I tugged my collar, still not accustomed to wearing anything besides thread-worn T-shirts that were verging on rags.  Fulda insisted on putting my best foot forward, she said, and chosen the same restaurant for me to meet Li as my first near-disaster with Jackie.  Fortunately, by now the smell of perfumed feet had left the clothes, so I could wear them without having flashbacks.

While Fulda walked back and forth making last minute preparations, I watched her from the granite countertop in her kitchen.  Her heels steadily clicked on the hard wood floor, and the cabinet doors rattled each time her toes slammed down.  She was putting in more work than I was, and dressed more elegantly to boot, with a form-fitting, backless black dress that was cut above her knees in front and came to a point behind her ankles and wearing what seemed to be her favorite pair of suede heels.

The cabinets’ rattling grew stronger, and I looked to see Fulda approaching, her fingers still working a white pearl earring into her earlobe.  Her monolithic form stopped in front of me, blocking the room’s overhead light.  I looked up from her waist, and despite the shadows I easily spotted her blue eyes peering back down at me.  “You ready yet?” she asked, as though I had been the one holding us up.

“Yeah, I’ve only got the one outfit,” I replied, pulling at my lapels.  “It’s not like I have a whole lot to get together.”

Fulda chuckled.  “I know that, little guy, I meant if you think you’re ready to meet Li.”

“Honestly, I’m not sure,” I said.  “The last two haven’t exactly gone well.”

“Oh no!” Fulda exclaimed, clapping her hands to her cheeks in mock surprise.  “A man in his twenties had a couple bad dates, call the police!”  She lowered her hands and a smile spread across her face.  “You’ll be fine, dude.  You have so much in common with her, I just know you’ll hit it off.”

“And she knows about my… size?”  There was no need to find a delicate way to phrase it.

“I don’t think she’d be coming out tonight if she didn’t,” Fulda responded.  “She was reluctant at first and asked if I was setting her up with some meathead from the gym.  When I told her that you’re an inch tall she was a lot more eager, almost excited.”

“Almost an inch,” I clarified.  “Helen was very insistent I remember that.”

“Ah yes, those very important fractions of an inch,” Fulda said mockingly.  “I’m sure Li will be devastated to see the difference.”  One of her hands swooped down, and in a flash she plucked me up between her thumb and forefinger, holding me immobile.  “C’mon, let’s go.  I’m eager to watch her swat you over a fifth of an inch.”  I did not resist while she lowered me into her clutch, and with a loud snap I was back in utter darkness.

With a soft click the handbag opened again, and I was treated to Fulda’s eyes eclipsing everything else I could have seen.  Her long, tanned fingers slid into the black bag and began probing around for me amid her personal items.  I lunged for a finger tip and wrapped myself partially around it like a tree trunk, giving it a tight squeeze.  Fulda slowly withdrew her hand, bringing me out along with it, and moved me over the table.

Vibrations ran up the spire I clung to when it touched down, and I released my grip on the digit.  After a short drop I landed on the broad white table cloth, just a few inches short of the maroon napkin for the table setting.  Fulda pulled her hand back and surreptitiously brushed it on the front of her dress before winking at me.  “Looks like we’re a little early,” she declared.  “You’ve got some time to nail down your set, then.”  She winked and turned around, walking to the table beside mine.  Until she sat down my eyes were glued onto her shaking butt, emphasized by the dress.  At the very least I was in the mood for a date now.

I did not have to wait long.  After only a few minutes I spotted a hostess heading for my table, though my attention was drawn to the Asian woman dwarfing her from behind.  She had straight, silky black hair that ran past her shoulders, and slim-framed glasses made her velvety brown eyes appear even larger.  A narrow choker was pulled tight around her slender neck, making it look longer, and an elegant, simple black dress ran down to the middle of her thighs, where a pair of dark stockings took over.  Her skin was pale but not unhealthily so, creating a strong contrast with her hair and clothes.

