“Honey, do you have to keep playing with those little things?”

            “No, but we’re not getting out of this house until I finish.”

            George Yeager tapped his polished shoes impatiently on the newly laid bathroom tile. “You can fix your earrings after we get back from the dinner. Come on, I already told Morrison we’d be there before it started, and we’re only just going to arrive when the first stockholders start their introductions.”

            “Like we need to hear all of that again,” Tamara Yeager retorted, a derisive chuckle echoing out of the spacious bedroom as she finally abandoned her jewelry on the top of their carved dresser. “You’re right, I won’t be getting these to cooperate. Let me just grab my other pair like this.”

            “All right, but the clock’s ticking.” He jabbed a finger at his gleaming watch.

            “I’m sure it is,” Tamara said, disappearing into their walk-in closet. “Are the boys sticking around tonight?”

            “Not that I’m aware. Josh got a ride to some back-to-school-something. And Brett is already gone. Some party or other.”

            “Are there going to be parents there? There have to be parents there,” Tamara protested, popping her head out of the closet.

            “Like I’d know. And even if I thought I did know, you think he’d tell us that there were going to be parents? He drove there. He knows not to drink before he drives.”

            “He knows not to drink period, he’s only seventeen!” Tamara barked.

            “Right, right,” George assured, unable to hide a proud grin. “The boy knows his whiskey, though. You saw that bottle he bought me last Christmas, right?”

            “I did, and believe me, I was not as big a fan as you. I want to know who he got to sell it to him without an ID.”
            “You’re just jealous,” the man teased. “Josh is the sensitive one you always wanted, anyway. You can’t keep both our boys from exploring their manhood.”

            “I don’t need anybody exploring anything until they’re both adults, and the drinking age,” Tamara snapped, though a snicker trailed out of her closet. “Josh is the sensitive one, though, in case you haven’t taken time to appreciate it. He wrote me a poem last week. A poem! I almost died.” Clothing hangers clattered along the poles, followed by the clunk of multiple high heels hitting the lavishly carpeted floor.

            “I thought you were just getting earrings, dear.”

            “I am, but I have to make sure they match the dress.” Tamara tossed another unusable outfit into a pile on the floor. “And the shoes.”

            “I guarantee you, no one will-”

            “You’re really going to tell me that no one will care? Trust me, they’re all going to be looking us up and down. Every little detail is going to matter.”

            George chuckled again in the ensuing silence.

            “You sound just like my brother when you say that word.”

            Tamara slipped back out of the closet with two dresses slung over her narrow shoulders, one green and one crimson. She stood on her bare tiptoes, planting a kiss on each of her husband’s accented cheekbones as she caressed his bearded jawline.

            “I’m sure I do,” she repeated, lovingly this time. “Kevin always did know the importance of appearances, didn’t he? So did Helen.”

            “He taught me everything he knows about it,” George said proudly. “Sure, he used to put me in headlocks on the playground when we were kids, but when we hit our twenties? My God, that man knew how to close a deal. And he didn’t even stay in the work, he went to law school! And he was good at that, too!”

            “He absolutely was,” Tamara soothed. “A man of many talents. And Helen’s taste in design is half the reason why this house looks like it does now.”

            “It’s…” George began, but let his words devolve into an aggrieved sigh. “It’s good to remember sometimes.”

            The flutter of dresses continued for another couple of minutes as George lowered himself onto the end of their four-poster bed, giving his wife her time as he dug through his wallet for his ream of glossy photos. Past the pictures of his wedding day, his parents, and his teenage boys’ school pictures was a family photo of his brother Kevin, his wife Helen, and their daughter Ashley: the family that had vanished into thin air on that anonymous, hateful night eighteen months before. The beautiful, beaming faces of whom George had been unable to wrench from his sleepless nights of rolling between the hot sheets, trying to force an answer into a puzzle that had zero leads and even less rationality.

            So deeply moment had the man fallen into his enigmatic strife, in fact, he missed the crackle of low volume sound in the closet. He fought the urge to roll his eyes.

            “I knew it might be a problem buying that TV for the closet, hon. It’s really overkill, you know. We have eight screens in the house now. At this rate, we’ll never get to any dinner functions. We’ll just be sitting in there on piles of clothes, watching the-”

            “George,” Tamara interrupted, her voice a frigid stalactite in comparison to its previous comfort. “It’s… not April Fool’s Day, is it?”

            “Not the last time I checked. We’re hardly into January, dear, in case you didn’t notice the snow.”

            “I… know, it’s just that…”

            “What is it?”

            “The news.”

            “Is someone hurt? Someone we know?”

            “No, no… at least not that I can… think of. It’s just what they’re…”

            “What?”

            “Why don’t you just come and… and look yourself…” Tamara uttered, the words clustered like marbles in her throat.

            “What, what am I looking at?” George muttered as he poked his head in. He tapped at the glass face of his watch, only casting a token glance toward the TV. “Am I supposed to recognize these people? Who are “Carly and Jack Arton,” anyway, and what does it have to do with me? We’re going to be late, you know.”

12 Hours Ago…

            Alison Hunt pushed on the door of the apartment guest room, letting it swing fully open to the tune of the creaking hinges before entering. She padded slowly across the carpet, trying not to slam her bare heels against the ground and risk shaking the contents of the small room, specifically the table that leaned against the wall in the corner.

            Her eyes fell to the spacious cardboard box that once housed an old microwave but now represented the abode of far more volatile residents, and taking a deep breath, she ran her fingers through her silky golden locks to brush them back from her face.

            Even before the eighteen-year-old had taken more than a few steps, she heard the frantic whispering coming from the makeshift habitat with walls far too high for its occupants to have a prayer of escaping.

            “Hey, guys,” Alison greeted as warmly as she could. She flashed a winning smile as she peered over the edge of the box and into the little habitat below. Though she raised a hand to wave lithely with the tips of her fingers, the gesture was not returned with the same enthusiasm.

            “Hi, Alison,” Tony mumbled dumbly, lifting a hand to wave once out of perceived duty. The four-inch-tall young man was only able to look up and hold eye contact with the towering normal-sized girl for a few seconds before his gaze fell back to his shoes. Alison never tired of seeing this sheepish display of intimidation mingled with respect, and would probably have giggled at him, if not for her desire to get off on the right foot today with her two live-ins.

            “Ashley?” Alison murmured, looking over to her equally tiny cousin where she remained lying on her side atop the makeshift cushion the two miniscule young lovers used as a bed. Normally the orphaned blonde bombshell would at least rise to her haunches when Alison came to greet them so she could wrap her arms around Tony in a show of loyalty, but today there was no movement.

            “Ashley?” Alison repeated more gently. “Are you okay?”

            “Yes,” Ashley groaned. “I’m perfect. Fucking amazing.”

            “Okay,” her cousin said with a nod, having learned to mostly disregard her embittered family member’s angry outbursts during the last year and a half she’d been in the custody of Alison and her mother Anna.

            And frankly, considering the hardships the miniaturized eighteen-year-old had been through ever since that serendipitous night when she, her parents, and boyfriend had mysteriously been reduced down to four inches in height beyond the explanation of known science or religion, Alison couldn’t begrudge her the negative attitude.

            “Do either of you want anything to eat?” Alison asked, resting her hands on the lip of the box and gripping it, though she refrained from rattling it. “I think Mom’s gonna make pancakes. Got a new skillet and everything. I’ll bring you some of the drips cooked on the edges, or-”

            “Fuck off,” Ashley scowled meekly, shuffling onto her haunches and crawling forward across the little bed.

            “I guess a “no” from Ashley on the pancakes,” Alison said as pleasantly as she could, turning her gaze to Tony. “How about you, hunky?”

            “Yes. Sure,” he answered awkwardly as he scratched at the stubbled nape of his neck, looking over his shoulder at his sneering girlfriend. “And… maybe some for her too? She might want some later, and-”

            “I said fuck off with your fucking pancakes,” Ashley grunted. “I don’t want any later.”

            “But-” Tony protested.

            “I guarantee you, I don’t,” the girl added before curling up under the miniscule blankets and covering herself in them, as though they would offer protection from her massive cousin above if such sanctity was required. “I think I’ll just starve today.”

            “Okay,” Alison mumbled amicably. Tapping the box a few times with her thumb, the monumental blonde lowered her arm into the box and opened her fingers as they neared Tony, who instinctively raised his arms and straightened his legs, knowing it would be easier to just comply with her. Once she had her palm pressed against his back, she squeezed her fingers gently back together and gave Tony an easy ascension from the box in her warm fist.

            “S-Sorry,” Tony uttered as the girl held him up to her face, blinking more times than necessary.

            Alison observed him for a moment, appreciating the feeling of his little chest rising and falling beneath the pad of her index finger. She brushed the fleshy curve of her thumb against the underside of his chin, stroking up to his cheek, then let her fingers ease their way down to his thighs. He seemed to squirm lightly at her touch, but didn’t flinch.

            “It’s okay. I get it,” Alison whispered truthfully. She eyed the tiny Ashley below bundled up in her blankets, half-expecting a screamed rebellion about her boyfriend being snatched away for the umpteenth time, but the girl was apparently already too resigned to a bad mood today, or simply at a state of painful peace with it. “I know it’s been really hard on her.”

            “Yeah.”

            “On you, too.”

            “Oh,” Tony sputtered, struggling in the space between fear and startled comfort. “Y-Yeah. It has.”

            “Don’t be nervous, cutie,” Alison said. She slowly backed away from the table that held the box, pivoting on her heel, and began making her way back toward the door. She had difficulty hiding the smirk spreading back over her lips, but it didn’t bother her, especially since Ashley hadn’t complained yet. Grasping the doorknob in her free hand, she shut the door behind her.

            “Where… um, where are we-” Tony managed.

