“Kickass party, huh?” Jay laughed, roughly nudging his friend Scott Stevens in the arm.

                “Oh, yeah,” Scott agreed semi-drunkenly, taking another sip from his Solo cup.  He sputtered for a moment, then laughed, nearly tripping backwards if not for a table that helped awkwardly catch his fall.  A small splash of beer leapt from the cup and dribbled down his shirt as he laughed harder, clenching his eyes shut and wheezing a little.

                “Jesus, man, what’s with you?  That’s like your third one.”

                “I know, it’s good, right?” Scott slurred.

                “No, but really, I’ve seen you down like eight before you even get like this.  Did you space ‘em out?”

                “Hey, hey… hey… hey…” Scott grumbled jokingly.  “I’m… just fine.  I’m fine.  See me being fine?  It’s just dark in here, sort of, I think…”

                “Yeah… right,” Jay frowned, grabbing his friend’s arm to stop him from tripping backwards again and bumping into a small cluster of girls pushing their way through the mob of people, their voices mostly drowned out by the pounding house mixes hammering out of massive speakers affixed to the walls.  “Look, I think you’ve had enough, dude.  Why don’t you put the drink down?”

                “Relax, I’m not even falling over, or… or…”

                “Well, yeah you are, but also, we’ve got a history exam tomorrow afternoon, remember?”

                “Yeah, so?  I know that stuff.”

                “Fair enough, but if you can’t get yourself up for it and actually be able to think enough to finish it, your grade is fucked, man.  You get it?” Jay insisted.

                Scott nodded, placing the partially spilled Solo cup back on the table and began patting the beer stain on his shirt.  Despite his inebriation, he was able to hear most of the logic in what Jay was saying, even though he didn’t really like it.

                “Yeah, yeah, okay, okay… done.  Done.  See me being done?” Scott groaned with emphasis, holding up his hands to prove they weren’t holding a cup anymore.

                “Yep,” Jay answered, raising an eyebrow.  “Hey, listen man, even if we didn’t have that exam tomorrow… how are you even… you know, like this already?”

                “I don’t… know.  How strong is this stuff?”

                Jay rolled his eyes.  “You’re kidding, right?  This is poor man’s frat water.  You can practically taste the damn yeast floating on the top.”

                “Oh… shit…” Scott frowned, clutching his temple.  “You sure the first one wasn’t just straight vodka or something?”

                “Yeah… pretty sure.  The bar ran out of it like an hour ago, before we even got here, or that’s what they said anyway.  I’m pretty sure Hal’s just had it in for me since we trashed the blowup Christmas things last winter, and he’s been standing up there the whole time, so I don’t know what the deal is, we’re third years and we can’t even get at the good stuff here… but it doesn’t matter.   I mean, you look like you’re gonna puke or something,” Jay said a little louder so his voice could be heard over the music.

                “No, I’m not.  Hey… hey, I’m thinking I’m gonna… I’m gonna…”

                “What?”

                “Head over here,” Scott concluded, burping quietly and pointing shakily to the far side of the room.  “See who’s over there.”

                “Okay, okay.  We should probably ditch this place in like the next hour or so, but whatever.”

                “Coo, see ya, I’m…”

                “Hey, wait.”

                “What?”

                “Don’t get in your damn car.  You’d be stuck halfway up a tree before you even realized it.”

                “No, I wouldn’t.  What the hell?”

                “Seriously. Gimme your keys.”

                “Jay, I’m fine, man.  I’ll be fine.  I’ll be back over in like ten minutes or so.  Go do something.”

                “Yeah, okay,” Jay said with a shrug, looking worriedly at his friend before disappearing into the swarm of party-goers bathed in dim crimson lights from the ceiling.

                “Awesome,” Scott nodded assuredly, pushing somewhat roughly past the people in his way as he crossed the large room, blinking a little more often than normal.  “My keys…”

                “Hey,” a voice behind Scott whispered seductively.  Surprised, the twenty-one-year-old stumbled a little as he turned around to find himself face to face with his girlfriend Ella.

                “Oh my God, what the hell are you… Ella, when did you…” Scott sputtered with a goofy smile.

                “Shhhh… don’t talk in here, I can barely hear you,” Ella smirked, placing a finger over her boyfriend’s lips to quiet him.  “Besides, your breath doesn’t smell so good.”

                “Only my second one,” Scott groaned, leaning in closer to his girlfriend’s face.

                “Yeah… well… could you at least get a stick of gum, or something?  It’s pretty fresh,” Ella said, blinking a little, attempting to not hurt Scott’s feelings.

                “Yeah, yeah, I gotcha.  I think this place sometimes has a little bowl of them up near the bar for before you leave, I’m gonna go… gonna go… grab one,” Scott concluded with some difficulty.  “Don’t move.”

                “Now where the heck would I go?” Ella laughed, crossing her arms as Scott watched her disappear into the crowd.

                “Where’s the g… the gum?” Scott swallowed hard, resting his forearm on the bar.

                “Good God, man, you only got here like an hour ago, did you pregame or something?” the bartender chuckled, sliding the glass bowl of pre-packaged gum sticks over toward Scott.  “You’re done, right?”

                “Yeah, yeah, totally… totally… I’m just doin’ this because…”

                “Meet someone on the dance floor?”

                “Actually,” Scott corrected slowly.  “My girlfriend is here.  She goes to Stark’s Vega U, but she’s here… somehow…”

                “Are… you sure?  Pretty insane for someone to come across the country on a weeknight.”

                “Oh, yeah, totally, she’s way, way over there… somewhere,” Scott frowned, now not entirely sure of where Ella had disappeared to, but he was determined to find her as he tugged the gum stick out of the wrapper and began rapidly chewing, his eyelids beginning to feel heavy.

                “Don’t chew that too fast or all the flavor will be gone,” came a sly voice from behind Scott.  The words were soft and deliberate, yet somehow they managed to cut through the blur of cheers and house music into Scott’s ears.  Sloppily, he shifted his weight and turned around to find himself staring into the crystalline blue eyes of his sixteen-year-old sister Maggie, her fair blonde hair tied back in a ponytail, her tanned arms crossed aggressively as she leaned against a bar stool, smirking with amused self-satisfaction at her older brother.

                Scott’s jaw dropped in confusion, at which Maggie quickly pinched her fingers around her nose.

                “Oh, God, Scott, that’s just… I mean, wow.  Is this all you’ve been doing at college?”

                “Maggie!  I… I mean, no, um… what’s going… what’s going on?  Why… how are you even…”

                “Better close that mouth before someone gets offended at the smell, bro,” Maggie cooed with a grin, pressing her thumb under Scott’s chin to help close his jaw.  “More offended than they already are, anyway.”

                “Did you and Ella come here together?  Seriously, I…” Scott blubbered, but Maggie was no longer paying attention to her brother, and had instead peeked over her shoulder to two co-eds also leaning against the bar chatting and giggling loudly.  Hair straightened and adorned with bits of glitter, black Persian-eye style make-up glossed around their sparkling pupils, they had apparently been getting into the party atmosphere heavily.

                “Hey, you two,” Maggie called to them, getting their attention.  “See this guy?  Next to me?” 

                The pair nodded. 

                “He’s my brother.  My older brother.  And my mom shrinks him all the time and lets me play with him.  I’ve had him in my shoes while I was wearing them so many times it’s like his vacation house.  Like, literally, if you smelled him right now, you’d probably still be able to smell my foot.  Isn’t that hysterical?”

                The pair covered their mouths and chuckled piteously at Scott, their eyes scanning up and down his body before nodding to each other, snickering, and darting off in the other direction.

                “I guess you won’t be going out with them any time soon,” Maggie grinned as she turned back to face the furious-looking Scott, who by now had loosely clenched his fists, his inability to stand tall and intimidating notwithstanding.  “It’s okay.  Their make-up was cheap anyway.”

                “Look, Maggie, just piss off.  You shouldn’t even be in here.  There’s…”

                “...what, drinks?  I know what alcohol looks like, little brother, you don’t have to point it out.  I’m not stupid like you.  I wouldn’t drink it with all these people around.”

                “I’m not your little brother,” Scott scowled, steadying himself on a bar stool.  “Don’t call me that.”

                “Give it time,” Maggie giggled, rolling her eyes.

                “I mean it,” Scott sputtered.  “You… you stupid… stupid…”

                “You’re really gonna try to argue when you’re already just doing your best to not puke on yourself?  Honestly.  I don’t know why Mom bothers paying for you to go to school.”

                “Shut… shut up.  Where’s.  Um, I mean, where’s…”

                “Your weird girlfriend who pretends to like you?”

                “Yeah,” Scott droned, getting angrier but realizing he was in no state of sobriety to deal with his sister’s provoking ramblings.

                “We gotta leave.  I’m done talking to you.  I like it a lot better when you’re back home.”

                “Don’t get ahead of yourself, little brother…”

                “I said stop calling me that.”

                “…as I was saying, don’t get ahead of yourself.  You may be home sooner than you think.”

                “Yeah?  And why’s that?”
                Maggie shrugged toothily, leaning in closer to her brother’s face and bopping him on the nose with her pointer finger.  “Oh, I don’t know.  Just a feeling.  Woman’s intuition.  Whatever they call it.”

                “Yeah, well get your intuition out of my face.  I’m getting Ella and we’re driving back to my apartment,” Scott grumbled.  He shoved his sister’s arm hard out of the way, which only warranted a snicker from her as she wrinkled her cute nose up.

                “I’m not so sure about that.”

                “Who cares what you’re sure about?” Scott challenged as he pulled his keys from his pocket, jangling them dramatically in his fist as he peered blankly back into the throng of partygoers.  “ELLA!  WHERE ARE YOU?”

                “Seriously, Scott, don’t do it.  Don’t be dumb like usual.”

                “ELLA!”

                “Oh… my… God…” a new voice drawled with crippling concern above the pounding music.  Superiority, intelligence, and biting elegance, rolled into one of the most falsely sweet voices that had ever graced Scott’s eardrums.

                “M-M-Mom?” Scott babbled uncertainly.

Scott’s eyes widened with horror as he turned to face his mother Judy Stevens.

                This party was going down the tubes by the second.

                Judy was clad in a crisply cut business suit that showed off her matriarchal curves just enough, her glossy blonde hair done up professionally, her smooth legs given sheen in tight nylons, and her pursed lips plush with intimidating crimson coloring.  Her arms were crossed aggressively, and as always when she was in a bad mood with her eldest son, she was tapping the hard black heel of her shoe in rapid pace against the floor.

                “Scott,” she answered back curtly.

                “Listen, Mom,” Scott groaned, clutching his forehead in an attempt to steady his vision.  “You gotta listen.”

                “I’m listening.”

                “I…”

                “This is what I’m paying for?  I work hard to make sure you and your siblings have all the opportunities in the world to be successes, and what do you do with it?  You just waste it here, getting drunk, maybe doing drugs in the bathroom…”

                “I wasn’t doing drugs, Mom, ask anyone,” Scott mumbled.

                “Be quiet,” Judy snapped, rummaging through her purse. 

                “Mom, I’m… I’m ready for the… the test.  Tomorrow.  I can do it.  I’m fine.”

                Judy began to step closer, letting the clack of her heels ring out miraculously above the roar of the oblivious crowd.  She stopped just a few inches away from her son.  With the added height of her heels, Judy actually was able to look down about an inch into Scott’s fearful eyes.  She simply shook her head before raising a hand toward her son’s face and running her long, firm fingertips over his forehead.

                “You’re sweating, a lot.  How much did you drink?”

                “It’s just hot in here, Mom, relax.”

                “Don’t tell me to relax.”

                “I’m… I’m not… I’m…”

                “It’s all over your breath,” Judy sneered, wrinkling her nose in disgust as she continued glaring down at her son, who was slowly leaning further and further back against the bar.  “Does the disgrace of your own family mean nothing to you?”

                “Sure it does, it’s just…”

                “I’m making a bid for that senate seat later this month.  You do remember that, right?  I’m trying to do something good for this country by entering office, and all you can do is sit here and fill your body with cheap beer.”

                “Mom…”

                “I should’ve known.”

                “What?”

                “I should’ve known you couldn’t handle college.  And I should’ve known you couldn’t handle being independent for this long,” Judy sighed as she finished fishing through her purse and drew out a silver-plated device shaped similarly to a flashlight.

                “Wait… the… the…” Scott sputtered as, even in the dark, he knew all-too-well the shape of his mother’s favorite household tool: the portable matter reduction device. 

