INCH WORM




A certain English stockbroker, who we shall discreetly refer to as L., having recently arrived in New York, woke up after a series of harrowing nightmares to find himself in a very odd bed. As he propped himself up on his elbows and gazed past his toes, he could see that the strange cottony mattress went on for at least four times his own length!

"Well this is a bit of a lark isn't it," he murmured. "I know these Americans like their conveniences but this is ridiculous why this bed must be eight meters long!"

His right arm seemed to roll over the side of the bed, and L. Remembered then how he had to continuously stop himself from rolling off during the night. Or was it the night?

"What in blazes is going on here? Why I don't have the foggiest notion of where I am another one of my tiresome blackouts I suppose...."

His alcoholism had taken him to many strange places. He had woken up in an ivy patch in Hyde Park, then on a bench outside of Madame Tussaud's in London, where a shy young tourist couple had actually touched his hand to see if it was wax, and then in his very own woody, stuffy office where he had just been hired as a fledgling stockbroker. The sudden glare of the fluorescent lights and the clamoring for morning tea had totally disoriented him, when he jumped up from a vinyl sofa in the secretaries lounge.

He couldn't very well tell them that he had stumbled in there the night before blind drunk could he? So he'd had to brace up and wear a cheerful smile and tell them that he'd come in early to get a good start on the day. But this... this was entirely different! For one, he didn't have that awful taste in his mouth, and then of course he didn't have that mind-warping lethargy that usually accompanied his nocturnal gallivants either did he? But more that that he simply knew that he hadn't had a drink, not even one drop since Guy Fawkes Day in 1996. L. warily tilted his head upwards and saw a skylight that seemed to have no glass. Why this is altogether fantastic, he thought the sky was blue all right, but why did it have corners? A ceiling? Could that be a ceiling? Turning to his left he saw a giant lipstick laying across a pack of gargantuan matches. He tried to believe in his cavalier laugh.

"Yes...well whoever this woman is that I came home with, she certainly has a sense of the absurd, I must say she probably got those props at that shop I heard about down in Soho that has cyclopean pencils and all that. New York's Soho is quite different from London's now, isn't it...but that lipstick actually looks...like it's been used...well that's rather silly, isn't it? Going to all that trouble just for a... my word! Look at that! Why that must be one of those mammoth liquor bottles I remember seeing those in the duty-free store in the Panama airport why there's enough Scotch in there to fill a bathtub... but wait... no, no, something is wrong here. I know that scent it's Rive Gauche Maude used to wear it why that's a confounded perfume bottle! Good Lord, what's going on here; look at the size of this false fingernail why you could cross the channel in that!"

But L.'s bravado was beginning to fade. As a matter of fact he felt something akin to panic. He turned around, looking front and back for something, anything that would give him some kind of security. There was nothing in that bizarre environment, not one territorial clue that would give him a sense of proportion or give him a fix on his space. A huge 7, a huge 9, a huge cent sign on a yellow poster affixed to a slanted mirror. His reflection was insane and he began to lose his breath. Terror was seeping in slowly now and he desperately tried to say it was a nightmare, but he knew very well that it wasn't. He pinched his cheek and knew, yes, that this was much too real. He leaned forward to blow his breath upon the glass, and yes, it clouded.

"Don't worry, old man," he shuddered, "We'll get through this one too...."

But he felt a large cold metal hoop slipping across the back of his neck... why it's a blasted earring! He leaped to his feet and scampered back only to lose his balance on that medicinal-smelling cotton log. He slid precariously to the edge, and then looking cautiously over he saw a long twisting cord at the end of his cylindrical bed.

"Good Lord," he hissed, shaking with dread. "I've spent the night on a giant tampon! But more importantly than that... it's been used!"

Both of his hands flew to his mouth, and when he curled all his fingertips over his bottom teeth, he realized that he had never made quite such a fearsome move in his life before. He had no time to reflect, he had no time to gather his wits, for he fell screaming backwards into a condom trampoline that bounced him onto a black leather, spiral-bound pocket organizer, where he lay panting next to a giant orange tab that said GOALS.

