“So you see, Scott. It’s a difficult choice on both sides here. No one is happy about it, certainly not in the short term,” Judy explained as she stared down at her inch-tall, naked son standing in the center of her wide, pale palm. “But it’s come to this, unfortunately. I’m going to swallow you, honey.”

            Scott cocked his head at the looming visage of his enormous parent’s face above. He searched her countenance for any sign of trickery or vindictive joking: every laugh line, every crook of her lip, every flare of her nostrils. The young man knew this blonde queen of a mother’s every feature down to the atom, given how many times he was forced to look up at her from this size, and he understood the emotional science of her face and body.

            There was nothing in even an iota of a skin cell to suggest to Scott that this was a deception. Her lips, eyes, and voice were utterly, frighteningly genuine.

            “What are you talking about, Mom?”

            “This cycle we’re in, sweetie. That you perpetuated, and then I only allowed to continue by granting you chance after chance for growth, with no lasting consequence,” Judy explained delicately. Her palm rose higher, up from below her chin, and leveled off just in front of the plush, pink portal of her closed lips. A slow draft of warm air exhaled from her nostrils above.

            Scott shifted from one foot to the other upon the cushy terrain of his mother’s creased palm. He couldn’t be sure, but he sensed the clamminess and pulse thumps requisite to anxiety beneath her skin. Or was that his own nerves?

            “Cycle? Mom, I’ve done everything you ever ask of me while I’m like this! I’ve been your… puppet person in front of the cameras for your campaign,” Scott said.

            “The campaign, and the cause of everything I’m doing now and in the years to come, honey, is exactly why I’ve got to swallow you,” Judy explained, just in case he’d forgotten that little tidbit of information she dropped a minute sooner. “Scott, we’ve tried. We’ve played out every scenario now with you as the prime example of the Shrink Act and all its good, but it’s just not working any longer.”

            “W-What are you saying?”

            “I’m saying that you being here, beside me, throughout all of this political madness now, is harming the sanctity of the ultimate goal for everything I’ve done,” Judy said. With her free hand, she combed her fingers through golden strands of shoulder-length hair, clearing her line of sight to the nude boy in her palm. “All I’ve worked for in this country, brought down, because you have so much trouble simply following directions and allowing me to mold you back into a good citizen. Now how does that seem fair?”

            Fair? Where to even begin? Scott’s mind raced as his mother’s insane ramblings sounded more and more like a serious proposal on her part. As though this conclusion was real to her.

            “Like I said, I’m not pleased that we’ve reached this point,” Judy said. “Scott, darling, I love you. And will always love you, despite everything you’ve done to sabotage my good works. This is simply something that must happen now, for the betterment of the population. One young man, even one as close to me as you are, can’t be made to jeopardize an entire nation’s equilibrium. You must understand this.”

            As many crazy doctrines as he’d had shoved down his throat over the years regarding criminal regulation and forced size change, Scott was now hearing the looniest one yet. There was no point of precedence for addressing his towering titan of a mother, laying down her verdict with the authority of a judge, jury, and literal executioner.

            What could he even say now, short of asking whether he could re-awaken from this surreal unreality he’d accidentally found himself in? Because he certainly was ready for all of this to go away.

            “Just as a kindness to you, though, sweetie, I’m going to give you a few minutes to get used to the idea. I couldn’t bear to think I’d been cruel to you in such a difficult moment, regardless of how our relationship has evolved over the years. So I want you to look inside where you’re headed next.” Judy’s lips spread wide apart. Her white, glistening teeth and molars shone from stray light allowed into the dark cavern of her jaws. That red, ribbed muscle which Scott was only too grossly familiar with writhed at the base, then slathered itself along the roof of her mouth. One string of saliva dripped from above and plopped down upon her tongue.

            A shaky chill infected Scott’s bones. Sure, he’d seen and even been inside his giant mother’s mouth plenty of times before; yet, every experience prior had always ended with him being plucked, slimy and exhausted, from her cheeks and dried off for use another day.

            This was a different display. She was demonstrating his last resting place.

            Scott staggered down to his haunches, overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he was being told. It still wasn’t quite processing for him. How could it? He bowed his head down on the doughy altar of his mother’s immense palm. It occurred to him that, if in fact what she was suggesting actually took place, his meager-sized frame would offer, at a molecular level, strength and growth to the very proteins which comprised this hand.

            It wouldn’t be much, at his size of an inch tall, but he would be a contribution; he would be food for the woman who gave birth to him more than two decades before. His own stomach overturned. This was beyond nauseating to imagine. He coughed, then dryly retched.

            “Yes, that’s right, Scott. Just take a moment to collect yourself. I was patient with you all these years, and I can be patient one more time,” Judy said. Her words came in a warm, frothy whisper. The pad of her pinky finger alighted against Scott’s back, caressing as best she could given the clumsiness of her comparatively gigantic digit. “We’ll take several minutes, even, if that’s what you need to get past this. Just think of it as re-entering your original home, once again. Not quite the same starting point, of course, but a reunion. With me. Your mother, who loves you so dearly, in spite of your sins.”

Scott regarded his mother as one might regard a drunken gunslinger pointing a barrel to and fro.

            “Mom, you can’t… you can’t be actually, seriously considering this… there’s-”

            “Honey, I told you. This isn’t a consideration. This is going to happen. Please, accept it, for the both of us,” Judy said, then took a deep breath. “I’m going to put you inside my mouth, dear. Then I’m going to swallow you. After all these years you’ve had to change, nothing you say is going to change that today.”

            Scott’s shoulders trembled. He wasn’t sure if it was from emotional duress or simply his mother’s finger pressing down on his back, flattening his naked body into her palm.

            “And then you’re going to come down here, sweetie, see? Just like this,” Judy explained with all the grace and care of a human physiology teacher. With her free hand, she extended an index finger against her neck, and traced a line down her skin. That fateful digit followed along her esophagus, then between her breasts, and finally down toward her abdomen, where Scott would become entangled in her intestines and eventually the acid bath of her stomach.

