“Butch! No! Get down!” Tory snaps her fingers at her massive dog as you turn your head to see him with his forepaws up on the counter, tongue darting out for the potato skins on the stovetop. She shakes her head as he gets down sheepishly, and you laugh quietly as you close your book, done studying for a little bit. “I swear, if I didn’t love you,” she says with a sigh, rolling her eyes before looking over at your closed book. “Yeah, think I need a break too. Anyway, how’d that thing at the science lab go?”

You shrug and make a face. “Long, boring, made twenty bucks off it. Nothing special. They told me to come back in tomorrow and let ‘em know how I feel.”

“Hey, gets you beer money,” she says with a half-smile, finishing her drink off and shaking the bottle. “Speaking of, I need another--want one?” she asks, standing up and stretching her short body.

“I’ll come see what you’ve got,” you say, standing up and stepping around the coffee table to head to the kitchen. As you do, you pause--you feel lightheaded, like a blood rush. “You okay?” Tory asks.

“Yeah, just a…” you say, but your voice fades a little. You feel weird. Really weird. You look over at Tory, and something looks...off. She looks a little taller than usual. “Hey, are you-” you start, but your face pales as you feel a tingling in your skin, and you realize she doesn’t just look taller, the whole room looks bigger. And it’s getting bigger. Fast.

You see her already huge eyes widen as your line of sight starts to go down until it’s at her level, and your heart races. She puts a hand to her mouth as you feel like you’re falling.

“Oh my god,” she exclaims, putting her hands out as if to stop you, taking a step forward, then back as her eyes look you up and down, and you just keep going down. “Oh my god, I- I don’t know what to do, how do I stop this? Help- help me help you, what do I-?!”

You’re speechless as she gesticulates wildly. She’s panicking, and she paces back and forth on bare feet on the carpeted floor you’re getting closer to with every passing second. The panic starts to grip you too, and you start looking around the room wildly as if trying to find help.

You see the coffee table looking much bigger than it did a few moments ago. You see Tory getting taller--you’re hardly up to her breasts now. You’ve known her as one of your shortest friends for so long that this is like looking at a completely different person, even if the curly brown hair, the round, expressive face, the green tanktop and the denim shorts all belong to the same Southern hippy girl. You notice her pitbull Butch, too, watching you with those dumb eyes, and his already big frame looks all the bigger now that you’re down to Tory’s navel. He tilts his head to the side like he can’t recognize you now that you’re different.

“Do something!” you say suddenly, and Tory looks even more afraid than before.

“I don’t know!” she says back, Mississippi accent coming out strong, putting her hand on her forehead, brown eyes watching you get smaller by the second. You feel almost like you’re getting smaller even faster, and you watch in horror as she puts her hands to her mouth and just watches you hit knee-height before either of you realized it. Her toned, beach-tanned legs are taller than you now, and you’re definitely not stopping.

You feel dizzy as you realize you can see the underside of the coffee table now, and your eyes lock onto Tory’s Birkenstock sandals slid under it, each about as tall as you are now. Tory, if you can even recognize her as Tory instead of the towering giant she’s become, is looking down at you with eyes the size of dinner plates. And Butch...you nearly faint at the sight of a beast who’d begged you for treats a few minutes ago, now thousands of times your weight with those same ponderous eyes. This can’t be happening. This isn’t right. You came here for a study group, but now, you’re shrinking down into a world of monsters.

Tory moves a hand from her mouth to make a fainthearted gesture to reach for you, as if she still could at your height, and you feel sick to your stomach as you watch the monolithic form of your friend slowly lean forward to see you better, her jaw dropping. Finally, you feel yourself stop shrinking, about the same time you realize the ground under you has changed. A lot.

You bring your gaze down. You now see the legs of the coffee table shooting up into the sky like skyscrapers. The television behind you is bigger than a city skyline, the remote on the floor like a building. The Birkenstocks catch your eye again, and you could swear you’ve hiked hills bigger than them. Then your eyes drift to Tory…

You fall backward at the sight of her. You’ve been inside buildings designed to make you feel small, to make the ceiling feel so much taller than you. That’s nothing compared to the expanse of her brown legs running up to a belly button you could drive a car into, breasts like stadiums, and a face so big it could be a city block. Her open mouth is so far away, but you know you can’t be half as tall as one of those pearly-white teeth you see behind her lips.

