Tom Baker groggily opened his eyes, staring blearily around in the darkness of his room, and groaned to realize that most of his body still easily fit on his pillow.  The rest of the bed comically dwarfed him, like he was a puppet that had appeared for humorous effect in some late night sketch.

            He still hadn’t regrown yet, even after eight hours of sleep.  Not that he was expecting to have regained his full stature, given just how low he’d shrunk the previous evening, but he’d hoped to be a little larger than doll scale by now.  As he clambered off the plush surface and stretched his limbs in all directions, it occurred to him that he was still probably just over a foot in height.  If that.  Better than what was often the case, since he could more or less manage things for himself, but nevertheless, it wasn’t a good starting point for his day.  Reaching the end of his bed, he slid down the ladder that rested there for just such occasions as this.

            Things had been going reasonably successfully.  For at least the past month, he’d been able to rise from his bed at very nearly his full height of five-foot-seven, which already was a little disappointing as many of his friends continued to feel lingering puberty’s growing pains.  Still, there was something secure about looking out at the world on its level, rather than up at it.

            Then something would come up, as it inevitably did.  A question usually, sometimes serious, sometimes a joke, or sometimes just a provocation to watch him squirm.  That was all it took.  And then the answer would come from him instinctively, like vomit spewed because of an overzealous gag reflex.  Occasionally it was under his control, and at other times it just burst forth like some alternate consciousness.

            A lie, or at least a perversion of the truth, which Tom understood as distinctly different things.

            The psychologist had once called him “a compulsive liar,” and considering the state of the world he happened to live in, where even the tiniest of white lies was enough to cost a person a few inches in stature, many others preferred other names for him like “unholy sinner.”  Certainly he was treated as such by many, even if they didn’t quite use this term in casual conversation.

            No, most preferred terms like “Little Tommy” or “shrinkbait” instead once he was small enough for them to torment.  Given the nature of his vocal crimes, especially considering how low he so frequently was reduced to, anyone with even the loosest moral compass knew he deserved any punishment dealt out by the normal-sized guardians of truth.

            Tom pinched the comfy and reliable fabric of his TruPlex shirt: the truest saving grace of his young life.  The clothing line had been developed as a deterrent against uncomfortable events in school or professional situations where repeated lying might result in an individual being reduced to a few inches in height.  Its fabric was designed to recognize the biological signs of a lie in its owner and subsequently become denser if need be to exactly match the calibrated size.  TruPlex had been started to ensure people weren’t left naked in front of total strangers in addition to being shrunken down to such helpless proportions, which was already enough of a strain on the person’s dignity as it was.  The name itself was somewhat ironic.  And thankfully, Tom received a healthy discount on all his outfits thanks to his father’s management position in the neighboring city’s branch that required him to spend nine months of his year out of the house, which was just as well, because the man’s dedication to a clothing line designed for liars did not preclude his distaste of the actual customers.

            Tom’s mother was already in the kitchen making breakfast, but hearing her second-youngest child’s tiny feet padding across the floor as he made his way downstairs, she turned to face him, looming above with palpable disappointment: a matronly sentinel with a billowing pink bath robe hugging curvy hips that she sported courtesy of four consecutive pregnancies in earlier life.  He came to a stop and leaned against the pantry door, gazing up at her with his most innocent expression in a vain attempt to counter the highly incriminating stature he held.

            “Well, honey,” Linda Baker sighed as she gazed down at her diminutive son with her manicured hands placed firmly on her sides.  She shook her head, somewhat out of pity with just a tiny glint of condescension in her quicksilver-blue eyes.  “Did we learn a little lesson this time?”

            “Yes.  Yes,” he mumbled awkwardly without thinking, and immediately he felt himself lose at least another three inches, causing his vision of the kitchen to swell even more and his titaness of a parent to become even more enormous.  Both knew full-well there was no way in hell this would be the final time Tom would experience a reduction.  It was a loaded question, really.

            Linda rolled her eyes and bit the corner of her lip as she watched her child dwindle down to nine inches before her and crossed her arms in disappointment.  “It just never gets through to you, does it?” she drawled sadly.

            “Maybe,” he answered neutrally, twiddling his thumbs in embarrassment.

            “Oh well.  We’ll talk more about that later, I suppose,” she said, and turned back toward the counter and swirled a spoon around a pot as steam billowed from its contents.  “I made oatmeal.  Smells good, hmm?”

            “Yes.  G-Great, actually,” he grunted, having been holding back a cough at its slightly burnt scent, and closed his eyes in resigned preparation as this especially exaggerated lie stole another six inches from him, until he stood at just three on the floor, looking particularly pathetic.

            His mother exhaled heavily and took several steps closer to the tiny teen, allowing him to feel every thunderous thump of her fuzzy house slippers as they landed for each step, until she stood close enough that he could’ve reached out and touched the bus-sized footwear.

            Or it could’ve lifted up and pinned him beneath its muggy mass.

            “Look what you’ve gone and done,” Linda sighed, not bothering to hide her bitterness.  She lifted a glass bowl from the counter high above, holding it aloft so that Tom had to crane his neck up to make it out.  “I made this for you, you know, but look at yourself now.  There’s no way you could use a spoon.”

            “Yeah,” he wearily admitted.  “Sorry.”

            “I guess we’ll just have to come up with some alternative method for you,” she stated, brushing her silky dark locks off her forehead, and batted her eyelashes a few times.  Steadily, she shifted her weight so that she could slip her right foot out of the house slipper.  The white-painted toes wriggled in the open air before she set her appendage down with a fleshy slap on the floor.

            “Well?” she said expectantly.  Pointing her toe, she nudged the edge of the slipper against the floor, rotating it so that its shadowy opening faced her trinket-sized son. “Go on.  Get inside.  Breakfast is served.”

            Tom nodded up at Linda, entirely used to this kind of treatment, and couldn’t even bring himself to feel particularly bad about it.  His mother still loved him, after all.  She was just following in her beliefs, and doing what she felt she had to as a parent to improve him.  Could he truly expect anything more from the woman?

            God knew he could use the improvement she was trying so hard to bestow, after all, and this was a truth Tom could fully admit to himself.  She still hadn’t given up on him, and he owed her his humility.

            Crawling into the deepest corner of the slipper, where Linda’s toes would end up once she’d shoved her foot in after him, the boy obediently found his ordinary resting place whenever he was put inside a pair of his mother’s shoes.  If he had chosen a location closer to the opening, Tom only would’ve been prodded to crawl in deeper, so it saved a lot of time to just do it himself.  He inhaled deeply, getting accustomed to the stale sweat and acrid aroma that pervaded the space where the woman’s mildly pudgy feet spent so much of their time when she was indoors.  It was only unpleasant for the first few whiffs; after that, it smelled as much like home as his own bedroom.

            Watching outside, he could see her naked toes curling against the floor, then splaying apart.  From just out of view, a spoon appeared with a dollop of oatmeal lumped into its scoop, and then overturned over Linda’s foot, so that its gloopy contents could tumble onto her digits.

            She squirmed her toes back and forth a few times, letting the wheaty breakfast splurge its way into the crevices of her skin, and then with a final pivot on her heel, lifted the foot to re-enter the slipper.

            Tom didn’t struggle at all as his mother’s massive appendage jammed its way back into the slipper, plunging him against the fuzzy wall and mashing him under the oatmeal-coated toes.  At last, getting his bearings, the boy wrestled his way out from under his parent’s foot and set about to do the job he already knew full-well was expected of him.  The fuzzy darkness had already enfolded him, but he didn’t need eyes now.  One handful at a time, he fished into the doughy spaces between his mother’s soft toes and scraped his meal off her skin, and then shoveled it gratefully into his mouth.

            Some of the oatmeal had already plopped into the lint-laden insole of the shoe, and didn’t taste particularly pleasant with the added flavor of old detergent and flaking skin, but he choked it down without much trouble, having had plenty of practice before.  Of course, much of the breakfast mush was already infused with the semi-sour hint of Linda’s skin, not yet showered after a night in her somewhat stuffy master bedroom, but as with most of this way of taking his meals, Tom was accustomed and hardly took notice after the first few salty swallows.

            The whole eating process took a bit longer than normal, especially since Linda was liable to continue walking about the kitchen as she prepared breakfast for her other three kids, which would interrupt Tom in his punishment as he struggled to keep himself from being pinned too firmly under his mom.  It was briefly all right again once she sat down at the kitchen table with her newspaper, but eventually she’d crossed her leg over the opposite knee and was bobbing her slippered foot up and down, unintentionally giving Tom a tumultuous roller coaster ride on a full stomach of oatmeal.

            As he bounced between the lumpy, oat-speckled insole and his mother’s aggressive, bulbous toes, the compulsive liar and possible unholy sinner reflected with some bearable level of contentment on his being.

            Things could certainly be worse.  There was no doubt about it.

            After all, there was a lot of perspective required here.  It had to be noted that Tom, intentionally or not, was a daily practitioner of the world’s worst moral crime: the violent perversion of pure, unvarnished truth.  This was one of the few things society was in almost total agreement on, and Tom had decided long ago that the whole world couldn’t possibly be wrong about something like that.

            Plus, it was right there in the Bible in the Book of 3 Peter, plain as day: “Thou shalt not speak an untruth, lest ye be made below thy fellow children.”  It was a very popular quotation from the good book, and even in the Baker household, it could be found everywhere from a cross-stitch hung on the wall to Linda’s email sign-off.  Tom frankly wasn’t entirely certain where he fell on the question of religion, but he did know that if so many people believed in the preservation of truth, there had to be something to it.  His psychological state made it difficult to feel connected to it, yet even so, he maintained some faith in it.

            Everyone had to have faith in something, after all.  It made sense to put his in truth, even if he had almost none of his own.

            Time slowed down considerably as Tom struggled under Linda’s goo-encrusted toes, which seemed far more intent on playing with his body than letting him eat breakfast from between them.  He could hear his brother and two sisters far above, clanking spoons against glass and chugging orange juice, enjoying their breakfast at a normal height with normal conversation like normal human beings, without having to scavenge for it in the dark between the smelly folds of their mother’s skin.  Of course, that was their reward for the truth, and Tom could respect that, even if he couldn’t help feeling a twinge of envy.

            After more than thirty minutes of being flicked below the gigantic plush toes of his mother, slightly spongy now between the gummy oatmeal and leftover night sweat, Tom had begun to grow again, if only an inch at a time.  Finally he felt the slippery digits grappling with him and sliding his four-inch frame into the open space between Linda’s big and second toes.

            Once her shrunken son was securely in place, the woman slid her foot from its fluffy cave and propped it up on her thigh, where she could observe the boy squirming in her grip in his skin-tight TruPlex.

            “I suppose that’s enough for one morning, honey,” she relented with a shrug.  She pinched the tiny teen around his waist with her thumb and forefinger and plucked him from between the grimy toes, then wriggled them around to inspect the damage.  “Looks like you got most of your breakfast up.  Taste better than it smelled?”

            “Uh-huh,” he said numbly, managing something truthful, however bizarre it may have sounded.

            “Good,” she said, satisfied with his lack of a reduction at this statement.  “Maybe next time you’ll tell the truth.”

            “Maybe,” he mumbled under his breath.

            “Don’t give me that look,” she cooed with genuine warmth as she lifted her shrunken child closer to her face for examination, still keeping him dangled between her fingers.  She stroked the tip of one finger along his stomach, hoping to comfort him.  “You know everything I do for you is because I want you to learn from your wrongs, don’t you?”

            Tom hung limply but not without resolve in his mother’s powerful fingers, his body flecked with bits of dried oatmeal and his now-mussed hair reeking of Linda’s oily toes.

            “Yes,” he said, managing another truth twice in a row.

            “That’s what I like to hear,” she sighed happily, then leaned closer to the ground, and placed him on its surface next to where her massive bare foot had come to rest, her toes bopping coolly against the floor.  She winked down at him before reclining back in the chair with her newspaper.  “Now, you’ve got a couple more minutes before you need to leave for the bus.  Why don’t you be a dear and pick out the last bits you missed for me, now that you’ve got some light to work with?”

            Shrugging, the boy humbly stooped back down and set to farming the remaining flecks of moist grit from between Linda’s toes, indeed happy to be able to see what he was doing.  Yes, he confirmed to himself.  Things could be far, far worse.

Tom hugged his arms against his chest as though flying down a log flume, though in reality he was being squeezed quite firmly between the fingers of his older sister Alaina’s fist as she, their older brother Blake, and youngest sister Emma all trudged down the sidewalk toward the bus stop.

            There was precious little room against his sibling’s plush palm that allowed for movement, let alone the steady rise and fall of his chest.  She kept her hand at roughly stomach level, though there was obviously very little concern for how much swinging her arm did.  Already Tom was feeling sicker than when he’d been flopped continually around under Linda’s toes earlier, and that was saying something.  He’d managed to regain a few more inches while cleaning out the last scraps of oatmeal from his mother’s feet, but Tom was still standing at only six inches when his siblings had come back downstairs, ready to walk down to the bus.

            “God, this is pathetic.  Look at him.  Just look at him,” Alaina mocked, shooting their shrunken sibling an excoriating glance as she marched down the sidewalk.  Blake, shaking his head, only scoffed under his breath.

            “Yeah, I know,” their brother mumbled, apparently just feigning similar concern to keep her off his back.  Though he and Tom certainly weren’t best friends, he at least didn’t hold his sibling up to same stringent degree of discipline as Alaina, and generally wasn’t as interested in helping correct the boy’s ways.  Unless the method of correction happened to be especially funny, of course.

            Emma, meanwhile, smirked and pretended not to pay attention as she twirled the end of her ponytail around her thumb  and smacked a thick wad of gum against the inside of her cheek.  She’d learned it was always easier not let her amusement at her sister’s irritation show.  It saved a lot of trouble later on.

            “Unbelievable how much Mom lets him get away with.  I don’t think we’ve had to carry him to the bus for weeks,” Alaina continued.  “If you ask me, he should have to walk there himself, no matter how much he’s lied.  That would teach him.”

            “I bet,” Blake agreed with a chuckle.  “He’d make it down to the birdbath in front of the Jefferson’s.  Maybe.  If he didn’t get eaten by the dog, obviously.”

            “I’ll carry him if you want,” Emma said as nonchalantly as possible, extending an expectant hand and tapping her fingers against her palm as she eyed her toy-sized brother.  A tiny rubbery bubble popped from the corner of her lips in earnest.  “You know, if you’re sick of him already?”

            “No.  I’m trying to make a point here,” Alaina snapped, knowing perfectly well how humorous her youngest sibling found all of this.

            Tom only listened in calmly.  They all spoke as if he wasn’t there, just as they usually did if he’d shrunken down much lower than his normal height in their presence.  His input certainly wasn’t asked for, and probably would only result in a harsh squeeze from his sister’s fingers that would compress the wind from his lungs if he so much as interjected.  It was simply much more practical to wait it out.  Besides, Tom had other more interesting things to focus on, like the neighbor’s new poppies, and the semi-nauseating lurch of his stomach on each of his sister’s steps.

            Alaina was as devout a believer in the sanctity of truth as her mother was, even belonging to two different clubs that incorporated this virtue somehow or other, as well as acting as president of the official Truth Council for the high school.  There was no questioning her dedication to honesty, and the fact that she had someone like Tom for a sibling was an endless source of utter humiliation for her that she had never been shy about letting him know.  Given her particular set of values, Alaina’s personal view of her younger brother was far closer on the scale to “unholy sinner” than “compulsive liar.”  This, too, she wasn’t at all shy about letting him know.

            “I mean, obviously whatever else Mom’s trying with him isn’t getting the job done.  He’s only sixteen, and he’s probably shrunk more times in his life than most of the teachers at our school.  Maybe combined,” Alaina rambled on discontentedly, adjusting her glasses on the bridge of her nose.  Her arm swung on a wider arc, and she seemed to intentionally shake Tom around like a ragdoll.  The thumb, even, seemed to ride a little higher up, lodging itself under the boy’s chin and forcing him to stare upward at his seventeen-year-old paragon-of-virtue sister.

            “No kidding,” Blake agreed dryly, ruffling a hand through his shaggy locks and blinking blearily in the glare of the sun overhead.  “He’s just used to it by now, I guess.”