But this in fact, actually gave L. Some solace. He was after all a practical man, a man secure with his facts. This organizer was something he could relate to. It was after all, an everything-in-its-proper-place sort of thing, wasn't it. "Now I'll find out what's going on around here!" he said in a burst of renewed vigor, but just as he was crawling up the side to TODAY, he heard a booming female voice high above in the miasma: "WHERE THE FUCK DID I PUT THEM?" He was suddenly buffeted about from wall to wall.

There was no doubt about it now he had to admit what he had expected. He was in a woman's handbag, and her sudden rummaging had the same effect on him as if he were being pushed around by ten bulldozers at the town dump. He backed up against the rubbery, rouge-covered walls, terrified by the frightening scratching that led to a match explosion. He watched her hair swirling high above the skylight, like a wrathful Hera storming at Zeus. Enormous wheels creaked outside... he threw his hands up to his ears the water thundered like Niagra. Yes! She must be in the bathroom! This was no nightmare. This was real and L. knew that he couldn't cope with it. He couldn't process this bizarre information. He saw a familiar light-blue color near the bottom of the organizer a Valium the size of a manhole cover! Yes, that's what he would do he needed help all right he would nibble off a piece, He artfully wound his way down through the spirals of the organizer. It was like going through a sewage drainpipe. The spray of her hair was storming down into the purse. He finally reached the bottom and gnawed desperately on the corner of the Valium.

"I'll be calm," he said. "Yes, that's it...panicking never did anyone any good, did it. I'll use my stockbroker's acumen, that's all. There simply has to be some scientific explanation for all this. I can't let this dismantle me, not me... haven't I my famous sixth sense? Don't I have uncanny foresight and an unusually keen knowledge of the world? I mustn't let this get to me if anyone can figure this out I can. I know all the latest advances, don't I? I know of all the new conveniences damn it all, what's happening here is impossible! Steady now...steady...logic shall prevail.

"But I must have numbers, yes, that's it, I need my computer wait! The organizer! Why those little pocket glance-a-days always have a calculator... of course, why didn' t I think of it? I must hurry before that female Polyphemus comes back!

L. Rolled over and peered around the bottom spiral. The leather cover was open, and yes... there it was! And not only was there a calculator, but right on top of it was spiralled in a perfect plastic ruler. He hauled a coffee stick over and raced up to the buttons of the calculator. It was easy for him on that thirty-degree angle to slide over to the ruler, and then lay down next to the markings. He looked carefully to see that his hair was on the 3" line, and then looking down at his bare feet he saw that they were exactly on the 4" line.

"Do you want to know any more then?" he asked himself in self-derision; "Or is this quite enough for you? According to this you are exactly one inch tall...."

L. Began to perspire profusely. He grew intensely hot and was tormented even more with fire-needles of prickly heat. He edged his way across 7, 8, and 9, like a little nude bug, and then climbed up to the red ON button.

"I can't think straight," he breathed. "I'll have to do this on the calculator. What is the equation? Don' t do it in feet... do it in inches: I'm normally six feet tall and now it seems I've gone down to an inch. Well that's a bit of a nuisance, isn't it? Nothing to worry about old chap happens everyday HELP! SOMEBODY PLEASE HELP ME! Stop that... what are you doing... get a hold of yourself... what sort of a man are you? Oh, yes... a one-inch man, that's what I am. All right then, let's get on with it: 72:1=9:X. What am I thinking of? One can't work out equations on this blasted thing! I'll have to do it with percentages. Yes, that's it... let's get a percent of reduction."

