At age 31, Michael Parker is presently in no situation to complain about his life. His research at the lab is earning him enough money to live quite comfortably, and he and his 29 year old wife Amy were recently able to purchase a beautiful home. Sure, it isn’t the mansion Michael dreams of one day having built to his exact specifications after he starts raking in the millions of dollars he believes the bizarre inventions he forges in his spare time will one day earn him, but for now it’s home, his wife absolutely loves it and her happiness alone is more than enough to suffice to keep him content, at least for the time being.

    It's a beautiful morning in early June. Michael and Amy are seated at the table in their spacious kitchen enjoying their breakfast together. “I know we’ve lived here for nearly two months already, but doesn’t it still feel just incredible being able to eat a meal in a home we can call our own?” Amy asks her husband before taking a sip of her orange juice.

    “It doesn’t matter where I’m eating, as long as it’s with you I’m sure to feel incredible… and it helps when the food is this good” replies Michael. 

Amy sets her glass back down onto the table and smiles at her husband. “Thanks, sweetie, I’m so lucky to have found a man that really appreciates my cooking.”

    “You’re welcome. So, all ready for the big day? I know you’ve been anxious to finally get your friends over here for the housewarming party.”

    “I sure am! And it couldn’t be a better day for it. Not a cloud in sight, yet it’s still not too hot to enjoy the outdoors.”

    “Looks like we’ll be firing up the grill after all.” Michael says as the two of them rise from the table and walk to the sink with their now empty dishes in their hands. Michael begins washing them and one by one he hands each cleaned dish to his wife whom dries them and places them in the dish strainer as they continue to talk.

    “Yeah, I just need to run to the store and pick up a few last minute things, a couple bags of chips, a bottle of ketchup, probably wouldn’t hurt to get another 2 liter of soda as well.”

    “Sounds good, want me to come with you?”

“NO, silly, our guests will be here anytime now! You need to stay and keep them entertained until I get back. But you need to promise me you won’t show off too much of our lovely home to our friends before I get back. You know I want to be the one to brag to them about every detail of this house, you know how long I’ve been waiting for this.”

    Michael chuckles a bit, he’s anticipated this, he’s known his wife would most likely get a little carried away and want to give their friends a “grand tour” of the house. He was just happy he was finally able to get her a home like she’d told him she’s always wanted. “Okay, okay, I promise I’ll let you give the tour of the house. I’ll make sure everyone stays in either the living room or kitchen until you return, unless they want to mingle outside and enjoy today’s pleasant weather.”

    “Thank you, sweetie” Amy says before hanging up the dish towel and leaning in to give her husband a kiss.

    “See you soon, honey” says Michael as his wife heads out the front door and begins the brief walk across the lawn to her car parked in the driveway. He hears the engine start and watches through the window as the car drives off while he removes the dishes from the dish strainer and places them in the appropriate cupboards.

    “Might as well check the mail” Michael says to himself before heading out the same door his wife had just used to make her exit. He closes the door behind him, takes a deep breath, stretches, and enjoys the greeting that the warmth of the sun immediately extends to him. Michael takes a look around his yard as he crosses the lawn on his way to the mailbox. He can see how his wife loves living here. It’s not just a nice home, it’s a nice home with a nice lawn. To his left about halfway to the mailbox is the wooden picnic table, to the right is the grill. He plans to make use of both later in the day.

    Michael reaches the mailbox and extracts today’s delivery. Looks like a newspaper and a couple bills. No surprises, not that he was expecting any. He turns his head and gazes at the only other home in sight. That’s another thing his wife relishes about their home: being able to live in relative seclusion.

    Amanda Knight lives with her daughter Claire directly across the street from Amy and Michael. From what he understands Amanda and her husband’s marriage withered many years ago, and she received the house and a decent chunk of money in the divorce. Michael is not even fully aware of Amanda’s occupation having only spoken with her few enough times to count on one hand, but he knows that she is very often away on business for days and sometimes even weeks at a time. She had embarked on another of these trips only two days earlier.

    Michael can faintly see the television playing through the Knights’ living room window and takes this as a sign that Claire is home and awake. He had been considering inviting her to the party as he knew she would likely be home and possibly bored but decided against doing so as he thought it would probably seem rather peculiar to have his neighbor’s beautiful 19 year old daughter attend he and his wife’s housewarming party.

    As he begins walking across the lawn and back to his house, Michael hears something that gets louder and louder on its approach. Soon the large object moves into his field of view and he recognizes it as his friend Jim’s obnoxiously large blue truck. He watches as the vehicle is maneuvered into the clear area far to the right of the mailbox where Amy and Michael’s guests know to park. He listens as the engine ceases to roar and watches from the lawn as Jim and his girlfriend Brandi emerge from the blue behemoth and begin walking towards him.

    “Hey Jim, how’s it going?” asks Michael.

    "Not bad at all, Man. And this… this is a great place you’ve got here. I’m impressed.”

    “Yeah Mike, it’s so beautiful. How did Amy manage to go this long without showing it off to everyone?” asked Brandi. “I bet it’s been driving her crazy.”

    “Oh, she’s definitely been having a hard time of it. She’s at the store right now picking up a few last minute things for the party. I hope you guys brought you appetites. It’s so nice out that it would be a waste not to use this opportunity to grille up some cheeseburgers and hotdogs.”

    “Sounds great, Mike. You know me,  I’ve never been able to pass up a cookout” says Jim. Brandi nods in agreement.

    Michael smiles and turns his head to gaze upon his home. “Before she left she actually told me not to show off too much of the house before she gets back. She wants the privilege of giving what she calls the “grand tour“ of our new home,” Michael tells to a lightly laughing Brandi. “We can go inside and sit in the kitchen or living while we wait for Amy and everyone else to arrive, or we can just stay out here and take a seat at the picnic table, it’s up to you guys.”

    “It is really nice out, and I’m sure everyone will be here soon, why don’t we just plant ourselves down on the picnic table? Sound good to you Jimmy?” asks Brandi. Jim nods in agreement and the three friends take a seat and converse for a few moments as the vehicles carrying their other friends begin rolling in.

The guests have all arrived within 15-20 minutes after Jim, Brandi, and Michael sat down at the picnic table and began talking. Amy has still not returned home from her trip into town to acquire the last minute supplies.
    Including the three of them, there are now 9 people sitting at the table. New to the group are Isaac, a friend of Michael and Jim’s from back in high school, Isaac’s wife Cynthia, and 2 of Amy’s close friends, Alexia, Jennifer, and their respective boyfriends, Keith and Scott.

    The 10 friends have begun to exhaust their supply of topics to discuss. They’ve already burned through the obligatory “How is everything with you?”s', and of course Michael was bombarded with the “WOW this house is so beautiful,“ “Can’t believe how nice it is here, must have cost a fortune” comments. The group has discussed movies they have recently seen, season finales of the shows they enjoy watching… they are beginning to grow bored waiting for Amy to arrive and for the food to start cooking, but Michael has already made it clear to them that he is under orders from his wife not to let them see much of the inside of the home as she wants to be the one to give the tour. Luckily, Jim is able to conjure up another topic to breathe a little more life into their current state of slight boredom.

    “Hey Mike, you been working on any… interesting… invention thingies lately?”

    “Yeah man, whatcha been spending your spare time on since the move?” asks Isaac.

    All eyes shift to Michael, and he begins to grin. Just as his wife likes to brag to her friends about her new possessions, Michael enjoys showing off his creations whenever an opportunity presents itself. “Well actually, I have been working on something you might find quite interesting. Amy said I should save showing it off for another time, but she’s running late and you guys could use some entertainment, plus, who knows when I’d be able to get all of you together again to show it off? Now is perfect!”

    Michael grows quite excited upon realizing he now nas the perfect opportunity to show off the machine he’d been working heavily on in his spare time the last few months. He knows it's was guaranteed to impress the group. “ Uh… Jim, Isaac, can I get you to give me a hand with this thing? It’s small, but it’s heavy.”

    “Sure” the two men reply in unison as they rise from the table and follow Michael into the house.

   “Everyone else, stay here. We’ll bring the machine out and set it on the porch” says Michael as he leads the other 2 men into his home to retrieve the machine.    

    The group at the table talks amongst themselves speculating as to what sort of device it could be that they are about to see. They all know Michael is as unpredictable as he is talented, it could be anything. 5 minutes pass before Michael returns, swinging the door open and holding it in position while Isaac and Jim carry the machine out to the porch in front of the eagerly awaiting crowd.

    “Set her down right here, guys” Michael says, pointing to the middle of the porch.

    The 2 men comply and the heavy machine touches down. “Damn, you weren’t joking, that thing weighs a ton” says Jim.

    Everyone’s eyes are locked onto the machine. To everyone but Michael it appears as simply a round black hunk of metal with a diameter of about 2 and a half feet nestled atop a surprisingly sturdy tripod.

    “You’d be amazed… it’s actually quite light if you factor in…”

    “Yeah yeah yeah, let’s skip the science lesson, I don’t need to know how it works, I just want to know what this thing does” says Jim, cutting his friend off before he could begin his techno-babble lecture.

    “In the most simple terms I can conjure, this machine was designed to take big things, and make them smaller.”

    “Uh… what… how?” Asked Isaac.

    “Care for an example, anyone?”

    By now everyone has risen from the table and formed a half circle in front of the machine standing slightly higher than their heads from its perch on the porch.  Each head nods yes, confirming they would like to witness a demonstration.

    “Okay then, guys. I’m gonna need something big to target... any suggestions?”

    An amusing grin creeps across Keith’s face at that moment. “Something big, huh? I volunteer” he says as he flexes his arms. A few members of the group roll their eyes and laugh, including his own girlfriend Alexia, before she wraps her arms around him and kisses him on his left cheek.

    Michael chuckles. “No offense, Keith, but for this demonstration I’d like to use something even larger. Anyone have an idea?”

    An idea pops into Brandi’s mind. “HEY! I know! What about your truck, Jimmy?"

    “I don’t know, babe, I’d hate to ruin Mike’s lawn driving my big blue beauty up to the porch. And then it would be awfully embarrassing for him when his fancy doohickey here fails to bring her down to size.”

    Complete confidence in his machine fuels the smile that conquers the rest of his face. “Go get your truck, don’t worry about the lawn.”

    “Well, if you insist.” Jim heads to his truck and the rest of the group awaits his quick return. He drives it slowly onto the lawn as the group spreads out around it and allows Jim enough room to position his massive vehicle directly in front of the machine, coming to a stop about 4 feet away from the first of two steps that lead onto the porch. Jim exits his vehicle and places his keys into his pocket. “Okay, let’s see what this thing’s got.”

        “Sure thing, Jim. Everyone, please take a couple steps back and I’ll fire up the machine.”

        The group complies and Michael steps behind the machine to man the controls. He checks the settings and makes sure everything is set properly, then makes the final adjustments and turns the machine ever so slightly so that it’s aimed directly at the truck. “Firing in 3...2...1...” 

    A red laser bursts forth from the black steel and illuminates the vehicle, encasing it in a crimson glow for no more than a single second and in the blink of an eye, the truck is gone.

    The group members look at each other with wide eyes. “Uh… so… it’s a teleporter? Where the hell did you send my truck, man?” asks a worried Jim.

    “Stay calm” responds Michael, “It’s still here, it hasn’t gone anywhere.” Michael pushes the machine about a foot to the right so everyone will have room to easily scale the 2 small stairs leading up the porch and be able to enter the house without immediately having to bring the machine back inside when his demonstration draws to a close. He then walks off the porch and rejoins the group.

    Brandi is the first to spot it. From where she’s standing she can see a hint of sunlight reflecting off of something very small and blue a few feet in front of her in the middle of the circle. The others watch as she moves forward, eyes focused on the ground. She comes to a stop after placing each of her feet parallel to the right and left sides of the once massive truck and continues to stare down at it, speechless, as is the rest of the group having now noticed the minuscule vehicle between their friend’s feet, perched atop her red flip flops. Brandi repositions each foot closer to the truck, leaving only an inch between its sides and her feet. She playfully lifts her big toes and slowly drops them back down to the top of her sandals, then repeats the same small movement a few more times. She begins to giggle, finding herself amused by the sight of her boyfriend’s truck that stood nearly twice her height just moments ago, now around one and a half times the length of her big toes, and being cloaked in the shadows which they cast as she continues to raise them and lower them. The others in the group continue to stare down, captivated by the sight of the tiny vehicle and Brandi’s feet surrounding it, the sunlight reflecting off her toenails coated in a bright red polish.

    “SOOOOO…. Are we impressed?” asks Michael.“

    “This… this is amazing” says Cynthia.

    “No, man, this is BEYOND amazing” chimes in Scott.

    “How is this even possible? Has science come this far in the last few years and I’ve been living under a rock?” Keith asks. The entire group is still mystified by the transformation they’ve witnessed.

    “So, Jim, how do you prefer your truck? Full size, or in Hotwheels form?” Everyone laughs but Jim, his disposition has changed over the past few minutes from calm and cool to nervous.

    “Please tell me you can change it back… Please just tell me this isn’t permanent.”

    “Relax, I can definitely restore it to its original size, we just need to wait… I’d say 20 minutes at the least. I’ve never reduced something so large to such a smaller state, I don’t want to risk firing the machine again and frying something internal because it didn’t have enough time to properly wind down. This is actually the prototype, it can be a little buggy at times but it’s been reliable for the most part. I have a newer version inside that I just completed assembling recently, it’s got a few extra features and runs much more smoothly despite the fact that it’s the size and shape of your average television remote control. Although the technology is so advanced, operating the device is a breeze, it's no more complicated than learning to use something like a modern cellphone. I wanted to bring this version out to show off though because it’s bigger, bulkier, more crude and menacing, it’s got that WOW factor on its side, whereas the handheld version has convenience.    

    “Okay Michael… okay” says Jim as he starts to calm down.

    Brandi crouches down and lifts the truck from the ground gripping it from behind with her index finger on the right side and her thumb on the left. She knows how important this truck is to her boyfriend, and displays this knowledge as she gently places it into the palm of her left hand, raising it to her face before peering into the windshield. “It’s so cute!” she exclaims to Jim. “You know what’d be even cuter? If you were in there as a teeny tiny passenger!”

    Jim actually cringes at the thought, everyone else laughs.

    “Anyone else wanna hold it?!” she yells, extending her hand out to group, offering up the tiny tribute. “If… Jim’s okay with the idea” she adds.

    Almost everyone in the group shoots forward, everyone wants to experience what it’s like to hold an actual truck in the palm of their hand.

    “Uh… babe, I’d really prefer it if we could just set it somewhere safe until the machine is ready to be fired again.”

    “Okay Jimmy, I understand” she says, and begins walking to the picnic table. Just as she’s about to set it on the top of the table, Michael stops her.

    “You might not want to place it there, it could roll off the table and smash to pieces, I’ve already turned his beloved truck into a Matchbox car, I don’t want to be responsible for turning it into a mini jigsaw puzzle in the same day.”

    “Damn, you’re right” Jim says. He grabs his truck from his girlfriend. “How about right here…” he says, crouching down and gently placing the vehicle underneath the picnic table, about 6 inches away from the nearest table leg. “Everyone see where it is… remember it’s there, please don’t touch it and I’ll retrieve it when Michael says the machine is good to go, okay?” Everyone nods their heads in a agreement and Jim stand back up to his full height and gives Brandi a kiss.

    The group slowly walks away from the picnic table and to the porch when Jim notices smoke emanating from within the machine.

    “Shit! Mike, what’s happening to your… black metal death ray? Is it gonna be able to restore my truck after this?!”

    “I’m sure everything’s fine, it’s probably just starting to overheat. I’ll get behind it and power it down. And hey… it’s not a death ray!”

    Everyone stands around the bottom of the porch, briefly startled by the appearance of smoke but now comforted by Michael saying that it was nothing to worry about.

    Michael gets behind the machine and looks down at the control panel. The entire screen is flashing red and the image displayed between flashes indicates to Michael that the machine is currently set to fire at…

    “Human targets? Auto-fire commencing in 15 seconds… But… how? What could have gone wrong that would cause a glitch like this?” he whispers to himself, still in disbelief of what he is reading. The machine startles him from his thoughts as it begins to produce a high pitched beeping sound, the sound’s speed increasing with every passing second. “SPREAD OUT, RUN!” he yells to his friends in front of the porch as he dives off and onto the lawn.

     The group hears Michael warn them to run, and they begin to, but they barely have time to disperse more than a foot away from each other when a red light spews out from the machine, encompassing nearly the entirety of the front yard as it seeks out its designated targets. Suddenly, the machine goes silent. The light vanishes, and so too have the 9 attendees of the Parker housewarming party.

All is quiet. The group members are isolated from one another as they pick themselves up off the ground. They rub their eyes, vision now returning after having been briefly stolen by the violent eruption of light that had just assaulted them a moment ago. Though they aren’t in the immediate vicinity of one another, each person takes in the same sight as they survey the area around them: close-knit patches of vegetation stretching endlessly, generally measuring to the tops of their heads, though even extending up to twice their height in some places. Though some are still slightly disoriented from the ordeal, it doesn’t take long to realize where they are.

    Michael can be heard yelling somewhere off in the distance from each of the group members. “HELLO? CAN ANYONE HEAR ME? FOLLOW THE SOUND OF MY VOICE!” He repeats his message a few times as the others begin to yell out each other’s names and frantically search the jungle-like environment they’ve been thrust into for their loved ones and their friends.

    Though the lawn had previously appeared full and rich, at their current size it is now almost splotchy in some areas, though this does little to make maneuvering it any easier. They traverse the new terrain and within ten minutes they’ve all managed to cover the distance and spot Michael. They can see through what visibility is provided between the grass that beyond Michael and extending out into the distance is the porch. They reach their friend and form a group before him.

    Keith quickly runs up to him and begins to shake him. “What have you done to us! How are we going to fix this? HOW!?”

    Jim and Isaac pull the understandably upset Keith away from Michael. The entire group has a look of fear and general nervousness plastered to their faces as they continue to understand their situation.

    “Look… yeah, this is bad” begins Isaac, “but the best thing we can all do right now is keep a level head. If we stay calm, I’m sure Michael will be able to figure something out and get us back to normal.”

    Michael turns around 180 degrees and gazes far ahead at the first step of the porch. He turns back around to face the group again before tilting his head up and rotating it to the right, taking in the sight of the colossal picnic table hundreds of feet away from them at their scale and extending high into the sky above. Finally he turns to the left, noticing the last landmark within range, the black grill also raising to incredible heights comparatively to he and his guests.

    “Well…” begins Michael, “The machine is on the porch. That first step onto the porch towers over us. As does the second step. Even if we could somehow scale those, climbing the machine would prove multiple times more difficult. Then assuming any of us can reach the machine, identifying the problem with it could be quite challenging. Even if all of this were feasible, actually repairing the machine would likely be downright impossible at this size, especially where I have no tools at my disposal of any size to work with. I’m afraid I’m going to need some time to weigh our available options and devise a plan.

    It becomes visible that the group does not like what they’re hearing. “Well you’d BETTER come up with something quick” says Alexia.

    “Yeah, it’s entirely your fault we’re in this situation, you’d better be able to get us out of it” adds Jennifer.

    As the group begins to bicker, a steady noise originating somewhere far from their current position distracts them as it gets closer and closer, then a bit further away before coming to a stop. There is a loud slam in the distance before everything is quiet again.

    “Was that…” begins Scott

    “AMY! It has to be Amy! We’re saved!” shouts Brandi as she jumps up and down in excitement. The mood of the group improves as they develop hope of being discovered by their friend and restored to their full sizes.

    “Okay, so here’s MY plan… get her to see us” says Keith.

Amy removes the keys from the ignition as she steps out of her car placing her pink flip flops on the pavement. She stands and closes the car door, then begins walking into the yard, plastic bags in her hands containing the last minute supplies she had journeyed to the store to acquire.

They can hear her approach before they can see it. The faint sound of the heels of her flip flops smacking against her soles grows louder and louder as the distance between her and the group dwindles with each step. She finally appears on the horizon, the entire group is spellbound by her sheer enormity. It’s incredibly complicated for them to comprehend the fact that the massive being they’re currently enraptured by is simply a 5 foot 4 woman.

    Everyone starts to jump in place and wave their arms in the air wildly while yelling with the loudest voices their minute bodies could conjure. “AMY! HELP US AMY! WE’RE DOWN HERE! HELP!”

She is now so close to the shrunken guests that the simple slap of her flip flops making contact with her bare skin is perceived by them as deafening thunderclaps which reverberate all around them. They know not for certain whether her booming footsteps are causing the ground upon which they stand to lightly shake or if their bodies have simply begun trembling in fear.

    Everyone ceases their efforts of jumping, yelling, and waving their arms and time seems to slow to a crawl as they see the pink sole of their friend’s flip flop raise high above their heads. Engulfed in the shadow of her foot, the men and women on the ground snap out of their collective trance and dart away in every direction as the extremity begins its descent to earth.

Miraculously, everyone makes it out from under the ominous shadow just in time, though scattered around the front, back, and sides of the pink flip flop they are all knocked off their feet from the combined forces of the boom of her foot hitting the ground and the gust of air displaced by it. Those that wound up behind the heel of the sandal are treated to the view of her heel separating from the foam, her sole rising, creases and folds in the pale skin appearing on its surface as she lifts her foot and takes her first step away from them. She turns slightly to her left, heading towards the picnic table.

    “UGHHH, Michael… I should have known I couldn’t count on you to get anything ready for the party” says Amy to herself upon finding the surface of the picnic table devoid of any objects. She deposit’s the plastic bags onto it and places her hands on her hips as she yells in a medium-volume. “HELLOOOOOOO…. I’M HOME, IN THE FRONT YARD. WHERE ARE ALL MY PARTYGOERS?” She assumes her husband must have taken them to see something in the backyard and decides to wait for them to come to her after announcing her presence rather than walk all the way around the house. She takes a seat sideways on the side of the picnic table nearest to the home, the left side of her body parallel to it. She is completely oblivious to the machine atop the porch, its position there obscured from her view by the railing and the support columns due to the earlier action of her husband moving it out of the entranceway.

    By now the group members have risen to their feet and gathered together again, the grass between them slowly returning to its original upright position after being pressed down flat by the weight of Amy. They gaze up and up at the mountainous woman sitting at the table a few hundred feet away from where they’re standing, totally unaware of their current plight.

    “Shit. This isn’t gonna work.” says Brandi.

    “This is ridiculously dangerous. She’s just too damn big” says Scott.

    “It’s hopeless, we’re nothing to her we’re never…”

    “HEY, the plan is still to get noticed. Now I don’t know about the rest of you, but I still intend to do just that. If we can’t manage to get Amy’s attention, I think it’s safe to say we’re doomed so let’s not give up just yet” Keith says, interrupting Jennifer. He then begins walking towards the table.

    Everyone in the group recognizes what Keith has said as the truth, and they reluctantly proceed to follow him.

    At a distance of what at their scale would be about half the length of a soccer field away from the picnic table a sound from above stops them dead in their tracks. Foam can be heard scraping against skin. The men and women look up to the source of the noise.

“Might as well get comfortable for a few minutes.“ Amy’s hands grip her flip flops and remove them. She effortlessly tosses them onto the lawn not far in front of her.

The people on the ground watch as the gargantuan pink footwear soars above them, some instinctively half-crouching as the shadows pass over them. They crash down with heavy thuds 75-100 feet behind them, the gust of wind generated by the impact whipping against their bodies, though it’s not strong enough to knock them to the ground.

    Their eyes are glued to Amy, watching as she leans back, still sitting sideways at the table, places her right foot on the seat, and lifts her left leg, placing it down on her right knee, her bare foot elevated into the air. Everyone continues to stare, transfixed by the mighty appendage as she spreads her toes and waves them in the air, scrunches them up, and wiggles them, giving rise to wrinkles that ripple across her pale soles, manipulated by each of her subtle movements.

    After a moment the woman sits up, returning her feet to the ground.

Amy looks down at her feet and twitches her toes. She notices something… a small blue object mere inches away. Extending her right foot forward a couple of inches, she prods the back of her discovery with her big toe, pushing the object softly along the grass ever so slightly with each touch. “A toy car? What would this be doing in the yard?”

Back on the ground, Jim starts getting nervous at the sight of Amy’s tremendous foot toying with his beloved truck. Everyone gasps as Amy stands her foot up on its heel and pushes it forward, a shadow cascading down onto the vehicle as her sole begins to enter the area above it. The group watches as toes like boulders with nails adorned in pretty pink polish grip onto the top of the truck and begin dominating it. She pushes her foot forward and then pulls it backwards, rolling the truck back and forth on the lawn.

    Jim begins to run towards her, Keith and Isaac quickly grab him.

    “What are you thinking? She’s too playful right now, we get too close and we’re accidentally crushed” says Keith.

    “She’s gonna demolish my truck with her fucking toes! I need to put an end to this, she’ll stop when she sees me running up to her, now let go of me!”

    “Actually” starts Isaac, “She sees you running towards her feet, she’s likely to panic up there and mistake you for some kinda spider crawling her way. Better your truck under her feet than yourself.”

    Jim listens to reason and can only watch in fear as Amy stops rolling the truck forwards and backwards with her feet. In an impressive showing of dexterity, she spreads her big and second toes apart, gripping the vehicle between them at its sides.

Amy is curious as to how a toy car found its way into her yard. Gripping it between her toes, she raises her right leg and delivers it to her lap, plucking the tiny thing out from between her toes with her right index finger and thumb, setting it in her palm. She brings it close to her face and scrutinizes it. “WOW, this is weird. It’s just like Jim’s truck. No, it’s EXACTLY like Jim’s truck.” She gazes into the windshield, surveying the interior. “It’s so detailed. What a great replica. But why is it here on my lawn? Maybe Michael bought it for Jim and is planning to give it to him today? But why would he leave it on the ground? That’s a terrible hiding place. Someone could have stepped on it.” She looks down at the foot in her lap and giggles. Amy plucks the truck from her palm and sets it onto the tabletop, returning the foot in her lap to the ground, planting it down next to its counterpart as she absentmindedly pushes the vehicle back and forth again, this time with her fingers.

    Bored of waiting, she begins toying idly with her feet. She rubs them back and forth, savoring the sensation granted unto her as she forces the soft grass down and compresses it beneath her soles. She loves having a lawn she could call her own, and she walks barefoot on it quite often, the feeling of the grass beneath her always able to calm her and improve her mood.

The shrunken group watches on, having not moved far from where they originally came to a halt when Amy began to remove her flip flops. The sound of her feet bulldozing through the lawn is audible to them. She soon stops this and begins to perform a new task. She squeezes her toes tightly together, trapping the tallest blades of grass between them. With minimal effort she extracts many blades from the earth as she barely lifts her toes. This action causes the men and women to feel smaller than anything else they’ve seen thus far has been able to. With such a simple action using only the smallest parts of her body she is able to pull the grass from the ground. Everyone doubts that they would be able to successfully do the same, even if they utilized every ounce of strength they could muster. They look on as the blades of grass begin accumulating at her feet.

Amy has finally grown tired of waiting for her friends to come out and greet her It seems as though they must not be in the backyard, that leaves the inside of the house as the only other option. She looks back at the truck on the table dwarfed by her own hand resting next to it. “Maybe… Maybe Jim brought it over to show Michael? Oh, I don’t know, I don’t even want to get involved. Better put it back where I found it” She crouches down and places the truck back onto the ground in the same general area where she had initially discovered it. Amy taps the roof of the truck 3 times with her index fingertip before rising from the table, standing to her full height and stretching. She takes two small steps forward and lifts her right foot up, displaying great balance as she continues to stand on the left, she brings her hands to her sole and starts to wipe her foot clean.

Debris rains down all around the tiny men and women, blades of grass and chunks of dirt that had become stuck to her soles and trapped within her wrinkles during her casual play fall from Amy’s skin and crash down in every direction as the entire group runs, fleeing from the chaos. They then watch in awe as her massive bare soles pass directly overhead as she steps over them, they touch down with booms and she takes 2 more steps on her path to the pink footwear she had discarded on the lawn earlier. She wriggles her feet into her flip flops, the now familiar sound of foam rubbing against skin greeting their ears once again. Hope dies in their hearts as they watch the woman whom was supposed to be their rescuer walking away from them, flip flop heels flapping and slapping behind her.

“Michael knew better than to give the grand tour without me, there better be a good reason for everyone being inside.“ With her feet situated in her sandals, Amy heads towards the house. 2 feet away from the first stair she notices something black becoming visible to her on the left corner of the porch. “What the hell? What’s THAT doing out here?
   
    Before she can make it to the stairs and even realize the machine is a threat to her, Amy’s entire body is engulfed in red light. With a flash, the Parker yard once again appears quite empty.

Michael bounds through the grass, moving as fast as his feet can carry him towards where his wife was standing when she vanished, the others following not far behind him. Had anyone been looking on when she’d shrunk, they’d have thought the woman simply disappeared, dropped off the face of the earth, or was teleported away just as Jim had thought happened to his truck when its size was altered only a short while ago. But everyone down on the lawn knew otherwise, Amy was still among them.

    “AMY! AMY, WHERE ARE YOU?!” Amy can hear her husband calling out to her as she begins to lift her body from the ground and into a seated position. “MICHAEL?! I’M OVER HERE” she responds. As she looks at her surroundings she cannot fathom where she is no matter how hard she thinks about it. A moment ago she was walking into her home, now she is sitting in a dense jungle-like environment that extends far further than the limits of her vision.

    Michael follows his wife’s voice as he continues through the grass. Soon he can see her form seated in front of him. He runs up to her, kneels down and wraps her in his embrace. “Amy! Are you okay?” he asks, standing up and offering her his hand. She takes it and Michael helps her to her feet.

    “Yeah, yeah, I think so. Where… where are we, Michael?”

Michael scratches his head thinking of a good way to relay the information on their situation to his wife but nothing comes to him. “We’re… we’re uh… still home…”

    “What do you mean we’re still home? Where the hell are we, Michael?!”

    “You see these tall plants all around us… that’s our grass… we’re still on the lawn, honey.”

    Amy still looks puzzled. “What are you talking about… what do you mean? What are you trying to tell me, Michael?”

    “Right now, we’re… we…”

    “Spit it out, where are we?!”

    “We shrunk! We’re on our own lawn and we’re the size of bugs! Honey, I am so sorry!”

    “Wait a minute… I remember now! I was heading inside and I saw it on the side of the porch, that… that MACHINE thing you’ve been building. That has something to do with this, doesn’t it?”

    “Yes.”

    “But YOU told ME that it only worked on objects, that it couldn’t work on living things.”

    “I know, and I’m so sorry that I wasn’t completely honest with you but I knew you wouldn’t let me keep it in the house if you knew what it could do.”

    As they continue to talk, the rest of the group begins to come into view.

    “Everyone’s here? Our friends… YOU SHRUNK US ALL?”

    The group begins to gather around the two. “Amy, please, it was an accident, everyone wanted to see what the machine could do and after a successful demonstration it just went haywire. You know I didn’t mean for any of this to happen.”

    “But still” begins Jennifer, “it DID happen, and YOU need to fix it.”

    “I’m still working on devising a plan, you must understand that I need time.”

    Everyone looks at Amy. They’re all slightly amused at how the titanic woman towering above them moments ago has once again become the shortest member of their group of friends.

Jim quickly walks up to Amy, Brandi trying to keep up without breaking into a sprint behind him. “Hey Giganta, did you have fun rubbing your disgusting feet all over my ride? If we get out of this, you’re paying for me to take at least 10 trips through the carwash.”

    Amy thinks back to the little blue truck she found on the lawn, her face turning red as she remembers playing with it between her feet. “Oh my god, Jim… that was ACTUALLY your truck?” She doesn’t wait for a reply, she already knows the answer. “I’m SO sorry! I thought it was a little toy car!”

