With Brandon’s departure down the hallway, the house turned quiet.

I looked to the closed bedroom door with rising dread. The door handle was located tantalizingly some tens of feet out of my reach. And even if I could climb up there somehow, my puny pencil-thin arms were too weak to operate it or pull the door open.

This morning – so, so long ago – my biggest worry had been passing the Academy final. Now I was reduced to being thoughtlessly trapped inside a teenage girl’s bedroom. The change was crushing.

The only person who had the power to let me out of the room was sitting on the bed, twirling her foot lazily. As she meditated on what her dad had just said, her eyes wandered over and gave my unimpressive height a condescending examination.

What had happened to the warmth, the gently mocking Mid-Atlantic accent? She looked at me with distance greater than her stunning height, as if we'd only just met, and even the hint of a mischievous sneer. All because I told her I didn’t want to hang out? She had taken it to heart – deeply – and now wouldn’t let me forget it. Lesson: never stoke the spite of a teenage girl.

I took a deep breath, hugged my bare chest and tried to get my thoughts together. So I couldn’t escape, I couldn’t navigate the house on my own. And if I did, I wouldn’t get far down the street anyway.

Brandon seemed like a nice guy, how could he do this to me? Maybe he was too nice. So nice that he was right in his daughter’s lap. Parents could be the most blind to their kids’ indiscretions.

Sure, I’m reduced, I thought indignantly, but I’m not lesser. I was still a person, the exact same person as before.  All my Academy training was intact, if my height wasn’t. Still, my heart pounded in my chest from shock.

The bed creaked as Tori shifted.

From my vantage point on the carpet, the view made me breathless. A prodigious vision of precocious womanhood half-reclined on the bed like a Homeric siren on the rocks, unbearably irresistible and ominously dreadful at the same time.

The foot that was in the air now dropped onto the carpet with a muted crash. I flinched. She leaned forward and –her eyes on me the whole time—extended one finger to beckon me. Her lips smacked with a kissy noise.

It wasn’t an attempt at flirtation–not a deliberate one—but a gesture that resembled a girl trying to win the favor of a mistrustful puppy.

But I was smarter than a puppy to not fall for it. My feet remained rooted to the spot.

She showed no sign of offence. But snapped to her feet suddenly, towering over me like a stone golem.

Letting out a thin shriek, I jolted into action, attempting to run across the carpet, with no plan, no idea what I was doing. Under the bed was the most obvious choice, but she stood between me and the bed.

Pushing on madly, I found myself faced with blank walls bordering every side.

Cool air whisked at my back. I jumped around and surrendered to the most basic instinct left at my disposal; cowering as her grasping hand rained down and closed around my middle—pinning my arms to my sides, as Brandon had done—and hefting me into the air. It was not a comfortable or dignified way to be picked up.

“This time, you stay right where you are.”

I was awash in her warm breath that fanned against my cheeks as I was moved right up in front of her face. It was so unexpectedly degrading my chest quivered.

“Don’t act like you can’t understand me.” Her voice played my tiny ear drums like timpanis. She grinned. “Sure, your brain got reduced to the size of my thumb. Doesn’t mean you can pretend you have no idea what I’m saying!”

She pivoted on her feet, causing the bed to rotate back into view.

“I wanna see just how teeny you are!”

For the next several minutes there was a fervor of inexplicable activity as she went around the room collecting various sized objects in the bedroom and gleefully placing me or holding me against them, observing the size comparison. Anything on hand within reach was employed as a quick measuring tool just for the fun of it.

She stood me upon the wood surface of her titanic desk, snatching up a pencil and holding it upright against my side. One fingertip rested squarely on my forehead, keeping my head affixed to the pencil. Embarrassingly, the sharpened lead point went over my head. It was a standard 7.5 inch. I was only 6 high.

All my strength went into peeling myself away from the stick. A hair’s breadth from my eyes, the pencil shaft was dented with a couple of big chew marks. The moon-shaped dents suggested teeth the size of honeydew melons. On the upside, the way her soft lips broke out made me feel giddy inside. On the downside, her smile was provoked by my humiliating stature. That pulled me back down to earth.

