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.