            All the while, the woman’s palm holding Scott was cupped in steady descension. She wanted him to see, up close, the journey he was to take. When her smooth, immaculately manicured hand reached the soft bulge of her stomach, she draped her fingers under the hem of her sensible top and tugged upward. The gentle rise and fall of the wall of her flat, white belly above stretched before Scott with infinite promise and fear. An eerie rumble growled from inside: hungering for a snack. He would be in there, somewhere, and he was starting to believe it now.

            “M-Mom?” he stammered, his voice cracking. Water welled in his eyes. He even, God help him, wrapped his arms around the giant finger which still pressed to his back, and embraced her. “Mommy?”

            “Oh, thank you, sweetie. It makes me feel so happy to hear you call me that one last time before you go,” Judy said. She closed her eyes, etching a grateful smile into her lips. “I’m going to remember the sound of your little voice calling out to me. It will help me keep hold of the good times, I think, few and far between as they were for us the last few bumpy years.”

            “Mom, don’t… don’t do this,” Scott uttered as her palm began to rise again toward her chin, faster this time. He clung tightly to her finger and commenced his hail mary. “I’m… God, I’m begging you, okay? What else do I need to say? I… I can change however I have to, however I haven’t changed yet. I’ll be whatever you want me to be. Look, I don’t ever have to leave the house again, okay? Never! I can… I can just be here, down… d-down in your shoes, if that’s where you w-want me? Under your foot… forever… if that’s what it t-takes.”

            “I appreciate the sincerity. I truly do, honey,” Judy said as she brought her palm again before the flushed entrance to her mouth. “Now, try to just relax. This will go easier if you just let nature take its course. I won’t make it happen immediately. You’ll have a minute to get used to this again, inside, before you go all the way down.”

            “NO! Mom, PLEASE!”

            “Good-bye, my love,” Judy whispered with authentic emotion cracked in her voice. “I promise. No more time-outs again for you after this one.” She shut her eyes, puckered her lips, and pressed them into her tiny naked son. Instantly he was pinned down into her palm by the kissing suction of her clenched lips. Then she began to slurp.

            It didn’t take much force. Between the lubricant of leaked spit and Scott’s feather-weight body, he was dragged up and over her lip and teeth like a wet gummy worm. Her tongue curled at his back, ensuring there would be no wrestling toward the entrance. The boy splashed down into the swampy pond of hot saliva inside, and then he was sealed into the blackness.

            A murmur of finality vibrated the ovular walls of the wet prison.

            Air and light were at an absolute premium, as always in this punishment. But hyperventilation was making it even tougher to claw breath into Scott’s lungs. There would be no coming out. Scott couldn’t see the hands in front of his face, nor could he take more than a single breath without feeling like he was inhaling his secondhand oxygen directly down from his mother’s warm, gurgling throat. In fact, that was exactly the situation.

            As the humidity and saliva-fog seeped over his skin, Scott rolled over in the muck beside his mother’s monstrous tongue. The atmosphere was redolent of the starchy green salad Judy ate for lunch in her office, lifelike and verdant, yet filtered through the hollowing tunnel of the woman’s gooey gullet. Every breath was akin to receiving constant mouth-to-mouth resuscitation from his mother, even though she was currently committing the exact opposite of a rescue.

            Tough as it was to distinguish amidst the darkness and moisture, Scott realized he was crying. And hard. Tears streamed heavy down his cheeks and neck. It was a pathetic shame for him to realize he was going to die, weeping, afraid and alone in the dark, like the little pansy his mother had transformed him into.

            Judy’s tongue was gentler than in its usual forceful play, perhaps as a last gift to her soon-to-be-eaten son; that still didn’t excuse Scott from being overtaken by it, though. After no more than a minute of being allowed to lie sideways in the puddle of saliva pooled around the rim of Judy’s jowls, Scott found himself colliding stickily with her tongue. The woman’s mighty red muscle grappled for purchase over his bare form, squishing him up against her cheek for leverage, until he flopped easily for collection upon the scoop-shape of her ravenous organ.

            Scott was clamped into the tube of his mother’s giant tongue. Her taste buds pulsed and buzzed, as always, by the default of feeling fresh, edible material squeezed into her tongue. Except, on this particular occasion, the digestive enzymes currently beginning work on Scott’s skin were actually required. Because this was the beginning of the end now. The start of the track which would eventually integrate Scott back into the massive five-foot-eleven titaness who birthed him, shrunk him, spent ten years entrapping him inside her shoes, and then finally tucked him into her throat for good.

            Another gurgle echoed back from Judy’s esophagus. The sound was impatient, eager for the new recruit to slide down into the void beyond. Almost welcoming.

            Tears continued to drip in miniscule volumes down his face, only to be summarily lapped up by Judy’s ever-swishing tongue as it polished his naked body. Though she’d never know it, the woman was receiving the added hydration and refreshment of her oldest son’s actual tears.

            Her tongue coiled back around him in that ever-familiar serpentine pattern he’d come to know so well. It was lifting, tipping, and revolving between one cheek and the other. The hollow orb of her mouth constricted. Saliva drained in a sluice through the tipping angle of her writhing pink muscle, washing past Scott from every conceivable point. He couldn’t even say for sure at this instant whether he was pointed up or down. Gravity was rendered pointless inside his mother’s doom-bringing mouth; there was only her control in here, just as there was everywhere outside this place.

            Only here, it was made elementally clear just how out of control Scott was of his own body, mind, and spirit. This entire conversation dealing him a death sentence in Judy’s stomach had proceeded just as she’d planned it. Hell, she’d probably timed it down to the second, and he was simply a player in her plot to go down the hatch and out of her master scheme. His words and pleas were just as useless as his meager strength compared to the pushing power of even one of Judy’s maternal fingertips.