L. found that he had to literally jump onto the buttons to make the calculator work. They were in fact as big as the pedals on the pressing machines in his uncle's shop in Manchester. And then the light! The big green digital zero came up! L. knew his way around a calculator all right, and in no time at all, after bounding back and forth between the buttons, he glanced up to get his answer on the screen. He had figured that if he had been 72" tall and his penis was 9", that now upon reduction when he was only an inch, his penis would now be 1/16". Upon erection it wouldn't even reach a pica... it would be 1/8" at most!

"I must be mad!" he thought. "Calculating the size of my sex organs while there's a cyclops outside gargling like the Victoria Falls! Well this is a good indication of my priorities isn't it? Not once did I even think of my brain. But my brain is all right, isn't it? Or is it? I may very well be having hallucinations... yes! Like that time I saw those wet human eyes in the daisies on my comforter... but that was because of that strange cigarette that awful woman gave me last week, when I first arrived at Port Authority. I haven't smoked anything this time, that's for sure... but what about this colossal harridan's handbag? All this rouge, powder, cold cream, nail polish; I daresay any normal man would have been paralyzed by this cloying cosmetic effluvia long ago. But not I. Indeed all women smells to me are instant aphrodisiacs. Sometimes I amaze myself: here I am veritably quaking with fear, and I'm still rummaging around in here with a whopping erection."

"Time to go to work, Looper!"

She was back! L. shrivelled back into the creases of the rouged tarpaulin. Her face was the size of his loft in London! He saw himself cowering in the pupils of her gamine eyes. An evil smirk line on the side of her enormous, lascivious lips was actually quivering in malicious expectation. It was her! The lady on the elevator! But now she was 72 times her normal size and grinning at him like a depraved delinquent! There was no doubt about that light of triumph in her eyes... she was up to no good. There was moisture on her upper lip. He was appalled by the way her great tongue came out and lolled it off. Her movements terrified him. When she shook her hair back, he ran to get more Valium. Her voice was low and predatory.

"Where are you, Inchworm? Ah... there you are! Trying to sneak behind my blush brush; huh? Don't you try to get away from me... hey! Drop that bobby pin! What've I got here... Sir Launcelot? More like Sir Dance-a lot, ha ha ha! You're gonna need more than a bobby pin to joust with me, baby. Crawl over here...c'mon...that's it...right on to my thumb, Inchworm."

L. Had no choice. He found himself crawling around the concentric ridges of her thumbprint, hypnotized again by those spirals that went around and round, drawing him to the middle, and then it came back to him... yes! It was on the lift... it happened on the way down. It all came back to him: She got on at the thirtieth floor, yes, and he was talking to that charming fellow from the penthouse, yes....

"And all about women," thought L. "We were talking all about women and in retrospect, I'd say it was making her very angry. The more I think about it, it must have absolutely enraged her... why I was an absolute brute! Oh I was feeling my male chauvinism all right... going on about how women were getting out of hand in New York, getting too big for their britches, I said, yes, and taking all the jobs in the bargain. They should be at home taking care of the young ones coming up, I'd said. What's wrong with being in the kitchen I'd like to know... and babies... why after all isn't that the whole idea? Hasn't it been since the advent of homo erectus? The propagation of the species? And if women don't do it, who will may I ask. Oh she was seething all right... I must have been absolutely overbearing. But then she reminded me of one of those sadism and masochism types, didn't she... yes, that you see staring at you with menacing eyes and brandishing whips and canes and what have you from the pages of those extraordinary tabloids. Well I wasn't having any thank you. And then when I said, 'The girl that I marry will have to be (as that wise old American melody puts it) as soft and as pink as a nursery' there was absolute fury in her eyes. After that..."

But it was too late for L. to think of the lift ride and what ensued... he had been whisked through the air and set down upon a record player! He was going around and around and on every revolution, (She was playing Hit The Road, Jack) he was blasted with "Don'tcha come here no more no more," every time he careened past her devilish eyes. She blasted it so loud that there was knocking on her walls. L. Fell flat on his belly to keep from slipping off and still she tormented him each time he came around.

"Propagation of the species, huh?"

(Her eyes appeared again.)