                Programmed to shrink any inorganic matter its ray came into contact with, as well as any organic matter identified by the device’s reticle as he or one of his siblings.  Usable only by his mother at any time she saw fit, and generally utilized as a punishment against her children, whom she often judged to be gravely misbehaving and in need of severe involuntary reduction in size to the point that they could’ve fit snugly into the warm palm of her hand.

                That was a feeling Scott knew all too well.

                “I’m not happy that this has become necessary, Scott,” his mother cooed apologetically as she began quickly tinkering with the settings on the device.  “But you’ve forced my hand.”

                “Mom, the… the PMRD is… you can’t use it on me n-n-now…”

                “What are you talking about, sweetie?  It’s still programmed to your DNA, just like always.  Of course I can use it on you.”

                “But I’m not a dependent anymore, I… I… You’re not the boss of me anymore, I mean, legally, you can’t…”

                “Scott.  Really, now.  Who’s the one with the law degree, and who’s the one still dripping beer down the front of his pants?”

                “Mom.  You... you’ve gotta be kidding me…”

                “I’m afraid not.  Believe me, I don’t want to have to do this.  I’d love it if you could just go off on your own and be responsible enough to handle that freedom, but I can see now very clearly that it’s simply not the case,” Judy sighed, pulling the trigger on the device and beaming the short green ray directly at her son’s neck.

                Instantly, the old nightmarish feeling of numbing chill flooded Scott’s skin and bones as he began to shrink immediately.

                “What do you m-m-mean?” Scott peeped as he watched his mother seemingly expand upward while he felt himself dwindle down, the top of his head already below Judy’s belly button.  His mother became like a well-dressed monolith, her features and strong stance imposing as ever.

                “What do I mean?” Judy began with a smile, tilting her head affectionately as she watched her son shrink toward the floor, his clothes becoming larger and baggier around his increasingly diminished body.  She placed a massive palm across the top of his head, easily dwarfing it, and began to calmly knead and ruffle her son’s hair like that of a young child, as though trying to offer comfort.

                She leaned down closer to him and continued whispering.  “What I mean, sweetie, is that you’re coming home.  Where you apparently belong.”

                “WHAT?”

                “With Mommy…”

                By now, Judy’s palm could’ve engulfed her son’s head like a tennis ball.  Rather than do this, though, she began sliding her fingers across his face and hair, disorienting him as he continued his journey towards the floor.

                “Mom, stop!”

                “Who’s the boss of who now, my little boy?”

                As the fully miniaturized Scott disappeared into the huge folds of his formerly usable clothes, he felt his mother’s thick, warm palm settle itself over the front of his body, with her fingers snaking around down his back and legs like smooth tentacles.  He squirmed for a moment, realizing he couldn’t breathe properly with his mom’s hand acting like a huge suction cup to his face.  Fighting seemed out of the question, but just as Scott let his arms hang at his side, his felt Judy’s grip squeezing on him.

                Tighter.  And tighter.

                Gasping now, Scott took to beating his fists against his mother’s fingers, which by now were all twice as thick as each of his legs, to understandably no avail.

                His air supply becoming less and less, Scott felt himself collapsing, almost as if drifting away, cradled on the hammering waves of sound generated by the party’s speaker system.

                Silence.

                The entire world came crashing back into being via Scott’s splitting eardrums and rattled bones all at once.  His frame suddenly convulsing, the impact struck the twenty-one-year-old’s body with massive force that blasted him backward against the surface behind him.

                Not his mother’s giant fingers, but a seat.  A car seat.  A normal-sized car seat.

                Trembling, his world still spinning in his head and trying to catch up with the present moment, Scott realized his hands were so tightly gripped around something that his knuckles had turned bone white, while his fingers were wrapped snugly enough that they’d actually gone numb around the steering wheel he had been holding.

                A car.  In a car.  A car.  His car?

                Definitely his car.  But something was different.  What?
                Scott groaned, coughing, pain in his temple increasing exponentially.  He cried out for a moment as the first burst of it hit him, mostly coming from his head, but also in his joints, which seemed to have taken the greatest brunt of the impact.

                Biting his lip and feeling his eyes flooding involuntarily with tears of pain and fear, Scott tried desperately to think.  To piece some of it together.  Had he blacked out after what was obviously dream of his mother, sister, and girlfriend?  He must have, and yet he somehow had managed to get himself back behind the wheel of his car and get moving.

                Blinking, he looked around out the window, which by now was fogged by smoke from the car’s hood.  Where was he?  He vaguely recognized the street as being about two miles away from the college.

                Fuck.  How long had he been going?

                The drinks.  It had to have been the drinks.

                Yet he’d had so little, how could it be?

                No time to think like that.  Get out.  Have to get out, he thought.  Have to move.

                Movement was a greater challenge than Scott was anticipating as he managed to slam the door open and stumble out onto the wet pavement.  He felt a piece of shattered glass slice along his finger as he righted himself, and winced as he steadied himself with one hand on his throbbing forehead.

                That was when he saw her.  Just about twenty feet from where he stood.

                An unknown woman, lying in the street, hands across her stomach and rubbing frantically back and forth.  From a combination of the moonlight and some dim neon store fronts, Scott could make out blood on her hands.

                Coughing, Scott began to limp forward, realizing his left leg was spotted with deep purple bruises, though apparently not broken.  He stopped just short of her, not wanting to startle her if she was in shock.

                “Miss?” he whispered quaveringly, unsure entirely of what to do.

                “M-M-M…” the woman whimpered, keeping her eyes closed, tears flowing down her cheeks.  Her elbows seemed to be bloody, as were the backs of her legs from the impact of hitting the street.

                It took Scott a full thirty seconds of standing blankly over her to realize he had hit her with his car right before crashing, himself.

                Never in his life had he felt so helpless, and he had had plenty of moments in his life to feel helpless before.  Nothing compared to this.

                “What is it?” Scott moaned painfully, rummaging through his pant pockets for his phone to call for help.  “What?”

                “M-M-M… My…”

                “Your what?”

                “My… My ba…” she cried, stopping short of finishing the word as she continued to rub her stomach, though Scott already knew what she was going to say as he realized the woman’s stomach was rounded in a way that could only mean one very distinct thing.  In the odd lighting, he hadn’t noticed it before, but now it was plain as day.

                As he heard the sound of sirens and the blue and red lights flashing far down the street on their way over, Scott realized his helplessness record had been beaten in the same minute-long span.

“Mr. Stevens?  Mr. Stevens, are you still with us?”

                “What?  Sorry… yes.  Yes, your honor,” Scott answered suddenly, snapped from his dazed stupor as he sat in the defendant’s seat of the crowded courtroom.  He could feel the cold sweat in his sensible dress shirt and jacket brought on by the excessive nerves.  Time seemed to be flying by at an excessive rate and he could hardly keep up consciously, let alone process it all effectively.

                It had been only a month since the drunken Scott had swerved in his car and hit a woman who happened to be eight months pregnant and not only managed to break her ankle and cause severe bruising but also end the unborn fetus’s existence.

                Considering his mother’s rising political status, Scott’s crime had generated a relative media circus for the city.  However, even through the blur of newspaper photographers trying to catch the perfect incriminating shot of Scott’s sleep-deprived face, or the influx of hate mail he had started receiving, he had been unable to make it real in his mind.

                “Try to stay with us.  I’m sorry if your own sentencing hearing is boring you, but we’re almost through,” the judge droned, clearly fighting back distaste for Scott as much as he could, although he seemed to have a tough time doing so.

                “Yes, your honor.”

                “Good.  Now, given the… unusual circumstances of this sentencing hearing in conjunction with the recently altered clauses discussed yesterday, for the benefit of those present and the record, the district attorney has asked that a summarized outline of Mr. Stevens’ sentencing in this case be read.  Bailiff?”

                Scott’s ears perked up, mostly out of nervousness, but he was nonetheless present in this moment.

                Judy had been working overtime with a couple of partners from her law firm to ensure Scott avoided the more severe penalty that the prosecution for the pregnant woman was seeking.  Once Scott’s guilt had been quickly determined based on some significant incriminating evidence, it came down to the sentencing, which ultimately came down as what sounded to Scott like a victory.

                In a rather curt conversation with her son the night before, Judy announced that she had managed to get him out of jail time by utilizing a legal loophole that she, in fact, had helped get passed as a law: a loophole that essentially would allow Scott to go under house arrest, for a time less than he would’ve been in prison, no less.

                Scott was well-familiar with his mother’s political activism and works, knowing that she had been the one to bring about the law allowing dependents to be shrunken by their parents or guardians.  It was a fact that had instilled a deep hatred of his mother over the years, yet now, hearing her explain how she’d managed to keep him out of jail, against the bitter wishes of half the city, he couldn’t help but feel conflicted.

                To Scott, it was like hearing he’d just won the lottery, and for the first time in a long time, he had felt genuine appreciation toward his mother.

                Now, finally, he would hear the specifics of this house arrest that Judy had mentioned and maybe begin the long journey out of this whole ugly mess.  There was still a long road ahead that he wasn’t looking forward to, but at least he wasn’t going behind bars.  Against all odds, Scott breathed a sigh of relief and waited patiently.

                The bailiff handed the judge a manila folder, which was opened and glanced over by the balding bespectacled judge as he adjusted his glasses.  Finally, clearing his throat, he began to read.

                “Again, keep in mind that these are simply summarizations for the better education of those present.  We begin.  Article 1, regarding circumstances of size of the sentenced.  The sentenced must remain at a height of no more than one foot, or twelve inches, and no less than one inch.  This is non-negotiable under any circumstances but medical emergencies, the details of which can be found along with the fuller explanation of the ruling.”

                Scott felt a lump the size of a basketball forming in his throat, and he almost managed to choke on thin air.

                What?

                “Article 2, regarding supervision of the sentenced.  The sentenced, being assigned as a dependent in the case of this hearing, will have expanded compatibility from his or her supervisors with regards to the Techilogic MRD, or Matter Reduction Device, Portable or standard.  This is to say that all under the same household as the sentenced will be given access to his or her size range, in order to maintain a high standard of cooperation and rehabilitation from the sentenced.”

                Scott felt queasiness worse than a month ago when he’d drunkenly sealed his own fate.  All under the same household had control?

                That meant his sister and brother both could operate the PMRD now.

                Shit.

                “Article 3, regarding household arrest of the sentenced.  The sentenced will wear a specialized device to track his or her whereabouts or, if need be, pacify the sentenced.  The device is to be programmed with a home beacon, the range of which is to be determined given the size of the household.”

                Scott turned and tried to make eye contact with his mother, who was in her best business suit and pressed skirt, although her vision was glued to the judge, a solemn expression on her face.

                How could she not even look at him?  How?

                “Article 4, regarding recesses from the household arrest of the sentenced.  The sentenced may leave the house no more than once every one hundred sixty-eight hours, or one week, for no more than one hundred eighty minutes, or three hours, under the supervision of one of his or her household caretakers in possession of a portable home beacon, the range of which is to be no more than one hundred twenty inches, or ten feet, from the sentenced.”

                As Scott continued looking backward at the crowd, he could feel the angry and satisfied eyes of them all shifting onto him.  It was only his mother who remained perfectly still and emotionless, staring ahead and upward at the judge on his podium as he continued reading.

                Just a little to his mother’s left, he saw his younger brother and sister, Kyle and Maggie.

                Kyle, in a new dress shirt, looked very serious, his head hanging down and his gaze inconspicuously on the floor, clearly trying to hide shame for a sibling he’d looked up to for most of his youth.

                Maggie, however, instantly made eye contact with Scott, a cheesy grin spread across her face.  She clearly had put some work into getting her cute blonde hair done up for the event, and her formal blue summer dress looked radiant on her.  Like she’d gussied herself up specifically in celebration.

                And now, upon hearing that not only Judy but she as well as Kyle were in legal charge of Scott, she certainly had a reason to do so.

                Scott narrowed his eyes at her angrily for her glee.

                She responded simply by raising her left hand up just high enough that Scott could see it, and began playfully “walking” her pointer and middle finger through the air, simulating a person’s gait.

                After a moment, Scott could tell precisely which person she was simulating, as her other hand swooped into view and grabbed up her own fingers in a fist.

                A preview.  Or, as Scott continued to watch Maggie gripping her hand as a stand-in for his entire body, he knew it was more of a warning.

                He quickly turned around, not wanting to look for too long back at his evidently joyful sister, for fear of becoming more anxious than he already was, although given what had been read already, he was just about ready to vomit.