            “Just my room. There’s a little problem I’m hoping you can help me with,” Alison explained as she gently thumbed Tony’s head again, ruffling his hair. She kneaded her pinky finger against his shins, careful not to cause discomfort, and actually felt him relax more in her grip.

            “A problem?”

            “Yeah. See, I’ve been feeling really guilty about something,” Ashley continued as she turned the corner in the hallway and approached her bedroom. “And I thought I could use some advice from you.”

            “G-Guilty?” Tony repeated back, a knot forming in his stomach as the girl’s fingers got progressively more exploratory around the nooks and crannies of his body. He bit his lip as her finger pulled back the fabric of his shirt and slid up against his abdomen.

            “Yeah, silly,” she sighed as she nudged her way into the room with her elbow. “It’s been weighing on my conscience, and I think I just need to get it off my chest for you. You know?”

            Her words, chewed delicately on every syllable, certainly didn’t suggest she was feeling the keen bite of morality. Still, Tony held a small hope in his heart, no matter how easily it had been extinguished time and time again.

            Maybe she was about to do it. Maybe this was the conversation where she’d admit that the pressure of keeping two tiny people as prisoners had caught up to her and she was going to grant them their freedom.

            “Um. Okay. Sure,” Tony said as nonchalantly as possible. Alison crawled onto her bed as smoothly as possible, careful not to jostle her passenger-occupied fist, and laid on her stomach. From her, she was able to easily cradle Tony in her palm and give him some room to move, while keeping the impossibility of his escape from this precarious position completely known. Her adorable grinning face loomed over him, making it all the clearer as her tongue batted out at the corner of her lips.

            “So here’s the thing…” Alison drawled, letting the pause sink in for full effect. Her eyes, unblinking, bore through the little man lying in the cushy center of her hand, and it took all her willpower not to close her fingers back around him for another squeeze, if only to feel his precious heartbeat against her skin again. “You turned twenty, what, like a month ago?”

            “Y-Yes…” he answered, no longer out of anxiety, but primarily because Alison’s finger, still burrowed comfortably up his puny shirt, had begun caressing his skin just enough to send some involuntary goose bumps to every inch of his appendages.

            She definitely knew how to push his buttons, even if she and her mother had virtually robbed him and his girlfriend of their lives, and then done the same thing to Ashley’s parents, but more in the literal sense.

            “And in that whole time, I realized, I still haven’t given you your birthday present!” Alison concluded, squelching the hope for good that this chat would lead to anything other than one of her games.

            Tony didn’t begrudge himself the letdown, though. As she’d said, he’d just begun his third decade of life, which didn’t appear to be changing from this semi-twisted imprisonment any time soon. The foolish hope of liberty was the closest thing he ever got to a vacation unless it was one of the days Alison and her mother were in the mood to go on a city walkabout without stowing their wards inside compromising articles of clothing.

            “Oh,” Tony said, wringing his hands together as he leaned his head back against the plush terrain of Alison’s fingers. “It’s um, it’s fine.”

            “Are you kidding? Of course it’s not,” Alison corrected, raising an accusing eyebrow. “Birthdays are special.”

            “You made a cupcake for me and Ashley,” he pointed out.

            “Yeah, but cake’s not a present. That’s just food,” she responded. “Plus, it’s the big two-oh. I figured you deserve something a little better, especially because of how good you’ve been the last year and a half, and your last birthday probably wasn’t as fun.”

            “Yeah,” he agreed, unable to contest such a reminder.

            His nineteenth birthday had been spent hanging onto Ashley’s hand as she cried her eyes dry, hopped up on as much anesthesia as could be safely allowed for a four-inch teenager, and under the scythe-sized knife of a woman who wouldn’t have looked out of place in a butcher shop.

            After Anna’s ultimatum at the Yeager house, she’d made her final argument by breaking all of Ashley’s limbs in one swift flick of her fingers. The poor girl, collateral of her parents’ mad greed, had spent a lot of that time afterward being carried around by Tony until arrangements could be made.

            As it had turned out, the best arrangement Anna could make for her niece involved a retired army medic-turned-veterinary surgeon who’d fallen on hard times. Several resetting procedures, plenty of painkillers, and more than a year later saw Ashley’s mobility returned to her, if only in small dosages, though it was anyone’s guess how much of this had to do with her abused body and how much had to do with a general lack of motivation for life now that she was her cousin’s pet.

            “Anyway,” Alison continued, tracing a gentle line up from Tony’s navel to his forehead with her pinky finger. “Like I was saying. I thought you should get a little something… extra. Just to show you how much mom and I appreciate you going along with everything so well. Considering how… you know…”

            “Right,” Tony sighed, resisting the urge to turn his face away from Alison’s probing digit, even as his spine tingled pleasurably at her practiced touch. He already knew precisely where this was going, and saw no benefit in trying to resist. “Um, thanks I… guess.”

            “Don’t mention it,” the girl said with a broad smile, and without further verbal teasing tugged Tony’s shirt off his abdomen the rest of the way. It came off easily, particularly with her finger already pressed against his chest under the garb. She followed up immediately with a delicate thumbnail into his waistband, skillfully snapping off the button and letting the slightly baggy fabric slide down his thighs.

            Left in his underwear in Alison’s palm, Tony let himself go limp, by now firmly accustomed to her getting her way with his state of dress or lack thereof. His heart rate actually was able to lower as he settled against her warm skin.

            “Almost,” she breathed calmly, sliding a finger down against his thigh again and hooking the miniature boxers well enough that they could be shorn from his legs. A final flick of Alison’s thumb and index finger left Tony’s doll-sized garments scattered over her bedspread, and his exposed naked body ripe for play in her hand. “Did that feel okay?”

            “Y-Yeah,” he said. This, after all, was the only correct answer.

            “Good,” she murmured. “Happy belated birthday, hunky.”

            Tenderly she compressed her index finger along Tony’s pill-sized dick, not so hard that it gave him cause to cringe, and set about caressing it in one of her games with him she’d been neglecting in the past few months.

            She cradled his junk against the pad of her thumb, savoring the power trip as she watched it grow, entrapping him between her digits. What a little rush. He was already growing firmer. She twiddled him between her fingertips, back and forth. Frankly, the joy of wrestling the powerless Tony into an embarrassed sexual climax had lost some of its luster as time wore on and she could see the weariness in his eyes, but Alison was feeling spontaneous enough today that this just felt right.

            That is, until she cupped Tony closer up to her face. She exhaled, letting the warmth wash over him and tingle on his skin. Already his member was at full mast from the smooth contact with her thumb, but she paused in the rhythmic motion for just long enough to silently demand mutual eye contact, which he granted out of prior knowledge that she could just as easily demand it verbally.

            Beyond his little face, then, and out of her depth of field she saw it.

            The small plastic purple picture frame she kept on the dresser she’d bought for father’s day twelve years prior, back before all of this madness had cost the family insurmountable pain and several casualties. Tucked inside the frame was a fuzzy photograph of her father Tom, Anna embracing him, and the young Alison hoisted up into view of the camera by her dad’s strong arms.

            Instantly she stopped dead in her tracks, leaving a confused and unwillingly aroused Tony sprawled and softly moaning in her hand as she shifted her gaze fully to the family relic.

            Alison couldn’t put her finger on the reason. Certainly her eyes had shifted idly around this bedroom plenty of times before as she had her way with Tony, probably coming to rest on the photographic specter of her late parent too.

            This time was different, though. A rawness was forming in her gut as jumbled memories of his voice began to creep back into her mind. The man whose kindness had indirectly prompted her mother and herself to commit atrocities against their criminal family now felt like poison burning along the walls of her stomach.

            It was a shame as real as anything she’d felt before, almost as gnawing as the grief at his passing. Alison’s eyes steadily began to flood with tears, making the sight of her transfixed expression even more bewildering for Tony, who had settled uncomfortably into a fetal position against her curled fingers. A few salty droplets plunked down onto his chest, which only increased the look of bewilderment in his eyes.

            “That’s… that’s enough,” she sighed. Swinging her legs off the bed, she rose up and set about plucking Tony’s clothes back up from the spread, depositing them back into her palm.

            “Okay,” he answered, hoping his gratification wasn’t too evident.

            “You should probably put these back on so Ashley doesn’t have to see you like…” Alison muttered, lifting up the shirt between pinched fingers.

            “Yeah,” he said. “T-Thanks.”

            “Don’t mention it,” she said sorely, looking away as Tony scrambled to re-cloth himself in her hands. Despite her ability to toy with the lives of two powerless human beings without the threat of consequence, in this moment, the growing hollowness made Alison feel smaller than she had in a long time.

Ashley rolled over in her miniature bed, pulling the fabric-patch blankets further over her shoulders as she heard the telltale creak of the door off in the distance, indicating the arrival of one of her normal-sized oppressors. As Alison had only just walked out the door with Tony in hand, she had to assume the girl had forgotten something, or was perhaps returning for another paltry attempt to make peace with pancakes. Or maybe just to gloat.

            “I thought I told you to fuck off already,” Ashley spat, loudly enough to be clearly heard even at her reduced size and through the filter of blankets. “I’m not hungry.”

            “I’m sorry to hear that,” another voice responded coolly. “I was hoping we could have a talk.”

            It was not Alison’s voice, and specifically, one that inspired something far worse in the tiny girl. Ashley’s heart, previously overcome with venomous ire, found itself now taken by chilling terror that involuntarily sent shivers from the back of her head down to her delicate toes. She held firm, though, squeezing her body down against the bed in effort to quell the shaking, even as she heard the soft rumble of the confident footsteps.

            Her aunt Anna, the woman who’d smashed Ashley’s father beneath her sole and eaten her mother alive, appeared over the edge of the cardboard house. The forty-year-old appeared to be putting the final touches on tying her dark, curly locks into a more manageable ponytail behind her head so as to more easily observe her shrunken niece below.

