Kirsten set the plate down beside me, creating a thunderous clap from the plastic’s impact. She strode around the table and pulled out the chair with a screech, then plopped down in it. I looked up at her looming over me, and her grin was accompanied by tremors from her elbows landing on the wood. Her delicate fingers grabbed the plate’s lip and dragged it toward her, stopping just before it barreled over me.
“Hop up!” she implored. “I’m curious as to how this will work.” I had the same questions, so I reached up and latched onto the plate’s edge with both hands, then worked to secure my footing. When I felt sure of myself I hopped up, kicking at the air and pulling with my arms until I was halfway over the edge. Quickly I swung a leg onto the platform, then pulled myself forward and came to a sitting position so that I could slide down toward the middle.
The first thing that struck me was that Kirsten had made a sandwich over twice my height. I’m not sure what either of us expected: there was no food in the apartment that was appropriately sized for me, and even if there had been she would have found it to be a pathetic amount. I turned back to her and shrugged, and she cocked an eyebrow. “I’m not sure what to do!” I said. “It’s too much!”
Kirsten furrowed her brow while her eyes alternated between me and the mountain of food. “Bear with me, I have an idea.” Her hands reached inward, and I reflexively ducked away from the massive limbs swinging toward me. She grabbed the sandwich and lifted it toward her mouth, pushing out her chin when it got close. I looked up, and saw that her chin was almost directly over where I stood on the plate.
She opened her lips and moved in to take a bite. Lettuce cracked as her teeth tore through layers of it, and crumbs falling from her lips rained around me. Once she had sliced through it she pulled it away from her mouth, then worked her jaw on the mouthful. After several seconds of chewing she swallowed it with an audible gulp, sending a visible lump down her throat. Her hands returned the sandwich to the plate, setting it down so that I stood in the section removed by her mouth. I fit inside it with room to spare.
Something about what I had just watched affected me in a way I had never expected. The way she had so effortlessly hoisted something that I had no hope of even budging, then took a sizable bite out of, emphasized how small I was now. It made me feel particularly powerless, while reinforcing the impression of her as a mighty giantess. Maybe these feelings would pass over the next few weeks, I told myself, since this was a bad portent for the idea of us as equal partners.
The plate violently shaking roused me from my contemplation. “Hey, you still with me?” Kirsten boomed. I shook my head to clear the cobwebs. Damn, her voice was still throwing me for a loop. “I need to know whether enough fell out that you’ll have enough to eat, or I’ll have to think of something else.” A quick look around showed a smattering of bread, cheese, and flakes of lettuce, as well as a few shreds of meat among the debris from her bite. Looked like I might end up a bit peckish, but since this was a temporary solution only I could make do for tonight.
“It’ll be enough,” I said. She cocked her head, clearly not understanding, so I cupped my hands and repeated myself, this time shouting it. Kirsten must have heard it this time, since her fingers rushed back inward to grip the sandwich for her next bite.
“Watch your head!” she called, and I ducked just as a wall of meat and bread would have rammed into me. While she took another enormous bite I began grabbing crumbs around me and devouring them, trying to make a game out of how many I could get before she set it back down. My mouth ended up stuffed by the time the plate rattled from Kirsten setting her meal back down, and I struggled to chew through everything I had accumulated by the time she began to hungrily eye the sandwich again.
We went through like this until she playfully shoved the last bit of food into her mouth, leaving me with nothing left to grab. I ended up feeling much more full than I would have with just a normal sandwich, and the impression of filling up on detritus from my wife’s meal stuck in the back of my mind. She seemed oblivious to the possible psychological affliction this was causing me, and simply asked, “So, did you get enough?”
I patted my stomach, feeling significantly more satiated than I expected. “I think if I eat another bite I’ll burst,” I called up to her. Before now I hadn’t realized how much of a messy eater she was: enough food for another person would have been discarded were it not for me!
Kirsten smiled. “Glad to hear it, hon,” she said. “Think it’ll be okay if I just set out some cheese and crackers for you tomorrow while I’m at work?”
“Yeah, that should be fine,” I said. Honestly, just a little slice of cheese would probably be fine. My new stomach was much smaller than I had anticipated, and even a pitiful amount of food was enough to fill me up. Kirsten would be able to figure that out though, and I didn’t want her to underestimate what I’d need.
“Good to hear,” she answered, then sent her hand in for me. I fought the urge to dodge as her thumb and forefinger closed in, and found myself clamped between her digits. Kirsten lifted me off the plate and slid it out from under me, then turned to the side. Carefully she lowered me to the floor, then set me down on the rug around the table. “Let’s just take it easy for the rest of the day and watch a movie, huh?” With how much she towered over me even while sitting I felt it best to go along with whatever she said. Besides, relaxing on the couch with her seemed like the best way to continue adjusting to my new life.
