Jenna woke up to loud thuds and light tremors running through the floor as she had the past week. She had given up sleeping in her bed entirely: climbing into it was too much effort, and getting down had become too dangerous. Instead she made a small pile of bedding at the base of her nightstand out of a clean ankle sock and the tip of a cotton swab. It was far from ideal, but with the door closed she was at least safe.
All around her was white cotton with a gaping opening some distance away. She must have shrunken even more overnight to disappear into the sock like this. With a groan she rolled over and got to her feet, struggling to balance on the individual soft threads on her way out. When she got out of the sock she sank up to her knees in the carpet. Defeatedly she sighed and stepped over the long fibers toward her nightstand, where a ruler had been notched into the side.
Jenna did her best to stand up straight and measure herself, but her shoulders slumped when she finished. Almost exactly at the one inch mark. Suddenly she felt very heavy, and leaned forward against the wood for support. She couldn’t believe it: an inch. It set in then that she was truly, unbelievably tiny. In only a few months she had shrunk over a hundred inches and no one could explain why. It seemed like just yesterday she had towered over her fellow students, and now she would be lucky if one of them didn’t accidentally step on her.
The rhythmic thuds of her mom’s footsteps while she got ready for the day brought Jenna back to the present. What would she even do now that she was an inch tall? Everything was too big for her to use. She could not even leave the room unless she wanted to squeeze through the crack, and if she got stuck she would never hear the end of it. Even her phone was monumental compared to her.
Jenna shrugged off her clothes from the previous day, now comically large on her. There was one more outfit she could wear laid beside the sock where she slept, something she had taken off a novelty fitness doll weeks ago when she realized becoming this small was a distant possibility. She slipped on the pink running shorts and pulled the black tank top over her head with a brief thought about how she used to use these for finger puppets. After this she would have to make do with scraps cut out from her old clothes.
Five minutes later boredom had already set in. The only thing she could think of to pass the time was read and even that was out of the question. There was a bookcase against the far wall, but getting to the bottom shelf would require scaling something three times her height now. Even if she could manage that, she doubted she could pull a book from its slot. If she got that far it would take more strength than she had to open it. Finally, if she managed all that, she could only read a few letters at a time while standing on the pages – if it didn’t snap shut on her.
Without anything else to do, Jenna decided to check out her old stuff. She walked over to her bed where a row of shoes was laid out in perfect order. Closest to her was the pair of black flats she had worn on the first day of school, her favorite. They fit her feet so snugly, she remembered, and brought out her skin tone.
Now she stood beneath their tips, looking up at the black leather. Is this how ants used to see me? she wondered, looking at the rounded points. Jenna walked along the side, running a finger along it, and found she was still shorter than the edges. It took several minutes for her to reach the heel – she never realized her feet were that enormous, since they were always roughly proportional to her. The fabric here was not even worn since she had worn them less than a dozen times, and if she wanted to climb to where her Achilles tendon used to be it could easily support her weight.
Next was the pair of pumps she wore when she realized she was getting smaller. The heels were modest but still seemed like obelisks to her now. Jenna made sure to walk between that towering post and the hard outsole, reasoning that it was not every day you got to stand under the bridge of a shoe. The sole’s hard, light brown surface contrasted deeply with the shiny black front, broken only by a bold, black 18 within a circle. She had asked Maddie once and was astounded to learn that she wore a 6 – she did not even know shoes came in single-digit sizes.
After that was the long series of shoes she had gotten to cover up how short she was getting. Many of them had high heels that were more like six-inch spikes, veritable redwoods to her now, and were bright, vibrant colors to take attention away from the rest of her. Blood red, sky blue, pure yellow – each one had an outfit to go with it, of course, another thing to keep people from asking about her height. Then she came to a gap, the pair Shelby had stolen from her, and no longer wanted to keep going.
That had been a nice distraction, but there was still a lot of daylight for Jenna to burn. Aimlessly she walked toward the center of the room, trying to think of something to do. At the very least, she thought, she would get into shape from all this walking around. Jenna grinned at the irony: her body was sure to grab attention if anyone could see it.
The door shook from a gigantic fist pounding on it. “Jenna, honey, I’m heading out to run some errands,” her mom called from the other side. That explained why she had not left for work yet: it was Saturday. “One of your friends is here with a project for school, she promised to lock up if I’m still gone when I leave, shouldn’t be very long. Love you!” Another series of pounding footsteps followed by the front door slamming, then she was gone.
There was a beat of silence, then Jenna’s bedroom door swung inward. The person on the other side was absolutely massive: everything from their sternum up was cut off by the doorframe. They stooped nearly in half to fit through the door, a long blond braid hanging down to their knees. When they stood up so tall that their head nearly bumped against the ceiling Jenna could no longer deny who it was.
