Ashley rolled over in her miniature bed, pulling the fabric-patch blankets further over her shoulders as she heard the telltale creak of the door off in the distance, indicating the arrival of one of her normal-sized oppressors. As Alison had only just walked out the door with Tony in hand, she had to assume the girl had forgotten something, or was perhaps returning for another paltry attempt to make peace with pancakes. Or maybe just to gloat.
“I thought I told you to fuck off already,” Ashley spat, loudly enough to be clearly heard even at her reduced size and through the filter of blankets. “I’m not hungry.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” another voice responded coolly. “I was hoping we could have a talk.”
It was not Alison’s voice, and specifically, one that inspired something far worse in the tiny girl. Ashley’s heart, previously overcome with venomous ire, found itself now taken by chilling terror that involuntarily sent shivers from the back of her head down to her delicate toes. She held firm, though, squeezing her body down against the bed in effort to quell the shaking, even as she heard the soft rumble of the confident footsteps.
Her aunt Anna, the woman who’d smashed Ashley’s father beneath her sole and eaten her mother alive, appeared over the edge of the cardboard house. The forty-year-old appeared to be putting the final touches on tying her dark, curly locks into a more manageable ponytail behind her head so as to more easily observe her shrunken niece below.
“Well, how about it, Ashley?” Anna questioned calmly. “I’m game to try for a civil discussion if you are.”
The tiny teen bit her lip, forcing it to remain still, and tasted metallic blood on her tongue.
She watched the monstrous fingers curl over the edge of the box, remembering as though it was yesterday the precise sensation of those massive digits plucking her up by the limbs and contorting them well beyond the point of abject torture. The ring of her own snapped bones still resided in her ear drums like a ghostly whisper, and Ashley could hear it quite plainly whenever she was forced to look at Anna’s hands.
They were powerful appendages, certainly. Larger than most women’s hands, which no-doubt made it all the easier for the spurned giant to snap her niece’s arms and legs like wishbones, yet smooth and rosy, the kind that would’ve been ideal for yoga, providing Anna put in the time. But she didn’t, and Ashley knew it. Those hands weren’t for holding herself up now, but for reaching for her subjects in this microwave box.
As if on cue, Anna’s palm opened up, her fingers outstretched. Though they lowered with plenty of warning, it was impossible for Ashley not to flinch. She lost her composure almost entirely in that instant, the color in her cheeks fading under the all-encompassing shadow. However, the enormous hand halted just short of wrapping itself around the owner’s niece. Anna’s lips pursed.
“C’mon,” the aunt whispered gently. “Meet me halfway, hmm? All I want to do is talk.”
“I’m tired,” Ashley groaned.
“You’re always tired. And I should know. We’ve spent enough time together in this place.”
“Why can’t you just leave us alone in here?” Ashley scowled. “You’ve got us trapped like your fucking pets, we’re not going anywhere, and none of us like each other. So what’s the point of pretending like we might!”
“I understand, believe me,” Anna said. Her fingers turned thoughtfully together, her index and middle fingers circling in soft figure-eights across the gridded surface of her thumb mere inches from Ashley’s head. “That’s what I wanted to talk about, in fact. So how about it?”
“I think we could just do the talk right here-” Ashley began.
“I was offering to let you come out and be on the same level, so I don’t have to keep looking down at you like this.”
“-no, no, let me finish. I was saying, I think we can just do the talk right here, because I was only going to tell you to fuck off and die like your piece of shit husband did.”
Anna closed her eyes and steepled her towering fingers together in the box, withdrawing them only momentarily before they snapped forward. Her fingers crowded around Ashley in the bed like fleshy tree trunks, grasping the toy mattress spring by its sides and tightening the fabric so taut around the four-inch girl that she was instantly immobilized. She lifted the entire bed out of the box, Ashley and all, and tipped it on its side as she drew it nearer to her face.
“Well, now, that’s not going to get us anywhere, you talking like that, Ashley,” Anna said with surprising calm.