    “It’s okay, Amy” says Brandi, “ We all thought it looked like that too. Jim let Michael shrink it while we were waiting for you to get home.”

Amy begins to put the pieces together. “So… you guys got here for the housewarming party, Michael showed you the machine while you waited for me to get back from the store, he shrunk Jim’s truck and you guys looked at it… then the machine shrunk everyone before you could get the truck back to normal?” Everyone nodded. “WAIT… that would mean… NO!” Amy’s eyes begin to tear up. “Is everyone okay! Did I step on anyone?! PLEASE tell me everyone is okay!"

    Michael comforts his wife. “Everyone is fine, we’re all here, count us if you’d like.”

    “You did come close though” says Isaac.

    “Yeah, more than once, too” adds Alexia.

    “Guys I am SO sorry! I had no idea you were down there!” Amy is still visibly upset as she looks down to her feet.

    “It’s alright Amy, you had no way of knowing. It was all an accident and we’re all safe, everything is okay” says Isaac, finally beginning to calm the woman down.

    “We were trying to get you to see us,” says Keith, “It didn’t work.”

    “We were hoping you’d notice us and then you could get us back to normal” explains Michael.

    “Well,” begins Keith, “we’re gonna need a new plan. And fast. I don’t want to be out here at this size any longer than I need to be, and I’m sure the rest of you feel the same. Any ideas yet, Mike?”

    Everyone looks to Michael, hoping he’s finally come up with something to get them out of this predicament. “Well… I do have one idea.”

    “Okay, let’s hear it” says Keith.

    “Let’s get to Jim’s truck first, my plan depends on the vehicle being undamaged so let’s check its current state.”

The group begins the walk towards the picnic table. Michael stops and points to his home stretching into the distance. “Hey, wait. Amy, did you want to give the grand tour first?” Everyone looks at him with serious looks planted on their faces. “What? I just thought I’d contribute a little comedic relief.”

    After a few moments they have reached the truck beneath the table, Jim arriving at it first, of course. He inspects his vehicle. The vehicle again appears massive to the men and women, they remember not much earlier they had watched as Brandi’s toes cast shadows down onto the vehicle. Now the vehicle was casting the shadow, and they were standing in it. 

   Remarkably, it appears that Amy’s play dealt the vehicle no damage, although it smells of feet and is covered in smears no doubt applied by her toes. Amy blushes again at the sight of the truck and at the thoughts of what she had done with it.

   “Jim, please tell me you’ve got the keys” says Michael.

    “I do” he replies, pulling them out if his pocket.

    “Alright then, get in there and see if she starts up.”

    Jim nods and opens the door to his truck, climbing up and into it before placing the key in the ignition and turning it. The engine roars to life, the sound bringing smiles to the group’s faces.

    Amy explores the grass a few meters behind the truck underneath the picnic table. She finds a shallow trench dug into the ground, created when she had lifted her foot on its heel and pushed it forward to reach Jim's truck and play with it beneath her toes. She stands staring, mesmerized by the fissure in the earth before her. "Did I...I...I did this? My foot made this?!" she asks herself in a whisper.

    “Okay” begins Michael, “here’s my plan. When I was checking the mail today I noticed the TV was on in the house across the street. I know Amanda Knight’s not home, she’s away on some sort of business trip or whatever again, she left a couple days ago. However, her daughter Claire is 19 and still lives there, apparently she’s home today. My plan is this: Half of us get in Jim’s truck and we make the long drive over to the house, and we do everything we can to get Claire’s attention.

    “How do you propose we get her attention? Especially if she’s inside. Can’t really ring the doorbell, now can we?” asks Keith.

    “We’ll wait for her to come out then, and like I said, we’ll do whatever we can to get her to notice us.”

    “Yeah, because that worked so well for us last time” says Jennifer.

    Isaac steps forward. “Anybody else have a plan?” Everyone stands still and silent. “That’s what I thought. Amy’s home now, and not only that, she’s just as small as the rest of us. Mike only has this one neighbor. We’re going to have to face it, this is our final hope of being returned to our full sizes.”

    Keith sighs. “He’s right. We really don’t have any other options. Here’s hoping this plan works.”

    “Okay” begins Michael, “Keith, I want you and the women to find someplace safe to stay. Don’t argue with me on this. You’re the biggest guy here and I want you keeping them safe. When we get Claire’s attention we’ll send her over to retrieve you and the hand-held device inside that she can use to restore everyone. Isaac, Scott, pile into the bed of Jim’s truck.”

    The men begin climbing into the vehicle. “Wait!” Yells Amy. “I feel terrible about almost stepping on everyone. I want to go with you, I need to do anything I can to help!”

    “No, it’s too dangerous, I need you to stay with behind with Keith and the others.”

    “I’m not taking no for an answer.” Amy climbs into the bed of the truck with Isaac and Scott.

    “Fine” says Michael, defeated. “Alright, let’s find a place for you guys to wait. I need to know where it is so I can tell Claire where to find you once we get her attention.” Everyone wants to say “IF you get her attention” but nobody can bring themselves to actually do it.

    Michael watches as Keith helps the women scale a rock that is to them very large to the right of the bottom porch stair. “GOODLUCK” Keith yells to Michael as he and his group wave. Michael waves back and begins his walk back to Jim’s truck.


    Michael climbs into the passenger side of the truck. “Good to go?” asks Jim. Michael nods. The engine roars to life once more and the group begins their trek across the lawn. 

A few moments have passed by and the group is still driving through Jim’s lawn towards the home of their nearest hope of rescue, Claire Knight. The roof of the truck is barely higher than the tips of most blades of the grass, some of them are even slightly taller than it. The terrain is manageable for Jim’s massive vehicle to maneuver, but it does force the group to travel at a slower pace than they would have liked.

    “This grass is so high, don’t you ever groom it?” asks Jim, laughing.

    “Hey, I mowed the lawn this week for the housewarming party. How tall it is… this is just a testament to how small we really are.”

Amy, Isaac, and Scott are still seated in the bed of the truck as it progresses through the grass. “I hope you guys know how sorry I am for everything. I hope I didn’t frighten anyone too badly. I really do feel terrible.”

    “Amy, relax, please. You had no way of knowing what happened to us. You have nothing to feel sorry about, right Scott?” asks Isaac, Scott nods in agreement with what Isaac has said.

The vehicle approaches the pavement, the group looks on as it appears to them as a black plateau. Jim hit’s the brakes. “We can’t get up there. What now, Michael?”

    “Drive around along it until we find a spot of ground level with the pavement, it will serve as an isthmus onto the road.”
   
    Jim understands and begins driving parallel to the edge of the pavement.

    Eventually a spot like Michael has mentioned pops into view and Jim drives the truck up and onto it. The vehicle’s tires soon touch pavement. Everyone looks around at the scenery, everything around them at such an incredible scale. The view is as beautifully impressive as it is frightening.

    “Alright, Jim, head towards the house.” The truck continues its journey across the ocean like expanse of pavement. Soon the group is at the other edge of the street. “Alright, let’s look for another isthmus and get onto the lawn.”

    “Screw that, I’m getting’ some air. Everybody hang on!”

Jim speeds up and drives the truck off the edge of the pavement, the jump is small but the group still wasn’t prepared. After soaring 15 feet or so (their scale) the truck lands on the grass and everyone is okay.

“Sorry guys, just wanted to have a bit of fun.”

The vehicle approaches the front of the neighbor’s house and stops in front of the stairs. “Anyone wanna knock on the door?” asks Jim.

    “We have no way of knowing when Claire will leave her house next. Guess we’ll have to sit here and play the waiting game.” says Michael.

    A loud slam startles everyone in the truck.

    “What do you think that was?” Jim asks.

    “I don’t know. It came from the backyard. Let’s check it out, maybe Claire’s out there.”

The blue truck drives and drives, along the side of the house and then back into and through the lawn. Eventually something large and black appears on the horizon.

“What’s that, there?” Michael asks, pointing to the object on the lawn in the distance. “Drive up to it.”

    The truck approaches, everyone inside staring. As they get closer an identical object comes into view next to it. Jim drives the truck towards the objects, positioning the vehicle in the middle so he can drive between them.

    Amy realizes what the black structures are first. “They’re… they’re flip flops…” They’re massive. She looks down to her feet and wonders if her own flip flops were this big compared to the truck before she was shrunken. Isaac and Scott cringe as the truck continues driving between the footwear, thoughts rushing back to them of Amy’s pink sandals soaring above them and crashing back down near where they were standing when she casually tossed them in their direction, oblivious to their presence.

    The group drives out from between the enormous black sandals and continues forward through the grass, some of them still looking back at them, admiring the markings at the front of the shoes, color had faded and imprints were created by the toes and sweat of whomever wore them. A few moments of driving later and there was again something big on the horizon.

    “Claire! That’s Claire, straight ahead!” yells Michael, pointing into the distance.

The truck drives closer. Claire is laying on her stomach atop a white beach towel on her lawn. Jim hits the brakes and the group stops at her bare feet.

    “So we found her, now how do we want to try getting her to notice us? Anyone brave enough to go up and touch her?” asks Jim.

    “No.” says Michael. That’s too dangerous, she might think we’re insects, we’d be likely to be crushed. Let’s drive up to her face, she’s low to the ground, she’ll HAVE to notice us.” Jim agrees and begins driving again.

    Everyone stares up at the pale soles stretching to the heels high above them as they drive by. Claire’s feet gently twitch and the tiny actions cause her pale skin to wrinkle, appearing to the tiny men and women like rippling waves on a creamy, silky body of water. Though none of them would admit it, some of them find themselves wanting to reach out and touch the skin as they pass by.

    The truck continues traveling along the left side of the girl’s body. It passes her long legs before reaching her light blue jean shorts, followed by a small black T-shirt, a fair amount of skin exposed between the 2 articles of clothing.

    The group is soon directly in front of Claire. She has her arms in front of her, left wrist laying on top of her right arm, her head resting on top and facing the right. She is wearing large black sunglasses, still oblivious to the truck and its occupants.

Jim brings the truck to a stop in front of her arms with her head resting atop them. “What’s the plan, Mike?”

    “Get noticed. Come on, honk the horn”

    Jim starts honking the horn. A few seconds later the gargantuan head begins moving, long black hair moving with it. Claire rests her chin on her wrist where it sits above them. “Keep it up, Jim” says Michael. Jim continues to honk and the 3 three people in the bed of the truck begin jumping up and down, waving their arms and yelling “CLAIRE! CLAIRE! DOWN HERE!”

    The group watches as Claire moves her right arm out from under her left and raises it to her face, taking fingers with nails coated in deep black polish and lowering the sunglasses from her face with them, revealing the 2 beautiful big blue eyes that had been trapped behind them.

The group watches as Claire moves her head closer to them. The three people in the back of the truck continue jumping, waving, and yelling up to her. The blue eyes widen at the sight they’re taking in and everyone on the ground begins to cheer.

Claire realizes she must have drifted into a nap as she relaxed outside on the towel in her backyard. A faint honking sound coming from the ground in front of her wakes her. She lifts her head and rests her chin on her arms, looking down on what appears to be a little toy truck… but it looks as though there is something moving in the back of it. Bugs? Curious, Claire grips her sunglasses and removes them from her face. She continues to stare at the truck and its passengers but is still unable to discern just what the energetic little beings are.

    Inside the truck, everyone watches and waves as the massive young woman continues lowering her head towards them. They stare up at her in awe, enraptured by her incredible beauty. They can feel her breath washing over them as the blue eyes scrutinize their movements.

    A look of sheer confusion spreads across Claire’s face as she studies the 3 creatures in the bed of the truck that has somehow found its way into her backyard. She lifts her head and checks all around her for any sign of this being some sort of prank. She sees nothing suspicious and lowers her head again. The beings look like people… very tiny people. Claire brings her face in for an even closer look, stopping just inches away from the truck. “What are you little things? Am I really seeing this right now? You… you look like Amy from across the street. Mrs. Parker… is that you?!” asks Claire to one of the beings in the bed of the truck.

    Everyone in the truck is thrilled, they have finally been discovered, and not misidentified as bugs but recognized as people. Michael puts his right arm out the window and repeatedly smacks at the outside of the truck’s door in an attempt to get Claire’s attention.

    Claire sees movement within the truck and decides to get a closer look. She grips the tiny vehicle between the index fingers and thumbs of both hands, thumbs on the right side and fingers on the left. Raising it slowly, she peers inside.

    The passengers are shaken by the small movement, everyone in the bed of the truck quickly sits down, afraid of falling out and onto the ground if they don’t, a fall that could prove hazardous to them now that they’re suspended in the air, held in place by the large fingers. Jim turns off his vehicle.

    “Claire! Can you hear me?!” Michael yells up to the woman.

    “Michael…” says Claire in a voice marked by shock/surprise, “Michael is that really you? What’s going on right now?”

    “Claire, we need your help. Yes, yes it’s me, and you were right before too, that’s Amy in the back and these other people are my friends. Could you VERY CAREFULLY bring us inside so we can discuss the situation?”

    Claire still looks incredibly confused. “Uhmmm… sure… yeah, yeah, okay.” Claire sets the truck back down onto the ground so she can pick it up again using only her right index finger and thumb. She lifts it into the air and places it in her left palm, keeping her fingers together, the back of the vehicle positioned towards her wrist.

    As the young woman rises from the towel, the elevation of the truck in her hand continues to increase.  The passengers are transported up and up along her perfect body. They pass her navel adorned with some sort of diamond-like piece of jewelry before coming to a halt between it and her breasts above them, pushing her shirt outwards and causing the orange Amon Amarth logo on the fabric of the small T-shirt to stretch a bit. Her breasts weren’t particularly large, but of course to the people inside Jim’s truck, they were quite massive.

    Having reached her full height, Claire removes her bare feet from the towel and begins walking through the grass towards where she had deposited her flip flops behind her before she laid down on the lawn to relax. She reaches them and slips her feet into them, her soles smoothly sliding along the black foam. With her shoes now on, she begins walking towards the back door of her home. She looks down at the small truck in her left hand. “Don’t fall” she says to its occupants before looking back up. Reaching the house, she climbs the two stairs onto the deck. In another few steps she reaches the door, gripping its handle with her right hand she turns it and pulls it open.

    From within the truck, the groups watches as what to them amounts to the monolithic gate to their salvation is opened, air whooshing around them from the action. Their giant transporter steps into her home, pulling the door shut behind her before carrying her cargo through the kitchen and into the living room.

    Claire enters her living room and approaches the center. She lowers herself in front of the rectangular marble coffee table, planting her bare knees in the soft plum-colored carpet below. Slowly and with great care, she brings her left hand to the edge of the table and tilts it up slightly, forming an incline that faces downwards towards the table. The little truck rolls off her fingers and onto the surface, her guests have been delivered.

    Amy, Isaac, and Scott look up as an index finger pushes down gently on the roof of the truck. They stare up at the large digit while Claire pushes the vehicle forward at an angle so as to put some distance between the people and the table’s edge.

    Retracting her arm back to her side, Claire leans in and brings her face closer to the group of people on her table, staring down at them. “So, uh… what… how…” The look of confusion is still prominent on the young woman’s gorgeous face as she struggles to find the right words for her questions. She makes small movements with the sides of her mouth as she thinks. “Okay, so… what is happening? Why are you guys so small?”

    Michael gets out of the truck and takes a few steps away from it. “Like I said before, we really need your help. You know me, I’m kind of a weird guy, I make inventions in my spare time. You know this, right?”

    “Mmmm, yeah…”

    Well, lately I’ve been working on a certain machine… something went wrong, I’m still not exactly sure what, but it shrunk us. All of us.

Amy climbs out of the bed of the truck and stands beside her husband.

    “You guys really are real, aren’t you? WOW, can I… can I touch you?”

Claire begins moving her arm before she has even finished asking her question. Slowly, she brings her pinky finger towards the shrunken couple. Amy screams and pushes her arms out in front of her defensively, pressing both hands into the large deep black fingernail. Claire’s eyes widen with the sensation of feeling the pathetic touch of resistance at her fingertip.

    Michael grabs his wife and pulls her away from the finger. “Claire, please, be careful. We really need your help here, you’re our only hope.”

    Claire again returns her arm to her side. Sorry, sorry, okay… what do you need me to do, Michael?

    “This is only half of our group, I need you to-”

    “There’s more of you like this?!”

    “Yes, yes, please let me finish.”

    “Okay, sorry, continue.”

“There’s another man and four women, we had to leave them behind so we could journey over here in my friend Jim’s truck to try and get your attention. The others are waiting for you to rescue them, they’re on a rock at the right of the bottom of my porch. You need to listen to me because this is very important, okay? Are you listening?”

    “Yeah, keep talking.”

    “You cannot go through the front yard to get them. Something is wrong with the machine, if it sees you coming, it will shrink you too. I don’t think any of us want that to happen, now do we?”

    “No, definitely not. So, what should I do then?

    “My back door is unlocked. I need you to enter through there, but FIRST, before going back outside through the front door, I need you to get something from inside the house.  The machine on the porch that shrunk us is very large, it‘s the first prototype. In a drawer upstairs in my office is the most recent model. It’s much more powerful and reliable, and it’s smaller than a television remote control. I need you to grab it and put it in your pocket, okay?”

    “Okay. Will I need a key or anything to unlock the door to your office or the drawer that the device is in?" 

    “No, everything is unlocked. Okay… so after you’ve secured the device, you’ll need to go back downstairs and out through the front door to get onto the porch.”

    “Are you sure the machine won’t be able to shrink me?”

    “Yes.”

    “Yeah, you say that now but you didn’t think it was going to shrink you and everyone else either, did you?”

    Everyone on the table laughs except Michael. “Look, all of its visual sensors are on the forward-facing hemisphere of the machine. It won’t be able to see you, and if it can’t see you, it can’t shrink you. Okay?”

    “Fine, it better not shrink me.”

    “It won’t. Alright. So when you get onto the porch you’ll be behind the machine. STAY BEHIND IT! Here’s what you’re going to have to do, so listen carefully. The machine is essentially a sphere with three legs to keep it standing. A tripod of sorts. Put your hand underneath the sphere and you’ll feel a gear-like knob. Turn this knob to the left until it and the piece it’s attached to falls free and just set it down on the porch. What you will have just done is removed the power source from the machine. It will then be safe to come out from behind it. Do you still follow?”

    “Yeah.”

    “Alright, with the machine out of commission you will then be safe to walk on the front lawn. You need to be EXTREMELY careful. There are 5 people down there. They should still be on the rock to the right of the bottom stair where they were told to wait but PLEASE watch where you step in case they ventured off of and away from this rock for any reason. Find them, pick them up, and carefully carry them and the handheld device from my office back here to your living room. So that’s the plan, any questions?

    “No Michael, I understand.”

    “Okay Claire, please hurry. It’s dangerous out there at this size. Thanks for helping us.”

Claire rises to her full height and looks down at the people on the table. “You’re welcome. Okay, I’ll be back soon. Stay right there.” Claire giggles at her own joke, she knows the little people can’t leave the table without taking a long fall onto the carpet below.

    The group on the table watches as she turns and walks away towards the back door in the kitchen. They hear the clacking sound of her flip flops slapping against her heels and soles as she walks, a sound they’ve spent a fair part of the day becoming quite familiar with. They can still see her far off in the distance as she pulls the door open, her long black hair blowing gently in the light breeze generated by the movement of the door. Soon the door is sealed shut with a slam and she disappears as she walks off behind it.

   

Claire walks through her backyard and around the side of her house, she stops when she reaches the pavement and looks at her destination, Michael and Amy’s home across the street. Having left her sunglasses back on the beach towel when she found the truck full of people, Claire has to lift a hand to her head to shield her eyes from the sun. She tries to spot the machine on the porch but it is just not visible to her from where she currently stands.

   “This stupid machine better not see me” she mutters to herself as she resumes her journey, walking far to the side of the Parker house and soon reaching the back of it. She turns the handle and pulls the back door open before stepping inside, unlocked just as Michael had said it would be.

   Although she had never been inside, Claire knows she has no time to waste admiring her neighbor’s home’s interior so she finds her way to the stairs and quickly scales them. She locates Michael’s office with ease and approaches the desk. Kneeling down, she opens all of the drawers and searches through them until she finds what she's looking for. She takes the small silver device in her hand and looks it over quickly before tucking it away in the right pocket of her light blue jean shorts.

   Claire standd back up and travels speedily back down the stairs and towards the front door. She opens it slowly and peers out onto the porch, spotting the machine to her right. Cautiously, Claire takes her first steps outside and pulls the front door shut behind her, never once taking her eyes off the machine. She kneels down and places her hand underneath the sphere, Michael’s instructions still fresh in her mind. After turning the gear-like knob to the left, the power source falls free of the machine. Claire holds onto it. It's fairly heavy but she manages to set it down gently on the porch before standing back up. She knocks on the machine a few times with her fist. “Guess you’re turned off now, huh?”

    Now Claire is ready for the most important part of her mission: securing the shrunken people.

   She descends the two porch stairs and briefly checks the grass for signs of life before taking her next steps. She continues stepping carefully and soon reaches the spot Michael had told her to look for, the rock to the right of the bottom step.

    Keith and the four women stationed with him on the rock are startled by the sound of something behind Michael and Amy’s home. Soon they can hear very faint sounds coming from within the house. “Is that… could it be the girl? Claire?” asks Brandi. The group hears the front door on the porch above them being opened slowly and then the slam as it is sealed shut. Then they listen as someone begins fiddling with something on the machine.

“I don’t know. If it is, I bet we’ll know pretty soon” replies Keith. Everyone on the rock stands up, anxious to find out if their rescue has arrived.

    Booming footsteps are birthed as whomever is on the porch draws near. A shadow falls over the group but they can't even yet see what is casting it. Suddenly two enormous black flip flops come down as if from the heavens and land directly in front of the rock, the body of their wearer stretching far into the sky above.

   Keith and the women stare straight ahead of them at the massive yet beautiful looking feet that lay before them, their presence dominating the landscape. Standing on the rock, they are just high enough to be able to look down and see the ten toes with nails coated in a deep black polish.

   They stand in awe, captivated by the enormity of the girl before them. She has to be even larger to them than Amy had been before she too was shrunken by the machine. She seems taller, and she likely is as Amy was always considered quite short. But one thing is certain, her feet are larger than Amy’s. They know this for certain as they had been up close and personal with Amy’s feet when she almost crushed them beneath her twice after returning home from the store.

Smiles find their way onto everyone’s faces. They are saved. “He did it! He actually did it! Michael got this girl’s attention and sent her over here to pick us up.” says Keith in an excited tone.

    Claire looks down at the rock just in front of her feet and spots the people on its surface. “1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Okay, looks like you’re all there.” Claire’s feet twitch softly. She giggles, the size of her toes in comparison to the man and four women on the ground somehow amusing her. She kneels down to get a closer look at them. “Okay… so how are we going to do this? I didn’t bring anything to carry you back in so I guess I’ll just have to use my hands.”

   Claire puts her hands together and sets them on the grass in front of the rock. “Okay, little people, climb on. I’ll take you to the rest of your group.” The tiny man and women comply and Claire can’t help but giggle again at the sight of five actual people climbing into her hands.

    The group doesn’t even need to climb down the rock. They are able to simply walk off of it and onto the girl’s hands. After they're onboard she lifts them to her beautiful young face and they stare up and into her blue eyes. “Careful little ones, don’t fall off.” Soon they are raised much higher as the girl stands up.

    Claire begins her journey back to her home, her cargo safe in her hands. She crosses the Parker’s lawn, makes her way across the street and soon finds herself in her own backyard once again.

    Keith and the others haven’t even bothered to try and stand up whilenbeing transported. They just lay there, cradled in the soft skin of Claire’s palms as they wait to reach their destination.

    Claire steps onto the back deck and prepares to enter her home. She realizes she won’t be able to grip the handle and open the door with her hands full.

    She looks down at the people she's carrying. “I won’t be able to open the door with my hands like this. Hmmmm.” After a few seconds she thinks of a solution. She slips her left foot out of her flip flop and kneels down in front of it. “I need a free hand to open the door with, I hope you guys don’t mind.” Without giving anyone the chance to object to the idea, Claire pulls her hands apart and tilts them downwards, dropping the little people as gently as she can onto the black foam of the sandal. She picks it up and places it in her left palm before standing and heading back towards the door.

    Jennifer can’t believe she is laying on some girl’s flip flop. She tries not to think of how the girl probably sweats in them when she wears them, although the smell of feet is definitely present and making suppressing such thoughts quite difficult. It isn’t overly unpleasant, but the scent is in the air with each breath she takes. “Thank god this nightmare is almost over” she thinks to herself as she is carried towards the home in which she will meet up with Michael and the rest of the group again and finally be returned to her normal size.

    Claire steps into her house and pulls the back door shut behind her again. She walks through her kitchen and doesn’t stop moving until she reaches the coffee table in her living room. Looking down she can see the five little people standing around the truck where they have been waiting for her to return. She kneels down in front of them as she had before with her knees planted into the plum colored carpet and she sets her flip flop and its passengers down on the table next to the little blue truck. The sandal is quite a bit longer than the vehicle. She could have taken the truck and placed it on the front of her flip flop and then formed a line with a few more tiny trucks just like it up the length of it before one reached the heel.

    “Uh… why are they in your shoe?” asks Michael as Keith and his group jumps down from the sandal and onto the table.

    “I was carrying them with both hands and I couldn’t open the door. I had to improvise.” Claire grabs her now unoccupied flip flop from the table and reaches behind her. She lifts her left leg a bit to help as she slips the sandal back onto her foot.

The women from Keith’s group run across the table and hug their husbands and boyfriends after reaching them, relieved to see that everyone is safe.

    Claire leans in a bit and watches the reunion of the little people on the table below. “So… what happened? Why was I your last hope?”

    “After we shrunk, we thought we could get Amy to see us on the lawn. She had gone to the store to get a couple things before we shrunk. We tried to get her attention when she got home but she just wasn’t able to notice us down there” says Michael.

   “Yeah, and she almost stepped on us at least twice” adds Jennifer.”

  Amy blushes and again feels bad about what she had almost done to her friends and her husband.

    “She sure noticed my truck though” says Jim in an annoyed tone. “She played with it under her feet like it was a damned toy.”

    “I thought it was one! Who could blame me? How was I supposed to know you guys shrunk yourselves and your truck on my lawn while I was gone?!” yells Amy, defensively.

    “So we tried to come up with a plan after the machine shrunk her too. You’re our only neighbors, you and your mother. I know she’s away for work right now and so you were our best hope for being rescued and returned to our normal sizes” says Michael.

    “Oh yeah, wow, I understand” says Claire after listening to the tale told to her by the tiny people.

    “Okay, so you followed my directions? The power source has been removed from the machine on the porch?”

    “Yeah.”

    “And you were able to find the handheld device in my office?”

    “Yeah, I think so. This is it, right?” Claire reaches a hand into her pocket and pulls out the device before holding it up and showing it to Michael.

    “Yes, yes that’s it. You did great, Claire. Okay, let me teach you how to use it.”

    Claire looks at the device in her hand. “Can’t be much harder than figuring out how to use a cellphone, can it?” she asks.

    Michael and a few others laugh, they remember he had said almost the exact words earlier in the day when talking about the device. “Okay. Well, you see that first blue button, on the left? That sets the device to shrink things. The one right next to it, the second button, that setting is for returning things that have already been shrunk to their original sizes. There’s a little trigger-like button on the back of the device. After you enter a setting, you just pull that and it fires.”

    Claire flips the device over in her hand and studies it. “Okay. And what about the third blue button… and all of these other smaller ones? What do they do?”

    “We don’t need to worry about those. I can teach you about it a little more sometime if you’d like but for right now all we need to worry about are the first two. Alright, so you wanna try it out on something to get the hang of it before you get started on restoring us?”

    “Sure…”

    “Go get something to shrink and bring it back.”

    “Okay.” Claire rises and walks into the kitchen. She returns to the table carrying an apple. She kneels down and sets the fruit on the table in front of the group of people. Even the apple is ridiculously large compared to the group. It’s taller than the truck. Everyone looks up at it, some of them can’t help but think of the a story they’d read years ago, James and the Giant Peach.

    “Alright Claire, let’s see if you remember what to do.”

    “Okay, so I press… this first button, and then…” Claire reaches forward and aims the device at the apple, “and then I just pull the trigger.” She pulls the trigger and watches as the apple disappears in front of the small people standing on the table. She has to lean in very close just to check if it’s still there at all. “WOW it works!”
   
    The ten people on the table watch as Claire brings an index finger towards the apple. She wants to feel it. She brings the finger down very lightly and the tiny fruit explodes at her touch, the group jumps in surprise, some of them find themselves hit with pieces of it.

    “OOPS!” Claire laughs. “I must have put too much pressure on it. Is everyone alright down there?”

    “Yes, yes, we’re all fine. Go get another one and shrink it so we can make sure you’re able to restore it before you start helping us” says Michael.

    “Okay.” Again she ventures into the kitchen and returns with an apple. She places it in the same spot as she had the previous one before kneeling down.

    “The device is already set to shrink so you don’t need to push the first blue button again. Just aim and fire when you’re ready.”

    Claire nods, raising her hand and pointing the device at the apple. She pulls the trigger and the fruit dwindles away to a tiny red dot in front of her. “Okay, so now I just press this second button… and then pull the trigger.” Claire squints, aiming carefully at the incredibly small fruit.

    The group sees Claire’s finger pull back on the trigger and they cannot prepare themselves for the sight of the apple returning to its full size. It’s like watching a balloon inflate to immense proportions almost instantly. Some of them gasp, the amazement granted to them by the shrinking technology they’ve discovered exists today thanks to their friend Michael still hasn’t worn off. Watching the apple grow again delights them all as they now know they’re just minutes away from being returned to normal and the end of this whole ordeal.

    Claire reaches down and grabs the apple from above with her fingers. She extends her arm and reaches over the group below, placing the apple out of the way at the back of the table.

    Michael claps his hands. “Alright, Claire, looks like you’ve got the hang of it. Now, one at a time, you can set us down on the floor and return us to our full sizes.”

    Claire looks down at the ten little people gathered together next to the small blue truck parked on the coffee table and smiles. “Nah.”

“What do you mean, ‘NAH?’” asks Michael, looking up at Claire’s imposing face as she continued to smile down on him and the others.

    “I think this is fine. I like you guys just the way you are.”

    “Good one, Claire. Very funny. Ha Ha. Okay, now let’s get started on changing everyone back.”

    Claire laughs. “Why would I want to do that? Like I already said, I like you guys at this size.”

    The group watches as Claire stands up and walks out into the kitchen after tucking the device away in her pocket. Their hearts drop in their chests. They had come so close to being helped by this young woman, or so they had thought. Now it seemed as though she had no intentions of returning them to their full sizes. But why? What reasons could she have for this? What could she possibly gain by refusing to help them out of their situation? They were snapped out of their thoughts when Claire entered the living room carrying a large round white porcelain plate. She set it down to their left, producing a clinking sound as it made contact with the table.

    “Okay everyone, all aboard!” Claire said as she smiled at them. Nobody on the table moved. “Come on, guys, get on the plate.” Everyone continued to stay completely still.

    Claire reached over and grabbed the plate in her left hand and pulled it back towards her body. “So I guess you all wanna do this the hard way? Fine. But just so you know, the hard way is still going to be incredibly easy for me.”

    The group looked on as the girl brought the plate to rest at the edge of the table. She held it there in her left hand as she reached towards them with her right one. First she picked up the little blue truck. She placed it on the plate and set her left thumb down gently in the bed of the vehicle, her fingers still holding onto the underside of the plate. “Better hold this down. We don’t want it rolling around loose and hitting you down there while I walk.”