She’s paralyzed as you’re on your back, feeling the fibers of the carpet like huge pillars holding you up, shifting with every movement. For a moment, you can tell she’s trying to wake herself up, to pretend this isn’t real--that you’re part of her nightmare, that you aren’t real, that you’re just dust in her world now. As that thought hangs between you, Butch moves.

You’d been so transfixed by Tory you forgot all about the titanic dog. Butch was a big dog already--the only man in Tory’s life, she’d joked. You remember you and your friends laughing when he’d plop himself on the couch on top of someone and knock the breath out of them.

So when that mountain of muscle took a sudden step toward you, a paw big enough to crush you without noticing making impact on the carpet in one swift motion, you felt nauseous as a primal panic gripped you, the fight-or-flight instinct dormant in humans for so long, never expecting to be in a situation like this.

“Oh my god, Butch! NO!” Tory’s voice booms, one of her hands going to his collar on instinct, but you know better--that dog can drag that girl around like a toy half the time. Before you have time to react, Tory does what she always does when she’s trying to get control of her dog: she adjusts her footing.

You see your life flash before your eyes as Tory lifts her foot and brings it forward just as fast as she would have any other day--she’s not a giant, you’re hardly more than an ant. You don’t even get a chance to see where it’s going. The next thing you know, you feel an impact under you and a gust of wind so strong that it lifts you off your feet for a moment before you hit the ground again. You lift your head, and you’re confronted with Tory’s heel just a few feet away.

Tory was an outdoorsy girl, always in sandals outside and barefoot in, with callouses from a lifetime of that. What you see looming over you isn’t comparable to anything you’ve ever seen.

Her foot is pointed away from you as she tries to stop her dog from investigating, and you see her heel expand up for dozens of meters. You can see every flaw in the skin, every bit of dust she’s picked up throughout her day, every crack in dry skin, and her Achilles tendon is like a California redwood shooting up into the smooth calf above, her leg running all the way to an ass the size of a mall, moving back and forth nauseatingly fast as she struggles to get her dog stopped.

The next instant, you bolt. You can’t even stop to think about whether she’s succeeding with Butch, you just know you need to move fast, or your friend’s thoughtless impulses are going to make you a stain on her sole.

Running across the carpet is hard, but you find yourself more atheltic than you ever knew you could be, sprinting across the carpet to the space under the clear glass TV stand. You see dust under there, but you don’t care--it’s safe.

You hear a gasp from behind you. “Oh, fuck!” Just as the lip of the TV stand appears overhead, you dare to let yourself look back, and you see Tory with her hands at her mouth, looking down at her foot. She must have just realized what she nearly did. Tears well up in her eyes for a moment before the inevitable happens.

Butch takes his chance. The dog, more eager now than ever to investigate the forbidden fruit that is you, bolts forward, nearly knocking Tory over and making her yelp as he takes three more massive steps toward you. You haven’t stopped running, though, and before he’s even finished going after this strange, familiar-smelling bug, you’re already further into the sanctuary.

You hear the terrifying sound of the monster’s snout lodging itself between the carpet and the ceiling of your ‘cave,’ but there’s one thing you neglected to think about as you let yourself slow down and breathe.

A heart-stopping, hungry, wet sound alerts you that Butch’s tongue has come out of his mouth, and you spring back one more long, impossible bound just in time to feel that horrible, slick, hot feeling of his tongue just barely grazing your back before you’re further into the lair of dust bunnies, out of the jaws of the pit bull the size of a mountain.

You turn around and put your hands on your knees, panting as you look up and see Butch pull his head back, making a whining noise briefly. What chills you the most, though, is the way he’s licking his chops.

He got a taste of you.

You force yourself to look past Butch to Tory, who’s holding her ankle and inspecting the sole of her foot, turning it around and flexing it. She’s looking for you, you realize, thinking she’s killed you. When she realizes you’re not there, she checks the other foot momentarily before realizing she let Butch go, and her eyes bug all over again.