            “What does she even do?  Throw him in her shoes a couple times a week after he’s lied about six times in a freaking row?  What’s that even doing to help?” Alaina demanded, more from the universe itself than from her sibling.  “Obviously, he needs that too, but that can’t be the only thing we’re doing to him, because something has to change.”

            “Yeah.”

            “Are you even listening to what I’m saying?” she snapped irritably, pointing an accusing finger at Blake to a rattling chorus of her bracelet beads.

            “No,” he groaned honestly.  Emma snickered, unable to help it.

            “I don’t want to hear any shit from you either!” Alaina scowled at her sister without missing a beat.

            “What are you getting mad at me for, anyway?  He’s the one who’s gonna make it tough for you to get re-elected to the fancy-pants club next year,” Emma protested, no longer finding it hysterical now that she was being made the victim of Alaina’s ire.  She reached back over to her sister’s fist and rubbed her thumb against Tom’s tiny head, massaging the back of his skull but also providing a forceful enough nudge that he couldn’t easily forget her presence.  The girl tended to like reminding him of how close she was.

            Alaina cringed at the mentioning of this terrible prospect of her burgeoning junior political career, and took it as a prompt to lift Tom back up to her face.  She seethed at him, boring through his eyes with her own fiery irises.

            “You are not going to ruin all the work I’ve been doing for our school.  Do you understand me?” she grumbled venomously, spraying a few stray drops of spittle onto her tiny brother’s face.  Emma stifled another giggle with her fist, endlessly entertained by these showdowns between the indignant Alaina and immovable Tom, and bounced her ponytail back over her shoulder.

            “Yes,” Tom wheezed.

            “You’re going to start shaping up before you become a problem for you.  Aren’t you?”

            “Yes,” the little lair said, and immediately he was reduced down to four inches, causing even more of his body to be swallowed up in his sister’s grip, until it was only his head that was able to pop out between her firm fingers like some miniature whack-a-mole target.

            “Oh my God,” Alaina gasped with disgust and horror as her brother shrunk deeper into her fist.  She opened her fingers to observe the reduced boy sprawled in her palm.  Her wrist trembled, unable to handle it.  “Are you two not seeing this?  He’s out of control!”

            “I don’t know what you’re so surprised about,” Blake chuckled.  The eldest Baker’s usual policy was not to give two shits about the ideological conflict between his eldest sister and brother; he was only given pause now because of the humorous rage Alaina was descending into.

            “Hey, screw you,” she snarled at him, though most of her annoyance was just a by-product of the living humiliation resting unapologetically in her palm.  With her other hand, she plucked up Tom by his leg between a thumb and index finger, lifting him lithely from his perch and dangling him upside down above the sunbaked sidewalk so she could speak at eye level.  “Listen up, you little hellion.  I am not going to let you destroy my chance at making a real difference in our school.  Okay?  I am NOT.”

            “Okay,” Tom mumbled as all the blood began to rush to his head.  He did his best not to look at the ground practically spiraling so far below between his sister’s enormous tennis shoe clad-feet, and instead tried to focus on the rubbery clatter of her impatiently marching soles, but this wasn’t much more helpful.

            The four siblings arrived at the bus stop just as the great yellow vehicle lurched around the corner of the other block with a puff of charcoal smoke.

            “You know that sooner or later you’re going to learn,” Alaina threatened, her warm breath washing over Tom’s face as she dangled him closer to her glossed lips.  “One way or another, I’m going to make it clear to you what it costs to be a filthy little liar.  Do you understand that?”

            “Yep,” Tom said, an in an instant had gone from a comparatively prodigious four inches down to a measly one and a half.  His tiny leg was practically swallowed up by the pads of Alaina’s fingertips.

            Unable to come up with an adequate retort to express her fury, Alaina resorted to throwing her free hand over her mouth just in time to suppress a wild scream, with all the emotion as though she’d just stumbled upon a mangled dead body.

            “I can’t take any more. Not right now.  I have to think,” Alaina groaned, extending her arm all the way out and pinching Tom’s miniscule leg with even less pressure, clearly too grossed out by his lack of proper values to even want to touch him at this point.  “Can somebody please please please take this piece of lying garbage away from me?”

            “Sure!” Emma piped happily, cupping her palm under Alaina’s hand to catch Tom just as he was unceremoniously released from his older sister’s grip.  She’d obviously been waiting for this moment, clearly with the hope that Tom would dig himself a deep enough grave that his thumb-sized body could be inherited into her hands.  The bus screeched to a halt at the end of the sidewalk as the door was squeezed open for its three normal-sized occupants to climb aboard.

            “Thank God,” Alaina grumbled, hopping up the steps of the transport.  Under her breath she added: “Figures she’d be the one…”

            “Wooow, that was a big lie, huh?” Emma smarmed cheekily to her brother.  Her voice held none of the revulsion for the “l-word” that her sister’s did.  She gently pinned Tom into the center of her hand and rubbed her thumb up along his stomach and chest as though examining him.  At less than the height of her smallest finger, he was powerless to fight back.  “Tommy’s itty-bitty.  I don’t think you’ve been this small since… since…”

            Grinning to herself, Emma fondly recalled the previous occasion several weeks back that Tom’s lying had put him down to such a vulnerable size.  She’d certainly taken full, entertaining advantage of the situation to create several fun memories she didn’t soon intend to forget, all of them completely at Tom’s expense.  She climbed aboard the steps and closed her fingers over her miniature sibling, caging him against her cushy palm in almost total darkness.

            “Don’t make a mess this time, Em,” Blake mumbled with irritation as he followed last, recognizing the mischievous glint in his sister’s eye before she’d even done anything.  “Mom blamed me last time you put Tom in-”

            “Ughhh… yeah, yeah, I know,” Emma said with a casual shrug, fully intending to ignore this warning if a good enough idea should strike her.  She swirled her gum, a bright purple grape-flavor today, about the tip of her tongue and along her top row of teeth.

            “Seriously.  And make sure you don’t forget where you put him, either,” Tom called as he walked toward the back of the bus, leaving his youngest family member in her zone near the front.  The bus chugged back to life and rolled down the street toward the exit from the neighborhood.

            “Hey!  I never forget!” Emma defended indignantly, not particularly caring that the other teenage passengers could clearly overhear the inter-sibling drama.  “Alaina’s the one who forgot him in her gross gym shorts, and who found him before he went in the washing machine?  That’s right: me!”

            By this time, Blake was already too blended into the raucous roar of his football teammates in the back to listen or care about Emma’s objections.  In giddy defiance, the girl instead returned her attention to the little trinket of a boy contained in her palm.  Brushing her short locks away from her eyes, she flashed him an earnest smile.  She flattened the violet gum against her tongue and slowly expelled its rubbery mass between her lips, inflating it as a bubble that rapidly began to expand.

            Once the gum bubble had reached its full capacity, however, rather than sucking it back between her cheeks as she had been, the girl gave a final meaningful glance to her tiny brother still splayed in the center of her palm.  She plucked him up by the waist between her thumb and index finger, bringing him to the purple sugary orb.

            For a moment, Tom looked at his vaguely distorted reflection shiny face of the bubble.  His sister’s titanic fingers, still pinched around his sides, positively dwarfed him as he hung limply in her grip.  There would’ve been no resisting possible, even if such a silly fantasy had crossed his mind.

            Giggling so hard she could hardly keep her tiny target steady, Emma pressed Tom’s body face-first into the sticky surface of the gum until it forcibly popped.  The tiny teen was hardly recognizable then as the strewn strands of gum softly exploded outward and coated his features and clothes.  Coughing, he struggled to get a clean breath of air, though every gulp of oxygen still tasted like hot, wet grapes and artificial sugars.  The stretchy mess tangled itself across his face, greasing his skin with Emma’s gooey spit.

            “Still, it doesn’t hurt to be too careful, right, Tommy?” Emma snickered, giving her miniscule sibling a victorious wink as she swept her free hand back through her ponytail again.  “And believe me, there’s no way anyone’s going to lose you looking like this.”

            Tom spent the rest of the bus ride immobilized in the moist bundle of his sister’s fruity gum, twiddled playfully between her massive fingers, as the spit-slicked candy gelled through his face and hair.

“Ewww…” Emma laughed as she peeled at the chewed mess of grape gum still plastered in Tom’s hair: the very wad of gum she’d pressed him into at his smaller and far more helpless size.  He’d managed to regrow back to eight inches in the intervening time by avoiding opening his mouth to lie, but it wasn’t a marketed improvement.  “You’re gonna need a shower before class, huh?”

            Her tone was neither joking nor apologetic; she was just as earnest in her desire for Tom to have some self-pride as she was, perhaps contradictorily, never going to acknowledge for a second that this morning was made any more difficult by her proffered gift of used chewing gum.

            The girl managed to collect most of the slippery candy with the tip of her fingernail, though much of it remained flecked hopelessly into her older brother’s hair.  Obediently, the now doll-sized liar held still while his sister did her rudimentary cleansing of his face that still reeked of grapes and Emma’s saliva.       

            “Probably,” he replied matter-of-factly as his sister’s other hand cupped against his back, keeping him centered over her short-clad thighs.

            “Did you remember to brush your teeth?” she questioned with sudden sternness.

            “Yeah,” he mumbled before the question was even processed.  Immediately he lost another three-quarters of an inch.

            Rolling her eyes and shaking her head, Emma allowed herself a broader smile.  As usual, she wasn’t at all bothered by his lie.  If anything, the sight of him reducing just a little more in her grip was a welcome sign.  “Gosh, what are we gonna do with you, Tommy?  You don’t want people saying you have bad breath, you know.”

            Pinching the small purple ball of gum between her fingers, then, she bit her lip, trying to hide another scheming grin.  Steadily she moved the gooey wad closer to her brother’s little face.

            “Open your mouth,” she whispered.

            More confused than startled, Tom raised an eyebrow, eyeing the lump in his sister’s other hand, and tried not to instinctively gag.

            “What?” he managed.

            “Your mouth,” she snickered.  “Open nice and wide for me.”

            “Really?”

            “Yep,” she confirmed.  She teased the sticky ball against Tom’s lips, causing him to shudder slightly at being reintroduced to its texture.  “Come ooooon.  We’re gonna fix your breath.  And you know I love sharing with my little brother…”

            “I…” he muttered.  “I don’t think I can fit the whole-”

            Taking her window, Emma shoved as much of the gum ball into her brother’s mouth as she could fit, wedging it such that shutting his mouth in defense was impossible.  The lump, still thick with the lingering juices of the girl’s throat, was far too thick to be refused.

            “Don’t talk anymore,” she ordered, gently but with enough firmness Tom knew the discussion was over.  She smiled from the corner of her mouth and brushed a fingertip over Tom’s gum-speckled hair.  “Just bite down.  As much as you can get.  And keep it in.  Don’t spit it out at me.”

            Nodding with passive defeat, Tom tore through as much of the revolting used gumball as he could until nearly every corner of his mouth was filled with what essentially amounted to his sister’s throat-flavored garbage. 

            “Good,” Emma said with satisfaction as she watched her toy-like sibling’s efforts.  She pinched a fingernail through the stringy mess that spilled from Tom’s mouth, though there wasn’t much; he’d managed to take a lot of it in, and she was glad to see his spirit in that regard.

            The bus rolled into the parking lot of the school just then and came to a stop.  Students all around began lugging their backpacks up from the floor and preparing to trudge inside.

            “Now just keep chewing my gum, okay?” Emma instructed.  “I’ll tell you when you can stop.”

            Smacking his jaws in an effort to chew through the ball that filled his entire mouth, Tom just tried to settle into a steady breathing pattern.  By now the gum was sucked away of most of its grape flavor, leaving it with the consistency of old clay and the potent leftover taste of Emma’s breakfast.

            “Looks like you’re not quite tall enough to go to class, Tommy,” Emma teased jovially, squinting studiously at Tom and drawing him closer to her face as he continued gnawing.  Her breath wafted down to his nostrils, scented with the heady hot grape that already covered so much of his body and now filled his jaws.  A fresh grin spread itself over her lips.  “So I guess you’re mine for now, huh?”

            Tom nodded in agreement with her sly statement, shrugging to himself.

            It wasn’t like there was anything to be done, after all.  It was well-known that most teachers at the school didn’t want shrunken liars in class, and requested that any offenders currently standing below their natural height simply skip the period and make up the work rather than sit in the room in public rebellion of society’s most vital value. There were a few exceptions, but for the most part, this was the golden rule.

            This, of course, for Emma, translated to her getting to “chaperone” Tom for the morning until he was of adequate height to move himself around.  The young man had become pretty complacent with this fate, though; looking on it with some perspective, things could be far worse, and of his siblings, he infinitely preferred to have Emma in charge of him.  Of course, that didn’t mean there weren’t noticeable downsides to being in her overly creative clutches.

            “You’re probably too big to fit in my purse,” Emma sighed, clearly disappointed as she held the handbag up to Tom’s seven-and-a-quarter inch frame.  She unzipped the top of the leather container all the same and shifted her grip on her brother so that he fell back into the opening.  As she predicted, he was long enough, but with her make-up, pencils, and of course extra chewing gum, fitting him in was going to be too tall an order.

            “Darn!” she grumbled.  By now the bus was nearly empty as others shuffled down the aisle; her two oldest siblings had already departed the vehicle for the day with friends and bookbags in tow.  She frowned, thinking the issue over as she cradled Tom in her hand.

            “I should’ve gotten you to lie again before I shared my gum,” she complained quietly.  It was something she dared never mention in the presence of Alaina or even her oldest brother or mother, but nonetheless, it was understood between Tom and Emma that she couldn’t have cared less how often he lied as long as it was to her advantage.  “You would’ve fit if you were just a few inches less.  Oh well.  There’s enough room in here.”  Her hand reached for her backpack and undid the back zipper, pointing inside.

            “I’ll just keep you in here until you’re too tall to fit, then you can go to your class, okay?” Emma said with genuine intent as she scooped her brother up and held him over the largest pocket.  Mumbling an affirmation, Tom wiped his mouth of moisture from the soggy gum wad.  He was laid with surprising care into the base of the pocket before Emma’s hand at last released its possessive grip on his back and rose up.

            “And remember: don’t spit my gum out!” Emma warned a final time, smiling cheerily before sealing Tom inside with the zipper.  “Actually, I guess it’s yours now, technically…”

Some quick jostling and awkward positioning on a textbook allowed Tom to sit down without getting thrown around too much as his sister shifted her backpack up from the bus seat and marched into the school.  Tom folded his arms behind his back, simply trying to stay focused on the little he had to work with.

            Enough light came through the upper fabric patch of the pocket that the teen didn’t completely lose his bearings inside Emma’s backpack.  By this point in his life as a compulsive liar, Tom was fairly adept at knowing where he was going without having the benefit of visual confirmation.  Watching shadows pass by and hearing the muffled voices and laughter changing all around, he was able to tell which path through the halls Emma was taking to her locker.  After a pause, a quick snap of the metal door again and the shuffle of his sister’s sneakers below told him they were on the way to first period.

            Through the auditory onslaught of freshmen, he could make out the chirpy commentary of his sister’s friends, one on either side of her, as they marched through the throngs of unassuming teens.  Gratefully, it didn’t even occur to her to draw him back out of the pack for a playful demonstration.  Emma usually wasn’t one to be shy about how small she’d gotten her brother down to, and enjoyed showing him off to her peers with usually more than a few challenging acrobatics as she gently tossed him between her palms or balanced him on the end of her nose, depending on his size.  These games usually got a pretty massive laugh from anyone watching, which Emma always soaked up with a broad grin and some entreating pets on Tom’s head.

            It wasn’t that the boy didn’t want his sister to be happy, considering how civilly she treated him compared to the rest of his kin, but it did begin to wear on the nerves when she’d fasten his body under the folds of her hair scrunchie and allow him to dangle upside-down from her silky ponytail through a full period.  Especially when it left him vulnerable to soggy soccer-sized spitballs from kids sitting behind her.  Today, though, to his muted delight, she seemed in enough of a hurry that her favorite school accessory wasn’t even introduced.

            Once they were in the classroom, with the backpack positioned on the floor between Emma’s legs, Tom could more or less relax.  Occasionally he’d feel his sibling’s tennis-toned calves rocking absentmindedly against the bag, nearly knocking him over, but that was about all there was to bother him now.