Next, she stacked me up against her smartphone. This comparison didn’t offer much more than the pencil, being that her smartphone was pencil-length, but the width of the flat screened phone dwarfed my width at least twice fold.

Barely having time to process the phone, she then fished out an object from the wastepaper basket on her desk. An eaten apple core, 4 inches tall. It must have been eaten a while ago, the remaining chunks of apple pulp were stained brown. Without hesitation she pressed me up against it. I cringed at the stale apple aroma, and the feeling of the dry scratchy leftover pulp poking my skin. Seeing the chunks that had been ripped out of the apple gave me appreciation of the frightening power of the girl’s jaw.

You know my friend’s dad eats the core,” Tori said casually, either to me or maybe no one. “How weird is that?”

I wish she hadn’t said that. It was too visceral to imagine. People could fit cores in their mouths. And that meant people could fit me in their mouths, at least my head and chest. Nausea flashed through my system. Every person on the planet had an entire moist cave inside their head that could function as a prison for me. I felt like the guy in the Ray Bradbury story who is terrified to realize his body contains its own Halloween decoration.

With a jolt of urgency, I wrestled against her grip vainly. She just clenched her hand more firmly around my middle.

“You can’t fight me with those widdle chicken wings,” she said, giving my bicep a couple of little squeezes between her pointer and thumb.

There were more demeaning size comparisons. She lay me on my back on a piece of paper and – keeping my chest pushed down with her fingertips, ran a pen closely around my outline, which tickled a little.

She was Natural, and people didn’t just get reduced everyday. I guess to her I was like some little fairy person and she was still caught up in the giddy whirl of disbelief that I existed. I was like some astonishing magic trick and her curiosity was anchored on me, trying to figure out how I worked.

But the reduction was still so fresh and bizarre for me, it was like salt in the wound, rubbing in my face how diminished I was compared to normal people. I wasn’t really a ‘Natural’ anymore, nor a ‘Super’, but something in between, what the Academy called a class Y person. Tori probably didn’t even know what a class Y person was, or seen one in real life. Maybe she’d never even seen a Super in real life.

And I didn’t like being her learning tool. She confined my waist in a pinch to shift me on the paper. I began to struggle against her domineering hand, as the pen tip rounding my foot and starting running up my thigh, trying to close the gap between my legs as tightly as possible. I felt the pen delicately shape my groin onto the paper.

Done with sizing me up, she dropped back into a sitting position on her bed. Dumping me on her lap, she me onto my back so I was looking straight up at her enormous face. Her eyes danced over my form, keeping me transfixed. It seemed like she’d had a change of heart and was keen to win me over again.

Then Brandon’s muffled voice trailed through the house.

“Tor!” he called out. “Dinner.”

“Oh!” she jumped to her feet, and put me back down on the bed. “Back real soon!”

She disappeared out the door, closing it softly behind her, leaving the light on, and me engulfed in her bedroom.

For a little while I paced around on the surface of Bianca’s bed. My weight was so negligible, the soft quilt barely depressed under my tiny feet. Then I dropped back onto the bed and lay staring up at the ceiling.

What to do now?

One thing was certain, I definitely couldn’t live in my house on my own. Disturbingly, the Vegas seemed to have no interest in helping me there. Or Brandon, realized what I had, he was too uncomfortable to say it out loud.

But even if I had an idea about how to escape, I was too tired at the moment to carry out plans. I got down into a reclined position, propping my head up on one hand. But before long, my arm started to slacken, my head going limp and sliding forward.

Then I pulled myself up into a cross-legged position, grabbing my ankles. If my eyelids dropped too much, I pinched the skin of my ankles. Still, my head began to nod…

It was difficult to tell how much time passed, as my perception of time was interspersed with jolts of micro-sleep. I estimated half an hour went by…and then an hour…

What was taking them so long. Maybe the girl had finished eating dinner and now she was watching TV, or doing her schoolwork downstairs…

Then again, was I so eager for her to return? Not really; I enjoyed the rest and peace and freedom away from the probing study of giant penetrating eyes.