    Claire brings her right hand back to the table. She sets it down behind the group, standing it up by placing her pinky finger and the side of her hand on the cool marble surface. Very slowly, she begins pulling her hand forward. Everyone tries to scramble out of the way and the little women scream as the high wall of soft pale flesh comes towards them.

    Claire carefully herds the little people onto the plate with her hand. She watches in delight as they flee from her body part. After the last person boards the plate to escape her approaching hand, she lifts it from the table and places it beneath the plate where the fingers of her other hand continue to support it. She raises the plate to her face and gazes down upon the tiny people standing on its surface. “See, I told you it would be easy.”

    Claire stands and begins walking, causing Michael and his friends to wobble, most of them falling down, unable to stay on their feet while the massive woman carries them through her home. They can’t accurately decipher where they’re being taken. They know they’ve left the living room but they’re uncertain of anything other than that as they can only gaze up at the ceiling above Claire’s head as she walks or watch as they pass by large objects on their left and right too quickly to tell what any of them really are.

    Soon they come to a halt as Claire stops walking. She removes her right hand from the plate and reaches up with it. The group follows her arm with their eyes and watches as she unlatches something on the ceiling. She then pulls down at it and stairs descend from their sky. They know now where they’re being taken: the attic.

    Claire ascends the pull down stairs and walks to the middle of the attic. Overall, the attic is in very good shape, but some of the floorboards still creak and groan beneath her weight as she steps onto them. Claire doesn’t need to switch the lights on as the room is already well illuminated thanks to the sunlight supplied by the windows in the walls. Standing in the middle of the attic, Claire leans down with her back to the stairs and plucks the little blue truck from the plate. She extends her arm to the right and places the vehicle a couple feet away from her on the wood floor. Next, she tilts the plate forwards away from her and dumps its passengers as gently as she can, spilling the ten tiny bodies out onto the floor.

    Michael groans as he picks himself up and watches as the others do the same. He looks around at his new surroundings. The attic is massive, it’s vast and mostly barren. There are piles of boxes stacked fairly neatly and pushed into the corners and a large wooden board leaning against one of the walls. Other than that, and of course the gigantic girl towering over him and his friends, the room is empty. He and everyone else around him look up in surprise as Claire begins to kneel down in front of them. She wraps her arms around her ankles as she rests her chin in the gap between her knees and stares down at them, watching.

    Isaac is the first to speak. “What are you doing? You have to help us. You need to grow us back to normal!”

     “I don’t NEED to do anything, little man” she replies calmly as she continues to kneel with the plate on the floor in front of her, the only thing between her and the little people.

    “We trusted you! We trusted you, and you betrayed us!” yells Amy.

    “Awwww. Poor little Mrs. Parker. Don’t be like that, we’re going to have lots of fun together.”

    “Why did you bring us up here? What are you going to do to us?” asks Isaac.

    Claire looks down and watches as the women cling to the men in search of comfort. She rolls her eyes. “Oh, stop. You look pathetic down there. As if this is going to be SOOOO bad for you. Like I said, we’re all going to have a lot of fun together.  It’s gonna be great.” With those words, she rises to her full height. She turns herself around and walks to the left towards a pile of boxes stacked in the corner, the heels of her flip flops slapping at her feet as she travels.  She grabs two light brown shoeboxes from the top of the stack and lifts their lids, checking inside them. She opens another much larger box and dumps the contents of the two smaller ones into it.

    With the boxes now empty, Claire carries them back towards the group of people on the floor. She sets one of them a few feet away from her next to where she had placed Jim’s truck earlier. Leaning down and over the little people, she removes the lid from the other box and sets it aside before laying the rectangular box down on one of its longer two sides behind the group of people with its opening facing their backs. When she’s finished with this, she stands back up.

    “I thought about keeping you guys in my room but decided up here was better. I come up here and hang out sometimes, It’s like a second room to me. My mother NEVER comes up here, she’s afraid of the big spiders and other creepy crawlies that she thinks live in here.” The people below her are visibly spooked at the thought of being stuck in the attic with spiders and other bugs that would be like large predatory animals to them. “Don’t worry about that, though. I’ve spent a lot of time up here and I’ve NEVER noticed any spiders or anything like that. But it’s good that she thinks this place is full of them and is afraid to set foot up here. That way I don’t have to worry about her coming up and finding you, and YOU don’t have to worry about her accidentally crushing you. See? It works out for everyone.”

    “Who do you think you are? Do you not understand the situation? You can’t just keep us up here like hostages!” Keith yells up to her.

    Claire laughs at the little man. “It seems like it’s YOU that doesn’t understand the situation, so let me help you out. You and all your little friends are the size of insects, and I’m much, MUCH bigger than you. Therefore, I can do whatever I want with you.”

    Keith hangs his head, defeated. The men take their women in their arms, some of them sobbing as they’re wrapped in the embrace of their husbands and boyfriends.

    “Anyways, I need you guys to get in the box.” Claire points to the shoebox she had placed on the floor behind the group of people. They turn around and look inside, the opening facing them like a small cardboard cave. “I have some important work to do. We’ll figure out some better living arrangements later, but for now I need you guys to get in there. I don’t want you running off and hiding behind things up here while I’m gone before I get a chance to talk with you again. So go ahead, get in the box.”

    Claire waits patiently for a couple of moments, staring down as the little men and women just stand still and stare back at up her. Finally, she has had enough of their defiance and decides she must do something to persuade them to obey her command.

    “You know…” she begins, smiling as she starts slipping her right foot out of its flip flop. “I take REALLY good care of my feet.” Claire lifts her leg and extends it, sending the now bare foot forward.

    Michael and the others watch from the ground as the foot comes towards them slowly, toes wiggling gently as they travel through the air. It stops and hovers, looming above and dropping a shadow onto the plate on the floor in front of them. Suddenly and without any warning, Claire brings her foot down, her sole slapping loudly against the plate. The ground briefly quakes under the group and though they are shaken by the tremor, they manage to stay on their feet. Claire’s foot flesh oozes out, spreading, expanding, taking up a little more area as she presses down, applying more pressure onto the plate. She lightly wiggles her toes and slowly rocks her foot, lifting it slightly on its sides back and forth to the left and right. A peeling sound is produced each time she lifts as her soft sole becomes unstuck to the plate beneath it before being pressed back down.

    Claire watches the floor, deeply satisfied with the sight of ten people completely enthralled by the gentle movements of her foot. “As I was saying… I take REALLY good care of my feet. And now, I have ten little helpers to help me with that.” She giggles and continues smiling.

    Claire keeps her heel on the plate and begins lifting her foot, exposing her pale sole to the tiny group. The action of her skin peeling away from the plate creates a loud suction sound. Everyone watches as her sole continues to rise, wrinkles are already visible and many more begin appearing as she scrunches it up. “I didn’t think I’d have to put you guys to work so soon, but if you REALLY don’t want to get in the box for me, then we might as well get started.” She continues teasingly wiggling her toes in the air, high above the little men and women as her foot remains standing on its heel.

    Claire’s words sink in, releasing the group from their trance. Everyone turns around and runs towards the box as quickly as they can. They scramble into the opening and run to the back of the box, pressing their backs against it to put as much distance as possible between themselves and Claire’s massive wrinkly sole.

    “There. Was that so hard?” Claire removes her heel from the plate and brings her foot to the top of the outside of the box. The group taking refuge within their cardboard shelter cowers in fear. Claire pushes on the box with her foot, returning it to its intended position. The people inside tumble around as the part of the box they had been leaning against now becomes their floor. They lay on their backs and stare up at the attic ceiling until it is replaced by Claire’s beautiful face. “Might as well put this in here with you for now.” She lowers Jim’s truck into the box, placing it with the rear bumper touching what is the back right corner relative to her own current position. “I’ve got important work to do, little ones. I’ll be back later and we can spend some more time together. See ya later!”

    “NO! CLAIRE, PLEASE! DON’T LEAVE US IN HERE! CLAIRE, PLEASE!” The group tries pleading with the young woman as she places the lid on the shoebox. As they are sealed in their world goes black.

   

Claire wriggles her foot back into its black flip flop down on the wood floor. With her foot comfortably returned to its shoe, she bends down and reaches over to her right, lifting the empty shoebox and the white plate before rising again. Tucking both objects under one arm, she starts heading towards the attic’s exit. As she walks, she turns her head and looks down at the shoebox on the floor containing the shrunken people. She reaches the stairs and thinks to herself as she descends them. “I almost wish some of them showed a little more backbone and refused to get into the box. I can’t even imagine how one of their tiny bodies would feel squirming against my soles.” This thought brings a large grin to her face. “Oh well, I guess there’s going to be plenty of time to find out. And at least now I know just how easy it’s going to be to get them to do what I want.”

    Her flip flops touch down on the carpet below as she steps off the last stair. She lifts the stairs and pushes them back up and into the attic. After the stairs have been tucked away securely, Claire moves the latch into place for extra safety. Upon completing this task, she begins walking through the house, soon reaching the kitchen, depositing the plate in the sink before exiting through the back door with the empty shoebox still tucked under her arm.

    Claire is a smart girl. She knows she has an important job to do. She is the only full-sized person aware of the fact that Michael and his friends have shrunk themselves. If she wants to keep it that way, then there is evidence that must be taken care of. Claire stands at the very end of the road, a bit past Michael and Amy’s home, her own house much further away on the opposite side. The empty shoebox rests on the ground at her feet with its lid removed as she breathes in the fresh air and enjoys the chirping of birds while she looks over the parked vehicles of Michael and Amy’s guests.

    The closest vehicle to the young woman is a bright yellow sports car. The vanity plates read “KEWLGUY.” Claire looks it over and can’t help but laugh. “WOW! How obnoxious. I wonder which little idiot actually drives this.” She reaches a hand into her shorts pocket and fishes for something. “Here we go” she says as she pulls the device out and aims it at the yellow car. She pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. “What the… oh, DUH!” Claire presses the first blue button on the left, setting the device to the shrink setting. It had still been set to the option for restoring things that had already been shrunk as the last time the device had been used was to return the apple to its original size back in her living room.

    With the proper setting entered, Claire aims the device at the yellow vehicle once again. She pulls the trigger and watches as the full-sized sports car takes on the appearance of a child’s toy on the ground in front of her. “WOW!” She steps up to the little car and pokes the back of it softly with the front of her black flip flop, contact with the foam causing it to roll forward a couple inches before she bends down and picks it up between her finger and thumb. “Awww, it’s so cute!“ she says as she looks over the vehicle in her hand. She walks back to the shoebox sitting on the ground behind her and kneels down, gently placing the mini sports car inside.


  


Michael and the rest of the group lay sulkily within the darkness of their cardboard confines. Jim stumbles around in the dark with his arms reaching out ahead of him as he explores the area for his truck. He bumps into the vehicle and continues running his hands along it until he is able to locate the front door. He pulls at the handle, opens the door and lifts himself up into the cab. With his keys in his hand, he fumbles around in search of the ignition. He finally manages to find his target and the headlights illuminate the shoebox, the group members scattered about inside quickly close their eyes, unprepared for the onslaught of radiance. “Let there be light!” Jim exclaims as he jumps out of his truck and joins the rest of the group on the brown cardboard floor.

    With their eyes now adjusted to the light, everyone gathers into one corner of the box, seating themselves with their backs resting against the walls and their heads hanging low.

    “I can’t believe she would do this to us.” says Amy.

    “We haven’t lived here long, but since we have, she’s always seemed like such a nice girl” says Michael.

    “Well I guess you’re just an excellent judge of character” says Jennifer sarcastically.

     “I don’t understand why she would keep us here like this.” Michael scratches his head and rubs at his eyes. “Maybe this is all a joke. Maybe she’ll be back very soon and return us to normal after she thinks she’s given us a good scare and we’ll all laugh about it later.”

    “A joke?!” Jennifer stands up quickly, yelling angrily at Michael. “Yeah, this is SOME fucking joke, Michael! I can’t decide what the funniest part for me has been so far, so why don’t you help me out?  Was it when my best friend… your WIFE… when she almost stomped on me and everyone else here? Was it when I got dumped onto and carried around on some young bitch’s smelly flip flop? No, wait. I think the most hilarious part so far has been getting locked up in a FUCKING shoebox with the guy responsible for all of this, YOU!”

    Scott stands and approaches his girlfriend, placing his hands on her shoulders. “Come on, honey, calm down. You know this isn’t gonna help anything.”

    “NO! She’s right! He’s to blame for ALL of this!” Keith jumps to his feet and starts storming angrily towards Michael. “You just HAD to show off your new invention. Then you just HAD to lead us straight into the clutches of this giant bitch after you fucked us up with your machine! We might be an inch tall, but I know I’ve still got enough strength to make YOU bleed!”

    Isaac rises and quickly puts himself in front of Michael, stopping Keith in his tracks on his warpath. “Hey! That’s enough! Everybody needs to calm down. Like Scott said, this sort of thing isn’t going to help matters at all. Michael didn’t mean for any of this to happen, and you KNOW that. Who asked to see Michael’s invention in the first place? We did. Sure, we had no idea what it was capable of, but maybe we’re all a little responsible for our current situation. And when Michael came up with the plan to head for this Claire girl, did any of us propose a SINGLE alternative? No. We all agreed this was our best hope for rescue. If one of us can be responsible for this, then we all can. Michael didn’t have the power in his hands and refuse to grow us back. Michael didn’t carry us into this attic on a dinner plate. Michael didn’t put us in this box. Michael isn’t our enemy here. Claire is.”
   
    The group listens to Isaac’s words of reason. “I’m… I’m sorry, Michael” says Keith, now starting to calm down. “I lost my temper. I’m just really frustrated right now. It’s been one hell of a day. Isaac‘s right though, you didn‘t intend for any of this to happen. Like it or not, we‘re all in this mess together, even you.”

    “You don’t need to apologize, you have every right to be upset with me. You all do. I know it wouldn’t help anything, but I wish you could all understand how sorry I am for all of this. I’ve put my wife and all of our closest friends in danger with my invention and now it’s in the hands of a girl on a power trip.”

    “What do you think we should do, Michael?” asks Jim. “Should we try and bust out of this box? It’s just cardboard. Maybe I can tear through it with my big blue beauty over there” He motions to his truck parked in another corner of the shoebox. “Hell, I bet I could just ram the walls a few times and tip this whole thing over! The lid will come off and we’d be free!”

    Michael looks at his friend with a very serious look on his face. “Jim, I hate to have to tell you what you don’t want to hear but as powerful as your truck is, at it’s current size there’s no way you’re driving through these cardboard walls… or flipping the box. Even if either of these things were possible, there’s no escaping this attic. We’re sealed in. And if Claire had left the stairs down, which we know she didn’t because we could hear her locking them back into place when she left us up here, there would be no way for us to reach the bottom of them without plummeting to our deaths.”

    “But if we could get out of this box we could hide behind something or in one of the other boxes up here before she gets back.” says Jim.

“That’s the exact reason she put us in this box” says Cynthia. “She didn’t want us hiding from her. What if we did… and she found us? I don’t wanna think about how she’d punish us for that. I think the smartest thing we can do right now is stay on her good side and not do anything to sour her mood.”

    “And even if we managed to hide in something up here where she couldn’t find us, we’d all experience extreme pain from starving as we slowly die of dehydration” says Michael.





Claire still stands in the area where Michael and Amy’s guests had parked their cars earlier in the day, though the entire spot is now quite empty. The Parker home is far to her right and the edge of the woods is off to her left. Scattered around on the ground in front of her are four tiny vehicles. There’s a fancy looking cyan car and three equally small average looking cars, one silver, one purple, and one bright red. Further ahead of the girl sits one final car to be reduced in size. The white vehicle appears nearly dilapidated, dents and scratches are present all over its surface. “WOW a real shitbox” says Claire as she aims the device at the car. Light bursts forth from the device in her hand as the car quickly shrinks. She stands over the five tiny vehicles and looks down on them, still intrigued by the power of the device she’s used to transform their size with. After a moment she begins picking them up, one in each hand, and walking them to the cardboard shoebox, placing them gently inside with the little yellow sports car. With all of the vehicles neatly situated in the box, Claire places the lid on top and lifts it from the ground before she starts walking across the lawn towards Michaels house.

    Claire reaches the porch and climbs the two small steps, setting the shoebox down upon her arrival. She has one last piece of evidence to take care of. She points the device in her hand at the large black machine. “I can’t believe I’m shrinking a shrink ray.” She pulls the trigger and the black machine appears miniaturized at her feet. Next she fires at the power source she had disconnected from the machine earlier, it too dwindles away before her. She bends down and removes both small objects from the ground with her fingers. She places them into the shoebox, sealing them in beneath the lid. With the box in her hands, Claire begins the trip back to her home as the sun begins to set in the warm June evening sky.

Claire pulls the door shut behind her as she enters her kitchen carrying the shoebox containing the shrunken machine and six tiny vehicles she had acquired during her journey into Michael and Amy’s yard. She makes her way to the attic entrance, unlatching the stairs and pulling them down before climbing her way up. Standing in the middle of the room, now fairly dark thanks to the setting sun outside the windows, she sets the shoebox down to her left and removes the lid from the one containing her shrunken neighbors and their friends. Claire smiles down on the little people huddled together in the light given off by Jim’s truck.

    “Attention: To the owner of a teeny-weeny blue truck, you’ve left your headlights on. Wouldn’t want you to get a dead battery.” She watches as one of the people below separates himself from the group and makes his way across the bottom of the shoebox to the truck. The light inside disappears and Claire sees the little man exit the vehicle. She bends down, reaching into the box, the little man darts quickly away from her hand as she picks up the truck. She sets it to her right on the wood floor before returning her hand to the box, gently flipping it onto its side with the opening facing her body. She walks to one wall and flicks the light switch, illuminating the entire attic.

    Michael rises to his feet as his world lights up, he sees his friends picking themselves up all around him on the cardboard floor. He watches as Claire returns in front of the box, she sits herself down on the floor, pulling her legs towards her body and crossing them.

    Claire sits for a moment and stares into the box, watching as the ten little people stand perfectly still and look back at her with their backs firmly pressed against the cardboard wall behind them. “Come on out of there, guys. And you know I’ll just make you if you don’t come willingly.” She smiles as the group slowly walks forward.

    “What’s in the box? Does it have something to do with the “important work” you went to take care of?” Michael asks upon noticing the shoebox next to Claire.

    “Evidence. Wanna see?” She removes the lid from the shoebox next to her and looks back at the people on the floor in front of her. “So, which one of you is the ‘KEWLGUY?’”

    “What are you talking about?” asks Michael.

    Claire reaches into the shoebox and pulls out the little yellow sports car. She sets it on the floor. “Vroom vroom” she says before she begins gently pushing the vehicle across the floor towards the group, like a child playing with toy cars. Keith watches as his automobile is driven forward at the mercy of the massive young woman’s fingers. She stops the car just inches away from the tiny people and lifts her hand away,  pulling it towards her and resting it on her knee.

    “That’s my car!” yells Keith. “What did you do to it?! It better not be damaged in ANY way! Do you have ANY idea how expensive it was?!”

    “So YOU’RE the cool guy, hmmm?” She watches as Keith stares up at her angrily. “I was wondering which of you actually drove around with plates like that. How embarrassing.”

Claire reaches into the shoebox and begins removing the rest of the shrunken vehicles one at a time, placing them down on the floor in front of the group. She already has the silver and purple cars on the ground next to Keith’s when she begins bringing the bright red one in her hand down to join them. Michael watches his vehicle’s slow descent. “What are you doing, Claire?! Why did you shrink our vehicles?”

    “I told you, I had to care of the evidence. You little people sure left a lot of it when you went and shrunk yourselves. So I went into your yard and shrunk all your cars and then the machine on the porch. I WAS just going to crush everything and throw it all away, but it was all SOOOO cute like this, I just couldn’t bring myself to do that. Just look at these little things, they’re adorable! Well, except for this one.”

    Claire sets the beat-up white car down onto the floor with the others. “What a hunk of junk” she says, tapping on the hood with her fingertip. Scott glances at his vehicle. “She’s right” he thinks to himself.
   
    “How do you figure this solves anything?” asks Michael.

    “What do you mean?”
   
    “Sure, you took care of the evidence, but we’re still missing. You don’t think the authorities will eventually ask you and your mother a few questions as part of their search for us?”

    “Hmmm, you might have a point there. I guess I’ll have to think of something to tell them in case they do wind up on my doorstep some morning.”

    “If you return us to normal you won’t have to worry about any of that.”

    “Just one more!” Claire says, ignoring Michael and reaching her hand back into the shoebox. She pulls out the fancy cyan-colored car and sets it in her palm, admiring the tiny vehicle. I LOVE this one, it’s SOOO pretty!”

    Jennifer’s anger rises as she stares up at her car high above in the girl’s hand. “Put my car down right now, you giant bitch! Who do you think you are, toying with other people’s property?!”

    Claire pretends to gasp at the outburst of the tiny woman below before laughing. “Oh, this is YOUR car?”

    “Yes, and you’re going to set it down gently on the floor! And then you’re going to take Michael’s device out and grow us all back to normal! And then…”

    “Hmmm” Claire interrupts, “And who’s going to make me do any of this? You?”

    Jennifer realizes she has no power over the colossal younger girl. She’s used to getting her way by using her temper and intimidating others, but she’s starting to realize that’s not going to work when she’s the size of a bug.

    “I’m not growing anyone, but you know… you CAN make me give you your car.”

    Curiously, Jennifer looks up at Claire’s beautiful face high above her. “How?”

    Staying seated, Claire pulls off her right flip flop and places her bare foot on the floor in front of the little people and their cars. The little people eye her foot and its nearness nervously, remembering just moments ago when she had so casually mentioned crushing their vehicles and disposing of them. “What’s your name, little one?”

    “J…Jenn…Jennifer.”

    “Well, Jennifer, do you want to make me give you your car? Do you want me to put it down on the floor with the rest of them?”

    “Y…Yes”

    “Well then. There’s one thing you could do to make me give it to you.”

    “What?”

    “Come give my toe a kiss, and I promise I’ll put your car down right after you do.”

    Jennifer feels as though the blood within her veins has begun to boil as she watches Claire wiggle her big toe. The idea of touching, let alone KISSING, any part of this girl’s foot disgusts her. She’d already had more than enough of Claire’s feet when she went for a ride on her flip flop after the girl first discovered her and the rest of her group.

    “If you think I’m going to do that, you’re INSANE! Now put my car down!”

    “Awww. You don’t like my feet, little Jennifer? Guess you won’t be getting your car after all. That’s too bad. But oh well, I’m sure one of these other little people will give you a ride around this great big attic in one of theirs if you need it. And hey, now I’ll be able to grow your pretty little car back to normal and drive around in style anytime I want!” Claire places the little cyan car back into the shoebox and sets the lid on top before taking it in her arms. She stands and begins heading towards the stairs with her right foot still bare.

    Jennifer growls angrily and clenches her fists down at her sides. She can’t stand the thought of this girl taking her beloved car and driving around in it on some joyride while she’s trapped in her attic like some sort of tiny prisoner. She yells as Claire starts to walk away. “Wait! No! Come back!”

    Claire smiles and walks back in front of the tiny people and their cars on the wood floor. “Did someone change their little mind?” She twitches the toes on her bare foot.

    “You promise you’ll put my car down with the others if I do this?”

    “Of course! As soon as I feel your tiny lips down there I’ll give you your car.”

    Jennifer shudders. Very slowly and with much trepidation she begins approaching Claire’s massive bare foot planted on the floor in front of her. Everyone else watches on nervously, especially Scott, as she continues to move away from them. The enormous toes wiggle slowly, producing a light scratching sound each time one rubs against another as Jennifer makes her way to the largest of them.

    Claire stares down excitedly at the tiny woman at her foot. She can’t wait to feel the touch of her little lips against her skin. Her heart races in her chest as she thinks of how fragile the small girl is, how little effort it would take to barely move her foot forward and grind the pathetic being out of existence beneath her.

    Jennifer reaches the big toe. She stands mere inches away (her scale, not Claire‘s) from its tip. Standing perfectly still, she hesitates to get any closer.

    “Go on, little one. You want your car, don’t you?” Claire holds the box in one hand and grabs the cyan car out from within with her other. She holds the vehicle between her fingers, shaking her hand slowly as if teasing a dog into performing a trick with the promise of receiving a treat afterwards.

    Jennifer leans in reluctantly and lightly touches her lips to the massive toe before quickly pulling away and repeatedly expelling her tongue from her mouth, spitting on the ground in disgust.

    Claire giggles at the sight below. “You’re gonna have to do better than that, I didn’t even feel anything.”

    In a fit of rage combined with her intense desire of wanting to just end the humiliation and free her precious car from the girl‘s clutches, Jennifer leans back in and plunges her face as deep into the thick yet soft skin of Claire’s toe as she possibly can.

    Claire’s eyes widen and she takes a deep breath as she experiences an incredible, albeit tiny, sensation on her toe. “ She did it! The little woman actually kissed it! And I actually felt it!” she thinks to herself enthusiastically. With an enormous smile, she savors the feeling at her feet until it ceases when the tiny woman’s head retreats from the toe.

    Incredibly pleased with both the compliance of the little woman and the satisfaction granted by her action, Claire leans down and gently places the cyan car onto the floor next to Jennifer before returning to her full height. She watches as Jennifer hurriedly gets into her vehicle and speeds off away from her feet towards a corner of the room.

    “Awwww, come on little Jennifer, don’t be like that. You know it wasn’t so bad.”

    Scott climbs into his own vehicle and begins chasing after his girlfriend. He barely distances himself from the group and their parked cars before the front of Claire’s massive bare foot touches down in his path. He instinctively slams the brakes and his tires squeal to a stop just in front of the tremendous toes.

    Claire feels slightly disappointed as she looks down on the tiny beat-up white car at her foot. She wanted to know how it would feel when the tiny vehicle made impact with her toes, but the little man applied his brakes just in time to prevent impact.

    “Bad idea, little man. I think Jennifer wants to be alone right now. Besides, don’t you want to stay here with your friends… and my pretty feet?” She wiggles her toes, lifting them and dropping them back down onto the floor.

    Scott looks ahead nervously, the view outside his windshield is completely filled by the young woman’s massive foot resting before him. He still wants desperately to catch up with his girlfriend and comfort her, but he knows if he attempts to escape Claire she’ll easily stop him again, and would possibly be angry with him.

    Claire separates her sole from the wood floor, it peels away from the ground with a light sound, although it’s probably much louder to the little man in his car. She slowly brings her foot towards the junky white car with her big toe pointed forwards. The thought of the tiny body inside the vehicle at her mercy watching as her foot draws near excites her greatly.

    Scott sits frozen in fear as the flesh of Claire’s big toe makes contact with his windshield, the same toe his girlfriend was reluctantly persuaded into gratifying just moments ago.

    “Your car is in such bad shape, little man. It looks like it has TONS of problems. Don’t you think it’s time you just got rid of it before something else goes wrong with it?”

    Scott is rocked back and forth in his vehicle, it creaks and groans beneath the weight of the toe as Claire moves it onto the hood. The car shakes with him inside as the young woman continues to poke and prod at it.

    “Don’t you want me to help you get rid of this old thing? It’s like a rickety old deathtrap, I‘d be doing you a favor” she says, continuing to rock the car with her toe. “Come on out of there, little guy, and I’ll take care of it for you.”

    Scott can’t believe his ears. This woman wants to destroy his car! And she wants him to feel as though she would somehow be doing him a favor! Sure, his car is in terrible shape and he should have relinquished possession of it long ago, but it has great sentimental value to him and thus he cannot bring himself to part with it.

    Claire wait’s a few moments for the passenger to exit his vehicle before she realizes he’s not going to. She lifts her toe from the car and plants her foot down on the floor in front of it. “Obviously this scrap heap is somehow important to you, little man, so whatever. I’ll be honest, I’m a little disappointed.” She pouts her lips as she looks down on the car. “I really wanted to feel it crumple under my foot. But lucky for you, I’m in a really good mood. That woman… I’m guessing she’s your little girlfriend or something for you to have been chasing after her like that… she made me feel REALLY great when she decided to give me that little kiss. So since I’m feeling so great, I’ll be generous with you. You can keep your little car too, even though it’s going to be such an eyesore up here in my attic.”

    Claire lifts her foot and brings it to the tiny car, touching her toe to the front bumper, riddled with rust, dents, and scratches. She slowly pushes the car backwards with Scott inside, bringing the vehicle to a stop next to the other little automobiles on the floor before pulling her foot back towards her body.

Amy has been watching the entire event with bright red cheeks and burning fascination. Luckily no one notices, everyone’s eyes have been and are still focused on the giant young woman towering over them. She can’t help but think of how only hours ago she had toyed with Jim’s truck beneath her feet in a similar fashion.

Scott chooses to stay inside his car and calm down from the torment he’d just experienced at Claire’s foot rather than exiting his car and joining his friends.

    Michael and the rest of the group watches as Claire lowers herself to the floor, seating herself as she had earlier, she pulls her legs in and crosses them before resting the cardboard box she had been holding in her lap. They listen to the sound of her sole sliding against the foam of her black flip flop as she slips it back onto her bare foot. The morale of the group is low after watching one of their friends made to kiss their beautiful captor’s toe and another played with beneath it in his vehicle.

    “So, Michael…” begins Claire, staring down at the little people, “I’ve been thinking…”

    “About what.”

    “About what you said earlier. About how I took care of the evidence but that doesn’t change the fact that you’re still missing.”

    Michael stares up and into Claire’s face with nervousness and curiosity on his own. “And?”

    “And… well, do you still have that motorboat on that trailer thingy to tow it with sitting behind your house?”

    Michael hesitates to answer, unsure of why Claire would be asking about this. “W… what? Why?”

    “Oh, just tell me. You know I’m gonna check if it’s out there even if you say no, so you’d better not lie to me.”

    “Y… yes, fine, yes, it’s out there, but why are you asking me about it?”

    Claire smiles. “Well, if I take care of THAT, if anyone shows up here looking for you, I can tell them that the last time I saw you and Amy, you were taking some friends out onto the water. I’ll say one of your friends hooked the trailer up to his big blue truck and towed it off and you guys all got in your cars to follow him.”

    The group’s morale lowers even further. It had restored a little hope to their hearts earlier when Michael mentioned the authorities might be able to piece together their disappearance and lead themselves to Claire and her mother. After hearing the plan Claire had come up with, the newfound hope quickly vanished. Claire’s story was believable, and if told to the authorities, her story combined with the fact that the boat was indeed missing from Michael’s property would cause them to take their search for the missing people to the wrong place.

    “Well, I guess I’d better go take care of that boat, then” says Claire as she stands to her full height. “And as for this little thing…” she begins as she pulls the black shrinking machine from the porch out of the shoebox and holds it up for the little people below to see, “I’m taking this with me. I can’t keep it up here in the attic. Even if I put it up high on a stack of boxes or something I’m sure you little people would take every chance you could to reach it and use it against me. That wouldn’t be very nice, I don’t want to be teeny-tiny like you guys!” Claire laughs as she places the lid back onto the shoebox after setting the machine back inside. “I’ll be back soon. Why don’t you move your little cars while I’m gone so they’re not in my way when I get back? You wouldn’t want me to accidentally step on them, would you?” She smiles down at the group and wiggles her toes in her flip flops. “See you soon, everyone!”

    The group watches as the massive woman walks away from them and heads towards the stairs. Her flip flops slap wildly at her feet the whole way down. They listen as the stairs are pushed back up and into the attic and the latch is moved into place, sealing them in.

    “Well, at least she left the light on for us” says Jim.

    “Yep… like the fucking Motel 6” says Keith.

The warm summer air greets Claire as she takes her first steps after exiting through the front door of her home with the shoebox tucked under her arm. The sky has grown darker by the further setting of the sun since the last time she was outside. There is still enough light by which to see, but Claire knows it won't be long before it vanishes and darkness claims the evening.

