Mother and son made their way through the department store. Roberta’s low clunker heels clacked on the gleaming tile. As she passed a floor-length mirror affixed to a pillar by the nearest shoe aisle, Roberta couldn’t help but stop to catch a glimpse of herself.

            She was met by the same vaguely disappointing reflection as always.

            Boring gray-and-red top, leather skirt. A pronounced hourglass frame ruined by a little extra pouch in the stomach, plus her less-than-pert breasts and globe-like ass. A prominent nose, thin lips, and seven-year-old glasses frames weren’t doing her plain facial features any favors. Plus, at age forty-nine, she was already beginning to weather under the pretensions of rapidly gaining middle age. Creased frown lines and visible crow’s feet marked her as a bit of an “old maid,” even though the number of gray hairs in her frizzy brown mane was, for now, under control. She sucked in her gut, tried to stand up straighter, and made the best of it.

            Not exactly a vision, but overall, acceptable enough. Roberta hadn’t felt attractive in quite a long time. Today, it seemed, wasn’t going to be any miraculous exception. The woman furrowed her brow again. She felt tiny arms and legs thrashing against the plush inner walls of her warm cleavage.

            “Quit your fussing, Kyle. You know, it’s this precise reason, because you can never follow simple directions, that you’re even in there in the first place,” Roberta scolded. She gave her son a few disciplinary taps on the head with her index finger.

            Kyle groused, ceasing the wrestling match with his mother’s tits, and crossed his arms as he sunk lower inside the vice of heavy flesh.

            “C’mon, Mom! Let me out, okay?” he groaned loudly, drawing a few curious eyes of passerby. “It’s getting super fricking hot in here. I can hardly breathe!”

            “Stay good while I do the shopping, and you’ll come out to try on some new clothes. How about that, huh? You’ll even personally benefit from improving your behavior.”

            “Fine.”

            She could virtually hear the roll of his eyes from that final grumbled pronouncement, but the woman decided to let it go for now. Picking one’s battles was important. A little stick and a little carrot. That was the way. Roberta pressed her breasts back together, embracing Kyle into the clammy pocket of aged skin and stale perfume, and set off at a brisk jaunt for the women’s clothing section.

            As this was one of her first public outings with her legally shrunken boy, Roberta was already enjoying the increased relaxation which came with milling at her own pace. Normally when she forced her son out in public with her, he couldn’t wait to squirm away and either hook up with friends or just make himself a general nuisance, bugging her about when it was time to leave. Well, this time, there would be no squirming. If there was, all Roberta had to do was jostle her bust and fasten the boy’s arms to his sides.

            “Could use some new panties, for sure…” the woman murmured to herself, eyeing the more expensive and garishly pink racks. She thumbed through the options with one hand, while with her other she twirled a fingernail in her puny child’s ruffled hair where it prodded from between her breasts. As expected, none of the higher-priced choices were exactly in her size, nor in her price range, for that matter. Roberta moved on.

            “Can I help you with something, ma’am?” a saleswoman in a smart pantsuit asked pleasantly, appearing from behind a blouse carousel.

            “Yes, I’m looking for the undergarments for the… err, healthier woman?”

            “Of course. Right this way,” the saleswoman said with a smile, indicating toward the back corner of the store. “Anything else?”

            “Actually, yes. If you could point me toward the Big & Tall section for my son, he-” Roberta chimed, but snorted before she could even get her whole joke out. She felt her son fold into himself with embarrassment against the bulging walls of her bosom.

            “Your son?” the salesperson questioned as they arrived in the correct department. “Is he…”

            “Decidedly not Big & Tall. Sorry, I couldn’t resist,” Roberta snickered. She fished into her cleavage with her thumb and forefinger, snatching her son around his chest. He resisted, going limp and automatically turning himself like a corkscrew such that he nearly managed to slide back into the sweat-glazed pocket he occupied. However, his mother’s fingers were far too dexterous, and she had him hooked by the back of his shirt and the beltline of his pants, prying him out.

            “Ah, I see now,” the saleswoman said cheerily, tapping a finger at her chin as she observed the six-inch shrunken young man dangled from his mother’s hand. “He certainly isn’t Big nor Tall, that’s true. Anyway, here’s the section you’re looking for. Will that be all, ma’am?”

            Roberta beamed, observing the beet-red complexion her son adopted at being paraded like this, and nodded again in thanks to the woman. She cupped an open palm beneath Kyle’s swinging feet. This allowed him to crumple awkwardly into her waiting hand; her fingers formed a shallow cage around his hips.

            “Why?” he muttered.

            “Hmm?” Roberta asked, already mostly preoccupied with flicking through the roomier underwear better suited to her robust derriere.