            Scott made no attempt to combat Judy’s gently swaying tongue, nor did he intend to do so at all as his arms and legs were pinned to his sides. There was no possible purpose in resistance. So just this once, even as he was about to be swallowed alive, the boy decided to whole-heartedly adopt his parent’s advice without irony. He was going to relax now.

            The usual dance proceeded, even though both mother and son knew the finale would be entirely different. Judy pinched her boy between her cheeks and commenced sucking on him like a lifesaver, completed by looping his flimsy body into a curve and jamming her tongue tip into the opening. Head over heels, Scott was sponged by centrifugal force against the cheek walls. He was trade from one buoyant side to the other, with the meaty mass of his mother’s tongue berating his form on every pass. Still he remained limp as a martyr.

            Judy was gathering saliva now. Ordinarily, once too much had filled in the moat in front of her teeth and beneath her tongue, the woman would carefully pin her shrunken son to the roof of her mouth for safety, then drain the sopping space down her throat with one gulp. She did no such thing now; it was obvious to Scott now she intended to swallow him without additional beverage aid beyond her own spit.

            True to her word, at least, Judy granted her son several more minutes of adjustment period, even while such a period wasn’t going to make the difference in his acceptance process. If anything, at this point, Scott had shrugged off his existence, and pondered why his mother didn’t simply get it over with and pull him straight down into her throat.

            She’d evidently grown bored of sucking on him one last time and taken to using his body instead to run the length of her teeth. Tucking him behind a molar like a patch of tobacco, Judy guided the boy through the slender aisle of fleshy gums, using her tongue to push him. Grit and grime speckled Scott’s back as he was used to floss along his mom’s bottom row of teeth, and then next the top, with the same artful control. Dizzy was no longer merely a sensation for Scott, but a state of being, in lieu of sight or sound aside from churning saliva.

            All the prior nausea and shock of his mother’s grim decision had clogged in his skull now, rendering him just a tiny object floating in the space of his mother’s mouth, bathed and battered in her juices and abandoned like a maraschino cherry for a one-time sweet consumption, never to be thought of again. He just “was” now, and he could feel the climax arriving fast as the collected aquarium of succulent, oozing saliva folded in on Scott’s body. Judy’s head was tipping back.

            The next sensations were novel for Scott, which he had to at least grant credit for, after so many years of being stuffed into shoes that he knew the routine by heart. His legs were gripped first in the tract of her throat, her uvula dangling and bobbing as she repressed a gag reflex. For a brief, near-comical instant, he felt his mother’s esophagus entrance rejecting him: her body involuntarily trying to save him, and her, by pushing him back out so Judy wouldn’t choke.

            But then again, his mother had always been a mind over matter sort of woman. And in that spirit, on the next attempted gulp, Scott’s entire inch-long body was absorbed with one go into the tunnel. He heard the rounded echo of her hard gulp.

            Breath, already-nonexistent before, didn’t exist in here. Scott felt his ribs closing in on him, his skin running numb with an odd cold, despite the squeezing, squishing proximity of Judy’s throat. He was nothing if not peaceful as he succumbed to the darkness of his mother’s body.

            Judy sat at her office desk, gazing out the window in a momentarily conflicted reverie. She collected a single dab of moisture from beneath her eyelid: the solitary symbol of her depression at this necessary act. In spite of herself, she managed a hopeful smile.

            “This is for the best, sweetie,” the woman sighed contentedly, recharged and renewed in the righteousness of her decision. Her hand caressed over her bare stomach. She wondered if he could hear her now. “You’ll see.”

“Okay, Mom. The joke’s super funny, but I’m not laughing anymore,” Maggie Stevens announced. She stood, arms crossed and heel tapping impatiently, naked at a single inch tall on the frilly carpeted floor. The teenage soccer star was just about on her last nerve.

            The shrunken girl glared with renewed vigor as a bare foot the size of a city bus crashed lovingly into the floor a stone’s throw away. Boulder-like toes writhing at the carpet, purple-painted nails flared with refracted sunlight, the pale sole flattened into the carpet.

            Judy Stevens, in all her five-foot-eleven glory, rested her chin on regal fingers as she gazed down at her tiny daughter down on the ground. The woman sighed from the throne of her office chair. And if it wasn’t conveyed yet by the mere fact she’d shrunken her daughter, her favorite child, with the PMRD, it was clear in her posture that Judy was unhappy. Disappointed, in fact. Which was even worse.

            “I’m not laughing, either, sweetie,” Judy replied. “But then maybe you shouldn’t have been following your older brother’s example and sampling beverages not meant for children. Then neither of us would be disappointed.”

            “How did you even know about-”

            “I have my ways, dear. I think you know that.” Judy’s hands crested over the smooth hillock of her knees, her fingers drumming on her shins. She stretched forward, digits spread apart to pick Maggie up.

            “But this is what you do to the boys, Mom. Not me!” Maggie protested. She winced as her mother’s spiral-printed thumbpad and forefinger surrounded her. “C’mon, it’s me! I thought you were… you know, cool with me having some fun so long as nothing bad happened.”

            “That’s the problem,” Judy said. “All bad things start out as someone just having fun and refusing to think about the future consequences.” Gingerly, she pinched her two fingers together and plucked her puny, nude daughter from the floor. The ascent was slow such that the girl’s head wasn’t left to spin, but it wasn’t exactly gentle, either.

            “Erghhh! Jesus, Mom. Okay, what do you want? I’ll even say I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Happy?”

            “Not yet,” Judy admitted. Her hand cupped just below her chin, where she deposited her middle child into a sprawled genuflection. “But I will be soon, I think.”
            “What the crap does that mean?” Maggie tried not to let the trembling in her knees show. She wasn’t scared of her mother, nor of just about anything on planet Earth, but even she wasn’t above feeling intimidated. Warm air steamed from Judy’s pursed lips just above and wafted down in a fog.

            “It’s like I tell Scott, honey,” Judy continued. “You commit a wrong, and it takes an opposite right to put things back where they belong.”

            “Huh?”