“Butch! Butch, nononono,” she gasps, her voice cracking as she thunders down to her knees, blocking off your exit with a mountain range of soft calves and thighs and shoving her fingers into Butch’s mouth to pull his jaws open.

You start to jump up and down and shout as loud as you can, trying to get her attention as her watery eyes inspect her dog’s mouth for signs of you. You see her face paling as she starts to conclude that you’ve already disappeared down Butch’s gullet when the tiniest of sounds reaches her ear, and she turns her head to your direction.

The gasp is enough to nearly deafen you, but you’re so thankful for it. “Oh sweet fuck, I- oh my gosh, thank god! Hold on! Just, just hold on there!” she says, getting to her feet again, and you watch her set each foot on the ground and see the flesh expand with her weight as she stands up, taking Butch by the collar. “I’m gonna take this doof away, okay? Just...hang out there!”

You know she has a baby gate she uses for Butch in her room, and as the giantess that was your friend stomps off with a horrifying monster in tow, you hear the clattering sounds of her setting it up, and you look around you.

This is real, you hear in your head, which is ringing with your pulse. You’re in the world of an ant now, so small your friend almost stepped on you without a second thought. She wouldn’t have even felt you. Seconds after whatever this is happened, you’ve been at death’s doorstep twice. You feel woozy and take in the unearthly size of the simple living room around you. Tory’s humble, kind of hippy-hipster house seems so imposing to you now. The succulents are rainforests, the tacky “Live Laugh Love” signs are wonders of the world, and a coaster is big enough to hold a mcmansion.

You don’t have long to contemplate things before you hear a booming sound coming back down the hallway, telling you a pair of bare size-7 feet are coming back toward you.

Tory appears again, eyes right back on you, and even with her, you feel that paralysis as if trapped in the gaze of a predator, even though your mind tells you she’s a friend.

She takes ginger steps forward, slowly lowering herself as she gets closer to the TV stand that saved your life. You watch huge hands lower to the ground and settle on the carpet, making it sink under them. Then she lowers her head, and her hot breath washes over you as you take a few tentative steps forward to her awed expression.

“Oh...my...god…” is all she can breathe, and now it’s her turn to realize that this is, well, real. She’s looking at you, the same you she’s know for months since you met in class. That first day she asked you about your notes after class, you’d never have guessed in your wildest dreams it would bring you to this point, on the floor, dust at her feet.

You can’t help but watch her open mouth, big enough for you to walk around in comfortably, though the thought makes you shiver. This isn’t Tory, this is a force of nature to you.

As she lifts her hand as if hesitating to reach for you, horrifying thoughts flip through your mind--what if you never had given her your notes that day in class? Where would you be when you shrank? Would you have shrank? Who would be with you? The thought that this has happened is still fresh, and here you are thinking about what-ifs.

Then you realize that she’s bringing her hand down, and you take a step back. “It’s okay,” she coos, a little scared herself, “it’s still me, you’re fine now. Oh my god, I can’t believe this.” You’d say something back, but you know it’s almost impossible for her to hear.

She sets her palm open on the ground, and you realize with a sinking feeling that she wants you to get on. It must seem so natural to her, not even thinking about how it would feel to be handled like that. Still, you find yourself stepping forward, because what else are you going to do?

Her fingers are tall, but you step forward with shaking legs to see that you can probably get a little leg up on her fingernail. She bites her lip as she realizes your difficulty, and as you put your hands on the ridges of her fingertips, you suddenly feel the unconsciously huge pressure of her finger lifting you up from your butt, letting you topple onto her middle finger’s pad.

Wincing, she guides you to her palm, and you put your hands on the ‘ground’ to steady yourself. And your heart nearly stops at the landscape around you. Ridges everywhere, soft, warm hills that make up the field of a palm that you’re in the middle of. And above, you see Tory, her face looming as she slooooowly rises to her feet. You feel vertigo and nearly fall flat against her. It’s hot on the surface of her palm, and you pray that she’s careful.