            For a little while he even tried listening to the lesson through the thin layer of zipper and fibers.  He’d actually had this very same geography teacher the previous year, though given his less-than-stellar academic track record, a reunion was best avoided, which made him grateful to be inside his sister’s bag.  Tom wasn’t particularly keen on making pleasantries when he was this small, especially to someone he’d once witnessed dunking a shrunken student into an iced coffee cup for making some falsely insipid remarks about the president.  The words of the lecture sounded fairly unfamiliar to him, though that wasn’t a huge surprise; odds were he wasn’t really paying attention at the time.

            By the time first period was over, Tom had regained another twelve inches, forcing him to hug his knees to his chest to make room in the pocket amidst the books.  Emma clearly noticed the difference, too, as she lurched the bag onto the desktop and pulled back the pocket to examine her misbehaving charge.  Her face was framed through the modest opening of the top, where she could plainly display a melodramatic pout for him.  As usual, she looked saddened to see him beginning the transition back to normal height.

            “C-C… Can I…” Tom questioned pleasantly as he wrestled with the secondhand gum again, having grown large enough now that talking was possible without removing the wad, though it was difficult.  The stuttering came as a byproduct of slackening jaws rather than nerves.  “C-C-Can I go now?”

            Emma tilted her head at the baby-sized boy in her backpack, thinking it over, then sighed and shook back and forth.

            “No, I don’t think so, Tommy.  You’re still too small to be on your own.  You know they wouldn’t let you in to class,” she reasoned sensibly.  She tapped a pensive fingertip against her chin as she explained.

            This conclusion of Emma’s was actually entirely true, and an answer he was grimly prepared for.  Tom’s second period teacher, in particular, would have a cow to see a student anywhere shorter than three feet marching up to a desk.  The far safer option, unfortunately, meant staying exactly and unproductively where he was now.  He hung his head, shrugging again.

            “Hey, don’t look so gloomy,” Emma giggled at the sight of her backpacked brother’s dismay.  She tucked a fingertip under the crook of his neck, tilting his head back up toward her.  “Be a good little backpack buddy for me and I’ll have a prize for you later.”

            “A p-prize?” Tom said after a confused moment of silence.

            “Yeah,” she drawled for suspense.  “I’m starting a new piece of gum in second period.  Mint this time.  And you can have first dibs on it once I’m done if you want.”

            For a moment Emma savored the blank look of withheld disgust on her brother’s face.  It got even better once he realized she wasn’t joking.  Then, with another wink and a waggle of her soft fingers, she patted Tom on the head to encourage him to duck and zipped him back up inside her bag, pulling the now-heavier load onto her shoulders and setting off undeterred toward her next class.

            Tom settled himself against the jumbled books of his little sister’s backpack in a vain attempt to make room.  Shrugging to himself with an affable sense of resignation, he set about chewing on the enormous ball of used gum again, slurping at it with more vigor now that he’d been numbed to its squalid flavor.

            Complaining seemed like a waste of time.  After all, he’d certainly had far worse mornings than this.

            “Baker?” Ms. Evans droned over her English class, already thoroughly irked by the answer she knew was coming. “Tom Baker?  I don’t suppose you bothered to complete your report that, I might add, is already a day late?”

            Snapping back to attention, Tom lifted his head up from his desk, trying not to look too conspicuously like he wasn’t paying attention, even though he most certainly wasn’t.  He’d only just returned to his full size in time for third period, and already knew there’d be plenty of work to make up in the afternoon for what he’d missed.  Drifting off in this class was hardly making an already more-or-less failed day much worse.

            “Uh…” he muttered somewhat guiltily, swallowing a lump in his throat.  “I’m going to take a look in my backpack.”

            At least this wasn’t a lie, because he proceeded to do just that as reached for his backpack and began idly rooting through the assorted binders and crumpled papers.  He was, indeed, taking a look in the backpack.  The chances of actually finding something useful, namely his essay, were almost nothing, and Tom was careful to omit this from his wording.  This was primarily owed to the fact that Tom hadn’t even started the assignment yet.  Though rare, technically truthful wording in the face of a lie was something he was able to do when focusing all of his energy into actual conscientiousness.  Even knowing he’d have to deal with the consequences sooner or later, and probably sooner, it was a miniature victory for the boy.

            Trying to buy himself some time now as Ms. Evans eyed him suspiciously, Tom lugged a hefty folder of old worksheets onto his desk and began to thumb through them as though searching for the paper he knew wasn’t there.  Taking his time, he watched gratefully as his teacher returned to the lesson, leaving him to his own devices.  Good.

            Closing this folder, Tom drew a second one from his backpack and began repeating the process.  He scratched an itch on the back of his head and plucked a tiny morsel of chewed gum out of his hair, still stuck there from the ride to school when Emma had inserted her hapless brother’s inch-and-a-half body into her moist gum bubble.

            After being reluctantly released from his sister’s handsy care, he’d made a pit stop in the gym locker room to shower the gummy residue and throaty odor of his sister’s tongue off his body.  It was lucky that the gum stayed its same size as he himself regrew to normal height, meaning it simply became a matter of finding the tiny remaining flecks of it and picking them out of his hair after washing off.  He knew he’d probably be finding stray, sugary bits stuck to his scalp for the next week or so.

            As he sat in English class now, reflecting on the embarrassingly repugnant acts his sister had committed on him simply with a piece of her used chewing gum, Tom paused.  He clacked his jaws together, at last arriving back in the moment with full awareness of his body after such a distracting morning, and came to a sad revelation.

            Without having realized it, even with no one around to police him, he was still chewing on the entirely flavorless ball of gum Emma had shoved into his mouth after spitting it onto his body from between her own lips.  In his haste to shower and reach class, he’d completely neglected to spit out the vile lump of hand-me-down rubber his sister had “gifted” to him as a replacement for brushing his teeth.

            Panicked, he gulped, accidentally swallowing the thing whole.

            “Baker!” Ms. Evans snapped with more emphasis, yanking Tom out of his revolted reverie.  He looked up and nearly fell backwards in his chair.  The woman was suddenly standing directly before his desk, leaving him with no cover now.  With her black hair tied back in a taut bun, crisp suit and skirt hugging her hips, and steely blue eyes trained unrelentingly on her target, even looking up at her from a normal height was enough to make anyone weak in the knees.  “Class is over in one minute.  Any progress?”

            The vulnerable teen felt all eyes in the room on him, most of them belonging not to concerned peers but thoroughly entertained audience members.  While the members of the class didn’t necessarily dislike Tom or even harbor ill will towards him, they nevertheless were aware of just how legendarily bad Tom was at defusing guilty situations.  It was like a racecar crash: unavoidable and, secretly, a massive, terrible pleasure to witness.

            “Not… really,” Tom piped up.  He feigned being as put together as he could, though in reality he hadn’t been thinking clearly all morning.  That was to be expected, though, considering he’d been wrestling in a slipper, popping giant gum bubbles, and riding around in backpacks with hardly a pause for coherent meditation.

            “I’m not seeing that essay in your hand,” she commented, glancing at the papers in his folder.

            “Yeah, it’s uh… not in here,” he gulped, stuffing the folder back into his backpack.

            “I see,” Ms. Evans said, nodding resolutely and crossing her arms.  A pen, perched between her fingers, was twirled from one to the other without stopping.  For a moment, it mesmerized Tom in this silent moment of truth, but his attention was quickly earned back as the period-ending bell rang.  Though clearly irritated to have missed the fireworks, most students were eager to escape the stern woman’s dominion and rose quickly from their desks at the musical toll.

            “Sorry,” Tom muttered, unable to make eye contact with the woman.  He remained stiffly in his chair, knowing he had not been given permission to escape his teacher’s scrutiny yet.  After another thirty seconds of hustling and pattering feet, the room was empty save for the guilty student and his interrogator.

            “I suppose it would be a waste of time for me to try and find out whether or not the paper is even done to begin with,” she said curtly, tapping her black heel-clad foot against the carpet.  Relieved to have avoided this question, Tom simply clasped his hands politely atop the desk and said nothing.  Drawing a lengthy breath, Ms. Evans added: “So today, I suppose I’ll just cut to the chase and ask you what, precisely, it is that you think is so much more important than your work for this course?”

            Though he didn’t let it show, at this simple line, Tom felt as though all his limbs had simultaneously atrophied.

            He put up with a lot in his life.  Constant toying by his siblings, strict discipline by his mother, and consistent teasing by the closest people he had to friends in this school.  Most of it he’d learned to deal with pretty well.

            But this particular question, he knew, was his bane.  Tom would have given anything to be asked something else, no matter how much of a guarantee its lack of truth would be.  Anything would be preferable.  He already knew there wasn’t a way to avoid this line of questioning now that Ms. Evans had opened it up, but all the same, he made a desperate attempt to evade.

            “Y-You mean…” he began pitifully.

            “You know exactly what I mean,” Ms. Evans snapped, placing her hands forcefully onto the desktop and earning a flinch from Tom as she leaned in closer to his face.  There was no escaping now.  “Just tell me what it is you were doing last night that prevented you from completing the assignment.”

            Mind racing, Tom felt his brow warming with the sheer effort to speak something that wasn’t a truth or a lie in technicality.  “I was… doing other homework.”

            “Not good enough,” the woman responded.  As the anger rose in her voice, granting her cheeks a rosy hue, it was clear she wouldn’t stop until she had a satisfactory answer, no matter how much prying it took.  “You’ve had plenty of time to write the paper, and everyone else has homework every night too, yet you’ve continually delayed.  I want to know what’s been keeping you from your responsibilities.”

            “I… I…” Tom fumbled.  Ordinarily words came to him with such ease, even if most of them were lies, but right now, his tongue was knotted hopelessly up.  The real answer to her question, above all else, couldn’t be made known.  It just couldn’t.

            “Well?” Ms. Evans demanded, tapping her foot against the tile and causing her cornered student to flinch.  “Tell me now.  What were you doing?”

            “…I was just fooling around all evening.  Goofing off.  Procrastinating,” Tom uttered.

            “Doing what, I said?  I want to know.  And you’re going to tell me, or your grade will be in more trouble than just one missed essay,” Ms. Evans said, seething now.  She’d been having issues with Tom’s timeliness all year and now, it seemed, it was finally coming to a head.  He couldn’t even blame her for wanting some answers, but unfortunately, he would go to his grave before giving them willingly.

            “I was, uh…” he muttered, his mind preparing for what was inevitably coming even before his body.  He opened his mouth, preparing unleash the floodgates: “…at the movies.”

            Immediately Tom sunk into the chair, losing a foot-and-a-half just with this one phrase.  Ms. Evans’ lips tightened, and her heel clacked more rapidly against the floor as she peered down at him without reacting yet.  Her eyebrow arched expectantly.

            “At the park,” he corrected untruthfully.  Again he reduced, slipping down to three feet in the blink of an eye.

            The teacher only stared on.  She leaned in further over the desk to witness his pathetic reduction, now looming intimidatingly over him with a stony expression.  Even if he leapt to the side of the chair, there was no escape, and he knew it.

            “Cleaning my room,” Tom continued as he promptly shrunk down to two feet.  The words were spilling out now practically beyond his control.  “Tutoring… other… kids…”  Not even having the pride to look Ms. Evans in the face anymore, Tom dwindled quickly down to just over a foot in height, looking distinctly like a pouty toddler as he sat in the chair that now dwarfed him so hilariously.

            “I think that’ll be enough of you for the time being,” Ms. Evans snipped.  At last making another move, her hand lifted from the desk and down to Tom and fastened itself around the back of his shirt.  She plucked him easily up by the nape of the fabric and lifted him like he was no heavier than a loaf of bread from the chair.  Tom dangled above the seat for a moment, suspended only by his teacher’s fist, as she examined him at arm’s length.  Her striking features seemed to harden by the second.

            “I’m sorry,” Tom managed.

            Patting her bun, Ms. Evans closed her eyes, taking her time in preparing an answer.  She opened her mouth as if to speak, but instead expelled warm air onto Tom’s face and shook her head.  The shrunken student half-wondered if smoke would puff cartoonishly from her ears at any moment.

            “I think it would do you some good to spend some time thinking on those answers you just had the gall to say to my face, and the harm they do to you and those around you,” Ms. Evans said curtly at last.  “Especially you.”

            Considering Tom was expecting her to be foaming at the mouth with pure rage right about now, this was a surprisingly gentle response.

            “So that’s what I’m going to give you, Tom Baker.  Time,” Ms. Evans said.  “And plenty of it.”  She turned from the now-vacant seat and marched purposefully between the aisles back toward her desk at the back, keeping Tom brandished at arm’s length.  A purple gemstone ring on her finger dug awkwardly at the back of his neck as her grip tightened on his shirt.  Anyone looking in now might’ve had to do a double take to ensure she wasn’t just dangling a disobedient puppy by its excess fur.

            “What do you say to that?” she questioned calmly as they arrived back at her swivel chair.  Unceremoniously she slumped Tom down into the chair and released her grip, positioning him on his back.  Towering above him, then, Ms. Evans gracefully turned back toward the desktop so that Tom was left facing her backside.

            “Uh… t-th…” Tom muttered, gulping shallowly as he gazed up at the looming monolith of Ms. Evans’ impressively toned derriere, clad in a form-hugging black skirt that complimented her louder than any human ever could with the most exquisite poetry.  Any other time of his life, the hormone-addled teen would’ve willingly sacrificed family heirlooms just to have a few minutes to admire this very sight in such proximity.  In being honest with himself, he’d spent more than a few bored evenings with a few clean tissues and the fond memory of Ms. Evans walking away from him in the classroom.

            Somehow, though, the desire was diminished as the sheer scope of the woman before him began to take hold.  Steadily, Ms. Evans grasped the armrests for support and bent at the knees, lowering herself down toward the chair, making her intentions clear once and for all.

            “Thank you!” Tom sputtered at last as he was swallowed by the shadow of his teacher’s pleasingly rotund butt, hardly knowing whether the show of gratitude was genuine or not.

            “That’s more like it,” Ms. Evans said satisfactorily.  With that, she lowered her firm assets onto the student and shifted her full brunt at last into the chair.  There was no pretense of gradually increasing the load: the entire force of her body weight was gifted in the first instant, and the wheezing huff of air she heard from beneath like an organic whoopee cushion gave the educator cause to snicker under her breath.  The metal legs of the chair creaked contentedly beneath.

            Gasping after having his lungs squeezed dry by the initial impact, Tom realized with a start that only his head was able to peek out from beneath the curved globe of the thirty-something’s rear end.  The rest was buried pitifully beneath the gorgeous feminine glutes and folds of fabric that, in just this particular instance, were maybe just a little too much for the boy to handle.  For a moment he instinctively attempted to wriggle in any direction, but quickly discovered Ms. Evans had him pinned, and he wasn’t going anywhere until she chose to rise.  Already his limbs were tickled with pins and needles, and his feet and hands were beginning to fall asleep.  Which, for just this one occasion, was perhaps a godsend, as Tom knew he would be well on his way to a satisfied erection if he still had any sensation left down there, thanks to the tauntingly close proximity he now found himself to Ms. Evans’ divine ass.

            With another smirk to herself, the English teacher pulled herself comfortably into the desk and rolled her cheeks back and forth across Tom’s aching body, settling herself into her chosen human cushion just as the next class began filing into the room.

            Tom lay beneath the heft of his teacher’s toned rump, aware that his limbs were now numb enough they might as well have floated into a void.  Certainly he couldn’t even see the rest of his body, as Ms. Evans had only allowed his head to poke out from beneath her as she sat comfortably upon him as extra padding in the desk chair.

            The compulsive liar had hoped once the next class started, his teacher would be on her feet for the remainder of the period, leaving him to ponder his sins in peace.  While she did rise several times to scribble something on the board at the front of the room, the majority of the period was presented through a slideshow, which Ms. Evans conveniently had stored on her desktop computer, allowing her to remain with most of her body weight centered over her shrunken student for much longer than he was anticipating.

            Each time she returned to her seat after a brief lap around the classroom to give the evil eye to gum chewers, she deposited her butt back onto Tom with full force, bouncing the swivel chair lightly and causing it to groan in protest.  A few times she even spun lightly from side to side, providing an additional trouncing into the barely-bracing seat cushion that ensured Tom felt her weight anew each time on every square inch of his body.