Li had me so entranced that I did not realize the short hostess had reached the table ahead of her.  An enormous slab of leather descended toward me, guided by the hostess’s hand, and I scrambled to get out from under it.  Unfortunately, I was too slow, and the menu set down atop me, knocking me over.  In a stroke of luck she had set it down gently, and I was merely pinned beneath it instead of being smashed instantly.

Fingers curled over the top of the menu’s cover and in a rush it was lifted off me, tossing me into the air with enough force to flip me halfway around.  When I recovered I got back to my feet, no worse for the wear, and brushed myself off.  In front of me was a tremendous black wall with some golden graffiti on the right, a set of finger tips on either side holding it up.  Great, she had not seen me either.

“Hey, Li!” I shouted, hoping to change that.  Her fingers subtly tensed, and I knew she heard me.  “Down here, on the table!  Other side of the menu!”  Cautiously, as though expecting a trick, Li closed the menu enough so she could peer around it.  When one of her enormous eyes was visible she quickly slammed it shut and dropped it onto the table with a thud, making the ground around me vibrate.

“Hello down there!” Li exclaimed.  She was trying not to draw attention to herself, but I could tell she was excited.  Her thin red lips pulled back in a smile and she continued, “You must be Fulda’s little friend.  It’s so good to see you!”

“I’m just glad you can see me,” I replied.

Li laughed and said, “Good, you’re funny.”  She shoved the menu away with a finger, apparently more interested in me than eating, and flicked her head so that her hair fell behind her ears.  “Short guys tend to be, so you must be hilarious.”

“That’s probably why Fulda keeps me around,” I joked.  Before she could say anything else I moved forward, trying to avoid another interrogation.  “So, what is it that you do?”

“I’m a medical student,” Li answered.  She set her elbows on the table and made a bridge with her fingers, then leaned forward and placed her chin on it.  Briefly she grinned down at me while I looked back up, in awe at how easily she had transitioned to looming over me.  “In another year I’ll start my residency, so I’m trying to get my life settled before then.  So how’d you get so small?  Were you born like this, did you get some disease…?”

Well, that lasted all of one question.  “Actually, Fulda shrank me,” I replied.  “We were dating back then, and she thought it would be a fun surprise to make me tiny.”  I figured it was prudent to leave out that I tried to break up with her, since she was going to do it anyway.

“Wait, you knew Fulda in high school?” she asked.  “How come I never saw you at any of our parties?”

“That’s not such a funny story,” I began.  “After she graduated Fulda decided she was bored of me and gave me to her kid sister.  She turned out to be a lunatic, and I was stuck with her for six years before I could escape with Fulda’s help.”

Li let out a little gasp.  “You mean she kept you prisoner?”  I nodded, and she continued, “That’s terrible!  How did you make it so long?  In my experience tiny people are lucky to live six hours, let alone six years.”

“Weirdly enough, she liked me.  She always called me her ‘boy toy’ and imagined a whole relationship in her head.  What do you mean about your experience with tiny people?”

Li paused for a moment before answering.  “Oh, don’t worry about it, you can ask Fulda next time you see her.”  She inclined her head and said, “You know, we’re talking about Fulda a lot and I want to talk about us.  What sort of stuff did you do before you were tiny?”

“Normal teenager stuff, I guess,” I replied.  “Reading, studying, playing video games, hanging out with people.  Though these days the only way I hang is off people’s clothes, and I never imagined I’d be living Shadow of the Colossus.”

She giggled briefly, then leaned in a little closer.  “That’s funny, you don’t look like much of a gamer.  Then again, I probably don’t either.  You’re probably in better shape than me if it weren’t for the whole ‘being able to fit in my palm’ thing.  What’s your secret?”

“Necessity,” I answered simply.  “I do a lot of climbing up legs, running between people’s feet, stuff like that.  You would not believe how good a workout I get trying to push someone’s finger off me.”

Li smirked.  “Mind if I try?”

