Carly leaned over the polished surface of the kitchen counter and took a deep breath, letting it inflate her lungs, and then exhaled softly.  Her right hand fished down into the shallow pocket of her cutoff shorts, wrapping around the wriggling legs of her tiny sibling to soothe him into motionlessness.  For a moment she just allowed him to be cupped into her palm, feeling every detail of his exposed body plastered against her closing fist.  Stroking her pinky finger along his back and down his inner thigh, she at last relinquished the grip on her favorite toy and placed her hands back on the marble.

            “Mom?  Daddy?” the teen called out earnestly, tucking a blonde lock behind her ear as she put on her widest and most persuasively gleaming smile.  “Can we talk, please?”

            A moment later, her parents trudged forlornly into the kitchen from around the corner, their arms around each other for support.  Both looked lost in their own home despite having lived in the place since before the birth of either child.  Though months had passed since Jack’s disappearance, they had kept up this practice even after the grieving had stopped being quite as apparent, if only for the comfort it provided.  They reached the countertop across from Carly, attempting to read her expression and emerge from the tragic cloud that clung to them in a murky haze.

            “Yes, honey?” her father said, trying his best to put on a happy face at the sight of his daughter’s always-optimistic countenance.  The girl’s constantly sunny disposition had been a great source of hope for the couple after the loss of their son, and they were certain it was only through Carly’s resilience of spirit that they were able to make it through the unbearable hell of not knowing.

            “I… wanted to show you both something,” the girl said innocently, her eyes darting from one bereaved parent to the other.

            “What is it?” Mrs. Arton said, tilting her head slightly as she laid her hands on the counter.

            “It’s Jack,” Carly said simply.  Reaching back into her pocket and coiling her hand softly around the target, she brought her arm back out into the open and opened her fingers.  In the center of her palm, naked and wrapped into a defensive fetal position, was her brother. No further explanation was offered.

            Rather than jolting, fainting, or otherwise reacting like normal members of the human race, however, both Mr. and Mrs. Arton paused, only briefly raising an eyebrow at the miniaturized sight of their son who they’d presumed dead only weeks before after months of searching had passed without luck.

            “Wow,” Mrs. Arton said at last, breaking the silence.  She leaned forward over the counter, index finger advancing on Jack’s huddled form.  Nudging him, the woman forced her finger between his defensively crossed arms, and splaying his limbs out into Carly’s hand.  She quickly withdrew, nodding her head.  “It certainly is Jack.”

            “I remembered him being taller,” Mr. Arton said nonchalantly.

            “You… you mean you’re not mad?” Carly choked, having dreaded this moment despite her cheery demeanor.  She gazed down at Jack, struggling to ball himself back up into his sister’s palm after the intrusion by his mother’s massive fingertip.

            “Of course not,” Mrs. Arton said.  “We thought he was gone, and now here he is.”

            “It’s just a surprise,” her father said.

            “I’m so glad!” Carly sighed.  She casually laid her thumb onto Jack’s stomach, kneading his abdomen and rolling him over in her hand like a living stress ball.  “I was afraid you wouldn’t be happy.  You know, about me keeping him like this and not telling you.”
            “I suppose you could’ve told us sooner, but it looks like you’ve taken good care of him yourself,” Mr. Arton commented, in spite of the fearful position his eldest child had taken in the girl’s expansive palm.  Jack still made no reaction to everyone around him, lying still like a miniscule trained mouse in his sister’s hand.

            “He does seem to be behaving much better than normal,” Mrs. Arton said.  She reached forward, fingers clawed expectantly, and plucked her nude trinket-sized son out of Carly’s hand, which remained willingly in place.  The woman dangled the shrunken seventeen-year-old over the counter, bringing him in closer to her face for examination.  “You’ve had him this whole time?”

            “Yes,” Carly admitted.

            “Where have you been keeping him?” she questioned.