            “Well, how about it, Ashley?” Anna questioned calmly. “I’m game to try for a civil discussion if you are.”

            The tiny teen bit her lip, forcing it to remain still, and tasted metallic blood on her tongue.

            She watched the monstrous fingers curl over the edge of the box, remembering as though it was yesterday the precise sensation of those massive digits plucking her up by the limbs and contorting them well beyond the point of abject torture. The ring of her own snapped bones still resided in her ear drums like a ghostly whisper, and Ashley could hear it quite plainly whenever she was forced to look at Anna’s hands.

            They were powerful appendages, certainly. Larger than most women’s hands, which no-doubt made it all the easier for the spurned giant to snap her niece’s arms and legs like wishbones, yet smooth and rosy, the kind that would’ve been ideal for yoga, providing Anna put in the time. But she didn’t, and Ashley knew it. Those hands weren’t for holding herself up now, but for reaching for her subjects in this microwave box.

            As if on cue, Anna’s palm opened up, her fingers outstretched. Though they lowered with plenty of warning, it was impossible for Ashley not to flinch. She lost her composure almost entirely in that instant, the color in her cheeks fading under the all-encompassing shadow. However, the enormous hand halted just short of wrapping itself around the owner’s niece. Anna’s lips pursed.

            “C’mon,” the aunt whispered gently. “Meet me halfway, hmm? All I want to do is talk.”

            “I’m tired,” Ashley groaned.

            “You’re always tired. And I should know. We’ve spent enough time together in this place.”

            “Why can’t you just leave us alone in here?” Ashley scowled. “You’ve got us trapped like your fucking pets, we’re not going anywhere, and none of us like each other. So what’s the point of pretending like we might!”

            “I understand, believe me,” Anna said. Her fingers turned thoughtfully together, her index and middle fingers circling in soft figure-eights across the gridded surface of her thumb mere inches from Ashley’s head. “That’s what I wanted to talk about, in fact. So how about it?”

            “I think we could just do the talk right here-” Ashley began.

            “I was offering to let you come out and be on the same level, so I don’t have to keep looking down at you like this.”

            “-no, no, let me finish. I was saying, I think we can just do the talk right here, because I was only going to tell you to fuck off and die like your piece of shit husband did.”

            Anna closed her eyes and steepled her towering fingers together in the box, withdrawing them only momentarily before they snapped forward. Her fingers crowded around Ashley in the bed like fleshy tree trunks, grasping the toy mattress spring by its sides and tightening the fabric so taut around the four-inch girl that she was instantly immobilized. She lifted the entire bed out of the box, Ashley and all, and tipped it on its side as she drew it nearer to her face.

            “Well, now, that’s not going to get us anywhere, you talking like that, Ashley,” Anna said with surprising calm.

            Ashley’s heart raced as she felt the pressure of the blankets alone keeping her from tumbling toward her doom on the ragged carpet far below, as her aunt’s palm wasn’t cupped protectively below her like usual for added safety. Her aunt’s giant fingers only seemed to loosen in the ensuing staredown, allowing the fabric to hold the girl up in an increasingly loose hammock.

            “I was offering you the chance to look me in the eye if you wanted. But if you don’t want to, then we won’t,” Anna continued. “But we are going to talk, whether you decide to tolerate it or not.”

            The air flushed from Ashley’s lungs as the bed plunged toward the floor. For an instant, she considered that her aunt had released her grip entirely on the piece of plastic furniture, finally ending the nuisance that was her niece’s weekly tirades, as well as her life. She was simply dropping her, it seemed.

            However, before Ashley could summon the courage to scream in a final blaze of glory, she realized the muscular fingers were still clenched securely around the sides. Anna was simply making this more of a belly-churning chore than was necessary.

            The bed was deposited on the floor and, of course, upside down. Her tiny forehead was pressed against the shaggy fibers of the floor. Ashley felt herself once again suspended hard against the bed, her spine trained in a line to its surface by the tension in the blankets. Clearly, Anna had pinched her fingers around the tufts of fabric on the bottom of the bed.

            Ashley craned her neck to the side, just able to make out the image of her aunt’s titanic bare toes. Only half of them were visible from the improvised restraining device her bed had become, but eventually the woman’s foot shifted until all five squirming digits were clearly visible. They inched closer, the toes grasping at the ratty carpet as though tugging the rest of the foot and leg along with them.

            It chilled Ashley’s bones anew, despite the all the dizzying blood that was now rushing to her head as her aunt kept her suspended by her stomach and chest, facing the floor that so easily could’ve ended her pitiful existence if only she’d reached it in much faster time. Sometimes, she wasn’t so sure she’d mind.

            “What do you think?” Anna questioned. “Can we have that talk now?” Her toes inched closer, near enough now that they brushed along the blankets.

            With a start, Anna turned her neck to the other side in the limited geometry of her bed-trap and realized Anna’s other foot now occupied the other opening off to the side. The peachy wall of her instep made for a suitable barrier, blotting out the light and forcing Ashley to turn her head back toward the toes of the opposite foot for any source of air.

            “What… do you want… to talk about?” Ashley coughed as menacingly as she could manage.

            “I just wanted to say I’m sorry,” Anna said.

            “What?”

            “I mean it. And I’m saying it now. I’m sorry about how all of this had to go.”

            Ashley choked back a gasp. She inhaled the tainted oxygen that only reached her lips after it had crept over the ancient carpet fibers, up from between the crevices of her aunt’s giant naked toes. It all tasted so mealy and poisonous on the roof of her mouth, and she wanted to spit on Anna’s skin, if she didn’t assume there would be even more inconvenient repercussions for this statement.

            Still, she wasn’t above a compromise in expression.

            “No you’re fucking not,” Ashley commented. The blankets had loosened sufficiently for her to touch down to the ground, at last allowing regular bloodflow to all parts of her body to resume. “You can’t get away with who you are… what you did.”

            “I expected you’d say that.”

            “Then why’d you say it?”
            “For me, I guess, then.”

            “Right,” Ashley snorted. “It must make you feel so good to tell me you’re so super-duper sorry while you’re trying to scare me at the same time.”

            “I didn’t think this would scare you,” Anna responded. “This is just to put you on the level you seem to want to occupy whenever I offer an olive branch.” The fingertips clenched around the sides of the bed flicked evenly, releasing their grip on the blankets. No sooner was Ashley fully liberated on the carpet when those same giant fingers were paled by pressure, rolling the bed up against Anna’s palm, and in the next instant the entire bed was flung across the room like a fastball.

            The wind of the flying bed watered Ashley’s eyes as she watched it fly. It landed with a hard clunk against the wall. Had Anna’s fingers failed to loosen all the way, plopping Ashley to the ground and out of the bed’s imprisoning clutches, she doubted she’d still have a head.

            Not that she would’ve been surprised. Anna had broken Ashley’s arms and legs before, so why not her neck as well?

            “Was that?” Ashley laughed.

            “Again, no,” Anna said. “That was so we could get a good look at each other.”

            “I’ve gotten plenty of good looks at you. I don’t think I’ll be doing any more.”

            “That’s all right,” Anna said sincerely. Her feet, still planted on the floor and flanking Ashley’s prone body, scrunched nearer together across the terrain of the carpet. She herself towered fully above again at full height, her hands deposited on her hips just in case there was any doubt of her control. “You feel free to look wherever you’re comfortable.”

            The miniature eighteen-year-old tried to minimize the quivering again as her aunt’s car-sized feet shuffled ever-closer like flesh-toned trash compactors. She refused to yield even a single shudder until Anna’s twin insteps were rubbed up against Ashley’s hips, threatening to begin applying untold pressure if either foot was to come any closer together.

            “Nice and situated down there?” Anna called out.

            “Was this all you wanted?” Ashley demanded. “Pretend to apologize and then fuck with me a little?” She nudged her elbows into the squishy mass of Anna’s bare feet, but only succeeded in knocking herself sideways at an even more awkward angle between her aunt’s heels.

            “No,” Anna said calmly. Her massive feet edged ever-nearer, accounting for the space differential Ashley had created by stumbling, and suddenly the shrunken young woman was entrapped between an impromptu sandwich of foot flesh. She wasn’t squeezed, but as she watched the big toes arching up, the muscles in the foot clenched for maximum effect, Ashley could tell she wasn’t moving anywhere, no matter how much she resisted.

            “Then what?”

            “I wanted to say I know I’m not a good person. I agree with you,” Anna said.

            Ashley grunted. Her arms thrashed meekly against the bulwarks of foot flesh clamped around her sides, unable to help it as she slipped further back between them until she was nearly flat on her back again, with her limbs pinned down by the creased rim of Anna’s soles.

            “Is that so?”

            “Yes, that’s so,” Anna said. The weight of her toned body was rolled onto the balls of her feet, then shifted to her heels, relieving Ashley of any more pressure other than the slabs of soles that now held her fast to the floor. “I mean it honestly. You may not ever believe it, just like you don’t believe that I’m sorry, but I just might mean this even more than the apology.”

            “…that you’re a bad person.”

            “Yes. Yes, I am. And yes, that’s what I’m saying,” Anna explained. Her hands had left their post at her hips, sliding down the tanned expanse of her thighs and taking up residence on her knees as she stooped down to observe her tiny niece, now entrapped beneath each of her soles. The only sight of the miniature girl she could make out now was a torso and head peeking up between the shallow canyons of her insteps.

            “Glad you fucking admitted it to someone,” Ashley puffed. Her limbs were in danger of going numb, creaking with the same kind of weariness as they had just before they were pushed beyond their limits a year and a half before.

            “It does feel a little better,” Anna said, some of her usual sarcasm pervading the final syllables. She smiled.

            “Then what’s the deal with the fucking standing on me right now, huh? You could’ve smashed my arms and legs already if you wanted. Then I guess you’d have to pay your trash-friends to fix me up again.”