No illumination spills forth from Michael and Amy's home. Claire is lucky she came outside when she did, had she waited just a bit longer she would have needed a flashlight to help guide her into her neighbors' backyard. “That boat better be out here” she mutters to herself as she continues her approach across the lawn. “Michael better not have lied to me.” She smiles as she rounds the corner of Michael and Amy's home and enters the backyard. Sure enough, the boat is there, resting atop the black trailer parked on the lawn in the distance. Claire sets the cardboard box down on the grass and walks up to the vessel, crossing her arms as she admires it. It's nothing overly fancy. It's quite plain, really, but it's still a nice looking boat and Michael seems to have taken care of it well. She takes a couple of steps backwards and fishes Michael's device out of her pocket. “I wonder... am I going to have to shrink the boat and the trailer separately? Or will this thing take care of them both in one shot? Better start with the boat first, just in case” she says to herself as she aims the device at the watercraft. She realizes if she fires at the trailer first and the device doesn't shrink the boat as well, the miniaturized trailer will be crushed beneath the boat and driven into the ground.

Claire's finger pulls back on the trigger. The boat disappears in front of her eyes, as does the trailer upon which it was perched. “WOW, this thing is awesome!” Impressed with the capabilities of the device in her hand, she takes a quick look at it before returning it to her shorts pocket. She brings her attention to the ground and scans the area ahead of her for the boat. Spotting it, she takes two small steps forward and gazes down on the tiny vessel at her feet. Claire crouches down over it, planting her right knee into the soft grass of her neighbor's lawn as she reaches down and removes the miniature boat from the ground. With her fingers gripping the steel trailer, she gently deposits it and its cargo onto the palm of her other hand before lifting it closer to her face and examining it with her beautiful blue eyes. “I'm holding a boat in the palm of my hand right now... an actual boat” She thinks to herself as she continues to scrutinize the vessel. “Just moments ago... I could have been a passenger on this very boat... and multiple other people could have been passengers inside it with me.” She still wasn't used to this feeling that she experienced each time she held a vehicle in her hand as if it were a toy. The feeling was even stronger now than it had been when she handled the cars of Michael and Amy and their friends, probably because the boat was larger in comparison to the other vehicles, yet still it was dwarfed immensely by the size of her body. Whatever this feeling was, it made her feel good. She felt powerful, and she liked it.

The night continues to grow darker around Claire as she surveys the boat in her hand. She knows what little sunlight remains is burning away quickly. Standing, she wipes her knee clean of any grass and dirt that may have become stuck to it with her free hand and carries the tiny boat towards the shoebox. She lifts the lid and places the vessel into the box with the black shrink ray from Michael's porch. “I still have to take care of that too.” Claire places the lid back onto the shoebox and picks it up with both hands, carrying it gently so as not to cause the trailer to roll around inside.

Back in the attic, Michael and the rest of the group have just finished parking their cars in a row with their rear bumpers facing one of the walls. Sunlight is no longer pumping into the attic windows, but the entire room is still illuminated thanks to Claire leaving the light on after she departed. Some were hesitant to move their vehicles as they had more concerning matters on their minds, but Isaac persuaded them into doing so by reminding them that Claire did say they should clear them out of her way before she returned. He wasn't sure of whether or not Claire would purposely destroy any of them, but he knew if she was going to be walking around up here with a bunch of tiny cars scattered around the floor like a child's Hotwheels collection, an accident was just waiting to happen and if anyone cared enough about their vehicles to not wish to see them flattened beneath the young woman, accidentally or otherwise, it would be in their best interest to clear them out of the middle of the room.

Michael exits his own car to see Scott climbing into his further down the row of vehicles. He waves and calls out Scott's name before jogging up to the white car. Scott is seated inside his vehicle with his hands on the steering wheel and the windows down but he hasn't started the engine yet. He looks visibly shaken, as he should after his encounter with Claire inside his car not much earlier. “Hey Scott... where are you off to?”

“I need to go find Jennifer.”

“I don't know if that's such a good idea.”

“I don't care, Michael! I need to find her. I need to make sure she's okay after what...” Scott sighs deeply, unable to finish his sentence. “After what... after, you know.”

“I understand, Scott, but I still think it's best if you stay here.”

Cynthia must have been near enough to hear the conversation as she walks up to the white car and joins the other two. “He's right, Scott. I think it's best if you wait here with everyone else. Claire will probably be back soon and it might make her mad if she sees you out driving around looking for Jenn like she told you not to do before she left. You don't want to make her mad, do you?”

“Exactly” says Michael, “It's best if we don't do anything to provoke her or anything that might make her feel playful again. We've just gotta keep clear heads and come up with a plan.”

“You still think we can get out this, Mike?” asks Scott with a look of hopelessness on his face.

“We can't give up hope. If there's a way out of this, we aren't going to come up with a plan that leads us to it unless we all stick together and stay as optimistic as we can under the circumstances. Just wait here with the rest of us, Jennifer will head back this way sooner or later, we're going to be fine.”

“Alright, Mike, let's hope.” Scott climbs out of his car and closes the door. Mike pats him on the back and watches as he and Cynthia walk away from him to join the rest of the group.

Michael sighs to himself. Before he can finish processing the conversation he just had with Scott and Cynthia, he is approached by Alexia. “Michael, what are we going to do?! Have you come up with a plan?”

“I don't know, and I'm working on it.”

“Why would that girl do this to us?”

“I don't know.”

“Why would she bring us up here? What does she want with us, Michael?”

“I don't know.”

“What is she thinking?! Why would she-”

“Jesus, Cynthia, how the fuck should I know?!” Michael snaps back at her.

Cynthia jumps and gasps with surprise at Michael's outburst, the other people not far in the distance their heads to look at the source of the yelling. Michael looks down and places his hand on his face and gently rubs his forehead. “I'm sorry, Cynthia. I didn't mean to yell, I'm just... I'm frustrated. I know we all are. We all want to get out of this and I'm trying my best to think of a way despite the fact that I know half of you are extremely upset with me and want to see me suffer for what's transpired today.”

Amy walks up to them and places a hand on Michael's shoulder. “Honey, is everything okay?”

“Yeah, I didn't mean to snap at Alexia like that, I'm just... I've got a lot on my mind right now, just like the rest of us.”

“It's okay, Michael” says Alexia. “I'm sorry if I bothered you. I shouldn't have asked you questions right now, I know you don't have the answers either but I'm scared, and it's like you said I guess, we're all really frustrated right now.” Alexia leaves Michael and Amy alone as she walks back to the rest of the group where Keith places an arm around her.

“You sure you're okay, Michael?” asks Amy as she looks up into his face.

“Yeah, yeah, all things considered, I'm fine. What about you? We haven't really had a chance to talk since you left this morning and now all this has happened, how are you holding up?”

“I'm okay too, like you said, all things considered.”

“You sure? You know I'm here for you whenever there's anything you want to talk about.”

“I know, thanks honey” says Amy before hugging her husband.

Something on the picnic table catches the attention of Claire as she passes through Michael and Amy's yard with the cardboard box in her hands. She walks up to the table and sets the box down onto the grass again. “Plastic bags. What are these, groceries?” she asks herself as she begins inspecting the contents of the bags left on the top of the picnic table. “A couple bags of chips and some soda... I'd better take this too, it could be considered evidence. Plus, it's be a shame to let it go to waste.” She lifts the bags from the picnic table and goes back to pick up the cardboard box but looks back at the picnic table before doing so. “Hmmm” she thinks to herself, “Maybe I should take this too, give my little guests a place to sit.” Claire sets the plastic bags down on the lawn next to the cardboard box and again retrieves the device from her pocket. She aims it at the wooden picnic table and pulls the trigger. Quickly locating the shrunken piece of outdoor furniture, she picks it up in her right hand. Claire tucks the device away again into her pocket and places the table into the cardboard box before closing the lid, picking it and the groceries up, and beginning her journey back home.

Claire closes the front door behind her as she enters her home. She walks through the living room and into her kitchen, setting the cardboard box on the table. She takes the plastic bags and walks down the hall, laying them on the floor near the entrance to the attic. She returns to the kitchen and opens the shoebox, pulling out the tiny black shrinking machine and the even smaller power source that runs it. “Now, where can I keep this thing?” Claire is still against storing it in the attic with the shrunken people. Michael is resourceful. Even if she kept the power source downstairs, for all she knows Michael could piece together another means of powering the machine out of parts from the shrunken cars or something. She knows it's safest for her to just store it somewhere downstairs. Entering the hall again with the shrink ray in her hand, she walks to her room and opens the door. Rather than taking a long time and picking out the perfect spot to stash her prize away in, she simply pulls open the drawer on the nightstand next to her bed and drops the machine and its power source inside before sealing it shut and leaving her room, closing the door behind her.

Claire brings the cardboard box to the attic entrance and sets it down next to the plastic bags. She releases the latch and pulls down the stairs. Realizing it would be easier to just carry the boat and trailer in one hand and the plastic bags in the other, she removes the boat and places the picnic table into one of the bags, leaving the cardboard box empty on the floor before ascending the stairs with the rest of the items.

“I'm back!” she proclaims. “Make sure none of you little ones are in my path, you know I don't want any of you getting stepped on.” She giggles as she continues walking towards the center of the room, eyes scanning the floor for the shrunken group. She spots them and smiles down on them, but something else catches her attention in the corner of her eye and she turns her head to face it. “AWWW! You guys moved your little cars into a nice and neat row for me! I love it! You know, I still can't get over how cute they look. Well, most of them. I'm still not crazy about that trashy little white one, but whatever.” She sets the bags down on the floor and takes a few steps towards the wall where the vehicles are parked. She kneels down on her knees in front of the cars and sets the trailer down with Michael's boat on top at the end of the row on the right.

The group stands and watches the massive young woman looking over their vehicles from their position behind and slightly to the side of her. She rests there for a moment on her knees with her toes pressed down onto the front of her flip flops and the rest of her foot rising into the air, the back of her black sandals dangling with plenty of space between both the floor and the soft looking skin on the bottoms of her feet. The group looks on and into the deep wrinkles of her pale soles, some of them cringing at the thought of being trapped beneath them despite the almost alluring appeal of the incredibly soft looking skin.

Claire laughs, still viewing the collection of tiny vehicles before her. “It's like I have my own little auto showroom up here! But hey, one's missing! Awww, Jennifer? Are you still off on your own sulking in your car somewhere up here? You'd better come back to the rest of your group soon, this big attic can be pretty scary at night. Probably even MORE scary when you're the size of... well, you.” Claire giggles again before standing to her full height and walks back over to the plastic bags, sitting down on the floor next to them with her legs crossed, leaving about a foot (her scale) between herself and the shrunken group.

Everyone stares up at the enormous young woman with fear. “What's in the bags?” asks Michael.

“Just a couple things I found on your picnic table.” Claire replies. “And... the picnic table itself.” Claire laughs.

“What?”

Claire reaches to her left and rifles through one of the plastic bags before plucking out the wooden table and setting it onto the floor in front of Michael and the others. “I hadn't planned to take it, but I saw these plastic bags on top of it, and then thought maybe I should grab it so you guys would have something more your size to sit on up here in this great big attic. See? I'm thoughtful.” She finishes her sentence with a smile.

Michael rolls his eyes as he looks at the table he and Amy had picked out for their yard earlier in the year. Either Claire wasn't paying attention, or he was just too small for her to notice the movement on his face from this distance away.

“Anyways,” begins Claire, “look what else I found!” Claire lifts the large soda bottles out of one bag and stands them up on the floor where they tower over the people and the picnic table below. Next she pulls a bag of potato chips out of the remaining plastic bag and brings it to her lap. “Yummy! Sour cream and onion, my favorite!” She opens the bag of chips and pulls one out. Placing it into her mouth, she begins to chew.

The shrunken men and women watch on with jealousy. Their mouths water and their stomachs growl as the young woman devours a few more chips, each of the larger ones roughly the same size as their cars. “Delicious!” Claire licks her fingers clean after her quick snack and seals the bag before placing it back into her lap. “Are you little guys hungry? I'll bet you are!”

Everyone on the floor is very hungry after having missed their cookout thanks to certain other events playing out, but none of them cared to admit it to their captor. Claire watches them from above, waiting for an answer, but she receives none. “Well then, if you guys are all set I guess I'll just take this stuff downstairs with me and help myself to the rest.” She barely begins to lift herself off of the floor before Michael calls out and she sits back down.

“Yes, Claire, we're hungry.”

“Okay. Yeah, I thought you guys must be. We can fix that. I've got just the thing.”

Claire pulls the device out of her pocket. It takes her a minute to do so from a seated position. She sets the bags of chips closer to the group before doing the same with the bottles of soda. The heavy soda bottles touching down so close cause slight tremors in the floor for the shrunken people. Claire aims the device and opens fire on the food and drinks in front of her and soon it appears miniaturized on the floor. It's all far too small for her to read any of the labels now without getting closer, and she doubts she would be able to read the nutritional facts or ingredients without a magnifying glass.

“Okay you guys, have yourselves a little picnic, I'll be back in like 10 minutes.”

Claire stands up and heads towards the attic exit and climbs down. Her flip flops noisily mark her departure but nobody left upstairs seems to care. The entire group sits at the table after gathering the food and begins feasting.

Downstairs, Claire stands in front of a hall closet with the door open and looks around at the contents of the shelves. On the top shelf are many blankets and pillows, stored there for when Claire used to have sleepovers with her friends or when a relative was in town and going to spend the night. Claire stands on her toes and leans forward as she reaches up to the top shelf and pulls down an assortment of blankets and pillows, and even a couple of sleeping bags that were tucked away behind a stack of blankets. After forming a pile on the floor in front of the closet, she hits it with the device and scoops everything up in her hands after it all shrinks and the device is back in her pocket. Claire closes the closet door before heading into the kitchen. She opens a drawer and pulls out a few dish towels. Her hands full, she closes the drawer with her hip and heads back into the attic.

“AWWWW! You guy really are so cute down there having your little picnic! I love it!” Everyone just looks at the massive woman and continues eating.

Claire kneels down in front of the cardboard box tipped on one side from much earlier in the day. She drops the supplies in her hands to the floor. Pulling the dish towels from the pile, she folds them and lays them down neatly inside the box.

“This is for padding. Like a mattress I guess” says Claire to the shrunken people watching on from the picnic table as they eat. She presses her palm down onto the dish towels laid out inside the box. “See? Soft.” Then she points to the pile of tiny pillows and blankets in front of the opening of the box. “These are pillows and blankets for you to use. You guys will have to sleep here in this box for now. I know it's not the most luxurious of sleeping arrangements, but you'll still be all snugly and comfy with the stuff I'm letting you use.

Claire smiles at them once more before standing up. “I've got to get some rest now, and I'm sure you all need some too. It's been a BIG day, hasn't it? Even BIGGER for some than it was for others!” She laughs at her own joke and walks to the wall, switching off the lights. Everything goes dark for the group seated at the picnic table. They listen to the slapping sound of her flip flops as the distance between them and herself increases and she approaches the stairs. “Goodnight, little people! Sleep well!” she exclaims as she descends the stairs. She raises them and fastens the latch closed on the ceiling, sealing the shrunken group in the darkness of the attic.

Claire doesn't even bother to change into something more comfortable before bed. Smiling, she closes her bedroom door behind her and climbs into the comfort of her bed, cloaking her body beneath the softness of her red blanket. Her black flip flops lay on the floor beside her bed where she had left them after slipping her feet out of them for the evening. Her head hits the pillow and her eyes close as she releases a small yawn. She is ready for a good night's rest.

Still seated at the picnic table, the group's eyes are adjusting to the darkness they have been left in. A small amount of moonlight pierces its way into the attic through the many windows. It's not much, but it's enough so that everyone can move around without bumping into things, including one another.

“I wish she'd left us with some damned cups” says Jim as he takes a few sips from one of the two liter bottles of soda. Everyone turns to look at him, watching as he drinks. “What? No offense to any of you, I'm not saying I don't want to drink after you guys, I just wish she gave us some cups, that's all.”

The group's attention shifts as small lights can be seen coming towards them from the distance. “What's that?” asks Alexia.

“Looks like headlights” says Michael. “Must be Jennifer.”

Jennifer parks her car in the row with the others to the left of Michael's boat. She exits her vehicle and closes the door with a slam.

The men and women at the table watch her as she approaches, they want to greet her but they don't know what to say. “Uhmm... hey Jenn...” begins Brandi. “Why don't you come sit with us and have something to eat? You've gotta be hungry.”

Jennifer continues walking angrily, almost stomping as she goes, passing the picnic table and ignoring everyone seated at it on her way by. The group watches as she hastily snatches up a shrunken pillow and blanket from the pile and marches into the darkness of the sideways turned shoebox. Scott quickly rises from the table and hurries off to follow his upset girlfriend into the box.

Jim looks at Brandi and smiles after he finishes chewing a mouthful of chips. “Nice one, babe. 'You've gotta be hungry.' She might not ever be hungry again after having her mouth on a giant toe.” Jim's remark is met with distraught faces. “Oh, come on. Looks like we might be stuck like this for a while, might as well joke around when we can unless you guys actually like being gloomy all the time.”

Jennifer lays down beneath the blanket she had grabbed from the pile and faces the back of the box. Scott sits beside her and holds her hand, doing what he can to try and comfort her. “Come on, hun, we need to talk about this.”

“No. No we do not” replies Jennifer, still facing the back of box, refusing to look at her boyfriend.

“Yes we do. You know I don't like seeing you like this, I want to help you feel better.”

“I don't want to talk about this. Ever. I need to just put this whole fucking thing behind me and forget any of it ever happened, okay? Now let me go to sleep.”

Scott sighs and reluctantly stands up. He grabs a pillow of his own and returns to Jennifer, laying down beside her and joining her for the night.

“Those two have the right idea” says Keith. “I'm exhausted. I don't think we're going to be making any more sense of this shit tonight, might as well get some rest.”

“Yeah, might as well” says Michael. “Tomorrow's a fresh day. Get as much of a good night's sleep as you all can manage. We'll put our heads together in the morning and see what we can come up with to get us out of all this.”

The group takes the rest of the pillows and blankets into their arms and retires into the shoebox for the evening.

With her room full of warm sunlight, Claire stretches in her bed and yawns as she awakens to the faint sounds of the chirping of birds. Comfortably laying there, her mind wanders, thinking of various things as she continues to wake herself up until one thought strikes her hard. “Was it all a dream?” she whispers to herself, brushing her long black hair out of her face with her fingers. “Wait!” She leans over and reaches out to the nightstand beside her, pulling open the drawer and peering inside. “Yes!” Her eyes open wide and she smiles at the sight of the little black machine at the bottom of the drawer, confirmation that yesterday's events had actually taken place and were not simply a dream from which she was now awakening.

Claire sits up in her bed before grabbing a corner of the red blanket and dropping it onto the other side of her body, uncovering herself. Swinging her legs off the edge of the bed, she drops her feet onto the floor below and remains seated on her mattress as she raises her arms into the air, stretching and yawning once more. She slowly scrunches her toes and gently rubs her soles into the softness of the plum colored carpet, enjoying the feeling of the fibers passing along the wrinkles in her pale skin.

Although still fairly tired, Claire is far too excited to allow to herself to drift back to sleep for a few more hours. She feels like a young child on their birthday or Christmas morning. The little black machine in her drawer means that she still has guests staying in her attic and she can't wait to see them again. Rising from her bed, she walks across the room and stops at her dresser where she extracts the articles of clothing she will be wearing today. With everything she needs in her hands, Claire leaves her bedroom. Her bare feet carry her into the bathroom where she will start her day with a shower.

Michael rubs his eyes. Radiance fills the attic as the youthful sun of a new day shines through the windows. Turning on his side, he faces his wife as she also begins to stir from her slumber. “Good morning, honey” says Amy as she opens her eyes to see the face of her husband looking back at her.

“Good morning to you too.”

“How did you sleep? Did you get enough rest?”

“Yeah, for sleeping in a cardboard box stuffed with dish towels, I slept quite well.”

Amy laughs. “Seriously though, Michael, did you get enough sleep?”

“Yeah, I mean it, this was actually a pretty comfortable bed. That being said, I am hoping we'll have to spend as few more nights on it as possible before we can come up with a way out of here.” Michael leans in and kisses his wife. “Time to wake up I suppose.”

Jim walks along the row of shrunken vehicles on his way to Michael whom is standing in front of his boat. He stops and stands beside his friend, joining him in admiring the vessel. “I could sure use a coffee.”

Michael laughs. “I'm with you on that one.”

“Thinking about going sailing?”

Michael smiles softly and scratches his head. “I can't believe she actually used the device on my boat. And worse than that, I can't believe she hasn't changed us back to our full sizes. Amy and I have seen her a few times since we moved here, Claire always seemed like a sweet, innocent girl. Not the type that would keep hostages in her attic.”

“Yeah, well, she's hot. And you know what they say. The hot ones are always crazy.” Michael rolls his eyes and laughs.

Michael and Jim walk over to the picnic table where Keith and Isaac are already sitting. The four men exchange good mornings. Over the course of the next fifteen minutes the rest of the group vacates the comfort of the shoebox, even Jennifer, and they take their seats at the table with the others.

“Alright.” begins Michael. “I hope everyone slept well. I just want to begin by saying that I am aware most of you are upset with me, and I can understand why. I built the machine, my machine malfunctioned and now we're like this. That's on me, I take full responsibility for it. But is it my fault that we're trapped up here in this attic? No, that's where I draw the line.”

Jennifer makes a snorting sound on the other side of the table. “Ha! He STILL won't admit that he's to blame for this entire fucking mess!”

Isaac interjects before another argument can break out. “Okay, okay, let's not go through this again. We had every reason to trust Claire to help us and so we did. For whatever reason she refused, and now we're here. The young woman downstairs is responsible for that. If you need to be upset with anyone, it should be with her. But playing the game all day isn't going to get us anywhere. We have to start getting along with each other one hundred percent and brainstorm if we're going to pull through this.”

“Thank you, Isaac.” says Michael. “Would anyone like to start? Does anyone have any thoughts to share?

“I have a question.” says Brandi. “Are we really stuck like this? I mean, it doesn't just wear off after a certain amount of time? Forty eight hours, a week? We won't just grow back to normal on our own over time?” Some of the men and women ponder the idea in their heads. They hadn't thought of this before, perhaps the effects of the shrink ray that left them like this could simply wear off with the passage of time.

Michael sighs and faces Brandi. “Good question, Brandi, but unfortunately the answer is no.” Michael watches as Brandi frowns. “Our condition is not temporary. It's reversible, but anything hit with the machine is permanently stuck at its new size, until it's hit again with the reversal. The only way to restore ourselves is with one of my machines. I'm afraid it won't be as easy as just waiting for the effects to wear off, or getting ourselves wet and growing afterward.”

“So we definitely need a machine then.” says Alexia. Claire has your original one stashed away somewhere downstairs. And she seems to be keeping the smaller one with her at all times. Realistically, there's no way we'll be getting our hands on that. But... could you build a new machine? You could take apart some of our cars and even your boat for parts, and there's gotta be some useful stuff in some of the boxes stacked up here, right?”

Michael shakes his head. “Nope. We just don't have the raw materials up here. Or the tools necessary to assemble anything. The key components aren't found in your everyday items, or even in vehicles. If it weren't for my job, I probably never would have been able to acquire the right stuff to make the technology powering the machine and device possible.”

“So, wait. Does that mean anyone from the lab where you work knows about the machine?” asks Isaac. “Is there anyone there that knows about what you were working on, and might be able to piece together what happened when you don't show up for work?”

“No. Nobody knows what I was working on. Just us.”

“And how lucky for us. Thank you so much for sharing your project with us, Michael.” Everyone ignores Jennifer's interruption and continues listening to Michael.

“And before yesterday, only Amy knew about it. And even she didn't know the full extent of what I was working on. I was doing my best to keep things under wraps until the right time. I didn't want anyone swooping in and trying to take credit for my work.”

“Okay Michael,” begins Keith, “we're small and we're stuck like this for now. But I've been thinking, have we ever been in any real danger this whole time?” The entire group looks at Keith with perplexed looks on their faces. “No, no, listen, hear me out on this. We shrunk, yeah. But how do we know we're fragile? What if like... when we shrunk, our bodies got all packed together and dense and we're really tough now? Like... what if, and I'm sorry to bring this up again, Amy, but I've got to. What if yesterday back in your yard, Amy actually DID step on one of us, but it was like stepping on a rock. What if she would have taken another step and whoever had been under her would have just been able to stand back up and brush themselves off?” Amy can't help but blush again as she thinks back to yesterday's events on her lawn.

“No, Keith. We didn't gain superhuman abilities when we got shrunk.” Jim and a couple others laugh.

“I didn't mean it like superheroes or sci fi. I just meant what if our bodies got much tougher. But how do you KNOW that we didn't? How can you say it for sure?” asks Keith.

“Think back to yesterday, Keith. Remember the apple on the table downstairs? Remember what happened when Claire shrunk it?”

“Oh yeah...” says Keith, defeated.

“Claire barely touched it with one finger and it was demolished. Completely demolished. It didn't offer her any more resistance than a full sized apple. It offered far less. I'm sorry, but the truth is we're incredibly fragile, so you better not go and do anything stupid thinking you're a tiny man of steel. I hate to use this analogy but it's really the only one that fits our situation. We're like bugs. Tiny and fragile, helpless against normal sized people, animals, vehicles, the damned weather, pretty much anything you can think of. And actually, most bugs have it better than we do. We're not even as durable as them. I'm pretty jealous of any of the ones with an exoskeleton right now.”

“So as far as coming up with a plan, what do you think it is that we should be planning for?” Asks Isaac. “You can't build a new machine, getting one of the existing two out of Claire's clutches is highly unlikely, nobody knows you were working on shrinking technology so anyone close to you coming to our rescue is out of the question... what else? Oh yeah, when people do notice we're missing, if the authorities come here looking for us, we can't rely on them because Claire's got a good enough story prepared to tell them that will send them off in a completely different direction. So what other options are there left to plan for? Escape? That's the only other thing I can think of, and I can't even begin to fathom any way that we could possibly pull that off.”

“Yeah, I hate to say it, but your assessment is accurate” says Michael. “Alright, so it looks as though-” A loud noise interrupts the meeting of the men and women at the picnic table. The stairs have been dropped down to the floor below and footsteps can be heard ascending them.   

Nobody speaks as Claire makes her way up the stairs and enters the attic. Everyone seated at the picnic table simply stares as the colossal young woman's body rises higher and higher into the air until she clears the stairs and takes her first step onto the attic floor. She is once again dressed in jean shorts, though no one can tell whether or not it's the same pair she had graced the day before as this pair seems to be identical. Higher up, she wears another black T shirt, this one bearing a red TOOL logo. “I guess she might have one thing going for her.” says Jim, breaking the silence at the table. “It seems like she might have good taste in music.”

Claire walks through the room, her bare feet producing soft slapping sounds on the wood floor with each step she takes. Every soft slap to her translates into more of a boom for Michael and the others. She passes the tiny picnic table and comes to a stop behind it. Lowering herself down, she crosses her legs and takes her usual seat on the floor. “Good morning, little people! How are you all today? Did you have a good rest?” She flashes a big smile down to the group below, exposing her perfect white teeth, the immensity of which causing some of the men and women on the receiving end to shudder.

The delightfully clean scent of soap, shampoo, and other hair products has filled the air surrounding the men and women at the table since Claire sat down, making it evident that the massive young woman before them has recently bathed. The highly pleasant aroma penetrates their tiny nostrils with each breath they take. The smell is so great that the little women on the ground can't help but feel envious as they stare into their captor's smile looming high above, none of them having been able to take showers of their own this morning. Oh, what they wouldn't give to be able to clean themselves up after yesterday's tumultuous adventures on their friends' lawn followed by a long night inside a shoebox?

Nobody answers Claire's questions about whether or not they had slept well, most of them still simply too intimidated by her incredible size to be able to respond to her, and besides, none of them care to give her the satisfaction of knowing that the supplies she had left them with last night were actually quite comfortable. “Are you little guys hungry again? Do you want some breakfast?”

“Claire...” begins Michael, trying to sound as stern and unfearful as he can while attempting to reason with someone so impossibly larger than himself. “This has gone on long enough. If this was some kind of joke, you've had your fun and nobody is laughing, it's time to end it. We're scared. You need to change us back to normal now so we can go to the restroom and then carry on with our lives.”

Claire is still surprised she can even manage to hear the little people so well when they speak. “Go to the bathroom? Oh my god!” Claire covers her mouth playfully as she gasps. “I can't believe I forgot about that! I made you guys a cute and comfy little place to sleep but I completely forgot to give you a place to go to the bathroom! I'm sorry little people, I'll be right back!”

Everyone stares in awe as Claire quickly stands to her feet and walks away, her steps causing small tremors that grow continuously less intense as she gets further away before reaching the stairs and disappearing from the attic. Some of them wonder, no matter how long they could be left at this size, would they ever be able to get used to experiencing the state of awe and sometimes even downright shock granted to them by normal sized people and objects?

“Well, Michael, great work” says Jennifer. “Great idea trying to talk her into helping us, because you know it worked just SO well for us yesterday.”

“She's had a full night to think about the situation. I thought it might be possible to reason with her now, that she might be ready to take things a little more seriously.”

“A full night to think about the situation?” says Keith. “What she's had is a full night to dream about all her new toys waiting for her up in the attic. If anything, she would be harder to talk sense into today than she was yesterday. It's hopeless.”

“I hate to say it, but he's right” chimes in Isaac. “Clearly, this girl is on some sort of power trip. She knows we're helpless, completely at her mercy, and on some level she has found this to be appealing to her. There's no other reason for her to have not returned us to normal yet, and as long as she continues to enjoy the control she has over us, how could we possibly hope to bring her to do so?”

Discussion ceases again as Claire enters the attic. Her footsteps lightly shake the floor until she once again takes her seat in front of the group with her legs crossed. In her left hand she holds a small white box. Using scissors she has cut what to the little men and women amounts to a doorway sized hole into one side of the box. Through the hole, they can see she has lined the floor of the box with folded up paper towels or napkins. “I even shrunk a couple rolls of toilet paper and tossed them inside. I know this isn't like the greatest thing for the job but when you guys need to go, you can go in here” she says as she leans over, placing the box down as far to her left as she can reach without having to stand up.

“That's disgusting!” yells Jennifer. “If you think I'm going to use that, you-”

“Awww, little Jennifer, you don't like my idea? I'm glad you came back to join the rest of the group after you took off in your little car yesterday, but if you want to complain to me again today, I can think of a certain part of my body that would just love to listen! “Claire smiles down on the tiny woman below and begins to playfully wiggle her toes without uncrossing her legs and moving her feet to a position where they could be more easily seen. The view from where Jennifer is seated must be just fine though as the color of her face switches to red and she refuses to interrupt again. She has gotten the message. “Anyways, that's the best I could come up with for now” says Claire as she points to the white box on her left.

Everyone gasps and freezes in place, unsure of what to do as Claire brings her closed right hand to a rest a few inches above the picnic table and allows it to hover there for a few seconds before opening it. A few crumbs and a shrunken one gallon jug filled with orange liquid drop from her palm and land on the surface of the table, causing the people below to jump in their seats. Claire pulls her hand back to her body as she giggles, amused by the fright she had unintentionally caused to arise.

“What's this?” asks Michael as the group begins to calm down from the scare given to them simply by the nearness of the massive hand lingering above.

“Breakfast.” The miniscule people begin to inspect the very large red crumbs in front of them. “I realized this morning that I pretty much wasted all those chips last night. If I'd left them full sized, just like one or two of those things would have been enough to fill all of you for an entire day! And even I could have enjoyed a few more of them that way too. It would be too expensive to keep shrinking normal sized food and feeding it to you guys. Maybe if you're really good, then as a treat I can, but for now stuff like this will be fine.”