Ashley’s heart raced as she felt the pressure of the blankets alone keeping her from tumbling toward her doom on the ragged carpet far below, as her aunt’s palm wasn’t cupped protectively below her like usual for added safety. Her aunt’s giant fingers only seemed to loosen in the ensuing staredown, allowing the fabric to hold the girl up in an increasingly loose hammock.
“I was offering you the chance to look me in the eye if you wanted. But if you don’t want to, then we won’t,” Anna continued. “But we are going to talk, whether you decide to tolerate it or not.”
The air flushed from Ashley’s lungs as the bed plunged toward the floor. For an instant, she considered that her aunt had released her grip entirely on the piece of plastic furniture, finally ending the nuisance that was her niece’s weekly tirades, as well as her life. She was simply dropping her, it seemed.
However, before Ashley could summon the courage to scream in a final blaze of glory, she realized the muscular fingers were still clenched securely around the sides. Anna was simply making this more of a belly-churning chore than was necessary.
The bed was deposited on the floor and, of course, upside down. Her tiny forehead was pressed against the shaggy fibers of the floor. Ashley felt herself once again suspended hard against the bed, her spine trained in a line to its surface by the tension in the blankets. Clearly, Anna had pinched her fingers around the tufts of fabric on the bottom of the bed.
Ashley craned her neck to the side, just able to make out the image of her aunt’s titanic bare toes. Only half of them were visible from the improvised restraining device her bed had become, but eventually the woman’s foot shifted until all five squirming digits were clearly visible. They inched closer, the toes grasping at the ratty carpet as though tugging the rest of the foot and leg along with them.
It chilled Ashley’s bones anew, despite the all the dizzying blood that was now rushing to her head as her aunt kept her suspended by her stomach and chest, facing the floor that so easily could’ve ended her pitiful existence if only she’d reached it in much faster time. Sometimes, she wasn’t so sure she’d mind.
“What do you think?” Anna questioned. “Can we have that talk now?” Her toes inched closer, near enough now that they brushed along the blankets.
With a start, Anna turned her neck to the other side in the limited geometry of her bed-trap and realized Anna’s other foot now occupied the other opening off to the side. The peachy wall of her instep made for a suitable barrier, blotting out the light and forcing Ashley to turn her head back toward the toes of the opposite foot for any source of air.
“What… do you want… to talk about?” Ashley coughed as menacingly as she could manage.
“I just wanted to say I’m sorry,” Anna said.
“What?”
“I mean it. And I’m saying it now. I’m sorry about how all of this had to go.”
Ashley choked back a gasp. She inhaled the tainted oxygen that only reached her lips after it had crept over the ancient carpet fibers, up from between the crevices of her aunt’s giant naked toes. It all tasted so mealy and poisonous on the roof of her mouth, and she wanted to spit on Anna’s skin, if she didn’t assume there would be even more inconvenient repercussions for this statement.
Still, she wasn’t above a compromise in expression.
“No you’re fucking not,” Ashley commented. The blankets had loosened sufficiently for her to touch down to the ground, at last allowing regular bloodflow to all parts of her body to resume. “You can’t get away with who you are… what you did.”
“I expected you’d say that.”
“Then why’d you say it?”
“For me, I guess, then.”
“Right,” Ashley snorted. “It must make you feel so good to tell me you’re so super-duper sorry while you’re trying to scare me at the same time.”
“I didn’t think this would scare you,” Anna responded. “This is just to put you on the level you seem to want to occupy whenever I offer an olive branch.” The fingertips clenched around the sides of the bed flicked evenly, releasing their grip on the blankets. No sooner was Ashley fully liberated on the carpet when those same giant fingers were paled by pressure, rolling the bed up against Anna’s palm, and in the next instant the entire bed was flung across the room like a fastball.
The wind of the flying bed watered Ashley’s eyes as she watched it fly. It landed with a hard clunk against the wall. Had Anna’s fingers failed to loosen all the way, plopping Ashley to the ground and out of the bed’s imprisoning clutches, she doubted she’d still have a head.