I looked Kirsten over. She was still wearing the same formal dress she had on when I had woken up, with the slit going up to her waist and elegant yet simple flats. Considering I was still in jeans and a T-shirt, I felt there was even more of a disparity between us. “Looks like you’re a bit overdressed for a night in, though.”
She looked down at her dress and giggled. “Oh shit, you’re right! I got all dressed up for your homecoming and didn’t even think to change. Here, give me a second and I’ll fix it.” She placed her hand on her sternum, and after a few deft movements her evening gown was replaced with something much more comfortable. Now she was wearing a white chemise with tiny (for her) dark blue shorts, with her tremendous shoes replaced with white ankle socks. “That better?”
I had really just wanted her to change out of the flats so that I was less at risk in case of an accident, and I had forgotten that this was her “casual” setting. Not that I minded the change. We both agreed that she had a fantastic pair of legs, and she took any excuse possible to show them off. “Yeah, it works for me.” I tried to downplay how much I liked it, but I think she saw right through it.
She had the décor not to say anything, though. Instead she simply stood and looked down at me with a smile. While I craned my neck back to look up the immense length of her legs she chuckled. “What, did you expect me to start carrying you everywhere now? You know where the couch is, I’ll be picking out a movie in the meantime.” Kirsten stepped away from the chair, buzzing me close enough with her foot that I saw each individual weave on her sock. Shockwaves went out when she set her heel down, followed by another set when the ball of her foot slapped against the floor. The tremors got successively weaker as she walked away, until I heard a muffled thud from her laying down on the cushions.
I wasn’t enthusiastic about having to walk my way there, but she had a point. It would be unreasonable for me to rely on Kirsten to do menial things like carry me around the apartment, and not doing it for me would allow me to retain a certain measure of independence. Besides, this was part of Doctor Kirillova’s orders, right? Kirsten was hardly going to undermine the doctor’s suggestions, and I was inclined to go along with her. Besides, a little walking would hardly kill me, and it was only a few feet.
As it turned out, without Kirsten to walk along with me and make it interesting they were a few of the longest feet I’ve ever walked in my life. Each time I stepped over the wood grain, or hopped across a divider between the planks, I was reminded how long it would take me to do absolutely normal tasks now. Kirsten kept idly scrolling through selections while I slowly made my way over toward her, which convinced me to walk under the end table instead of around it. Thankfully there were no cobwebs beneath it, and in only a few more minutes I was standing at the base of our couch.
Kirsten spotted me almost immediately, as though she had been waiting for my arrival. “Oh, you finally made it!” she exclaimed, blowing back the hair on my head. “So, I know that per doctor’s orders you should climb up the couch to get to me, but that seems really unfair.” She paused to brush her hair behind her right ear. “Besides, I can’t wait that long to snuggle with you.” This was a relief. The whole walk over here I had been dreading the climb up our faux-leather couch, certain I wouldn’t be able to make it.
Her hand rushed down, ensnaring me before I realized what was happening. My stomach fell while she raised me, perhaps a bit too fast for what had before now been more like a long elevator ride. With her help I came over the couch cushion fairly soon, then she continued to carry me onto her. When I was over her flat tummy she set me down, letting me go so that I would sink into the soft skin beneath her chemise. It took me a moment to get situated, eyeing me carefully while trying to suppress a laugh.
“I hope you don’t mind, I picked out a nice rom-com for us tonight,” she said, pressing a button on the remote to start it. I figured that she did know I minded, but we never exactly had a strong track of sticking with movies once they started. I tried to get situated on her chemise while she looked down at me, and both of our expressions told me that no matter what happened with this film, we wouldn’t be watching it through to the end anyway.
The movie’s holograms took shape, filling our living room up to the couch with vibrant colors and ostensibly three-dimensional figures. “Bet you’re getting a kick out of this,” Kirsten asked, with unexpectedly strong vibrations running down and making my feet quiver. “It’s like you get a big screen experience without having to leave the apartment.” I tore myself away from her and faced the movie playing just in front of us. To my surprise, it was remarkably like an experience in a theater. Momentarily I got lost in the exhibition, watching the holographic figures move back and forth while I was mesmerized by how small I seemed compared to them now.