            “You obviously weren’t concerned with what you put inside your mouth,” Judy said. She exhaled slowly. Her pink-flushed lips puffed from inside. “So I’ll demonstrate for you a great deal of concern for what I put in my mouth.”

            “You’re kidding me, right?” Maggie gawked with revulsion. “This is just to scare me straight or whatever? Mom, honest to God, I will not drink another sip of booze until I’m twenty-one.”

            “I know you won’t, my darling,” Judy informed her daughter. “Especially after this, right now.”

            Instinctively, Maggie crawled backward in the broad plain of her mother’s peachy palm. Not that it could’ve made any difference to avoid what was coming. Judy’s lips creased and unfurled. In a fresh billow of steam, the mammoth muscle of the woman’s tongue, seething with glistening saliva, crossed the pink border. It pressed against the heel of her hand, licked forward, and clobbered Maggie beneath its dripping weight.

            The inch-tall girl ripped loose a scream of utter disgust. The roiling weight of her mother’s living organ shifted and squeezed all around her. Taste buds like suction cups plastered to every square inch of her exposed body. In a flash she was sticky with strings of thick saliva. In another flash, Maggie realized she was rising. Her body weight surrendered to the easy pull of Judy’s tongue.

            No. No, no, NO. There was no way this was actually happening. To her.

            Maggie quaked partially with nausea at all of this slimy contact, but mostly in righteous fury. This was not how things worked in this house. Her brother Scott was supposed to be the misbehaved one who always caught Judy’s wrath from all the combined tensions of the household and political business. Her brother was the scapegoat. The criminal. The toy. The one she and her mother could bond over by laughing as he was plopped in the tip of a shoe and forced to watch his giant family’s titanic toes barreling inside.

            Did that bond mean nothing to her mother?

            Judy’s tongue lapped away from her palm, with her miniature naked daughter adhered to the rubbery tip. She slurped both tongue and brat over her teeth, and next thing Maggie knew, she was lying face-up on her mother’s hot, worming muscle and staring up at the ribbed palate above. What tainted light made its way inside glinted sickly off Judy’s back molars and undulating cheeks like the interior of an underwater cave.

            The air was hot and humid, flavored of tangerine, mouthwash, and ghostly morning breath. However, the breathing conditions were the least of Maggie’s problems. She watched, in bitter disbelief, her mother’s lips approaching from above and below to meet. A crystal rope of saliva hung at the corner of the giant woman’s lips: an automatic response to feeling the insignificant but potentially edible weight of an object inside her jaws.

            “MOM!” Maggie screeched. She lunged forward on the slippery pad of the tongue, but was halted as the red muscle curled upward, squishing her in the face and matting the shrunken blonde’s hair in damp, haphazard strands. “DON’T!”

            Either Judy didn’t hear or simply didn’t care for the poor manners of speaking with one’s mouth full, though, because the woman’s lips finally smacked together with moist satisfaction. Maggie was completely marooned in the pitch-dark of her mother’s warm, slimy mouth. The girl held her hand up in front of her face, determined she couldn’t see it, and slid it on her neck just to confirm her senses still worked. Of course, she only came away with a fresh caking of spit down her chest, so she quickly abandoned that method.

            Long before the hapless shrunken teen could begin either a hopeless escape plan or impassioned rhetoric, Judy’s mouth set to work. The broad slab of the tongue ascended, with Maggie still centered, and pinned her to the roof of the woman’s mouth. Next she was squeezed sideways into the spongy wall of her mother’s cheek. She couldn’t hold still for long enough to attempt a foothold anywhere against tooth or tongue.

            “Mom! Mom, stop. Please!” the girl squealed. As if her voice could be heard at all.

            Judy’s mouth compressed like a deflating weather balloon. From cheek to cheek, Maggie was traded, face-planting into the soppy curvature. Her nose, lips, and eyes stung with the inescapable flood of hungry saliva. Her arms flailed and her legs kicked desperately for purchase, but on each casual bounce, only Judy was in control. The muscular peak of her tongue aided in the swishing, pressing itself to her daughter’s back on every repetition.

            This blind torment carried on for several cheerful minutes. Just when Maggie thought it was over, she was collected into the soupy surface of her mother’s tongue again and splashed like a pancake into the cheek wall. Variety of the worst kind.

            After a while this pattern was getting dull, though, at least to Maggie, who was used to some physical tribulation from punishing soccer league drills. Almost on cue, Judy shifted the gentle bouncing from cheek to cheek. Instead, the giant mother’s mouth converged on her tiny prisoner. The walls of those cheeks closed in, air compressed from the space.

            Maggie found herself tubed into the grip of her parent’s monstrous tongue at the center. Its swampy, unrelenting mass pulsed from the contact with her body. Tasting her, probably, the digestive enzymes beginning their work at a molecular level. Fresh spit seeped from every pink skin cell, the woman’s mouth evidently accommodating of its potential morsel. To think of these middle school science lessons now repulsed the girl all the greater. Even greater than the sickening sensation of her nethers being smothered by her own mother’s mouth on all sides; this was a revelation Maggie had to force to the side of her thoughts or face breakdown.

            However, physically resistance in loathing of the balmy citrus air and viscous terrain was all but impossible. Maggie attempted thrashing at one point, flinging her legs every which way, but she was firmly burritoed by her mother’s lashing muscle. She even tried screaming, if only to catch her mother off guard. This only succeeded in filling the base of Maggie’s lips beneath her tongue with a generous blob of foreign saliva. She wouldn’t be making that mistake twice.

            In the intervening seconds, Maggie found she was mostly left alone. Strapped into the tubed tongue, her actions mattered little, but at least she wasn’t being thrown around any longer. Her mother’s cheeks squelched as they sponged to and fro, in bizarre imitation of octopi suction cups. It was then the girl realized what was happening as her skin was plastered once again to the walls of riveted taste bites, only to be released again at the undulation of those cheeks.

