Today seemed like just another ordinary day for Jack. The 20 year old college sophomore never really felt much excitement in his life unless he was partying all night getting sloshed. The usual place to be for the nightlife was his friend Gary’s house. His parents were loaded, so he had his own house, where the party never stopped and the beer and sex flowed like running water.
Jack grabbed the keys off the desk and headed over to Gary’s place. He ducked to get through his door frame and over to his car. At 6”4’, that wasn't an uncommon occurrence. He got in his car and drove across campus to pick up his pal Duke. Well, not just Duke. You see, Duke was the sort of guy all the ladies couldn’t keep their hands off. Duke was not only coming with his sidepiece, but he’d even gotten Jack a piece of the action.
When he rolled up to Duke’s dorm, he stepped out with two ladies in tow. To Jack’s surprise, Kim was one of them. Kim was in the medical program training to be a nurse, so you two ended up sharing a bunch of classes. But the petite Asian woman had always given off the aura of a serious, no-nonsense sort of person. Jack had never had her pegged for the partying type.
The other woman was Tanisha, and she had come with Duke a few times to these escapades. She was a complete bombshell. She was wearing a tight slip-on dress that accentuated all her curves, and her make-up game was on-point as always, and hair that reached past the small of her back. Though, I suppose if you’re going to hang on the arm of somebody as built and chiseled as Duke, you need to look your best to stand out. After all, with his perfect muscles, his perfect build, and his perfect hair, you would almost think he was the model for the cover of teen romance novels
On the way to the party, Duke got a text from Gary that his car had broken down at the liquor store when he was out buying the good stuff for the party. Jack had plenty of room in his car, so they went to pick him up too. When they parked in the parking lot, Gary approached them laden with booze. He opened the car door and everybody blacked out.
When everybody woke up, the car was gone and everybody was naked. They were standing on a smooth black surface that nobody recognized. Jack, assuming they had just gotten blackout drunk, helped the others to their feet. Looking around, he noticed the black wall around the enclosure was actually connected to the ground. The only other items of interest that could be seen were a large, shallow bowl in the middle of the enclosure filled with gray dirt and five peculiar white logs in a stack to its side. Looking over, he noticed one of the logs on the bottom of the stack had a crude picture of his face on it. He wondered whether he’d drawn that in a drunken stupor, but decided that wasn’t worth worrying about. He was more worried about where they were and how to return home.
They heard a loud creaking sound from somewhere over the large wall, when suddenly the sound of footsteps approached them. But these footsteps were louder than any feet they’d ever heard. A man came into view that shocked everybody trapped in the walls. His hair was jet black with a silver streak through it. He was clean shaven with a very chiseled chin. He was wearing a black T-Shirt. A pair of glasses with thin frames perched upon his bulbous nose. His wrinkles gave him a wizened appearance. But none of that is what made him so shocking. From their perspective, the man must have been at least 300, no 400 feet tall.
Grant was a 47 year old man, who had always felt he let the best years of his life pass him by. Even before he had gotten as old as he had, he always felt jealous that other people had their lives together, while he was just chugging along, and his midlife crisis certainly hadn’t helped things. Then on his 45th birthday, he realized he had acquired a certain power that would change the trajectory of his life, namely the ability to shrink people. With this new power, he both found a way to make himself feel better about how much of his life he felt he wasted, and to feed two of his addictions at once. So when he saw four young college students pick up their friend to enjoy the best years of his life, he knew what he had to do.
Imagining by now his guests had probably awoken, he made his way back into the living room. On the table was a cheap plastic TV tray. But to Grant, it was special. It was where he did his favorite activity. Looking down, his prisoners looked up at him in awe and started to panic. He supposed if he were looking up at a gigantic god of a man, he would panic too. He didn’t blame them, especially knowing what was going to come next.
Grant picked up the top log in the stack, giving everybody a better view of them. To their surprise, the log was actually a cigarette. As Grant lifted the cigarette, Jack noticed a picture on that cig as well. The artist hadn’t done a very good job, but the image was still unmistakably Duke’s face. Grant turned the cig to take a look at the picture and smiled. He had hoped that this one would be one of the first to go. Grant grabbed the hunk and brought him to his face.
“Tell me, little one. What do you want to do with your future? Do you have any dreams or aspirations?”
Duke was taken aback. He hadn’t expected the giant to get philosophical with him, but he could tell from his twisted smile and focused eyes that he didn’t have Duke’s best intentions in mind. He started wriggling in his grasp and begging.
“Please, I don’t know what you want, but I’ll give you anything you want. If it’s money, no problem! If you need a girlfriend, I can hook you up! Please, just let me go!”
Grant was a bit disappointed. Sometimes his little victims didn’t want to talk to him. But that’s a bit okay. After all, if he was just another face in the crowd to him, he didn’t really need to feel bad about what he was going to do next, did he?
Grant put Duke’s back up against his cigarette and pinched him against it, freeing up an extra hand. He grabbed a rubber band from off the table outside the walls of the TV tray, and he wrapped it around Duke, pinning him to the cigarette. Duke was now suspended from the cig looking down. Disgustingly, it seems the shirt Grant was wearing hid the fact that he wasn’t actually wearing anything below his waist except a pair of cowhide boots. His bush, his hairy legs, and his flaccid cock were on full display to the suspended man.
Click, Click
Duke recognized the sound. It was a lighter. Realizing where he was and what that meant, he tried his hardest to break his bonds, but he couldn’t pull himself away from the cig. He felt himself getting warmer as a bright light shown through the hair draped over his face. That’s when it happened. The cigarette and Duke’s hair caught fire. Duke screamed and cried and begged as Grant put down his lighter. He tried blowing his hair, shaking his head, even spitting. Anything to just make the fire go out. But nothing would spare Duke his fate. As Grant cradled his cigarette in his left hand as he took long drags, his right hand drifted down by his side. The last sight Duke ever saw was Grant’s right hand clasping around his cock as he stroked his dick.
Grant looked down at his playthings as he tapped his cigarette ash, and a significant portion of Duke’s burnt body into the ashtray. He always liked having the ashtray right in the middle so everybody could see just how gruesome each death truly was. The tiny man had so much life ahead of him. He could have had so many experiences. And now he was a corpse in the middle of his ashtray. The thought that this man’s life was in his hands, and he had so easily taken it away got him excited in a way few things could.
Tanisha was unconsolable as she held what was left of Duke and cried in Grant’s ashtray. Gary was scratching at the smooth walls of the tv tray, hoping for any way out. Kim curled into a fetal position, having a breakdown. But Jack looked up in awe at the giant unable to comprehend what he was seeing. It was almost maddening.
Grant finally finished his cig and snuffed it out in his ashtray. That was fun and was good fore-play, but he could do better than that. He slowly and deliberately reached back into the pile.
One cigarette down, four to go.