            Her student, of course, dared offer no such rebellion himself upon each return.  It would’ve been difficult anyway, as every time Ms. Evans sat down on his foot-length body, the firm curvature of her ass squeezed the air from both his lungs in a single instant.  He’d hardly had time to re-inflate them with a few calming breaths as he was exposed to the cool air again.  These were always only the briefest of recesses, though, as the teacher would return quickly to her seat.  Without even acknowledging the boy, she’d turn around, smooth her skirt out along the back of her thigh, and promptly bury Tom under her robust tush once again.  A puff of bracing air would escape his lips, and that would be the end of his break.

            Certainly it wasn’t something Tom minded, per se.  Ms. Evans took care of herself, a fact he now knew with tactile experience as her cheeks would occasionally flex through the fabric of her clothing, compressing him at varying levels of strength into the seat below.  The cushion below Tom’s back offered very little padding itself.  No wonder she needed the added support of his body to sit on, though he suspected she had other reasons for using him in this way, namely to make a profoundly potent statement without even having to open her mouth.  Indeed, as Tom had experienced multiple times in his life from several “teachers,” academic or not, sometimes a robust pounding under someone’s butt said all that needed saying.

            Not that Tom would’ve listened, of course, to whatever it was Ms. Evans’ rear end was saying.  He was simply too deep into this way of life now; his lips had a mind of their own, where the truth was a rare treat, and trying to explain that was difficult in a world where needlepoint Biblical verses of lying as the eighth deadly sin were plastered over many a kitchen stove.  His only course was to take his lumps, or in this case, two lumps, provided courtesy of Ms. Evans’ body.

            She wasn’t exactly rail-thin, which Tom appreciated, as he’d served as a seat cushion for several particularly skinny individuals, and their legs always tended to be bonier and made him feel like he was sleeping beneath a rickety sofa mattress.  His teacher had just enough muscle and flesh to make it at least bearable for him to camp out here, and over the course of the period, he became well-acquainted with every angle of Ms. Evans’ underside.

            Idly, Tom noted that he was learning far more about anatomy here than if he’d been allowed to report to his next class which, boringly enough, was in fact anatomy rather than the extra English lesson he was receiving here now from beneath his teacher’s ass.

            On the final time she sat down, with only minutes left before the class ended, Ms. Evans really made sure to roost comfortably.  She stretched her legs out under the desk, kicking her heels off and freeing her dark stocking-clad feet against the carpet fibers.  Her hands slid delicately along the armrests of her swivel chair, and her long fingers curled possessively around the handles, gripping them for relief from the stiffness of the morning.

            As her whole body began to relax and settle in to a more familiar position over Tom, Ms. Evans’ taut cheeks softened as well over his body.  More and more of the fabric of her skirt rolled its way over his face, covering his mouth and nose until all he could do was peek up from under the curve of her thigh.

            The cloth was scented sweetly of fabric softener and possibly a hint of mango body wash from her skin, which Tom was grateful to have there.  Not every person who borrowed him for seat cushions or other useful accessories had the courtesy to clean themselves before exposing him to less desirable areas of their bodies, which Tom totally understood.  It wasn’t like he deserved to be treated like a king when he’d lied so much.  Nevertheless, it was a pleasant surprise.

            In fact, Tom couldn’t imagine he’d mind so much if Ms. Evans were to get even more comfortable now in her solitude.  With little else to do, his imagination immediately began concocting something almost too wild to conceive of if he didn’t already have the muscle memory of his teacher’s ass squashing him into the chair as a reference point.

            Maybe she’d decide the room was getting a little too hot and, with no students or administrators there to admonish her for poor dress code, casually allow her skirt to slide down the toned pillars of her legs and collect around her stockinged ankles.  Maybe she’d sit back down, then, not even with a second thought (a rarity where Ms. Evans was concerned regardless of how clothed she was).  Tom couldn’t help but shiver to let himself play out the sensations of the pale, silky skin of her cheeks molding themselves atop his meager frame.  As long as he was imagining, he decided she might as well be in a black lacy thong.  No, red.  Like the deadly crimson lipstick she’d suddenly be wearing for the convenience of his increasingly steamy fantasy.  It might get a little itchy positioned under the nearly bare bum, with Ms. Evans’ crack positioned just over his crotch, but it was a small price to pay to experience the warmth of her flesh and an even more personable sampling of that haunting mango scent infused into every skin cell.  The heat would eventually foster a little sticky dampness between Tom and the unrelenting ceiling of his teacher’s ass, of course, but he supposed it wouldn’t be so terrible to put up with.  Perhaps even enjoyable, if enough of it had infused with that wafting hint of flowery perfume.  “Enjoying the view?” she might ask him ironically, and God help him, it would take every ounce of strength not to answer and reveal that, yes, he was very much enjoying the view, thank you very much.  If he gave the answer she wanted, he might well shrink down far enough to become stranded in the tangle of her thong’s fabric, moist with perspiration, and sink even deeper into the crescent valley above.

            Lost in himself for a moment, the little liar couldn’t help but drool.

            Tom was snapped out of his arousing reverie as his teacher’s butt came crashing back down upon him to readjust itself in the seat.  Hey, a boy could dream.

            Once the bell rang and homework was distributed, the class rose from their seats, departing in a mumbling mass out of the room.  Tom had never even sat up from his flattened position, even when Ms. Evans stood up from him, so none of them had become aware of his presence.  He was glad for this, too; it was always a bit of an embarrassment to discover someone had been using you as a cushion, no matter the circumstances.  Tom was prone to getting a bit pink in the face, especially after so thoroughly descending into the thought of his teacher’s skirt coming off.  The boy had been forced to swerve his thoughts elsewhere to avoid getting an incriminating boner that would either be noticed by his teacher the next time she sat on him or simply be snapped like a twig on the next bounce, neither of which was particularly appealing.

            Ms. Evans herself once again made no effort to rise as she waited patiently for the next group.  She slid her feet several times across the floor beneath her desk, the swish of her stockings briefly mesmerizing her entrapped student as he used his limited focal point to look down the length of her thighs and shapely calves.  From on high he heard her unscrewing a plastic water bottle, which caused him to lick his lips empathetically from thirst and accidentally taste the skirt-clad globe of a butt currently weighing down on his body.  It wasn’t bad.  The flavor of fabric softener, maybe, mixed with leather from a car seat and just a hint of perfume-enhanced sweat that had beaded down her back and into the crevice below.

            There was still one more period until lunch, and already Tom’s stomach was growling, though he braced himself, knowing that if he couldn’t grow back a significant enough amount by then, Ms. Evans could easily deprive him of the noon meal with perfectly founded reasoning.  After all, how was he supposed to carry a tray, let alone reach high enough over the steamy counters to grab some food and slide it onto its surface?  What, was he just supposed to ask someone to do it for him, when he was standing right there in plain sight, a liar for all the world to see and mock?  The thought made Tom chuckle quietly to himself, so accustomed to it he felt no bitterness.

            What an absurd concept.

            At least Ms. Evans seemed contented to remain in place now as she chugged the water down, crackling the bottle in the grip of her firm fingers above.  As much as Tom appreciated the brief chances to air out when his teacher would stand up from her chair, the inevitable return of her ass, squashing down without remorse onto his body like a crashing hot air balloon, didn’t quite make for a good trade-off.

            “You know something?” Ms. Evans sighed, breaking the silence at last and startling her flattened student.

            It took a second for Tom to register she was talking to him, even though there was no one else in the room yet.

            “Huh?” he answered as casually as possible, though it came out more like a coughed whisper, as conversing was difficult with so much heft being compressed over his throat and abdomen.

            “I’ve been an English teacher for… almost ten years now.  Do you know why I chose this particular profession, Mr. Baker?” she questioned, uttering the more formal title with complete disdain.  Her cheeks tensed slightly again over Tom’s body, bringing him deeper into the center of the chair.  He’d regained a matter of inches during the previous period, so his feet could poke out from the opposite end of the woman’s rear, but there was still more than enough of him to keep pinned numbly under her weight.  She didn’t even bother to lean any closer to his ears for the conversation; the sentences reached him well enough.

            “No,” he said truthfully.  The imminent compression of his body and near-loss of awareness gave him little else to focus on other than squeezing out the occasional virtuous syllable.  If this was the goal, it certainly seemed Ms. Evans knew what she was doing in squeezing the truth out of him.

            “Because language has always been my greatest love.  Even when I was a little girl, I read everything I could get my hands on and studied famous orators.  The word is… well, it’s our most powerful tool.  Nothing else can match it, not hydroelectric or nuclear or anything else,” she explained.  She sighed deeply, causing her ass to rise and fall just a few inches, providing Tom with a gasp of air before her cheeks lowered again, parting through the fabric, where they were able to partially clench him in their bulbous grip.  “Is that something you agree with?”

            Biting his tongue, Tom nodded meekly and remained at his current size.  Either Ms. Evans felt it or the question had been hypothetical, because she charged right on.

            “What I can’t understand is how I’m expected to go about my day-to-day, witnessing a constant perversion of this gift for humanity,” she continued.  “Truth… doesn’t have to be about knowing what’s right or wrong, like everyone says.  It, and the words that compose it, are their own sacrament.  They are what unlock the world around us, allow us to adapt and advance according to what we find.”

            Tom blinked, having an idea already where this was headed.

            “And then there are those that would go against that order… those that not only understand the difference between truth and lie, and what they represent for our gifts, but actively go against the direction of their own species…” she continued, her voice on the verge of quavering with intensity.  Ms. Evans cleared her throat.  “I understood the danger of these kinds of people from an early age.  I couldn’t even escape it in my own home.  My… brothers and sisters, if you want to call them that… could never learn, no matter how many lessons I taught them.”

            “Oh,” he huffed meekly.

            “Do you know what I did with them, Mr. Baker?  Those who would molest the truth for their own gain?”

            “No.”

            “I would introduce them to the only place befitting those who dare go above what correct.  And I would make them part of my throne,” she explained coolly.  Her fingers descended over her thigh, tapping idly at the curve of her butt, and immediately her student understood pretty clearly.

            In this moment, Tom felt a bizarre kind of kinship with people he’d never heard of until this moment.

            “I became an English teacher because I know it is my duty to protect the word… the truth… from the snivelers like you.  By any means necessary,” Ms. Evans said.  Her hand snaked down the chair, grasping at Tom’s stubby legs poking out from one side of her seat, and tugged.

            With a gasp, Tom’s head was yanked underneath the crushing darkness of his teacher’s as, feeling the cushy give of her crack directly through just a few layers of fabric as it lowered down with another air-robbing smash.

            “You clearly don’t respect people with your lies, and that’s something you’ll face the consequences for until you learn otherwise,” the woman concluded loudly enough for her smothered audience to hear.  “But one way or another, Tom Baker, I will teach you to respect the word.”

            “And she just… sat on you?  For two periods?  Ms. Evans?  Fuck, you lucky son of a bitch,” Jordan grumbled as he listened to his friend Tom’s whispered plight at the far end of a lunch table.  “I think I’d lie willingly just to get under there.”

            Their voices were easily covered up from nearby listeners by the overpowering drone of the student body all around.  Most wouldn’t have wanted to hear such talk from two of the most well-known liars in the grade, anyway.  In a way, there was sanctuary between them, where truths somehow seemed to come with ease like nowhere else, however embarrassing they were.

            “It wasn’t too bad,” Tom admitted.  By now, he was just a few inches shy of his full height, and could easily pass for normal.  He chomped on a turkey sandwich, knowing it would be wise to stock up on food sooner rather than later.  “I’ve had way worse.”

            “Way worse?  Do you know what Kaylie and Josh did to me last night?” Jordan demanded with a scowl, obviously just trying to get out some pent-up frustration about his younger siblings.

            “Do I even want to know?”

            “No,” he confirmed heartily, clearly intent on forging ahead anyway.  “They did the same goddamned thing to me, except it was after they got back from that cross-country meet, and their shorts were soaked.  Fuck, I couldn’t even breathe down there.  Dad only told them to let me out because I was coughing so much he thought I might puke on the rug.”

            “Would you have?” Tom asked, taking another bite of sandwich.  “Puked, I mean.”

            “I don’t know!  Maybe!” Jordan reported, lifting his arm up to his nose and taking a big whiff before hacking lightly, turning his head away in revulsion.  “I took two showers last night and another one this morning.  I still smell like their sweaty asses.”

            “C’mere,” Tom requested, grabbing his friend’s arm and smelling it.  “Let me guess.  Kaylie took her turn last, right?”

            “What, are you some kind of fucking connoisseur now?” Jordan demanded, though he couldn’t hide his admiration for the apparent odor wizardry.  “How’d you know?”

            “Kaylie’s sweat is saltier.  How else?” Tom said with a little bit of odd pride as he set his sandwich down and took a swig of juice.  “How big were you?  Foot?   Foot and a half?”

            “At most.  I think in the middle there I got down to eight inches because Kaylie asked me if I’d be more goddamned comfortable if she took her pants off and just sat on me in the sports underwear!” he groaned, gagging at the mere mention of it, though Tom could only shudder a little in remembrance of his previous period.  “And Christ, they get heavy when you’re that small.”

            “Big deal,” Tom chuckled.  “Alaina’s sat on me before when I was four or five inches.  That was bad.”

            “Yeah, except she wasn’t sweating out of every pore at the time!” Jordan countered with annoyance, at last scooping up some chips from his own lunch and chomping them down with contempt.  The competition was only just heating up, as it usually did.

            “What’s up, boyos?” their friend Heather smarmed as she slid into a seat on Tom’s opposite side, slamming her full tray on the table and wiping a few spilled crumbs off her pre-workout sweatshirt.

            “Nothing,” Jordan grumbled, not wanting to give the girl any ammo.

            “Just shooting the breeze?” she suggested.  She brought a buttered roll to her mouth, tearing a large hunk off as she batted her amber hair over her shoulder.  Her possum-like eyes squared to her two shrinkable peers.

            “Something like that,” Tom responded a little more pleasantly.

            “Didn’t see you in anatomy class, Tom-Tom.  Or in the hall before fifth period,” she pointed out cheekily, nudging him in the shoulder with her elbow.  Already she was engaged and she didn’t have a single word of proof.  “Come on.  I want the story.  Now.”

            Tom sighed, knowing it would be easier to just give in now rather than having it wheedled out of him at the cost of shrinking in front of Heather.  She was one of the few other people in his grade who didn’t treat him like garbage just for his tenuous relationship with the truth, but that didn’t mean she didn’t occasionally have a taste for some fun at his expense.

            “Not really anything to tell,” he said with a shrug.  He looked to Heather as she scooped up a spoonful of vanilla pudding from a cup on her tray, though her eyes remained locked onto him with entertained intensity.  “I just, uh… didn’t get to all my homework last night.  Evans asked me if I did it, and I said yes.”

            “That wouldn’t be enough to keep you down for two whole classes, though,” Heather countered with the wisdom of someone who took immense pleasure from carefully tracking the shrinking habits of her friend’s body for careful use to her own advantage later.  “How small did you get?”

            “Uhhh... maybe a foot?” he said, gulping as he focused on easing out the correct words.

            “Yeah, definitely more than one lie, then.  Maybe three big ones,” she reasoned, leaning in closer as she pushed the spoon of pudding between her lips and cleaved its yellow goopy contents into her throat.  “So what was it next?”

            “She just asked what I was… doing instead of the homework,” Tom continued.  It occurred to him that Heather was starting to back him into a corner much like his teacher did, and there was little he could do to prevent it.

            “And... you said what to that?”

            “Aren’t you hungry?” Jordan queried to their friend, trying to give Tom a hand.  “Shouldn’t we just get our food down and talk about this some other time like… I don’t know, never?”

            “Nope!  I want to hear what he said,” Heather corrected, shifting her gaze to Jordan and batting her full eyelashes playfully.  “Unless you wanna tell me about your evening instead, Mr. Nutrition?”

            “What?  Why would I want to-” he gasped.

            “I can smell you from over here,” Heather intoned dully, trying not to smile too wide.  “Maybe you should shower after one of the Wonder Twins wears you in their shoe.”

            “I wasn’t in their damned shoes!” Jordan snapped defensively, realizing the web he’d been caught in too late.

            “So what’d they do with you, then?” Heather followed up instantly, leaning further over Tom’s lunch to be able to make herself heard.

            “They didn’t do anyth-” Jordan spat bitterly, then caught himself in the middle and clenched his eyes shut, making a choice.  “-ing but sit on me.”

            “Better or worse than being in their shoes?” Heather asked bluntly as though she’d prepared the questions ahead of time.