                “Article 10,” Scott heard the judge read.  In his nervous delirium, Scott realized he had missed a chunk of the pointers.  Not that it mattered much, given how thoroughly his fate was already sealed.

                He knew his mother would ensure he knew all of them far better than he would ever have hoped by the time this day was over.

                “The sentenced will undergo the reduction in size, and be under the immediate watch of one of his guardian supervisors before leaving the premises,” the judge finished, clearing his throat.  “A complete detailing of the sentencing can be found in the public files.  Hearing is adjourned.”

                The gavel smacked the judge’s podium with conclusive force, causing Scott to wince and disappear into another haze.

The hustle and bustle of the exiting crowd behind him, as well as the snapping and flashing of journalists’ cameras, weren’t enough to shake Scott from the sheer surrealism of the moment as he stared blankly at the tabletop before him.  Only when the bailiff’s hand roughly patted his shoulder to handcuff him again and return him to the holding cell did Scott even manage some kind of above-average brain function.

                When Scott arrived, walking at a dejected snail’s pace, back to the holding cell, he felt a chilling flutter in his heart to see his family waiting for him.  Kyle and Maggie stood obediently outside the cell, while Judy herself, looking as professional and intense as ever, was seated calmly in a chair behind the bars.

                Stepping inside the door of the cell, Scott’s hands were uncuffed and he found himself awkwardly standing in front of his mother.  With a thigh crossed over a knee, Judy had one large hand tucked into her purse, with her other running her fingers through her glossy blonde hair.  Her plump red lips puckered with impatience as she at long last made eye contact with her son.

                “Scott…” she breathed slowly, incredible neutrality pervading her tone, given what had just taken place.

                Scott felt his hand quivering, rage bubbling up inside, but he bit his lower lip, managing to hold it in.  In all the years of his life, through all the humiliation and borderline abusive shrinking punishments at the hands of his mother, the young man had felt such bitter resentment and even hatred for Judy.  This was the first time he actually had the urge to slap her.  Hard.

                Now was not the time.

                If there ever was one again.

                “Mom,” Scott responded dryly, shifting back and forth in his clunky dress shoes.

                Slowly, Judy’s hand began to slide out of her purse, as if drawing a gun from its holster, and indeed, she had the PMRD brandished in her fingers.  Scott tried not to let the nausea take over.

                “It may be uncomfortable for you very soon.  In that outfit, I mean.  If you like, you can strip down…”

                Behind him, Scott heard Maggie snicker heartily, but he fought the urge and turn and scowl.

                “…to your shorts, I was saying,” Judy continued, ignoring her daughter’s small outburst.  “But it’s your choice.”

                Scott understood, and although he hated the idea it, he knew he’d regret it later if he remained where he was like an over-dignified sphinx and let his mother shrink him while still in his dress clothes.  He quickly began unbuttoning the jacket, shirt, and pants, as well as kicking off the shoes, and in a matter of moments, Scott was down to only his white undershirt and checkered boxer shorts.

                “Mom, I…” Scott croaked, his throat dry, as he looked up at his mother, just in time to feel the green flash of the PMRD momentarily sting his pupils with the brightness.  He blinked, grunting with discomfort, as Judy ran the beam down his body, ensuring his clothes were zapped as well.

                By the time Judy had carefully deposited her favorite tool back into her large black leather purse, Scott was feeling the cold chill of the holding cell against his skin.  He looked outward through the impossible vastness of the bars to see his towering siblings.  Kyle had his back turned and his arms crossed, clearly embarrassed by the situation.

                Maggie, on the other hand, had her fingers between the bars of the cell, the same victorious grin on her soft face, unbridled glee in her eyes as she preened condescendingly down at her brother.  She rippled her fingers around the edges of the unmoving metal bars as though simulating grabbing them up into her fists.  It was clear she was incredibly eager to live out this action.

                Although he couldn’t be certain, from looking ahead at the jet-sized pumps adorning his mother’s stocking-clad legs, Scott guessed he was around an inch tall.

                It figured Judy would take full advantage of the smallest legal size at which they could keep him.

                Scott wrapped his arms around his stomach, already feeling cold, when the full impact of the moment hit him that, for the foreseeable future and even probably some of the unforeseeable, he wasn’t going to get significantly taller than this.

                Finally, Judy gazed down at her reduced offspring and pursed her lips, folding her hands in her lap for a moment after her purse was snapped back shut.

                “Scott, we discussed it in the car on the way here, and… well, I was going to carry you out, but there’s going to be a lot of press outside.  It might get a little much.  I mean, they’re going to be jostling us around on the way to the car.  You know?”

                Scott shook his head, keeping his face tilted toward the ground immediately after hearing what Judy had to say.  He could hear the booming giggles of his little sister off to the side and far above.

                He bit his lip.  What had this all come to?  What had his years of being punished so severely by his restrictive mother led to?  He had gained the independence he so craved after years of her sickly-sweet version of parental oppression, and after his time spent in college, he had felt safe.  Secure.  Like nothing from his past could get close to him again.  He had made it.

                He thought.

                It had been so easy to believe for so long that he had escaped.  That it was all over.

                He heard the familiar clomping sound of Judy’s pump falling onto its side on the concrete as she casually slipped it off her foot.

                Scott dared raise his eyes just enough to stare across the expanse of floor between himself and his Olympian-proportioned mother in her chair.  Her newly freed right foot, swollen slightly from the tightness of the heels all day, rested weightily within the skin-tight stockings, her toenails scraping softly against the fabric.

                As she scrunched her toes for relief against the concrete, the brushing of the stockings against the floor seemed almost to screech in Scott’s ears with warning.

                “It’ll just be until we can get home, Scott.  Then we’ll figure out some new arrangements, okay?” Judy continued sternly, more so than Scott had ever heard her speak before.  She couldn’t even be bothered to put up the front of sugary affection she normally did while carrying out her favorite PMRD-powered justice.  “I’ll make sure to favor my other foot.”

                And somehow, deep within, despite all the fear and confusion, after what he’d done, Scott knew he couldn’t entirely blame her for her tone.

                Scott held unflinchingly still as his mother’s titanic thumb and pointer finger zoomed in to snatch him up from the floor like a dropped bobby pin.

                “I want him!” Maggie called loudly from the backseat.  “Give him to me, Mom!”

                “We just started driving, honey.  Why do you want to see your brother already?”

                “Because, my foot hurts.  I bumped my pinky toe during practice yesterday.” 

                “Didn’t you change your shoes before we left the courthouse?  I know you hate those heels.”

                “I did.  It still hurts!” The sixteen-year-old tugged her left heel off and let it plop to the floor, then proceeding to pull on her stocking until it slipped tautly off the ends of her thick toes.  Wriggling her newly freed digits with a sigh, she crossed her ankle across her other knee and began kneading at her pink, marshmallowy sole with her thumbs.  It was still swollen from a hard day of drills on the soccer field the day before, and with each revolution of her fingers, the girl moaned with slight comfort.

                With so many tough practices, she had missed her brother while he was away at college.

                Or more accurately, she had missed his tiny shrunken hands massaging her sore body like her own personal servant.

                “Shut up already,” Kyle Stevens scowled at his older sister from the front seat as he fumbled with his cell phone in his lap, hardly paying anyone else present any attention.  “Nobody cares about your stupid toes.”

                “Yeah, well, Scott will.  He’ll have to.  It’s his job now,” the girl retorted, slamming her bare foot hard onto the carpeted floor of the car.

                “And just what are you planning to have your brother do?” Judy snickered in spite of herself, already very clear on what her daughter meant, but feeling far too amused to stop the conversation.

                “I need him to rub it for me.  It stings when I walk on it.”

                “Don’t be silly.  He’d never be able to stand still enough to do that, not on a road this bumpy, at least.  It wouldn’t be safe for him.  He’s only an inch tall right now.”

                “Easy, then,” Maggie simpered, crossing her arms and pursing her lips.  “I’ll just stuff him in my shoe, so he doesn’t go anywhere.”

                “Now, now,” Judy soothed.  “We don’t ‘stuff’ anyone into anything.  We’re not looking to have injuries on our hands here, right?”

                “Yeah, I guess.  So, I’ll cradle him real slow into my shoe like a little baby.  How’s that?” Maggie whined, sarcastically chewing over her correction as she batted mindlessly at the short ends of her silky blonde hair with her fingertips.

                It was just like old times for Scott.  Shrunken, hidden out of sight and out of mind, within earshot of people loudly making decisions for him as though he were a stupid farmyard animal on a chain about to be marched behind the barn to be made into dinner, rather than a human being with feelings and cognitive listening skills.

                “Mmm… maybe later, sweetie.  Those shoes you brought might not be very safe for him, though,” Judy added at length.  “I let you get them because they were cute, but you and I both know you’re almost a half size bigger than those.”

                Obviously, Judy had considered overlooking this fact for a moment.

                “Yeah, so?  You’ve had him in your heels before, and they’re pretty tight.  It’ll be like a vacation for him to be in my shoes.”

                “Patience, honey.  I’m driving.  There’s no safe way to get him out of there.  You can spend some time with your brother when we get home.  I promise.”

                “Can I climb up and take your shoe off and get him out?  I promise I’ll be careful,” Maggie wheedled as sweetly as possible, keeping her voice high enough that it boomed cleanly through the thick fabric of Judy’s heels and heavily into Scott’s tiny eardrums. 

                Her determination to have her turn with her shrunken brother sooner rather than later was burning more urgently in her voice.

                Scott shuddered hearings his sister’s voice.  He knew she was shouting like that just so he could hear loud and clear.  It was purely for his detriment.  Just to get him good and scared, so that by the time they got home and his mother decided to trade him off to his no-doubt plotting sister, he’d just curl up for her like a frightened mouse and let her do whatever she pleased with him without complaint.  He’d be far too out of it to come up with any sort of rebellion.

                Not that rebellion was going to be possible in his state.

                Whenever his mother shrunk him for misbehaving, she always promised to grow him back once the punishment was over.  While she occasionally extended it beyond the original agreement, the time did indeed always come when he was allowed to regrow and feel like a human being again, rather than an odor eater ball in someone’s shoe.

                This time, there was no promise of growing back to normal at the end of this punishment.  That had always been the light at the end of the tunnel every time Scott had endured this humiliation in his teen years. 

                But not anymore.

                Now, as he cowered at an inch tall, tucked “safely” under his forty-four-year-old mother’s dark stocking-clad toes in a pair of her favorite heels, he was filled with a paralyzing sense of dread and loss at the idea that no freedom would come to him after this shrunken stint was over.

                And this time, it wasn’t just at the idea of being stepped on at an awkward enough angle that would snap his bones under the crushing pressure of a row of femininely maintained toes, which happened to be painted a seductive dark purple (Judy’s favorite color).

                All he had to look forward to when he finally emerged from his mother’s shoe was being passed into the incapable and bratty fist of his younger sister, who would proceed to stuff him into a soccer cleat and keep it on around the house just for the satisfaction of wearing her older sibling as a secret accessory. 

                This wasn’t even a cruel usage of a technicality on Judy’s part.  This was a sentence handed down from on high by people that would make the punishment a good deal more severe if Scott stepped out of line.

                And judging by some of the death glares Scott had received from the judge and crowd behind him, he had a feeling anything his mother or sister could cook up for him would be small potatoes compared to what the law thought he deserved.

                “Can you pipe down, Maggie?  Mom’s like right there,” Kyle groaned.

                “Or maybe Kyle would like a turn to spend time with Scott here?” Judy suggested brightly.

                “No!  They’re like friends, he wouldn’t even PUNISH HIM!” Maggie blurted in protest, stamping her other foot hard against the car mats, clearly incensed with the mere thought of Scott not being put through the wringer for any given amount of time.

                “Well, hold on, honey, the goal isn’t necessarily to… punish… your brother every waking moment.  It’s to keep an eye on him, give him some time to think about what he’s done, and remind him of his place in society.  Make sure he stays out of trouble, and… employ his maintenance services from time to time,” Judy explained.

                As she did so, she curled her plump toes down a little harder on her son’s body, flicking them down against his legs and hips playfully and compressing him in rhythm against the well-worn leather base.  “Isn’t that right, sweetie?” she cooed downward toward the floor in direct address of her eldest son.