"What are you gonna do about that, Inchworm?"

(Gone again.)

"With your millimeter peter?"

(Appeared again)

"Ha ha ha ha ha!"

(Gone again.)

"I'm gonna convert you, needle-dick."

(Appeared again.)

"From now on you're on our side...."

(Gone again.)

The needle was getting closer and closer. She was laughing like Renfield, that spider connoisseur from Dracula. "I used to do this when I was a little girl," she said. "I used to make little paper men...and when they got close to the needle...ohhhhh. I just loved that...."

L. was gasping but couldn't cry out. The revolutions were coming closer and it took his breath away. Her mischievous gray eyes whizzed by again and again, faster and faster. He was tormented yet mesmerized by their demonic gleam, and then... OFF! He was rushed through the air in her fist then and coming down next to a 20-story aluminum wall. Just as he turned around to see his wired reflection... JONG! JONG! The toast was up and L. was on his belly.

"Crawl, Inchworm," she teased. "Get those crumbs under there. There's butter on them. It's pita bread... it's good." He looked up at her rolling cyclopean cheeks and two crumbs the size of boulders fell out of the side of her mouth. Every noise was an assault: the slamming of the refrigerator, the wickedly piercing beeper, the ripping of the perforations of her 'Women Power' stamps. She put Gloria Steinham on his front and Susan B. Anthony on his back.

"What a trip," she said to her friend on the phone. "I have a friend here who's wearing a sandwich board he's marching for the women's movement, ha ha ha ha ha... only thing is I think it's a little heavy for him... c'mere mighty mite." She fell back on her unmade bed and flung apart her gargantuan thighs. Two fleshy Himalayan mountains fell apart and he was thrust into the steaming divide, immediately entangled by a maze of curling hairs. He could feel the heat of her great muff beneath his naked feet and he slipped and slid as he tried to trek across the steaming mons veneris. To him, her pubic hair was like elephant grass, her flesh like the landscape of Venus. L. could hear her moaning above.

"Oh but she sounds like an angel now." It was then that he slipped into that velvety, rubbery-slick, flowing crevice, hanging just by a handful of hair that he managed to wrap around one wrist, desperately trying to get a toehold, but it was in that very bicycle movement of his bare feet that made his ground shake even more. The more he kicked to get back up, the more the sticky rapids came he was caught in a deluge of come! "Good heavens!" he gasped. "I must be treading on her very clitoris!" But he continued on, because he knew that the only way to make the land subside was to bring on a volcanic eruption. "One thing' s far sure... I've got to keep this up at all cost... I must keep this gigantic woman happy... no telling what she'd do if she were frustrated!" He clenched his sticky eyes and pedaled for all he was worth. The whole pubic mound shook and shuddered in a giant fleshquake. He managed to bind more hair about his waist and like a soap-covered window-washer stuck it out to the last.

Her orgasm was so cataclysmic that it rocked him back to the lift and made him remember... made him remember... Yes, he remembered how they were going down, after that man got off at 10. How was it then that they continued going down, past the lobby, past the basement, past the deepest recesses of...where? Where? It was as if the lift descended into the very bowels of the earth!