            “Why’d you have to do that? Pull me out in front of her like that?”
            “Well, for one, I was going to be needing your opinion on the clothes I pick, and second, you’ve got to get used to being around people much larger than you anyway, Kyle,” Roberta explained. “You might as well get some practice.”

            “Sure, but… c’mon, Mom. This isn’t cool.”

            Roberta paused, unhooking a pair of black panties from the rack, and looked down upon her son in her hand. She narrowed her eyes, pursing her lips from one side of her mouth to the other. A warm exhale wafted over his body.

            “That might very well be true, dear. But then again, it wasn’t particularly “cool” when you and your hooligan “friends” took it upon yourselves to vandalize the superintendent’s car and his poolhouse. It was anything but “cool” when you chose to jeopardize your academic futures and possibly criminal records over a stupid, silly game or prank or dare or whatever it was you kids thought you were doing. So maybe, just maybe, a little more “uncoolness” is necessary for comparison, so you can begin to understand the magnitude of your mistakes.”

            The strict, motherly benediction all came out in one breath. When it was through, Kyle looked deflated for the time being. He slumped against his mother’s thumb and crossed his arms over his chest, his chin bowed toward his lap.

            Roberta didn’t let him see it, as she was officially in “parenting” mode now, but she allowed herself a sneaky little smirk. In times past, she might well have had to escalate their conflict all the way to a screaming match before either of them backed down. Now, with Kyle at convenient hand-held size, he could be put in his place practically as easily as a button-activated doll. He had the Ken-style good looks, chiseled jaw, and sandy-blonde hair already; this size, then, was just a natural conclusion for him and his marauding ways.

            “All right, dear, you don’t need to play the victim all day. We’ve still got plenty of shopping to do. Now buck up, and tell me what you think of this pair?” Roberta asked. She extended the generous waistband of the midnight-black panties all the way out, letting them hang like a flag from her fingers, though she still kept her palm level enough for Kyle to perch.

            “Seriously? Your underwear?” he snarked.

            “Yes. Is that so strange? I just want an opinion, and I’ve got you here.”

            “Yeah, but… isn’t that a little… I don’t know, personal, Mom? I don’t need to see your underwear.”

            “I suppose not. But then again, I’ve seen yours plenty of times, all those years I spent changing and dressing you,” Roberta simpered. She crossed her thumb over her son’s stomach, subtly pinning him back into her palm. “Maybe it wouldn’t kill you to show a little gratitude sometimes and just play along, hmm? Now come on, tell me what you think. Here, I’ll even let you have a feel of it.”

            “Have a… what?” he sputtered dramatically as his mother’s giant fingers clamped around him. The boy was plopped unceremoniously into the parachute-like folds of the crisp black panties, while Roberta stretched out the fabric like a tablecloth, with her son laid squarely at the center where her hypothetical ass crack would be cradled.

            “Well, Kyle? Does it get the seal of approval? Is it soft enough to keep my tush comfy all day long?” she asked, trying not to laugh aloud at the obvious, fidgeting repulsion she’d visited upon her son simply by placing him in a factory-fresh pair of panties.

            Indeed, Kyle was caught between a full-body dry-heave at the mere concept of his surroundings, and also trying to keep still enough to avoid tumbling off the precarious loft of panty fabric toward the death plunge below.

            Roberta could already tell how much better just about every aspect of public life, shopping included, would be now with her son at his much more manageable six inches. Plus, he was pretty cute in there, too.

            The underwear portion of the shopping trip dragged on for half an hour, much to Kyle’s consternation. Roberta took her sweet time fingering through each and every rack of luxurious plus-size fare. Various cotton and silk fabric combinations in multiple thread counts and increasingly sensuous colors were all tested, first by the woman’s fingertips, then by Kyle himself, who was without fail laid at the center of the billowing folds. Roberta, ever the overbearing parent, simply beamed at him for a few seconds with each new predicament, taking mental pictures of her child hammocked in her potential future undergarments.

            After the tenth or so round, the teen seemed to be fussing less as his mother’s fingers released him into the exact location in the panties where a woman’s, specifically Roberta’s, ass crack might situate. Like he was getting used to it. She hoped he was retreating into a more docile state of being: the kind of man he had to learn to be on his own if he was ever going to survive out in the real world, beyond the reach of his mother’s punitive hands.

            Roberta at last selected the perfect pair of crimson-red panties with a faint leopard-print pattern. She plucked her son out of the underwear and made herself a smug mental note. It was rapidly becoming apparent that if she was to mold Kyle into an upright citizen, then he was going to have to settle down and learn to accept the things he couldn’t change. And the exact way to do that, it seemed, was to give him plenty of what he didn’t want, in spite of his gripes, until he learned to accept it.

            Nestling him in his mother’s panties in broad daylight was just one example. Roberta was certain she could find others as well.