                Scott gritted his teeth as he felt his muscles straining against the tightly squeezing pressure of his mother’s stocking-stretched toes caving down on him.  The warmth of her skin, stagnant-smelling already from half a day of walking around, captured like a vile plague in the fabric of the stocking, spread itself over every corner of the shoe’s baking interior.

                He tried not to cough out his last gasp of air as his mother’s third toe mashed itself into his stomach like an industrial piston and settled in comfortably down on him, restricting his airflow severely.

                They were just going to “employ” his maintenance services, Judy had said.

                Knowing his mother, she would be employing his maintenance services the same way that an alcoholic employed cheap beer.

                “How about it, Kyle?” Judy continued, clearing her throat and finally letting up the increased pressure on her warm toes, which allowed Scott a moment to breath normally again.  “Want some quality time with your brother?”

                “But you have to wear him in your shoe!” Maggie cackled gleefully.  “No!  In your sock.”

                Scott shuddered at the very notion of having yet another family member literally kick him around in a shoe, but felt relieved to hear his younger brother snort in abject disgust at Maggie’s commentary.

                “God, no.  What the crap is wrong with you?” Kyle sneered.  “I never got why you guys did that.  It would be like having a cockroach crawling all over your foot.”

                Scott felt mildly and oddly hurt by the latter half of Kyle’s answer that compared him to an insect, but it was easily outweighed by the teen’s opinion on Maggie and Judy’s favored hiding place for him.

                “Fine,” Maggie sighed.  “I just get all of his turns with our little brother, then, I guess.”

                “Now, Maggie,” Judy corrected slowly.  “Just because he’s going to be a lot shorter and weaker than you for the foreseeable future doesn’t make him your little brother, and I want you to treat him as such.  Okay?”

                “Whatever,” Maggie shrugged with feigned disinterest.  The heavy air of annoyance in her voice made it perfectly clear to Scott she was just trying to close out the conversation rather than actually acknowledge in any way, shape, or form that he was still her “big” brother. 

                Even at his normal size, Scott knew she hadn’t thought of him like that for a very long time.

                “Ah, here’s the shortcut back road.  It looks like they opened it up again after they cleared that tree away from the storm!” Judy noted with delight, turning the car slowly onto a rockier patch.  “This should let us shave at least five minutes off.”

                “Whoop-dee-doo,” Kyle muttered under his breath.

                “It’s about to get a little bumpier here, everyone,” Judy announced as the car began bouncing lightly along the gravelly road.  “Seatbelts on?”

                “Mom, you’re gonna make me sick,” Maggie droned with annoyance, leaning her head back against the seat and closing her eyes.  “And I’ve got practice in like an hour.  I don’t wanna puke in front of everyone.”

                “No need for melodrama, honey.  It’s only a few minutes, and we’ll get there faster.”

                “You’re probably gonna pulverize him on this road,” Kyle interjected, nodding his head in the direction of Judy’s shoe and its tiny occupant, but still not taking his eyes off his phone.

                “Oh.  Scott.  I almost forgot,” Judy gasped with a wince before leaning her face closer to the carpet again.  “Scott, sweetie?  Maybe you should hang on to my stocking so you don’t get rattled too much.”

                “This wouldn’t have happened if you had just let me put him in my shoe…” Maggie muttered, rolling her eyes.

                Sighing deeply, Scott knew it was in his best interests to take his mother’s advice, mostly because he remembered this road was particularly bumpy, but also for the simple reason that she had him curled underneath her warm toes so precariously to begin with.  He scrunched himself up and began shifting himself steadily under the still-omnipotent weight hanging above him.

                At least she had changed her mind about the shoes and transferred him to her left heel, rather than the one working the gas and brake pedals. 

                After making this optimistic observation, though, Scott had to stop and remind himself that there still wasn’t much to be thankful for here.

                Scott felt his mother’s meaty toes parting above his face through the stocking as much as the leathery interior of the heel would allow, which let a quick burst of cooler air into the shoe, intermingling with the pungent aroma of sweaty leather and lotion-lubed flesh. 

                Coughing under his breath, he gulped and bunched up as much of the taut stocking fabric into his hands as he could for support.  Finally, hating every movement involved, he hugged himself to it for better stability, just as the car really started bumping on the rocky road.

                The shortcut road took less than five minutes to drive through, although it felt like nearly triple that to Scott.  Each bounce of the road pressed his inch-tall body even harder up into his mother’s gargantuan toe.  His head felt like it was being lightly smashed into the center of the soft, greasy toe print.  Like Judy was leaving her signature on her little son’s face with each bounce in the road.

                On the downside of each bounce in the road, Scott was jammed harder down into the plush leather.  Judy either neglected to or didn’t seem to care about the weight of her toe down on her son, because without fail it came back down on Scott’s chest like a weighted beanbag chair.  If anything, the woman seemed to be scrunching her toe across Scott’s body harder with each bounce.

                On each impact, he’d wheeze with increasing volume, hoping Judy would get the hint, but no change was made.

                He dug his fingers into the tougher sides of stocking around the big toe, feeling residue of old sweat and fuzzy thread ends from recently worn nylons pressing into his palms and invading his body with their early summer stink.

                It wasn’t long before the scent had soaked itself thoroughly into his meager clothes, leaving a sticky coating up and down his body, practically making him one with his mother’s toes, and so Scott gave up for the remainder of the trip, keeping his arms wrapped uncomfortably tightly against his mother’s toe. 

                As the car finally pulled into the driveway and the sloped curb was hit by the tires, the strongest bounce of all was experienced.  Scott was pressed so hard into the softened underside of his mother’s scrunched toe that he felt his crotch bending at a painful angle through his pants against her stocking.  He let out a screech of pain that went mostly ignored, except for a raised eyebrow and a grin from Maggie in the backseat, who had been listening quite intently for any sound effects from Judy’s little passenger.

                “All right, everybody.  And especially Scott,” Judy smiled widely, putting the car in park and unlocking the doors.  “Welcome home.”

                Even as Scott felt his mother’s gargantuan middle toe lifting off of his stomach in the dank tip of her massive leather heel, finally allowing regular oxygen flow into his lungs, it took him a while to start breathing normally.  He had been experiencing the overpowering strength of Judy’s toeprint through the dark stockings tapping absentmindedly against his chest with the weight of dozens of sandbags, and he had long ago resorted to barely inhaling tiny gulps of air, in order to prevent the muscles in his abdomen from becoming too sore for him to move.

                He waited breathlessly for a few seconds as he found himself alone once again in his mother’s shoe.  Admittedly, any sort of break from his usual five pink and pudgy sausage-shaped roommates was a usually a good thing, but at this moment, Scott was even more mortified.  It meant a conversation was coming up.

                The conversation.

                From the point when she’d placed him in her shoe at the courthouse and driven home without many direct words to her tiny son, Judy had treated Scott with a cold yet almost ambivalent negligence.  Her toes had hammered aggressively against his body as he rested under them in her shoe, but that was normal.  There had to be something more coming.

                It worried Scott immensely.  The last time he had come anywhere near to committing such a crime of social justice as this was the summer six years ago when he’d egged the house of a sports rival with a group of friends.  Judy had read him the riot act twice over.  In fact, he was almost certain she had improvised some additions to the riot act.  Unless, of course, the original riot act included a clause about said rioter being plastered to the sunbaked skin underneath his mother’s foot and continually slapped against the rubber insole of a flip-flop she was dangling off a pool chair.

                Scott knew better than to clamber out of the shoe himself.  At one inch tall, the descent from the mouth of the shoe would be technically possible down the front slope, but far more treacherous than it was worth.  Judy knew this, and had obviously left him there purposefully to stew in his own thoughts.

                At one point, the monumental palm of Judy’s hand, which to the one-inch-tall Scott was practically the size of a circus tent canopy, came into view and blotted out the light, robust feminine fingers clutching the shoe on either side.

                Scott tensed his core and prepared for liftoff as the shoe was carried weightlessly through the air.  He couldn’t even see Judy’s face as she laid the shoe down and her hand flew out of sight again, though he had a hunch he was now parked on top of her bedside table, because of the loud clack he’d heard from the spike of the heel hitting the wood.

                The ceiling visible through the opening of the shoe above seemed marginally closer, although to Scott it still seemed like looking up at an infinite morning sky.  After this transference to the table, though, nothing else happened.

                She was going to let him stick it out a little longer.  Great.

                Scott tried to focus on the faint sounds from the rest of the house that he could perceive from this higher vantage point.  There wasn’t much, given the way his mother’s padded shoe acted as a sounding board.  By closing his eyes and holding his breath, though, Scott was able to pick up on enough.  A few seconds worth of listening proved to him that he wished he hadn’t heard at all.

                “But Mom, you said I could!” Maggie whined loudly from somewhere outside the room.  “You promised.”

                “I know I did, honey, but you’ve got practice right now, and…”

                “Then I’ll take him with me!  He can ride along in my cleat.”

                “I think we’re going to hold off on that for now.  Remember, he can only leave the house once a week?  I’d prefer you took him somewhere without quite so much kicking,” Judy responded.

                “But Mom…” Scott’s sister groaned again, audibly stomping her feet.  Despite being sixteen years old, she had never fully outgrown her brattier elementary years.  “…I’ve waited so long to be able to play with him.  It’s not fair.”

                “Just relax and go to practice, Maggie.  I’ll worry about what’s fair.  You can see your brother later.”

                “But then I’ve got Ashlynn’s party later, and I’m not taking my lame little brother to…”

                “Big brother, honey.”

                “…whatever.  Lame big brother to the party.”

                “Well, then, I guess it’ll just be me and Scott tonight.  You can catch up with him tomorrow morning.  Now come on, move along, before you’re late again,” Judy said, before quickly adding.  “And I want to know there are going to be adults at that party, all right?”

                Scott breathed the most tentative sigh of relief, but with the end of his family’s conversation, the cold silence settled cumberously back in.

                The waiting was unbearable.  Beads of anxious sweat collected on his brow and the nape of his neck, although it was already hard to tell how much of it was his and how much of it had been slathered unceremoniously across his body from between his mother’s toes.

                During the drive home, Judy’s dark stockings had accumulated a colossal amount of sweat that had collected distinctly into crescent shapes in the fabric crevice between each digit.  As her massive foot shifted from side to side, kneading the heavy liquid-laden stocking fibers along Scott’s body in a rough scrubbing motion, he developed stinging rug burns that were quickly soaked up with salty residue trickled from between his mother’s tremendous toes.

                To say the least, his nerves weren’t helping matters at all.  Sure, he’d dodged a bullet in the form of Maggie’s busily occupied evening for the moment, but for how many days was that little get-out-of-jail card going to save him?  His mother would only be able to say no so many times before the rebellious Maggie would just scoop her tiny brother up when no one was looking and take him anyway.

                Off in the distance through the house’s walls, he could hear the car squealing off down the driveway.  He was safe from Maggie for now.

                His mother, however, was an entirely different story.

                Judy’s immense face finally appeared in the opening of the shoe.  Her long blonde hair was slick from a fresh shower, and she was wringing a towel the size of a parachute around it as she stared down into the footwear, her face completely stoic and calm as she slid her long fingers through wisps of wet hair, raining down a soft mist into the shoe with each pass.

                For a second, Scott’s heart leapt back into overdrive.  The talk was coming.  He knew it.  At long last.

                It wasn’t even the accompanying punishment of her words that Scott fully feared anymore.  Being jammed between his mother’s enormous toes or under her vast, creased sole was a hell he had endured countless times before, and though he hated it with passion like nothing else in his life, it was predictable.  He had learned the tricks necessary to endure with his body and mind intact.

                But at this moment, as mother and son made eye contact through the relatively narrow frame of Judy’s shoe opening, nothing could be expected.  Scott tried not to tremble as he stared into the blank visage of his mother’s deeply swirling eyes.

                Still nothing happened.  Swallowing hard and deciding to make the first tentative move, Scott began crawling steadily up the velvety incline of the shoe.

                The surface was slightly greased with sweat leaked from his mother’s gracefully arched sole, though this coating was beginning to harden into more of a sticky film, making the climb easier for the tiny lad.

                He reached the top and placed his hands against the hardened backing of the shoe, trying to get the best glimpse of the towering behemoth that made up his mother outside.  He could barely see anything above her stomach level from his position on the table, but as his eyes traced up her tightly wound hot pink bathrobe and toward her neck, still glinting faintly with dampness from the shower so far above, he could feel the sickness creeping into him.

                He almost felt nauseous, and he didn’t even have a monstrous set of toes sweating like greasy pigs onto his battered body.