            “B-Better,” Jordan managed with effort.  Blinking, he looked down at his body, which still retained its normal stature, though he was apparently half-expecting to suddenly be looking up at the looming face of his vindictive friend. It was clearly a tough call.

            Chortling at the teen’s misfortune, Heather sank back into her chair, clearly sated for the moment but nonetheless unsatisfied with her inability to catch Jordan in a lie.  Her eyes snapped immediately back to Tom, who was innocently trying to scarf down the rest of his sandwich before he lost the chance to do so under his friend’s line of questioning.

            “Well?” she said to Tom with a broadening smile, launching right back into it as another lump of pudding disappeared into her mouth.  “What do you have to say for yourself?”

            “What do you mean?”

            Heather rolled her eyes melodramatically and ran her fingers through Tom’s hair, ruffling it aggressively in jest.  “Your excuse.  What did you tell Evans you were doing when you should’ve been working?”

            “I… I…”

            “No, wait.  Not good enough,” she corrected, a sly smile spreading anew over her lips as she parted them again to receive another morsel of dessert.  The warm metal of the spoon clicked against her teeth as she rattled the utensil thoughtfully between her thumb and fingers.  “What were you doing instead of your homework?”

            And there it was.  Tom gave his tray a nimble shove into the center of the table and sighed deeply, looking with irritation over to Jordan, who only shrugged and tried to avert his gaze.

            “I… I was doing the laundry,” Tom said, closing his eyes as he accepted his fate.  The flush of his size took place in a near-continuous motion, as though his body was anticipating the inevitable next loss in a pattern.  “I mean, I was helping my mom garden.  Helping dad with cleaning the car, I mean, that’s what it was.  Cleaning the garage, not the car.  Garage and the car.  A-Actually, it was… it was none of that.  Or all of it.  Just… later.  It… was sunbathing.  I was just sunbathing.”

            “Was it now?” Heather whispered as she leaned way over into Tom’s seat, which by now was barely occupied, save for a boy who stood at just under two inches tall.  “Sunbathing.”

            “Yes, it was,” he reported, losing another entire inch.

            Heather’s hand lowered to the chair, the shadow of her fingers casting alternately over her reduced friend, and landing with a thud that nearly jolted Tom off his feet.

            “And that’s the truth?” she pressed, her hot breath scented of bananas and mint gum seeping in a cloud over Tom’s whole world as he looked up at her lips, rippling into another massive grin.

            God, he was small.  Smaller than he’d been in weeks.  Maybe months.

            “Yes,” he said simply, instantly dropping down to just a quarter-inch in height in the shadow of his triumphantly grinning friend.

Heather’s expansive hand edged closer along the surface, closer to her miniscule target.  Tom remained in place, knowing now he just had to wait and let nature take its course, or rather his humongous and manipulative friend.  It was like watching a storm cloud approach from on high.  Nothing he could do to stop it but take cover and hope things didn’t get too wet.

            Her thumbnail was more than double the length of his entire body, her hand in of itself comprising the scale of a flesh-toned UFO, stretching up a monolithic arm and toward a body so large it might have been said to only exist in imagination.  There was no choice in the matter for him now, and already he was working through the “acceptance” stage.

            “Well, thank God one of you is willing to let me play with you,” Heather sighed.  She lifted her thumb and index finger, parting them ever so slightly as they advanced rapidly on Tom, who only lifted his arms obediently and allowed himself to be pinched between the two enormous, pillowy pads of his friend’s fingertips that threatened to swallow him up if she squeezed with just a little more pressure.  A great deal of focus was concentrated in her eyes, like she was on the verge of splitting the atom.  With him trapped in her practiced grip, she lifted him up from the seat with no more effort than allowing a fluttering dandelion seed to alight on her fingertip.  He soared up dozens of inches up to the level of her soft eyes, now like clock tower faces to the shrunken lad.

            Tom struggled to get a grip, finding he could fit his fingertips into the slight grooves of Heather’s spiraling prints but could do little else to aid in gaining ground.  As expected, he had to rely entirely on the mercy of his mountainous friend.  He wriggled awkwardly between the elongated walls of Heather’s firm digits and looked over to Jordan’s equally titanic face with a beseeching grimace.  The defense he’d hoped for didn’t appear to be twisting itself into the statuesque countenance of the other frequent liar.

            “Sorry, dude,” Jordan said genuinely, throwing his hands up and running them anxiously over his buzz-cut scalp, having learned several years before that it paid in the long run to not have hair get in the way while shrunken.  “I tried to help you!  I passed the quiz she gave me.  What more do you want?”

            Tom shook his head, and would’ve shrugged in agreement if Heather’s fingers weren’t beginning to press more tightly around his hips, constricting most bodily movement - he knew she liked to feel him squirm at larger sizes, but at his nearly insect-scale, it probably wasn’t quite as much fun.  Jordan had a point there, and Tom wasn’t one to place blame where it wasn’t due.  As usual, this was totally on him.  And maybe a bit on Heather as well, but who was going to argue with a girl who was now big enough to suck him up into her nostril like a dust mite if she inhaled hard enough?

            “I swear, someday this will get old, but it is most definitely not today,” Heather commented victoriously as her hand lowered toward her lunch tray.  Once her pinched fingers were hovering just an inch over the pudding below, she parted them without fanfare, allowing Tom to tumble the short distance from her grip and into an inescapable lake of sugary goodness.  He pulled his limbs into his body for the descent, praying for a soft landing as wind whipped past his cheeks.  With a soft plunk so quiet it might’ve been drowned out by a pebble rolling into a still lake, Tom hit the whipped surface of his friend’s enormous dessert and became submerged.

            “There’s no need to be a jerk about it.  You already got him down that low,” Jordan noted begrudgingly.  He moved his hand to try and scoop his crumb-sized buddy away from Heather, but she was prepared, instantly swatting him away and keeping Tom to herself.  “Why can’t you just let him be, huh?”

            “Don’t feel too bad, Tom-Tom.  See, this is why you’re my best friend, and Jordan is just my best acquaintance,” she said earnestly as her hand departed, going to scoop up the spoon again.  There didn’t appear to be a hint of irony in her tone, and as she didn’t lose a millimeter of height, she clearly believed it.  Jordan, ignoring the denotation, returned to his own lunch again.

            Tom, meanwhile, ensconced in the miasma of pudding, watched with his usual nonchalant regard for the things he couldn’t change as Heather’s rocket-sized spoon descended back toward the pudding.  Not that there was anywhere to go, but as he sank deeper into the yellow food-dyed sea of his friend’s food, the liar noted he wasn’t even strong enough at this size to swim away from the inevitable.  And sure enough, he watched as the spoon met the surface of the pudding and dove beneath, advancing below the surface like a cold metal shark.  For a moment he caught his distorted reflection in the concave surface of its ladle, streaked with saliva and smeared pudding though it was, and blinked.

            The uprising was swift and dramatic as Heather scooped her spoon back up beneath him.  The earth seemed to tremble as the terrain itself was sponged from the uniform mountain of squishy yellow treat and collected into the crater of the utensil.  Tom barely flinched on his ascent, sinking deeper into the pudding so that only his head could peep out of the gooey sea.

            “Here comes the airplane,” the girl giggled as she parted her lips, giving Tom a broad view of the hot, glistening prison cell of her inner jowls that was about to become her friend’s habitat for the foreseeable future.  The red walls of her cheeks undulated, dribbling with ropes of crystal saliva and excess moisture as the new tenant prepared to make his entrance.  Exhaling heavily over the spoon and washing the miniscule boy in her stifling breath, Heather brought the spoon over her teeth and slurped Tom into the sticky valley of her titanic tongue.

            Tom was tucked into the inside of Heather’s cheek beneath the rippling might of her tongue, expertly pinned over him such that he could be slid onto any surface in the pitch-black hovel of her mouth that she pleased.  Her red muscle pushed him harder, bending him into the squishy give of her jawline wall.  Next she flicked him up to her top row of teeth, entrapping him against her gums just beneath her upper lip.  It was a predictable cycle that nonetheless never ceased to trip the boy up.  There was little else he could do other than throw his hands over his head for added protection as he was transported on a slimy river and a flick of Heather’s tongue to the next desired location in her mouth, and even this didn’t always work.

            It was tough contesting the might of the strongest muscle in the body of a girl who was already large enough to lose him like a piece of stray dandruff if she weren’t so intently focused on playing with him which, Tom supposed, was a plus given his size.  Attention of any kind would ensure he remained in the awareness of a person, which was the definite priority at this height.  He’d heard multiple horror stories before of liars reduced down to a similar crumb-scale being lost on the floor and suddenly finding the shadow of a tennis shoe hovering over them with a few pond-sized globs of rubbery used gum infused into the treads.  These stories generally ended without mortality, incredibly enough, but usually there was a solid narrative in the middle of the liar being tramped into the sea of dirty pink waste and worn around on the bottom of the shoe for a few hours without the owner even realizing it until they removed them at the end of the day, and sometimes not even that soon, to find the unfortunate sinner nestled into a canyon of the treads.  In short, having Heather make him into her personal human tic-tac was probably the best case scenario for Tom.

            The hapless shrunken liar had only managed to regain a couple fractions of an inch over the past half-hour stuck atop Heather’s tongue, making him easier than a fleck of food to transport around the cavernous depths of his friend’s mouth.  His only respites for air came when her lips parted, spilling in blinding artificial light from the cafeteria as well as a fresh spoonful of the vanilla pudding that had first delivered him into this muggy mess.  He accepted these gratefully and in what eventually turned into a practiced rhythm of awaiting the sanctuary of light pouring in, gulping up the warm oxygen as it became available, and then promptly holding his breath to prepare for the onslaught of pudding already rushing toward him in a sludgy tidal wave as darkness enveloped him once again.

            Whenever a new bite was introduced, Heather would slide Tom underneath her tongue, flattening him beneath it like a damp mattress.  As the drool would fill in like a gooey moat all around him, the sweet gloop from her lunch would dribble in as well, intermingling into one steaming liquid mess.  Tom knew it was just lucky his Truplex outfit was resistant to stains.  He already wondered if the sugar-sweet stench of vanilla extract and sour flavor of Heather’s throat would let go of his body any time soon, though it was still preferable to Jordan’s situation, as he was probably damned for the next several days to smell like his younger siblings’ sweaty running shorts.

            As the final lump of pudding from the lunch tray neared Heather’s titanic mouth, she allowed her fractional friend to plop into the center of her tongue.  Bringing the spoon in close, she stuck her writhing muscle out between her pursed lips, with Tom glued to the tip, and buried it in the soft pile of pudding.

            Tom was bulldozed through the yellow muck, finding it hard to breathe as he detached from her tongue and became lost in Heather’s dessert again, but could already feel the spoon lurching forward.  In the next instant every morsel of pudding was swept inside the dank environment and guzzled off the utensil, sending Tom tumbling back as it was all sucked down toward her esophagus.  It was only a quick tubing of the girl’s tongue that caught him in the gummy center again, preventing an unfortunate detour downward.

            Heather’s lips parted again as her tongue pressed through the plush barrier, with Tom still entrapped on its slick surface.  As she lapped along the soft rim of her mouth to collect the final smears of pudding, the hapless boy was rolled along with the gargantuan muscle, until he realized his hair and clothes had become ensnared on her newly sticky flesh.  Her tongue gulped in the last drops of the vanilla treat and slipped back inside her mouth, leaving Tom glued helplessly to her lower lip like an errant crumb.

            Not that he minded so much.  It meant more fresh air, plus some conversation to break up the tedium of being continually dunked in the syrupy lake of Heather’s saliva and licked along her teeth.

            “C’mon, aren’t you done messing with him already?” Jordan groaned, rolling his eyes as he glanced at the minute speck of Tom dangling by congealed spit to Heather’s steadily growing smile.  “He’s already missed two periods today.  That’s a lot of work to make up, you know.”

            “Hey, I’m helping him improve his work ethic,” she answered, her lips vibrating as she spoke and momentarily making Tom think he might come unpeeled from her mouth, though he luckily didn’t.

            “How?”

            “Because with how tiny he is now, it’s probably gonna take at least another three periods to get up to normal again,” she commented slyly.  “So he’s definitely gonna know a lot about time management after today.  Don’t you think?”

            And with a soft gurgle from the back of her throat and a lumpy swallow of the final pudding bite, Heather’s tongue snaked back out of her mouth, its tip sliding over Tom to collect him before she licked his body inside her mouth again.

            The pressure mounted, disorienting Tom as the squishy walls of Heather’s mouth undulated inward.  Balmy waves of vanilla-laced spit doused him again and again, soaking into the shrunken young man and then being absorbed right back into the pink flesh that surrounded him on every surface.  A deep rumble emanated from the darkness as Heather began lightly humming a tune that had recently been rocking the airwaves.  Had he been able to move, Tom might’ve attempted to hum along, though his musical notes would’ve been swallowed completely in the cacophony of gargles bubbling up from her throat anyway.

            Compressed into the tightest corner of the girl’s cheek behind her molars, Tom felt Heather sucking vigorously on him like a tic-tac, though not quite to the point where it inflicted pain beyond irritating discomfort.  This allowed the teen to enter into a neutral state of acceptance.  No matter how all-consuming the cavern of Heather’s mouth became, she at least had the courtesy to leave him little more than dizzily soggy after her game was through.

            Certainly this was not Tom’s first rodeo as his friend’s tongue toy, and even more certainly, it would not be his last.

            Eventually he could hear the bell ringing through the wall of Heather’s cheek, and felt a seismic shift as she rose to her feet to return to classes with the rest of the student body.  Unsurprisingly, he remained swimming in her saliva as she made her way to the next period.  This seemed reasonable to the boy; after all, he wasn’t much larger than a fleck of dust.  What other use could she possibly have for him at this size?  It wasn’t like he’d be capable of transporting himself anywhere without help.

            The antics of Heather’s tongue at least slowed once she had to pay attention to a lecture, allowing Tom the freedom to keep his head above the soupiest layer of her drool, but with the massive muscle resting comfortably over his body, his movement options were limited.

            Occasionally she’d make use of him by lightly licking him along the slimy back row of her teeth, collecting gritty remains from between her molars into his clothes.  She’d then deposit him back onto her tongue and squeeze him into her lips, sucking the chewy remains from his body, before repeating the process.  Having nothing else to do, the boy eventually took to helping her out by trying to grab out particularly pesky chunks of food from between the pearly grinders.  Once the task was completed, she slurped Tom back up and gave him a wet, warm squeeze against her inner cheek in thanks.

            For some time the boy was stuck to the underside of Heather’s tongue like a dishonest barnacle as she casually twisted the muscle against the roof of her mouth.  As he was positioned upside down and glued with gummy sputum far too thick for him to get off without help, he soon fell into a bored nap.

            He was awoken at least a full class period later during a five minute break when he felt his friend’s tongue glide back down to the base of her mouth and rise him away in a fresh pool of minty spit.  Tom sputtered, trying and failing to re-engage his senses in the pitch-black hovel where every moist surface quivered at his touch and every breath was filled with the warm, moist flavors of everything Heather had eaten that day.  It occurred to him that he had regained enough height to actually wrestle his way out from under his friend’s muscular tongue, though that also could’ve just been because she felt like giving him a break; there was no way to be sure.

            “Hey, Heather.  Seen the liar around?” a voice snarked from outside, muffled somewhat by Tom’s disorientation, though he recognized it immediately as the discerning scowl of his older sister Alaina.

            “Oh, I don’t know…” Heather intoned, rattling Tom’s entire world with each simple syllable and bouncing him back up to her lips.  She shoved her enormous thumb into her mouth, liberally coating it in glistening saliva, and quickly pressed it to her miniscule friend’s back, where he immediately stuck.  Dutifully, the boy went limp and allowed her to fish him out from her lower gums.  A moment later she popped her finger and the defeated liar out into the bracing light of day, where he remained glued to the fleshy pad of her thumbprint.  “…I guess I’m not seeing him much.”

            “Oh, for God’s sake,” Alaina groaned, rolling her eyes in disbelief.  “I don’t even want to know how he got down that low.”

            Tom had the difficult choice to look either toward his sister’s bitterly disdainful face looming just ahead, larger than life though she was only a couple feet away, or the towering gateway of Heather’s victoriously smirking lips just behind him.