“Go right ahead,” I agreed.  “See if you can knock me down.”  One of her hands swung down from beneath her chin with incredibly speed, and before I could even jump out of the way the heel of her palm struck the table with a crash.  An instant later her fingers hit, with one laid right across me.  I toppled backwards beneath it, and Li’s index finger rested on my chest.  She adjusted it slightly so that I could see past the tip of her finger, and she was practically beaming down at me as though she had accomplished some great feat.

She chuckled and leaned in until her face eclipsed my view.  I struggled to push her finger off, but it was futile; any time I made progress she simply pressed a little harder to keep me pinned.  “Looks like I’ve caught me a tiny man,” she whispered huskily.  “I guess I never thought about it, but my finger’s like a thousand pounds to you, isn’t it?”  I nodded, and she grinned wider.  “That means you’re trapped.  What do you think I should do with a tiny little man like you, completely under my power?”

I gulped.  Not again.  “Whatever you want,” I said.  By now I had been through this enough that I could feel where it was going.

“Anything?” Li asked, drawing out the last syllable, and I nodded fervently.  “Good.  You might think this is weird, but I think I should take you back to my place.”

“But Fulda said –“

“I thought we weren’t talking about Fulda anymore,” Li interrupted.  “Let me worry about her, and before you know it we’ll be back in my apartment playing Shadow of the Colossus.”  The smirk remained on her face while she sat back up, leaving her finger on me so I would remain immobile.  As she did so I saw a tall, well-dressed woman standing behind her, looking down at Li impatiently.  After a few seconds the waitress cleared her throat, grabbing her attention.

Li jumped slightly in her chair and turned to look at the waitress.  “Oh, sorry!” she apologized.  “There was an odd stain on the cloth I was checking out.”

Unfazed, the waitress got on with her job.  “Can I start you out with a drink while you wait, or maybe an appetizer?”

“This might be a little weird,” Li said, shifting uncomfortably.  While she moved her hand jostled me, making me wiggle back and forth beneath it, “but I’m just here to surprise my friend.  See that redhead at the other table?”  With her free hand she pointed at Fulda, who was acting way too engrossed with the menu.  “It’s her birthday, but she didn’t want to celebrate.  If you could do something small for her, I know she’d really appreciate it.”

The waitress clapped her booklet shut and tucked it into her apron.  “I’ll see what we can do,” she said, then walked away into the distance.

When she was gone Li turned back to me, still pinned beneath her finger.  “Now we just need to wait for them to swarm her and I’ll get you out of here.”  She looked at me helpless in her grasp, practically devouring me with her eyes, with a small, satisfied grin.  I stayed silent, gazing up at her nearly in disbelief at what was happening.  Li was really taking me back to her place, and for once I was excited for a date to end.  Apparently, the third time really is the charm.

After a few minutes a dozen or so staff swarmed Fulda, and I was just able to see the look of surprise on her face before they formed a solid wall of white linen between us.  When we were fully blocked, Li slid her thumb around to my back and lightly pinched me, picking me up from the table.  Carefully she lifted me away from the cloth and toward her, then stopped me beneath her chin.  Below I saw the crack of her cleavage, her modest breasts enhanced by her dress enough to make a perfect landing for me. 

While the opening bars of “Happy Birthday” filled the room she opened her fingers, dropping me head-first into her cleavage.  I dropped rapidly, plunging deeply into the darkness until only my feet were sticking out.  Li gave her chest a couple of light pats, helping me settle between them, then my stomach slid to my mouth while she stood.  The world gently swayed while she walked, bouncing with her gait, and I did my best to get comfortable between the sizable fleshy mounds on either side despite the heat.

The journey was surprisingly short, around fifteen minutes, and before I could even doze off the powerful shocks of Li ascending a flight of stairs jolted me.  The powerful slams of her shoes striking each step echoed through the cavernous stairwell, becoming a distorted roar as it was funneled into her cleavage.  It was a tremendous shock after the soothing walk she had just taken with me, and it made me realize just how insulated I had been during the trip.