                God, why wouldn’t she just do something?

                “Are you going to put these back on?” Scott called out at last, the words coming out less like a question and more like a wandering utterance of barely quelled horror.  His throat was so dry he could barely disconnect each word.

                Judy raised an amused eyebrow and changed the direction she was twirling the towel around her hair to dry off.  She smirked.  “Do you want me to, honey?”

                What the hell kind of game was she playing?  Scott frowned a little, but Judy looked totally serious in her question.

                “No thanks.”

                “Thought so,” Judy said, finally pulling the towel away from her damp hair and tossing it out of sight with a flop onto the bed.  “Now why don’t you come out of there so mommy can see you better?”  Her hand quickly lowered toward the shoe opening after releasing the towel, her thumb and middle finger descending into the warm hovel of her heel again and shrouding Scott in complete shadow with her palm looming ominously above him like a maternal UFO.

                Scott held perfectly still as the two walls of finger flesh the size of peachy mattresses closed in on either side of him, allowing them to overtake his inconsequential weight like that of a paper clip and bring him soaring into the air and out of the shoe.  He had learned long ago he was far better off just trusting his motion to Judy’s careful and surprisingly loving grip on his brittle form. 

                Still, it was hard not to shake as the ground that had already been far below seemed to spin downward into a vortex of blurred carpet fuzz.  As Judy held her son pinched between her supple fingertips at chest height for a few agonizing seconds, Scott was treated to the stomach-churning sight of the drop to the ground.

                The fuzz of the luxurious pink robe poked out invitingly around the rotund landscape of Judy’s covered breasts, but as Scott’s vision traced the spiral downward toward the ground and to Judy’s freshly washed bare feet, it felt like the carpet had become an entirely zoomed out view of Google Maps, apparently under attack by a colossal Judy.

                Scott shut his eyes and tried not to let his shaking become known to Judy, but this was quickly remedied as he felt himself being placed in the safely leveled center of his mother’s massive palm.

                This had to be it.  As soon as he looked back into those imperative eyes, Scott knew a vocal tirade would be unleashed against him unlike any he had experienced before.  His mother’s background in legal practice had made her a formidable persuasive speaker, and when she had her debate victim cowering in the very center of her palm at an inch tall, there wasn’t much hope of avoiding total emotional wreckage.

                Scott tried to bide his time as long as possible.  Rather than peeking upward, he crossed his legs together and began gazing across the smooth, creamy surface that sloped into a fleshy dune at the heel of his mother’s hand near her thumb.  One of the three major creases in her hand was directly beneath his rear end, and Scott chose to look directly down at it, tracing the squishy indent with his eyes and counting the seconds until he was forced to look up.

                It didn’t take long.

                “Scott, honey,” Judy drawled warmly, her voice collected and steady, her thumb delicately pressing itself against her diminutive son’s back to get his attention.  “We need to have a little chat.”

                Scott’s whole body tensed as his mother’s tremendous thumb stroked his back, applying just enough pressure to shake him from his daze.

                “Did you hear me?” she repeated softly as she slid her finger back up her son’s torso and rested it against his thin shoulders.

                Her booming yet still somehow controlled words reverberated uncomfortably in the eardrums of his one-inch tall body, and he tried not to show it, though he was certain her skin was sensitive enough to feel his shoulders trembling.

                “No need to be nervous, sweetie,” she explained.  “I just want us all to be on the same page with how things will work around here from now on.  You, me, Maggie, and Kyle.”  Slowly, keeping her hand as steady as possible to spare Scott the turbulence, Judy took a seat on her bed just behind the pair of them and crossed her right leg over her left to get comfortable.  “I know you heard loud and clear what the court says for you, but we’re going to have some extra rules around here.”

                Scott wasn’t even surprised enough to feel deflated in the slightest.  He could’ve expected nothing less.  Maybe this was where she would get him with whatever it was he knew she had to be planning.  Frankly, he preferred she just got it over with so he could have some relief from the gnawing suspense.

                “We haven’t really had time to put your room back together since you got back from the university, but I don’t think it would matter much, since you can’t really reach the top of the bed on your own anyway.  So, Kyle’s putting together a little doll bed for you that we’ll set on the couch in the living room.  Okay?”

                “Okay.”

                “Let’s see, what else?” Judy tittered.  “Now, because we can’t really be watching out for you every minute of every day, most of the time I’m going to keep you at twelve inches tall.”

                Scott was actually pleasantly surprised with this decree.  Being his maximum height of one foot for the majority of this house arrest was going to make things considerably easier.

                Of course, he assumed she was just trying to butter him up with a positive point before she decided to drop a bomb.  He just knew she had to have one waiting.

                “Really?” he asked timidly.

                “Well, you know, if I have some shopping to do and feel you need to be supervised, I may shrink you again so you’ll be a little more portable,” she mused, patting her fingers gingerly over the puffed pocket of her robe.  “But yes, twelve inches, as long as you can handle the responsibility.”

                “Um, responsibility?” Scott repeated.

                “Of course,” she said, smirking.  “I’d expect nothing less from any my children, even if you’re not up to my knee.  Or my thumb, in this case.”  Judy made no attempt to hide her pitiful chuckling.  “Of course, it’ll be a little different than it was when you were living here.  This isn’t supposed to be a vacation, after all.”

                Apparently Judy had considered Scott’s frequent stints inside her pumps back in high school to be a vacation.  Once again, he lacked the gumption to feel surprised.

                “Oh?”

                “Nope.  Like I said, you can be twelve inches tall, but only as long as you do what you’re told.  Remember what this stay is taking the place of.  You need to listen to what you’re asked to do and do it.  Not just from me, of course.  From your brother and sister too, since they have to help me keep track of you with the PMRD.”

                Scott flinched a little at the thought of this, but strictly speaking, it still wasn’t anything he wasn’t expecting.

                “Is that where you’ve been?” Scott asked finally.  “Setting up the thing for them?”

                “Yes,” Judy said with a nod.  “I just wanted to make sure they’re ready to go for your stay back home.”

                As far as Scott knew, Kyle was far too ambivalent to even think up a reason to use the PMRD. 

                Maggie was another matter.

                “Mom, you know, um… Maggie…”

                “Yes?  What about her?”

                “You know how she… um… her, I mean, her… her… the way she… plays.”

                “Ohhh, I see,” Judy whispered affectionately.  “She does like spending time with you at this size, doesn’t she?”

                “I guess so.”

                “Well, you do need to stay as healthy as we can keep you, and like I said, we’re not here to punish you every minute of every day.  Only when you misbehave.  And she knows that.  So, she just gets to use it when you refuse a reasonable request.”

                “Reasonable… request?”

                Judy rolled her eyes playfully and waggled her fingers above Scott’s head without really thinking about it, simultaneously vibrating his rear end with the motion of her palm’s landscape.  “Oh, Scott, sweetie, it’s too early in the day for you to be playing ignorance.  We’ve had a very successful discipline system in this house for the past, what, 8 years?  I think you know what I mean.”

                “For instance?” Scott asked slowly, trying not to sound so clueless that he was belittled again.  It seemed vital to get these kinds of examples hardwired into his mind.

                “Oh, all right.  Maybe if the floor’s dirty, we’ll have you run a rag over it.  Maybe my nails are chipping a little, so I have you paint them while I’m getting some work done.  Or if your sister comes back from soccer, you might give her a little foot massage.  That sort of thing.  Nothing you can’t handle.  Deal?”

                Scott knew his agreement with such a deal was not really necessary for its implementation, but he was actually surprised to hear this.  These things were by no means ideal but surely among the milder activities he had been forced to engage in while shrunken before.  Sure, Maggie’s definition of a “reasonable request” was almost certainly going to entail something unreasonable and probably incredibly irritating or even embarrassing for Scott, but at least there was some kind of line in place. 

                Obviously, Judy still was holding out on her more shattering decree.  It was there, somewhere.  The catch.  It had to be.

                “And that’s about it, really.  As your warden, welcome to the Stevens Penitentiary,” Judy said with a gleeful giggle before correcting herself a frowning.  “Only kidding, honey, this is your home, where you belong, not a prison.”

                Somehow, deep inside himself, Scott knew his mother’s joke was a little closer to the truth than either of them was willing to admit.

                “Don’t look so worried, Scott,” Judy reassured him.  “I said you’ll only have to go below twelve inches if you refuse a reasonable request.”

                “So can you make me…” Scott gulped, daring himself to keep steady eye contact with the billboard countenance of his mother above, suddenly and uncomfortably reminded of some of the ad campaigns he had seen of her wildly grinning face for her growing political career.  “…you know, a little bigger now?”

                “Well, maybe not just yet,” the titanic matriarch wheedled, biting the corner of her plump lip playfully.  Scott watched his mother’s eyes break contact with his own and steadily trace down her thighs and calves, all the way down to her freshly showered feet, which she arched majestically in tandem with her writhing toes.  “I’ve got a few… reasonable requests to make of you first, sweetie.”

                Judy shook her head, cooing piteously at her son’s clearly dejected form in the palm of her hand.  “Don’t mope, honey.  It’s not so bad.  I wouldn’t give you a job I knew you couldn’t handle.”

                Scott very much doubted that, but knew the sooner he stopped stalling with his glum posture, the sooner he could finally get a moment’s peace after this whirlwind day of catastrophic turns.

                “What is it?” he asked at length.

                Judy cleared her throat, and Scott could almost swear the pitch of her voice was rising as she spoke each word softly and sweetly, like sour candy in her cheek: “Well, you know, Mommy’s been working awful hard to keep you out of jail, Scott.  Lots of extra hours at the firm.  Which meant lots of extra hours in my heels.  And now I’ve gotten a little blister on the mommy toe.  It seems only right you give it some attention.”

                “I… I… okay,” Scott responded dryly, knowing at least what to expect with a request like that.

                “Doesn’t it seem only right?”

                “Yes.”

                “Yes… what?”

                “Yes, Mommy,” Scott groaned as neutrally as possible, swallowing his pride hard.

                “That’s what I like to hear from my special little boy.  See how well we’re working together already?  You’ll be done in no time at all with an attitude like that!”  Judy cheerfully declared.

                No time at all seemed to Scott like an eternity as Judy’s thumb and forefinger plucked him back up from the center of her palm.

                “Here, I’ll show you where I need you to work,” Judy announced as she pinched her little son securely in her fingertips and swept him toward her waiting foot.

                Scott could almost feel his very bones shaking as he was whisked along the terrifying slope of his mother’s tremendous legs that emerged like peachy tree trunks from the endless fuzzy pink landscape of her robe far below.

                Her airplane-sized foot, meaty and powerful as ever in its size 12 glory, glistened aqueously with stray droplets leftover from the shower.  Her creamy skin, bathed in the gleam of the afternoon sun, seemed to come to life with each scrunch of her sole and the ensuing ripple effect of every curved wrinkle down the length of her expansive sole all the way to her thunderous heel.  Her toenails, bedecked with her favorite deep purple shade without a single spot untouched, caught the same streams of light perfectly as the stocky tip of each femininely dexterous digit wriggled with anticipatory delight.

                By default, Scott threw his arms up to catch himself as the vice of his mother’s two massive fingers gripping him on either side of him practically caused a collision with the monstrous big toe.  Although the impact was much gentler than it looked from the speed of descent, Scott’s hands pressed into the tougher flesh of his mother’s toe, the swirling grooves tingling under his touch.

                His entire body was just shy of being as tall as the entire rounded surface of Judy’s bull-sized big toe.

                “Now hold very still.  You’ll need to get closer to get at it well enough.”
                “What?” Scott gasped, confused as to how much closer he could get with his dwarfed hands already on the monumental toe, his chest pressed against it in a forced embrace.

                With practiced tenderness, Judy lovingly inserted her thumbnail-sized son into the fleshy crevice between her big and second toes, until he was jammed firmly into the deepest corner.  Then, gently releasing the grip of her fingers, she began compressing into him with a few twitches of the muscles in her feet, trading off the duty of gripping him from her fingers to her toes.

                Scott grimaced, trying to keep his breathing measured as his mother’s toes sandwiched him like a pair of purple-painted sumo wrestlers.

                At least she had just finished showering, leaving an overpowering aura of sweet lilac hanging around her feet.  Keeping his breathing steady with less oxygen was always tougher when he felt the uncontrollable urge to gag his guts out due to the usual stench of stale stockings and sour toejam concocted into an inharmonious symphony of omnipotent odor.