“I can't even tell what this is” says Michael. He nor anyone else had yet taken a bite from one of the large crumbs.

“It's bacon, silly! I took a slice and broke a few little pieces off for you guys so you could manage to handle and eat it. And that's orange juice in the jug. I grabbed an empty jug that used to have water in it and I shrunk it on the counter. Then I really carefully filled it with orange juice. I didn't need to shrink the whole thing of orange juice and waste it like the chips. I spilled a little while I as filling the tiny jug though and I had to wipe the counter. I should have used an eyedropper or something.” Claire giggles as she lifts her hand to her face and pretends to squeeze the top of an invisible eyedropper between her index finger and thumb. “Maybe I'll remember that for next time and make things easier.” She smiles again before standing up. “Okay little people, enjoy your breakfast. I'll be back soon and we can have a little fun together today!”

Despite having to feel the vibrations in the floor as she moves, the group doesn't even pay attention to Claire as she walks away and descends the stairs, leaving them alone once more in the vastness of the attic. They're too focused on the large red slabs in front of them which they have been told are crumbs of bacon. Isaac reaches out and lifts one from the table, holding it awkwardly thanks to the object's size and weight. He brings his head in close and takes a bite, chewing for a few seconds before swallowing. The bacon is relatively soft and not overly difficult to chew as everyone had imagined it would be. Had it been crispy or somewhat burnt, then they would have had trouble eating it. “Not bad, actually” says Isaac before leaning in to take another bite.

Slowly, the others begin to join Isaac in his feast, with the exception of Jennifer. “The bitch didn't even shrink this shit for us! Like we're little fucking animals that she can just feed scraps too! I'm not going to take this for much longer!”

Michael finds himself wanting to say “how are you going to stop her?” but he keeps from doing so and continues to watch as the woman sits enraged on the other side of the table. Everything she was saying was true and he was sure the others felt the same way, but he and the rest of the group seemed to be better at keeping their cool. Of all his wife's friends, Michael did always know Jennifer as the one with the temper. As he takes a sip from the jug of orange juice, the woman raises an arm and swings her fist down in anger. She struck her target, a chunk of bacon on the table below. “OW!” she yells as she pulls the expression on her face into a scowl. Her fist bounced off the unscathed bacon and she managed to cause herself a bit of pain instead. Jim covers his mouth with his hand to help conceal his smile and attempt to hold back laughter.

“So, what do you think the 'fun' she said we'll be having today will be?” asks Keith with a mouthful of bacon.

“No idea” replies Amy. “But if it's going to be 'fun' for her, I'm betting it won't be for us.”

“Likewise” says Isaac.

At least twenty minutes pass as Michael and the others feast upon their meal of bacon and orange juice. After finishing the meal, the group shifts its attention to the small white box Claire has left on the attic floor for them. “So, what do you think of our new bathroom?” Michael asks.

“I'm pretty sure you already know what I think” says Keith. “But I'll tell you this: I don't want it so close to us. We start using that thing, and it's not exactly going to smell pleasant. There should be more distance between us and it.”

“Hmmm, you're right.” says Jim. “I've got an idea though. You two, meet me over there next to it, I'll be right there.”

Michael and Keith nod their heads and rise from the table before beginning their short walk over to the white box. Jim heads in a different direction after leaving the table, towards the row of shrunken vehicles. He climbs into his truck and starts it up, then drives it over to the box on the floor where Michael and Keith are waiting, bringing his vehicle to a stop directly in front of the structure. “What's the plan?” Keith yells up to Jim, still seated in his vehicle.

“I'm gonna push this thing back” responds Jim through his open window.

“You sure your truck can handle it? asks Keith. This thing's probably heavy.”

“Yeah” says Jim, laughing. “My baby can handle it. She's tough. This thing can't be THAT heavy, the walls look pretty thin. Guess we'll find out though. Go up to the wall and tell me when to stop.”

The two men move themselves to the wall and motion for Jim to begin pulling forward. The blue truck begins to move, the engine roars loudly as the vehicle makes contact with the box and begins to slowly push it across the floor. “Keep it coming” says Michael as the distance between the box and the back wall begins to decrease. “Alright, stop!” Jim hits his brakes and his truck halts, the back of the white box comes to rest just inches away from touching the wall.

“Great work, guys” says Jim. “Hop in, I'll give you a ride back to the group.” Michael and Keith climb into the bed of their friend's vehicle and are driven back across the wood floor towards the picnic table. As the two men climb out of the vehicle, the sound of footsteps on the stairs below becomes audible before Claire comes into view. She enters the attic, carrying two metal buckets by their handles, one in each hand as she walks through the room. She takes a seat in front of the wall opposite to where the little cars are parked, setting the two buckets down next to her, one on each side of her body. Instead of sitting in her usual position with her legs crossed, she plants both of her bare feet onto the floor and rests her back against the wall behind her. She pulls her legs a little closer to her body, her knees in the air.

“Hey little people! I thought of something we can do today! Come over here and we can get started!” She smiles as she looks across the room to the tiny picnic table. “Did you guys go for a little ride?” she asks, noticing the little blue truck on the floor next to the table. She waits patiently for the group to come to her but they just continue to stare at her, unmoving. “Ugh, again?” Her voice doesn't show any anger or frustration with the little people and neither her tone nor demeanor change as she tells them what she must to get them to obey her. “Come on, little ones, you know if you don't walk over to me on your own I'll just come and get you, and you know you won't like that at all. Don't make me do that, just be good and come over here.”

Everyone knows from experience that Claire means what she says. Rather than force her into having to stand and retrieve them, which would be another frightening ordeal for them, the group reluctantly stands up from the picnic table and begins walking towards the massive young woman on the other side of the room. Halfway there, Claire speaks again. “Whoever's little truck that is, you should bring that over, it might come in handy.” Everyone else keeps walking towards Claire but Jim stops and stands still, nervous. He really doesn't want to see his vehicle take part in any more adventures with giant women. Claire watches the one man on the floor standing still while everyone else continues walking, knowing he must be the owner of the blue truck. She smiles at him. “Fine, I guess I can get up and grab it myself, little man.” Jim immediately turns around and heads for his truck, causing Claire to laugh. Everyone else stops a fair distance away from Claire and stares up at her, not sure of what to do next. “You can get closer than that, guys. Jeez, I don't bite!” Still reluctant, they move closer to her, stopping not far in front of her enormous bare feet. Her toes lay out before them, nails unpainted. The polish has been removed from them since the last time she was in the attic. Jim drives up in his truck and parks it behind the men and women before getting out and joining the group at Claire's feet.

An extremely pleasing odor emanates from the gigantic girl's feet resting on the wood floor. It's as if she has recently applied some sort of lotion or moisturizer to them. Cynthia finds herself gently closing her eyes and smiling as she takes in a deep breath, intoxicated by the blissful aroma. The scent almost has a soothing effect on her.

“Okay guys, so here's what we're going to do” Claire says as she looks down on the tiny people in front of her on the floor. “I know it's going to be a lot of work for you at your size, so I already started to help you by removing the old polish. You guys can do the rest. You're going to give me a pedicure! This is going to be so much fun!”

The idea presented to them is extremely displeasing to everyone on the floor. Unfortunately, they know they have no choice but to comply. They have absolutely no power over Claire, and even if they try to refuse her request, they have no doubts that she would simply forcibly put them through something else, something possibly even less desirable than the current task they're being asked to perform.

Claire pulls a bottle of black nail polish out of the silver bucket on her right and sets it on the floor by her feet where it stands taller than not only Michael and his friends, but higher than Jim's truck as well. “I know what you're all thinking. Black? Again?” Claire laughs. “Yeah, well, it's my favorite color for my nails.” She reaches into her pocket and grasps the shrinking device. Aiming it at the bucket on her right, she fires. The bucket dwindles away in size and she then repeats the process on the bucket to her left before tucking the device back into her pocket. Claire reaches out to pick up one of the buckets between her index finger and thumb but quickly thinks better of it, stopping herself as she remembers what had happened when she went to touch the miniaturized apple downstairs. “Shrunken cars are one thing, but I better not try picking these up. So tiny... they're probably way too flimsy. I'll fill them up with nail polish and then you guys can grab them. Take all the stuff out of that one first though” she says as she points to the bucket on her left.

Claire reaches down and takes the bottle of nail polish in her hand, lifting it away from the group. As she unscrews the cap, Michael and the others approach the shrunken bucket and take a look inside. It's filled with paintbrushes and a couple of small paint rollers. Michael reaches in and pulls them out. He distributes them to the other men and women whom unhappily take the paint applicators into their hands. Claire carefully drips the nail polish into the bucket on her right. An incredibly small amount of the polish quickly fills the bucket which before shrinking was capable of holding between five and ten gallons of liquid. “This one's ready. Come and get it!” When no one else volunteers, Keith hesitantly makes his way over to the other side of Claire's feet to retrieve the bucket. As he does so, Claire fills the other one before screwing the cap back onto the bottle of nail polish. “I'll probably need to give you guys a refill, especially if we're doing two coats.”

“TWO coats?” Scott groans. “This just gets worse and worse.”

Keith returns to the group carrying the other bucket with him. “Uh...” begins Michael, yelling up to Claire after she's set the capped bottle of polish back down. ”So, how exactly are we supposed to do this?”

Claire sets her hand down on the floor next to the little people with her palm facing up. Its size and nearness causes them to take a few steps back. “Half of you, climb on.” Keith helps boost Scott, Jennifer, Cynthia, and Isaac onto the hand before grabbing the bucket of paint again and climbing up himself. Claire giggles at the passengers standing on the soft flesh of her open palm as she very carefully moves her hand towards her right foot. “Here's your stop.” The tiny people jump off her hand and onto the large expanse beneath them which is really the soft skin on the top of Claire's foot. “Be really careful, don't spill any of that on my skin. You look like you're the strong one” she says, looking at Keith as he stands still holding the bucket.” Maybe your job will be a little easier. Why don't you hold onto the polish so it doesn't spill and let these other people come and dip their brushes in and do the paining?” As ready as they'll ever be to do this job, the five little people begin walking towards the front of Claire's foot. “Try not to tickle me at all down there, little people, and I'll do my best not to twitch my foot or wiggle my toes! I don't want you guys falling off and making a mess with the nail polish.” She watches as the group approaches Keith and dips their brushes into the bucket.

Scott is the first to head towards her toes. He kneels down with the thick paintbrush in his hand and carefully begins applying small strokes of black polish onto the clear nail of her big toe, causing Claire to smile with joy. “I knew I was going to love this!” she thinks to herself. “Now, for the other foot...” she says out loud as her attention shifts to Michael and his group still standing on the floor to her left.

While Keith and his group continued to labor over the nails of the massive right foot, Claire had put Michael and the other four tiny people to work on her left. Michael any Amy knelt into the soft flesh of her foot and slid their brushes rich with bristles coated in the black polish back and forth along the giant nails of their younger neighbor. Meanwhile, Jim, Brandi, and Alexia work out of the bed of Jim's blue truck after he had been instructed to back it up and park it directly in front of the imposing toes. They stand with a bucket of the black polish in the truck's bed with them and apply the black lacquer with their own brushes, the vehicle being high enough off the ground that the men and women standing in it could easily reach the tops of Claire's toes well enough to paint them without having to stand on the surface of her foot like the others. Now beginning their second coat, Claire finds herself having to refill the tiny buckets for her little helpers. After carefully dripping polish into the first bucket as Keith held it steady from his position on her foot, she brings the bottle over to her left. “Please don't let her spill any of this shit on my truck” Jim mumbles under his breath as the enormous bottle with Claire's fingers wrapped around it comes into view above his vehicle. Remarkably, every drop of the black liquid finds its way into the bucket. Relieved, Jim gets back to work with the others.

On the other foot, Jennifer neatly spreads the black polish over one of Claire's nails with her brush. Out of the entire group, she is the one enjoying themselves the least right now. Rather than object, complain, and yell at the much, MUCH bigger girl, Jennifer is surprisingly able to keep calm and focus on her work. She may finally be coming to understand that the colossal toes beneath her and the equally massive young woman they belong to aren't going to be intimidated by her as long as such a size difference exists between them.

Smiling, Claire watches the view below from between her knees as the tiny people continue to pamper her pretty toes. She isn't sure just what it is she feels like in the moment. Royalty? No, whatever it is she's feeling, it's even more gratifying than royalty. It felt so bizarre each time the minuscule people on the tops of her feet walked or pressed their hands and knees into her skin. At times the sensation was almost tickling, but she was very careful not to react with any sort of twitch. While she thought it would be funny to watch one of the little men or women topple over and onto the floor, she was more worried about causing the bucket of polish to spill or a tiny paintbrush to accidentally touch her skin, either situation creating smudges of black on her feet that she would then have to take care of herself. “This is so exciting! You guys really are the perfect size for this” she says as she continues happily watching the view from between her knees. “You're small enough to do such a thorough and detailed job down there. There's no excuse for my nails not to look perfect when you're done, so I know that's just how they're going to. Perfect!”

Michael continues painting away at one of the nails, sharing the surface of Claire's left foot with his wife. He feels quite frustrated, and he knows everyone else must be feeling the same way. Their canvas is so large. It's bad enough they're being forced to conduct this tedious task, but now they're being talked down to and made to feel even smaller. This has to end soon. All of it.

“Claire!” Michael yells as he stands up, paintbrush still in hand. “We need to talk.”

“Ugh” Claire rolls her eyes and leans forward. “What now, little man?” She gently places her hand onto her left foot. Michael nervously climbs onto her waiting palm. “Everyone else, keep working. You're doing great!” She rests her back against the wall again and brings the hand that holds her shrunken neighbor closer to her face, looking him over with her beautiful blue eyes before smiling. “Well, what did you want?”

Michael stands in her palm and gazes into the massive face looming in front of him. It's size and nearness once again bringing nervousness to his body. “We... we need to talk, Claire.”

“You know, Michael... I did always think you were pretty cute. That was before you shrunk. Now... well, you don't even have any idea just how adorable you are now!” She laughs cutely.

Amy looks up in anger as she is forced to listen to the incredibly beautiful younger woman flirt with her husband and there is absolutely nothing she can do about it.

Claire looks down to her left foot and notices Amy watching her from below before returning her gaze to Michael. “Awww. I bet little Amy wishes she found you like this.” When Claire speaks her name it causes a fearful chill to surge through Amy's body and she quickly gets back to work painting the nails. “She would have thought you were so cute too! And I never would have gotten to see you like this! Oh, that would have been awful!”

“Claire! This is serious! We need to talk!”

Claire giggles at Michael standing angrily in her palm. No matter how angry he could possibly get, the sight of his tiny body in her hand would still amuse her. “Fine, Mr. Grumpy. Talk about what?”

“About this, about everything! Are you listening?”

“Yes” says Claire, again rolling her eyes.

“Why are we even doing this? Why are we painting your nails? They were barely starting to chip before you removed the polish you already had on them!”

“It's just something fun I came up with that we could all do together today. Barely starting to chip, though?” Claire smiles again. “Awww, that means you noticed. Someone's been paying attention to my pretty feet! Thanks, little man!”

“NOTICED?! Of course I fucking noticed! How could any of us NOT at this size with you walking around up here?!” Michael takes a few breaths, trying to calm down and get to the real reason he wanted to speak with Claire. “Anyways, this... this isn't even the point. Me, Amy, everyone else... we'd all be willing to forget everything that's happened here. We just want to put this whole thing behind us and move on. If you take the device out and change us back to normal, we won't tell anyone anything about this, I promise” says Michael, trying to reason with Claire.

“Awwww. You mean you little guys haven't been having fun with me?” Claire pouts.

“Claire, stop! This is serious! You need to change us back!” If you do, like I said, we'll put this all behind us. Get the device out and help us!”

“The device really is cool, Michael. If I didn't get to see it and try it out myself, I never would have believed it was real.”

Michael sighs, failing once again to reason with his neighbor, he decides to try a different approach. “I've been thinking, okay... this technology was almost 100% ready to be revealed to the public. If you grow us back to normal, I'll give you 50% of the credit for my work! You'll be rich! From now on, you'll live your life as a millionaire!” Claire giggles again. “That's not a joke, I mean it! Why would you not grow us back?

“Why would I grow you back? When would I ever get this opportunity again?”

“What are you talking about? What could be better than the opportunity I am giving you now? I'm telling you, you could live your life as a millionaire!”

“Even if I could trust you-”

“You can! You can trust me on this, I swear! Just change us back!”

“Even if I could trust you... yeah, sure... living like a millionaire might sound good to you, but you know what's even better than that? Living life like a goddess!” The little people at Claire's feet can't believe their ears. A goddess? Did this girl really just say that? Michael just stares at Claire with his jaw dropped. “At least, that's what I must seem like to you little guys down there. I'm the biggest living thing any of you have ever seen! I can get you to do anything I want, and there's nothing any of you can do to stop me. That's just the way it is. Your entire lives are in my hands. You depend on me for everything right now and you'll only survive if I allow it. Luckily for you though, I'm nice. I've been taking great care of you and none of you should be complaining about anything.” The smile on her face as she speaks makes her words even more frightening. “I don't want your money, Michael. Money can't buy what I already have. I have ten tiny people to take care of and to play with... you know we're going to have so much fun together! You were all so cute down there in my living room, I just couldn't let you go! And to you, I'm like.. well it really is like I said before, I'm like a goddess to you! Like from the stories of ancient Egypt and Greece. But lucky for you guys, it's better than that. Because I'm real! Oh, I'm still so excited about all of this! We really are going to have SOOOO much fun together!”

“Isaac was right” Michael thinks to himself. “She is on a power trip. And I don't see how to end it. There really is no reasoning with her now.”

Claire smiles at Michael before lowering her hand back down to her left foot. She watches as he jumps off of her palm before she brings it back to her body. “Finish up down there. You little guys must be almost done now! I can't wait to see my new pedicure!”

The group finishes their work though their mood is understandably gloomy. The second coat of black polish has finally been applied to Claire's nails. “WOW! Okay everyone, I know you probably want to spend more time with my pretty feet but I need you all to get off of them now.” She laughs as the tiny men and women scramble off of her soft skin and onto the wood floor below. “Gather up all the brushes and buckets and set them somewhere out of the way so I can admire my new pedicure. You might want to move that truck too.”

Jim gets into his vehicle and drives it back to the row of cars at the opposite wall after Brandi and Alexia climb out of the bed. He starts making the long journey back over to the other side of the attic to join the rest of the group.

After placing the brushes inside the buckets and setting them a good distance away, the group stands around Claire's feet. With her soles still pressed firmly into the wood floor, she begins to wiggle her toes, startling the tiny people and causing them to back away. Claire would be laughing were she not too focused on admiring her freshly painted nails. “WOW! They look amazing! Seriously, little people, you did a really great job! I love it!”

As she continues to admire her nails, to the dismay of everyone on the floor, she starts to fan her toes out. The large chunks of soft meat spread apart, the sight inciting fear into the men and women as they watch on. Finally finished, she presses her feet firmly into the floor again and holds her toes still while looking at the group. “You know what?! I still need to learn your names! Let's start on the left. Let's see, there's Michael and Amy, of course. But who are you? Introduce yourselves.”

One by one they tell Claire their names.

“I'm Isaac, this is Cynthia, my wife.”

“Cynthia. That's a pretty name. Next.”

“My name is Alexia... my husband is Keith.”

“Oh yeah, he's the 'Kewlguy.' Claire laughs. “Next.”

“I'm Scott... my girlfriend is J-”

“Jennifer! Yeah, I know her already” Claire says before a massive grin appears on her face. “Next.”

“My name is Brandi. My boyfriend's name is Jim”

“Oh yeah, so he's the one that drives the blue truck. I guess he's still not back yet from parking it. Anyways, thanks, my little helpers! I'll try my best to remember all of your names!” Claire pulls the device out of her pocket. Everyone below wishes she would just aim it at them and pull the trigger, ending their nightmare and returning them to normality. They watch with sadness as she instead aims it at the buckets containing the paintbrushes and fires. “I'm hungry!” she says as she stands up and stretches. She picks up the buckets by the handles, both of them heavier than they were when she had first brought them into the attic as they now contain an unknown measurement of nail polish that had grown with the containers when she returned them to their normal size. “I'm gonna take all this stuff downstairs and clean it up before I eat. I'll be back up here later with some supper for you!” She steps over the tiny people whom hold onto each other tightly and quiver as her massive pale wrinkled soles pass by over their heads and generate wind that blows through their hair and whips at their clothes. “Have fun!” she says before heading down the stairs and sealing them back up and into the attic.

Moonlight glimmers in through the windows, bestowing soft, faint luminescence to the attic. Michael, Amy, and the other four couples have drifted off to sleep, having to spend yet another night within the comfort (or lack thereof) of a shoebox. A few hours earlier, Claire had returned to the attic as she had said she would, bearing more crumbs for her guests to dine on.

After delivering their supper, she said her goodnight to the group, smiling and waving down to them before venturing back down the stairs again, sparing them for the night from her play and any humiliation that would inevitably accompany it. Perhaps it was because she was still in a great mood, still content after receiving her pedicure, or maybe she was tired herself and decided she'd spent enough time in the attic for one day? No one knew for certain how they managed to get out of spending more time with the comparatively massive young woman, but just the same, no one was complaining.

Back in her room downstairs, Claire lays comfortably on her bed, the covers below her. She lifts her right leg off of the bed, extending the long, toned limb into the air. She rotates her ankle slowly from side to side, tilting her foot into various positions and pointing it in every direction as she gazes up and admires the handiwork of her little helpers. Her toes wriggle, spreading apart slightly and grasping at the air.

“They did such a good job...” Claire says to herself, still impressed with the work of the tiny people in her attic. “I knew they'd be teeny enough to see every little spot and paint it absolutely perfectly! This is probably the best pedicure I've ever had!”

Claire lowers her leg, her bare skin dropping gently onto the softness of the red blanket beneath her. Reaching out to the wall behind her, her hand finds the light switch and snaps it off. In the darkness, she makes her way under the covers and tucks herself in before drifting off to sleep for the night.

Amy finds herself on her front lawn, alone, seated sideways at the picnic table in front of her and Michael's home. The warmth of the sun shines down and a gentle breeze blows, rustling leaves on the branches of trees in the distance. Wind softly brushes through her hair. Her pink flip flops lay discarded in the grass, tossed aside a few feet away from her on the lawn.

Amy glances down to her bare feet planted on the ground in front of her. Her eyes widen as they take in the sight of a group of tiny beings clambering around on the tops of her feet. She leans down slowly to get a better look at the creatures that are seemingly pampering her feet as their tiny bodies continue to explore her skin.

They're not bugs, she realizes. They're... people. Tiny, tiny people, but that's not all. She recognizes them. She sees her friends, Alexia, Jennifer, their boyfriends, Michael's friend Jim and Jim's girlfriend, Brandi... they, along with even more people she knows, continue to move about on her bare feet, as if oblivious to Amy while she watches them from above.

Her heart begins beating faster and faster and each breath she takes in is slow and deep. Amy leans in even closer to see just what it is the tiny people are doing. Briefly pulling her attention away from the tiny people and onto her nails, she notices that the pink polish on her toes is fresh. She can see incredibly small objects in the hands of the people below, the tip of each object coated in pink, the same shade of pink adorning her toes. “My nails... they've been painting them...” she whispers to herself upon the realization.

Suddenly movement catches her eye and she focuses her gaze onto her left big toe. One of the little people had been knelt down onto it with their back to Amy but was now beginning to stand. The tiny body turns around to face her and she gasps, quickly covering her mouth with her hand.

She found herself staring into the tiny smiling face of Michael. Her own husband. Standing on her big toe, he begins to jump up and down, waving his hands in the air.

Michael's rubs his eyes after opening them, unadjusted to the shining sun of a new morning casting its rays into the attic. His wife lays next to him, her back to him. Michael reaches out and places a hand on Amy's shoulder and she begins to stir beneath his touch as he gently rubs his hand back and forth.

“Good morning, honey. Sleep well?”

“Mmmmmm, yeah” Amy tiredly replies. She opens her mouth to release a yawn. “What about you?”

“Yeah, I slept fine. You know, you were talking in your sleep last night. You must have been dreaming. What was it about?”

Amy is still facing away from Michael, otherwise he would have noticed the color of her face change to red. “Dreaming? I, uh... I don't remember.” Her heart rate accelerates. “I was talking in my sleep?”

“Yes.”

“What was I saying?”

“That's the thing, I don't know. It was more like murmuring, really. Couldn't make out the words. Are you sure you don't remember dreaming about anything?”

“No... if I did, I don't remember it now. I'm sorry, honey, I hope I didn't keep you awake.”

“It's okay, and you didn't. Well, I'd better get up, see what the others are up to.”

“I'm gonna lay here a little longer sweetie.”

“Alright, I'll see you later.” Michael leans in and plants a kiss on his wife's cheek before standing up and exiting the cardboard box.

Amy listens as Michael walks away. She hears him say good morning to Jim and a few others as he leaves the shoebox. Her heart begins beating normally again, relieved that she hadn't mentioned anything while talking in her sleep that would have revealed what it was she had been dreaming about. She remembered the dream very well. It was so vivid. But how could she explain it to Michael? She didn't quite understand it herself, and even if she did, is it even something she should talk about? “What is my subconscious telling me?” she thinks to herself.

Amy thinks back to when she was seated in the bed of Jim's truck, driving along through seemingly miles of grass before encountering the pair of colossal black flip flops. As the tiny blue vehicle passed between the two titanic sandals, she couldn't help but wonder if the sight she was seeing now... and if the feeling of being so insignificantly small... if it was exactly the same as what her friends had experienced in the presence of her flip flops when she walked through her lawn before she too was shrunken.

Her mind wanders to what transpired a little later on that same day after Claire had brought everyone into her home. She thinks of how she watched on with such curiosity and wonder, even, as Claire's beautiful body towered over her and her friends from where they stood on the wood floor of the attic. Their cars, scattered about on the ground, rested dangerously close to the gigantic powerful feet of her younger neighbor, the powerful feet that at any moment could be lifted with minimal effort from their owner and brought down onto the cars, crushing them into flattened heaps of scrap metal beneath her weight. As Amy watched on, transfixed, she couldn't think of anything else but what it would be like to have the vehicles at her feet. To have the group of people in the attic's attention glued to her body as it towered over them. Staring on while Claire's toes playfully toyed with Scott's car, Amy was oblivious to the seriousness and danger of the situation. Her friends all around her down on the floor were watching the event play out with nothing but fear, yet Amy was experiencing something else entirely. Envy.

Amy was jealous of Claire. She was still afraid of her too, that was only logical. Amy was nothing more than a bug in relation to the size of Claire after falling victim to Michael's machine. But unlike the others, Amy found herself filled with more than just fear of Claire. She wanted what Claire had. She had no way to explain the desire, and she even felt ashamed for feeling this way, but nevertheless, she wanted it. “But... But I would have helped them” Amy thinks to herself. “When I got home from the store... if I could have noticed them down there on the lawn... I would have helped them. I wouldn't have done any of this, I would have changed everyone back to normal. I know I would have.”

And it was true. If Amy had found her husband and their friends shrunken down on her lawn when she arrived home from the store, she would have helped them, provided she had not mistaken them for insects, of course. But after watching Claire play with the tiny people, after seeing vehicles dominated by the body parts of her younger neighbor, something deep within Amy changed. Her husband's machine turned what was ordinarily a quite normal girl into a goddess, a massive feminine creature ruling over the lives of a group of people. Amy knew something was very wrong about what she was feeling, but still found herself wanting desperately to experience that which Claire was. And what's worse, she had the opportunity and squandered it. Just two days prior she was the one with goddess proportions on her own lawn to the nine tiny bodies below her. The very thing she now dreamed about had been in her grasp, there for the taking, but she was totally unaware of the situation she was in and the opportunity to experience the same level of power as Claire now possessed slipped through her fingers as quickly as it came. All she had managed to do during her brief reign as goddess of her lawn was play with a little blue truck, which at the time she was fully convinced was nothing more than a child's toy. It was like a cruel joke to Amy. Last night's dream now made perfect sense to her, and she couldn't allow anyone to know about it.

The group has assembled, though they haven't been for long, some sitting at and others standing around the shrunken picnic table in the middle of the attic. They stop talking amongst themselves, their attention drawn to the sound of the stairs lowering and Claire climbing them as she makes her way into the room. Her bare feet carry her across the wood floor as she approaches the group and she holds a rectangular plastic container in each hand.

“Good morning, everyone! I hope you had a great night's sleep!”

“What's that?” Michael yells up from his seat at the picnic table, noticing the objects in Claire's hands and wondering if they could mean more work for him and the others like the buckets had meant when she'd carried them up yesterday.

“Water. Where do you want me to put it?” She looked around the attic before lowering her gaze to Michael.

“What? I don't care...” Michael was already frustrated with the girl despite it still being so early in the morning.

“I'll just set it down over here.” Claire walks to the back of the room. Kneeling down, she sets the two shallow clear containers down onto the floor a few feet away from the box she had designated as a bathroom facility the day before. “Awww, you guys moved your little bathroom” she says, just now noticing the box has been relocated to the back wall despite having been in the attic since. Claire dips her fingers into one of the containers and removes a small chunk of soap from the water, placing it down in front of the container she just fished it out of. She rises back onto her feet and wipes her wet fingers on her shirt, drying them with the fabric. “I wish I could have watched, you guys must have looked so cute moving the big heavy box around.” She giggles before turning around and walking back towards the middle of the room, stopping with her toes not far in front of the table. She looks down at the little people as she stands over them.

“What's with the containers of water?” asks Michael.

“Oh, those? I brought them up so you guys can give me a bath.” Ten pairs of tiny eyes stare up at her, dumbfounded, causing her to laugh. “I'm kidding, god, you're so gullible. I thought you guys could use one of them for drinking and the other one for bathing and washing your little clothes. I even brought some soap for you to use.”

“Claire! You need to stop this!” Michael knows he has no hope of reasoning with Claire, but at this point it's just natural for him to continue to try. “You can't keep us up here like some kind of pets! You need to grow us back to normal and let us go!”

Claire rolls her eyes. “I'm not gonna hear about this anymore, little man. I'm getting sick of it. I'm taking good care of you little people. I've given you a comfy bed to sleep in, I've been feeding you good meals, and now I've even given you stuff to clean yourselves up with. How can you be so ungrateful? You have no idea how lucky you are that I found you.”

Michael stands from the table and clenches his fists at his sides. “We're lucky you found us?!”

“Yes, you are. Very.” Claire smiles down on the angry little man below.

“First of all, you did not find anyone! We came to you, thinking you would help us! You weren't supposed to take us hostage and refuse to grow us back!”

“You can think of it how you want to, but I still found you. And you're still lucky that I did.”

Keith rises from the table and joins Michael. “How! How the fuck are we lucky?!”

Claire giggles at the outburst of the tiny man at her feet. “You think you've got it so bad here? Just because I didn't grow you back? You little people need to stop complaining for a minute and realize something. You could have it a lot worse than this. Much worse. Imagine if I didn't find you out there in the grass. Imagine if I wasn't out in my backyard when you were driving through. Imagine if I wasn't even home when you people went and shrunk yourselves nextdoor. What would you have done then, hmmm? Driven that little truck towards the road for what would amount to miles and miles and miles for you? Or until you simply ran out of gas? You're so tiny. I don't think you even realize just how small you really are. If I didn't bring you inside, you could still be out there right now, fighting for your lives against creepy crawly bugs.” The group at the table is startled as Claire begins wiggling her bare toes where her feet stand directly in front of them. The sun shining through the attic windows causes her toes to cast shadows down onto the wood floor that reach the table as she continues lifting her toes into the air and rubbing them together, the friction creating a scratching sound. “And the bugs out there, the bugs that would be dangerous to you... I could crush those same bugs under my pretty little feet like they were nothing." Claire lifts her toes into the air and wiggles them before quickly slapping them back down onto the floor, emphasizing her point. The floor shakes upon impact, jarring the men and women at the table. "That's how tiny you are.” Claire laughs as she watches the horrified faces staring up at her. “That's how insignificant you cute little things really are, and that's why you should count yourselves extremely lucky that I found you. If it weren't for me, you'd probably all be dead by now, crushed under the feet or in the belly of something much, much bigger than you.”