            “Oh, all over the place.  Usually in my sock drawer, but sometimes in my workout shoes if he’s not being good.  Or sometimes inside my clothes while I wear them, if I feel like,” the girl shrugged.

            “So it only took you a few months to get him to act like this?” Mr. Arton said, impressed, as he witnessed his wife idly prodding at their miniaturized offspring’s exposed body.

            “Yep!” Carly said proudly.

            “That’s amazing.  We’ve spent his whole life trying to get him to be nice, and you turned him around in a fraction of that,” Mrs. Arton said with the same level of admiration.  She poked Jack in the side, then lowered him into her other palm and steadily closed her fingers around him, squeezing his body into her palm.

            “It wasn’t so hard,” Carly said, trying not to brag, but still doing it anyway as was usual for her.  “I just had to teach him his place in life.”

            “Quit squirming,” Mrs. Arton instructed her son, pressing her lips to the opening in her fist between her thumb and index finger.  She exhaled a puff of hot air into the balmy pocket in an effort to extinguish his struggles.  “I’m just trying to see what you feel like.”

            “He’s pretty fun to play with,” the girl said.  “Especially after you figure out what he likes.”

            “You mean he… he likes this?” Mr. Arton chuckled.  “That’s pretty sad.”

            “Maybe, but I like having fun with him, so I want him to like it, too,” Carly answered, placing her fingertips against her mother’s closed hand.  “Mom?  Can I see him again to show you?”

            “Sure, honey,” Mrs. Arton said, relenting on her grip at last.  Inside her palm, Jack had remained completely motionless, not uttering a peep of protest.  “Incredible.  If only he’d shrunken sooner.  I could’ve been teaching him myself all this time.”

            “Carly just has the magic touch,” Mr. Arton said.

            “I guess so,” she answered cheekily, scooping up her brother out of her mother’s hand and gripping him by his arms so he hung awkwardly from her pinched fingers again.  She swept her golden hair out of her eyes for full concentration.  “Now watch this.”

            With intense focus, Mr. and Mrs. Arton witnessed their daughter bringing Jack up to her mouth.  Her lips parted as her saliva-slathered tongue lashed out of the darkness and pressed itself flush to Jack’s body.  He wriggled lightly at the sticky contact, but made no further struggles as Carly’s massive tongue proceeded to slurp up the length of his body, coating him in frothy spit.  Again and again she licked him, wrapping her tongue around his thighs and up to his chest, eventually settling over his crotch, where she proceeded to lap the gooey red muscle against his package.  Jack winced with surprise but quickly settled in, gyrating lightly as Carly’s tongue pumped between his legs.  After a few moments, the shrunken teen was breathing heavier as the monster tongue, lubricated by steam and fragrant goop, ravaged his junk with expert precision.

            “Well how about that,” Mr. Arton said with apparent interest as he witnessed his children engaging in spit-drenched intimacy as though he’d accidentally stumbled onto a particularly fascinating program on the Discovery Channel.

            “Looks like he really does like it,” Mrs. Arton giggled, reaching across the counter and ruffling her saliva-covered son’s hair with a fingertip as he continued receiving a particularly messy blowjob from the voracious tongue.  “He’s even got a tiny little erection to match his tiny little body.”

            “I guess Carly would know what he likes, especially since she’s going to be taking care of him from now on,” her father stated, crossing his arms.

            At this, the girl immediately pulled her pulsing lips away from her titillated toy and sucked her tongue back into the cavern of her mouth, her attention diverted immediately to Mr. Arton.  Jack, meanwhile, so near to climax, hung with painful sexual frustration between his sister’s spit-greased fingertips and grunted in an attempt to work through a bad case of blue balls.

            “You… you mean it?  I’m keeping him?” Carly gasped.

            “Well, of course you are,” Mrs. Arton giggled, delighted to see her daughter so pleased.  “What kind of parents would we be to pull you two apart when you’re finally getting along so well?”

