As usual, I was lost in a crowd. I just wanted to get to a nice, secluded area so I could study, but the mass of people around me had different ideas. Up ahead I saw a path leading off, but when I tried to head that way a shoulder pushed me from behind, shoving me into the back of the person in front of me. Before I could recover a blow from their hips jolted me to the side, though colliding with another person kept me from falling. This was not the first time this had happened to me, so I slowed my gait, waited for the person to pass, and quickly zipped between people to exit the crowd.
Before I could even catch my breath I collided with a wall I had not noticed a few moments ago. The wall was suspiciously warm, and had a white cloth covering over its unusually soft insides. Curious, I took a half-step back and looked up, only to find the wall bulged toward me a bit further up. Leaning back, I saw a pair of light, clear blue eyes peering down at me from over the top of the wall.
“Oh, I didn’t see you down there, little guy!” declared the tallest woman I had ever encountered. She giggled and brushed a strand of blond hair behind an ear with a single diamond stud with her long fingers. Her full, red lips cast shadows over her pale skin under the library’s lighting, and her rounded nose was almost directly over my head. Her light, plucked eyebrows arched while she knelt so we would be closer to eye-to-eye.
“I’m Vanessa!” she said cheerfully. “Do you want me to help you find your parents?”
I stared up at her in silence for a moment, unsure how insulted I should be by that. “I’m actually a freshman here,” I replied, deciding to let it slide, and her eyes widened.
“Oh!” Vanessa exclaimed, giggling again as she stood back to her full height. She straightened her black, pleated skirt against her thighs. “I just figured you were, like, a professor’s kid or something. You look like you should be in fifth or sixth grade.” As she spoke she showed no signs of the embarrassment I would expect from someone who seems addicted to putting their foot in their mouth.
“Well, I’m not.” With her significant frame in the corridor, I could not simply move past her. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I was really hoping to use this time study for my geology midterm.” I looked to her left to indicate I wanted to pass, but she did not budge.
“Oh really?” she asked, resting a hand on the waist of her skirt. “I’m in that building all the time, why have I never noticed you there?” While I searched for an answer, she provided her own. “I guess you’re so small I wouldn’t normally notice you.”
“Do you talk to everyone this way?” I asked, finally losing my patience with her rude remarks.
“No,” she replied haughtily, turning up her chin so she could look even further down at me, “just shrimpy little small fries like you. Why, does it bother you?”
“A little bit, yeah.” It looked like there was more space to the side, but she still blocked my path. “Look, I don’t want this to be a whole thing, I just want to sit down and study for a bit. Can you let me through?” As I looked up at her, she seemed a little bit taller than when I first bumped into her.
“Why would I do that?” Vanessa asked back, placing her feet shoulder width apart. “We’re having such a great conversation! Do you get nervous talking to women or something?”
I audibly sighed. “No, you’re just making fun of me for being short.”
She placed a hand on her chest and gasped in feigned offense. “I’ve done nothing of the sort!” Vanessa looked a bit larger now, like she had grown a couple of inches in the past few minutes. “All I’ve done is point out that you’re incredibly short for a guy, I can’t help it if a bit of gentle ribbing goes right over your head.” Looking down at me, she seemed even taller now. “Did you ever want to be taller? Not like a basketball player or anything, just, you know, a normal height.”
“Can’t say I have,” I replied, looking for an opportunity to slip past her. I had no idea why this stranger was so interested in my height, I just wanted to get away from her.
“That’s probably for the best.” She smirked and crossed her arms under her breasts. “It’s a bit too late, and it’s not like you’re going to magically grow taller.” Her eyes widened, and a wicked smile spread across her face. “What if you got even smaller? Wouldn’t that just be horrible for you?”
“I guess that would depend on how much smaller,” I replied, my mouth suddenly dry. The longer I looked up at her, the further she pressed this conversation, the smaller I felt. It now seemed like I was looking up from her waist.
“A lot smaller,” she clarified excitedly. “Like, if you ended up itty-bitty.” She held up a hand beside her face with her thumb and forefingers extended, their tips about an inch apart, to demonstrate. “Like, this big.”
“It doesn’t really make sense for me to think about –“
“I know you think that because you’re so small, you can’t possibly get any smaller,” she interrupted me, then pressed her fingers together and rotated her forearm. “But what if I told you that all I had to do was snap my fingers and you’d shrink?”
“Then I’d say you’re delusional at best and a liar at worst.” Her smug, confident expression as she loomed over me was making me feel plenty small already, I did not need to suspend my disbelief enough to think she could actually make me physically smaller.
“You’re not very scared for someone who’s about to be the size of a bug,” she shot back. “I’m sure you already feel that small when you’re standing next to a great big girl and she’s so much taller than you, but if I snap you’ll be feeling a lot smaller.”
“I’m not scared because it’s all nonsense.” Her aura of self-satisfaction made me want to go along with her little fantasy even less than I normally would have.
“I gave you a chance to beg me not to, but now I kinda think you want me to shrink you.” She smiled again and briefly chuckled. “Yeah, that must be it! You’re already so small, but you dream of being a minuscule little man gaping up at all the giant women towering over you, so you want to be shrunk to a teeny-tiny size. Well, far be it for me to stand between you and your little dream.”
