Despite his ragged attempts to refill his lungs, the tiny sweat-soaked professor seemed to jolt abruptly back into reality at the sound of Chelsea’s words. 

            She could hear his breathing increasing rapidly again despite the freely available oxygen, and she grinned.  The old feeling of satisfaction was returning that she hadn’t felt for a while.  The strength of her words, the mere soft sounds passed between her lips with seductive nonchalance, able to impale fear directly into the heart of her captive listener like a serrated blade.

            Her only regret was that the brilliance of the moments she knew were coming might never be surpassed in her lifetime.  Luckily, Chelsea was only 20, and she had plenty of time to try and one-up herself.

            “W-W-Wha… w-what?” he gagged, his voice barely there, as he crawled forward across the cushy surface of the creased flesh in his student’s hand.

            “You heard me.  I want to know how much you love your family.  You told me you love them a lot.  But I want to know what… you’d do… for them.”

            “I’d do anything,” Brandel said solemnly, his voice beginning to crack.  Evidently, he could already tell where this was going.  “Chelsea, I will do anything.  Anything you ask.  If you just leave them all alone.”

            Chelsea smiled, tilting her chin and batting her long eyelashes.  He was good.  Sharp.  She almost wished he didn’t have to become useless again as soon as this conversation was over.

            Almost.

            “Good, sounds like you finally get how this works between you and I.  All right, then.  We can play it like that,” Chelsea said, mulling slowly over her words and watching the fear clouding in her professor’s beady eyes.  With her free hand, she reached to her side and grabbed up the picture frame of the Brandel family in her fingers.  She carried it swiftly up to the view of her other open palm so her little subject could gaze up at it.

            At the sight of the picture, the reduced man bowed his head, and Chelsea could hear him sobbing quietly into his hands with guttural bitterness the young woman had never thought possible to come from even the most deeply suffering human being.

            She had never experienced chills so rampant as at that moment.

            “But here’s the thing, James,” she said slowly and with icy intent, making sure each word registered and hit him in the head like an anvil.  “No matter what you offer to do for me, I’m still in charge.  I still hold the power.  And even if you just bend down and do the hokey-pokey on my tits for me, I can still go to your house right now if I want, shrink your entire family to the size of my thumbnail, and sprinkle them in my iced tea.”

            Had Brandel not already been cowering on his knees in Chelsea’s hand, he would’ve been bowled over by the words.  His shaking became almost uncontrollable to the point of verging on a seizure.

            “P-P-Please…” he whimpered, his words trembling so much that Chelsea had to lean her head in to hear well enough.  “D-D-Don’t… I’m… I’m…”

            “Don’t worry, I’m not.  Probably.  It depends on you.  Like I said, I want to see what you’ll do for them,” Chelsea explained, casually bouncing the heels of her shoes against the front of the large desk.  “So here’s my best offer.  I’ll only do it to one of them.  Your wife, your son, or your daughter.  Pick one of them for me to shrink and swallow, and I’ll leave the other two alone.”

            The silence that followed seemed, despite its nothingness, to echo wrathfully against the tight walls of James Brandel’s office.  It hung heavily and stank like corpses left to rot in the searing sun.  For a while, all that seemed to move in the entire earth was the tiny professor’s chest as it heaved heavily, his cries now hollowed out into dry swallows that still left him with so many tears he could barely see.

            A man lost in a nightmare worse than he could’ve imagined in three lifetimes, and a young woman lost in her fruitful daydreams that flowered with more life and passion for her than she had ever experienced in any game before.

            She knew this was what was missing from her life.  It wasn’t enough to toy with and break the weak emotions of her lessers.  She needed more than just their undying love.

            She needed their being.

            “Y-Y-Y… you’ll j-just… leave the other t-t-two… alone,” Brandel repeated after it felt like hours of cold and darkness had consumed the room in its entirety.  He swallowed so hard Chelsea could hear it clearly without leaning in.  “And you’ll… s-s-s-swall… s-s-s…”

            “I promise,” Chelsea said completely truthfully.  “To just swallow one member of your family for dinner.”

            The full-body quivering began again in Brandel’s knees, rumbling against Chelsea’s fingers.  She felt as though, with so much subtle movement, she was hyperaware of every square micrometer of her skin as the pathetic subject in her hand wallowed in his limited options.

            His cry of anguish erupted so loudly in the silence that even Chelsea was thrown off for a moment, flinching uncomfortably.

            “ME!  TAKE ME!” he screamed, wild-eyed, spit spraying from his mouth as his whole body continued jittering as though a variety of deadly diseases were in the process of chewing through his intestines.  “EAT ME!”