Michael and Keith sit back down at the table, joining everyone else in silence as they think about what Claire has said.

“Now, I'm going to go take a shower. I'll be back up here later and we can find something to do today before I make you some lunch. Have fun, see you later, little people!”

Claire flashes a final smile down to the group before walking away towards the stairs. Everyone at the table sits still, contemplating her words as her bare feet softly slap down onto the floor with each step she takes. The men and women continue mulling over everything she has just told them as the attic entrance is sealed shut.

The men and women remain seated sullenly at the picnic table where they continue to process the words Claire had left with them before exiting the attic. “I really, really hate to say this...” begins Keith. “But everything that bitch just said is true. We don't have any hope of getting out of this mess.”

“What do you mean?” Asks Isaac. We can't let ourselves think like this. We can't just give up. It will take time, but we need to stay positive if we're going to come up with a way out of here.”

“A way out? Did you not hear anything the giant bitch just told us?! How can you still have coming up with an escape plan on your mind? As much as I hate what she said, she's right. Even if we could get out of this attic and back outside, we wouldn't stand a chance against even the smallest threats nature could throw at us. It's hopeless.”

“It is not. Only after we choose to abandon it, will there be no hope left for us.”

“What if she's right, not just about the dangers outside, but about taking care of us?” asks Cynthia.

“What?” replies Isaac.

“Think about it. She hasn't hurt us. She's feeding us and she gave us a comfortable place to sleep, just like she said.”

Jennifer laughs. “Great, Isaac. Your wife's come down with Stockholm syndrome.”

“Cynthia...” begins Isaac, turning to face his wife. “We can't allow this girl to keep us here, like toys to be played with when boredom strikes her. We can't accept this as our fate.”

“No, no... I... I just mean that she is treating us nicely, all things considered. She hasn't hurt any of us. I just think maybe we shouldn't try to escape. Maybe we just let her have her fun and eventually she gets bored, changes us back to normal and lets us go? What if we do try escaping, we fail, and she catches us? How upset do you think she would be? We haven't seen her when she's upset, we don't know what she would do if she was angry with us. Take away our food and water? Our bed? Maybe she would keep us in a small box, sealed in the dark under a closed lid because she couldn't trust us to not try escaping again? Or maybe she would do something worse. All I'm saying is maybe it's safer for us if we don't try anything that might upset her. Right now we're all together, we have food, and we have shelter. Trying to escape could jeopardize all of that. We have to decide, is it really worth the risk?”

“You make some good points, Cynthia, but overall, I don't agree” says Michael. “No, none of us have been hurt. Yet. Who's to say that won't change down the road? These are the things we need to be thinking about. We already know Claire doesn't trust us to just go back to our lives like nothing happened if she returned us to normal. We can't just wait for her to change us back of her own volition, because it's not going to happen. And yes, Claire has so far been feeding and 'taking care' of us, but what if somewhere down the road she decides it's too much of an inconvenience for her to continue doing so? What happens to us then? I'd much rather take my chances with an escape plan than with staying here.”

As the group continues to weigh their options, or lack thereof, the sound of the latch being undone can be heard before the attic stairs descend. Soon, Claire comes into view. Her feet are now clad in her black flip flops, the heels of which slap loudly at her soles as she walks across the wood floor of the attic towards the shrunken picnic table in the center.

“Hello again, little ones!” she says, smiling down on the tiny people after stopping in front of the table. The tiny men and women stare back up at her. Claire turns to her right and walks to a pile of boxes. She grabs a shoebox much like the one her guests have been using as a bed and shakes it to make sure it's empty before walking back to the group and kneeling down in front of them.

“I thought I'd be used to seeing you by now but you guys still look so cute down there! I'm sorry about earlier, if things got a little dark. I just wanted you to try and see things differently, for how they really are.” The group is less focused on what Claire is saying and more concerned with the shoebox in her hands as they contemplate what its presence could mean for them. “I've been taking good care of you since I saved you and it makes me a little sad when you don't seem to appreciate it, that's all. I didn't mean to scare any of you down there, but I needed you to understand.”

“What's the box for?” yells Michael.

Claire smiles sweetly. “Well, I was thinking... it's such a nice day, and you guys are probably a little sick of spending all your time cooped up in this attic. Why don't we go outside and spend a little time together? Wouldn't you like that, little people, to get some fresh air and a little sun on this nice summer day?”

Claire stands to her full height and removes the lid from the cardboard box before placing it on its side down on the floor near the picnic table. “Go ahead, get in the box and I'll take you outside for a little bit.”

The men and women slowly rise from the table and make their way into the box. The idea of spending some time outside for the first time in a few days is a rather pleasant one, and even if it wasn't, they'd have found themselves reluctantly marching into the box regardless because although it was being presented to them now as such, it wasn't as though they really had a choice in the matter.

Claire watches as the tiny group makes its way into the box down on the floor by her feet. Once everyone is inside, she leans down and grips the sides of the box with her hands. “Careful, little ones, I have to tilt the box now.” Using her hands, she gently rests the shoebox onto its intended position, and though she was gentle, she still causes the people inside to tumble about briefly as the back wall of cardboard becomes their floor.

“There. We'll be outside in no time!” Claire places the lid onto the shoebox and gently lifts it from the ground. The group inside would have preferred the lid to have been left off during their journey. Within the darkness, they listen to the familiar sound of Claire's flip flops slapping at her feet and clacking back down against the floor with each step she takes towards the stairs, down them, and through her home. The box shakes a little more than usual as the sound of a door opening and closing greets their ears. Michael and the others assume Claire altered the way she was holding the box so that she would have a free hand to open the door with, which would account for the momentary extra shaking.

Having exited through her home's back door, Claire walks across her lawn towards the white beach towel, still laying out in the yard where she had left it after first discovering her shrunken neighbors and their friends in Jim's truck. Her sunglasses also rest on the lawn inches away from the towel.

After reaching it, Claire sets the cardboard box down very carefully onto the grass to the left of the towel. Next, she slips her feet out of her flip flops, leaving the now empty sandals near the box. She enjoys the feeling of her bare skin touching down on the grass beneath her. After rubbing her feet along the grass a few times to savor the sensation, she kneels down in front of the box and removes the lid.

Bright light pours into the shoebox and the men and women know the bumpy ride out of the house is over as they find themselves staring up and into the beautiful young face of their captor. Suddenly, one of her massive hands enters the sky above them and they back away to the sides of the box as it begins coming down. It touches down onto the bottom of the box with its palm facing up. “Ladies first!” Claire announces from above.

Reluctantly, the five women in the group slowly approach the girl's hand and begin climbing onto the soft skin of her palm. Once they're all on board, the hand moves through the air and is lowered towards the towel. Claire tilts her hand gently, and her passengers drop onto the soft white fabric below.

She returns her hand to the inside of the box. “Okay, boys. Your turn!” After the tiny men climb into her hand, Claire begins to lower herself onto the towel, positioning her body exactly as it had been laying when the shrunken truck first arrived on her lawn.

In front of Claire's face, the tiny women watch her hand hover above the towel after she finishes laying down, waiting for the hand to release their boyfriends and husbands and deliver them onto the white fabric below.

Instead of doing this, Claire reaches out behind her and tilts her hand, dropping the tiny bodies onto the soft, supple skin of the bottoms of her bare feet laying pressed together on the towel. The men tumble down her skin, stopping just in time to keep them from rolling off of her pretty toes. Michael, Isaac, and Scott find themselves on her left foot, Keith and Jim on her right.

Claire reaches to her right and takes her black sunglasses into her fingers. She lifts them to her face and puts them on, concealing her alluring blue eyes behind the dark lenses.

The men begin to sit up and collect themselves after their bout of tumbling and rolling. Jim grunts groggily and looks to Michael “What is it with this girl and her feet?”

Standing on the other gigantic foot, Isaac surveys his surroundings, taking in the sight of a lawn that stretches on and on, seemingly endlessly. Far in the distance, or at least far relative to his current size, Isaac spots a snail slowly crawling its way along through the grass, its brown body under the protection of an even darker brown shell. Unsure of his accuracy thanks to the distance between himself and the creature, Isaac estimates that it must be at around the size of a large bull compared to him, possibly larger. He continues watching as the mollusk inches its way across the massive backyard before turning to face the other men. “Hmmm... you see this, Keith? We're out of the attic, are we not? Perhaps your hope of escaping the situation has returned?”

“What are you doing?!” Brandi yells up to Claire out of fear for her boyfriend and the rest of the men.

Without moving the rest of her body, Claire turns her head to address the tiny men behind her. “You boys wouldn't think of running away and making me sad, would you? Especially not while I have your little ladies here with me, right?”

The men now know that even though they're out of the attic, escaping today is out of the question. They can't go off in search of some form of help and leave their women in the clutches of Claire.

Confident that she's so easily persuaded the men against wandering off and away from her, Claire returns her gaze to the tiny women in front of her. The sunglasses on her face hide her eyes, making the comparatively massive younger woman even more intimidating to them. She watches as the tiny bodies gently shake before her, no doubt out of fear. “Awww, don't be scared. I thought we should have a little girl time. I bet you've been dying for a break from your boyfriends.” The tiny women continue to stare up at Claire's face, trying desperately to see her eyes through her sunglasses. Instead, the only sight that returns to their vision is their own reflections in the gigantic lenses. Claire giggles. “Come on, sit down, relax, and just enjoy this nice weather.” The women comply and seat themselves down onto the fabric of the towel.

“Did you like the soap and water I brought into the attic for you?”

Cynthia looks to the other women to see if they're going to answer. They just continue staring silently into Claire's looming face. “Y...yes, we did. Th..thank you for it” Cynthia says nervously, realizing the other women aren't going to answer the question.

“Awww. You're welcome, Cynthia!”

“Y...you remembered my name?”

Claire smiles. “Of course I did, little one. Cynthia. A pretty name for a pretty little lady.” Jennifer rolls her eyes.

“Th...thanks” replies a blushing Cynthia.

“I remember all your names. That's Amy and Brandi on your right, Alexia on your left, and Jennifer on her left.”

Claire turns her head to again address the tiny men behind her. “Boys? Since you're already back there, I know you wouldn't mind rubbing my pretty feet for me, right? It's SUCH a nice day out here, a little foot rub would help me enjoy it even more!” She faces forward and flashes a smile down onto the little women seated before her gaze.

“Fuck that!” Keith yells as he rises to his feet in anger, though the distance between the tiny man and Claire's ears is too great for her to hear his objection. As he stands, Keith's shoes sink slightly into the luxuriously plush, soft skin of the young woman's pale soles. “I don't care HOW big she is, I'm not doing this bitch any more favors!”

Claire rests there for a moment looking over the women before letting out a sigh of disappointment and turning her head to address the men on her feet once more. “UGH. I don't feel anything back there, boys. If this job is too hard for you, maybe I'll just have to reschedule girl time and put the little ladies to work back there to help you out, hmmm?”

Growing tired of waiting for the men to get to work, Claire scrunches her soles, turning the landscape of her feet into a sea of deep wrinkles. As the ground beneath him shifts, the defiant Keith loses his footing and falls face first onto the cushiony surface below where his nose and mouth are treated to the scent and slight taste of lotion mixed faintly with sweat.

Jim can't help but laugh before he stands and extends an arm out to Keith, laying prone on a bed of wrinkles. “Need a hand, Keith?” Keith swats Jim's hand away from him and stands up on his own with a look of intense anger plastered across his face.

“Look, we'd better just do it. Get it over with, without having her drop the rest of us back here and put them through it too” says Michael.

“Yeah” says Scott. “I'm not gonna hear Jennifer bitch all night about how she had to spend all day rubbing a giant pair of feet and how it's all our fault. I'm with Michael, let's just get this over with.”

Scott's knees sink into the pliant flesh as he lowers himself down onto them. He takes his hands and presses them deep into the incredibly soft pale skin and begins to rub them back and forth. Hesitantly, Michael, Jim, and Isaac lower themselves down into similar positions and join Scott in the task of rubbing the gigantic feet. Scott looks to Keith, continuing to stand angrily off to the side while the others work. “Keith, come on, man. If we don't do a good enough job here, you know she's gonna grab Alexia in her giant hand, lift her all the way back here, and drop her down on her feet just like she did to us. Do you really want Alexia to have to go through that if you can help it?”

Hesitantly, Keith finally joins the other men, preserving the anger on his face as he works.

Claire smiles and her eyes light up behind her sunglasses. Slowly but surely, the men have begun to work, she can feel it. Satisfied, she returns her attention to the tiny women seated in front of her face on the towel.

Michael presses down and works both hands into the soft flesh of his younger neighbor's feet. Though voluptuously soft, her skin is too thick to adequately wrap his hands around and take into his grip. He forces his hands deep into the meat of Claire's soles and rubs them, up and down, back and forth, over and over again. He watches his hands carefully as they continuously run along the vast expanse of skin, nervous each time they encounter one of the many unavoidable wrinkles. He worries about what might happen if he were to get a hand caught in one of the wrinkles of Claire's feet. If she were to twitch ever so slightly and manipulate her skin into wrapping around his tiny extremity, consuming it in a fleshy fold, how much pressure could such a small action on her part be capable of exerting onto him? Would his entire hand become trapped inside the deep wrinkle? Would he be unable to pull it out even after employing his full strength? Worse yet, could the pressure be enough to crush his hand between her skin, breaking his bones?

Michael shudders and shakes his head, attempting to clear such thoughts from his mind as he continues on with his work. He looks up and up, his eyes wandering over the gigantic soft soles as they slope upwards higher and higher, covered with wrinkles all the way up to the apex, Claire's heels, which rest in the sky above like pale hills. Behind him, her immense toes occasionally twitch gently, perhaps even involuntarily.

Claire lays still as she perceives the touch of ten tiny hands pressing into and rubbing her feet behind her. In some spots, the feeling is weak, and in other much more sensitive areas of her skin, she experiences an almost tickling-like sensation. But the feeling of the tiny hands pressing into and pampering her flesh combined with the knowledge that she can so easily manipulate five grown men into carrying out her will enhances her satisfaction tenfold.

Claire moans softly, expressing pleasure, startling the women as her warm breath washes over them. “Mmmmmmmmmm... that feels SOOOOO good. Your little boyfriends and husbands give an amazing foot massage, ladies.”

The women sit and stare back into Claire's face, anger growing inside of them as their men pamper this beautiful younger woman and there is nothing they can do to stop it. They've been feeling small and powerless ever since the incident back on Michael and Amy's lawn, but they feel even more so in this moment.

“Oh, wow! Mmmmm! I hope this isn't making you jealous or anything, girls. But you wouldn't believe how great their tiny little hands feel back there. Oh yeah, right there, that's the spot!”

Claire giggles. “I'll bet most of you ladies wish you were me right now, don't you? With five hard working men to take care of your feet? Oh, you'd be in heaven, you can't even imagine how good this feels. Best foot massage EVER!”

The flames of Amy's jealousy burn much higher than those of any of the other women. While the jealousy of the others stems solely from their significant others serving another woman, Amy's jealousy is once again rooted in envy. Envy of what Claire has, of what Claire is to the shrunken people. Amy is suffering as she watches the young woman soak in pleasure granted unto her by her fellow tiny people. She wants nothing more right now than to experience what Claire is. It's just not fair.

Many moments pass as Claire continues to enjoy the gratifying sensation of the men rubbing her feet while she lays relaxed on her back lawn under the warm sun of a quiet day. Claire yawns, takes a deep breath, and sighs. “Sorry, boys. I think we might have to call it a day. I don't want to accidentally fall asleep out here again. I doubt I'd be so lucky to wake up again to find a tiny truck full of little people.” she laughs.

The men stop working their hands into her flesh after hearing her words. Suddenly, her feet begin wriggling and scrunching, causing their tiny bodies to flounder about on top of her soft skin. Her wrinkles pass along all over their bodies like waves against a sailing ship, almost as though her feet are repaying the men with a massage of their own for their hard work.

Still laying down, Claire burrows her right hand and forearm beneath the towel. She positions her hand directly underneath the five seated women and lifts them into the air. She dumps them into her left hand and rolls her eyes as they scream before depositing them into the shoebox. Next, she lifts her feet up onto her toes, turning her soles into an even steeper slope until the men laying on top of them roll off of her skin and onto the towel below. She gets to her knees and turns around before picking the men up and dropping them into the box with the women. “We definitely have to do that again, little ones. But maybe with lotion next time!” With all ten tiny passengers inside, she places the lid onto the box. Her feet take a few steps through the grass as they step off of the white towel and travel towards her flip flops. They wriggle their way into the sandals and Claire picks the box up off of the ground before carrying it back towards her home, leaving the towel on the lawn.

Claire enters her home and closes the door behind her. She removes her sunglasses from her face and tosses them onto the kitchen table as she passes by. She travels through the hall and makes her way towards the attic stairs. 

Night has fallen. Claire walks along an abandoned street, enjoying the freshness of the evening air, a slight chill present in the atmosphere thanks to the sun having set much earlier. Every so often she finds herself beneath the illumination of one of the many street lamps posted up along the sidewalk. Soon she comes to a shopping complex. She continues walking past the various stores, each of them dark and without signs of life, the parking lot just as devoid. In her hands she carries an empty shoebox, the very same shoebox that had once contained ten tiny passengers.

Before setting off on her adventure, she had left her shrunken neighbors and their friends with something to eat for supper prior to safely sealing them up inside the attic once more. They had all they would need for the night, food, water, and a place to sleep. But Claire decided that last part could use an upgrade if she was indeed intending to let her little guests enjoy a long stay in her home.

Reaching the end of the strip mall, Claire makes her way around the side of the building and walks behind it. She stops in front of a red door, the rear entrance to a mattress store.

“Here we go.” Claire reaches into her shorts pocket and pulls out Michael's device. She crosses her fingers on her free hand as she aims the device at the door. “Please work please work please work” she chants to herself as she pulls back on the trigger.

The red door shrinks, literally right off its hinges. Miraculously, an alarm does not sound.

The tiny door falls downwards and spins around as it travels through the air before producing a faint clanking sound as it hits the ground. Claire kneels down and picks it up between her index finger and thumb. She carefully examines it for a moment. Specifically, it's the extreme smallness of the doorknob that catches her interest. After a few seconds, she tucks the tiny door away into her shorts pocket before standing back up and taking her first step into the mattress store.

“I'm not shoplifting” Claire says to herself, smiling. She drops the shoebox and jumps into the air. The cardboard box hits the carpet floor at almost the exact second when Claire's body lands on one of the store's beds. “Not technically, right?” Claire asks herself. “WOW This is comfy!”

“These beds are just displays for the store, not merchandise...” Claire thinks to herself. “They don't actually sell the displays, do they? They're just physical advertisements, right? But they sell the TV's that were used as displays in electronics stores. Maybe this really is considered shoplifting.”

Claire laughs and shakes her head as she rises from the comfort of the bed and stands over it. “Am I really worried about stealing a couple beds right now? I'm sure I'm already guilty of much worse” she says, smiling as she thinks about the “guests” currently trapped inside her attic.

With her arm extended forwards, Claire aims Michael's device towards the bed and pulls the trigger. In an instant, the piece of furniture seemingly disappears, as if replaced down on the ground with a tiny version dwarfed by the presence of Claire's pretty feet resting atop her black flip flops.

Very carefully, Claire plucks the tiny bed from the ground and lifts it into the air. She carries it to the empty shoebox on the floor and gently places it inside.

Before long, four other tiny beds have joined the first one inside the cardboard box. Upon setting the last one inside, Claire places the lid on top before picking the box up and carrying it out through the doorway. She walks around the side of the building and begins the long walk back to her car. She had thought it would be a good idea to park her car a fair distance away from her destination.

“Oh yeah...” Claire says to herself as she remembers the shrunken red door inside her pocket. “What am I gonna do with that?” Holding the shoebox with her left hand, she reaches her right one into her pocket and pulls out the door. She raises it closer to her face and looks it over. “I probably shouldn't just grow it back and leave it here... if I did that, they'd probably be able to get a fingerprint off of it. Well, a GIANT fingerprint!” Claire laughs. She looks ahead and notices a trashcan far off in the distance on the sidewalk. “Guess I'll just get rid of it on the way.”

Claire reaches the trashcan, and without stopping, she flicks the tiny door away down into the darkness of the container. Now she can see her little black car in the otherwise barren parking lot in the distance. But something is different now. “That wasn't there before” she thinks to herself, noticing a green car parked next to the sidewalk between herself and the parking lot containing her vehicle. Two men are leaning against the green car, each one smoking a cigarette.

“Did they see me?” Claire worries to herself. “Do they know I stole the beds? Just act cool, Claire. Ignore them and they'll ignore you.”

Each step brings her closer to the green vehicle and the two men leaning against it. It's a nice car, or at least it would be, if it were taken better care of. In its current state, it's a victim of years of neglect. Just a couple of meters away from the car, one of the men calls out to Claire and she stops dead in her tracks.

“Well, hello there, miss. Allow me to introduce myself. My name's Kurt.” The man stares at Claire, who stares back, frozen in fear. “You're just a treat on the eyes, now aren't you, girl?”

The other man laughs. “I think she's afraid of us.”

“Is that right, miss? Are you scared?” The man throws his cigarette to the ground and begins to approach Claire. His friend stays by the car and watches as he continue to smoke his cigarette.

Kurt reaches Claire. A bit taller than her, he smiles as he studies her body. “Whatcha got there, girl?” Without warning, he rips the shoebox from her hands and looks inside. Claire jumps from fright and begins to take a few steps backwards away from the man. “What the fuck is this? Doll furniture?” Kurt laughs. I thought you looked young, but aren't you a little old to be playing with dollies, girl? He throws the box to the ground and takes slow steps towards Claire, still taking slow steps backwards away from him. “Get the trunk opened...” Kurt yells loudly enough for his friend back at the car to hear. “I'll toss her in.”

“No!” Claire screams. As fast as she possibly can, she pulls Michael's device out of her pocket and aims it at the man. Adrenaline pumps through her body and her heart beats harder than it ever has before.

Kurt smiles and throws both of his arms into the air, feigning fear. “Careful, girl. Wouldn't want you to hurt anybody.” He laughs. “What is that, anyways? I know it ain't a gun... probably ain't a Taser... looks like a damned TV remote!”

Shaking from fear, Claire speaks to the man. “Go back to your car and drive away or I'll pull the trigger.”

“What are you gonna do, bitch? Change the channel? I ain't afraid of your little remote.”

The man lunges forward and Claire pulls back on the trigger faster than anything else she'd ever done before in her entire life. Instantly, the menacing looking man disappears before her very eyes.

“What the fuck did you do?!” yells the other man, snapping Claire's attention onto him. “Where is he?!” Claire quickly aims the device and pulls the trigger again, causing the second man and the green car to vanish from sight as well. Claire inhales and exhales deeply and takes a moment to calm down and collect herself.

“What the FUCK?!” Kurt yells as he picks himself up off of the pavement. “What did that bitch do? Where am I?”After rubbing his eyes, Kurt can't believe the sight that they're taking in. “Ho...ly... shit...” Not far in front of him stand two gigantic feet, each one clad in a black flip flop. He raises his head higher and higher, straining his neck as he struggles to take the sight of the mountain of a young woman in. His gaze passes up her long, toned legs, and all the way up her body until her head comes into view. Her enormous yet beautiful face stares straight ahead off into the distance, as though the girl is stuck in some sort of trance. “She's not looking at me... does she even know I'm down here?”

“Hey! Over here!” A voice in the distance behind him catches his attention. The man turns around and spots his car and his friend Travis jumping up and down next to it on a seemingly endless expanse of pavement. “Come on, man, you've got the keys, we need to get out of here! Now!”

Back at the car, Travis waits impatiently for his friend. “Come on come on come on!” he yells as he watches Kurt ran as fast as he can, a pair of enormous legs stretching into the sky in the background. Both men bolt into the car and shut their doors before Kurt thrusts his keys into the ignition and Travis fastens his seat belt. The car roars to life and speeds off along the unfathomably massive expanse of pavement.

Once again calm, Claire spots illumination on the pavement not far in front of her, the headlights of the tiny car as it inches away from her as fast as it possibly can. She rolls her eyes. “Well, shit. What am I gonna do about this?” She watches as the distance between herself and the tiny vehicle continues to very slowly increase. “I can't grow them back, they've seen my face, and they probably want to hurt me now more than they did before. I can't bring them home to live in the attic, they're dangerous and they would probably hurt my other little people. And I can't just leave them shrunken out here, someone might find them and rescue them and then everything gets led back to me.” Claire sighs and begins walking towards the little green car in the distance. “I guess that only leaves me with one other choice.”

“Where are we gonna go?!” asks Kurt as he looks frantically out his windshield.

“I don't know!”

“Where are we right now, even?!”

“I don't know! It's all just an ocean of tar!”

Suddenly a series of booms becomes audible, each one louder than the last and accompanied by an even louder slapping sound.

“Ah, shit, that's gotta be her! Where is she?!” yells Kurt.

“I don't know!”

“Then CHECK!”

Travis turns around and his jaw drops as he looks through the rear windshield to see Claire's enormous feet rapidly closing the distance between herself and the car with each step she takes. “She's right there!”

“Where?!”

“Right there, right be-FUCKING-hind us, man!”

“Damn it! How did she find us so fast?! We had like... a three minute lead over her”

“She's fucking massive, that's how, now get us out of here!”

Kurt turns right and keeps the gas pedal pushed to the floor. “Come on, faster, faster! Are we losing her?!”

“I'm looking, I'm looking!” Travis turns around again only to find that the enormous feet have disappeared from view. He begins checking out each of the other back windows in search of Claire. “I think we lost her!”

“FUCK!”

Travis turns around just in time to see Claire's right foot slam down in the car's path. The force and the smack of her sandal slapping against the pavement creates a boom louder than anything he had ever heard. Kurt tries applying the brakes at the last second but it's too late. The tiny green car smashes full speed into the front of Claire's black flip flop. The impact causes Travis' limbs to lash around violently while his body is held secure behind the seat belt.

In a daze, Travis' ears ring and his vision fades in and out. He looks ahead through the smashed windshield and watches as Claire's terrifying toes wriggle slowly in her flip flop. “Come on, Kurt, we've gotta get out of here!” He turns to his left and whimpers, “No...” Kurt's head rests on the steering wheel, slick with the crimson liquid running like rivers down his face. Travis watches in horror as his best friend remains perfectly still, either unconscious or dead from the collision. Travis doubts he has any chance of escaping, but he knows he won't be able to carry Kurt away from this. He and his best friend since way back when they first met in school... Kurt and Travis. They had both lived rather brief, uneventful, and quite pitiful lives. But for the most part, they had lived them together. Kurt always had Travis' back, and Travis always had Kurt's. And this is where it would all end for them, with their lives culminated to a conclusion on this summer evening at the feet of a girl, as though they were nothing more than a pair of irritating insects.

“Kurt, no! Come on, man!” Travis shakes his friend, trying frantically to wake him, to jolt his body back into consciousness. Suddenly he hears a loud scratching sound. Outside, the massive young woman's flip flop scrapes against the ground as she lifts it from the pavement and into the air before maneuvering her foot towards the car. She dangles her sandal from her toes and lets the toe section touch down onto the hood of the vehicle, causing the tiny car to groan and creak under the pressure of her flip flop alone. Travis watches on through the windshield as her massive toes playfully wiggle.

“Ugh...” Claire begins as she lifts her foot away from the car. Her flip flop hits the pavement and she wriggles her foot back into its proper place on the sandal after having dangled it. “Why couldn't you guys have just gotten in your car and drove away the first time, like I warned you to? Anyways, you didn't so now this has to be done. Sorry.”

Travis watches as the bottom of Claire's flip flop passes over the windshield and disappears from his view as she raises her right foot above the car. The vehicle rocks back and forth a couple of times and groans loudly as Claire rests her sandal on the roof of the car without applying any pressure. “Sorry.”

“NO! NO! PLEASE! NO! PLEASE! STOP! NO!”

Claire can barely hear the tiny screams coming from below. She takes a deep breath and slowly begins to press down. The steel folds and bends beneath her weight.

“NO! PLEASE! STOP!” yells Travis as the walls of his prison close in around him.

Snapping, cracking, and shattering sounds are birthed as the steel sinks lower and lower, forced into the ground under her unfathomable power. When her foot is offered too much resistance to allow her to press down any further, Claire knows her task is completed and she lifts her flip flop off of the car and scrapes it off back and forth on the pavement behind her. She can no longer hear the tiny screams begging her for cessation. The tiny car at her feet is simply crushed, flattened beyond all recognition.

Claire walks to the shoebox and picks it up off of the ground where Kurt had thrown it. Inside, each of the beds are broken, shattered from the impact of the box hitting the ground. She releases a sigh of disappointment before walking back to the tiny hunk of steel and kneeling down in front of it.

Claire picks the crushed vehicle up between her index finger and thumb. “Idiots” she says to herself before flinging the tiny heap of scrap metal into the cardboard box with the broken beds. She carefully picks up all of the larger chunks of metal and glass scattered about on the pavement and tosses them into the box as well before standing up again.

She walks off towards the trashcan where she had deposited the door from the mattress store not much earlier. When she reaches it, she dumps the contents of her shoebox inside, shaking the box to make sure each and every crumb is evicted. “Now I have to go shrink beds all over again.”

Claire thinks about what she just had to do as she travels once more towards the mattress store. “They were going to hurt me. They wanted to get me into their car and they wanted to do terrible things to me. They were bad people. Yeah, they were very bad people. If anything, I just made the world a better place. A safer place.”

“I'm like Dexter!” Claire yells excitedly before giggling. “But... I think Dexter would have worn gloves...”

With five new shrunken beds safely contained inside the shoebox tucked under her arm, Claire opens the door and climbs into her car. She places the box gently down onto the passenger seat and closes the car door before driving off out of the empty parking lot and into the night.

Claire enters her home through the back door carrying the shoebox containing five shrunken beds under her arm. She locks the door behind her and turns to walk deeper into the room.

“Claire, is that you?” A feminine voice calls out from somewhere in another room of the house and startles her. Caught by surprise, Claire's fight or flight response kicks in and she quickly places the shoebox onto the kitchen table before reaching into her pocket, preparing herself to pull out Michael's device and use it on whomever has entered her home while she was away.

Before she can even grasp the device, her mother's head appears peeking around the corner. “There you are, sweetie. Late night out with friends?”

Claire slips her hand back out of her pocket and breathes a sigh of relief. There was no intruder, it was only her mother, Amanda. “Mom! You scared me... I thought someone broke into the house while I was out!”

Amanda steps into the kitchen and laughs as she watches her daughter recover from her fright. “Sorry, dear. It's just me. No burglars have been here tonight, at least not since I've been home, which has only been about twenty minutes. Why are you so surprised to see me, didn't you see my car parked outside when you got home?”

Claire had been so full of excitement while driving home after the evening's activities that she hadn't even noticed her mother's car parked outside the house on her way in. “No, I missed it. And speaking of missing things, I've missed you, mom.” Claire walks across the kitchen and wraps her arms around her mother.

