A field of bright red fabric, pockmarked by specks of lint and imperceptible clumps of fluff, stretches vast in every direction. The gigantic form of the swivel chair’s backrest, hundreds of miles away, looms like a blood-red gas giant in the skies of an alien world. The air is as thick as soup. Damp too with the moisture of her sweat, built up over hours. The hot drops have since seeped into the cloth, wetting it and leaving a salted smell clinging to everything. A windless ambience, serene from a distance.

Sitting in one place for the morning left a damp and uncomfortable trench in the cushioning. It was refreshing when she could finally stand up, stretching and stuffing borrowed books into her bag. Flakes of dead, moulting skin and strings of loose denim now punctuate the landscape like huge boulders and fallen trees. Cracks where the cloth hills have stretched and torn are reminiscent of ravines, red splays of string dangling over the edges like vines. She has been gone just short of ten minutes, having sat for hours working, texting, chatting, all the while an ungodly pressure and heat was building up beneath like restless tectonics. The lingering heat makes this a red hell.

Even atop arching strands of loose, black hair, the inferno cannot be escaped. The ground burns with an intense residual heat, as if the misty rainforest is ablaze and every dust speck is a hot coal. To the briefest touch, the ground scorches, radiating upwards and scolding the skin of a dozen men and women who writhe, squealing in agony. At a scale where the heat of the cushioning can sting like fire, distance is warped – what should be an inch feels like miles, the mighty outline of a desk and computer further still, and shelves of books across the aisle might as well be distant planets. Running is useless, if it were achievable; those meek creatures choose instead to tumble and scream on the hot, blistering cloth, draped in wetness from the musty air and their own seething sweat.

Clutching the ground with clawed hands, ripping up chunks, blistered and pumping with juicy flesh, they hear the moans and screams, the echo of the library, student laughter mixed with the hum of the lights. Some screams have given up, dissolved into tortured sobbing, some still are silent but shiver as though simmering on a pan. Skin pulsates and reddens and peels, letting blood. A sleek form passes by in the hazy distance, a woman with her bag slung over, and those who still can reach up and shriek for anything. A sharp glance could suffice to remind them they exist beyond suffering. She moves on without offering as much.

The last one collapses to his belly and spits out a cry. Unfeeling now in any other capacity, the heat has overthrown them. The thought of a cold death is comforting. The bodies twitch and still whine a little, far from home or really anything familiar, and burned in a land of rolling hills stained with an eye-straining red.

A dark sky pinpricked with glimmers of light, warm air hanging over shadowy plains – the scene could be mistaken for a summers night under the stars. It was only under deep recollection and intense back-and-forth that the group realised their true location: under beady holes in a massive blanket, a taste of early morning light, and a land of mattress cloth stretching out into darkness all around. Unsure of their scale, they marched in close file, eager not to lose anyone under the cover of sheer blackness. It was easy to lose the rest of the group in this place, a lesson some learned all too well.

The further “north” the company marched, the warmer the air got and louder was the steady rumble of breath after heaving breath. They were not alone beneath the covers. An hour passed, then another. The place was not uncomfortable, though it stank slightly of sweat and a hint of perfume. Endless discussions were of course accommodated by the long and simple journey. The fragrance was noted as familiar by everyone, and soon the sleeping girl’s identity was revealed: a close friend to some, a distant acquaintance to others, a student to a few, and to one an ex-girlfriend.

Before long, friendships were forged and the team were laughing, regardless of only knowing each other by the tone of their voices. When finally they hit a soft and immense wall, they quickly assumed it was the ball of a foot. While it would be concealed in darkness above, this would mean her arching sole was towering overhead, and that thought gave no great joy. Still, the close-knit team went to work collecting anything useful for scaling or waking her, then they reformed using whistles and shouts.

It would have been hard to separate that lot with their comradery, brought close by the eerie strangeness of their situation. Perhaps hours went by, it was difficult to tell, but in the end the morning light shone details into the landscape. A wide open flatland of sparse clumps of dirt, strands of hair, and specks of fluffy lint. In the distance behind the team, so far away it boggled their minds, the creases of the sky met the land. As the light grew more revealing, the team saw strange ruggedness and dark-toned colouration in what they had spent the night with. On the one hand, it certainly exceeded expectations, as huge as a mountain with gashes running down like fissures in a cliff face. Roots of wool or hair poked out like bent trees. As the dazed team made their way around it, the view of a far greater mountain hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles away came into sight. Arching, creasing, looming, the foot was speckled with spots of dirt, a loose hair strand sticking to the skin here and there.

What followed, in the wake of the literal dawn, was the shaking revelation they had spent the night scaling a tiny piece of dirt. Looking back, it seemed like no more than a sand grain and, from the queasy smell, the enormous thing had likely fallen off her sole. The distant toes twitched. She would wake soon, an hour at most, and the journey to her foot would take absurdly longer than that. So much so, the thought drilled a pit into everyone’s stomach. One wept, another just wandered off and never came back. Those who remained sat in silence for the longest time and only spoke in the briefest of terms.