            “This? Oh, I just didn’t like what you said about my husband Tom, whom your parents unfortunately saw fit to murder,” Anna simpered with utmost serenity. She gave the muscles in her soles the tiniest twist, forcing Ashley onto her side, until her tiny face was mashed up against the massive ball of the foot. “So just keep that in mind while you’re giving your Auntie Anna’s feet some kisses for the next… I don’t know, fifteen minutes?”

            “Mmmffuck y-”

            “Ah-ah!” Anna chuckled. Her feet twisted again, now firmly planting Ashley’s face into the wrinkled slope of her reddened sole until it fit snugly against the ceiling of grit-speckled flesh. “Don’t forget, sweetie. It’s just like you said. I may not like that I’m a bad person, but I can’t get away from what I did, and who I am.”

            Anna and Alison’s apartment was mostly silent save for the low hum of the outdated television resting on a foldable dinner tray. The lights had been switched off to preserve energy, the screen the only source of vision in the space.

            With her mother out on a couple of errands, Alison slouched comfortably in the old couch, her feet propped up on the ottoman just a twitch of distance away from where Tony and Ashley were seated delicately on makeshift bedding consisting of the eighteen-year-old’s giant white socks.

            Occasionally Tony would crane his neck around to their keeper, watching the lights flicker on and off along Alison’s towering sole. It wasn’t a particularly comforting sight. She’d placed him and her cousin here specifically so she could keep a close eye on them while they were out of their box, without intent to toy with them. Still, being seated on a pair of cotton footwear that had imprisoned him and his tiny girlfriend numerous times was a bit much for Tony to swallow, even if it did allow Ashley to recline more comfortably. He’d spent several sleepless nights in the past cuddled forcefully up against those wriggling digits, his back compressed into the dirty-blonde’s warm sole while she rested peacefully in the knowledge that he wasn’t going anywhere.

            “You guys wanna watch anything?” Alison offered. She flipped the channels absent-mindedly, stabbing the buttons with her thumb. “Anything? Crime show? News? There might be one of those sitcom round-up marathon things happening tonight, too.”

            “Can you just take me to bed?” Ashley croaked without turning around. Her voice was far more civil than it had been during the rest of the day.

            “Uh, yeah, sure,” Alison shrugged, touched by the strength she knew it took for her cousin to make a request minus the insult. Her feet slid carefully off the ottoman, plopping to the floor below without rattling the furniture. The girl’s hand reached forth, preparing to collect her cousin into her palm.

            “My back hurts,” Ashley said.

            “Oh.”

            “So be careful,” the smaller girl grunted, then managed to vomit out a final word in the lowest volume possible: “…please.”

            “What’s wrong with it?” Alison questioned. She was a little taken aback by this previously unforeseen level of generosity.

            “It hurts from trying to hold my fucked-up arms and legs that your Mom popped like fucking crackers,” Ashley spat, returning to her usual self in smooth form. “In case you forgot.”

            “Oh. No, I didn’t forget,” Alison promised solemnly. “You want some pain meds?”

            “No, I want to get the fuck out of this hellhole and get as fucking far away from you and your pscyho-bitch mother as possible. But yeah, sure, pain meds will be okay for now.”

            “Coming right up,” Alison said, not skipping a beat. She gave the ottoman a little nudge with her leg, just so it was too far of a leap over to the couch for Tony, ensuring he and his girlfriend remained marooned on the cloth island of the footrest. “Just hold on.”

            Alison entered the shared bathroom by the apartment closet and sprung open the medicine cabinet. There wasn’t much, but a bottle of aspirin eventually presented itself once Alison brushed past the de-bristled toothbrushes and empty floss containers. Grasping for it, her knuckles knocked against the plaster backing of the cabinet, causing it to creak like the straining belly of a rowboat.

            Frowning, the girl gave the wall another little push, revealing a panel that opened fully into a dusty space behind the cabinet and fastened firmly into the wall. Though she wasn’t particularly excited about discovering any spider kingdoms in the darkness, Alison’s intrigue guided her fingers back into the void. Her palm closed fully around a plastic cylinder, which she steadily drew out and held beneath the bathroom light.

            It was a spritzer, or maybe an eye dropper, but with the label entirely torn away, leaving only a blank cylinder on its face. Alison unscrewed the cap, holding the narrow spigot up to the bridge of her nose for examination.

            She hadn’t intended to squeeze the bottle, only supporting its base by her fingertips with the express purpose of relieving pressure. However, it seemed an air bubble had been trapped just below the spout until opened, because as soon as Alison opened it, a shot of moisture fired into her left eye.

            Staggering back, knocking a bar of soap from the sill, Alison shook her head, wiping away what little remnants of whatever medicinal concoction had apparently been left by the previous tenant in the wall. The bottle was instantly placed back in its secret hideaway, the panel pulled back into place. She rinsed her fingers thoroughly in the sink, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue.

            “That’ll teach me…” Alison mumbled with some lingering irritation, struggling to keep her flickering eyelid open. The scent of the misty gunk suggested an aged vinegar to her olfactory senses, and she was greatly anticipating finding something stronger-smelling to cover it up as soon as she delivered Ashley’s meds and put the two miniature roommates to bed.

            Finally returning to the main living room of the apartment, Alison tipped an aspirin into her waiting palm. Next, securing it by her fingertips to the countertop, she mashed it into a fine powder with the blunt end of a butter knife.

            “Here,” she said, drawing nearer to the ottoman again. She stooped low over the patiently waiting pair, her fingertips extended and dipped in the powder. “I’m not really sure how much you should take. I mean, this is like… a quarter of a pill right here, so maybe just a few little clumps?”

            “You’re the real fucking MVP,” Ashley mocked. She leaned in, scooping some of the granules off her cousin’s fingers. “I hope you washed your hands first.”

            “I did,” Alison said truthfully. She drew her hand back as she sunk back into the couch cushions, licking the needless remnants of the aspirin off her fingers. “So, you still wanna go to bed right now?”

            “Who’s that?” Tony droned, his voice distant and comatose.

            “Who’s who?” Alison asked, still watching her cousin gobble up the pain med powder.

            “The… girl on the TV.”

            Raising an eyebrow, Alison looked up at the news channel. An image of a smiling young woman was displayed, probably not much older than Alison, and with very similar sheen to her hair. She was tall and toned, almost surprisingly so, as she stood next to a man and woman that Alison presumed to be the parents. Her name was displayed on the bar beneath her image.

            CARLY ARTON

            “I guess that’s who it is,” Alison shrugged.

            “Keep… keep watching,” Tony mumbled.

            “Again, we’d like to emphasize that these images have not been altered or enhanced in any way,” the television news anchor said in some drunken disbelief. “What you’re seeing is real.”

            Alison just about felt her legs go out from under her. A young man, sharing several of the same features with the previously displayed girl, who was standing in the palm of someone’s hand. He couldn’t have even been three inches tall. The camera shifted to various angles, clearly to prove that the image hadn’t been doctored. The tiny boy was doing his best to shield his face from the flash of the cameras and the loud questioning that surrounded him in a wall of massive humanity, until at last another hand rose protectively to block him from sight.

            “If you’re just tuning in, these clips were taken mere hours ago, from outside the campus where Jack Arton, a twenty-two-year-old former high school student, was found to be alive after having vanished for nearly five years. We’re not yet hearing any information on the source of the remarkable physical transformation of his, but sources are confirming that his sister, Carly Arton, a nineteen-year-old student college freshman and star forward her the women’s basketball team, was not only aware of his survival, but keeping him secretly in her possession. We’ll be bringing you more on this story as it develops.”

            Alison’s jaw hung limply from her skull. Her pupils stung from glaring in wild-eyed disbelief at the fairy tale madness unfurling on the screen, or maybe it was just the lingering effect of her accidental dispersal of the fluid. She flashed a glance down to Tony and Ashley, both looking just as shocked as her, and that was when it happened.

            The effect was nearly instantaneous from the moment she became aware of the tingling in her spine. A burning sensation emanated from behind Alison’s eyes, rippling out like needles in every direction across her skin. Cold permeated each bodily cell, as though someone was invisibly inserting sheets of ice beneath every layer of muscle. And then she was falling, or what felt more like tumbling, down to her hands and knees. By the time Alison desperately caught herself on her haunches, she found the darkness had transitioned from its cool, television-glow staleness to a true blackness, warm and uncertain.

            It was then that Alison realized she was naked, covered in a broad tent of fabric that it took her several moments of coughing and gasping for breath to realize was her own shirt, now billowing around her hopelessly tiny, shrunken body.

            “What…” she croaked. “What the fuck?”

            Palms clammy, she forced her limbs through the parachute of her shirt, its folds seemingly growing heavier with each length forward she moved. In her panic, Alison hardly realized she’d emerged from the shirt until she felt the cool air of the outside on her bare skin. As her eyes adjusted to the slivers of light silhouetting around the now-gargantuan ottoman, she could make out the two figures peering down at her from above. Though it was difficult to make out through the shadows, there was no mistaking it.

            Alison was smaller than her cousin and her boyfriend. Much smaller.

            “Holy shit,” Ashley gawked. “Babe, look.”
            “I see, babe,” Tony said,

            “What are you waiting for?” Ashley demanded, her voice hoarse with mania. “Fucking get her.”

            Ashley’s legs were moving before she’d even fully processed the cerebral command. She moved somewhere between a four-limbed stumble and a sprint, barely keeping on her feet as she made for the nearest structure of the empty bookshelf. There was a dusty crack just beneath the lowest platform, tall enough for her to dive under, but just maybe too tight of a squeeze for her pursuer.

            The weight of Tony’s body pouncing over top of her knocked the wind from Ashley’s much frailer frame. She tumbled head-over-heels, rolling a few paces further from the tackle. She turned, looking up at the miniature twenty-year-old she’d spent all these long months imprisoning in a box and only removing occasionally to masturbate between her fingertips.