“I've missed you too, dear” says Amanda as she embraces her daughter. At thirty-nine years old, Amanda is quite an attractive woman. Essentially, appearance-wise she is an older version of her daughter in almost every way. Her skin isn't quite as pale as Claire's, but like her daughter, her eyes are a lovely shade of blue, and her face is framed with beautiful black hair, albeit much shorter than that of her child. She stands shorter than her daughter, and though by no means should she be considered overweight, her body isn't exactly in as excellent shape as Claire's. But this is acceptable and should be expected of a woman her age whom is too preoccupied with her demanding job to spend long hours exerting herself at the gym on her days off.

“How was the meeting?” asks Claire as the hug draws to a close.

“Same as the rest of them. Long and boring. And they need me to be at another one very soon.”

“Awww. How long are you home for?”

“Not nearly as long as I'd like to be. But at least I get to spend some time in my own home and see my daughter before I catch my flight in a few days! So, how have you been? Did anything exciting go on around here while I was away?”

Hmmm... exciting... well... Claire thinks to herself, Our neighbors threw a party and shrunk everyone down into tiny bug-people then came over into our yard. Then I made them paint my nails and massage my feet and I'm keeping them in the attic. Claire fights off the laughter that her own thoughts are provoking within her so she doesn't look ridiculous and have to explain to her mother what's she's finding so amusing.

“Nope, nothing exciting. Just the usual, watching TV, hanging out with friends, tidying up the attic, that sort of thing.”

“Yeah, that's what I figured. I never worry when I'm away because I know my sweet Claire always stays out of trouble.” Amanda smiles and receives a smile back from her daughter. “What's that over there?” she asks, gesturing towards the box on the table holding the shrunken beds.

“Oh, that? It's just some junk I found when I was cleaning out my car earlier. I threw it all in this box and I'm gonna just store it in the attic for now.”

“Oh, alright. Well I'm exhausted. I'm gonna finish unpacking and I know I'm not gonna have any trouble falling asleep when I'm done. Goodnight, dear, see you in the morning.”

“Goodnight, Mom” says Claire as she hugs her mother again. She watches as her mother exits the kitchen and turns to walk down the hall and towards her bedroom. She hears her mother release a long yawn before closing her bedroom door behind her.

Claire turns and faces the wall to read the time on a clock hanging there in front of her. “Hmmm... is it too late to give my little people their present?” she asks herself. “Nah!” She lifts the cardboard shoebox from the kitchen table and begins carefully carrying it towards the entrance to the attic. Luckily for her, the attic stairs and her mother's bedroom are on opposite ends of the house.

Michael awakens to the sound of the attic stairs being dropped to the floor far below and booming footsteps as someone ascends them. The other men and women around him begin stirring in the darkness as well.

“Tonight?!” yells a tired and angry Keith. “Seriously, tonight?!”

“It's the middle of the night, what the fuck does she want now?!” asks Jennifer. Though generally unpleasant and grouchy in normal situations, Scott knew all too well that Jennifer's anger was elevated to a much higher level when anyone disturbed her sleep. He could only hope that the fact that the person disturbing her sleep on this particular night was of gigantic proportions would be enough to keep his girlfriend's anger from boiling over.

Suddenly, light floods into the room as the light switch is flicked on and all of the men and women nestled inside the shoebox on the attic floor burrow their heads beneath their pillows and blankets, unprepared to face the onslaught of brightness.

With her feet still in her black flip flops, Claire steps over the shoebox and kneels down in front of the opening. She sets the other shoebox with the tiny beds inside down and off to the side on her right. Her body casts a shadow over the box, blocking enough light that the people inside can manage to open their eyes and keep them open without so much exposure to the illumination that they weren't ready to face.

“Hello, little ones” Claire says softly as she peers into the box and looks over the tiny men and women. “Awww, you're all so cute in there, it's like you're having an itty bitty slumber party!” She giggles and watches as the tiny people rub at their eyes and toss and turn beneath their blankets. She can clearly tell that they're more than a little frustrated with having been woken up and made to endure bright light and a colossal younger woman. “Sorry for waking you, little people, but it's not even midnight yet, I didn't know you'd already be asleep up here.”

“Yeah, well, hard to keep track of time when you're the size of a bug and held like a prisoner in someone's attic” snaps Keith.

Claire rolls her eyes. “Oh, please, little man. Don't start with that tonight.”

“Don't start? Don't start!? You-”

“Well” begins Claire, cutting off the tiny man below her. “Since you all seem to just love sleeping, I think you're really going to enjoy the surprise I have for you.”

Michael and the others shift their gaze for the first time to the box Claire had carried into the attic with her, no doubt it contained their “surprise.” They begin to grow nervous as they ponder just what it could be.

“Okay, little sleepyheads. I need you to all get out of the box.” She watches as their tiny faces stare up at her, most with looks of nervousness. “I promise it's just for a few minutes, then you can go back to sleep. Come on, don't make me have to pick the box up and dump you out.”

Slowly, the men and women rise and emerge from the box. They stand on the wood floor between their cardboard sleeping chambers and the massive feet of Claire. Though they've been around her for a considerable amount of time now, the sight of her body and its sheer enormity relative to their own diminutive forms as they gaze up at her kneeling over them still evokes within them intense feelings of fear and wonder. Her gigantic feet lay before them, resting upon her black flip flops. The same flip flops that unbeknownst to the group on the floor had extinguished two lives less than an hour earlier, effortlessly crushing them out of existence beneath the thick foam soles.

The group is startled as Claire leans in and reaches over them as she places a hand inside the shoebox they have just emerged from. She gently places her hand down onto the bottom of the box, and with one swift movement she swipes the dish towels along with all of the tiny blankets and pillows out from the box and onto the floor in front of her feet.

“What are you doing?!” yells Michael.

“You'll see” replies Claire as she reaches to her right and removes the lid from the other shoebox. She reaches inside and the group watches on as she very carefully begins lifting an object into the air.

“A... bed?” asks Brandi as she watches in curiosity with the rest of the group.

Claire carefully moves the tiny furniture through the air and gently sets it down inside the shoebox in front of her. “Yes, a bed. Surprise!” She repeats the process four more times, carrying the shrunken beds to the box and neatly setting them down inside. “Well go on, try them out!”

Cautiously, the group wanders back inside the shoebox and they begin to inspect their new furniture.

“This isn't like... doll furniture” says Scott as he looks over one of the beds. “These are real, but they're tiny... like us. Where did she get them?”

Jim climbs up onto one of the beds. He begins jumping up and down on the mattress. Claire giggles as she watches the tiny man's actions. “This thing's pretty comfortable, check it out, babe” says Jim, calling the attention of his girlfriend.

Brandi shakes her head as she approaches the bed her boyfriend is currently jumping up and down on like a child. “You're such an idiot.” She presses her hands into the mattress. “Oh wow, that's actually really soft.”

“So...” says Claire, bringing the group's attention away from the beds and back once more to the presence of the gigantic girl in the room. “I hope you enjoy these, little ones. I went through a lot of trouble to get them, it will really hurt my feelings if you don't.”

“You won't be needing these for padding anymore.” Claire tosses the dish towels into the empty shoebox and picks it up after placing the lid back on and rises to her full height. “Goodnight, little people, see you tomorrow!” She smiles down at them before walking away off towards the stairs. She flicks the lights back off for the night before making her descent.

In the darkness of the attic, each tiny couple gathers pillows and blankets from the floor in front of the cardboard box. They choose a bed of their own and after placing the supplies onto it, they climb in and return to sleep.

Downstairs, Claire closes her bedroom door behind her and steps into her room. Exhausted, she drops the shoebox to the floor and slips her feet out of her flip flops before climbing into her own bed. She pulls the covers over her body and works on getting a good night's sleep of her own.  

Claire awakens to the sound of someone knocking at her bedroom door. “What?” she asks herself quietly before yawning and groggily rubbing at her eyes. She hadn't planned on being awake quite this early, after all, the previous evening was something of a late night for her.

“Claire, dear...” Amanda begins, “I know it's early but you'll have to get up, there's someone here that would like to talk to you. They're waiting in the kitchen.”

“What? Who?” asks Claire as she unenthusiastically lifts the covers from her body and sits up in her bed.

“He's a policeman. He says he's got a few questions he'd like to ask you. I'll tell him you'll be out in a few minutes” replies Amanda before walking off to the kitchen.

Claire's heart rate kicks up and a cold shiver of nervousness passes through her body. “The police?!” she thinks to herself. “Is this about the beds? Were there cameras in the store?! Did someone see me?!” Her mind races. She takes a moment to calm herself down before opening her door and walking out into the hallway.

In the kitchen, seated at the table is a man Claire would guess to be somewhere in his forties. He turns to face her as she comes into his view. “Ah, you're Claire, then. I'm Detective Jensen. Please, have a seat.”

Claire seats herself at the opposite end of the table. “Can I get you two anything? A cup of coffee?” Amanda asks.

“No thanks, Mom. I'm all set.”

“Yes, please. Black is fine” says Jensen. Amanda heads to the counter and he returns his attention to Claire. “I'm sorry to wake you. You're not in any trouble, I'd just like to ask you a few questions regarding your neighbors, Michael and Amy Parker. They and many of their friends have been missing for a few days now. I understand your mother had been away on business, but she tells me you've been home. I'm hoping you can tell me something that might point us in the direction of where to find your neighbors and their friends.

Claire's nervousness dies down and relief washes over her upon the revelation of the detective's visit being about Michael and Amy rather than herself. She's prepared herself for this, she's confident in the plan she's made.

Amanda places a cup of hot coffee down onto the kitchen table in front of Jensen. “Thank you, ma'am.” The detective brings the cup to his face and takes a sip.

“You're welcome.” Amanda smiles and walks away from the table. She works at various tasks in the kitchen while her daughter and the detective talk.

“So, Claire, can you tell me when the last time you saw your neighbors was? And were they alone?”

“Yes. It was the weekend. And they weren't alone. They were having a party, a housewarming party I think they called it.”

“Did you go to the party? How many people were there?”

“No, I didn't go over. I was watching TV in the living room and I looked out the window and saw there was a bunch of cars parked over there. I don't know for sure how many people there were but I saw at least eight plus Michael and Amy.”

“Nothing unusual happened during the party? You didn't hear or see anything out of place?”

“No.”

“What about after the party, what happened? Everyone left?”

“Yeah. One of the people... he had a really big blue truck. He hooked the trailer with Michael's boat on it up to his truck and drove off, everyone else got in their cars and followed him. Last time I talked to Michael was the day before the party. He told me he was having the party so I should expect to see some cars driving by and he mentioned that he was thinking about taking his and Amy's friends out on the water afterward.”

“You're sure about this? This was the last time you saw your neighbors, and you didn't see anyone else go to the house after this?”

“Yes, I'm sure, and no, I didn't notice anyone else go to the house after that, but it's not like I was paying close attention. I didn't know I should have been. Maybe they were home for a little while since then and I was asleep or something so I missed it. I should have been paying attention.” Claire feigns a look of sadness and worry on her face.

“No, no, it's okay. You didn't know there was anything to be looking for, nobody did. You've done great, Claire, you've been a big help. You've given us a good lead, now we know we should be looking for Micheal's boat. But when you last talked to him, did Michael mention where he might take the boat?”

“No, he wasn't specific. All he said was he was thinking about taking it out on the water. I should have asked, now I wish I did.”

“It's okay, it's a... it's a start.” Jensen rises from the table and pushes in his chair. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a card. He extends his arm and hands the paper over to Amanda. “Here, there's my number. Please, don't hesitate to give me a call if you or your daughter remember anything that might help us find your neighbors and their friends, or if you see anyone turn up next door.”

“I do hope everyone is okay” says Amanda. Michael and Amy are such a sweet young couple, they've been the perfect neighbors since they've lived here. I really hope you can find them.”

“As do I” replies Jensen. “Thank you for your time, ladies. Remember, call me if you see or remember anything, anything at all.” The detective walks through the house and exits through the front door. He gets into his car and drives off.

Amanda turns to Claire as the sound of Jensen driving away grows fainter and fainter. “WOW, I really hope they turn up soon. I'm sure there will be a lot of people out looking for them.” But no rescue party is going to find the missing people. Unbeknownst to Amanda, Michael, Amy, their friends, and even their boat are safe and sound, held captive in her very attic. “I'm going to finish getting ready for the day. Are you going back to sleep for a while, dear?”

“No, I guess I might as well stay up now. I'll go take a shower.”

Later in the day, Claire returns to the kitchen. Her mother stands at the counter, preparing some sort of meal. Claire walks through the room on her way towards the refrigerator. She reaches her destination and pulls the door open.

“Would you like some lunch?” asks her mother.

“No, I'm not too hungry yet. I'm just gonna have a little snack for now.” Claire grabs a couple slices of ham and salami. Afterward, she seals the fridge shut once more and takes a bite from one of the snacks.

“So, what are you doing today? Going back up to the spider motel, dear?”

Claire laughs, knowing her mother is talking about the attic. “Yeah. Actually, I've seen tons of them up there lately. I swear, last time I went up there was like ten bugs on the floor.”

“Eww!” says Amanda, shivering at the thought of the bugs. You know I don't want to hear about creepy critters living in my home. I hope you got rid of them.”

“Oh, come on, Mom. They're just little buggies. You shouldn't be so afraid of them, you know they can't hurt you.”

“HEY, some of them can! Some of them have little stingers and… pinchers and… and teeth, even!

Claire laughs. “Teeth? Yeah, whatever Mom. You know you’re like… thousands of times bigger than them. They should be the ones afraid of you, not the other way around.”

“I’m sorry, dear. I know they’re teeny tiny and most of them are harmless, but I can’t help it, they just freak me out. Especially when I’m not expecting to see them. And THAT is why I stay out of the attic. One could pop out of anywhere at me up there.”

“Well I'm going up for a little bit. I'll be back down later for some lunch.”

“Okay, have fun!”

Claire climbs the attic stairs carrying the remaining slices of meat from the fridge. Her bare feet slap at the wood floor below as she enters the attic and walks deeper into the room. She looks down and to her surprise, the group of tiny people is gathered at the shrunken picnic table. She had expected them to still be asleep inside the shoebox.

“Good morning, little people!” she says cheerfully as she smiles down at the men and women below her before kneeling down in front of them. “I bet you all slept well in those comfy beds I got for you!”

Nobody at the table is willing to give her the satisfaction of admitting that the beds were actually extremely comfortable and provided them with a great night's rest.

“What's that?” asks Michael, inquiring about what Claire holds in her hand.

“Lunch” answers Claire. She begins shredding tiny pieces from one of the slices of meat and lets them drop down onto the surface of the picnic table. “This one is salami.” Next she repeats the process with another slice. “And this one's ham.”

The group watches as the massive young beauty takes a whole slice of ham which is of an immense proportion compared to them and places the entire thing into her mouth. “Mmmmm” she says after chewing and swallowing her snack. “Eat up. I'm afraid we won't be able to have too much fun together the next few days. My visits up here are going to have to be short.”

“Why?” asks a curious Michael. “We heard voices downstairs, were you talking to someone? Does it have to do with that?”

“Awww, you're so smart, little man. So smart and so cute! Yeah, my mother's home for a few days so I can't stay up here and talk to my tiny guests all the time like I want to.” Claire pouts. “That would seem suspicious, right?”

“Amanda's home?!”

Claire giggles. “Yes. But don't be too excited. Remember what I told you when I first brought you up here. You know she's not going to come up here. She thinks this place is riddled with bugs. If she saw you little people, you'd give her the creeps. She wouldn't go anywhere near you.” Claire laughs. “Anyways, eat your lunch, little ones.”

Claire stands up and smiles sweetly down onto the group at the picnic table. “I'll be back tonight with something for supper. And I should change your water too. Have fun, little ones!” she says before walking away and heading back down the stairs.

Beneath the shade of a mighty oak tree, Claire's body rests calmly as she sits in the grass and enjoys the fresh air of another beautiful June afternoon. She often comes to this spot to relax, it's only a short walk away from her house and there's always something calming to her about leaning against the sturdy old tree and watching as the cars drive past on the road not far in front of her.

Thomas finds himself quite bored as the yellow school bus his team has rented chugs along down the road towards its far-off destination. He sits in the middle of the bus with his large black duffel bag full of his equipment next to him. In the seat to his left, his best friend Marcus struggles to get comfortable.

A couple years after graduating high school, Thomas and Marcus really only missed one thing about it. Football. Their desire to get back on the field and play the game again eventually became so great that the two joined a local men's league. Fast forward a couple years further, and here they are today, in their early twenties, cramped inside a rented bus transporting nearly thirty men to yet another game.

“You ready to pick up another win, my man?” asks Marcus, leaning over to speak with his friend.

“Definitely. This year is ours. We're gonna crush the competition.”

Marcus laughs. “Man, maybe if we actually start winning some games we can start traveling in style. I'm getting real tired of being chauffeured around in this yellow tin can. This isn't at all what a man of my excellence should be showing up to games in, you know what I mean?”

Thomas can't help but laugh. “Yep, yep, a man of your excellence. Somebody should be pushing you around in a wheelbarrow and dumping your ass on the field when you get there.”

“Oh come on, man, that's cold” says Marcus after laughing again. Something outside the right windows catches his attention. “Hey, check it out, gorgeous girl at three o'clock.”

Thomas turns and peers out through the window. His eyes take in the sight of a beautiful young woman resting on the lawn. But perhaps beautiful is an understatement. Her long black hair is swept up in a gentle breeze and brushes softly against the porcelain skin of her face as she sits beneath the shade of a large tree. She appears to be very close in age to Thomas, maybe just a couple of years younger. He continues staring, admiring her gracious beauty as the bus passes by her and continues traveling down the road.

An unpleasant sound greets Claire's ears and its source is soon discovered as a large yellow bus appears. The vehicle approaches from the left, and it rumbles and groans all the way past her as it travels down the road. Suddenly it's as if she has lost control over her body as her right hand enters her pocket. The vehicle is so large, easily many times bigger than herself. There's something growing inside her, a need, a need to see how the yellow behemoth would look if it were cut down to size. With Michael's device in her hand, she extends her arm, shaking with excitement. Aiming for the bus as it continues steadily rolling down the road and away from her, Claire pulls back on the trigger.

Martin hits the brakes, bringing the bus to a screeching halt as the entire world around him changes instantly. In all his days of being a bus driver, he's seen some strange things. It comes with the job when you're paid to drive the likes of bratty children, and today's precious cargo, overgrown musclebound children, from point A to point B. Yet he's never encountered anything quite this bizarre in any of his previous journeys. He finds himself surrounded on all sides by a seemingly endless plain of pavement.

Behind him, the passengers begin to grow rambunctious. They've risen from their seats. Something outside has driven their attention to the right side of the bus, where they flock to the windows for a better look.

“Everyone, please, return to your seats!” yells Martin, attempting to calm the men down, still unaware of just what could have sent them into such a frenzy. Suddenly a great booming sound is birthed from not far off behind the bus. Accompanying it is a loud clapping-like sound. The two noises are the first in a series of many, each time they repeat they grow greater in volume. Martin knows this can only mean one thing, whatever is making them draws nearer.

“What is this? What is going on here?” Martins says to himself as he thinks over the possibilities. “An earthquake? Thunder? But it's so bright out...” he says as he turns off the engine and rises from his seat to take a look outside for himself. “Not a cloud in the sky, it can't be a storm.”

Without warning, a massive object descends from the heavens and crashes down hard onto the earth just outside the windows. The shock jolts them and all any of the men inside the bus can manage to utter is a resounding “What the fuck?!”

It doesn't take long for the men to realize what the object is. Right outside their windows, atop a monolithic flip flop rests a female foot. A gigantic female foot, longer from toe to heel than the entire length of the bus. The skin looks unbelievably soft, and the elevated height of the bus gives the men glued to the windows a stunning view of every perfect nail on each enormous toe, all of them coated in a deep black polish which reflects the glimmering sunlight shining down onto them.

The foot is lifted from the ground and pulled forwards. It soars through the air and crashes back down to the pavement in front of the bus.

Claire slides the device back into her pocket as she rises from her resting spot beneath the tree. She wipes at her body with her hands, clearing away any grass or dirt that may have become stuck to her. As she walks along the pavement, she scans the area in front of her in search of the now much smaller vehicle. She knows she must be quick about finding it. Although this isn't a busy road, the possibility of another car driving by at any moment still exists.

Her eyes fall upon the shrunken bus, it remains stationary a few feet in front of her. The driver must have found himself at the bottom of a pit of shock and confusion after being shrunk and brought the whole thing to a stop. The sight of it, a once great beast of a vehicle now reduced to the size of a child's toy excites her and brings a radiant smile to her face.

Claire knows she should be wasting no time in retrieving her prize, but there's one temptation she simply cannot resist. She lifts her right foot into the air and with great care she aims it perfectly before bringing it back down to the ground. She plants it onto the pavement parallel to the right side of the bus, leaving mere inches between her skin and the vehicle. Her mind races as she tries to imagine how incredibly powerful she appears to its tiny occupants during her little display of dominance. She leaves her foot still for a few seconds before taking another step and bringing her body to a kneeling position over the front of the bus.

“What happened here?!” Claire asks, feigning surprise with her voice as she talks down to the bus, her face too high above them for anyone inside to observe the lack of concern on it. “You were driving down the road and all of a sudden you shrunk! Let me get you out of the road and into safety!”

Claire lowers her right hand down towards the bus and her dainty fingers wrap nearly halfway around the middle of the vehicle as she takes it into her grasp. The front and back protrude from her grip due to its size. It's much larger than any of the shrunken automobiles she's handled in her attic, including Jim's truck. With the bus secured, Claire begins the walk back to her home.

Michael and the others have gathered around the picnic table. Once again, the topic up for discussion is devising a way out of their current predicament and bringing the whole “being tiny” ordeal to an end.

“All I'm saying is that this is our window. Possibly our only one” says Keith. “Her mother's home, and she's our ticket out of here. But she's only gonna be here for a few days so we need to act fast, before the window closes.”

“The 'window' was slammed shut long before we got here” says Michael. “Amanda being home means nothing for us, except for the possibility of a reprieve from Claire toying with us.”

“How can you say that?! This is our chance and we need to act!”

“Act how?” replies Michael, frustration growing in his voice. “We're sealed in up here, have you forgotten? We can't get to her. And the chances of her coming up here to us are quite low. But even if she did set foot in this attic, do you know what she would see? Not people. No, she'd have to get quite close to look at us and see human beings. She would see bugs, and fearfully retreat back down those stairs.”

“You know, we might not want Amanda to find us anyways” says Jim, bringing the attention of the others to him.

“What do you mean? Why the hell wouldn't we?” asks Keith.

“Well, think about it. The way Claire's been... maybe the apple didn't fall far from the tree.”

“Look, yes, we still need a plan” says Michael. “I'll be the first person to agree with you there, Keith, but I'm afraid this discussion here isn't going to lead to one.”

After sneaking back into the house with the shrunken bus, Claire quietly enters her bedroom and closes the door behind her. She sits on the floor with her legs crossed and gently places the bus down onto the plum-colored carpet in front of her. Its right side faces her.

“What happened? How did you get so small?”

Inside the bus, the men recover from their journey after finally being returned to steady ground. Their world was rocked back and forth continuously as they were carried in the clutches of this gigantic girl and delivered to a room inside her immense home.

“Helloooooo, is anybody in there?” Claire asks as she lightly taps at the roof of the bus with the tip of the nail of her index finger. “You can come out of there, you're safe now.” She smiles sweetly at the bus as she tries to peer inside without leaning in for a closer look.

A window near the back opens and a man near the back begins shouting, his face red with anger. “You bitch! What the fuck did you do to us?!”

“Oh, um, hi to you too” says Claire. She giggles, the display of anger by the tiny man amusing her. Many more windows begin opening, revealing behind them more tiny men. Though they're tiny, they're mostly of quite muscular builds. “Are you guys, like, a little sports team or something?”

“WOW, nothing gets past you, does it?” the red faced man yells sarcastically. “Now answer my question, what the fuck have you done?!”

“What do you mean, what have I done? What did you do to get so little?”

Another man closer to the front of the bus opens his window. “Is this funny?” he yells. “Is this a game to you? We saw you shoot at us with some sort of... thing. We know whatever happened to us, you're the one that did it.”

“Yeah, you think we're stupid or something? We know it was you” yells the man near the back. “You better change us back to normal before we miss our game, bitch!”

“Yeah, yeah, change us back!” chants a large group of tiny voices inside the bus.

Claire is amazed. She thinks to herself, how can such small people dare talk to someone so much bigger than themselves in such a way? Are they extremely brave, or just exceedingly stupid? She rolls her eyes. What a foolish bunch of boys. Here they are, in the bedroom of a beautiful girl, and all they want to do is leave so they can get onto a field with more muscly boys, smash their bodies into each other and exchange concussions.

A sound coming from the kitchen distracts her from her thoughts. It's the sound of cupboards opening and closing as things are being placed back away inside them. A wicked smile spreads across Claire's face as a fresh idea enters her mind.

“Awww, you caught me. I was just trying to have a little fun, I thought you guys would like it.” She pouts. “I'm sorry. Come on, I'll grow you back to normal. I really don't want to make you miss your game.”

Claire carefully lifts the bus up and away from the carpet and searches her room for another place to set it. She spots a hardcover book on the floor behind her and she gently places the vehicle down on its surface.

“I need you guys to come out of there and step onto the book.” She giggles as none of the men seem willing to exit the bus. “Come on, you know I can't grow the whole bus back in my room, you silly little people! I need you to get out if you wanna be changed back.”

After a few seconds, the doors at the front of the bus hiss open and the men begin exiting. They spread themselves out as best they can over the surface of the book. There must be around thirty of them. Claire works hard to contain her excitement.

Claire reaches over the heads of the little men below and picks up the now empty yellow bus. She lifts it higher into the air and extends her arm out to its full length, reaching for her nightstand, atop which she deposits the small vehicle.

“Alright.” She says, smiling as she brings her attention back to the men scattered all over the book before her and slips Michael's device out of her pocket. “Let's get you little guys back to normal!”

Thomas stands on the middle area of the expansive surface of the book next to his friend Marcus. The gigantic girl's beautiful face looms above him as her fingers tap at different buttons, each one pressed causing whatever the incredible device is that she had used to shrink the bus with to emit a soft beeping sound. Thomas is quite surprised by how so many of his teammates spoke to the girl. Sure, he was just as excited and anxious as anyone else on the team to get to the game, but he didn't mind a little delay in his schedule if it meant spending a bit of time with such a beautiful creature.

His teammates had spoken to her with such vitriol. Here they were, with such a difference between them that she could easily win a match of tug of war against any of them using nothing more than the strength residing in her pinky finger alone, yet they worried not in the slightest about angering her. Luckily they had apparently not managed to do so, as she now holds the mysterious size changing device in front of her, aimed and ready to fire.

Claire presses a final button on Michael's device before aiming it at the group of tiny men below. “Please let this work” she says softly as she smiles down on them and moves her index finger towards the trigger.

Thomas smiles back at the gigantic beauty. He knows in just a matter of minutes he'll be the same size as her again and back on the way to the game, but not before he gets the chance to ask for her phone number. Still smiling, he watches as her finger curls around the trigger and pulls it back. A small light on the end of the device flashes briefly and his entire world changes again... though not in the way he and his teammates were expecting.

“Yes! Yes, it worked!” cheers Claire before tucking the device back away inside her pocket. “WOW!” she says as she leans in towards the book for a closer view. Before, the men were already tiny, the same size as Michael and his friends in the attic, but now... now, they are smaller even than the most minuscule of ants! Her smile grows wider as her eyes look over them excitedly. She's proud of herself, everything has worked out according to her plan, the book didn't even shrink, only the men on top, just as she'd hoped.

The men are overtaken with confusion. Thomas stares into Claire's smile, betrayed. Seconds ago, she was gigantic, but now she sits before him unfathomably massive. He knows the new size of himself and his teammates isn't the result of a mistake on her part. Her booming cheers of excitement and the sight of her slipping the device away afterward are more than enough confirmation of this.

Claire grabs the top of the book with one hand and places her other at the bottom. She lifts it slowly partway off of the carpet and giggles as the incredibly tiny men slide down the slope of the book's surface and into the palm of her hand. With everyone off of it, she lets the book fall flat to the floor again and rises to her feet. Very quietly, she turns at her doorknob with her free hand and pulls the door open. She brings her hands together, cupping the men safely inside as she enters the hallway.

She walks softly through the halls in her black flip flops, careful to minimize the sound produced with each step. She reaches her destination and peers around the corner. Her mother stands at the far end of the kitchen, wiping at the counter with a dish towel with her back to Claire. “Perfect” she thinks to herself.

Claire quietly leans down over where the carpeting ends and the white linoleum flooring of the kitchen begins. She touches her hand to the cool floor and tilts it, letting the men roll down and drop onto the ground. She returns to her full height and watches as they pick themselves up and stand still in front of her. She rolls here eyes. “How stupid are they?” she thinks to herself before lifting her right foot and pushing it forward. She allows it to hover low over their heads in an attempt to motivate the pathetically tiny men beneath it to scurry out from underneath and away from her. “Finally” she mutters under her breath as they come into view out from under her sandal and begin running off further into the kitchen.

As the tiny men run across the vast plain that is in reality nothing more than a kitchen floor, they soon discover that the girl who shrunk them isn't the only other person the kitchen with them. Standing all the way at the end of the room with her back to them is another ridiculously massive woman.

“Look!” yells Martin, still running though struggling a bit with keeping up with the much more athletic passengers from his bus. “That must be the girl's mother!” he shouts, pointing to the woman. “Come on, we need to reach her and get her attention!”

Claire smiles as she watches the tiny specks journey deeper towards the center of the kitchen. 'Mom!” she says excitedly, finally announcing her presence to her mother.

Startled, Amanda jumps, dropping the dish towel to the counter before turning around to face her daughter standing at the other end of the room. “What it it dear? You scared me. Was that payback for the other night?”

“No, Mom.” Claire points to a spot on the floor between herself and her mother. “Look!” she exclaims. “Ants!”

Amanda gasps as she focuses her eyes on the spot her daughter points to. At first she struggles to even see them, they're so tiny! But sure enough, there's something there. Her eyes widen as soon as they lock onto the swarm of tiny specks moving across the floor and heading straight towards her.

The men stop dead in their tracks and strain their necks as they gaze towards the heavens and into the startled eyes of the woman whose vision seems to be fixed on them. “Alright! She sees us!” yells one of the men, eliciting cheers from many of the others. The group stands in the exact center of the kitchen, one giant woman at the side of the room behind them, and another at the end in front of them.

“Ants?! In my kitchen?! Claire, get them out, please!” Claire giggles. “Please, Claire! You know I can't stand the thought of bugs being inside the house! Oh, of all the places they could be, why my kitchen?! Please, Claire, you have to get rid of them!

“Mom, calm down. They're just ants. If you don't want them in the kitchen, what's stopping you from getting rid of them?

From their position down on the floor, the men nervously turn their heads back and forth from one gigantic woman to the other as they listen to their conversation.

“Honey, please, just take care of them for me. You know how I feel about bugs, I can't help it.

“Mom, come on. Look at them. They're so tiny you have to nearly strain yourself just to notice them. Remember how we talked about this the other day? Are you really gonna live in fear of something so small and insignificant. Ants are invading your kitchen, don't you want to show them why little buggies shouldn't wander into places where they're not welcome?”

“They're just little buggies. You shouldn't be so afraid of them, you know they can't hurt you.” Her daughter's voice plays in Amanda's head as she remembers their recent discussion in the kitchen. “You know you're like... thousands of times bigger than them. They should be the ones afraid of you, not the other way around.”

Amanda sighs. “Okay. Okay, maybe you're right, dear. Go and grab the broom for me.”

Claire laughs. “The broom? What do you need the broom for?”

