I almost didn’t go into work the next day.  I stayed up most of the night trying to figure out how I could escape the firm and Olivia.  I kept coming back to the fact that I didn’t know anyone who had managed to successfully quit and returned to a normal life.  Paralyzed by despair, I drifted in to work out of sheer habit.

That afternoon, Yvonne stepped into my office and closed the door.

“Olivia did it again, didn’t she?” she asked.

The chill bit my chest again.  “How did you know?” I asked, dreading the only possible answer.

“Zorah says she saw you when you were, you know.”

My blood froze.  I needed to know what Zorah was telling people.  “Is that all she said?” I asked.  “That I was tiny?”

“I don’t think she’s entirely sure what she saw,” replied Yvonne.  “But she did, didn’t she?”

“I tried to hide,” I said, terrified of telling Yvonne much more than she already knew.

“She didn’t talk to me,” said Yvonne, “but apparently she told Janie.  Janie just said that Zorah saw you go into Olivia’s office, and when she went in there she saw something tiny moving around, and since you hadn’t come out, she thinks it was you.”

Nothing about me being trapped between Olivia’s boobs, then.  Either Zorah had kept that little detail to herself, or Janie had kept it from Yvonne.  Not really reassuring either way.  I put my face in my hands.

“What am I gonna do?” I wailed.  “She said she’s gonna take me with her when she deposes Torres.  He lives on the other side of the state.  That’s at least an overnight trip.”

Yvonne looked at me with a mixture of compassion and confusion.  “I still don’t get why she’s doing this,” she said.  “Did you screw something up?”

“No,” I protested.  “She’s always said she likes my work.”

“Maybe you. . . offended her somehow.”

Yvonne and I had had shared plenty of dirty thoughts, and I had scoped her out both when she had known I was looking and when she hadn’t.  Had she guessed that I had been pervving on Olivia and had been caught?

“If I did,” I ventured, “she hasn’t told me how.”

Yvonne didn’t look very satisfied with this answer.

“She must be doing it for some reason besides just humiliating you,” she said.  “There’s gotta be some benefit to her.”

“I think she might be draining my energy somehow,” I said, not sure how best to contain this line of inquiry.

“Do you feel tired afterwards?”

“Sort of, yeah,” I lied.  “She did say that I was helping her prepare for the deposition.”

“Really?  That’s weird.  When the transcript comes back we should look to see if she got any particularly juicy testimony out of him.”

That made a remarkable amount of sense.  I began to think of Yvonne as a viable ally in this nightmare.

“So you said she said a special word to make you small?” continued Yvonne.

“Yeah.  I have no idea what language it’s from.”

“What was the word?”

“Inshil-hatam.”

“Inchilhadam?”

“No, it’s ‘in-shil’ then ‘hatam,’ like in Arabic or something when they hock some spit on the ‘h.’”

“Inshil-hatam,” said Yvonne.

I felt the chill before I smelled the sulphur.  I saw Yvonne’s eyes bug out just as I became lost in the tent of my shirt.

“Jesus!” I heard her exclaim.

Panic returned as I fell through my clothes to the seat of my chair.  Naked and helpless, I cowered under my giant shirt, conditioned to expect imminent degradation.  Then the sky spoke.

“Tyler?” thundered Yvonne through the sheets, louder than she had ever been.

I froze, absurdly conflicted as to whether I wanted to be found by Yvonne.  She really was the only person who could help me in the current circumstances.  I was nevertheless in a very embarrassing position, and I wasn’t sure I could trust her.

A shadow fell over my shirt , and a corner of the white cotton started to lift away.

“Tyler,” hissed Yvonne, “where are you?”

Fearing that she might inadvertently knock me to the floor, I ran to the opening she had created and started waving.  I ducked a falling sleeve as she removed my shirt entirely, then I tilted my head back to look up at Yvonne.