"It must have been her eyes," he thought. "Never have I seen such eyes! It's much different looking into a lovely face that's the size of your own, instead of a countenance fifty feet tall, I had never seen such a rare combination of fineness and vulgarity, a lustful classic beauty as it were. She had that rare quality that I'd always looked for in women, that ageless sort of thing you know...so mysterious, so bohemian. Why it would have been just as natural to find her in Monte Carlo as it would in ancient Babylon. She could have been in Thebes, or Rome, or even Timbuktu. Those full sensual lips, those concave cheeks; something about her mouth hanging open like that... she fired the imagination! She wore very little makeup and had her hair brought up in a very fetching kind of free chignon. "But it was her eyes...those long lashes that never blinked. Her face seemed in a state of constant expectation... and yes! I remember my strength being sapped away... she drew me in... 'Go down,' she said. I'm amazed that I lost my guard; I let myself be caught in those enthralling, maelstrom eyes. They were like two deep, devouring whirlpools. I was caught in a spin, a spin, and right there on the lift, she said: 'Go down...just let go...it will be so much easier for you...I'll take care of you...just go down...just get smaller for me...that's it...get down on your knees. You're only three feet tall now... aren't you...and when I raise these up you'll get even smaller...think of that... do you see? I'm drawing my skirts up slowly...inch by inch, and inch by inch you are going, down...because you want to go down, don't you...don't worry, you won't do anything that you don't want to do....' It was uncanny! As she oh so painfully slowly raised her black skirts up, exposing those long creamy thighs, (For she wore nothing at all beneath that long Morticia dress) I struggled to reach her pubic mound with my face. She brazenly leaned against the wall of the lift and thrust her pelvis forward, as I descended past her knees, yes... and then that evil laugh...I found myself clawing desperately on the buttons of those granny shoes; I kept on going down, and then I don't remember anything... no, not until I woke up on that infernal tampon! And now I'm feeling it again... that same feeling...I'm blacking out again; I don't know where I am anymore...or whether I'm big...or whether I'm...."

L. Woke up in a Bambu rolling-paper packet As he pushed the lid up, the whole of his harrowing workday came back to him then. He had a fleeting moment of that terrible clarity that comes on one in the morning sometimes and then vanishes because of one's fears. He reached down to a pain in his leg. He ached from head to foot. He remembered her snapping, "WORK!" and then pushing the gigantic cardboard tube as hard as he possibly could, and slipping along the vulva. Splattered from head to foot with her hot juices, he had finally descended by letting the long rope roll through his feet like a schoolboy coming down from the ceiling in a gymnasium. She called him her tamponeer. And then that horrible clamp-cage, something she had devised to latch on and run around the rim of her toilet so that he could clean all 32 holes under the rim with a pink cue-tip with cotton on both ends, the same cue-tip in fact, that she had him use the night before as a balancing pole to tightrope across her nipple rings!

"I know that I did those things," he thought. "And those rubber gloves that I used... why look... they're right over there! And they're life-size! And... and how is it that my feet are large and oh, oh... my dick! It's large again! But what is it doing dangling over my face? What's this? Women all around me? Is this some kind of a party? What is going on they're all nicely dressed and having drinks, and I... I am naked... with my body spotlighted as it were...is this an exhibition? And there she is! What a remarkable beauty... and in her Morticia dress... she's bringing a tray...why it's probably for me...."

Then came the familiar voice, but now in a normal range: "Looper is an inchworm., He belongs to me, don't you, Looper? Inchworms are also called measuring worms, did you know that? Oh this one measures things all right last night I caught him trying to measure his penis...." The sounds of laughter, the clinking of ice cubes. The fascinated women leaned back imperiously, obviously enjoying the spectacle. "Measuring worms walk by moving these feet up to these feet so that the body forms a large loop, giving the insect the appearance of measuring the surface upon which it is walking. Right, Looper? Now you can see why he is called Looper." There were many sighs of admiration then, for L.'s member had fully enlarged and was signalling around his protruding lips. He was so ecstatic at seeing his penis full size again that he wasn't about to go against anything that she wished. "You know what to do, Looper...roll yourself up in your auto-fellationist ball...sort of like yin and yang, isn't it? The male meeting the female...." L. Sucked greedily, his eyes darting from woman to woman. "That's it...do your thing, Looper...very good...yes...that's what we want to see...we want more inchworms like you, don't we, ladies? Un huh...we're all very interested in the propagation of your species, ha ha ha ha ha...so don't get too frisky over there...thinking you're out of trouble. You can enjoy yourself during this little friendly respite, but at 10 tonight you're going down again...get those jaw muscles working, baby... ha ha ha ha ha! Tonight it's the Anal Canal."

THE END