            He was double her size. Maybe more. Like a full-grown adult standing over a toddler.

            “Hold still,” Tony hissed, his voice not possessed by the same shrieking malice as Ashley’s, but nonetheless infused with an understandably reinvigorated sense of confidence. He towered over Alison, wringing her shoulders as he pinned her to the floor with his broad hands. God, he was strong. “Stop moving. Now.”

            “Tony. Tony. Tony.” Ashley had turned into a broken record, winging at the edge of the ottoman as far as she dared crawl. Her fists, still tiny but newly enlarged in Ashley’s eyes, even at this distance, dug aggressively at the plush terrain. “Tony. Tony. Bring her. Bring her here. To me.”

            Blinking, Tony looked back down to his girlfriend’s cousin, the young woman who’d spent the better part of two years feeding him scraps in a cardboard box and treating his genitals like her personal amusement park. Wildly she whipped her head back and forth, her lip quivering as she silently pleaded.

            “T-Tony…” she uttered. Her hand opened, fingers outstretched toward him for support she already could read in his beaded eyes was not forthcoming. “Please…”

            “Right away, babe!” Tony called out to his beloved in the distance, nodding resolutely to himself as tears began to roll down their new captive’s cheeks.

            There was work to do.

            Alison huffed, catching her breath with some ragged difficulty as she splayed on her back. A heavy purple bruise smeared across her bare stomach now from where Ashley had kicked her square in the gut like an oblong football and punted her halfway across the ottoman.

            “Get back up, bitch,” Ashley ordered from where she stood nearer the edge of the furniture’s lunar platform. She nursed her sore shin with slender fingers, obviously somewhat pained to have used her once-broken limb for such high-impact sport, but the effort was clearly worth it. “Stand UP.”

            The order went ignored, and so Alison endured another pounding and flailing of limbs. Ashley didn’t exactly have the precise aim of a prizefighter, but she was just power drunk enough and just tall enough by comparison to her newly tiny cousin to inflict some severe sting. Idly, Alison wondered if she’d sprained her ankle when her cousin’s foot connected with it with the force of a runaway ten-speed bike.

            Tony stood numbly on the sideline as Ashley stalked hungrily after her pathetically shrunken, naked cousin. After all this time, he’d privately convinced himself he didn’t exactly want Anna and Alison to suffer the same fate of Kevin and Helen, no matter how much one of them might’ve deserved it. Still, there was a certain kind of pleasure to be taken in watching this display. Every swing of his girlfriend’s fist into their former captor was a chink in the walls that had kept them penned for two years like animals.

            Alison, meanwhile, only managed to claw another inch further away on the plush earth before her older relative had overtaken her, planting her heel into the small of her back and giving her a hard boot that nearly spun Alison completely around again.

            “How do you like that? That feel good?” Ashley spat, clearly short on creative taunts as she was pouring most of her raw energy into repaying two years’ worth of pain and parental murder. Her unstable body twitched with the adrenaline of finally enacting power she hadn’t possessed in what felt like a lifetime. She wrapped her considerably broader hands around Alison’s puny shoulder and propped her just high enough off the cushioned platform to see her face.

            By the time Alison summoned the courage to open her eyes, her double-sized cousin’s fist was barreling at her face, landing like a cast stone on the cheek. It felt like she’d chewed on a piece of gravel with her back molars. A few choice slaps followed for good measure, not quite making the same meteoric impact, but nonetheless stunning Alison into palpitated heartbeats.

            “God, if only you were just… a little bit… a lot smaller…” Ashley sputtered. She rolled her cousin back onto her side and pressed her foot into the center of the two-inch girl’s stomach, steadily shifting all of her weight onto the ball of her foot. Alison chomped at empty air for breath, her hands thrashing like the fins of a beached fish. She watched helplessly as her cousin’s other foot rose up, planting itself squarely across the entirety of Alison’s now-fragile skull. Ashley wedged her heel against her cousin’s lips, angrily teasing them, her toes grappling with the girl’s hair, while her opposite foot continued to pump air out of her lungs with repeated oscillations of weight from one leg to the other.

            Momentarily satisfied with her trampling, Ashley smirked and stepped off of her cousin, allowing the girl to flop to her back. A plum-like bruise was already forming just below the tiny eighteen-year-old’s eye.

            “C’mon, babe,” Tony encouraged at last. He lurched forward onto his haunches, holding out a hand to his girlfriend. “Give it a break for a second?”
            “Why?” she demanded, wiping her brow. “Did she ever give us a break? Did she?”

            “I mean, someti-” Tony began, but quickly recognized this was the wrong answer by the welled flood of venom behind Ashley’s eyes. “Well… what I mean is, I don’t want you to get too worked up, either. I’m worried about you, you know.”

            “Are you kidding me?” Ashley gasped, smiling wider than she had in years. “This is the most fun I’ve had since I was little. I mean, since I was actually… never mind. The point is, I’m not giving her a break until I feel good and ready to.”

            “I hear ya, babe,” Tony said. He side-eyed Alison, who was still breathing heavily a short distance away, having not bothered trying to get up as she gingerly nursed her fresh bruises. He stood up and took Ashley’s quivering hand in his own. “The point is, the real big bitch is gonna be back soon. We need to start thinking about-”

            “So what? She won’t even know what happened to her precious little girl by then,” Ashley scowled. She pulled her fingers out of her boyfriend’s grasp and approached her prone cousin again on delicate footsteps, hands on her hips.

            “What’s that mean?”

            “What do you think it means?” Ashley growled. A string of saliva exited her lips, which she wiped away. She kicked Alison in the stomach and elicited another cry of pain, though as it had been before, no verbal resistance was made by the younger cousin. “By the time my bitch-aunt gets back, she’s gonna have to peel her daughter off the floor with a fucking spatula and then get a DNA test to make sure she’s not just dead cockroach.”

            “Hold… hold up,” Tony breathed. He followed after Ashley, wrapping her into a restrictive embrace before she could wind up for another kick. “Just think about that for a second. I know how you feel now. I get it, I do. I feel the same. But… how useful is she to us if she’s… you know. Gone. When Anna gets back. Don’t you realize what she’ll do?”
            “Do I look like I give a shit now, babe?”

            “Not really,” Tony admitted. He kissed her forehead, sticky with sweat. “But just follow with me for a second.” Looking down, he nudged Alison’s hip with his own foot, just to ensure her stomach was able to rise and fall for oxygen flow. She was the size of a small child now to them, which was saying something, as he and Ashley had been trapped at four inches for so long. It was empowering like little else to stand above something that was actually smaller.

            “What?” Ashley asked impatiently.

            “We can use her, see? If Anna comes back and Alison’s… not usable anymore, what do you think that means for us?”

            “We’ll probably get the same,” she said solemnly.

            “But if we keep her close… make it clear she could be okay eventually, then-”

            “I don’t want to lose this chance,” Ashley hissed bitterly. She seemed to be crumbling at the knees, falling down to a kneel. Tony followed her, sitting between her and Alison’s battered body. “If I only get the chance to kill one of these bitches, then I’m taking it.”

            “Don’t you see, babe? We use her as… what’s the word? Leverage. We’ll have her call the police. Or get someone for us. Something.”

            “No,” Ashley cawed. “No police. You’ve seen her creepy friends, like the one who almost fucked up my arms and legs for good. If she calls the police and just gets one of her friends to come in here, we’re fucking dead and then we didn’t get either of them.”

            “Okay, okay,” Tony said, nodding. “That’s true.”

            “Fuck right it’s true.” Ashley extended her leg and swatted at Alison with her foot like a cat pawing at a mouse. “We need someone we know.”

            “So what? We don’t know a damn person in this piece of shit town she took us to. That’s why we’re here.”

            “No, no, but…” Ashley said. Her eyes lit crystal blue with the spark of something resembling hope. “Maybe… an hour away. Out of the city, in the suburbs, there’s some nice neighborhoods, and-”

            “So?”
            “My uncle and aunt live out there,” she said. “My dad’s brother.”

            “That’s good,” he said. He kissed his girlfriend several times in quick succession on her damp forehead. “Perfect. That’s what we’ll do.”

            “Okay,” Ashley sighed. “Just let me at her for a couple more minutes, then I’ll take a break.”

            “All right, but don’t knock her out,” Tony said. He rose back to his feet, helping Ashley on the way to stand up as well. “We need her awake so Anna doesn’t kill us as soon as she sees us holding her.”

            “Don’t worry. She’ll be just as surprised. She’ll be scared out of her fucking mind that we’ll do something else bad to her little girl,” Ashley insisted. She wrung her hands together, licking her lips. “All this time, she’s thought she was safe from anything being able to touch her. The stuck-up cunt.”

            “I can’t argue with that,” Tony said, freshly giddy with the possibility of rescue in the near future. He pulled his girlfriend close, wrapping his lips over hers. Their tongues danced in saliva for a few moments. The longer the kiss lasted, the more eager Ashley grew. She chewed at his lip, wrapping both arms and a leg around him until her chest was smushed against his neck.

            “God, this is gonna be fucking sweet,” Ashley sighed, clearly aroused, and unhooked her body from Tony’s. She wiped her hands together, dusting away imaginary refuse, and planted one foot on either side of Alison’s body. “You hear all that, lil’ cousin? I guess you lucked out. You’re not gonna die right now, cuz you’re useful to us, and that’s all. Once we’re back with my family, they’re gonna send everybody after your mommy. Neither of you will ever get away.”

            Alison blearily rolled her head against the soft terrain of the ottoman, trying to focus on its fluffy texture to distract herself from the pain of the prior beating. She cupped a palm over her cheek, which was already considerably swollen up. Probably dark and ripe as a fruit, too.