Not that she would’ve been surprised. Anna had broken Ashley’s arms and legs before, so why not her neck as well?
“Was that?” Ashley laughed.
“Again, no,” Anna said. “That was so we could get a good look at each other.”
“I’ve gotten plenty of good looks at you. I don’t think I’ll be doing any more.”
“That’s all right,” Anna said sincerely. Her feet, still planted on the floor and flanking Ashley’s prone body, scrunched nearer together across the terrain of the carpet. She herself towered fully above again at full height, her hands deposited on her hips just in case there was any doubt of her control. “You feel free to look wherever you’re comfortable.”
The miniature eighteen-year-old tried to minimize the quivering again as her aunt’s car-sized feet shuffled ever-closer like flesh-toned trash compactors. She refused to yield even a single shudder until Anna’s twin insteps were rubbed up against Ashley’s hips, threatening to begin applying untold pressure if either foot was to come any closer together.
“Nice and situated down there?” Anna called out.
“Was this all you wanted?” Ashley demanded. “Pretend to apologize and then fuck with me a little?” She nudged her elbows into the squishy mass of Anna’s bare feet, but only succeeded in knocking herself sideways at an even more awkward angle between her aunt’s heels.
“No,” Anna said calmly. Her massive feet edged ever-nearer, accounting for the space differential Ashley had created by stumbling, and suddenly the shrunken young woman was entrapped between an impromptu sandwich of foot flesh. She wasn’t squeezed, but as she watched the big toes arching up, the muscles in the foot clenched for maximum effect, Ashley could tell she wasn’t moving anywhere, no matter how much she resisted.
“Then what?”
“I wanted to say I know I’m not a good person. I agree with you,” Anna said.
Ashley grunted. Her arms thrashed meekly against the bulwarks of foot flesh clamped around her sides, unable to help it as she slipped further back between them until she was nearly flat on her back again, with her limbs pinned down by the creased rim of Anna’s soles.
“Is that so?”
“Yes, that’s so,” Anna said. The weight of her toned body was rolled onto the balls of her feet, then shifted to her heels, relieving Ashley of any more pressure other than the slabs of soles that now held her fast to the floor. “I mean it honestly. You may not ever believe it, just like you don’t believe that I’m sorry, but I just might mean this even more than the apology.”
“…that you’re a bad person.”
“Yes. Yes, I am. And yes, that’s what I’m saying,” Anna explained. Her hands had left their post at her hips, sliding down the tanned expanse of her thighs and taking up residence on her knees as she stooped down to observe her tiny niece, now entrapped beneath each of her soles. The only sight of the miniature girl she could make out now was a torso and head peeking up between the shallow canyons of her insteps.
“Glad you fucking admitted it to someone,” Ashley puffed. Her limbs were in danger of going numb, creaking with the same kind of weariness as they had just before they were pushed beyond their limits a year and a half before.
“It does feel a little better,” Anna said, some of her usual sarcasm pervading the final syllables. She smiled.
“Then what’s the deal with the fucking standing on me right now, huh? You could’ve smashed my arms and legs already if you wanted. Then I guess you’d have to pay your trash-friends to fix me up again.”
“This? Oh, I just didn’t like what you said about my husband Tom, whom your parents unfortunately saw fit to murder,” Anna simpered with utmost serenity. She gave the muscles in her soles the tiniest twist, forcing Ashley onto her side, until her tiny face was mashed up against the massive ball of the foot. “So just keep that in mind while you’re giving your Auntie Anna’s feet some kisses for the next… I don’t know, fifteen minutes?”
“Mmmffuck y-”
“Ah-ah!” Anna chuckled. Her feet twisted again, now firmly planting Ashley’s face into the wrinkled slope of her reddened sole until it fit snugly against the ceiling of grit-speckled flesh. “Don’t forget, sweetie. It’s just like you said. I may not like that I’m a bad person, but I can’t get away from what I did, and who I am.”