            Heather shrugged, keeping her thumb propped up as she studied her tiny friend clinging like a smashed insect to her spit-slicked skin.  Her saliva was starting to cool out here in the open, forming a gooey slab over Tom’s clothes and hair.  He’d managed to grow back to around half an inch after all this time, but still had quite a ways to go before there was much of anything else she could do with him.

            “It was just a lot of them, back to back,” the girl answered.

            “I really meant it!  I don’t want to know!” Alaina gasped, cupping her hands defensively over her ears.  “I can’t understand how you even want to hang out with him at all, even when he can’t get through a single freaking class at normal size.”

            “Hey, that’s what friends are for,” Heather said earnestly, looking down to Tom and giving him a winsome wink.

            “You’re crazy.  I’ll see ya around, I guess,” Alaina sighed, adjusting her glasses on the bridge of her nose and turning around in a huff after a final glance at her pathetic sibling glued to the end of his friend’s monolithic finger.

            “And I’ll see you once you’re big enough to do something else with,” Heather reported softly to Tom.  “Sound good?”

            Though it was difficult to respond because of the heavy strands of saliva weighing down his shoulders, Tom managed an awkward thumbs-up.

            “Awesome.  Geometry’s next, so I’ll try to take good notes so you can copy later,” she said, blowing out an irritated raspberry at the thought of it and spraying Tom with fresh flecks from her throat.  “Seriously, be glad you don’t have to sit through that.”

            Noting that she did, indeed, have something of a point, Tom, watched contentedly as his friend’s lips parted again into another self-satisfied smile to receive him.  The darkness and vanilla air enveloped him as Heather stuck her thumb inside her mouth, imbibing her best friend and favorite toy once again into the frothy fray.

            “Sorry, Tom-Tom.  I really thought you’d be a little bigger by last period,” Heather said as she cradled her friend in the palm of her hand.  This wasn’t technically a lie.  Tom was now up to three inches, mathematically larger than the pitiful fraction of a stature he held earlier when he was being washed around the inside of the girl’s mouth at the size of a crumb.

            Still, the both of them knew very well that putting him down to such a drastically miniscule scale was going to take a long while to recover from, well-beyond the last class of the day.  Once again, Tom had missed a full day of classes, between riding around in his sister’s backpack, playing seat cushion to Ms. Evans, and being suckled like a human breath mint between his best friend’s lips.

            Heather trudged her way into the high school’s front office, earning a drearily dismayed expression from the secretary at the main desk.  The woman didn’t even need to see Tom perched in Heather’s hand to get the picture, and she already had the overhead speaker phone to her lips before the pair could reach her.

            “Bakers.  Could I get one of the Bakers down to the main office for a pick-up?  Thanks,” the woman droned into the microphone so that the entire student population could hear, having had to repeat this particular phrase at this particular time of day at least two-dozen times this school year alone.

            It was easier to say “Bakers,” though really Tom knew only one of his three siblings would be willing to come get him.  There was no need to specify the kind of pick-up, either; practically everyone in the school knew exactly what the call meant, and most shared a collective giggle at the sound of it.  Those who personally knew Tom would often place bets about how low he’d shrunken, though the rules of this tended to be shaky, since these people were often not only present but directly responsible for his reduction in size.

            “Hiiiii, Mrs. Cratchet,” Heather said, grinning almost too cheesily to be bearable.  With her opposite hand she plucked Tom out of her palm between a thumb and forefinger and lowered him to the desktop, where he stood as casually as possible in waiting.  “I guess you already know why we’re here, huh?”

            “Hello,” the woman groaned to Heather alone, returning to tapping away on her desk keyboard almost immediately.  The little liar didn’t even receive visual acknowledgement, which he was more than fine with.  The woman tended to carry something of a temper just below the surface of her rigid face and tight bun.

            “All right, I gotta get going.  If you want the anatomy and geometry notes later, give me a call once you’re tall enough to hold a phone,” Heather said cheekily to Tom.  Blowing him a joking kiss, she waved goodbye and heading back out the glass door of the main office.

            Tom continued facing the door with his hands folded together, knowing that turning and looking up to the semi-haggard and most-likely scowling countenance of Mrs. Cratchet wouldn’t be in his best interest.  He’d found it was best to make his presence in these circumstances as unobtrusive as possible, and it was much easier just to watch the exit like the little mindless trinket so many considered him to be at this size.

            With a start, he realized this reasoning may not have been entirely sound, as a broad hand flattened itself to the glass outside, the slender fingers tapping impatiently away and causing the nails to clack each time.  Tom flinched dutifully with each repetition, then tried not to let his stomach get too twisted as Ms. Evans swiftly entered the office, moving eerily like a shark as she made her way toward the desk with those seething irises squared directly to her most disobedient student.

            “Well, Mr. Baker,” the woman greeted through grinding teeth, her hands on her hips as she looked down upon the pitifully reduced pupil, who was now dramatically smaller than he’d been after the verbal thrashing she gave him that morning.  “I suppose it was just wishful thinking on my part to believe a single word or action I employed today to teach you a lesson made any kind of impact at all?”

            Tom almost had to fasten his hands around his neck to keep himself from nodding in either the affirmative or negative.  Neither one was going to do him much good now as he gazed up at his towering teacher, trying to ignore the continuous drumming of her fingers against her thighs.  Each digit was longer than his entire body still, and he didn’t particularly enjoy accidentally conceiving of what might happen if one of those pale, probably-muscular logs were to coil around his frail frame.  He swallowed a lump the size of a golf ball.

            “No answer.  No defense whatsoever,” she scowled, rolling her eyes and running her fingertips down the narrow bridge of her nose in disdain.  “What are we going to do with you, Mr. Baker?” 

            The question was apparently rhetorical, as she at least had the decency not to fire a few optical daggers through the already frail three-inch Tom, and instead looked to Mrs. Cratchet, still ticking away at the keyboard with nary a glance at anyone who entered.  The teacher’s hand then descended into the pocket of her suit pant, rifling through for a moment before drawing out the six-inch form of another unfortunate deviant, though apparently one who had at least not sunken quite as sinfully low as Tom.  A girl, whose dark hair had become rather unruly and frizzy in the probably static-filled darkness of the teacher’s pocket.  So that was what that fidgeting lump through the dark fabric was.  Tom was fairly certain his strict educator wasn’t in the habit of carrying live gerbils around, though if she did, he was pretty sure they’d be primarily for the purposes of midday snacks.

            Ms. Evans cupped the half-foot liar upright and brandished her before the desk, smoothing out her frayed locks with the pointed edge of her pinky finger nail.  Tom suspected this was rather to instill some kind of unpredictable feeling of befuddled fear on his part rather than to help the poor girl upkeep her personal hygiene.  After all, it was perfectly possible for the woman to transport the girl in her hand rather than stuffing her in a pocket like an afterthought.  Of course, it was probably a little easier to breath in there than when pinned beneath the woman’s curvaceous rump.

            “Got another one for you,” Ms. Evans reported coldly to the secretary, snorting derisively at the girl in her palm, who remained unapologetically still with her arms crossed and a bitter grimace on her tiny lips.

            “Hansen.  Could I get Archie Hansen to come down to the main office to pick up Sheila?  Thanks,” the woman monotoned, punctuating the announcement with a stiff cough as she returned to her keyboard.  Clearly Sheila was enough of a repeat offender that no checking of the records was required to rattle off the names.  Tom wondered if Mrs. Cratchet saw this as a good thing, as it meant she didn’t have to roll across the carpet to the filing cabinet to fish out the necessary information.  If she didn’t, she was seriously missing out on a rather sizable positive in an otherwise grimly tedious existence.

            Ms. Evans lowered her hand to the tabletop, unceremoniously tipping it so that Sheila was more or less forced to roll out and over her fingers.  The girl stumbled to her knees and rose back up, losing none of her apparently vitally withheld dignity as gave her long, messy hair a toss over her shoulders.  The miniature student straightened her skintight Truplex, patting it down on the more complimentary angles of her hips and bosom, and sauntered further across the sheer surface, not even bothering to turn and give the teacher another glance.

            Tom looked up at the shrunken girl who still managed to dwarf him so pathetically, as his head only touched the level of her waist.  He couldn’t help but be filled with admiration at her defiance even in the face of what had most likely been an afternoon of degrading torment in the hands of the especially consequence-prone English teacher, and wished she could look him in the eye for just a second so he could give her a salute.  Evidently he too was not worth the time of day to her, though, as she kept her chin held high and took a few more steps into the center of the desk before plopping down onto her haunches and crossing her legs to sit in wait.

            If Tom had been wishing for attention, though, it seemed the universe had a twisted sense of righteousness about it, among a few other equally twisted senses, because he suddenly found himself enveloped in two firm pads of finger flesh, far more overpowering than he was imagining even just from staring at the pale pillars of his teacher’s splayed fingers for too long.  As usual, he wasn’t particularly skilled at estimating exactly how severe the wages of his sins would turn out to be.

            His attention had been momentarily diverted to Sheila, hoping for some acknowledgement of their solidarity that had obviously been mistaken due to her social status and the fact that she still could’ve beaten him in a wrestling match with three fingers at her current stature.  In that awkward moment of missed connections, he’d left himself wide open to be scooped up like the babbling toy he knew he was to the world and quite possibly himself.

            Mrs. Evans’ fingers tightened menacingly around his sides, practically causing his bones to creak in the nonetheless plush vice as he was swooped upward on a wing and a prayer toward the increasingly massive and even more increasingly stern countenance of his authoritarian despot of a grammar instructor.

            Ms. Evans’ steamy breath engulfed Tom in a cloud, greased with a touch of lunchtime pastrami and then singed on the end with a hint of black coffee bean.  He sputtered, not quite on board with having his every lung refill consisting of bad Italian meats and the twin tangerine tic-tacs that were egregiously inadequate to cover up her digestive aroma at this proximity and scale.  Almost immediately the hot puffs of air slicked him with a few condensing beads of spittle on his forehead and neck.  Her massive fingers drew him close enough to her steadily parting lips that he could reached out and swiped off a lump of her sanguine knockoff-designer gloss if he was so inclined, though he suspected this would not be very appreciated.

            “I want to make something clear to you, Mr. Baker, before you go today,” the woman whispered throatily as she held her three-inch student up to her lips, each syllable a fresh burst of that warm mist still continuing to assault Tom’s face with sticky sputum and his nose with stale rye bread from her sandwich.  At this point, he’d all but forgotten about the soreness of being squeezed so tightly, when her breath was assaulting his senses.  “Are you listening carefully?”

            He flinched on each word not from terror but from revulsion, and tried to keep himself together and listen to what he was assured would be a reasonably important mortal threat.  It seemed unlikely that he wasn’t listening, let alone carefully, given that she was gripping him so close to her titanic chin, but she demanded an answer.  Tom nodded obediently.

            “Fantastic.  So at least you can answer some things with truth,” she commended sarcastically.  Her fingers shifted on his sides, relenting marginally on their iron grip to allow him to focus less on the stinging sensation and more on her upcoming dangerous proclamation.  “Make no mistake: what you went through today was but a taste of the kind of justice I am capable of imparting if the truth… my truth… is being threatened by someone like you.”

            Tom blinked, wondering if he should try to nod in acknowledgment or just continuing doing his best to avoid gagging on the now-thickening gloss of his teacher’s fogged saliva clinging to his chin and shoulders.

            “If you should falter again in my presence…” she continued gravely.  “If you should so much as devolve by an inch where I can see you… then I’m grant you an extra-special lesson I haven’t had to use since I was your age when my siblings were running around like the heretic runts that they were and are.”

            “Um… and what would that lesson be?” Tom questioned earnestly, actually genuinely curious about what he was already determined would be his fate whether he wanted it or not.

            At this, rather than snarling and unleashing a flurry of harrowing insults due to his lack of fear, Ms. Evans’ crimson lips actually curled into the slimiest smile Tom had perhaps ever witnessed in his life, let alone close enough to study every individual gloopy crinkle in the makeup-caked flesh.  Frankly, he much preferred a scowl from her.  It wasn’t quite so foreign or terrifying.  For perhaps the first time in the woman’s clutches this day, the three-inch Baker felt a twinge of fear rattle down the links of his spine.

            “I’m glad you asked that,” she said, again shocking him.  Apparently, she was indeed happy, which only doubled his apprehension and brought out a layer of nervous sweat on his neck to complement the now-congealing glob of Ms. Evans’ sprayed spit.  “It’s really not so different from what we did today, only we take a brief trip to the lady’s room first.  I have a little wardrobe alteration.  And then…”  Her fingers reared just a few fractions of an inch closer to her bulbous lips, such that her student’s head almost passed through the pink barrier and into the hollow and moist void beyond.  The murmur she emitted could barely even parsed out, yet Tom knew exactly what she said as each piece slithered out: “…and then I throne you in the purest way possible.”

            Instantly Tom was pulled away from Ms. Evans’ lips and given a fuller view of the winding landscape of her body.  The woman’s free hand, so far below, snaked along the curvy mountainside of her black-clad body and wound down to her ass, jutted out just far enough to give Tom a clear view of his future holiday destination.  Just to drive the point home, his teacher clasped her palm against the rounded hill of her left cheek, giving it a pat for good measure and drumming her fingers against it.  Next, they traveled up the fabric wall and toward the waistband, which she proceeded to tug down a few centimeters with her powerful thumb, revealing the rim of her panties.

            If the threat wasn’t clear yet, it was pretty crystal by this point.  Tom could only shudder through every part of his simultaneously chilled and melted being, unsure if he was trembling out of fear or partial arousal or, in all likelihood, a troubling combination of both.

            Idly, he wondered if his teacher ever applied any sort of perfume near the region of her butt or thighs.  It seemed a relevant concern considering the inevitable next time he shrunk in front of the woman he was going to be squeezed between her bare cheeks and made to be close personal friends with her tightly puckered anus.  However, he was willing to bet that broaching such a subject at this juncture would be unwise. Rude, even.

            “Do we understand each other?” she uttered, bringing just close enough to her stiffly batting red lips to sample a final whiff of her lunch breath and throat gunk.

            “Yep!” Tom declared, perhaps a little too spryly, though there most likely wasn’t a correct way to respond that would’ve avoided a lasting growl etching itself into his teacher’s pretty but often gargoyled face.  He actually experienced a touch of calm to feel Ms. Evans’ hand descending again, bringing him roughly into contact with the table such that he was dragged for several uncomfortable paces on the surface along his knees until the woman at last released her grip on him.

            By the time he’d managed to right himself, pump his lungs back up with a regular dose of air, and massage his vigorously imprinted hips now tattooed with the pink shape of the English teacher’s domineering fingers, she was already strutting away.  Amazingly, her heels almost succeeded in clacking despite the fact that the room was carpeted.  For a bracing moment, Tom accidentally imagined what it would be like to be speared on the spiked ends of one of those wiry supports, continually being shoved higher and higher up the black pole like a piece of kebob meat on every step the woman took.  However, he quickly shook his head and gasped in another breath, resolving to just focus on the imminent threat of being utilized as a butt plug the next time he lied in the vicinity of Ms. Evans.

            Emma arrived just as Ms. Evans sauntered back out through the glass entrance.  Outside the bustling student body was thinning, meaning it was almost time to head out, so it was lucky she’d made it on time with backpack slung across one shoulder.  The girl’s bright eyes fell instantly to the edge of the table on the precise corner she knew her brother would be waiting, as the statistically significant number of times she’d had to perform this errand of retrieving her misbehaving sibling had allowed her to encode it as muscle memory.  Immediately her lips spread into a broad grin.  A very particular twinkle was clearly alighting in her eyes at the realization that Tom had undergone at least one fairly major shrinking episode after leaving her custody that morning.

            Which, as Tom knew very well, was an enormous source of joy to his youngest sibling.  He supposed that was a plus, considering how often he relied on her by day’s end.  The rare occasions where she’d been sick or at an away-game all day, forcing him to wait for Blake or, even worse, Alaina, hadn’t been especially comfortable rides home, as he’d spent them tangled in a bundle of gym shorts and stuffed into a raunchily pungent knee sock, respectively, by each.

            “You lucked out, Tom-Tom,” Emma said with a half-smirk.  She practically skipped across the carpet, allowing a slight rumble to emanate up through the desk and into her miniscule brother’s feet with each joyful bounce of her rubbery treads.   “No tennis practice today.  We’re going straight home.  Doesn’t that make you happy?”

