Once I had a full cup, I turned around to survey the rest of the party and ran face-first into a red sequined halter top.  She hadn’t been there when I dunked my cup in so she must have crept up on me, extremely fast at that.  I craned my neck back, only to be met with the smug look on her cream-colored face.  She had her blond hair pulled up in a high ponytail so the ends drooped back down to tickle the back of her head.  “Where did you come from?” I asked, trying to conceal my surprise.

“I’m a genie, silly!” she replied with her husky voice, then giggled.  “I grant wishes.  You must have wished for me to be here, and I appeared!”

I smirked and decided to play along.  “Well if you’re a genie,” I began, “shouldn’t I have to rub a lamp to get wishes from you?  That’s how it works in the stories.”  I figured Li would be around since she had invited me, but she was off with a pair of meatheads.  With her preoccupied, I was no less happy to flirt with this blond bombshell.  As a best-case scenario, I’d score with her and make Li jealous at the same time.

“That’s a common misconception,” she replied, sliding a hand around my waist.  “You can get wishes out of genies by rubbing anything they like.” She leaned in so her mouth was next to my ear and continued conspiratorially, “You could even rub me to get a wish if that is… your wish.”  With a wink she stood back up, practically wedging my nose between her breasts.

“I could always use another wish or two,” I said, my voice muffled amid her cleavage.  “I wish…”  She rapped me on the back of the head, breaking my train of thought.

“Uh-uh,” she clicked, grabbing the scruff of my neck and jerking me away from her.  “Another little-known rule of genies: for every wish you get, I get one, too.”

I wrapped both arms around her waist, pulling myself into her again, and looked up so I wouldn’t be muffled this time.  “Well then, what is your wish, genie?”

“I wish that we could get a little distance between us and everyone else.”  She practically picked me up and carried me across the room, coming to stop in a corner on the far side.  It was hardly intimate since we were still in the living room, but it was a big improvement.  I couldn’t help but notice that Li was in the corner beside us with her brand new boy toy, and to show her how much I cared I needed to show her how much I didn’t care.

There was a bit of an awkward pause, and she prompted me, “You know, these aren’t like birthday wishes.  In fact, they’re almost the opposite: if you don’t tell me, then it definitely won’t come true.”

“All right then,” I started, a little defensive from how forward she was.  As she looked down at me from a foot above, I got a distinct feeling of hunger from her.  Or thirst.  Some innate biological need at least.  “I wish that we would make out, right now.”

It was risky, but for once taking a risk didn’t backfire.  She simply declared, in her velvety voice, “Your wish is my command,” then leaned in toward me.  If she was simply playing a part, she was doing a hell of a job at it: I wasn’t sure if I was pulling her closer, or she was pulling me.  Regardless, our lips met, and she seemed no less excited than me.  Our mouths went back and forth, attacking and defending in turn, while our tongues flicked between looking for an advantage.  Neither of us were able to gain the advantage for long before being upturned, then the other would quickly swoop in.

Ultimately though, she decided when it ended, and she separated our lips after only one passionate minute.  She looked down at me with wide eyes and proclaimed, “Okay, now it’s my turn!”  She inhaled sharply, and I stood on my toes in anticipation.  “I wish… that we knew each other’s names.”  That was a bit of a disappointment, especially considering what I thought had been our escalation.  “I’m Helen.”

I told her my name in response and started thinking of a more exciting wish than that.  It shouldn’t be too hard.  “I wish… that we could get a little more intimate, Helen.”  At the end I pulled myself into her, bringing us even closer, as if she needed more of a hint.  That ought to be enough to get the point across.

Helen put a finger in the middle of my forehead and shoved me back, forcing me to look up at her while I was pushed away.  “What a coincidence, I was just wishing the same thing.”  Her hand tipped my cup toward my lips, and the liquid began flowing into my mouth.  She kept her fingers there, making sure it kept pouring, until it was empty.  Only then, once I had cleaned every last drop from it, did she relent and allow it to drop from my lips.  “I’m just not sure you’ll like my version of intimacy.”