            “Do you hear me, bitch?” Ashley hissed. She stooped down, until she was close enough to spit into her cousin’s ear, which she did rather thickly, before licking her lips and forming the next words. “You and your mommy are gonna fucking die. Nice and long and slow. The cops might have to just shoot her in the back of the head, which makes me sad, but you? You’re gonna get something super-special. I’m just gonna have to pretend, then, that you’re both of you. Every fucking thing Auntie Anna’s ever done to me and Tony and my parents, I’m gonna do it back to you, until you’re begging me-”

            Alison tasted metal in the back of her throat.

            “-begging me like a little bitch to end it. But I won’t. Not just then,” Ashley whispered. She brought her fist down again, slamming her cousin in the back of the skull. “Not until I’ve had my fucking fill.”

            Ashley amused herself in the intervening minutes by dragging Alison up by her ankles and beating her down from side to side like an old carpet, finally putting her back on the floor by kicking her in the groin and slapping her so hard that Alison face-planted back into the cushion.

            “And we’re only getting started,” Ashley laughed. Once she’d started cackling, she couldn’t stop, until the sound of joy from her four-inch body was swelling to fill the entire tiny apartment. Tony couldn’t help but join in as though he’d caught her same disease of belief. He doubled over, wheezing emptily after a few minutes while his girlfriend stamped her heels into Alison’s sides and stomach, holding back only just enough to avoid snapping a rib. Her nails clawed plenty, though, digging into her cousin’s flesh and drawing just enough blood that both she and her cousin’s hands were painted in crimson fingerprints by the time Ashley stumbled away and into Tony’s waiting arms, breathing heavily with carnal delight, while Alison somehow clung onto consciousness by a few loose threads.

            She wanted her mother. So, so badly.

            The distant sound of keys grinding in the lock crunched in Alison’s ears. Muffled as her hearing had become over the past hour of painful quality time with her cousin, who now stood at twice her height, the two-inch girl had honed her senses through the soreness and bruising to await the creak of the apartment door hinges. Finally her silent patience had paid off. Her mother was back.

            “All set, babe?” Tony questioned to his girlfriend. He hunkered on his knees, prepared for the limited number of assaults he could endure without falling at his miniscule size, and placed his hand down against the slender small of Alison’s back. He propped her up by his shoulder, supporting her feather weight against his knee, as a clear display of her continued oxygen use. Seeing a potentially dead girl laying between the pair of them would do them no favors when Anna entered, and he knew it.

            “I’ve been fucking set for two goddamn years,” Ashley spat, her voice still musical with righteous glee. She gave Alison a sporting flick to the black eye, earning no more than a flinch from her martyred younger cousin, who’d resolved not to speak or attempt engagement after her unsuccessful escape earlier on the floor.

            “Just stay calm. I know you want to, but don’t yell… too much. Just… talk straight, babe, and this will go okay. I believe in you.” Tony seemed to be convincing himself almost as much as her, though probably Ashley just a little more.

            “Fine.”

            The door handle twisted, the final lock coming undone, and the passage swung open. Anna stood innocently, silhouetted against the dimly lit hallway behind. The low glow of the TV still hummed from behind, providing just enough guidance to deliver her gaze to the sight awaiting in the center of the ottoman. Tony and Ashley, standing defiantly alone, or so it appeared, until the two-inch figure draped over Tony’s leg was processed in the woman’s mind.

            Alison, her vision still swimming from the beating, had difficulty picking out her mother’s expression amidst the shadows, even when she towered so high above them now. It was difficult not to experience the briefest of heart flutters to witness a human being at such massive scale for the first time, even if it was the one who could deliver her from this nightmarish mess.    Anna blinked, shutting the door behind her with startling slowness, not bolting toward them with fists raised skyward for a deadly blow, as Tony had presumed. Rather, the woman’s countenance remained mostly composed, save for the bulge of her eyes on the initial moment of recognition. Otherwise, she was a paragon of serenity as she set her purse down on a side table, and took several tentative steps across the carpet, toward the ottoman, where her tiny family stood in a threatening huddle. She flossed her dark hair between long fingers.

            “Not another step, bitch,” Ashley roared.

            Tony had a feeling his girlfriend would be the one to make the first comment in these negotiations. It was hard to lay any guilt on her, though. Not after everything she’d been through; Tony had suffered serious losses, of course, but nothing like what he measured in her.

            Anna’s lips pursed, her hands halting at her sides, and she obeyed, coming to a full stop not three steps away from the ottoman. Her sandals softly slapped at her heels: the only sound in the intervening seconds.

            “Now move back. Three. No, four steps,” Ashley spat, clearly anxious about the very real possibility of her aunt leaning over in one mad swoop, hand outstretched. They were currently in range, after all. Then she added, just in case the point wasn’t made: “Fucking cunt.”

            A solemn, single nod. Anna folded her hands behind her back, possibly for reassurance that she wasn’t going to attempt anything heroic. Close enough for more accurate study, her eyes zeroed on her now-tiny daughter, battered and swollen, but nonetheless breathing heavily, eyes open and conscious to the dangerous world surrounding her.

            “It looks like you’ve had a busy evening,” Anna said quietly, her voice as unchanged as her face.

            It puzzled Alison to hear not a single note of panic in her mother’s voice, but also somehow reassured her. Her mother’s tone was as low and collected as it had been when they first entered the Yeager household eighteen months before and encountered the anomaly of science and reality which allowed them to begin rebuilding their lives, at the cost of two others.

            She’d trusted her parent on that confusing night as well, and it had gotten her this far, until her own serendipitous misfortune had cost her a few feet in height. Alison knew she’d have to summon that same trust again.

            There was an assured stillness in her mother’s body that Alison noticed now which she couldn’t say she’d truly seen before, and probably couldn’t have, until she was looking up at her parent from a size nearly equal to that of her thumb. And she was certainly massive now.

            “Just fucking stay there,” Ashley grunted, though she’d been given no prompting by movement or response from their blackmail recipient. To Alison, her cousin sounded more concerned with reminding everyone in the room that she was still in control of the situation.

            “All right,” Anna said. Conversationally.

            Tony wrapped his arm tighter around Alison’s stomach, securing her against his knee. His other hand had risen, sliding up the miniature girl’s spine, until it was poised decisively against the back of her neck, giving him unique leverage to inflict some cranial damage, should too much seismic activity occur around him, or a giant hand come crashing down from above. It was a pose he and Ashley had spent the better part of the past half hour carefully devising for maximum effectiveness in convincing Anna of their ability to snap the links of Alison’s bones, should they be given sufficient reason to.

            “Is my daughter all right?” Anna asked, hands still folded behind. She looked to Tony rather than her niece, perhaps sensing which of the hostage-holders was the more self-possessed at this moment.

            “Yes,” he said, knowing how important it was to establish their cards here. He patted his hand against the back of Alison’s scalp. “She’s a little beat up. But she’s breathing, honest. She’s gonna make it.”

            “Hold the fuck up. I haven’t decided that part yet,” Ashley growled. She shot her boyfriend a look which he couldn’t quite read: somewhere between a hopeful beg and a leer of betrayal. “Whether or not she’s ever all right again is gonna be up to you, Auntie.”

            “Okay,” Anna said. “What do you want?”

            “See, told you she’d go along with it,” Ashley hissed to Tony. She cupped her palm under her tiny younger cousin’s chin, prodding at her willowy neck, threatening to temporarily impede the flow of air down Alison’s throat. The smaller girl gurgled, writhing gently against Tony’s leg, but didn’t offer further resistance.

            “Just tell me,” Anna said.

            “You’re gonna take us to my dad’s brother’s house. Uncle George and Aunt Tamara,” Ashley said. She took her time pronouncing

            “All right.”

            Ashley’s mouth was already opened again, teeth bared and foam around her lips, but she quickly shut up, her brow narrowing to a frown. She obviously had been expecting, and preparing insults for, a substantially longer argument over the matter. The hysterical girl shrugged.

            “Okay, so here’s what’s gonna happen. You’re gonna go get that fucking hamster cage you kept us in when you took me to your creepy friends to fix my legs. You’re gonna open it, then step way back while we get in with your precious little girl, and then you’re gonna drive us to their house.”

            “Fair enough,” Anna said, just as placid as ever. “And then what?”

            “You’ll get the next part after you do what I said first, bitch.” Ashley chuckled under her breath, obviously savoring this moment more than anything in the past two years. Perhaps longer than that. It was more maniacal fun just verbally berating Anna, even, than it was punting Alison across the ottoman.

            The two-inch hostage batted her bleary eyes, steadily getting her vision back as the swelling around her eye settled to its new mass. She tried to make eye contact with Anna, who mostly kept her steely vision trained to either Ashley or Tony at all times, never the space around them, and not to the battered girl hung over the young man’s leg. A soft gurgle in her stomach: the desire to call out for her mother clawed at her throat, but Alison resisted the urge. Whatever her mother’s reason for this behavior, there’d be an explanation soon enough. Or so she hoped. It was hard to know what was real emotion and what was a winding sense of painful dizziness at this stage.

            “What are you standing around there for?” Ashley demanded. Her fingers balled into a fist and thrust into Alison’s abdomen, purging the girl’s already-shriveled lungs of air in a single blow. A shudder rippled through Alison’s body at the impact on her already bruised ribs as she choked for oxygen. “Get the fucking cage.”

            “Okay,” Anna said. Her body held still as stone while her daughter received her ninetieth punch to the gut of this long night. Her hands appeared out from behind her back again, causing Ashley to brace back against the soft terrain on her haunches, eyes wild with anticipation for assault.

            “Get it NOW.”

            Anna nodded and turned toward the door, delicately landing each step such that the ottoman wasn’t rattled, no sudden movements made to startle her trigger-happy niece. She disappeared into the bedroom.