Not that I had a lot to use the spare time for. There was nothing to do on the bed except rest, and I didn’t feel confident about trying to climb down the side of the bed, which was over a storey tall. Even if I managed that, where would I go? The bedroom door was shut.

I briefly considered hiding under the bed. The girl would not easily be able to retrieve me. But what if the girl leaped on or stood on her bed, and the frame buckled slightly, smashing down on me from above. It freaked me out too much to try.

Plus, there might be all sorts of ways the girl could try and get me out from under the bed. She could send a vacuum cleaner nozzle under there and suck me out.

I resolved to stay on the bed until one of them returned.

*

Rapid footfalls thudded up to the room. I started into awareness, uncurling myself from my lying position on the bed.

The bedroom door swung open gently, and Tori’s enormous face peered inside. Making sure I wasn’t on the ground immediately before the door, she then stepped inside, shutting the door again.

She was holding a small plastic tray in one hand, and crossing the carpet, she placed it down on the ground next to the bed. Curious, I crawled over to the edge of the bed and looked down.

The tray carried some upturned jar lids with small piles of broken up food inside. One contained what looked like cooked mincemeat, another torn up pieces of bread, and a third contained some thinly shredded lettuce.

Before I could react, she reached across and snatched me up; her fingers curling under my front and the pressure of her thumb between my shoulders. I found myself flying through the air like a little wingsuit glider – her hand being the wingsuit – before coming to a rest, upright on the carpet just before her feet.

“What are you waiting for?” she exclaimed, getting onto the ground and crossing her legs. “Eat up!”

The meat looked like brown popcorn, and smelled undeniably enticing. I hadn’t eaten anything since lunch time that day. I had no idea what time it was now, but it must have been past nine ‘o’ clock at night.

As I ate her finger brushed my hair and her sing-song rung out above me:

“Mmmm, yummy! So good!”

But she quickly grew bored and started tugging on my hair until my scalp began to tingle. I tried to eat faster.

Once I had finished, her pointer finger darted out at me to poke my stomach. Refusing to be degraded again, I successfully dodged it, but she chased me, and there was nowhere to run to. As it came for me again and again, I vaulted over it and smacked it away. In frustration, she snatched my hair and had me effectively locked in place by the most fragile part of my body. The power she had over me took my breath away.

I’d started to become cagey about speaking up. That was ironic. I was so small my voice was simply not powerful enough to get the attention of a normal sized person, unless I yelled out, or they brought me right up to their face or ear. Which only reinforced my helplessness. If I was standing at ground height I had no way of communicating to anyone normally.

Tori was getting sick of my silence.

“Say something! Say ‘That was nummers. I’m just so in love with you right now!”

“That was nummers.”

“Say it properly! The last part wasn’t my words.”

“That was nummers,” I said tonelessly, “I’m just so in love with you right now.”

My scalp prickled and stretched as she twisted my hair with unbearable affection as if trying to bend my head around her fingertip.

“Ouch.”

Her voice bloomed with excited volume.

“Your voice is so funny! Okay, fine. Good boy. Fine, fine, fine.”

Triumphant, she poked my stomach to gauge how much I ate, then, taking the tray up, left the room again.

My posture slackened in defeat. It seemed like my status in the household was reducing faster than my height.After she left my eyelids closed for what seemed like only a moment, but in reality must have been over half an hour. It was the weird feeling of knowing time had passed without knowing how I knew.

The ground shook. I blinked my eyes open to see Tori’s enormous smooth creamy feet, launching through the air towards me.

Her voice filled the room.

“Sorry I was gone so long, Rocky. But you know – ice cream at room temperature. Once you start it doesn’t mess around waiting.”

Before I knew it, there was a twinge of pressure around my middle and I soared into the air.

“Too bad for you; we don’t have any tiny beds! – so we have to be creative!”

She placed me down on her bed so she could search the room for some appropriate size bedding. Cupboards, drawers and cabinets were opened and rummaged through, before the girl returned to the bedside. A fuzzy white sock was in her hand. She waved it in front of my face. Seeing my proposed bedding flap around in the air with ease made me feel dizzy.