            She was being sucked on. Judy was sucking on her daughter’s inch-tall body like a mint.

            “Oh, Mom!” Maggie groaned. “That’s so effing gross!” She instantly regretted speaking up again, and as she spat out another mouthful of goo, she only shook her head. This was all going so wrong. None of this was proceeding how she recognized it, and had recognized it, for all these years with access to a size-changing ray in the house. This was what happened to Scott. Scott, not her.

            All Maggie could think of now throughout this entire disorienting trip of a punishment was how satisfying it was going to be later when she found an excuse to do the same to Scott. Even as the girl was squeezed between the pair of cheeks and redeposited on Judy’s tongue, spit-clogged hair matted to her face, she pressed her tongue to the roof of her own mouth.

            She imagined her pathetic, inch-tall criminal of a sibling, the boy she’d been given the legal right to abuse for his wrongs. She imagined him hugged to the roof of her mouth and swished in her mounting saliva. She imagined him moaning for release, his little limbs fighting against the rows of her teeth and tonsils.

            Despite the disgust of her current surroundings, Maggie managed the unlikeliest of smirks in the dark. God, it would be sweet to turn the tables. It was only unfortunate she couldn’t enact the same payback on Judy, but beggars couldn’t be choosers, or rather: Maggie didn’t get to pick the hierarchy of the shrinking device. She just got to use it to her heart’s content on her hapless older brother.

            Judy’s tongue exercises came to a startling halt as light and fresh oxygen flooded back inside the cave. A murmur of relaxed elation bubbled up from Judy’s gullet. The giant disciplinarian extended her tongue past her teeth, with her daughter sprawled upon it.

            Maggie was so thoroughly coated from every angle in the plasma of her mother’s saliva, that her body was glued to the rubbery muscle on contact with cool air. A thumb and forefinger fastened themselves with practiced grace around the girl’s shapely hips. Judy pried her daughter away from her tongue, stretching a seemingly endless strand of spit from Maggie’s thighs down to the serpentine organ inside Judy’s jowls. At last the sticky string came disconnected. The senatorial hopeful held her beloved prize out before her own enormous sea-blue eyes.

            “Now, I suppose we’ve learned a little lesson now, haven’t we, sweetie?” Judy questioned with the lilting promise of a stern schoolteacher.

            “Ooog,” Maggie said. She wiped her knuckles over her lips and coughed.

            “Yes, I suppose we have,” Judy answered for herself. “Think you’ll be testing out any more adult behaviors in your free time again?”

            “I kinda said before… I mean-” Maggie corrected bitterly. The last thing she needed right now was to inherit her stupid brother’s lack of common sense and bark back at this woman who had the power to put her anywhere she desired. “-I mean no. I won’t be drinking anymore, Mom. I promise.”

            “I’m so pleased to hear that, Margaret,” Judy declared. “Now, if you like, go ahead and shake out your arms and take a deep breath. Make it count. I’m sure this next part will prove… a little challenging, as well. But nothing you can’t handle, I’m sure.”

            “Next p… Mom!”

            “I’m sorry, dear, I truly am,” Judy admitted. She sunk back in her chair and propped one broad bare foot over her knee. “But we have rules in this house. And I don’t bend them an inch for anyone. Even my favorite daughter.”

            Judy’s size-twelve appendage flexed and scrunched its meaty width, the buttery wrinkles of her sole a particular threat in Maggie’s eyes as she was lowered down toward her mother’s lower leg. The girl shook her head, her body limp with aggravation and anticipatory perturbance.

            She still wasn’t afraid. She’d never be afraid. But that didn’t mean Maggie wasn’t thoroughly repelled in her every fiber as she was pressed face-first, snow-angel style into her mother’s expansive, warm-blooded sole. Judy’s thumb planted and twisted gently but firmly into the small of her inch-tall daughter’s back. The girl wasn’t going anywhere.

            “Now, I understand this lesson has little direct correlation with what you choose to imbibe, honey, but just work with me here,” Judy whispered in lullaby. “I know you’re such a fan of this particular form of punishment for your brother. Perhaps it would do you some good to experience it once in a while, as well, for perspective?”

            Maggie grunted. She endured the earthy aroma and doughy sole wrinkles caressing past her cheeks. And she swore up and down inside her heart that she would, indeed, remind herself of perspective, just as soon as she regained her full size, what it felt like to be the lording queen with a tiny family member molded to her plush instep.

            She smiled again, broader than ever.

Scott Stevens stretched toward the sky, or at least, toward waist-height of an average human being. To him, after several years of life at the size of a thumb, growth in the direction of even sub-normal was monumental by comparison. A flood of euphoria spread goose bumps liberally across his frame as he ascended in the warm glow of a PMRD’s emerald light within the Techilogic facility complex.

            In a break from the norm, the young man’s size change was not a private affair, as he stood amongst the new-age metal cathedral of this corporate kingdom. With a cluster of litigators present, some reporters, plus a couple Techilogic higher-ups for ceremonial purposes, and his family including Judy, Maggie, and Kyle Stevens, Scott was the center of attention. And for once, it wasn’t humiliating. He stared out at the people, restored to his full height of over six-foot, and couldn’t help but feel a welling up behind his eyes.

            “Feeling all right, Scott?” one of the techs asked on approach, clipboard in hand. “Any numbness, tingling?”

            “Nope,” he said. “All good.”

            “Excellent. Our scans read you in good health as well. If you experience any problems, of course, considering your reduction time was so long, you can just let your mother or anyone here know, and we’ll be happy to take care of you.”

            Scott nodded. He shared a passing glance with his encouraging siblings, and then his mother: the woman who’d spent the past ten years, and especially the last three, making his life a living, gum-smacking, toe-squishing, dignity-depriving hell.

            “Now, if everyone would like to follow us this way…” one of the Techilogic royals said, clapping her hands. “…we’ve got the main event of today’s little public reduction and rehabilitation prepared in the other chamber.”