            “What are we supposed to do with him now anyway?  He’s useless for anything but what you want him for, honey,” Mr. Arton snorted with derision.  “Plus, if we told people he was still alive, we’d probably have to give back all the consolation presents from the funeral.”

            “That’s true,” Mrs. Arton agreed.  “So consider him a present for being such a wonderful daughter, Carly.  Your brother is ALL yours.”

            “Forever?” the girl squealed.

            “Forever,” her parents confirmed in unison, robotic smiles spreading over their faces as they nodded.

            “Wow,” Carly uttered, shuddering with arousal at the very idea.  The cerulean pearls of her eyes sparkled as she returned her attention to the squirming little life between her fingers, human putty for her to use, abuse, and pleasure as she saw fit.

            Wanting to keep their shared climax private, Carly winked at her miniature sibling as she parted her lips and deposited him with victorious finality inside her mouth, tucking him into her cheek for a final slobbery fondling against the slimy underside of her tongue.  Her hand was already digging down into the front of her pants and fumbling with the waistband as her breaths came shorter and shorter.

            With a smile on her lips, Carly emerged groggily from the rapturous dream.  She’d experienced it innumerable times over the months that she’d been alone, the surreal declarations of her parents occasionally altering, but for the most part, her subconscious knew exactly what she wanted.  Often she’d take naps in the middle of the day in her glass cage at the facility, not out of exhaustion, but simply with the hope she could fade into this wonderful fantasy yet again.  Imagining it while awake only went so far; it was far better seeing it play out inside her head as she slept, where everything felt so convincing she hesitated to believe it was all a dream upon waking.

            Her vision swam as she struggled to regain full consciousness, and as the pleasant sensations of the dream faded, the shreds of memory before her forced slumber began to come back to her out of chronological order.

            The TV.  Her glass box.  The guards changing shifts.  The giant bitch snatching her up.  The electric crackle of a taser and the plunge toward the ground.  A black glove, breaking her fall and caging around her, the fingers like stygian tendrils.

            How long had she been out?  Scrambling awkwardly to her feet and scraping her knuckles against the floor, Carly looked down at her body, realizing she was no longer wearing the customized beige jumpsuit she’d been sporting for the past year.  In its place was a simple white cloth, draped over her body with barely enough of an opening to allow her neck and limbs through.  Apparently someone had taken it upon themselves to give her an even bigger fashion downgrade while she was asleep.

            Though the space was dusky, as Carly’s eyes gradually adjusted, the walls knitted themselves into existence from the black.  A drab olive hue, the metal siding didn’t seem all that distant, even to someone of Carly’s diminutive stature.  If she didn’t know any better, she would’ve guessed she was inside a bunker.  The surface she stood upon was black, absorbing any stray light that made its way from under the crack of a door just ahead.

            After the girl had taken more than a few cautious steps forward, she smacked into a sheer surface so clear she hadn’t even seen it, save for the spiraled smudge of her fingerprints.  Nearly toppled from her feet, Carly placed her hand against its cool surface, gasping out shallower breaths by the instant as she gazed up the length of the wall, which reached too far up into the shadows above to detect any viable way out.

            Things were so much simpler when she just had a bunch of overzealous vigilante security guards spitting in her food or flicking her around the cage.  Carly could handle them, put them in their place even if she wanted.  This, now, was completely uncharted territory.  For the first time in a very long while, the girl felt powerlessness in its rawest form.

            A door in the center of the adjacent wall swung open with a lumbering metal clang, flooding in just enough merciful light for Carly to make out the boundaries of her new tank.  Though admittedly roomier than her previous lodging with its own miniature bed, toilet, sink, and what looked like a playground jungle gym, the circumstances of this particular situation made the girl long to be clenched back in the grubby fingertips of the steroid-enhanced president of her fan club.  She stumbled back, instinctively looking for a place to retreat, but knowing already there was no way to avoid whatever was coming.