            “This is going fucking great,” Ashley huffed with almost sexual joy into Tony’s ear. She prodded her knee into Alison’s stomach again, but seemed satisfied enough with the effectiveness of the plan to stave off another demonstrative attack on her already considerably plum-speckled body. A euphoric grin spread Ashley’s cheeks wide, and even Tony found himself bearing an involuntary exhalation and a relieved smirk he couldn’t quite shake.

            They were closer than ever. It had never been so real except in dreams, up to now.

            Tony scooped Alison’s prone body up into his arms, cradling her close to his chest. Their breathing synced together. The hamster cage set down on the platform, its grated gate opened up with an unsettling creak. Anna’s fingers separated from the carrier handle atop the structure as she backed away, at Ashley’s barked instruction.

            Confident in their security, the four-inch pair clambered into the cage and huddled at the center, shielding their prize from any prying thumbs that might emerge from the shadows. As predicted, though, Anna’s palm only returned to close back around the handle.

            “Just fucking watch yourself,” Ashley crowed as Anna collected her keys and purse back over her shoulder. “Remember, there’s two pairs of eyes on you right now. If you try something I don’t like, then there goes cute lil’ cousin Ali. Just like that.”

            “I understand,” Anna responded robotically. She folded a dark cloth towel over her wrist. “I’m going to cover you up until we’re in the car, all right?”

            “Just hurry up.”

            The cage lifted up, the towel fluttered down, and they were off at a stately pace. Tony nodded, proud of his girlfriend for mostly-keeping her unbridled rage in check, at least in the ways that counted. With a free hand, he grasped her arm, giving her a reassuring squeeze.

            “What are you doing?” Ashley hissed at him. She jostled his knuckle away and crept forward on her haunches toward the wall as the towel concealed the shrunken inhabitants of the hamster home. “Keep both hands on her. On her.”

            “Right, babe. Sorry,” Tony sputtered, easing the heel of his hand against Alison’s chin, though with decidedly less force than when Ashley was watching over his shoulder. He was even careful, he realized after a minute of the journey downstairs to Anna’s rundown vehicle, not to place his fingers over Alison’s bruises. Why this was, he couldn’t begin to say, other than realizing he must’ve been feeling a very particular type of kinship with combat veterans who’d lost limbs.

            “Hold tight,” Anna said, setting the cage into the passenger seat and casting the towel aside. The key twisted in the ignition, the engine only chugging at first, but a second crank brought it to life.

            “How long will it take?” Ashley demanded.

            “Two hours at least.”

            “That’s not how long it takes,” the girl snapped, her voice instantly harried. Her bones shivered through her arms. Her tiny eyes were jaundiced with paranoia. “What the fuck are you planning, huh?”

            “It will take that long if I have to drive slower. To make sure you three are safe.”

            “Oh, yeah, I’m sure you’re real concerned about us, aren’t you? Don’t fucking lie to me just because you know you’re about to lose.”

            “I’m not concerned, dear. You know that,” Anna said with quicksilver cool. “I’ve told you before I won’t lie to you, and I still won’t. But you won’t be hurting my daughter any more than you already have. And neither will I.” Her eyes locked to the road ahead.

            “We’ll see about that,” Ashley vowed under her ragged breath, fingers steepling together in near-religious reverence. She wrapped both arms back around Tony’s shoulders for support as the car lurched into the twilight promise of impending liberty, in all its animal glories.

Raindrops splattered across the windshield as Anna roared down the dusky highway, the precipitation seemingly turning to hail on contact with the earth. The tires clattered in whisper over the ice-pebbled road, nearly empty of other vehicles as the evening turned to night. Gravel on wheels was the only source of conversation, as inside Anna’s car, no one had spoken in at least half an hour.

            “Slow down,” Ashley barked suddenly from the wide-rimmed cardboard box deposited in the adjacent passenger seat. Her tiny voice carried with plenty of force up to her aunt’s ears, despite the owner’s four-inch frame. She snuggled nearer to Tony, while tightening her grip around Alison’s forearms. “Now.”

            “I thought you wanted to get there as soon as possible, hon,” Anna remarked, devoid of emotion. She glanced to the secondhand GPS guiding them to the home of George and Tamara Yeager.

            “Yeah, and we also want to get there without you fucking killing all of us with your car. I know you’re thinking about it. I know you. So just know that I’m also thinking about snapping your little girl’s vertebrae. ‘Kay?” the venomous twenty-year-old spat, instantly cursing herself for her rhymed threat, but ultimately deciding it was best to leave it be.

            “Understood,” Anna responded.

            Her petulant niece experienced another miniature burst of adrenaline and quasi-arousal from the sheer, unmitigated joy of finally holding the power to order around the woman who’d murdered her parents. Ashley was only disappointed that she still had yet to detect a single note of fear in her aunt’s voice.

            Alison was in a similar emotional position, albeit a hazier one, as she was primarily concentrated on stringing one breath to the next. She hadn’t bothered thinking too far ahead of the present moment. But still she wondered. Why hadn’t her mother reacted yet?

            After all, the teen was propped across Tony’s knee with her older cousin’s white-hot fists wrapped around her wrists, her battered back and bruised limbs in central snapping stance if her two captors saw fit to do so. Frankly, she was shocked to have made it this far without blacking out, but what puzzled her even more profoundly was her mother’s lack of an answer to all of this.

            As much as Alison trusted her mother with implicit, unflinching loyalty, just as she had all these years when all they had in the world to lean on was each other, it was hard not to wish for some sign of life from the woman. Currently, the eighteen-year-old, newly shrunken to a mere two inches in height, was sporting a variety of cuts and spots along most of her body, only some of which had begun the slow healing process, courtesy of the overzealous Ashley. More than anything, Alison wanted to embrace her mother, or probably more likely now, her mother’s thumb, and know that everything was going to be all right.

            But there was nothing about their current standing to suggest anything was going to be all right. Best case scenario, Anna went to prison, and Ashley was whisked off and donated to science. And that was the best case scenario. The worse cases, in all likelihood, involved some combination of mother and daughter maimed or dead by the end of the evening.

            Tony, for his part, wore a stoic and solemn expression in the darkness of the box as he did his duty, holding Alison fast to his thigh for security against the giant woman with whom they were cautiously negotiating a release. He only allowed himself the luxury of blinking while staring up at Anna’s towering person when his eyes were so dry they stung for a break.

            Still, he had the good grace not to squeeze too tightly on their hostage, only keeping her secure to his body. It was a comfort, even if only a small one, for Alison, who was prone to wincing now from just about any angle she was touched, after the beating she’d received.

            Anna’s index finger flicked, and the turn signal chirped as the car veered gently onto the highway exit.

            “How close are we?” Ashley demanded after another bout of uneasy silence. She wrapped an arm around Alison’s throat, stopping just short of applying choking pressure around the girl’s windpipe. “How close?”

            “Close,” Anna said without taking her eyes from the road. “Five miles.”

            “I don’t care how far, that doesn’t mean anything to me, when I can’t see it,” Ashley growled. “Don’t fuck with me, bitch.”

            “I didn’t mean to,” Anna insisted, offering only the minimal amount of resistance in her tone to demonstrate she wasn’t being sarcastic. “Less than ten minutes.”

            “Say you’re sorry.”
            “I’m sorry.”

            “Say it again like you mean it.”

            “I’m very sorry for fucking with you, Ashley,” Anna corrected.

            “That’ll do for now. But I want to see some good fucking begging when we get there. Do you hear me? Begging,” Ashley slurred, clearing her throat. “So just be thinking about that, if you want your itsy bitsy baby girl to have any kind of chance of living.”

            “Well, you can’t say that wasn’t a successful night,” George Yeager beamed, stripping his rain-dampened coat off as he and Tamara stepped back into the regal foyer of their home.

            “You always say that,” Tamara chuckled.

            “What?”

            “You can’t say it wasn’t… whatever it was, a good night,” Tamara said. “You never just say “that was a successful night.”

            “Are you asking me to change it? I’d never noticed I say that before,” George said. He smirked.

            “Not at all. It’s just a George-quirk I’ve come to take notice of.” She folded her own coat over her arm and leaned up for a kiss on his cheek as he reached for the closet door handle.

            The man pulled his wife in close, his hand a few inches from snaking beneath the fabric of her dress along her back. Tamara was already reaching around her husband’s hip.

            “Get a room!” Brett yelled out from his bedroom at the top of the stairs, just beyond the reach of the art-deco railing. He slid the door shut with an extended leg in time for his room to erupt with the bone-marrow-penetrating sound of dubstepped electronic.

            George and Tamara balanced foreheads together, breaking into collective snickering, as each retracted their PG-13 groping. Ironically, their son’s suggestion was probably what was called for if they didn’t want commentary from the peanut gallery.

            “Are they being weird again in public?” Josh yelled out to his older brother from down the hall, though his softer voice was hopelessly drowned out by the thundering boom of Brett’s chosen background music.

            “No, we most certainly were not,” George defended loudly, his answer just barely reaching his son’s ears. “Just celebrating a successful night at the shareholders’ dinner.” He looked expectantly to his wife with wide eyes for his intentional word choice, which Tamara answered with a joking thumbs up.

            “Brett, could you turn down the racket?” Tamara yelled, knowing there was no chance in the universe that the party-harder of her two teenage children would hear her. “We can’t feel ourselves thinking. Let alone hear it.”

            “I got it, I got it,” Josh said dutifully. He ambled along the carpeted upper balcony of the foyer, two different dog-eared books hooked under each arm. Rapping a fist on his brother’s door several times in quick succession, the music receded down several postal codes of volume.

            “Thank you, dear,” Tamara said.
            “Much obliged, son,” George grumbled, dramatically spinning his pinky along his ear canal, almost certain his elder son’s music choices would deafen him well before he turned fifty.

            “So it was a good night?” Josh questioned pleasantly, leaning against the railing. A goofy braces-gleaming grin followed.