                Unfortunately, the pleasant scent of a flower garden could do little to aid in the fact that Scott was dangling at what to him was like a couple dozen stories above the carpet, with only the maternal grip of Judy’s toes to prevent him from taking the plunge.

                The situation worsened as Judy slowly and freely leveled her foot, which was still crossed over her thigh, at a horizontal angle, leaving Scott tugged by the terrifying void of gravity from either side of his mother’s stacked toes.

                “Can you feel it down there, Scott?  Can you feel Mommy’s blister?” Judy queried from high above after giving Scott a minute to awkwardly adjust to his precarious position.

                Gasping, and more or less finding an equilibrium for himself, Scott knew this gravitational ordeal would be over much sooner if he could get ahold of himself and satisfy Judy’s not-so-subtly delivered demand.

                He set about examining the massive canvas of big toe that filled his vision.  Given how up close and personal he currently was with his mother’s skin, it didn’t take long to make out the swollen area, blushed with a pinker hue than the surrounding area of rounded flesh.  He ran his fingers over it, feeling the rougher texture to it coming off more like worn down sandpaper against his tiny palm, and the softer give of its slightly inflated state.

                “Can’t hear you, Scott,” Judy commented, bobbing her foot slightly to get her son’s attention.  “I asked if you found it?”

                “Yep!” Scott cried out simply, shutting his eyes and trying not to focus on the vibrating motion of his mom’s toes shaking him to his core.  Grasping at the swollen patch of skin for balance, he began working.  He slid his palms up and down in a steady rhythm, lightly compressing in intervals and digging his fingers down into the bloated blister.

                “Don’t be afraid to press harder, honey,” Judy commented sweetly.  “Your cute little hands aren’t going to hurt Mommy.”

                Scott shrugged, knowing she was right.  At this size, Bruce Lee with a barrel of cocaine wouldn’t have the energy to put a dent in Judy’s monumental big toe.

                Balling his hands into fists, he smacked at the rounded skin with his knuckles like a boxer on an enormous fleshy speed bag, and finally dragged them up and down the blister in firm circles, now officially worried about what fit inside his mother’s definition of “reasonable requests.”

                “Ooohhh… that’s the spot sweetie, right there!” Judy moaned with pleasure, arching her sole in ecstasy and clenching her eyes tightly as she enjoyed the rolling relaxation of the moment through her whole gargantuan body, caused by her son’s barely perceptible toe rub.

                As though unable to control the minutiae of her bodily functions in moments of such deep comfort, Judy’s toes began worming about with renewed zeal.

                Scott found his soft, fleshy companions on either side of his body slamming themselves into him, halting his progress momentarily as they ground aggressively together as closely as they could without Judy bending her feeble little son in half.

                Frantically, Scott flung his arms and legs around, just trying his best to keep some kind of center of balance in between them as he was continually mashed on either side like his mother’s insignificant piece of organic lint.  The situation was quickly made worse though as Judy began rotating her foot at the ankle in a relaxed stretching motion, turning Scott’s already stomach-churning horizontal ordeal into a world-spinning roller coaster that would’ve turned the insides of even the most intrepid astronaut.

                Judy’s simple yet violent reaction to her son’s massage went on for no more than thirty agonizing seconds, but to Scott it felt like time had entered a nauseatingly no-passing zone.  It only ended when Judy, her lips pursed with pleasure, opened her eyes again and happened to glance down toward her foot at her hardworking son on his desperate plight to stay conscious.

                “Oops!” Judy gasped, covering her mouth and ceasing the free motion of her foot.  She held still, and her face did suspiciously seem to hold genuine concern, but then again, Scott had been known to misread her reactions before.  “I’m sorry, honey.  You’re just… doing such a good job, I…”
                Scott rolled his eyes under the coverage of Judy’s mammoth big toe, knowing it wouldn’t be seen.  Apparently he couldn’t even win by doing his job well anymore.

                “Are you okay?” she cooed with suddenly corrected care.  Her fingers flew down, sending a soft gust of wind over Scott’s body, as two probing fingertips fished him out of the warm crevice of her animalistic toes.  She quickly brought him up to her face, holding him in such a way that he was able to perch on the curvature of her thumb.  “I didn’t mean to be so rough with you, honey.  I’ll be more careful, I promise.”

                Scott, still dizzied from the screwball ride on his mother’s toes and the subsequent express elevator trip toward her worried face, hovered on the tip of his titanic mother’s finger like a bird for a few awkward seconds.  Her lips slowly parted and a warm breeze, redolently swirled with what the tiny twenty-one-year-old detected as orange juice from breakfast, washed over him in a series of oddly calming waves.

                “Yeah, I’m fine.”

                “Are you sure?”

                “I’m sure,” he said, clearing his throat.  “Mommy.”

                Scott imperceptibly flinched.

                Where did that come from?

                He gazed upward in time to see his mother’s ample lips suddenly hang open, a barely audible gasp of adoration escaping them in another citrus huff that rolled down upon his body again.  His spine tingled as the warmth of Judy’s acridly acidic juice breath weaved in a cloud around his nose and mouth, causing his eyes to water.

                Arching her pointer finger behind his back to keep him steady on her thumb, Judy drew him closer as her lips pressed back together, the creases disappearing in a crimson pop as she puckered them in with a dull chirp.

                Knowing radical motion would only prolong the incoming gesture, Scott closed his eyes and held his breath as he was immediately body-slammed into his mother’s closed lips in a smothering kiss.

                The bulbous lips rolled across his chest and face, ruffling his hair and leaving a gooey residue dotting his forehead, but focused right on his face, rippling and tensing with each suckling inhalation against his skin.

                Scott had no point of comparison for the sensation as the all-encompassing layers of pink padded flesh wriggled lovingly against his face, blotting out much chance of a fresh breath of air.  With each furrow of Judy’s passionate lips in a centered assault of ardor on her son’s miniature head, Scott could feel fresh layers of trickled saliva sponging against his cheeks and chin, still sticky with the dried sugar from her orange juice. 

                He tried to turn his head for a moment of relief, but as he expected, Judy’s lips only followed his face, burying his features in another wet, motherly pucker that could so easily consume the top half of his body with a few effected inhalations, if she so chose.

                Adjusting his breathing finally to the squishy terrain engulfing his whole face, Scott managed to keep himself still, rather than struggling for clean breaths of air.  It wasn’t the most ideal way to receive a kiss, particularly from his own mother, whom he normally limited to pecks on the cheek; however, with his secure seating position on her roomy thumb, and the massaging sensation of the undulating lips billowing against his face like weather balloons, things could’ve been far worse.

                In fact, as he steadied his inhalations, he found himself strangely comforted by the familiarity of the situation.  That same tang of his mother’s morning orange juice was still being stamped onto his face with each gentle pucker of her lips, but he could also detect the bitter residue of her lipstick in microscopic splotches speckled between the ripples of her skin she had neglected to notice at her size.

                Overwhelming, yes, and a violent clash of his senses, but in his renewed miniature world, it was something he recognized, and even the plush wall of his mother’s embarrassingly lengthy and personal kiss pressing itself against him was welcome after such a long day in court.

                After having gone several years without being shrunk and literally in the gigantic capable hands of his mom, Scott had always imagined that any time after would be akin to an immediate transportation back to hell, but in the most contorted recess of his mind, Scott realized that in this moment, good or bad, bad being more likely, it felt less like hell and more like home.

                Even though there were few positions at this moment as awkward and emotionally uncomfortable as having his face caved into the pillow-like valley of his mother’s lips, he knew that in his most private of moments, he could admit to himself that he didn’t really hate it.

                Of course, almost anything would’ve been better after spending a few gut-churning moments pinched from a couple of sky-high maternal toes.

                Finally, just when Scott was starting to wonder why even his mother found kissing her son’s entire face for this long to be socially acceptable, Judy moaned softly with satisfaction and released his face from the powerful peck in a tiny spray of syrupy moisture dredged unknowingly from her tonsils.

                She grinned sheepishly as she moved her hand slowly away from her lips again, allowing Scott to take stock again for a second.

                Wiping a knuckle across his spittle-ravaged face, Scott was at least grateful that his mother had wiped away her lipstick after her shower, to spare him what would’ve appeared like crimson war paint across every inch of his face otherwise.

                “Sorry, honey,” Judy bashfully whispered, her eyes unblinking, barely lifting her lips as the words slipped out like elegant puffs of steam.  “Keep being that much of a sweetie to me, and I just might have to taste you for real.”

                Judy paused for a few silent moments, enraptured by her son’s mortified reaction, her lips shifting from side to side as though literally chewing over the possibilities.

                She knew he was watching her enormous mouth with bugged eyes, a cool sweat on his brow, and she couldn’t help but find his anxiety at her suggestion to be adorable.

                Scott’s legs were shuddering harder in metastasizing dread with each passing second, so finally Judy chortled good-naturedly, throwing her head back with joy and letting her damp locks of hair catch the light, before raising an eyebrow and smirking at him.  “No need to shiver, honey.  I’m just playing with you.  You know that.”

                “Uh-huh,” Scott breathed painfully, his swelling fears quelled for at least this moment as a normal tone in Judy’s voice replaced her previous one of soft sultriness.

                “You can trust me,” she added.

                “Uh-huh.”

                Of course, given his mother’s track record in being trustworthy on this day alone, her reassurance of joking did not mean much.

                “It just makes me so happy when you say things like that to me.”

                “I could tell,” Scott muttered under his breath.

                “What did you say?” Judy asked sweetly.

                “I said, I aim to please,” Scott lied.

                “I guess you do, don’t you?” she agreed, nodding her head and shrugging.  “You know I love you too much to put you in danger, sweetie.  It’s just been so long since we’ve been able to spend time together… like this, you know.  I’ve just got to remind myself how delicate you are at this size.”

                “Yeah…” Scott mumbled, knowing no further comment was needed.

                “All right, that’s enough of that.  No more spin cycles, I promise.  Let’s get back to it.  That blister’s not going to rub itself away.”

                Pinching Scott back between the very same fingertips that had moments ago been used as a perch to kiss him on, Judy quickly lowered her vulnerable little son down toward her foot and deposited him back between her toes, which eagerly squeezed him back into his crevice hold like before.

                Scott got immediately back to work caressing the rubbery skin in its most tender grooves, this time forcing himself to ignore the drop on either side, as well as the discomfort of being grasped by his mother’s thankfully steady toes like a graceful gorilla.

                In a positively sickening moment of realization, he knew that not even this current activity qualified as whatever surprise punishment his mother had in store for him eventually.

                Scott couldn’t be sure, but he was pretty positive that there was no feeling in his life he had appreciated more than the sensation of lying down at the end of the day, the coolness of the woolen floor under his neck inviting him aggressively into a deep, exhaustion-induced sleep.

                Having spent the entire evening at an inch tall and wedged tightly between his mother’s toasty toes trying to massage away her blister in an act of simultaneous mind-numbing discomfort and stark shame, Scott had a feeling his house arrest had started as it intended to go on, and then some.

                At least Judy had kept her word and returned him back to a foot tall at the end of the evening, after Maggie had already left for her party, giving him some temporary peace before the next fully shrunken storm he knew was waiting for him the next morning.  Of course, the limited downtime before had left him in a mood for little else than collapsing from tiredness.

                Judy had given Scott a necessary break at dinnertime to scarf down a thick ball of peanut butter and bread, along with a few pen caps full of soda, but immediately afterward he was whisked off to her office, where she had a mountain of paperwork waiting for her since Scott’s case was finally closed and she could return to her regular assignments. 

                The shrunken twenty-one-year-old found himself quickly nestled back between his mom’s busy toes and tucked underneath her desk as she got to work, ignoring him for the time being except to occasionally hug her toes tighter around his body in seeming gratitude for his services.  No longer even needing prompting, Scott had rapidly returned to work massaging the swollen blister on the side of Judy’s monstrous big toe.

                The three-hour mark passed without any form of communication between mother and son, save for a few token squeezes of Judy’s toes.  Scott perceived the sunset and the darkness filling the window frame of the office, though he couldn’t see it directly with his mother’s mammoth foot blotting out the last of the light.  Judy had been on and off her cell phone almost continually while she worked, answering questions calmly and even chuckling at whatever was being said over the line, all the while dangling her thumbnail-sized son underneath two of her naked toes.  Scott was beginning to wonder if he’d been forgotten entirely as he clung tightly to his mother’s doughy skin to avoid tumbling out onto the carpet far below.