“Fee fi fo fum,” Gina boomed, an enormous smile plastered on her face. “How’s the world’s smallest giantess doing today?” Jenna was petrified from fear looking up at Gina. Her titanic body made her feel even smaller, like she was nothing in comparison. She wanted to run, but had no idea where she would even go.
Gina took two long steps toward the tiny woman in the middle of the room, her tremendous hi-top Converse making great tremors when they crashed into the ground. When she stopped Jenna was between her insteps, left with nothing to do but gaze up the pale, towering legs on either side of her, bare except for the light pair of rolled shorts. Gina’s hands rested at the base of her tight black shirt while she looked down at Jenna trapped between her feet, her grin only getting wider.
“J… just leave the project and go,” Jenna managed to squeak. She hoped it was loud enough for Gina to hear. “I’ll work on it with Maddie.”
Gina let out a terrifying, resonating laugh that caused Jenna’s insides to shake. “You must be the dumbest, most gullible person I’ve ever met!” she said when she finished, her voice overpowering Jenna to the point that she was stunned. “There is no project, if you hadn’t guessed. I bet you believed me about the shrinking disease too, right?”
Jenna was totally incapable of answering, which Gina interpreted as a yes. “Have I got a story for you, then,” she continued. “But I’d like to talk face to face, now.” She squatted as low as she could go, forming a gully with her legs with Jenna at the bottom. Mirthfully she eyed her victim, still paralyzed from abject terror, practically engulfed by her. Methodically she lowered a hand toward the tiny woman who could only watch the tremendous digits draw closer, then with a light pinch plucked her up by the back of her shirt.
Gina stood rapidly, causing the blood to rush out of Jenna’s head during the ascent. Dazed and stunned, Jenna struggled to stay conscious, let alone focus on the enormous face dominating her view. Her head lolled, and Gina stifled a giggle at her predicament, not wanting to accidentally knock her unconscious. Patiently she waited for the shrunken woman to recover before launching into her monologue.
“Being smaller than someone is my biggest fear,” Gina began. Jenna clapped her hands over her ears at the sonic assault, but quickly found that it did little to lessen the impact of the titaness’s voice. “So when you showed up I was shook. In my mind you weren’t just a few inches taller than me, you were hundreds of feet tall. I imagined myself shrinking into your hand. To me I was nothing but a bug to you, and you could do whatever you wanted to me – and you did. The thought was exciting, really, but I couldn’t let you get away with humiliating me like you did.
“Before I even left that day I cast a spell on you. Every day at midnight you would shrink an inch. I was going to cut it off when we were even, but you had to keep pushing my buttons.” Gina batted Jenna with a finger, causing her to swing like a pendulum in her grip. “Bragging about a growth spurt you had coming, wearing heels to cover up how small you were getting, and I couldn’t let that go unpunished. Down you dwindled, and I kept a close eye on you to see if you deserved to stop, maybe even get some of your height back, but you never did. Now, ironically, you’ve shrunk into my hand, and I can do whatever I want with you.”
Jenna doubted her ears would ever stop ringing from Gina’s voice, and the giantess’s omnipresence had overwhelmed her visually. Driven beyond the capacity for rational thoughts or emotions she asked flatly, “Are you going to kill me now?”
The corner of Gina’s mouth tugged up in a smirk. “I could, couldn’t I?” she asked devilishly, as though she had never considered it. “It would be really easy. I could crush you in a fist, swallow you in a gulp, put you back on the floor and stomp you into dust… I’ve got options, is what I’m saying.” Gina’s hand crept into her purse and dug around until she found what she was looking for.
When Gina withdrew her hand she held an empty, lidless glass jar. “Killing you in your own home would be barbaric,” she declared, centering the opening beneath Jenna. “Leaving your tiny corpse for your mother to find… just unbearable.” She lowered Jenna into the jar until her feet touched the glass bottom, then let her go and withdrew her fingers. “Better to let her think you shrank down into nothing while I have my fun with you.” She screwed the lid back on slowly, letting the treads grinding together burn their sound in Jenna’s mind until it was completely sealed.
Gina delicately held the jar to her face with two fingers. She tapped the glass several times, causing deafening thuds to resonate throughout the confined space while powerful vibrations ran through the glass. Jenna looked in horror at the giantess looming outside the glass, its curvature causing her already humongous face to warp around and seemingly surround her. Unable to deal with what she saw, Jenna retreated to the far side and sat down, brought her knees to her chest, and whimpered.
The blond titaness beamed at her tiny captive. “Hey, don’t be like that,” she said. “I won, and to the victor go the spoils.” She slid the jar back into her purse and left, keeping her promise to lock up after herself. Covering for her kidnapping would be easy: she already had it planned out. There was nobody in Jenna’s room when she came in, she would say, and she looked everywhere. From there it would be an easy jump to her shrinking to nothing more than a speck, and she would be left to have her fun.