Li came to a sudden stop and I lurched forward, getting wedged further between her breasts.  After a loud beep the door swung inward with a bang, and I felt myself spinning while Li turned to and fro in her apartment.  A loud series of clatters came from the floor and my stomach fell out, a sudden drop of several inches jolting my body.  Her feet’s soft soles padded over the floor, and with a loud click light began pouring into my crevice.

Fingers dug into the skin around me, and after a second of groping one overtook me.  Li curled it around my body and dug me out, pressing me against her sternum for support.  Her thumb swung in to join it, holding me securely against her finger, and she carefully lifted me out of her dress.  Keeping me pinched in her grip, she held me in front of her face and grinned while she adjusted her glasses with her free hand.

“Glad to see you made it in one piece,” she said, her voice rolling over me like thunder.  “For someone already bite-sized I hate to think how small those would be.”  Her apartment had much better lighting than the restaurant, and now I could see that she was strikingly beautiful.  Li’s eyes were darker than I had originally thought, almost black, and she had long, slender eyelashes around them, all popping magnificently against her pale skin.  There was a slight bulge at the base of her nose, drawing attention to her delicate pink lips which, for the whole time I had known her, had been pulled into an enticing smile.

“So, what do you want to do?” I asked, trying to play it cool.  It was ridiculous that I should be calling the shots from inside her hand, but my whole life for over half a decade had been no less ridiculous.

“We’ll get to the main course soon enough,” Li replied.  She took a step forward and the world seemed to shift around her.  “I really am hungry though, and since I skipped dinner I’d like to get a few bites to eat if you don’t mind.”

“No, not at all,” I responded, though I knew my approval held no power.  Behind her the wide, open airspace of her living room was replaced by a stark white wall with a simple analog clock hanging from it.  A large, white box with a window came into one edge of my vision, with a green digital display, and a great steel monolith on the other.  Predictably, she was taking me into the kitchen, wanting to keep me close while she ate.

Rapidly her hand dropped, and before the vertigo could clear I found myself standing on a white countertop.  I looked up Li’s monumental torso and watched her easily open a cabinet, then reach in to withdraw a red box and brown cylinder.  She set them both down on the counter beside me with a loud crash, buffeting me with wind as it rushed from beneath the gargantuan containers, then opened a drawer beneath me with a clatter of metal.  Her fingers slid in and grabbed a single butter knife, then with a gentle thrust of her hips she closed it with another rattle and boom.

“So, little guy,” Li began, popping the tabs on the box, “want to know about my history with people like you?”  A terrific rustling assaulted my ears as she pulled out a sleeve of crackers, taking one off the top before putting it back in the box.

“If by that you mean tiny people, yeah,” I answered, gazing up at her in awe.  “Fulda mentioned that all of you would know how to handle me.”

“Is that how she phrased it?” Li asked, setting the cracker down beside me.  Laid flat it came up to my knees, and it could fit several of me laying side by side.  “That’s funny.”  Her hands gripped the cylinder, and with a firm twist with her mighty hands she screwed the lid off.  “I mean it’s true, but it’s also funny.”  She set the yellow lid in front of her, and I estimated it came up to my shoulders at least.

“Every few months our sorority threw a party,” Li elaborated, plunging the knife into the open brown container.  “We were all tall and wanted to feel taller, so we specifically invited the shortest men we could find.  The whole thing was very hush-hush to maintain a certain air of mystery about it.”  She pulled the knife back out, bearing a large glob of peanut butter on the edge.  “They call came, eager to party with some of the hottest girls on campus, thinking we were interested in them.”

Li picked the cracker off the counter and gingerly spread the peanut butter over it, absent-mindedly adjusting it so it would be even.  “Then we shrank them.  Sometimes it was a little at a time throughout the night, sometimes all at once, but they all ended up about your size by the time we were done.”  She set the disc back on the counter, with the peanut butter so smooth it looked like a mattress atop it.  “That was when the fun began.”