                However, at ten o’clock, a half-asleep Scott was lowered back toward the carpeted floor and released from between Judy’s toes, his arms so sore from rubbing that they felt like they had tensed into pure cartilage.

                He barely even noticed as a cheerful Judy, with her extensively pampered toe blister finally softer and on the mend, zapped him with the PMRD back to a respectable twelve inch height.  Placing it back in the case, Judy leaned closer to the carpet so the obliterated little boy below her could hear.

                “You’re free to go, honey.  Take the rest of the night off.  You’ve done a good job for your first day living with us again,” she informed him.

                Of course, as tired as he was, Scott gave no response, simply nodding.  All he really wanted to do was take in the relief and ultimate relaxation as he felt the warmth of the carpet against his aching back, his body no longer squeezed between a pair of absentmindedly writhing toes, grinding against his sides with gleeful abandon, and flicking him between the fleshy folds like a forgotten ball of malleable lint.

                “Scott?  Did you hear me?”

                Seeing her son lying motionless on the carpet below her, Judy cooed quietly, clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth.  She lifted her foot heavily off the ground, her toes lithely wriggling, and gently stroked her pinky toe along the side of Scott’s head in an attempt to rouse him from his collapse.            

                “Scott, honey?” she called down to him while placing all of her completed paperwork back into drawers and folders, soon to be snapped back into her leather briefcase.  When he didn’t respond, she rubbed her pinky toe against the top of Scott’s head, ruffling his hair lovingly.  “I’m all done up here.  You can take a break and go to bed if you want.”

                Words were never so unnecessary in the wiped-out Scott’s ears.  Sleep came on almost immediately as he remained sprawled on the floor under Judy’s desk, transporting the weakened home-and-shoe prisoner gratefully into a place of fitful rest.  His mother could only chuckle to herself as she bent down under the desk and scooped up her son’s doll-sized body against her chest in a careful embrace to carry him to his bed.

                Scott squinted, his knees wobbling a little, as he came to, practically drowning in a heavy glow from above.  The floor beneath him sagged and caved with each twitch of his feet like sand, though aside from this, empty air surrounded him on all sides for several football fields.

                And then he saw her, though it was difficult to tell from the distance.  A few second’s glance confirmed his curious guess.

                It was his mother.

                Or, at least, it looked like his mother as he strained his neck upward to see her face so high above that he had to squint to fully make out her visage, made fuzzier by the gleaming halo of blinding light from the kitchen bulbs so far above they might as well have been separate planets to Scott.

                There was truly nothing to compare her to.  Until this point, his mind would’ve been unable to conceive of something so large, and calling her large wouldn’t even be fully justified.  Words like titanic, or perhaps even godlike, were the only ones that clung to his quaky thoughts, as Scott gawked upward in sheer awe.  He could truly conceive of nothing greater.

                Sure, there were things this immense that he had seen before, such as mountain peaks that stretched so high they were wreathed by clouds and snow.

                But she was different.

                This monumental colossus of his mother was in a different league altogether.  Every movement, every puff of her cheeks and rise of her chest as she simply inhaled looked to Scott like a living landscape that stretched up toward the heavens coming terrifyingly to life.  Clear with a single glance at her was her potential destructive power to wipe out skylines with a single flick of a manicured finger or a cyclonic exhalation between lips wide enough to swallow a yacht as easily as a potato chip.

                How could this be possible?  This had to be something his mind had cooked up: a hallucination brought on by his overtaxed body.  Even at his minimum height of an inch tall, Judy was far smaller than this, and considering how Scott was dwarfed embarrassingly by his mother’s toes in that scenario, this was truly an exception.

                At his current height, Scott had no doubt that he could easily crawl under his mother’s toenail without even being detected, if the dastardly ascent up the print-ringed cliffside of her digit didn’t kill him first.  She had to be at least ten times bigger.  There was no way it was real.

                And yet, the image didn’t go away.  It was like a mirage that didn’t have an end on either side of his vision.  Besides the ground around him, brown and muddied, it was only Judy’s torso that made up Scott’s view, the edge of the wooden horizon making up the kitchen table ending a little below her abdomen.

                Of course, if there was anything else even there to notice, its significance would’ve been easily made invisible by the sheer magnitude of any given part of Judy’s body, such as her Superdome-sized breasts jiggling so high above behind a thunderous wall of her machine-knitted skirt long enough to cover several neighborhoods, holding a deep blue hue that made it look like an ocean flipped entirely on its side.

                Her eyes seemed almost to have a light source of their own, profoundly infinite and capable of swallowing up the mind anyone of Scott’s size foolish enough to stare into their crackling abyss for too long.  Her limitless gaze seemed fixed to some point miles beyond Scott’s reach, and he could tell she had absolutely no idea he was there.

                The sudden fear and anxiety he should’ve felt for his own safety in the presence of such a colossal goddess-on-earth that was unaware of his existence was nowhere to be found.  He knew he should’ve been cognizant and horrified of the fact that at any moment, Judy’s fist could lower toward him, far too long in either direction for him to get away from the damning shadow, and in seconds flat he would be no more than a crimson squelch between the folds of her cataclysmic fingers, probably not even noticed as he was rinsed away amongst foamy suds resembling a blizzard the next time she washed her hands.

                He should’ve been horrified at the possibilities, but he wasn’t.  So great was his fantastical wonderment and reverence at the unbelievable size of this woman who just happened to be his tyrannical mother that he could feel nothing else.  It was admiration and apprehension rolled into one complex emotion, practically bursting from his chest and yet still shocking him to his core, cementing his feet firmly to the ground out of a kind of respect for the power before him that no one witnessing it would be able to comprehend.

                In Judy’s gargantuan hand was a fork.  A simple kitchen utensil, though when gripped so casually in the hand of someone so unthinkably massive as Scott’s mother, it was like an instrument of war too large for the biggest fleet of helicopters to transport alone.

                Finally managing to pull his stingingly unblinking eyes away from the magnificent tower of Judy’s upper body sitting at the kitchen table, after so much time with all his senses locked to the sight of her, Scott became aware of where he was.

                Or what he was on, specifically.

                The ground, whipped in jagged points of curled husk, was littered with soft chunks of earth the size of boulders.  Everything in sight was sopping with something oily and darkly golden, pooling in liquid wells at various points across the ground, yet still sticky enough to hold like gooey threads of spider web, and as Scott looked down upon his body, seeing the goop smeared across his chest and down his legs, he inhaled.

                The scent was unmistakable.  Sweet, almost sickly so, thick with the remnants of sugarcane but still with a tang of molasses.  He didn’t even have to put his face closer to know that it was syrup spread liberally around to every inch of ground he could make out.  In the seconds following, it took even less comprehension to fully understand that he was standing atop a stack of freshly made pancakes, set before his mother on a plate the size of a race track circuit.

                It wasn’t until the towering tines of the fork collided seismically with the surface of the pancake, at long last connecting his feebly microscopic form in some way with the titaness that was his mom, that it became real at long last for Scott.  Instantly, he could feel the spongy ground between his feet, sluggish and claylike though it felt to him, rippling easily with each earthmoving tug from the strength of Judy’s hulking fingers anchored at a palm enormous enough to clasp around an aircraft carrier.

                Looking around, Scott could see a perimeter stretching for dozens of yards in either direction shearing along in an avalanche of squishy crumbs as the piece of pancake the fork was stabbed into was steadily torn away from the surrounding area.

                And Scott was right in the center.

                He immediately began running hard through the thickness, stomping into the pulpous surface of the sweet morsel and yanking his foot away hard enough to break free of the gooey pull of the syrup.  It wasn’t more than a few steps before the strong pull of the sticky stuff relieved Scott of his shoes, which he abandoned as he continued taking strained lunges for the edge of the pancake bite.  His socks were lost in the dark brown puddles of goop only a few steps later.

                He forced himself to continue onward for a few more seconds, even as he watched the pancake panorama he had previously been attached to fall away below him as the fork rose higher and higher into the air, its prize bite of breakfast in tow.  Little more than a second passed of ascending upward on the power of the fork and Judy’s fingers before Scott knew the fall would kill him, even if he did manage to reach the edge of the pancake bite and jump to escape.  So, he stopped moving and lowered himself to keep balanced, letting the strands of syrup tug him lower and lower into the moldable surface on this sugary plain of breakfast food.

                He watched his mom’s thumb, itself the size of a freight train to him, as it pressed down into the soaring aisle of metal that made up the utensil she was gripping so eagerly.  Even as he remained practically kneeling into the steadily sinking miasma of syrup and shredded pancake crumbs, so far below the mighty fingers holding up the fork currently hoisting him toward palpable doom, nothing was secret to him.  He could make out the hexagonal skin cells along the surface of his mother’s thumb, the minute imperfections that caused her mostly softly tanned skin to darken with birth marks or the tiniest of freckles, and the transparent hairs even shorter than himself dotting the skin like sparse grass.

                It was then that he forced himself to turn around full and look up to his destination, though some part of him wished he had simply closed his eyes and waited for the end.

                Judy’s mouth gaped open like a canyon on the intricate globe of her head.  Her pink lips, like a cushioned fortress wall, stretched so wide that they appeared to welcome the pancake and Scott into the entrance to hell itself.

                Rolling heat waves blasted out in cruel storms that were already hovering around the edges of the fork and Scott’s syrupy grave.  At his size of roughly a tenth of an inch, his skin was sensitive enough that even the feeling of the heat from this far out away on Judy’s bite caused Scott’s body to sting with the sudden change in temperature.  He curled himself deeper into the mess of syrup and crumbs for protection, gasping in pain, and the bready ground seemed only too willing to invite him lower into the mess, so much so that it seemed it would’ve taken a horse to drag Scott out from the squishy hovel of the pancake now.

                Judy’s tongue, the size of a sea serpent as it emerged violently from the darkness, rippled and twisted hungrily while teeming with thousands of colonies of saliva and bacteria thriving between each rounded taste bud the size of basketballs to the tiny boy.  Flushed red and dripping with delight at what was to come, it lapped playfully against the end of the fork’s modest catch like something out of a twisted legend.  It seemed to beckon on its mountainous slope downward toward the nothingness that waited between rows of perfect ivory teeth sharp enough to grind apart army tanks like Skittles.

                Scott had never seen anything like his mother’s tongue at this scale, and as he marveled in unparalleled shock as it moved closer and closer until the chunk of pancake was plopped onto the very tip of it in an unceremonious spray of syrup and spit that splashed across the ground mercilessly like sticky rain, he still felt none of the terror or dread at what was coming that he should’ve.  Only esteem, veneration, and even, for the privilege of witnessing what was the closest thing he’d ever see to a mythical monster, gratitude.

                Yes, it was definitely that.  Gratitude that something as insignificant in size as him, made pathetic looking even next to a pancake crumb, would be able to witness this otherworldly and even divine sight before it was brought to an end.

                “Thanks, Mommy,” Scott stated simply, a smile on his lips, as he lay in the spongy tomb of pancake and allowed the gooey tendrils to congeal over him, savoring the last view of his mother’s holy mouth as a few stray cracks of light gleamed along her towering jawline.

                Steaming darkness swallowed him up as his mom’s colossal teeth clacked shut and the fork slid noisily along the vice of the house-sized jowls.  Her tongue flipped the bite of pancake along the magnificent ridge of her molars, unknowingly thrusting her son into a violent typhoon of swirling saliva and sugary syrup that tugged him deeper and deeper into the blackness.

                Scott felt as though all the air had been siphoned from his lungs as he was dizzily expelled from the wild nightmare.  He lurched back into groggy consciousness again, his eyes watery and his throat sore as though he’d been shouting.

                If this was going to start being a nightly occurrence, he knew he could already look forward to many exhaustive and troubled days of flashing nocturnal images in his mind coupled with an already dictatorial living situation.

                The twenty-one-year-old had experienced dreams dwelling on his size-changing at the hands of his disciplinarian mother, but somehow, in the three years since his last miniaturized punishment, he had managed to finally banish them even from his unconscious mind, and his sleep had been peaceful.

                Apparently, that streak was no more.  It also didn’t help matters that the dream he’d just experienced, imagining himself at a tenth of his minimum height, was undoubtedly the most darkly vivid one yet.  He could still see that version of Judy, stuck painfully in his mind, at a height that would’ve dwarfed God himself by an embarrassing margin.