At my look of uncertainty, she said:

“You’ll fit in this for sure.”

That was true, but it didn’t make the sock any more appealing to sleep in. With a flicker of distaste, I noted the large gray smudge marks – sweat stains – as well as some balding patches caused by a combination of rubbing and sweat. By the looks of it, she had worn this sock frequently for school athletics, and I felt offended she couldn’t offer me something better.

“All my socks are in the laundry,” the girl shrugged blithely. “So you gotta sleep in this one. I wore it to school today, though.”

Without hesitation her huge hand splayed out at me, capturing me in the fist, and I was launched into the air.

She went and opened the tall sliding door near her bed, which revealed a dark walk in closet, filled with clothes on hangers. The bottom of the closet was lined by a row of shoes, including sandals, strappy stilettos, chunk heels, tall leather boots, slip ons, and sneakers. Some of them looked almost new, while others looked ratty and worn.

There was a small bare patch of carpet in the corner of the closet, next to the first in the row of shoes: a shiny pair of stilettos which seemed astonishingly adult for a teenage girl.

Before I could react, I was zooming forward, deep into the closet, and placed down on the bare space in the corner, next to the stilettos.

There was a faint trace of shoe leather and sweaty feet that hung in the air, trapped inside the insulated closet and left to fester. Maybe the girl was so used to it she didn’t notice it, or maybe the smell didn’t travel high up enough to reach her; if so, it was concentrated at ground level – exactly my height. And this smell was going to accompany me all throughout the night.

“I can’t sleep on the floor!” I raged, balling my fists.

“Guess you’re right,” she said, turning away.

To my right, a big fluffy white bunny slipper went thump on the ground.

“This is your bed tonight,” the girl said happily, dropping the worn white sock down next to me. “And that’s your sleeping bag.”

I looked up at her plaintively. Her towering frame was in silhouette, filling up the entire closet opening, blocking the bedroom light, but I could just make out that her head was tilted down.

“No!” I cried.

“This is my room, so I say so!”

“It’s gross, you just wore that slipper.”

“And you’re gonna wear it now, and all night!”

“No way!”

“Looks like I have to tuck a guy in,” she chided. “Is that what you’re waiting for?”

Her hand surged down and ensnared me in her powerful fist. I was lifted up out of the closet and into the bedroom light once more. The sock opened like a mouth and began to swallow my body. She pulled the opening up to my throat and then observed me with satisfaction. It was new sock with intact elastic, and held around my form snugly. My arms were wrapped at my sides and I looked a little like a mummy but with my face exposed.

She stopped and chuckled.

“Wait…” she said after a moment of consideration, “…I almost forgot to kiss you goodnight!”

My heart sunk as her huge smiling face came into direct view as it lowered to meet my tiny imprisoned face. Her smile ballooned into a cushy pink pucker as she impatiently ran my face into her lips. Her hand was scrunched around my torso and I couldn’t turn my head away before it was handled by the buds of moist flesh, which pressed my head tight like a pair of firm palms trying to mold clay.

There was still some ice cream coating her tongue. The tight seal of her lips parted slightly, a mass of wet muscle budged into my face, painting it with saliva and the melted ice cream that coated her tongue, slightly soured from mixing with remnants of dinner.

A wild burst of arousal ran through my manhood. I breathed deeply, trying to keep it under control, but it thickened into a steel rod. As her hot, sticky breath rushed downward over my groin, tickling my thighs, the proximity of her warm lips and my member was too intense to ignore.

Then her firm hands pulled my body like she was trying to remove a sticker; with a sloppy wet smooching sound, my head unstuck from her big lips. My sock-bound body was quickly slipped into the opening of the bunny slipper, gulping up my body up to my head.

Then the slipper rested in the corner of the closest, with my head poking out.

“Night, Rocky,” she called happily as she slid the closet door closed.

In the dark, I rested my head against the back of the slipper. The sock’s fuzzy texture surrounded my body. It was slightly moist from perspiration. There was a faint wet squelching as my weight shifted along the slipper’s sole.

The fumes of the closet were beginning to make me feel dizzy, so I shut my eyes and tried to breathe through my mouth.