            “Eat you?” Chelsea laughed piteously.  “Why would I want to eat you?  You’re old.  You probably taste like crap.  Now, your kids…”

            “ANYTHING, then.  I will bow down to you as I go down and thank you as loud as I can from inside,” mumbled Brandel, settling back in to a broken down state.  “Just make it me.  Whatever it takes.”

            “Whatever it takes, huh?  Then strip.  Take off the clothes.  I’m not eating your clothes.”

            In spite of his battered frame, Brandel whipped off his garments faster than Chelsea would’ve thought possible, tugging his pants to his ankles and his shirt over his head in one motion. 

            He soon stood naked in her palm, quivering in the fresh chill he experienced from the draft, and Chelsea relished it with breathtaking fervor before barking out again.

            “Now tell me you hate your family.”

            “What?”

            “TELL ME YOU HATE YOUR FUCKING FAMILY’S GUTS!” Chelsea screamed in encouragement, knowing her voice would not reach a single other soul in the building with how isolated they were.

            “I… hate my… family’s… g-g-guts…” Brandel choked out, practically throwing up in the act.

            “Tell me you wish they were dead.”

            “I… w-w-wish they…” he continued, the retching in his throat returning violently again.  “…they were dead.”

            “Good.  And finally, if I eat you, I’m not going to swallow you and let it be quick and painless.  I’m going to chew on you.”

            “Okay,” Brandel croaked.

            “I’m going to chew you slowly.  It will not feel good.  You will probably still be awake when your arms come off.  Are you okay with that?”

            “Yes.”
            “And it happens now.  Ask me to eat you, right now, and I leave the other three alone.”

            “Eat… eat me… now…”

            “And say please.”

            “PLEASE!” screamed Brandel, his words devolving into gurgling sobs as he fell face-down in the girl’s palm, his whole body vibrating with terrified tremors.  “PLEASE DO IT NOW!”

            Chelsea nodded to herself.

            It was that time.

            It had all worked just as she had planned.

            She brought the heel of her hand to her chin, slid her moist lips open slowly so that dangling threads of crystalline saliva could stretch plainly from her rippling tongue to the roof of her mouth.

            “Climb in,” she demanded simply.

            She could feel his little feet dragging slowly as he hiked up the slope of her fingers like a man climbing the steps of the gallows, clambered over the slippery edge of her mouth, and tumbling over her lower row of glistening teeth.

            She wasted no time in throwing her head back, allowing him to be swished quickly in a sea of hot, sticky spit in circles back and forth across her teeth.  Using her tongue, she pushed him into the roof of her mouth, feeling him writhe uselessly against the red frictionless void, and finally, she poked him toward the side of her mouth and pinned him against a cheek.

            Wedging him into the corner, she felt his knee press across her left molar, and she bit down.  Hard. 

            It was as easy as biting through a pie crust.

            The specificity of the next moments were blurred as Chelsea felt the thrashing of tiny limbs ceasing as one by one she pressed the little mass of body under her molars and chomped them off, the thick moat of her gooey saliva becoming tainted with gushing blood. 

            Soon, all she could feel was a blob balled up on the back of her tongue, as if she was just taking dinner and chewing through the main course.

            The taste was disgusting, metallic and dirty, and Chelsea wanted to gag and spit him out, but she knew she couldn’t.  This was too important to her, and in the heat of the moment, she forgot the bitter taste of the mulched human body currently inside her shapely jaws.

            Instead, she allowed a light to fill her entire body, from the tips of her bare toes as they scrunched against the carpet of the office, to the ends of her soft fingertips as they grasped the desk edge for support.  She could feel it in her face, in the ends of her gorgeous blonde locks as they hung over her shoulders, and she smiled more brightly than she had in years.

            She swallowed.

            She had a direction now.

            For a few moments after picking it up again, she simply gazed at the iPhone in her hands.  It was her one key to achieving her full potential.  No one could know, and no one could ever come close to her again without risking it.  She couldn’t just play the old games anymore.  The rules had changed now.

            It was worth it to protect her power.

            She knew almost anyone else might choose to squander such a tool by shrinking everyone in sight, claiming themselves as an unearned queen.  Chelsea knew she would never resort to such boring measures.  There would be no true meaning to it, and she’d be left alone with legions of weak-minded fools who would surely bow to her before she so much as raised a hand.  She knew she would only ever achieve this pure a feeling again if she could find more like James Brandel.

            It would be tough.  People like him were rare.  As usual, though, Chelsea was up to the challenge, and she knew without a doubt she would track them all down.  In fact, it was what she lived for.

            Casually, she got dressed again and practically skipped her way back down the deserted hallway of the university, the only sound once again coming from the squeaks generated by the rubber treads of her powerful red Converse.

            “I am,” Chelsea sighed, reciting the only words she could vividly remember from any of those Sunday school classes she’d been dragged to in her youth.  “That I am.”