Minutes before she awoke, the team exchanged a few hugs. They gathered leftover strings and tightened them into cords, then silently strangled each other. The last one finished himself off to the unceremonious tune of his ex’s alarm.

“What are you doing with that?” she asked the inhumanly tiny person, slowly pushing a crumb across the table. Her question got no answer. The speck simply kept on pushing the slightly bigger speck, inch by inch, across the vast wooden waste. The girl sat staring, bemused by the tiny person’s ignorance, or arrogance. Without a sound, at least to hear ears, she dropped her hand in front of the speck, lightly curving her fingers to form an impenetrable mountain range.

The speck stopped dead. Spinning around, nothing the faint outline of a head, arms, and two shaking legs was clear to the girl. One edge of her lips twitched into a smirk and the tiny person staggered a few steps away. She slid the paper plate and her half-finished coffee to the side, making the table quake and sending the tiny tumbling to their backside. She snickered a little through her nose.

“I said,” she repeated, deepening her voice a bit and pausing for effect, “What are you doing with that?” The girl darted her eyes to the scone crumb, then back to the human crumb. She possibly got a response, it was impossible to hear. She gave a theatrical sigh and gently tapped her fingers against the table, each land making the smallest slap. Down there, it must have been a roaring tremor as the tiny stumbled over again and slammed their hands to their ears.

“That’s not yours,” the girl said. Her voice was soft and mocking. She changed to tapping her nails against the wood and she smiled when the little person struggled to their feet and waved wildly for her to stop. She cocked her head and pretended not to understand, still tapping.

“You should really learn to ask first,” she whispered. By now the speck must have been screaming but she still couldn’t hear, so she leaned a little closer to make out a word or two. Despite the strain, she barely made out the word ‘need’.

“What?” the girl asked at a volume more suited to someone her own size. After the tiny person’s hearing recovered, they continued to shout and again she made out ‘need’.

“So,” she replied, “You need this? And I don’t?” The tiny stopped shouting. Silence fell and she quickly knew how to respond, but she let the anticipation stew. It was a struggle to stop herself from smiling. Eventually she said, “I don’t need it. But I bought it, it’s mine. I decide what to do with it, little friend.”

With that, the girl lightly pressed her finger onto the scone crumb, crushing it hard and flat. She flicked it away onto the floor, then she carefully swished any remaining crumbs off the side of the table. Turning back to the tiny with a faint smile, she got no response. The speck stood there staring back, motionless, looking up with an expression that the girl could never register.

As she stood up to leave, she leaned over and gurgled from the back of her throat, hacking up spit that landed mere inches from the tiny onlooker. The foaming viscous spread and settled and the girl winked.

“Didn’t think I was going to leave you with nothing,” she chimed, “Did you?”

Grabbing her attention was beyond any reasonable expectation. He paced and cursed to the air in her shade, as she sat at her desk scarcely a foot away; an inaccurate measurement when an inch is a day’s worth of distance. He had been like this for hours now, he had watched her go and come back to her work many times. The gargantuan area she took up in the sky, her deific scale and beauty with ponytail hair and piercing marine eyes, diminished to absolute meaninglessness when the shock was over and the hunger set in. It was bad now, but as the afternoon ticked by into evening, as co-workers gradually got up and left, he was left with a growing hollow in his stomach.

The sickening dizziness of it made the feeling more unbearable: streaking ridges in the wood made canyons, flaws stuck up like mountainous shards, dandruff his co-worker had scratched from her hair and flicked to the table made up globular hunks, sprinkled across the chipboard desert. Waving and screaming had not worked, nor had ringing or so much as messaging her because his phone wouldn’t cooperate at this scale. The disorienting, lonely, maddening scenario was made all the worse as his stomach lurched in hunger and his tongue dried up with thirst.

He had felt personally insulted when she had returned from lunch still crunching a roll, slapping her lips together in taunting satisfaction that he wished he could know again. Every slurp of sweetened coffee shook the dry wood lands; bad enough at a normal size, she ate louder close-up than he could have imagined. He let a disgusting hope build up inside that a small, single drip of sauce or speck of cheese could come crashing down like a blessing from heaven. The best he got was still enough to excite him. Flakes of toasted bread roll, golden and still warm, impacted the surface all around. The nearest was jagged and resembled a crashed star ship, looming distant and promising relief.

Not long after she had finished eating and licked the remains from her fingers, he set out to reach the magnificent flake. It would be cold by the time of his arrival, but that was not on his mind in the slightest. He was desperate. One ridges after another proved its own special challenge and a straight path was out of the question. Some gaps in the surface were so wide and deep, it took hours of walking, climbing, and retracing footsteps to reach the other side. By the time he had passed three great crevices, even she had left and the world was plunged into darkness.