As if holding a hot cup of coffee, she takes careful steps to the kitchen until she’s at the counter, where she lowers her palm to it again and lets you climb off carefully--her finger helps you descend onto the smooth, cool surface, and she takes her hand back, relieved to not be handling so fragile a thing as you.

She brushes her hands off on her sides and shivers. “Whooooahmygod, this is...I’m sorry, I just can’t wrap my head around this,” she says, huge eyes fluttering as she looks down at you. “Alright, so, you’re safe up there. Let me just…” She picks up a fork from the sink and sets it face-down on the table, pointing at you, the gentle clattering noise sounding like a cacophony. You realize with a sinking feeling that she’s marking where you are so she doesn’t lose you.

“Stay there,” she instructs you, “and I’ll go call...god, I don’t know, somebody. We’ll get you help, alright?” You can only nod as she forces a smile and takes her phone out of her pocket before stepping to the screen door, and she heads outside as she dials. It’s understandable, you know--you would need a break from the room after that too.

At least it gives you a little time to think.

Or not; there’s a dull ‘thud’ of something getting pushed aside from down the hall, and you feel your heart leap to your throat.

No.

“Tory!” you shriek, turning to the screen door, jumping up and down. You can see her massive figure, bare feet pacing on the concrete of the patio as she holds the phone to her ear. “Tory!” your lungs cry as you hear a telltale booming down the hall.

Butch is out.

In an instant, you see the hulking pit bull appear from the hallway, nose to the ground, purposeful as he heads straight to where he remembers you being. This time, he’s determined. You see his wagging tail whipping as he shoves his nose roughly under the stand again, this time nearly knocking it over. He’s an impossibly strong dog normally--now, he can move mountains. He’s a big, stupid dog that eats anything he can get his mouth around, and right now, he wants to know where that funny new thing went.

You look back to Tory, seeing only her backside as she taps her foot on the ground with the phone to her ear. Maybe if you can wait it out long enough, Butch will be distracted by your scent under the stand. “TO-RY!” you shriek, hoping against hope.

Then Butch’s head goes up. Your heart sinks to your stomach like a ton of bricks. Tory can’t hear you. But a dog can. That enormous head turns, and you see those golden eyes lock onto you.

Butch trots up to the counter in an instant, and his nose is up in the air, snuffling, a horrific vacuum over the counter below you as he confirms that you’re what he’s looking for. You hear each rapid sniff with a gush of hot air like a geyser as you back away, heart pounding, and then he stops. He licks his nose again, eyes steady on you.

“Butch,” you say with a shaky voice, “Butch, no, you’re not allowed on the counter. Butch…!” You muster your best disciplinary voice, hoping he’ll recognize it. He’s just a dog, after all.

But you’re not master.

You see Butch turn his head to where Tory is pacing outside, eyes never to the door. You hope for a second he’s going to go get her like in the movies, but he looks back at you, then to her once more, and that hope shatters.

He’s just looking to see if he’ll get caught doing what he’s about to do.

“No, Butch!” you shout, watching his muscles tense in the moments before the inevitable, tears welling up in your eyes. This can’t be happening. Not like this. Anything but this! “Butch, no! No!”

Two paws the size of houses slam down on the countertop on either side of you as Butch stands himself on his hind legs, reaching up to you, tongue rolling over his lips excitedly, the fact that he’s breaking the rules all the more sweet to him.

You scream. You can’t do anything else, you fall on your back and raise your hands up above you as you watch the dog tilt his head to the side for a split second before thousands of tons of canine jaws move toward you, covering you in his breath as he opens his mouth. You see a tongue what looks like a kilometer long, teeth the size of towering boulders all around, a mouth Tory had inspected just moments ago. He opens it just enough to let that tongue out, and in one swift swipe, you feel the wet, agile muscle lick you out of that giant world you’d been in so briefly, away from your life, away from Tory, away from everything, and the world goes dark as you feel something lurch you in darkness forward, where muscles pull you down in one gulp. Your last thoughts are on Tory, on the look on her face when she finally turns and sees her beloved dog standing there, wagging his tail and looking up at her next to an empty fork.

You’ll never know.