            Raising an eyebrow, Scott dusted himself off and followed after the shuffling throng of people. It took at least a few steps to recalibrate his legs to taking normal-sized strides, which left the young man with sea legs. However, curiosity spurred him forward.

            His mother Judy, dressed to impress, complete with imposing executive top and skirt, granted him a wink and a proud smile. Then, without comment, she took up the lead of the small crowd amongst the Techilogic powerful. The rest of the techs, reporters, and lawyers filed after, leaving Scott and his two siblings to bring up the pack.

            “What are they talking about?” Scott whispered to his younger brother Kyle as they walked. The lack of understanding wasn’t a surprise, of course; he was used to being left out of the loop at his former three-inch height. “What’s the “main event?” Is somebody else re-growing too?”

            “No idea. She doesn’t tell me anything either,” Kyle muttered. He looked his brother up and down. “So how’s it feel?”

            “Like fucking drugs,” Scott joked, earning a snicker from his sibling. Not that this was much of a stretch.

            “I thought you were better off being little,” Maggie whispered. She walked a pair of fingertips up her brother’s shoulder, simulating his previously miniature limbs.

            Heart fluttering momentarily, Scott turned and looked down at his little blonde sister, with her smug smirk and expressive baby-blues. Just when he thought they’d come to have a peaceful rapport.

            “Only kidding, big bro,” she snorted. “Now I don’t have to carry you everywhere. God, that was annoying.”

            “No kidding,” Scott agreed with relief.

            The next chamber was considerably more cavernous than the high-tech physics lab where Scott was re-proportioned. Here, the group found themselves in what essentially amounted to an empty airline hangar, with walls stretching more than a dozen stories up. At the center of the ceiling was a beam device, which to Scott looked like something belonging to the base of a lunar rocket.

            “Yeah, that looks safe,” Kyle scoffed quietly.

            “What’s Mom doing?” Maggie whispered to her older brother, as if he’d know.

            Sure enough, Judy was marching out toward the epicenter of the room, alone. The clack of her high heels stabbing the steel earth echoed roundly about the hall. Hers was a confident, unflinching march. Wherever she was headed and whatever she was doing, she knew precisely what it was well ahead of everyone else.

            “Absolutely no idea,” Scott said back to her. “Why do they make this place so big?”

            “Ladies and gentlemen,” one of the Techilogic executives boomed. “We’re pleased that you’re here to witness the first official, permanent, legal alteration of personal size outside the R&R program. Be so kind as to stay back, behind the yellow line. The process is about to begin.”

            Process? Scott squinted, watching his mother half a football field away come to a stop at the center of the room and lie flat on the demarcated ground. The ceiling ray hummed and ebbed with a green ember. Then, when all the techs and reporters were clear of the line, the mounted device chugged and fired a quick pulse of its trademark emerald down to the floor, directly into Judy.

            In a stunted flash that passed in a matter of seconds even as Scott felt time had slowed to the lurch of crashing waves, Judy grew. Considerably. Her ample, bulging legs stretched to the furthest corners of the room; her gleaming crown of hair became a tangled cataract of gold; those hands reached for the stars. She had to be close to one hundred and fifty feet tall.

            The sight warranted a flurry of gasps and applause from the crowd of professionals. At back of the pack, however, Scott felt himself go brittle in the knees.

            This couldn’t be happening. There was no way, that on the day he finally grew back to his former size, that his mother, in all her calculated wisdom and political clout, had orchestrated herself to be grown to the size of an actual, breathing goddess. The universe simply couldn’t be so serendipitously vile. At her new size, by relative scale, Scott was right back to being three inches tall as far as his mother was concerned.

            “We have a successful run, ma’am!” one of the techs at the controls declared. More applause rang out, even a couple of hoots and hollers. A deep, sonorous murmur arose from the giant woman.

            Judy Stevens, ever the consummate face of aggressive societal change, pulled herself up with regal poise. The room rumbled under her delicately placed hands, fingernails scraping the floor for yards at a time. She pushed to her haunches and turned her gorgeous, billboard-ready face out to the public. Those razor-white pearly whites gleamed back at everyone with a hungry zeal.

            “Thank you very much, all of you, for being here for my little growth spurt,” Judy boomed. “I know this may come as a bit of a shock, to see me anew like this. Techilogic’s choice to reintroduce its growth science, beyond merely returning shrunken individuals to their former size, will be a controversial one. However, I believe there’s much to be gained in a controlled allowance of elite professionals and leaders gaining this height. I say that not because I see myself as above all of you, but because there’s much to be learned, and what’s more, much to be accomplished with these advancements into the future.”

            The crowd ate up Judy’s braying. Just like they always did when she formed herself a pulpit and molded her doctrine into that sugar-coated nonsense. Scott thought he might be ill after all.

            Journalists’ cameras were in a flashing frenzy. Questions from lawyers and reporters started piled with chattery abandon. Hands rose. But Scott, Kyle, and even Maggie retreated a few steps away from their gigantic parent. The giantess’ sky-blue gaze drifted over them in that maternal, omniscient way only she could manage. Her lip curled in a grave smile.

The back wall of the facility, evidently a makeshift ceiling-length retractable garage, ticked upward. Sunlight spilled inside, and with that exchange, Judy Stevens in her newly 150-foot glory was given access to the now-puny outside world.

            “Anyone is welcome to accompany me, at a safe distance, of course, outside for my orientation as the very first Sky-Class citizen in our midst,” Judy informed them. With that, she ascended almost to full height, but bowed her head before it could crash through the roof. Then, with fingertips alighting at the walls to guide her in the cramped space, she extended her foot outside into the concrete exterior, and then the rest of her massive form followed.

            The crowd, of course, followed their leader like a swarm of flies.

            “Unbelievable,” Scott uttered. He shambled in a trance toward the door far beyond.

            “I know,” Kyle said.

            “She said this is… like, a permanent thing?” Maggie asked.

            “I think so.”

            “What the hell?” Scott swore.