Fingers seized me around the waist, much harder than before, and snatched me off the counter.  “We all had our own ways to dispose of shrinks like you.”  Shrinks.  Jackie had used that word, too.  “Jackie liked to play games, make them think it was their fault for displeasing her.  Helen kept them in cages and used them as little stress balls.  Fulda just loved crushing them with her shoes, under her butt, between her thighs, she was really creative.”  Li began dropping me back down to the counter, carefully positioning my descent, and continued, “Before the night was done we’d go on a shrink hunt, and either exterminate them or keep them for later.”

Cold goop gripped me by the back, and Li’s finger gently patted me down into it.  “Oh, I didn’t tell you how I did it, did I?” she asked with a giggle.  “My mistake.”  When she pulled her finger away I was firmly stuck in the peanut better, barely able to even wiggle my digits.  She gripped the cracker between her thumb and forefinger, and blood rushed from my head while she lifted me to her face in an instant.  Her eyes locked onto the little parts I had poking out from the peanut butter, looking me over hungrily.  “I ate them.”

For emphasis she licked her lips, leaving a thin layer of saliva on them.  “There’s really nothing like swallowing another person alive.  First, they scream for mercy, begging me not to eat them.  Then they thrash around in my mouth, trying to fight their way out with their pathetic little arms.  Finally, they slide down my throat, struggling the whole way, and it feels amazing to have someone thrashing around in there.  Sometimes they would fight in my stomach, but that never lasted too long.”

Li’s lips parted, and she began drawing the cracker I was stuck on toward her maw.  “Li, no, wait!” I shouted.  “Please, no!  If you don’t eat me I’ll do anything you want, anything!  You can keep me as your pet, your slave, you can even give me back to Fulda and I won’t say anything!”  Through it all, my inexorable approach toward Li’s mouth continued.

“See?” she asked when the edge was at her lips.  “They always beg.  It’s such a rush of power.”  Li pushed the cracker until it was halfway into her mouth, and I squeezed my eyes shut.  A deafening crunch assaulted my ears and the wheat disc shook violently as her teeth tore through it, but no part of me was sheared off with it.  I forced my eyes open, and saw gleaming white incisors pushed together a millimeter from my feet.  Her lips curled inward, drenching me in saliva when one engulfed me, then she pulled the remainder away from her cavernous maw.  She worked her jaw purposefully, breaking the bite down with her saliva, before theatrically swallowing it in a large gulp visible from outside her throat.

“I almost don’t want to eat you,” Li declared, her voice booming like timpani from only a few inches away.  “You really are cute and funny, and I think I’d have a lot of fun playing with you.”

“You don’t have to, you could –“

“But I’m going to, because you’re a puny shrink and I’m a giantess.”

A loud crash came from the other side of the door and it bowed inward.  “Li!  Open this fucking door!” someone shouted from the other side.  It was Fulda!  She had come to save me!  “You knew the deal, so let me in before I break the door down!”

“Well, that’s that,” Li said, smacking her lips deliberately.  “I hoped we had a few more minutes together, but hey, she’s huge and runs fast.”  Another loud crash rocked the door.  “Try to fight on your way down, okay?”  She opened her jaw wide and extended her tongue, working it beneath my feat.  Slowly she slid the slimy appendage beneath me, bucking it every few millimeters to loosen me from the peanut butter.  Little by little she drew me into her mouth, and I looked at her uvula hanging over her gullet in abject terror.

Li’s tongue finally pried my loose and retracted, sliding me into the tremendous tooth-lined cavern.  At the same time the door exploded inward with a thundering crash, making the whole room shake.  Li spun around, and between her parted lips I saw Fulda gripping the doorframe, heaving.  The redhaired titaness had a mask of fury on her face and strode toward Li with determination.  When she was close Li sealed her lips and flicked her tongue back, tossing me onto the soft tissue of her gullet.

With a sickening squelch Li’s gullet opened, and I fell into the chute of her esophagus.  Her throat muscles clamped around me, holding me tight as they compelled me down toward her stomach.  I resigned myself to my fate, knowing that the last thing I would ever see was the woman who put me in this situation.