            A silhouette materialized in the narrow doorframe, advancing on the cornered Carly in her glassed entrapment.  It was a woman, her slender hips belied by a militaristic march, though her boot-clad feet fell near-silently on the cold ground, and as the glow of a lamp behind her reflected off Carly’s cage, a face composed of porcelain skin seemed to paint itself into visibility from out of the harsh shade of the bunker.  Her incendiary red locks, tied in a ponytail behind her head, bloomed even in the dimly lit room, her raven sweater swallowing up just as much color as the floor of Carly’s new prison.  Jet-black eyeliner tarred beneath her lids gave her sourly rigid expression a suggestion of tired starvation.

            “Well,” the woman sighed, crossing her arms and tapping her gloved fingers against her biceps.  “Carly Arton.  Welcome to… the future, or something like that.”

            Frowning, the young kidnapped psychopath backed up several more paces, clutching her cloth tighter around her thin shoulders, well-aware that this woman could probably reach right in and strip her naked if such a thing occurred to her.  Withdrawal was only a delusion here.

            “I’m willing to bet you’re not in the mood to talk back to me just yet, seeing as we snatched you out of the lap of luxury in that hideous federal government building…” the woman continued uncaringly.  “…so how about I do all the talking for now and you just pay attention.  You know, in the name of speeding this process along.”

            Blinking incredulously, still unable and unwilling to drink the situation fully in, Carly nonetheless kept her focus on the woman, though she didn’t look her directly in the eyes.  The woman’s emerald irises were just a little too exacting to stare into for more than a few seconds without forming an onerous knot in the stomach.

            “Since we’ll be seeing a lot of each other in the near future, and I, along with the rest of America, already know so much about you…” the black-attired woman rolled onward, not bothering to check for confirmation in her capture.  “…my name is Claire.  There’s a little more to it, but for now we’ll just stick with that.  Right now you’re about three stories beneath the surface of the earth, and maybe… I don’t know, a thousand miles away from your hometown?  I say that just to save us both the time later of you trying to escape.  Not that you’d have an easy time of it, anyway.  You’ll find out soon this place is an absolute maze.”

            Stock-still, Carly took in the details, not allowing a single muscle in her face to twitch.  She crossed her hands behind her back, keeping her chin tilted upward as Claire took another step closer to the glass.

            “There will be plenty more to go over later as it becomes necessary.  Luckily for you, though, for your part in all this, there’s very little you have to do other than exactly as I tell you to.  From what I’ve learned about you, I doubt that’ll be acceptable to someone quite so… self-assured, but I’m just throwing it out there now so you can’t say I didn’t warn you later,” Claire continued, tapping an index finger against the glass wall, simpering with a gentle shrug.

            Carly bit her lip, steadily coming to grips with her reality, already sensing how very little she was going to like it.

            “Now, I’m sure this can’t look good.  Me just grabbing you up and everything, bringing you here, making threats.  I don’t want it to seem like I don’t admire you, little Carly, because I do.  You’re a woman after my own heart,” Claire said genuinely, placing a hand over her chest.  “And because of that, it seems only fair to offer you the chance now to ask any questions you have.  This is a limited time offer, though, so I suggest you take advantage instead of playing the stoic martyr.”

            Nodding, the tiny twenty-year-old boldly stepped nearer to the wall of her cage, advancing on her captor, and felt the words swelling into her throat with very little difficulty.

            “Why did you bring me here?”

            Raising an eyebrow, Claire actually let a smile fracture the line of her lips.  “Oh, I’m so glad you asked something like that instead of something stupid like trying to offer me money or whatever to let you out.  That’s what a few of our other little friends tried, and trust me, it did not go how they wanted it to.”

            “Why?” Carly commanded.

            “All right, eager beaver, all right,” Claire chuckled.  “It’s nothing much, really.  You’re here to help us advance scientific knowledge into the twenty-second century.  And who knows?  Maybe even a little further than that.”