            Outside, Judy was able to stand at her full fifteen-story stature, and she was making the most of it. Her broad hands stretched far overhead; she was a marvel, standing there amongst the dollhouse-sized billion-dollar facility, with all the finger-sized populace at her feet. Just above the staggered industrial rooftops of Techilogic, Judy could make out the urban sprawl, unsuspecting of her newfound state, unless any of them happened to be watching the live feed from the reporters. Gently, she stooped down and removed her bus-sized high heels with their dizzying spikes and set them neatly aside in the grass beside the Techilogic complex wall.

            “Safety first, you know,” she informed them all, and was answered with polite chuckling.

            Scott observed his mother’s impressive giant pumps where they matted down the grass, just about the same size they usually were when he was inserted inside them. Now, by sheer cosmic convenience, on the very day he thought he’d rejoin ordinary life, he could now say with confidence he would always fit inside his mother’s shoes, no matter how short or tall he became.

            The young man next watched Judy’s mature, purple-painted toes squirm luxuriously in the grass. Flexing and curling. Terrain was ripped up in wide garden patches as she gripped the earth in her dexterous digits. When next her foot rose, there was a noticeable crater dipping more than six inches into the ground, in the distinct plump, ovular shape of her ped. It was a shape Scott was more than used to seeing whenever his mother laid him in one of her foam flip-flops for a little sunbathing, and he discovered the fossilized divet of the woman’s weight. Now, that same geometry was adopted by the very planet.

            His stomach overturned.

            “Jesus,” Kyle uttered. “Does this mean we don’t have to live with her now that she’s bigger than the house?”

            Scott stifled a painful smile. If only that were true. Somehow, though, he knew his mother would have other arrangements laid.

            “Wow,” Maggie said with some dreamy admiration. The girl’s fingers twirled in her blonde locks. “She’s… huge. Everyone in town must be able to see her.”

            “Now, where are my children?” Judy asked pleasantly of the crowd. “I want to be able to share this first exciting afternoon with them. And to show them a surprise I’ve had planned. Especially Scott, who I’m so proud of, after all his hard work earning back his size.”

            An adoring coo from the reporters rose at this loving response. That would make a terrific soundbite for Judy, as per usual. Scott, however, winced. He wrapped both of his younger siblings into an embrace, one under each arm, and stared with all the defiance he could muster up at the 150-foot leviathan who just happened to be their legal guardian.

            “Oh, there you are!” Judy declared happily as her spotlight-gaze struck her three offspring. She batted her eyes, brushed her bangs out of her line of sight, and bent down. The ground sunk again under the compressed strength of her soles. Both of her hands opened, fingers outstretched. For a moment it seemed she was going to simply snatch them all up, but instead, she deposited both palms up on the ground.

            “Climb aboard!” she instructed.

            Kyle and Maggie did so, one out of fear and one out of thrill, and each climbed into opposite platforms. However, Scott remained standing in place. He knew it was foolish, but in this moment, he just couldn’t bring himself to step forward and back into his mother’s hand without retching.

            Judy nodded, recognizing that look of rebellion in her oldest boy’s eyes, and lifted her hands back up without him. Her fingers caged protectively around his siblings as she brought them up to chest level, granting them a view better than they’d get from the top of a Ferris wheel.

            “It’s all right if you don’t want to ride up here, Scott, dear. But I do want you to come along. I have something to show you kids, remember. Why don’t you just grab hold of the chain, please?” She arched her heel up from the earth, indicating the silver-linked anklet jewelry at the top of her foot.

            Scott frowned. He didn’t know his mother to be a regular anklet-wearing person. Did she honestly put it on today anticipating this moment? He wouldn’t put it past her. Either way, from the imperiousness of that “please,” he understood there was no question.

            Sighing to himself, Scott stepped toward his mother’s enormous foot. He clambered over the row of contentedly resting toes, though not without a little bit of a bucking surprise from her flicking digits between his legs. Keeping his balance only just, though, he made the awkward hike up the incline slant of the woman’s foot. At the top, he looped his arm around the chain for grip, and braced himself.

            Just as was expected, Judy led a march around the spotless campus of the Techilogic facility, around the greenery, and out toward the parking lot which separated it from the city. Two children perched in the restrictive playpens of her palms, and the third dangled like extraneous jewelry from his mother’s bobbing anklet. Upon turning the corner, she laid her feet down with the same gentility as before, but her stride was becoming more self-assured. More like Judy, really, only much more of her.

            She plastered on a permanent smile, knowing just how many people could see her now, in all her plastic benevolence.

            However, with her attention diverted, Judy’s sole came crashing down upon a two-door sports car parked in the fire lane of Techilogic’s front curb. Scott opened his mouth to make a noise, then tightened his limbs in preparation for impact; however, the blow hardly registered as a vibration in his mother’s skin. The gleaming crimson-chrome car crunched like a flimsy soda can under the ball of her foot. By the time she’d noticed what was happening, the entire vehicle was already flattened to the ground in shorter order than a garbage compactor.

            “Whoops,” Judy whispered. She arched her foot, revealing twisted metal chunks clenched in the impregnable network of crisscrossing flesh wrinkles of her grassy sole. For a moment the car remained stuck to her skin, then plopped back down with in a gust of wind and a groan of gears.

            Scott gulped. He’d seen his mother accomplish some impressive physical feats, but at the end of the day, those were always put in the perspective of his current height. Optical illusions, really. But right now, he’d just witnessed his mother crush an actual human-scaled car under her naked foot with hardly a notice.

            No perspective necessary.

            “I suppose that’s one way to teach someone how not to use the fire lane, especially with the risk of emergency,” Judy said, reacting quickly. Mumbled agreement resounded from below. She scraped off the leftover car pieces in the grass and nudged the totaled vehicle with her big toe. Then, proceeding as though nothing had happened, Judy set off across the parking lot toward the nearest road bustling with life and business, with her cluster of supporters behind.