            Sighing with relief, Tom had to admit that this day could’ve gone a lot worse, all things considered.  Of course, it could’ve gone a lot better, considering he’d missed every single class in order to devote all those hours to being either worn, sat, or sucked on by a series of gargantuan human beings with especially self-serving senses of humor, but what was he supposed to do, anyway?  Not lie about the secrets that lurked in the deepest and most embarrassing sub-basements of his soul?  At least he got to go home now, rather than letting the sun cook him through the thin fabric of Emma’s increasingly damp sweat towel and dodging cannon-sized tennis balls fired at him at least somewhat on purpose by overzealous doubles partners.

            “Yeah.  Yeah, it does,” he said, uttering one of his few truths of the day.  And Tom reflected that, yes, this was a pretty a-okay day as he thrust his arms out to the side like a farmer waiting to let the emerald beam of extraterrestrial visitors slurp him into the saucer.  To the satisfied tune of Emma’s chuckling, he contentedly watched the arm-length shadow fall over the cusp of the desk and then his body, molding into the familiar sensation of his sister’s greedy fingers wadding him like an uncooperative jelly bean into her clammy fist.

            Tom had to give his sister Alaina credit for dedication to her research as a few trickles of cool wind whipped gratefully against his cheeks, having managed to reach his slimy and heat-cooked body under the duct of the gigantic seventeen-year-old’s vigorously sweating armpit, where she had him taped under several layers of gummy material.

            She’d tried other adhesives before.  Masking, duct, even gorilla glue tape, which he knew couldn’t be particularly pleasant on her skin.  And he knew personally, because it was usually simultaneously attached to his own body whenever she used it to entrap him somewhere on her person once he was small enough and lacking in the necessary musculature to escape the sticky prison.

            Still, none of these crafty strips proved useful in the long run, at least not for Alaina’s purposes.  Which, coincidentally, happened to be long runs.  It hadn’t been so bad a few years ago when she’d only been focusing on speed and improving her mile time, meaning Tom just had to endure being taped to his sister’s overheated and massive machine of a body while she ran for short, hellish, though endurable bursts of time.

            But no more.  Now, she was only interested in taking it further, opening it up with a jog then working in a few interval sprints as she crossed from the neighborhood and into the nearby subdivision, taking every cul-de-sac and every dead end on purpose to drag out the distance.  She was certainly getting better, too, crossing about eight miles now in less than an hour and a half: not bad for someone who wasn’t even on the cross country or track teams.

            Of course, given that she preferred to bring Tom along on these ventures if he happened to be small enough to require consequences for whatever word vomit he’d committed that day, the endurance rounds were made difficult.  Ordinary tape could hang on for forty minutes, maybe fifty before it started to peel away under the relentless deluge of her salty sweat absolutely teeming from every one of the girl’s smooth pores.

            Tom, too, was generally worse for wear after being so thoroughly soaked in his sister’s secretions that his hair was matted down and his body pruned as though he’d taken a daylong bath, but this was hardly a concern to the girl.  Really, the main reason for all the time she’d put into discovering the correct tape for their jogs “together” was to ensure Tom wasn’t lost in a grassy knoll somewhere at just a few inches tall and half a dozen miles from home because the tape failed to hold.  While he largely didn’t appreciate having to marinate in the sweltering heat and sopping musk of Alaina’s enthusiastically sweating body, Tom had to agree this was a good choice as a top priority.

            Eventually, her energy did pay off, thanks to a few tips from online forums run by other aficionados of encouraging truth through more extreme means than the average waggled finger.  Though most of those digital discussions weren’t intended to allow for a shrunken liar to be taped up during exercise, but merely to be worn as body jewelry until the effects had worn off, Alaina had stumbled on a sixty-page listing that detailed exactly what she was looking for, plus a link to the obscure store that sold tape even more powerful than gorilla glue that was capable of keeping Tom squeezed against her swollen skin no matter how heavily she sweated.  Now, anything was possible.  Anything.

            And today, Alaina had chosen to position her now four-inch sibling into her armpit: a pocket of decidedly spicy aroma, generating an odor of rancid depth unlike quite any other place on the teen’s body, or at least the locations the toy-sized Tom had been taped.

            Obviously some regions were off-limits by Alaina’s decree, thank goodness, but most of them could be relied on for a certain level of regular airflow.  Even being attached to the girl’s pounding thighs, rough a ride as it was on each seismic clash of her trainers with the concrete so far below, was preferable in certain ways.  At least he could swallow full breaths down there, and feel the rush of the breeze on his body.  This especially was appreciated and even necessary, as Tom tended to inherit the near-boiling temperature of his sister’s athletic form as she tanned and allowed the sun’s rays to bake her already overworked limbs.

            Unfortunately, no such luck was to be had.  Alaina hadn’t been in what Tom could charitably call one of her “good” moods when Emma had walked into the house after school with their little brother curled up like a gerbil in her palm at a humiliating height just shy of four inches.  He’d made a feeble attempt to cling onto his younger sister’s protective thumb before being snatched away on a chorus of enraged shrieks from Alaina, but he knew it was futile even before her trembling fist had clawed its way for him.  The girl was liable to get what she wanted, and what she wanted, regrettably, at that moment, was to blow off some steam with a nice, leisurely six-mile run in the seventy-eight-degree weather.

            With her miniature brother taped firmly into the foulest crevice of her torso industrial-strength adhesive.

            His sunburned skin melded stingingly into the tender skin, luckily freshly shaved with her favorite purple razor, as Alaina was a stickler for any kind of stubble appearing on her feminine form, so Tom was saved from itching on the back of his neck as he was continually jostled by the constantly colliding walls of flesh consisting of her toned arm and chest.  However, he wasn’t saved from very much else.

            Even ten minutes in, given how the air was trapped inside with such aggressively feverish efficiency, Alaina started to sweat.  Tom’s hair was affected first, with trickles of it seeping stickily into his already mussed locks, but he was able to put this aside and instead focus on timing the occasional whiff of air that didn’t smell like year-old vinegar.  As the minutes wore painfully on.

            Chafing eventually became a problem, too, with the slightly doughy underside of Alaina’s firm bicep brushing by his face every half-second without much care as to whether or not she was starting to rub away at crucial parts of his head.

            It wasn’t long before the boy’s skin was stroked a deep, raw red, leaving him entirely vulnerable to the sopping, singing sensations of the potently salty excretions rapidly increasing their load as they poured by the fetid gallon from Alaina’s flesh.  Every drop started to take its toll with refreshed strength, no longer merely dribbling down Tom’s desperately welting body, but seeping into his own skin, absorbing the liquids that couldn’t escape the darkness of the girl’s putrefied pit.

            Near the end, enough of the sudor had collected in a gooey, crystalline mess along the entire curved wall of Alaina’s armpit, covering Tom’s body generously too, that it couldn’t even begin to leak out at a fast enough pace.  So, it was left to fester, inhaled painfully up Tom’s nostrils on every necessary gulp of oxygen to keep on breathing regularly.  Though he was a little too dizzy to know for sure, the liar couldn’t help but make the comparison of those flavors to some European spice traders’ wares allowed to mummify over a century before cooked into the soup that now comprised Alaina’s absolutely abominable sweat.  His brain swam with the sensation of overturning continually in a swimming pool until his entire cavity had been flooded with the horribly salty juices still-gushing from his older sister’s beast of a form.

            Now, with every regrettable gulp, he felt a fresh mouthful of the hot liquids rush down his gullet and churn like a chemical reaction in his stomach about to implode with nuclear force.

Tom was only just clinging to some shred of coherent clarity, lost in the sweaty haze of being pummeled by swishing skin again and again and again, when he realized he was being unpeeled from Alaina’s fair flesh and plopped in a wet heap on a washcloth in one of the kids’ shared upstairs bathrooms.

            Apparently she didn’t even have the decency to help him get untangled from the heavily dampened super-tape, though at the same time he couldn’t quite count this against her.  Relying on Alaina to detach him with even her gentlest touch was akin to having a meter stick smarted across his balls.  Eventually he heard the shower turn on and off, then the mighty ruffle of her towel as she returned to her bedroom to recuperate from all the indignity of interacting with such a little heathen.

            Instead, he simply closed his eyes, attempting to gingerly crawl his way back into a state of conscious being.  Eventually Tom felt soft fingertips pinching him up and steadily working the tape off his body under warm, soapy sink water: obviously Emma’s, as he knew the feel of her digits and especially was accustomed to her more practical and less excruciating methods of removing him from a jam.

            This was certainly a welcome trait, as she herself had on more than one occasion found reason to tape him up somewhere, though it was generally something more bearable like the bed in her dollhouse to make out with Barbie back when she was a little girl, rather than the veritable sweat-boarding he received under Alaina’s physical tutelage.

            “You really reek today, Tom-Tom,” Emma commented casually as she tenderly scrubbed her sibling down atop the surface of her bent fingers, allowing the suds to rush down his awkwardly squirming frame and off her fingernails like a waterfall.  The fingertips of her other hand quickly put a stop to his half-sweat-drunk rebellion, though, pinning him into her palm and allowing her to continue her work.  “Hey, cool it with your little hands and little feets, or we’re not gonna get all her grossness off of you, okay?”

            He nodded, at last managing to work his way back to reality, and Emma’s fingers relented on his limbs, allowing him to splay openly into her palm and hold still while her probing digits did their work.  The liquid sloshed over, actually cooling his body back down despite the fact that the warm tap was twisted further in than the cold.  There was quite a way to come down in terms of body heat after being pickled in the cushioned purgatory of Alaina’s gyrating flesh and pulsing sweat.

            “Maybe you should ask Alaina to walk it off a little more, huh?” the fifteen-year-old suggested earnestly.  “Might not be as messy.  Less work for me, then.”  It was funny to hear her groan about such things, as if the girl didn’t positively adore the chance to bathe the misguided boy like her own personal pet who’d foolishly rolled in his own feces.

            Hell, he couldn’t remember a bigger tooth-bearing smirk on the teen’s face than that day Alaina had taken a tumble in the mud on a particularly slick day during a run last year and returned with Tom caked in nearly an inch of muck.  After she’d gotten the requisite before-and-after shots of his goofy visage taken for her social media accounts, Emma had put an admirable amount of attention into chipping away every last granule of mud from her brother’s body.  Despite his complaints about having his condition captioned with cartoonish heart emojis for all her friends to see and share, he couldn’t help but feel grateful.

            “Think about asking her, that’s all I’m saying,” Emma added.  She gave the faucet another twist, allowing a few fresh spurts to plunge out and dampen the last few soap slicks along the heel of her hand that hadn’t yet been inflated into cleansing bubbles.  Cupping her hands together and forming a wall with her fingers, the girl briefly turned her palms into a makeshift bathtub for Tom, who sunk leadenly to the basin of his sister’s fleshy confine before she parted her digits, allowing it all to rush out.  Of course, she easily caught the boy before he could be flushed out into the drain.  “I bet she’d consider it.”

            “Right,” he uttered back with a sarcastic snicker that accidentally allowed a swig of violet-flavored soap to choke into his throat, though even this bitter mouthful was infinitely preferable to the dank secretions endured in the balmy hallows of his elder sister’s pits.  He couldn’t quite imagine even in daydream the gumption necessary to suggest to Alaina, as she taped him firmly into her smelly skin, that she give him a break of any kind.  His younger sister’s statement, in technicality, was not a lie.  Alaina would indeed consider his request for all of the quarter-instant it took to process it before flicking him upside the head with a masterfully propelled middle finger for his further insubordination, imparting enough velocity into his skull to wreck a Hot Wheels truck.

            Such a concept was beyond preposterous, and Tom might’ve mentioned it to its author, if he didn’t rely so very heavily on Emma’s cheeriness to help him out after the fact without complaint.  Having to untangle himself from the tape and attempt to reach the soap for a rinse, let alone twist the spigot to wash away his older sister’s filth, at this scale was the kind of daunting that would most likely just force him into the lifestyle of a permanent sink hobo.  That way of doing things probably had its advantages, too, Tom realized, until he considered that his mother might not be keen on him emptying his bladder into the drain.

            “All right, kids, dinner’s on the table!” Linda Baker called from downstairs, timed just as a fragrant scent of steamed carrots, juicy beef, and piping cornbread wafted favorably up the stairs and under the crack of the bathroom door.

            “Hear that?  Time to eat!” Emma crooned, pawing at her brother through the thick padding of the hand towel she was using to dry him off.  She gave him a final rubdown in her fist, ensuring he was completely free of all liquids before gently dumping his nearly six-inch body into her palm. She frowned, then, as she grasped the knob and nudged her way into the hall to pursue her hungry normal-sized siblings down to the dining room.  “You might not be quite tall enough to fit in a chair yet, though, Tom-Tom…”

            “Probably not,” he admitted carefully, determined now to keep what little height he had left.

            “You don’t worry, though,” the girl reassured with an airy giggle, ruffling her tiny brother’s hair and softly biting the corner of her lip as her eyes shifted steadily down to the carpet, where her dainty toes were scrunching playfully at the fibers in thought.  “We’ll find… somewhere for you to go.”

            Tom tiptoed forward across the bumpy terrain of the woolen rug, conscious of every step and half-praying that his miniscule footsteps would simply sink away into the plush fabric and be lost.  Creeping over the curled wooden slat that formed a support for the towering kitchen table, he held his breath, hoping to make as little sound as possible as he advanced on the gently tapping toes of his older sister.  There was plenty of auditory cover from above, where his normal-sized family was eating dinner to a clanking choir of utensils against glass plates and cups of milk being sloshed back and forth from lips to table, but he still wanted to be sure.

            He was close now.  Alaina’s bare foot, at least freshly washed from her shower a few minutes before and scented lightly of lilacs, bounced gently against the lump of crumby cornbread that had been deposited under the table for the four-inch-tall member of the Baker family to eat.  Like a monstrous dragon guarding its prey.  Her big toe played lightly with the bready ball: stamping the spiraled imprint of her toe into it, rolling it back and forth from end to end of her peachy digit, even mashing it down into more of a disk shape, which Tom supposed was a benefit.  It wouldn’t be able to move as fast in that kind of geometry, and he might finally be able to catch up and eat it.

            Nevertheless, he’d apparently taken too long to make his move, or maybe his older sister had simply cheated at the game his truthful siblings had devised long ago for him to endure while meals took place, because with a flick of the toe Tom’s dinner was hurled across the rug to the opposite end of the table.

            Snapping his fingers in frustration, the liar swiveled back around, eyes darting around the pillars that formed the table’s legs, and groaned to realize the cornbread had rolled to Blake’s side of the table and come to a stop right in front of his absentmindedly bobbing big toe.

            His brother, easily the most physically imposing member of the family, never more than now, seemed to hold still for a moment until Tom began to creep toward his menacing feet where they rested.  It was a small blessing to see the eldest Baker child’s peds weren’t encased in his football cleats like they so often were; if that was the case, Tom’s morsel would probably end up with more than a few granules of field turf embedded in it, not to mention the distinctive impression of Blake’s treaded spikes after he’d mashed the food down beneath his heel.  This always necessitated picking out the artificial gunk before chowing down to avoid accidentally eating some foreign bit of rubber.  Which Tom didn’t especially appreciate, because he was generally pretty hungry and ready to scarf by the time he’d finally won the game of dinner-soccer.  However, the titanic eighteen-year-old’s feet were out instead, and luckily recently cleansed as well after a particularly taxing scrimmage on the gridiron after school.  Another small blessing.

            Unfortunately, Tom realized a little late that his gargantuan brother was probably just pranking him on to have held still this long, because before the boy could reach out and snatch his tainted bread, the enormous foot lurched to life.  The big toe rose and smacked into Tom’s stomach, nearly winding him as he was flung backward a few paces onto his face.  Tackling certainly was something Blake knew inside and out, given his extracurricular activities.

            Before the shrunken liar could recover and make another lunge, though, he looked up with dismay to realize his brother had rolled the yellow lump under his sole and flattened it down against the rug.

            Great.  No way a few added flavors weren’t getting in that way.  At least it would smell semi-edible considering the musky body spray his sibling utilized at a frequency as though it would defend against all the world’s diseases.

            When the big grunt had lifted it back up, the ovular remains clung to his swollen skin for just a moment before peeling away from the slope of his instep and flopping onto the carpet, seemingly with a stray hair caught inside.  Tom considered dashing under the shadow of Blake’s foot to try and grab his dinner, but instead resolved it was best to wait it out for another penalty kick.