            “As a matter of fact, it was,” George said. “

            “Did you guys see the creepy thing on the news earlier?” Josh asked. “About the brother and sister? The… little dude?”

            “We did see something, didn’t we?” Tamara said with a frown, struggling to conjure the unusual imagery of the newscast from earlier. For some reason, the name “Carly” had stuck in her mind, but not much else, other than the flash of old school photos of a boy and girl with similar facial features and the exact hue of dirty-blonde hair to link them as siblings. It was like something out of an odd dream.

            “Something or other, yes,” George chuckled. He tugged at his tie with a free thumb, loosening the collar’s hold on his neck until it came undone. “They’ll put just about anything on the news these days for ratings, Joshua, I tell you what, and almost none of it is actually true. It might as well be a fantasy channel. Trust me, if you want the real news, you’ve got to go find it on your own. Why, just the other day, I-”

            It was only then, after the volume of Brett’s music was begrudgingly reduced down to manageable bass levels, that both George and Tamara became curiously aware of the gentle droning of the doorbell just a few feet away. It tolled again after a moment of silence.

            “Who could that be at this hour?” Tamara asked. “And in this kind of weather, too?”

            “Real weird,” Josh said, bouncing down the stairs with his books still in hand. He paused at the base of the flight.

            “Was that the fricking doorbell?” Brett muttered sleepily, poking his head out his bedroom door and at last silencing his techno beats. The lanky teen hung a pair of top-dollar headphones around his neck, leaning out into the hall. “Some of us are trying to get things done up here, you know.”

            “Turn on the porch lights, would you, honey?” George requested. He took a few tentative steps away from his wife, releasing the gentle grip he’d maintained since they’d begun casually disrobing their rain-slopped clothes. His brow furrowed as he peeked through the damp ceiling-length glass beyond.

            The lights rose. Through the droplets dotting the window, George could almost instantly make out the face of the woman standing in the dim glow, clutching a shoe box to her stomach, a satchel slung over her shoulder. Easily as he’d recognized her, though, he couldn’t allow himself to believe it. At least not at first.

            “Who is it?” Josh asked.

            “I-” George croaked.

            “George?” Tamara added.

            “It… can’t be.”

            “Who the f… I mean, who the heck would come over this late? Aren’t you gonna tell them to get lost, Dad?” Brett commented slyly. He was creeping his way down the stairs now, clearly hoping for this particular outcome, for the entertainment value of it.

            “It’s just some lady,” Josh said, squinting as he pressed his nose to the window on the opposite side of the door. “Do you know her, Dad?”

            “Maybe we should just leave her alone,” Tamara suggested, slowly making her way toward the glass for her own view. “Give the neighborhood watch a call if she doesn’t go away in a minute. If you don’t recognize her, then-”

            Tamara’s jaw hung limp, quieting her just as handily as George lost his own voice. The pair stared out onto the porch, directly at the last woman to have seen Kevin, Helen, or Ashley Yeager alive, not to mention the poor girl’s boyfriend.

            “Open the door,” Tamara hissed. She was already fishing for her cell phone in her handbag’s pocket. “George, open the door.”

            Obliging in his half-zombie state, the man unlatched two locks and swung the door open.

            “Thank you,” Anna said coolly, an uncharacteristic smile on her lips. “I was beginning to think you hadn’t heard us.”

            “Us?” George uttered. Knowing where to begin addressing the woman was an impossible task, but luckily, she’d chosen to take the lead.

            “Yes, of course, us. I’ve brought you some guests who would really like to see you,” Anna said. She peered down into the box she’d been gripping with both hands just below the level of her chest. “Come see.”

            Lost in the eerie uncertainty of the moment, like something out of the Twilight Zone, both George and Tamara inched forward over the porchlit threshold of the front door to the chorus of the still-falling rain beyond the stoop overhang. Josh and Brett, now both at the bottom of the stairs, hung behind, unnerved by the prophetic sight of the woman each was only just beginning to remember. Tamara’s hand was wrapped around her phone, but she’d neglected the necessary level of consciousness to actually dial any number for support.

            They stood before Anna. Through tremendous effort, the couple tore their gazes away from the earnest brunette in order to gaze into her mystery box. It took nearly a half minute of silent staring for the vision alone to register for George and Tamara, let alone for them to produce a reaction. There, in the box, was their niece Ashley, huddled on her haunches by that boyfriend of hers, cradling a smaller girl: the younger, spitting image of Ashley. Of course, each figure was the size of a human finger, properly proportioned and animated, but nonetheless miniscule, smaller than anything either George or Tamara could’ve imagined.

            “What is it?” Josh called out anxiously. His voice was so distant in the ears of his two parents that he might as well have been standing down on the opposite street and speaking into a tin can. “Mom? Dad?”

            “Uncle George… Aunt Tamara… thank God. It’s me! It’s us,” Ashley sputtered. Her voice was cracked with ugly crying before she’d gotten out the second syllable. She stumbled as she rose from the unsteady ground of the box, managing to stand by the support of Tony’s shoulder. The young man remained with their living leverage coiled around his arms and legs.

            “What…” Tamara was hardly aware that the questioning word had come from her own mouth.

            “Please. Don’t you recognize us? It’s me. Ashley. And… and Tony. We… I don’t know what happened,” Ashley meandered. “Something happened to us. They… they did this to us. And Mom and Dad. They… they KILLED Mommy and Daddy.” Though she’d thought through how to deliver this bombshell beforehand, now that freedom was so near she could taste it, the speech wasn’t playing so coherently. Most of Ashley’s words had devolved into a state of half sobbing, half rage-screeching.

            “It’s us. Please. You’ve got to help us,” Tony piped up, realizing he’d have to take the wheel if concrete information was going to be made known to their saviors. He struggled to adjust the wounded Alison across his knee as he leaned forward, basking in the hopeful safety of the still-bewildered, enormous middle-aged faces above, gazing in at him and his beloved like they were an alien zoo exhibit. He swallowed, taking a steady breath, and noticed his heart was racing so fast his vision was on the verge of swimming.

            “Not…” George coughed. “Not possible.”

            “Yes it is. Please. Just listen,” Tony said, confidence swelling in his voice. “Two years ago, the four of us shrank in the house. We don’t know how. Then these two showed up, Alison and… her mom, and they… took us, and-”

            “FUCKING HELP US,” Ashley cut in with a wail, tears streaking down her red face. “We’ve got her. Help us put them in the fucking ground.”

            Tony nodded, pulling the girl into an embrace. She’d gotten the essential message across.

            George was struggling for air as he backed away by a step, reaching for his tie again to loosen it in a bid for oxygen, until he remembered he’d already removed it. Tamara, hand over her railing heart, followed. She looked to her husband, who looked back to her. Anonymous confusion and unfettered fear, like something from a waking night terror, greeted each in the pupils of the other.

            Tamara opened her mouth, maybe to speak, maybe to breathe. She would never be certain of which, and in the next instant, neither mattered.

            Anna’s grip on the box had shifted so invisibly, not even the passengers of the cardboard vessel had taken notice until one of the hands previously supporting its weight had arced over the side like a serpent. Ashley, split off from the other two, weeping and hacking with emotional release, only looked toward her dumbfounded relatives; Tony, in his effort to clarify for his scatter-brained lover, had allowed his guard to drop to previously unseen lows as only a single hand remained on Alison’s body.

            Quietly as shadow, Anna’s massive thumb and index finger swooped in around Tony, flicking him aside like stray dust and reclaiming her daughter in the same flash. Alison, though pained by the sudden pressure of the emergent flesh on either side of her bare body, rippled with euphoric goose bumps at the realization that her mother had her again. A warm palm closed protectively around her two-inch body: a tactile vow of eternal protection from here on.

            How could Alison have ever doubted?

            “TONY!” Ashley screamed. She nearly toppled over in effort to follow after her gently felled partner, scrambling on her hands and knees, her own fingers made slippery from wiped tears. Eyesight, as well, was clearly at a premium from all the moisture.

            Tony doubled over, merely stunned by the relatively kind-hearted defensive move he’d received from Anna’s digits when she could’ve just as easily shattered his skull to powder in the same twitch. His senses swirled now, making it unclear which way was up or down. He heard Ashley scream his name again, a raspy plea in the spinning haze of darkness and looming humanity, and then he was falling, slowly, delivered toward the earth with such angelic grace he couldn’t have been sure it was happening until he felt the thrust of the earth beneath his palms. Anna had placed their box on the ground.

            It was as though the entire population of the world had been reduced down to just these eight people, at least in Tony’s sight. He doubted another soul existed for at least a quarter mile around. More than enough for the apocalyptic happening he was drinking in but by no means digesting.

            George and Tamara, dwindling. Spun around toward the light of the foyer, and then they were gone. Tony didn’t have to see where. He knew, instinctively, that the couple had shrunk down much closer to his particular stratosphere of the planet. Just for confirmation, though, he had the sight from above of Anna’s bare hand extended into the house like an invading sorceress, her fingers clenched around an object concealed by silhouette.

            In nearly the same flash, the two boys in the front hall of the house vanished just as well, joining their parents and cousin in their shrunken state. Somehow, to Tony, it was almost inevitable. Just a transition of events as they were always going to proceed, from the very moment Alison had shrunk. He was anything but surprised.

            Only Anna stood at the size of a real human being now. With the certainty of one born to these unearthly acts, the widow bent down, recollected with one hand the box containing the miniature boy and girl who now held precisely zero bargaining chips to parlay for their lives, and cradled her abused daughter in the opposite hand.

            “Well,” Anna sighed with chilling relief, rolling her neck against her shoulders. Her dark, rain-combed hair draped in black cascades. “I do believe I’m in the mood for a good, old-fashioned, little family reunion. Anyone else feel the same?”

            The woman stepped back over the threshold, gifted the toy-sized Ashley with a simpering smirk of quiet, deific victory from on high, and shut the door softly behind her.