“To get rid of the ants. Go get it for me and I'll sweep them up.”

“Mom! You don't need the broom! Maybe you need a better look at them. They're so small it's pathetic. Come on, stand a little closer to them and see for yourself.”

Reluctantly, Amanda takes a couple steps towards the tiny beings in the center of the room before standing still again. Claire giggles. “Get closer than that, Mom, come on.” Her mother takes a deep breath before moving forward once more.

The men remain frozen in amazement as the gigantic woman makes her way towards them. The bottoms of her feet peel away from the linoleum floor as she lifts them and with every footstep they slap back down with enough weight and force behind them to cause tremors powerful enough to shake the earth for the tiny men ahead.

One final step places Amanda's feet directly in front of them. Much like the rest of her body, her feet are like shorter, slightly less elegant versions of her daughter's, and of a wider shape in comparison. Her pudgy toes would probably appear quite cute under normal circumstances, but in their current situation, the gargantuan extremities do nothing more for the men than incite fear. The group soaks in the heat radiating off of her feet and the scent of sweat begins to mix in with the air that they breathe.

Amanda looks down at her toes. Her nails are coated in a beautiful dark purple polish. Just inches in front of them, the mites remain perfectly still as she gazes down on them. She watches them curiously, the entire group of them standing in the small area of shade created in front of her toes which stand much taller than any of the creatures. “What's wrong with them? Why are they just standing there?”

“I don't know. Maybe they found some food and they're eating it. Some sugar or a crumb or something.”

“Fine, no broom, then. Just let me slip into my shoes and I'll-”

“Ughhh, Mom! Come on! You don't need a broom, you don't need shoes, you don't need anything!” They're ants! Compared to them, every part of your body is a weapon of mass destruction! Stop worrying and just take care of them!”

“So... you want me to just... step on them?”

“Yes!”

“With no shoes?”

“Yes!”

“But-”

“Look at how tiny they are! You won't even feel them, Mom! I promise. Just a few small steps and your kitchen will be bug-free, just like you like it, and you might even have fun getting it that way!”

“Well, I... I don't know...” With much hesitation and great trepidation, Amanda slightly lifts her foot from the floor and begins slowly inching it forward.

“Come on, Mom. You can do this, I know you can!”

On the ground, with the exception of Martin, the men begin backing away as the woman's right foot travels forward, closing the distance between them and it. Her big toe spreads apart from the others and hovers directly above Martin as the titanic foot stops creeping closer. If the girl had scaled his bus down again to match his current size, the length of the entire vehicle could easily fit in the fleshy valley forged by the spreading of the woman's toes. Martin looks up at the enormous bulbous digit and snorts before turning around to face the other men as they continue to slowly retreat. “Are you guys kidding me? We're perfectly safe. A bunch of big strong football players, and you're afraid of this middle-aged woman? Unbelievable.”

“She thinks we're ants, man!” says one of the other men. “That other bitch has her thinking we're bugs! How the hell are we safe?!”

“Because, you idiot, she's a woman! Every woman I've ever known, they've all gone out of their way to avoid touching a bug. Now will you guys come back here and relax? Everything is going to be fine.”

Without any warning, Amanda's big toe drops to the floor, burying Martin beneath an unfathomable mass of flesh and creating a tremor that knocks all the other men to ground. Just as quickly as it had fallen, her toe rises again and she pulls her foot back, dropping it where it rested before she inched it forward less than a moment ago. A red stain occupies the spot where the massive toe just pulled away from, leading the rest of the men to the conclusion that whatever else remains of Martin must be stuck to the woman's soft skin.

“Oh, Shit! Shit!” The men scream and shout as they get back on their feet. “Everybody run, now!”

“I... I got one. I got one!” Amanda looks to her daughter and smiles. “One was standing there by itself and I got it! You were right, I couldn't even feel anything!”

“Mom, look!” Claire points to the floor, returning her mother's attention back to the puny creatures at her feet. “See, now they're the ones that are afraid. Don't let them get away!”

The woman raises her right foot and moves it forward once more, much faster than the previous time. Rather than inching forward, it soars through the air, effortlessly catching up with the tiny men as they attempt to flee below. Gliding towards them, it appears to the men to be longer from heel to toe than the length of the world's largest aircraft. Thomas looks over his shoulder and watches with horror as the gigantic foot travels towards the group. “Faster! Run faster!” he yells. Oh, god, no...”

In less than a second, the woman's soft, pale sole looms directly above them, darkening their sky and replacing it with an ocean of deep wrinkles hovering just overhead. “Spread out! Disperse! Move, now!” yells Thomas.

The fleshy ceiling slowly descends. Many of the men narrowly avoid being extinguished, darting out of the way just as Amanda's foot makes contact with the ground. For several others, her foot is simply too immense in comparison to their bodies. There just isn't enough time for them to run out from underneath her wrinkled sole before it crashes down. Her soft flesh expands, oozing onto the floor as the weight placed on her foot is increased. Those whom managed to avoid her footfall are swept up in the violent gust of wind it generates and tossed roughly back down to the ground, their bodies scattered all around the woman's feet.

“You missed some, Mom! You have to be faster than that!”

Amanda laughs, her eyes glued to the floor. “I know, I know. I'm still getting used to it, dear.”

The men pick themselves up once again, their bodies aching from the abuse they've taken fighting for their lives at the feet of an ordinary woman completely oblivious to the seriousness of the situation that she is in and the severity of the chaos she is brewing with every move she makes.

Thomas gets to his feet and quickly assesses his surroundings as his ears take in the frantic screaming of the other men and booming laughter coming from above. To his right, the massive biological force of destruction that has already delivered doom to several of his teammates. To his left, an enormous kitchen table, possibly his only chance at shelter and survival. He takes one more look to his right and bolts off in the other direction.

The first man on the bus to roll down his window and yell at Claire stares into the sky and gazes upon the woman's face. Her expression terrifies him. It's as though she's enjoying herself. He knows he has no chance of outrunning her. None of them can. She's just too massive compared to them. The man knows that if she locks her eyes onto him or any of the others and decides they're her target, there's nothing they can do to escape their doom. However, currently her vision seems fixed directly in front of her feet. Perhaps it would be possible for him to sneak behind her and run for safety while she's distracted with the others.

“Mom! One is escaping!”

“Where?!”

“Behind you, look!” shouts Claire, pointing to the ground. “Quick, get him!”

Running at full speed, the man barely makes it to the back of the gigantic foot before his plan is foiled. “Ah, shit! Thanks, bitch!” he yells, frustrated. He raises one arm and brandishes his middle finger for anyone standing behind him. Already beginning to tire out, he continues on, trying to push himself harder, hanging on to the hope of getting to cover.

Amanda turns her head so that she can see behind her. She quickly spots one of the mites running across the floor, currently no more than a few inches away from her. “Oh no you don't” she says, smiling as she lifts her right foot off of the ground and swings it backwards through the air.

The man continues running as a shadow envelops his body. Never slowing down, he turns and looks to the sky to see how much distance is left between himself and certain doom. He's quite unimpressed with the answer. He finds himself directly beneath the back of the woman's foot. Further up, he can see an anklet with jewels swinging high above his head like glamourized wrecking balls. Faster than the man can even realize what's about to happen, the woman slams her heel to the floor, instantly crushing him beneath it.

“Gotcha!” Amanda exclaims happily as she turns her attention back to the area in front of her.

Thomas reaches his destination. He's checked over his shoulders countless times and can't believe he's actually made it across the floor and to the table. Even though he's one of the fastest members of the team, he probably never could have safely reached this spot if it wasn't for one of the other men distracting the giant woman. He runs behind one of the legs of the monolithic structure and drops to his knees to catch his breath.

Three specks moving on her right catch Amanda's attention. “Safety in numbers, huh? We'll see about that” she says as she locks her eyes onto the fleeing insects and turns her whole body to the side.

Still catching his breath, Thomas leans slightly out from his position behind the table leg to see what's going on. The woman has repositioned herself and now stands directly in front of him with her back to the table. He breathes a sigh of relief, knowing he should still be safe... for now, at least.

Thomas watches as the woman lifts her gargantuan right foot again, revealing the sight of three of his teammates far off in the distance that her appendage had been blocking from his vision. Her foot soars through the air, quickly passing over the three men as they continue running beneath her wrinkled sole. Thomas watches on, able to see everything from his spot beneath the table as the woman tilts her foot at an angle in the air. Next, she plants her toes down onto the ground ahead of the three men while her heel hangs high in the air far behind them.

With their path blocked by a fleshy barricade, the three men quickly turn around and begin running in the opposite direction. Thomas watches as they run, screaming as they work to get out from beneath the woman.

When they're nearly out from beneath her heel, the woman begins to very slowly pull her foot backwards with her heel still in the air and her toes planted firmly on the ground, sliding them across the floor.

“Oh shit! Shit!” yells Thomas, still watching in horror as the deadly mass of flesh closes in on three of his teammates in front of his very eyes. Though she's moving slowly, her size advantage helps the woman's foot easily catch up with the men.

Their actions are futile. None of the men have a chance of outrunning their demise. In mere seconds, the gigantic toes are upon them, sweeping over the three men like a steamroller and dragging further back over the linoleum floor, smearing the tiny bodies and leaving a crimson trail in their wake.

Thomas unleashes a flurry of kicks and punches into the table leg in front of him, screaming as he does so. He only stops when he hears the voice of his best friend, Marcus, calling out to him from somewhere in the distance. “Marcus?! Where are you?” From beneath the table, his eyes scan the kitchen for any sign of his friend.

“I'm over here!” yells Marcus, far too close to the colossal woman's right foot for comfort. “I'm gonna try to make it over to you!”

“Come on, come on!” Chants Thomas anxiously as he watches his friend running as fast as he can across the floor and towards him. Several other men are still running in all directions as the giant woman scrutinizes them from above, planning her next move.

Marcus makes it halfway to the safety of the kitchen table before the woman moves her feet again. Gazing up, he is relieved to see that she doesn't appear to be looking at him, but focusing her attention on another man instead. Unfortunately, the man is running straight towards him, which means the woman's eyes will soon be fixed on him!

Thomas looks on, already aware of what's happening. The woman lines her foot up in the air and slams it down with a sickening thud. “NOOOOOOOO!” screams Thomas. The woman raises her foot again and the two men he just watched running from it are nowhere to be seen. Thomas drops to the floor in despair.

The next few moments are a blur for him. Seated with his back against the table leg, Thomas closes his eyes and does his best to block out the sounds of the heavy footfalls of the enormous woman. Tremors ripple through his body. The drop of a toe here, the slam of a heel there, each action causing the number of his teammates to dwindle down to nothing.

“I did it! I don't see anymore of the little creepy-crawlies, I got them all!” exclaims a smiling Amanda.

“See, I knew you could do it! I'm so proud of you, Mom!”

Amanda crosses the kitchen and embraces her daughter. The two women step into the hallway. “You were right, sweetie, I didn't feel a thing! But I bet they sure did.” She laughs and lifts a leg, resting one hand on the wall to balance herself as she grabs her right foot with the other and exposes her sole. “Yuck! They're pretty messy for such tiny things, aren't they? I'm gonna take a shower and get cleaned up.”

“Okay, Mom. So does this mean you're over your fear of bugs? Maybe next time you see a spider you won't scream and yell for help?”

“EWWW, goodness, no! These were just ants! Spiders?! Spiders can kill people!” Claire laughs. “I'm not going anywhere near a spider, and that is why you still won't see me setting foot in the attic!”

“Good.” Claire mutters under her breath.

“What? Asks Amanda.

“Hmm? Oh, nothing. I just guess if you're going to insist on being afraid of spiders, maybe it's best if you stay down here. There are a lot of them up there.”

“Well I need to wash my feet. Can you do me a favor and clean the floor a bit for me? I don't want to step in any more little buggie guts after my shower.”

“Sure, Mom.”

“Thanks, dear. See you soon!” says Amanda before walking down the hall and off towards the bathroom.

The giantesses have retreated from the kitchen. Thomas remains leaning against the table with his head between his knees, his body trembling. He was, quite literally, the sole survivor. (Sorry, I couldn't resist) How could the girl do this, he wonders? How could someone so beautiful be capable of doing something so heinous? And to think, less than an hour ago he found himself attracted to her, so much so that he had found himself waiting for the opportunity to exchange phone numbers.

A coughing sound in the distance startles him and Thomas snaps his attention towards its point of origin, the center of the kitchen.

“Th... Thomas... You there?” a voice calls out before coughing again.

“Hello?!” Yells Thomas, getting to his feet.

“Thomas, it's me.” Laying on the floor, Marcus raises an arm and waves to his friend.

“Marcus! You're alive?! How?! I saw her foot come down and you were gone!”

Marcus sits up and takes a moment before standing to his feet. The distance between the two friends is so great that they must shout to communicate with one another. “Nah, man. Giant women with dirty ol' feet? It'll take more than that to kill me, you know that.”

Thomas smiles, amazed and overwhelmed with joy upon finding that he's not alone in his situation. “Seriously, man, how are you not a stain on the floor?”

“I almost was. I was coming over there towards you and some idiot start running straight for me. Next thing I know, she's looking at the guy, getting ready to take him out. So she slams her foot down after him. I don't know if she even sees me but BLAM her foot hits the ground and I'm blown backwards. I'm laying there, wind knocked out of me... so I played possum. And you know, man, it worked!”

“So what's our plan now? You think whatever that girl zapped us with is gonna wear off or are we stuck like this or what? What should we do?”

“I don't know, man, but-”

The slapping and clacking sound of approaching flip flops echoes through the room as Claire enters the kitchen. The colossal girl walks to the sink and grabs a paper towel, briefly holding it under the faucet and running water over it. “Ah, shit!” yells Thomas. “Get under here, now! Run!” He positions himself behind the table leg again and leans out, motioning with his arm for his friend to hurry.

Claire lowers herself to the ground and wipes at the floor with her paper towel, focusing the majority of her effort on the spots where she had watched her mother step. In the distance she can hear water beginning to run in the bathroom, knowing that as it flows down the drain, so too will any other remaining evidence of what transpired here in her kitchen today.

As she wipes at the floor, a tiny speck catches her eye, moving across the ground at her side. Her mouth drops open and she leans in for a closer look before smiling.

Marcus stops running, paralyzed with fear as the beautiful young woman's face fills his sky. “Well well well, thought you could get away, little fella?” Her words boom down onto him and he is washed in her warm breath. “Sorry, little guy, but getting away... that's not part of the game” she says, pouting. She reaches a hand towards him, and Marcus begins running frantically away from her and towards the table.

“Come on, faster, faster! Screams Thomas, watching in terror as the gargantuan hand moves towards his best friend. Marcus doesn't even make it halfway to the table before the girl's fingers catch up with him. She turns the back of her hand towards the floor and scoops the pathetic speck of a man up with her index fingernail before standing up.

Claire lifts her finger to he face to get a look at her passenger. He's so tiny, she can barely recognize him as a human being, even when he's just mere inches away from her eyes. She giggles as she watches him desperately trying to keep still and avoid falling from her nail and thousands of feet to the floor below.

“Come on, little guy. I know the perfect place for you!” She begins walking through the kitchen and stops when she reaches the back door. She kneels down and starts lowering her hand towards something which causes Marcus to scream and wave his arms in desperation.

“Please! Please, no! Please don't do this, just let me live!” His pleas are useless, at his current size, even if the girl were willing to listen, she wouldn't be able to hear his words. “Please, I won't tell anyone what happened here, just let me go!” Marcus is frantic as the girl lowers her finger down into a woman's sneaker. Claire tilts her finger and the tiny man drops from it, the soft insole below cushioning his fall. He rises to his feet and jumps up and down, begging again for her to not let this be his fate, to no avail.

“And now, you play the waiting game!” says Claire before returning to her full height and standing over the tiny man trapped in one of her mother's pink sneakers. “Bye bye, little man!” she says, waving her fingers cutely before turning around and walking away, her long black hair flowing gently behind her. She tosses the paper towel into the trash and exits the kitchen.

Thomas watches the whole thing in shock. After the gigantic girl leaves the room and her booming footsteps decrease in volume as she ventures to another part of the house, he bolts out from beneath the table and towards the obnoxiously pink pair of shoes at the end of the kitchen in which his best friend is currently being held captive.

Somewhere in the state, on a football field basking in warm sunlight, a rival football team grows frustrated as they await the arrival of their opponents. Little do they know, without even having set foot on the field, their competition has already been crushed.

Thomas runs as quickly as his legs can carry him across the expansive kitchen floor and towards his friend. To a normal sized person, the distance between the kitchen table and the back door could be covered in a number of footsteps low enough to be counted on the fingers of a single hand. But to Thomas, at his minute size the trek is almost something of a small journey.

Thomas stops when he reaches the heels of the gargantuan pink sneakers and catches his breath. He gazes up and marvels at the women's footwear which simply towers over him. Running towards them, the shoes seemed to grow larger and larger the closer he got to them, and now as he stands directly before them, he can't help but feel like nothing more than an insignificant speck in their presence. The fact that his best friend is trapped within the right one contributes further to this feeling.

“Marcus!” Thomas yells as he continues staring upwards. “Marcus, are you alright?!”

Inside the shoe, Marcus paces back and forth on the soft insole below him. He looks skyward, to the opening of the sneaker so very high above him. He can hear his friend calling out to him from beyond the walls of his peculiar prison.

“Yeah, I'm okay, man! Just kinda... stuck in here, you know?!” The inside of the shoe is rather warm. Not particularly hot, but definitely warmer than the temperature back on the outside. Though the stench is far from unbearable, Marcus' entire surroundings smell faintly of feet and sweat, as one should expect. Marcus surmises that it's been at least a few hours since the sneakers have been worn, or else the odor's potency would be far more extreme.

Thomas breathes a sigh of relief upon hearing the sound of his friend's voice. “Alright, man, well we've gotta get you out of there! Hold tight, I'm climbing up!” Thomas places his hands on the sneaker but is immediately faced with a problem. There's nothing for him to properly grab onto on the rubber sole of the shoe for him to begin his climb, and even this simple base part of the sneaker stretches upwards higher than he is tall.

“No!” Marcus' voice calls out. “Don't try to climb this thing! The last thing we want is for you to fall in and get trapped in here too!”

“Well what are we gonna do?! Can you grab onto anything in there and climb out?!”

“I... I don't know, let's find out.” Marcus ventures to the sneaker's left wall. He runs his hands along the surface, dragging them over whatever materials the interior of the feminine footwear is comprised of. At his scale, the texture is bizarre to say the least. There are many odd things for him to grab onto, but are they strong enough to hold his weight?

Marcus grabs onto the strange wall before him and pulls back hard, tugging at whatever is in his grasp. Satisfied when nothing comes loose, he calls out to his friend. “I think I can climb this thing! It's gonna take time, but it's doable!”

“Alright, man! Be quick about it, try to hurry!”

“Try to hurry?” Marcus mutters to himself. “I'd like to see him make his way out of here.” As he begins scaling the wall of the shoe, Marcus gazes up at the opening. It must be hundreds of feet above him. Discouraged, he sighs and continues his climb.

Thomas remains standing in his spot at the heel of the mighty pink sneaker, impatiently awaiting his friend's emergence. He turns and surveys his surroundings, letting his eyes scan the vast emptiness of the kitchen floor.

He knows he's in constant danger by being out in the open like this at his new size. There's not just the danger of the two women. No, there's far more to be worried about. Even something as ordinarily inconsequential as a spider looking for a meal could bring forth his demise. He shudders at the thought, and returns his attention to the shoe.

“How's it going in there, Marcus?! You almost out?!”

“I'm like halfway there, man! I told you this was gonna take a while!”

A faint tremor rumbles through the ground beneath Thomas, followed by another, then another, and they continue, each one with slightly more intensity than the last. It doesn't take him long to figure out what is happening. Something big is moving through the house and getting closer to the kitchen. Something... or someone?

“Claire, dear?” A woman's voice calls out from another part of the house, startling both of the tiny men. “I'm heading to the store, is there anything you want me to pick up?”

“No thanks, Mom,” replies a second voice, muffled as though it's coming from behind a closed door, “I'm all set.”

“Oh, shit! Is that... is it one of them?! Are they coming this way?!” Marcus calls out to his friend, unable to see for himself just what is going on outside.

Thomas' eyes grow wide with panic as he stares across the kitchen and looks on in horror as the gigantic older woman comes into view. She takes her first step into the room, and he quickly notices that her feet are bare. Thomas watches as she stops and scans the kitchen for something.“Ah, there they are,” her voice booms above as she looks down towards the floor at the opposite end of the room, the pair of pink sneakers meeting her gaze.

“Hurry up, man! You've gotta get out of there, now!” The colossal woman resumes her approach.

Even through the insulation of the sneaker, Marcus can feel the vibrations of the woman's footsteps outside ripple through his body. Each one carries more power than the last, and he knows she draws nearer with every passing second. “Thomas, you need to go and hide somewhere safe!”

“But-”

“Don't worry about me, please, just do it!”

“But... No, I can't just-”

“Now! Get out of here, now!”

Reluctantly, Thomas complies. He starts running towards his hiding spot beneath the table from earlier but he knows he won't have enough time to reach it before the woman is upon him. He'll be lucky if there's even enough time just to make it out of her path.

Three ground-shaking footsteps later and the gigantic woman has nearly reached Thomas. He runs with every ounce of energy his body can muster, desperately trying to speed up as he sees the woman preparing to take her next step. Her right foot looms above him, but he doesn't even dare to look up at it. He narrowly escapes as it comes crashing down dangerously close next to him. His body is thrown to the ground by the impact, and he flops and rolls further away from the danger while the woman continues her walk to the door. As she moves, her skin releases a pleasantly clean scent into the air, courtesy of her recent shower.

Marcus climbs frantically but is forced to stop as the vibrations of the approaching woman have become so forceful that they threaten to shake him loose if he fails to maintain a strong grip. Suddenly the tremors cease and through the mouth of the shoe he can see her face come into view thousands of feet above him, the sight of which makes his blood run cold.

Thomas lifts his aching body off of the floor and looks ahead of him, completely unsure of what to do. He stands about halfway between the kitchen table and the pair of pink sneakers which the colossal older woman now stands still in front of.

Thomas knows he's very likely still in grave danger by being this close to the giant woman, close enough to add up to little more than a footstep away for her. He still can't decide what to do. Part of him wants to run towards the table and take shelter beneath it. Of course, another part of him wants to run to his friend and somehow rescue him, but he knows this would very likely lead to the woman noticing him, mistaking him for an insect, and dealing the same fate to him that she had dealt the rest of his team earlier in the day in this very kitchen. Instead, he simply stands and stares ahead at the towering giantess, waiting for her to make her next move.

Frozen in fear, Marcus studies the woman's face hanging ridiculously high above him. She doesn't look happy, she doesn't look sad, she simply seems... bored. She's not even looking down towards him, but really, why would she be? She has no idea that two tiny men are in her kitchen, completely at her mercy.

The woman bumps the sneaker with her right foot as she peels it away from the floor. Inside, Marcus is jarred roughly and knocked loose from the wall. He plummets downwards until he hits the soft insole below. His fall is cushioned, though still quite painful. He watches as the woman's gigantic toes come into view. He considers screaming, trying desperately to get the woman's attention, but ultimately decides against it. He knows she wouldn't be able to hear him, and even if she could, she'd just look down and see another mite.

Instead of putting up a fight, Marcus lays still, watching above as the woman's gigantic toes dip into the opening of the shoe, giving him a quick look at the beautiful purple polish coating their nails before she pushes them further into the depths of her footwear. The shoe rocks from side to side, and Marcus along with it as the woman slips her foot inside. The fleshy, wrinkle-covered ceiling slowly descends upon him. As he sheds a single tear, his entire world fades to black.

Thomas watches on in horror as the woman works her way into her shoes. Powerless to do anything to help his best friend, he's never felt more helpless in his life.

In a matter of seconds the woman's feet are nestled within the pink sneakers. She takes two powerful steps, each one accompanied by a loud booming sound. She pulls the enormous door open and exits the house. The door is closed loudly behind her and Thomas drops to his knees in despair.

Amy once again finds herself back on her own lawn, and at her full size. It's another warm afternoon, with a gentle breeze in the air as she lays peacefully in the grass. She turns her head to look behind her, and she can see her tiny friends spread out across the bare soles of her feet. She can feel the delicate touch of their teeny hands kneading into her flesh, massaging her feet in the same way as they had been made to do for Claire not so long ago.

Amy turns her head to face forward and looks down into her hand. She leans in for a closer view and smiles brightly as she sees her husband, Michael, laying comfortably in the palm of her hand with his back resting against the base of her thumb. He smiles back at her lovingly, his relaxed body still laying in the shade of her partially curled fingers. Amy winks at her tiny husband and giggles.

Suddenly, Amy looks upwards, away from the ground and towards her home. Her heart drops in her chest as something begins rising behind her house. The top of Claire's head becomes visible and continues to rise until her eyes come into view. Amy's blood runs cold as she looks into the gigantic girl's face. Claire's enormous blue eyes peer over the house and simply stare down at the woman laying on the lawn. Amy can't help but feel insignificantly small again as she is trapped in the girl's gaze. “No!” she yells, “No, it's not fair!”

Amy awakens, startled and in a cold sweat. She finds herself in the darkness of Claire's attic. Beside her lays her husband, still asleep. Frustrated, she turns over and closes her eyes once more, hoping to return to her rest.

The sun has begun to set on another hot summer day. The last bit of daylight spills through the attic windows, bathing the shrunken group of people gathered at the tiny picnic table on the floor in its warmth. The group's discussion is halted by the sounds of the attic stairs being dropped to the floor far below followed by the familiar rhythm of footsteps ascending them. This has become a very familiar interruption to the group.

Everyone at the picnic table turns their attention to the other side of the room to watch as Claire makes her entrance into the attic. Her head appears as her feet carry her further up the stairs. Her long black hair bounces gently as she moves, and she wears a beautiful smile on her gorgeous face.

A few steps more, and Claire is far enough up the stairs for something entirely unexpected to come into view. She carries something with her, a fairly large object which she transports with the support of both her hands.

The group stares at the younger woman and her cargo, dumbfounded. Amy's mouth drops at the sight before her. Color fades from her face and she whimpers softly before burying her head into her husband's chest. Michael wraps his arms around his wife in an attempt to comfort her.

The Previous Evening

Startled, Thomas rises to his feet as the kitchen door is forced open with a loud cracking sound and the gigantic older woman steps through it before sealing it shut once again. Thomas has spent hours cowering beneath the kitchen table, his back pressed against one of its towering pillar-like legs and his head cradled in his hands, clinging desperately to the hope that his friend would still be alive when the massive woman returned home.

Amanda sighs tiredly and the tiny man watches intently from his vantage point beneath the table as she begins slipping off her pink sneakers. “Finally” she says to herself. She presses the toe section of her right shoe against the heel of her left and her foot slowly slips out from within.

Next, she pushes her right shoe against her left foot, now bare, and works her heel out of the sneaker. She then lifts her foot and gently swings her leg forward, kicking off her other shoe. It lands on its side not far in front of her and she sighs again, though this time it's not a sigh expressing fatigue, but rather one of pleasure. “Ahhhh, it feels soooooo good to get out of those.”

With her feet now free from the confines of her stuffy pink sneakers, Amanda takes a moment to wiggle her liberated toes. She spreads and wriggles them, allowing cool air to pass between them. Satisfied, she flicks the kitchen lights off and turns around before walking through the kitchen and heading off towards her bedroom.

“Goodnight, sweetie!” Amanda says before traveling down the hall.

“Goodnight, Mom!” Claire's voice replies, calling out from elsewhere in the home.

“Please be alive... please be alive... please be alive” Thomas chants to himself as the colossal woman's footsteps recede upon her exit from the room. Though she had turned out the lights, the evening's sky is rather bright, allowing Thomas to see quite well in the massive kitchen. With the danger gone from the room, at least temporarily, Thomas wastes no time. He darts out from beneath the table and runs off towards the pink sneakers in search of his friend.

As he travels across the kitchen, Thomas notices new markings on the linoleum floor. Amanda's perspiring feet have left gigantic footprints in her wake, and they glisten in the moonlight. Thomas runs past several of them from toes to heel on his journey to the sneakers.

He finally reaches them, the right shoe conveniently laying on its side. “Marcus!” he yells. “Marcus, where are you?!” No answer.

Thomas reaches the opening of the overturned shoe and hurriedly climbs his way into the colossal pink footwear. Stepping inside, he finds himself in a sweat-laced inferno. Heat washes over him, radiating from every square centimeter inside the sneaker, covering his tiny body and overwhelming his senses. The scent is overbearing, so incredibly pungent that its power causes his eyes to tear up and nearly brings him to his knees as every breath of air he takes becomes a burden he must endure.

“Marcus!” He yells once more, fighting through the pain. “Marcus... please...”

Several minutes pass, though to Thomas it seems as though an eternity has come and gone as he waits for a response from his friend which never comes. The sweltering heat and the terrible odor continue mercilessly assaulting his body as he stands inside the woman's shoe.

Thomas clenches his fists. He faces reality and abandons his hope of being reunited with his friend. Marcus is gone. Any remains of the man he was have been crushed out of existence beneath the weight of an oblivious older woman. Any final trace, washed away into nothingness by the salty sweat emanating from her feet thanks to the heat of an otherwise normal summer day.

A Few Hours Later

Consumed with excitement, Claire quietly sneaks through her home and makes her way to the front door. She's planned everything so carefully, waited for her mother to return home and given her a few hours as to make sure she's had enough time to fall into a proper sleep. With her hand on the doorknob, she carefully gives it a twist and quietly steps out into the yard.

Carrying a small gardening shovel in her left hand, Claire walks softly across the pavement. She's careful to keep the sound produced by her flip flops down to a minimum. Soon, she finds herself at her destination: Michael and Amy's front yard. She smiles, gazing upon their home standing before her in the light of the moon. Her body still trembling with pure excitement, she sinks her hand into her pocket and extracts Michael's device.

Claire programs her desired settings into the device before extending her arm, shaking in anticipation as she aims for the house. After a deep breath, she closes her eyes and pulls back on the trigger.

When she opens them again, the house has vanished, gone from her sight. She looks down and sure enough, just ahead of her on the ground rests a tiny structure.

Her eyes and mouth open wide as she takes in the sight. She takes a few steps closer and kneels down, pressing her knees into the soft earth. “It's sooooooo cute!” she whispers excitedly.

Just a moment ago, the home towered over her, but now, the entire building is so incredibly dwarfed by her comparatively massive feminine figure. Adrenaline surges through her body. This is the largest thing she's shrunken to date courtesy of the power of Michael's machine, larger even than the bus full of boring little football players, but despite all this, she knows it could still be entirely destroyed in nothing more than a single step.

Not wanting to spend any more time outside and risking getting caught, Claire gets to work. She takes the little gardening shovel she's brought with her and with extreme care she begins digging the tiny home loose from the dirt. When her work is done and she's satisfied with it, using both hands she so very gently plucks the tiny house from the earth, porch and all.

With it cradled safely in the palm of her hands, Claire marvels at her prize. An entire home, constructed by the efforts of a swarm of workers and built for human beings to reside within now rests in her grasp as if it were nothing more than a dollhouse to her, a children's plaything.

Rising to her feet, Claire takes a look at her neighbor's now empty yard and giggles. Very carefully, she begins the journey back to her own home with the much, much smaller house remaining in the palms of her soft hands.

After quietly entering her home, Claire moves silently through the halls so as not to wake her mother as she makes her way to her bedroom. She gently sets Michael and Amy's tiny residence down inside the safety of her closet before closing the door.

Claire sets her alarm for the next morning, ensuring that she will awaken before her mother. With a beautiful bright smile refusing to leave her face, Claire turns out her light and climbs into bed.