She had come around my desk and bent over my chair, peering down at me in amazement.  Her brown bangs fell forward to frame her wide eyes, eyes that promised both deliverance and desire.  She held one of her arms across her chest and the other was tucked under her chin.  One of her giant hands started towards me, but I reflexively flinched and she drew it back.

Yvonne then began to kneel down beside my chair to bring her face closer to me.  As she reached out to the side with her arms for balance, my eyes fell to her giant breasts.  They weren’t as big as Olivia’s, but they were still fetching and, at my current scale, intimidating.

I don’t know whether Yvonne could discern the shift in my tiny gaze, but she raised an eyebrow and whispered, “You never said she made you tiny and naked.”

I had become so accustomed to getting a boner when Olivia shrunk me that it wasn’t until a hint of a smile appeared on Yvonne’s giant face that I thought to cover my crotch with my hands.

“You have to say the other word to make me big!” I shouted.

Yvonne shook her head.  “I can’t hear you like this,” she rumbled.

I raised one arm and gestured for her to lower her ear towards me.  Instead, she pursed her lips and brought her hand up around me.  She was quick, and when I involuntarily raised my arms to fend her off, the only result was that my arms were outside her fist when her huge warm fingers curled around my torso and legs.  At least one of her pillow-sized fingertips brushed my stiffy.

Yvonne raised me to her face, and I gazed into her soft brown eyes, desperate to determine her intentions.  Her rapid breathing showed clear alarm at the dark magic she had triggered, and the gentle (if sudden) embrace of her fingers signaled concern for my safety.  But there was a brief twitch of her lips that hinted at other appetites.

“You have to say the word to make me big!” I insisted.

“What’s the word?” she asked, her voice like a warm ocean breeze that makes a beach stroll difficult.

“Kahp-hasheena!” I shouted.

Yvonne furrowed her giant eyebrows at me.  “Cappuccino?” she boomed.

Impatiently, I waved her closer.  She raised me to her ear, and I felt the warmth radiating from her neck and smelled the sweet fragrance of her hair.  The tendons in her mighty jaw flexed nervously, and I could see her powerful throat muscles move when she swallowed.

I cupped my hands in front of my mouth and shouted again:  “Kahp-hasheena!”

With the mouth that I had often fantasized about and which could now consume me in a single gulp, Yvonne said the word:  “Kahp-hasheena.”

Pain stabbed me and through the fog I heard Yvonne yell “Fuck!” as I returned to full size in her fist.  I thudded to the floor next to my chair, and by the time my vision returned Yvonne had retreated to the other side of the office near the door, rubbing the hand that had held me.

I sat up and started gathering my clothes.  Yvonne tried to calm herself down with deep breathing, but she kept looking at me as if I might sprout horns at any second.  For all I knew, I had.

When I was about to stand up to put on my pants, she said, “I’ll watch the door,” and stepped outside my office.

It was the third time in a week that I had to hurriedly dress at work, and I felt so defeated that I started to consider changing my wardrobe to allow me to dress more quickly.  Definitely slip-on shoes and fewer buttons, I thought.

When I was again presentable, I opened my door to find Yvonne chatting with Sondra, someone she ordinarily scorned.  I rather doubt Sondra had been coming to my office, but Yvonne must have decided that a hallway chat would give her a plausible reason to camp out in front of my door.  The look she shot me indicated that she had already exhausted her meager supply of small talk.

I smiled and nodded at both women and headed to the nearby, less private men’s room.  I took a stall and sat down to sort out my head.  I still had the remnants of a boner from when Yvonne had held me before her beguilingly gigantic face, but it was ebbing naturally and my erotic imagination was my own.

It started as a ball of ice in my gut, and then the full implications of the afternoon’s events quickly washed over me in a prickly wave.  Anyone could do this to me.  It wouldn’t be enough just to get away from Olivia.  Anyone could make me insignificant and helpless.  Anyone at all.

I spun around and threw up until there was nothing left in my stomach but a dull chill.

When I got back to my office, Yvonne was no longer loitering outside, but there was a curt email from her:  “Six Bells.  5pm.  Mandatory.”