            And sure enough, Blake’s mighty appendage reared back like a pendulum and swung forward to make mulching contact with the cornbread ball.  It soared far over Tom’s head off to the side and bounced into Emma’s knee before finally plummeting down and landing with a splat atop her bare foot.  Loose crumbs sprayed every which way, though there was still plenty of bread left to make a grab for it worthwhile.

            Emma’s aquamarine-painted toes bounced merrily in her tiny brother’s sight, encouraging him to attempt the heist of his meal away from her.  She was careful not to jostle her leg, as she was apparently trying to keep the food balanced on the smooth curve atop her bus-sized ped to entice Tom to crawl atop it and retrieve his reward.  Not unusual for her, and it wasn’t particularly attractive an offer considering she was the only sibling not to have showered after school due to a lack of a tennis match, but at least it was Emma.  Tom knew he’d at last get to eat, but of course he’d have to appease her first with a little game within the game.

            She didn’t make the climb easy.  The girl held still as Tom gingerly placed a foot atop his little sister’s powerful pinky toe, easily strong enough to buck him off with a single flick, but the boy suspected this was just so he wouldn’t give up immediately.  Emma was a tough but fair playmate when he was this size, which he appreciated, because it was more than could be said for his two older siblings, who more just focused on the “tough” aspect while forgoing the “fair.”  Once he had a strong center of balance atop the colorful shell of Emma’s nailbed, he shifted his entire weight onto the cushy row of her toes and began the ascent.

            It wasn’t a steep climb, at least, given that Emma’s foot was mercifully flat on the ground right now and Tom himself wasn’t down at one of his more infamous micro statures.  Those particular occasions helped give him some perspective, because his little sister took great delight in carefully plucking the delicate quarter-inch body of her sibling up between a couple of carefully poised fingernails and depositing him onto the summit of her foot, forcing him to make the hike down along her glowing skin to reach solid ground again.  At least she’d usually have the decency not to rattle an earthquake through her skin at those times, but it still was a task not to be taken lightly, as even the minor speed bumps of the soft veins beneath her skin made the terrain more challenging.

            Hand over hand he went, pressing his limbs into the plush flesh like he knew Emma wanted, and suddenly felt the vibrations begin, inevitable as they were.  He struggled to keep aligned with the center, where it would be easiest to avoid sliding down to the side and having to start again.  However, just as he was within grabbing distance of his precious food, his sister made her move, jolting her foot hard enough that Tom managed to stay on by cowering but was too slow to save his dinner.

            The cornbread slid swiftly down the pale slope of her foot and became wedged between her big and second toes, where she immediately mashed it down into an even purer sludge of crumbs and matted meal than when Blake had trampled it under his sole. She immediately got to work pinching Tom’s dinner between each worming digit, carefully dividing the stuff up so that each toe had an equal amount mashed across its skin.  The commotion quickly caused the shrunken liar to roll down the soft hill of Emma’s foot and ramp off her bouncing toes back onto the carpet.

            By the time he’d pulled himself up and recovered, what had previously more-or-less resembled a piece of cornbread even after Alaina and Blake were through stomping it, was now not much more than a mushy pulp, continually being squelched into the girl’s reeking digits.

            “Coooome and get it, little brother,” Emma giggled from on high. She extended a hand below the surface of the table, beckoning him with a curled finger and then pointing down at her awaiting peds again.  “Nice and hot.  Just how you like it.”

            Tom wrinkled his nose in slight disgust as he helplessly watched his dinner being squeezed and ground between his sister’s muscular toes, then threw his hands up in defeat as he so often was forced to.

            Food always tasted the same, no matter what shape it was in.  Or at least, sort of the same, considering the number of questionably clean giant human feet that had just walked across it, not to mention the volume of dirt and carpet lint that was now mixed into the stuff courtesy of all the pounding pressure of those overbearing soles ensuring the tiny sinner couldn’t eat a single bite without being reminded of his place below them thanks to his egregious molestations of truth.  Apparently marinating his food in day-old foot sweat and flaked skin was just considered shorthand for divine comeuppance.  Convenient.

            Still, food was food, and Tom’s stomach was rumbling fiercely now.

            It wasn’t that the boy minded having to eat dinner like this, per se.  After all, the rules of dinner-soccer were perfectly equal, and everyone in the household stuck to them.  If you didn’t lie and managed to hang onto your size, you got to eat up in a chair like a civilized person using a fork and knife off a clean plate.  If you didn’t, you had to work a little bit for it.  And maybe put up with some added seasoning in the food provided courtesy of grass flecks and pebbles in the carpet and sweat greased on from the over-eager toes of your siblings.

            And at least Emma seemed placated for now, because she had parted her toes to make the job easier for Tom, even eagerly wriggling them around to help attract him toward them.  Not that it was a particularly attractive offer getting to eat his last meal of the day out of some toes that had been encased in sock fabric for eight hours and clomping around school in poorly air-conditioned classrooms.  But she knew well he’d be hungry by now, and wouldn’t have many qualms with being served this way.

            So he set to work, peeling off the easy to reach crumbles of the cornbread and wolfing them down without a second thought.  His stomach rumbled gratefully, not caring in the slightest how revolting a source he was getting the food from, so long as he was fed.  Emma’s toes squeezed gleefully together as Tom’s willingness, and he was pretty sure he could detect a delicate layer of goose bumps running along her skin to have him eating off the filthiest part of her body without complaint.

            She reveled in this, no matter how much she did genuinely care for him.  He couldn’t begrudge her that attitude, he supposed.  It probably had its charms feeling miniature human hands tickling at her toes and farming them for edibles like some midnight fairy visitor. He imagined it might be kind of fun if he ever maintained his size long enough to experience it for himself.

            It wasn’t so hard getting all the pieces that still littered the smooth top of Emma’s foot, but eventually Tom knew he’d have to venture between her playfully squirming digits: something she’d of course more than accounted for by compressing as much of the meal as she could into those fleshy pockets.  She splayed her toes again, knowing it was time, and inviting Tom’s tiny hands to make their way inside.

            Rolling his eyes, the boy got to work.  He slid his fingers into the mush, crossing his fingers that Emma wouldn’t choose to clamp her toes shut on his hands and drag out this dance even further, and began.  It was gritty work at first, and the bread was certainly flavored much more potently with the stale after-school flavor of Emma’s shoe-entrapped peds, that flowery lotion she sometimes used long-ago replaced with the pungent zest of her socks and the moistened ball of her foot.  He almost wished she had participated in a tennis practice today so she’d have an excuse to shower before happily using his dinner to wipe the grime and caked sweat off her slender feet.

            Gobbling up mouthful after mouthful, Tom settled into a pattern of plucking the lumpy crumbs that had become nestled in the tender crevices between Emma’s toes.  Unfortunately, so mechanical had he become in the pattern that he realized all too late as he shoved the next bite between his lips that he’d accidentally grabbed a plump wad of his sibling’s toejam.  It had a similar chewy texture to the carpet-dragged cornbread, and he was chomping and swallowing it all so fast that it didn’t occur to him he’d eaten a piece of soggy lint cooked between his sister’s toes all day until the acrid bite was halfway down his throat.  He gagged, hoping to retrieve the salty morsel, but the flavorful intruder was already halfway down his esophagus.  Shrugging, then, Tom continued scooping up the next piece after more thoroughly inspecting it to ensure it was intended to be eaten.

            At least it added some variety to his meal.

            Once he’d gotten all he could other than a few crumbs indistinguishable from sock fluff, Tom ceased laying his hands on the warm skin of Emma’s foot and stepped back to let her know he was down.  The toes curled dejectedly into the carpet to help smudge away the remaining sludgy lumps, probably disappointed he hadn’t willingly started licking away the leftovers directly off her skin.  Of course, there was an unspoken truce about this particularly demeaning and vile act that Tom would only engage in it if he was really, really hungry.

            He still had his pride, after all.

            Probably.

            “I guess you got most of it,” Emma sighed, her beaming countenance suddenly appearing above as she peered under the wooden high-rise of the tabletop to observe her tiny sibling’s handwork.  She tilted her foot on its side, arching her sole and flexing her toes to make sure all the major morsels were cleaned away.

            “Yep,” Tom said, wiping a wrist across his mouth and slurping up a final crumb that tasted much more like concentrated vinegar than his mother’s sweet cornbread recipe.

            “Want some more?”

            “Sure,” the boy said truthfully.

            Grinning ear-to-ear, Emma willingly reached back up to the tabletop and scooped up a fresh piece of cornbread, fresh from the oven and even with a few wisps of steam still rising from its delectable crumbs.  He could smell it from here.  Warm, wonderful, and completely untainted by the sour additions from the feet of his family.  Tom couldn’t help but salivate.

            That is, until he felt his heart sink a little as Emma’s hand descended, her pinched fingers around the bread rapidly nearing her foot again.  Parting her big and second toes, she easily wedged the food between her digits and set to work pulsing it with alternate long and short squeezes.  It was only a matter of seconds until the mushy meal was plastered back across her tender skin, molded around the rounded contours of her vigorously waggling toes and waiting to be peeled off and consumed by some lowly form of life.

            Unfortunately, beggars couldn’t be choosers, and Tom was most certainly a beggar.

            “Okay.  And then what happened?” Samantha ordered with a glint in her eye, a broad smile already spread ear-to-ear to display her glistening pearly whites through the fuzzy filtering of the laptop monitor.  She brushed one of her jet-black bangs away from her heavily shadowed eyes, wrinkling her cute button nose, and leaned in closer to the webcam to get a better look at the shrunken liar who currently stood on the other end of her digitized chat program.

            “Well… then she sat on me.  All the way,” Tom admitted cheekily in reference to his English teacher, twiddling his thumbs behind his back as he gazed into the lens of his own camera where it sat propped up on the carpet to capture every angle of his three-inch body for the fetishistic pleasure of his online friend.

            “Hot.  For a long time?”

            “Yep.  The whole class.”

            “And did that go how she wanted it to?  The lesson.”

            “Uhh… no, not really.  She… actually kinda threatened to, uh…”

            “What?  Threatened to what?”

            “…stick me in her ass the next time I shrink in front of her,” Tom admitted, shakily at first but swelling with pride at the mention, against all odds, as he watched the light in his digital pen pal’s eyes glow brighter.

            “Wow,” Samantha breathed.  “That’s fantastic.  Can’t say I’m not jealous, though.  Of her, not you, obviously.”  She leaned back in her chair, crossing her arms over her chest and angling her violet Converse upon the desk with a rubbery thump of the instep.

            Tom could only fidget with mounting arousal to be able to study the zigzagging treads on the girl’s massive footwear that, he was quite sure, would waste no time in pinning him into the carpet with unforgiving pressure if he and his normal-sized companion happened to be in the same room right now rather than on regrettably opposite sides of the country.

            He knew just how she’d do it, too, as she’d described it many a time.  Shifting her weight from the ball of her foot, into her arch, and finally to the heel, she’d roll him from end to end, making him aware of every part of his body in turn as it was continually mashed under her crushing weight of the hexagonal cells.  Not enough to break bones, but certainly enough to make them talk with a series of creaks and groans, and the rest of him would be imprinted with the loops and lines of her treads for weeks after.

            Tom noticed what looked like the tiny black stain of an insect long-ago liquefied and melded into the ridged landscape that made up the bottom of Samantha’s shoe, its general shape the only thing it was allowed to preserve of its being after being integrated into the violent sandwich of gravel and earth-moving rubber.  Though he could do without the “death” part of the equation involved, he couldn’t help but imagine himself replacing that tiny smear beneath his friend’s foot.  Already his pants were beginning to tent.

            “Tell me something, Tomboy.  Because I’m honestly curious,” Samantha said, having savored the sight of the boy staring reverently at her shoes for long enough.  “Can you be truthful with me right now?”

            “No problem!” Tom said as he was yanked from focus, instantly being robbed of another half-inch before the girl’s eyes.  “I mean.  I’ll try.”

            She shrugged it off, only shaking her head, and continued on: “Aren’t you worried about people finding out the truth about you?”

            “Truth about what?” Tom asked innocently.

            “You know,” she chuckled.  “That you like to shrink?”

            For a few moments there was only silence as Tom bathed in the monitor’s stinging luster and sat on the dusty floor of the basement closet where he kept his laptop and webcam: the only place he could safely hide in the night to have these forbidden conversations about even more forbidden topics with his friend Samantha, a girl he’d never met in real life but who knew him more deeply than any other person on the planet.

            “Yes,” he said after the pause had gone on long enough.  He swallowed hard, his throat so dry it felt like choking down a marble, and struggled to wrest the truth out of his mouth as promised.  “Yes I am.”

            Not even a hair’s width was lost in his stature.

            “It wouldn’t be pretty if people found out,” Samantha commented.  “You might not even get the chance to talk to me anymore.”

            “I know.  I’d hate that,” Tom admitted sheepishly, again retaining his size as he crept across the keyboard to be closer to the girl’s adorable gothic-tinged countenance onscreen.  He pressed a hand to the warm plasma of the interface, wishing he could be placing his palm against her massive lower lip.

            “Me too,” she said.  “What would you do, though?  If someone ever found out.”

            “I don’t know,” he said honestly.  “I’ve never thought that far.  I’m afraid, I guess.”

            “Someone’s probably bound to find out someday, though.  They all know how to take advantage of you already.  What’s to stop them from wondering aloud if you just enjoy what they do to you?”

            “Nothing,” Tom said.  “Nothing at all.”

            “Because… you do enjoy what people do to you, when you’re shrunken.  When you’re punished.  Your mom, your siblings, your teacher, your friends… you like that, don’t you?” Samantha asked, genuinely concerned but also slightly aroused at the prospect as she leaned further into the webcam to make her face appear even larger on Tom’s display, just how he liked it.  She lapped a slithering tongue along the rim of her lips, coating them in saliva and giving Tom something to drool over as he watched the plush pink flesh compressing under the heft of her red muscle, studded with that beaded piercing they both adored so much.

            “Yes,” Tom breathed heavily, wishing now more than ever that he could break through the fiberglass dimensions separating him from Samantha and splash headlong into the cave of her moist maw.  “Yes.  I like it.”

            And again, Tom remained exactly at two and a half inches.  If the universe and its accompanying laws of nature functioned differently, in fact, he might’ve actually gained height at this mortal admission of his.

            “You like it when people make you their little itty bitty bitch, don’t you?” Samantha continued slyly, by now having just gotten into their usual taunting games but still desiring to hear these rare truths come from Tom’s pathetically tiny mouth.  She was already fumbling with the gilded belt of her designer jeans below the view of the camera, her hands descending and tugging back the waistband of her panties to reach her already-pulsing nethers.  “You wish you could be their miniature play-toy all day long.  Every.  Single.  Minute.”

            “Yes,” Tom gulped hollowly, by now having meekly lowered himself onto his haunches due to the strength-sapping erection he now had.  Luckily, prostration before Samantha was a perfectly acceptable position to both of them.  “Yes, I do wish that.”

            “Oh, God,” Samantha huffed.  “Little boy, do you know what I’d do with you if I had you in my hands right now?”  The girl raised her right arm up, brushing her palm and each of her black-painted fingertips along the camera just to give Tom an extra-special close-up of her textured digits.

            “No.  Please tell me.”

            “I’d put you right in here,” she teased.  Her tongue flicked once more of the corner of her mouth before sliding back inside as she slurped her thumb over the slippery ridge of her lips, sucking it inside.  “Roll you around for a little while under my tongue, get you nice and lubed up, and then…”

            “And then?” Tom gasped.  His voice had devolved into a shallow whisper as his entire focus was devoted to the dark angel onscreen.

            Samantha’s fingertip traced along her lips, then steadily began a winding path down her body, tracing between her breasts, along her stomach, and toward the tangle of her jeans and panties as they slid down her pale thighs.  Her slender digit brushed through the curly mess of her pubes, already globbed with anticipatory ejaculate, and crested through the flowery pink lips that Tom so longed to enter with his entire being.

            “…and then…” the girl repeated achingly.   “Well, I don’t think I’d need to tell you.  I think you know the truth when you see it.  Don’t you, Tomboy?”

            “Yes,” he sighed, letting another rare piece of honesty be coaxed out of his throat like a sacred song.  “Yes I do.”