The night was restless; walk, stop, keep going, cry a little, shake with the cold, test if the wood grains taste better over here – and so on. This went on into the next day, and again she came, ate, worked, and left. Then again. His feet tripped with every step, the heat of the lights and the cold of the night pained his arching skin and joints, and he had nothing to accompany him but the lonely thoughts of hopelessness that drowned his mind, or the banal muffled ramblings of office chatter.

By the third day, he was crawling and weeping. The flake seemed no closer than the day he had started. He was far from energetic enough to even scream in anger at the gods above. At some time around lunch break, as she returned once more to the desk, he gave way altogether and collapsed to the ground. Within an hour, the tremors of typing had sent his body tumbling into a crack. The last thing he knew, at the bottom of the ravine, was the slurp and crunch of cruel fate and the image of a flake burned into his eyes.

Throughout the sludgy, salt-smelling wastes that rolled unevenly for hundreds of miles around, there was an ecstatic cheering. Months of work had paid off and now a convention of a few dozen men, all deeply entrenched in the macrophile fantasy, were scattered across this alien land. The ritual had not been simple, nor without great sacrifice, but they were here; the promised land of their dreams; each man was less than a dust particle in a bowl of food.

After the dizzying teleportation, they grouped and hugged and celebrated. The feeling of such insignificance, surrounded by a country’s worth of brown-reddish marshland, was greater than they could have imagined. Some had to sit down on nearby stone-like chunks, others simply collapsed in unconscious euphoria. It was too much for them, the glory of it. Soon she would come, the girl that would bring them all to an end, stuffing the vast landscape into the hot cavern of her mouth.

As for exactly what kind of food they were standing on, it was a mystery. Some had hoped for a yoghurt or something similarly sloppy, others vied for the classic hoop cereal. This looked like neither, chunky bog land with mounds of red meat in places, and the thick waft of casserole filled their nostrils. The men’s feet sunk into the wet ground, every footstep a hefty, sloshing plunge, like wading across a water-clogged field. Not the worst way to go, they supposed – as dinner. Unlike breakfast, she wouldn’t be in a rush to have it. They could enjoy themselves for a bit longer.

Distant booms grew louder and shook the boggy ground. Globs of slick mud wobbled as they fell under the gargantuan shade of that woman. They broke out in rejoice and cheered for their demise, even weeping and kissing each other: she was young, with a sharp cute nose and two gorgeous blue eyes, and locks of dirty-blonde hair. She wore this grey shirt that lazily draped over her breast and revealed the tips of her shoulders. Most of these miniscule men had never touched a woman; now they were so close, they could feel the heat of her breath, they could see every pockmark on her cheeks.

Her glazed eyes told them she was somewhere else, lost in thoughts regarding work or something – all the better, they would be consumed without a second thought. Her tiny voyeurs got so hard, some had already came to the sight of her. Those who had not held it in, eager to let loose at just the right moment, on the verge of their sensual annihilation. The ground wobbled like jelly, every man tumbling over with the force of her gripping the bowl and lifting it up. The tips of her fingers and thumb popped out from behind the far-off wall of ceramic. Soon, her lips and tongue would be in touching distance. Her voice echoed so loud and deep, it was almost impossible to tell what she said:

“Molly, dinner!”

Molly? The sudden shock, then a wash of relief, cast over the perverse group of men – this beautiful woman was not to be their destroyer, but at the very least they would be eaten by a girl named Molly. A friend; daughter; partner? They couldn’t tell and hardly cared at this point, they were this deeply entrenched in the reality of the greatest fantasy. They wallowed in their glory just as they wallowed in the slick mud.

“Here y’go!” the woman called out, her cute smile stretching out further than the distance of a million suspension bridges. She lowered the bowl.

To the floor.

Every one of the dozens of men leaped to their feet, insofar as they could with the sticky brown ground clinging to their bodies. A collective breath was felt, deeply filled with the salted stench of the landscape. The woman rose to her full height, towering so high the men could not even crane their necks enough to see her. Their necks were not the only thing that ached; their hearts and groins pounded with agony. Sniffing hysterically, the snout of a gigantic dog rose over the bowl’s rim. Less of a pet, more of a godly entity in its own right, the creature shoveled mountains of slop onto its tongue and down its pitch-black gullet.

If the ground had been rock solid, they still could not have run fast enough; instead, the harder they crawled and writhed, the deeper they sunk. That mysterious woman, their idol of worship, abandoned them to hell, pacing away across unknowable swatches of land in absolutely no time.

They were so close – she was right there – the bitch was right fucking there.

The last thing they felt was the crushing, sloshing, crunching, heat of death – their last scent was the pungent air of dogfood mixed with foul breath – the last thing any of them heard was the squelch of entire continents of food crushed to mere meal, and the bitter screams of the crowd who called out for rescue, for hope, for any death at all but this one.