Vanessa snapped, making a sudden crack of thunder that was many times louder than it should have been. Instantly she doubled in size, then tripled, quadrupled, and kept growing. The hem of her pleated black skirt, about midway down her thighs, raced past my view, and the smooth, pale skin of her thighs took up more of my vision on both sides. Her knees came into view for a moment before sliding overhead, and I had to choose which of the great pillars of her shins I wanted to focus on. It was not even a second before the great, shining white canvas of her Keds shoes came into view, expanding in size until they were the size of houses. She had not adjusted the slightest bit to account for her explosive growth, leaving only one possible explanation – she had really shrunk me!
Blue eyes peeked over the enormous chest several hundred feet above me as she leaned forward. “Hello down there, little guy!” she boomed with a smile, her low, rumbling voice lingering in my ears. “Like your new size?”
“You… you actually did it!” was all I could manage, my bewilderment intermingled with anger. “You shrank me!”
“No need to thank me, but you’re welcome anyway,” she said, smirking. “You know what’s cool? I can still hear you, but you’ve got a squeaky little voice like a mouse because you’re so teensy-tiny!”
“This can’t be happening!” I shouted up at her. “Grow me back to normal size!”
She laughed, a series of low, rumbling booms. “But this is your normal size!” she replied. “You’re just an itsy-bitsy little guy in a world full of big, scary giant people. Which reminds me, I should move you somewhere safer. Wouldn’t want some enormous person to come by and accidentally smash you, would we?” To emphasize her point, she lifted up her right foot, briefly letting me see the brown, rubber sole of her shoe before slamming it back onto the ground. A tremendous crash accompanied a wave of seismic activity emanating from her shoe. My knees went weak and I collapsed helplessly to the ground.
By the time I recovered my senses Vanessa was already kneeling over me, her skirt parted like a massive tent around her thighs. “See? It would be so easy for someone big like me to squash you like a bug now. Just one step and your puny little body would be splattered on the sole of my giant shoe! But don’t worry, I’ll give you a giant helping hand to keep you safe.”
Before she was even done talking her hand was reaching for me, her thumb and forefinger poised to pluck me off the ground. The tip of her index finger shoved my head to the side, and the very ends of her digits pinched the back collar of my shirt. My arms and legs hung for a moment when she lifted my body like it was nothing, then she began raising me toward her face. Her pink lips were pulled tight in a smile of rapturous joy, and her blue eyes shone with glee. I thrashed my arms and legs in a vain attempt to break her grip, but it was too tight and my efforts only made her smile wider.
Seconds later I was dangling between her massive blue orbs, each as big around as I was tall now, while she studied me with amusement. “There! Don’t you feel safer already? No one’s going to crush you up here!” This close to her face, Vanessa’s voice was belligerently loud, and the force of it hitting me made me sway slightly.
“No one was going to crush me before you shrank me either!” I protested. “Just grow me back, I’ll be perfectly safe and I won’t tell anyone what you did.”
“Grow you back? Now why would I do that?” Vanessa’s free hand came toward me, index finger extended, and batted me to the side with the tip. I swung back and forth like a pendulum while she giggled, following me with her eyes. “You must have wanted me to shrink you, or you’d have asked me not to. Besides, I’ve just started playing with my new toy, I’m not going to give it up already.” She prodded me with her finger, making the swinging start all over again.
“I’m not your toy, I’m a person!” I shouted. “And you’re just a giant spoiled bitch!”
Vanessa’s smile faded instantly, her eyes narrowed, and her eyebrows slanted inward. “Well that wasn’t very nice.” Her fingers parted, and I instantaneously fell from her face to the floor. “I’m just trying to help a teensy-weensy shrunken man, and what do I get for it? Insults and name-calling!” She stood back to her full gargantuan height, and the floor shook when her enormous shoes took their positions on either side of me. “You really messed up, bug boy. I don’t like it when minuscule little men disrespect me.”
“I’m sorry, it’s just a big –“
“You’d think someone so small would be nicer,” she boomed over me. “With a mouth like that it’s only a matter of time before you piss off the wrong big person and they squash you like a fucking ant.”
“I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean –“
“Oh wait, I’m a big person and you’re the mouthy, rude little pipsqueak who ruined my good mood!” Vanessa continued glaring at me, and I watched in frozen horror while she raised her right leg and positioned her foot directly overhead. “I bet you’ve imagined getting squashed by people much bigger than you your whole life, but never thought you’d actually end up squished like a bug under a giant woman’s huge shoe. Guess life’s funny like that when you’re a scrawny little shrimp. Bye!”
Before I could say anything else Vanessa’s shoe raced downward toward me, and the brown rubber of her sole quickly blocked out everything else. Reflexively I raised my arms, but the tremendous force of her shoe barreling down just pressed them against my chest when she knocked me to the floor. I felt a brief flash of pain and pressure as my body was compressed under her gigantic Keds shoe, snapping my ribs into fragments in an instant and flattening my insides. For a split second I heard the thundering crash of her shoe colliding with the ground, flattening my already destroyed body, then it was over.
Vanessa repeatedly stomped her foot on the red smear the tiny man left behind on the floor, working out her frustrations on his puny remains. After crushing him several more times, she raised her heel and ground her toes back and forth over him, further eviscerating the little man. Once she was finally satisfied, she walked off and went about her day as though nothing had happened. It was not worth getting upset over just another squashed bug.