I sat down against Kirsten’s hip bone, and we were able to maintain the fiction of caring about the movie for a whole five minutes. “The whole time you were walking over here, I was looking for something like our situation,” Kirsten said, making me glad I was braced against her skeleton as the tremors ran through me. “Weirdly enough I couldn’t find anything. You’d think if it were so common there would have been something about it by now, right? Or at least some Oscar-nominated film about someone trying to deal with the challenges of someone suddenly being tiny?”
I sat back, trying to think of something to reply with. As I watched the typical presentation of the characters in the film, I realized that this was not the first time our lives didn’t exactly line up with what was presented in film. “Yeah, seems weird to me,” I agreed. “With how hard Dr. Kirillova was pushing this, you’d think it was a fairly common procedure.”
“You know what I think?” Kirsten asked, making me tremble along with her words. “I think we’re the first people this happened to with any sense of marketing. So what do you think?” Her fingers clenched around me, then lifted me away from her hips. She held me about a foot in the air and over her chest while she addressed me. “You want to make history?”
By now I was totally absorbed by Kirsten and the attention she was giving me. Specifically, how, vulnerable I was in her hands. “Let’s give it a week,” I suggested, wanting to adjust to my life before we agreed to make a movie about it. “We’re going through a lot of stuff right now, and I’m not sure if it’d be appropriate for all audiences.”
“Yeah, you’re right.” Kirsten slowly lowered me until I rested upon her pale skin just beneath her collar bone. “Besides, I don’t think the ratings guys would particularly approve of this.” Almost immediately her index finger shot forward, slamming into me and forming me against the curve of her fingertip. In an instant she had pushed me inside her chemise, sending me past her breasts before removing her finger so that I slid off against her underboob.
Left inside her chemise, I instantly looked for the fastest way to ignore Kirsten. Most likely she expected me to go up between her breasts again, so I started walking down along her tummy. I sidestepped her navel on the way down and headed for her right leg. Moments later I cleared the overhang provided by her chemise, coming out onto her shorts and looking out along her lusciously long legs ahead of me.
“Oh, are you trying to get away from me?” Kirsten called. Her hand descended on me while I ran along her shorts, trying to reach her bare legs. Just when I stepped out over her smooth, placid skin her fingers seized me, lifting me from my course along her leg. “I’m not sure that’s such a great idea right now. If you get too far away and I lose track of you, and I’ll have to spend the whole rest of my night finding you. Why not just spend the rest of the night hanging out with my hand? We can do more fun things later, I just want to make sure your first day goes off without a hitch.”
I may not have agreed – personally I wanted to run up and down her legs like I had always dreamed of – but she did have a point. Besides that, I wasn’t getting free of her grasp anytime soon. So instead of fighting back, I made myself at home in my wife’s grasp, enjoying the warmth that I wouldn’t have been able to feel otherwise had we not gone through with this procedure.
Kirsten played with me throughout the film’s duration, to such an extent that I felt she stopped caring about it before halfway through. Her fingers were a constant source of entertainment for both of us, stroking me up and down while she held me captive within her grip. I hardly minded, and every chance I got I reached out to stroke her fingers, letting her know that I was still there and up for whatever she had to throw at me.
“Letting you walk around may have been doctor’s orders,” Kirsten began, shaking me inside her grip, “but it’s sure not very time effective. It’s already time for me to go to bed, and I’d like it if you came with me.” That meant I was going to bed with her since I had no other way to get up to my bed, which I was perfectly fine with. It’s not like I had anything to do when she was asleep, anyway.
Kirsten clutched me around her stomach, letting me appreciate her tight tummy while I tried to deal with the vertigo of being carried around by someone else. “I’m sure the good doctor would disapprove of me carrying you, but I need to make sure you get in that bed tonight.” I could hardly disagree, since if I had to experience this day all over again it would be like my own special kind of purgatory. “I won’t tell her if you don’t, okay?” My lips were sealed, which I’m sure she would take as agreeing with her.
After a few thundering steps we were back in our bedroom, and Kirsten gently placed me back on top of my multi-purpose bed. She tossed a couple layers of cloth onto the bed then stepped back, looking down at me while I was stuck at her knee level. “Uh, guess this is something else I need to get,” she said, giving an embarrassed laugh down at me. “You’ll need some tiny blankets and sheets. I’ll go ahead and add that to the list.”
Kirsten climbed into her bed, leaving me alone on my platform. “Goodnight, Julian!” she called, reaching over to seize the gigantic chain above me. Her delicate fingers gripped it, and with a quick tug the room was plunged into darkness.
“’night, Kirsten!” I replied, doing my best to make a bed out of what I had been given. It wasn’t much, but after my first day as a tiny person I was exhausted anyway, and I soon drifted off to sleep as well.