As though it had been pre-arranged a series of syllables belted out once Helen finished, deafening me to the peals of laughter that followed.  They were followed by an incandescent blue light that assaulted my senses, making me unable to perceive anything outside of it.  I felt dizzy and light-headed while it lasted, and the feeling endured once it was gone.

When I could see again I immediately noticed something was wrong.  Everything was several orders of magnitude larger, like it was built for a race of gigantic people.  Even the carpet seemed out of scale, and I had partially sunk into it.  At a glance, the running board on the wall I faced could have been the wall itself.  Was this the lead-in to another phase of the party, some sort of funhouse?  Strangely enough, I couldn’t see anyone else from where I stood, not even Helen, and she was hard to miss.

A deafening clap interrupted my survey and my attention snapped upward.  It looked like I was on the ground floor of a building with an open middle and the ceiling was draped with broad swatches of purple fabric, and the much larger second floor’s walls had been painted cream.  Two thick beams painted the same color stretched over the gap, angled to intersect each other.  At the point where they met was a huge cluster of material in the shape of – no, not just in the shape of.  It was two enormous hands clasped together.

“My wish came true, at least,” boomed a tremendous voice above me.  My focus shifted from the mammoth pair of hands to the building’s ceiling, where to gigantic, inlaid sapphires seemed to stare back at me.  Once my perspective adjusted, I realized those weren’t the largest gemstones I had ever seen, but eyes.  Looking down at me was Helen’s colossal face, somehow several times larger than the building I stood in.  Wide-eyed, I continued processing my situation, since none of it made sense. 

Several seconds later there were only two conclusions I hadn’t ruled out, though both were absurd.  The first was that Helen had suddenly and inexplicably grown to the size of a skyscraper and the rest of the world had adjusted for her new size.  Alternatively, I had just as suddenly and inexplicably been greatly reduced in size until I was about an inch tall, and Helen was the “building” I stood in.  Regardless, the reality was that Helen’s titanic form was crouched over me, and compared to her I was the size of an insect between her feet.

Another overpowering clap rattled my eardrums when she brought her hands together, and I uselessly clutched at my ears.  “Hey!” Helen barked, and a fleck of spittle landed in the carpet next to me.  “Bug!  Do something!  Ask what happened, beg me for mercy, run away, anything!”  I simply stood there dumbfounded, gawking up at her.  My mind was still trying to work out whether she had become titanic, or if I was tiny.

She slapped her hands onto her knees, making me flinch from the loud crack.  “You are, without a doubt, the most boring tiny person I have ever dealt with!” Helen roared, making me clutch my ears again.  Finally, a definitive answer.  “I should’ve figured Li’s guests would be about as fun as a wet noodle.”  I still gawped up at her, confused.  Was this some sort of game for her?  Had I been shrunk as a joke?

I was still struggling to come to terms with the situation when she shook her head, throwing her pillar of blond hair to and fro.  “You know what?” Helen began.  “If you’re not going to play along, I’m fucking done.”  She raised a hand from her knee and pointed it palm-down toward me, fingers together, and clenched her jaw.  Her hand reared back, and once it reached her shoulders began racing back down.

Too late I realized what was happening, but her hand was so massive it wouldn’t have made much difference.  Helen’s hand sped toward me, moving impossibly fast as her powerful arm swung it downward.  Her fingers quickly blotted out my view skyward, only to be pushed out as her gigantic palm drew closer.  The wrinkles of her palm were like crevices and the whorls on her skin more like trenches, every mark and imperfection starkly visible to me.

I only had a moment to reflect on that before her hand slammed into me.  For a split second I was prone but her hand continued its movement, compressing my body between it and the floor.  There was not even time to cry out in pain before Helen’s palm smashed me into paste.  A small mercy that the single greatest agony I had ever experienced was over in an instant, followed by feeling nothing at all.

Helen felt the joyless tiny man splatter beneath her hand when she swatted him, reduced to mush in an instant.  For good measure she repeatedly slapped the ground where he stood, mashing him into the carpet, until she was slamming her fist into the quarter-sized red circle that was left.  Her eyes flicked to the other shrunken man by her toes, easily within arm’s reach, looking at her with wild eyes.  She could have smashed him too, but it wouldn’t be sporting.  Hopefully he would be more fun to hunt than this one.