            Passerby on the street froze, many of them snapping photos of their own, and only a few backing away. Judy regarded them with a friendly, royal wave after she transferred Kyle over to the same hand as Maggie, freeing her up. The two siblings huddled together in her palm.

            Around the bend, Judy came to a stop in front of a half-demolished, condemned apartment building, shrouded in dust. The wrecking ball was already arcing back for another swing at the structure. However, Judy leaned down and caught the destructive black orb in her fist like a baseball.

            “Allow me, gentlemen,” she said, peering directly into the glass cab of the vehicle. Its driver, too befuddled, released his grip on the controls as Judy set the wrecking ball down in the dirt. Then, with that very same hand with which she so skillfully captured the sphere, the power-hungry politician balled her fingers into a mighty fist and punched directly through the foundations of the building.

            Those lingering brick walls, hardened over decades, and probably ready to withstand another several hours from the wrecking crew, collapsed like toothpicks. Judy withdrew her fist in a puff of smoke, which she waved away from her face, and then patted down the rubble to ensure it wasn’t going to slide into the street. The entire structure had been leveled with one blow.

            Scott, shocked by the destruction taking place so near to his home base of Judy’s foot, threw his hands over his face for protection, even as no part of the debris reached him. In that fumbling moment, he released his grip on the anklet chain and rolled down the loping hill of his mother’s ped.

            “Better watch yourself, Scott, if you want to convince me you belong back at this size, honey.”

            Just before he could topple into the street, Judy’s toes parted with expert practice and snagged her son’s arm in the fleshy crevice. Satisfied with the quick destruction of the doomed apartment, she rose back to full height and continued on with her stroll, apparently with no intention to allow Scott another chance at his perch. The young man was left at the graceful mercy of his mother’s firmly clamped toes around his numbing shoulder.

            “By the way, Maggie, sweetie?” Judy said into her hand. “This new form will only be available to a select few at first, but I’ve pulled some major strings. If you like, and it’s totally up to you, I may convince them to let you have the same privileges.”

            “Y-You mean…” the girl stammered.

            “Yes. You can be a big girl too, just like your mom.”

            “Oh my God,” Maggie gasped. “I… I just…”

            “I know, it’s a big decision, and you can absolutely have some time to think about it, dear. As I said, it’s not a done-deal yet, but I think we can-”

            “YES!” the girl squealed, hugging her parent’s giant fingers with suppressed ecstasy. “Yes, PLEASE, Mom! I want it! I want to be just like you!”

            Way down below, though he could only hear the muffled shrieks of excitement from his sister, Scott got all he needed to by listening in on Judy’s motherly pronouncement. And as nauseous as he was becoming being thrashed about from side to side in the vice of his mother’s restrictive toe valley, it made him all the sicker to imagine his sister, as well, regaining the height advantage over him he’d so briefly held this afternoon. Her shoes, too, would eternally be functioning prison cells for him at any size.

            He just couldn’t catch a break, it seemed. Maybe he never would again, judging by how this day was playing out so far. Scott felt his comparatively tiny fingers congealing in the flow of sticky, springtime sweat within the balmy crevice of his mother’s toes. Gluing him down, just in case the woman’s imprisoning grip on him loosened. There was no exit. Fitting, really.

            “But… M-Mom?” Kyle asked timidly.

            “Yes, hon?”

            “Where will we all live? Will… it just be Scott and I and… maybe Maggie, in the old house together, and you-”

            “Oh no, no, Kyle. Don’t be so silly. You think I’d abandon you kids to live alone, just because I can’t fit inside the walls right now? I suppose you’re forgetting we have superior science on our side with this one. Wait until you see the surprise I have waiting, just a little further,” Judy explained. She extended her free hand out, index finger pointing to the forest. With every lumbering, earth-shuddering footfall, she brought them nearer. “Just beyond the trees, there’s a healthy acreage Techilogic has generously gifted our family, simply for being the shining examples that we are. This is where we’ll make our new home. And not in that old dump of a place we used to stay, no-no. You just wait.”

            Scott’s arm peeled away from the iron-hold of his giant mother’s mammoth toes. Of course, it was only because she let him, via the flexing of her digits and a lithe flick of her ankle. He tumbled awkwardly onto his back in the densely shrubbed greenery, just beyond the pines. Above, his tremendous parent loomed overhead as she always did, and just about at the same comparative scale. Somehow, though, the framing of ancient woodland and the sky behind her made the distance seem all the greater. Like the woman was capable of scooping up the earth itself in her long reach and remolding it to her desires, just as she had her eldest son.

            “Get up, Scott,” she instructed softly. “We’re going to take the grand tour.”

            Crawling onto his belly, Scott watched helplessly as his mother’s foot ascended again. Her sole passed mere feet above his head, the rosy, grass-stained wrinkles dotted with brick grit and car chunks. The mass of her ped sunk into the earth just beyond, then, as she led the final constitutional toward the house.

            And what a house it was. Though to Judy, the state-of-the-art modern residence was a bit of a step down in raw square footage compared to her last quarters, the woman was also 150-feet-tall now. This new house was akin to multiple shipping warehouses stacked atop one another, yet with all the taste and décor intact of Judy’s prior standards. It looked like something grown out of a fairy tale, to see a house so magnanimous and fortress-like which now dwarfed the proud trees.

            Scott scrambled after them, even as his bones seemed to protest, aching in warning. He paused briefly, watching his mother arrive at the front door. For a shining moment she appeared normal and surmountable again in front of the towering house, until Scott caught a glimpse of a nearby oak so pitifully shorter than his mother, and the dream snapped.

            This was a veritable giant’s castle at the top of the clouds, except inside there would be no giant: only a giantess, quite possibly soon the daughter of the giantess, and their toy boys wandering around the endless halls and losing themselves to the reality-bending enforcement of Judy’s titanic will on society.

            “C’mon, Scott,” Judy bellowed out to her son across the field as she opened the pristine cream-white front door. “Come home now, please.”