapidly flashing moments was digested in Carly’s head, not out of disconnection from the world, but because they didn’t matter. All she could see ahead of her, fastened to her eternal sight even in the darkness, was Jack, tiny and helpless, naked and afraid, crying out for her from past the veil put up by the world and all its sickening inhabitants.

            But no more.

            The second sensation was just as instantaneous, but far more potent as Carly witnessed herself taking pure form.

            The one she was meant for.

            The expansive white floor beneath her back reduced into nothing, fading faster than a day-old dream. Her arms seemed to billow outward in the once-yawning metal canyon, filling the space faster than she could’ve imagined as her wide hands each pressed to opposite walls, feeling the metal shrink beneath her touch, as though she herself was crafting its new shape along her radial fingertips. It felt something akin to willing herself into the realms of Neverland and Wonderland from the bygone childhood myths she once spent hours upon hours mentally rewriting: correcting the short-sighted scope of their original creators, her body literally expanding into the dream’s story.

            Only this was no dream.

            Carly Arton had grown.

            Her legs extended to full length as the girl released a moan of seismically erotic relief she’d had pent up for months on end, letting her darkly radiant hair cascade regally over the railings of the lab. There was hardly room to contain her now.

            The sound of her musical victory yawp rattled the clandestine underground hall, but it was immediately contested in its pitch by the earth-splitting crash as Carly, a grin plastered over her pillowy lips, collided both nude feet into the bulk of the prototypical MRD with all the power of a medieval battering ram and triple the glee. Its cold silver chassis folded like crispy tin foil under Carly’s buttery heels.

            She flexed her soles, digging her ankles down into the now-flaming wreckage of Claire’s magnum opus, hardly aware of the slightest singe as she buckled the massive underside of her left and right feet again and again upon this device so much time and pain had been spent upon. The last gasp of its eerie blue glow peeked from among the crumpled, charred pile of copper and steel, but Carly quickly squinched a big toe over this last bastion of the machine’s life, crunching it with hardly a flick of her meaty digit.

            Satisfied that none could follow her now, Carly drew her truck-sized bare feet back into her body, clutching momentarily at the blue uniform Michelle had stitched together: a last gift from the overly trusting woman. She flicked aside the hall’s chairs with a bat of her slender fingers, shuffling for shoulder room as the newly titanic twenty-year-old gazed up upon the ceiling that had once seemed so distant but now looked close enough to touch.

            Of course, Carly did far more than touch it as she pressed off from the cold ground by the balls of her feet and splayed toes, launching upward with all the potential energy of a nuclear rocket concentrated into her nubile body, her curves bulging with long-dormant amazonian might. Her fist passed easily through the pathetic sheet of six-foot stainless steel, causing it to erupt upward in tattered flecks and, to her surprise, into the blazing sunlight.

            Wrapping her warm fingers over the edge of the landscape above and dragging her luminescent visage out of the MRD’s coffin and into the land of the living again, the one-hundred-and-fifty-foot goddess-in-becoming gazed out into the dusty, mountainous terrain of her captor’s hideaway. Over the sprawling, rocky earth and just past a branded green sign bolded with “Avalon Valley,” she spied the urban stubble of houses and buildings dotting the horizon just beyond.

            “Now…” Carly murmured with all the serenity she knew the people out there could no longer enjoy, now that she existed in full. She allowed the warm solar rays to kiss her cheeks like a lost sister as she stretched up toward the heavens with both hands spread wide, ready to receive her new world onto the tip of her waiting tongue, and swallowed. “…just where did my precious little bro get off to?”

 

End Notes:

All right, all right, go ahead and hate me if you must. But you didn’t really think I could wrap up this series in just one more chapter, did you?

This whole fifth story has been about Carly and Jack’s journeys apart, with the conclusion now finally bringing them back into the same place. The next, and probably final, story of the series will show what happens when our tiny immovable object (brother) meets a gigantic unstoppable force (sister), and also allow Carly to grow into a height more suited to her personality.

So stay tuned for the continuation in A Little Blackmail 6. I don’t know when it will be appearing, but certainly in much less time than it took me to begin posting this one. As always, comments are sincerely appreciated, and I hope you let me know what you thought of the ending.

Peace, kiddies.

This story archived at http://www.giantessworld.net/viewstory.php?sid=5219