                Most of his shrinking nightmares revolved around his mom, uncomfortably enough, and usually consisted of waking up at the bottom of a pair of patent leather heels just as Judy’s plump foot was forcing its way in.  But these, being so close to real life, hardly damaged Scott’s psyche.  Ironically, some of the worst dreams woke him up before he even found himself wedged under the warm sole of a family member, and instead tormented him with the image of his mother marching into some safe haven of his life and shrinking him on the spot for all the world to see.

                Just like in the frat party before he’d nearly killed a woman and set this whole mess in motion.

                Resolving not to think on this matter in the interest of getting some kind of sleep, Scott crawled forward.  Blinking to clear his vision up, he found himself in almost pure darkness, with only the soft static glow of the TV humming across the room on a commercial for soy milk.  No lights remained on in the house.  How long had he been out?  It had to be after midnight now, if not later.

                As he rolled over onto his side, though, trying to relax after his tortuously trite slumber, Scott found himself descending into a soft cushion and realized he was back on the couch, resting on the small bed his brother had constructed for him.  Obviously he had passed out from pure fatigue after spending an entire evening tending to Judy’s blistered toes, and she had simply carried him off to bed.  Grateful at least that she had the mercy to do so rather than just leaving him under her desk, Scott sat up, knowing he should try his best to fall back asleep, but finding himself increasingly unable to do so.

                It was then that Scott realized he was not alone, and with a semi-conscious start became aware of his brother Kyle sitting on the opposite end of the couch.

                The towering fifteen-year-old’s eyes were darting disinterestedly back and forth between the TV and his ever-present cell phone in his hand.  Blonde and mostly on the shorter side like his older sister Maggie, in the past few years while Scott had been away at school, he had evidently undergone a growth spurt that left him lankier, making the difference in their sizes at such close range even more of a shock to the foot-tall Scott.

                Thinking back to earlier in the day on the way home from the court, where Kyle had immediately dismissed Judy’s offer for the pair to spend time together, Scott began to reflect on his relationship with his kid brother.  Kyle had always looked up to Scott, both literally and out of respect.  Having always had much more of an interest in literature and science, Kyle hadn’t been gifted with the same rampant social graces Scott had that allowed him to generate party atmosphere from almost nothing.  As a result, he’d followed his older brother around like a puppy in his youth, hoping to pick up on whatever it was that made Scott such a titan of the teenage social scene.

                Scott had a hunch Kyle no longer harbored those feelings of admiration toward his brother.

                “Hey,” Scott finally said, his voice weak in his throat.  “Hey, man.”

                Kyle didn’t bother tilting his head in Scott’s direction as the TV returned to the show, instead just letting his phone fall back into his lap.

                “Kyle,” Scott corrected, crawling to his feet and taking a few unsteady steps across the couch cushion.  “Can we talk, man?”

                Again, nothing.  Kyle shrugged and flipped the channel dial a few times, seemingly dissatisfied with every new program that popped onscreen.

                “You’re killing me.  Please, man, it’s been so long since we hashed anything out, I just…” Scott groaned, finding himself in a state of pleading.  He hesitantly padded toward his brother’s enormous form on the opposite end of the couch.

                Even if all his brother did was ignore him, he needed someone of authority in the house to claim him from time to time so he could have some paltry breaks in between humiliating sessions of borderline slave work.  Even if his brother ordered him to clean up his room or fold his laundry, it would be miles and away more merciful than whatever the female members of the Stevens household cooked up.  After all, having Kyle on his side was the one thing standing between him and practically 24/7 hard labor in the shoes and pockets of his mother and sister.

                Scott stopped walking close enough to tap his brother on the arm, suddenly intimidated.  Even at his maximum height of one foot, he was oddly insignificant next to the reclining fifteen-year-old, the top of Scott’s head just barely being below the level of Kyle’s chest.

                Nevertheless, he knew breaking this awkward barrier sooner rather than later would be in his favor.  He began rapping his fists aggressively against Kyle’s elbow as it rested against the malleable wall of couch cushion behind him.

                This time, he got the reaction he had been waiting for, though certainly not the friendly manner he’d been hoping for.  Kyle’s right hand shot out from his lap, his fingers clawed, aiming for his tiny brother’s torso.  He grasped Scott by the scruff of his shirt and lifted him off the surface of the cushion so that his feet dangled in empty air before the elder boy even had time to react.

                “Hey, glad to see you can hear me,” Scott said in his most amiable tone, resting his forearms on his brother’s massive balled fist as it clenched most of the foot-tall young man’s shirt so tightly that it ensured Scot wouldn’t be able to slip out of the clothing to escape.  He smiled and tried to chuckle good-naturedly, though as he finally made cold eye contact with his brother, he could tell it wasn’t going to be very effective.

                “What do you want already?” Kyle answered curtly, clearly far beyond tolerance for annoyances at this hour of the night.  His arm wavered slightly as if testing the feathery weight of his reduced brother.

                “Um, you could probably put me down if you want,” Scott offered innocently as he pointed downward toward the couch.

                “What do you want?” Kyle repeated, his fist seemingly not about to budge from its powerful grip on Scott’s shirt.

                “I just want to talk,” Scott, trying to keep himself from slumping in midair by wrapping his arms around Kyle’s wrist for support.  “I wanted to earlier, but you know, I’ve been kind of… busy.”

                “Right.  So if I put you down, are you going to stop punching?” Kyle asked, raising an eyebrow, a small smile crossing his lips when his brother said the word “busy.”

                “Sure, anything you want!” Scott answered with more enthusiasm than he intended, coming off slightly panicked.

                “Cool,” Kyle shrugged, releasing the iron grip of his fingers from his brother’s shirt, allowing Scott to tumble back onto the cushion.

                “Thanks,” Scott said immediately as he pulled himself back onto his haunches, now with Kyle’s limited attention finally squared on him.  “Listen…”

                “Let me guess,” Kyle interrupted, scooping his phone back out of his lap and returning to typing.  “You want me to help you.”

                “I… um, well, yeah,” Scott said, folding his hands behind his back with embarrassment.

                “You want me to babysit you sometimes so Mom and Maggie don’t suffocate you in their shoes.”

                “Yes,” Scott managed to peep with shame, knowing that despite the bluntness of the phrasing, altering his brother’s words would only mar the truth further.

                “And how do you know I won’t do it?” Kyle said simply, his voice deepening with impact.  “How do you know I won’t decide to wear you in my shoe?”

                “Because,” Scott swallowed meekly, trying not to sound anxious.  “Because I heard you say you hate the idea of it.”

                Nodding in agreement, Kyle bit his lip, clearly unfazed.  “I could still just make you an inch and leave you in my sneaker sometime.”

                Scott hung his head, unable to say anything else.  Obviously this situation was much more hopeless than he’d guessed.  He’d expected some animosity beneath the surface with Kyle, the kid who’d spent half his life trying to be exactly like his older brother, but nothing so hostile as this.  Then again, he could hardly blame him, given the circumstances.

                “Stop looking at me like that, I’m just screwing with you,” Kyle snapped with irritation.

                “Oh.”

                “But you know it’s no more than you deserve,” Kyle admitted with a sudden bitter softness in his voice that cut deeper in Scott’s ears than any of the more aggressive threats his brother had just made.  He could tell he was serious this time.

                “C’mon, man, I’m just trying to make things right here,” Scott pleaded, lifting his head again.  “I want to make things right.”

                “You want to make things right?” Kyle grumbled, pointing an extended accusatory finger at his brother.  “Then learn how to bring babies back to life.”

                “Kyle… c’mon, bud, I just… just…”

                “Just what?” the younger brother demanded, prodding his finger at Scott’s chest hard enough to topple the shrunken sibling over onto his back.  “Just screwed up for the millionth time in your life, even with all the stuff that’s gone wrong before, just to make absolutely sure that everyone thinks you’re as much of a dick as you seem?”

                “I…”

                “What?”

                “I was drunk,” Scott uttered.  It was all he could manage.

                “I guess that fixes everything, doesn’t it?” Kyle angrily responded, leaning forward over his sprawled brother on the couch, the volume in his voice steadily rising again.  “You get a free pass for killing someone and almost killing another one because you’re too stupid to think about anyone else before you get in a car.”

                “Kyle, you’ve got to believe me,” Scott blurted, finally seeing a necessity to share what had been on his mind all this time since the event.  “I don’t remember getting in that car, okay?  I wouldn’t have gotten in that car.  It… I mean, I don’t know how it happened, but… but… it wasn’t my fault!”

                “Wow,” Kyle breathed.  He only shook his head as he crossed his arms and leaned back against the couch cushion again.  “You really are that evil, aren’t you?”

                “Please, bro,” Scott muttered wearily, finally out of options.  “I need your help.  Please.”

                “Listen,” Kyle hissed as he rose from the couch and flipped the switch on the TV remote, plunging them both into pitch blackness.  “You treated me well when I was a kid.  For that, I owe it to you to not screw with you the way Mom and Maggie do.  But don’t think that just because I used to think you were so cool you get a get-out-of-jail-free card for this.”

                “But…”

                “You’re a criminal.  That’s that, and I honestly don’t care what they decide to do to you.”

                “Kyle,” Scott practically cried, clasping his hands together prayerfully despite the inability for the gesture to be seen.

                “Have fun tomorrow,” Kyle said simply as he sauntered off toward the staircase for bed, leaving his stunned tiny brother in the throes of self-pity and hollow, disbelieving loss.  “Maggie set her alarm clock early for you.”

                Scott blearily opened his eyes on his makeshift couch bed the next morning, sunlight spilling in through the living room window and flooding the air with false hope for the shrunken housebound convict.

                After his altercation with his brother last night had left him feeling more alone than ever within the four walls of this domestic prison, sleep had not come easily, and once it did, it was tormented at best.  The whole ordeal had left him feeling bitter and angry, not at Kyle, but at his own prospects for existence in this house in the near future.  Without any sort of protection from his younger brother, there was nothing standing between him and enough ruinous misery to warrant decades on a psychologist’s couch.  What was the use even hoping to catch a break?  He could hardly make himself care about the encounter he knew was inevitably on her way.

                With his back pressed up against the soft fabric of the couch cushion, Scott found himself suddenly vibrating violently against the plush surface.  Blinking wildly, he tried to right himself with his arms, only to find himself actually bouncing in rhythm with the violent rocking of the cushion.  Finally, getting ahold of his bearings, Scott realized the source of the excessive motion.

                Maggie’s foot, clad in a baby blue polka-dotted sock, was pressed into the cushion with her toes just a few inches away from his face, and she was putting her full effort into pumping her leg up and down on the chair so as to rock her brother from his rest as roughly as possible.

                “Maggie, what the hell?” Scott grumbled, trying to push himself into the chair back at the sight of his sister grinning down at him.  After a moment, Scott also realized his sister, with her short blonde hair in a small ponytail, was clothed only in a T-shirt and short shorts that rode so far up her shapely runner’s thighs, with her leg raised high enough to press on the cushion, that he could easily see her panties within.  He quickly averted his eyes, but the embarrassing damage was already done.

                “Wakey wakey, eggs and bakey, Scott,” she smarmed, increasing the frequency with which she was pressing down into the cushion with her foot.  “I’m your new alarm clock.”

                “I’m trying to sleep.  Go away.”

                “Not anymore, you’re not.”

                “What does that mean?”

                “I want you to get up now, and Mom says you have to listen to me and Kyle unless we’re being unreasonable.  And so did the judge.”

                Great.  Maggie had missed the opportunity for possible subtlety with her newfound rights like a champ.  Next to her, Kyle’s display of rage the previous night was an unfathomable gesture of charity.

                “You have to be kidding me.  That just means things like extra chores or whatever.  Leave me alone.”

                “C’mon, get up, or I’ll make you,” Maggie threatened, ceasing the pounding of her socked foot against the cushion.  Instead, she inched her toes forward until the cottony sole was arched menacingly over Scott’s face.  “Mom said I couldn’t play with you yesterday, so now we’re making up the time.”

                “It’s too early for this shit, Maggie,” Scott groaned, covering his head for protection as best as he could just as the thick, fuzzy weight of the titanic sixteen-year-old’s toes curled over his shoulders.  He could already sense that familiar persistence in his sister that was impossible to dent, but he was going to be damned if he caved to her childish whims so easily on only his second day back home.

                “Like that, Scott?” Maggie giggled, her cotton-clad toes worming intrusively across Scott’s torso and face.  “You should take a nice big whiff and get used to it.”

                “God, get the hell off!” Scott grumbled, banging his fists against the dancing toes as they bopped continually over his head, the thick blue canopy of sock fabric all but smothering him as they squeezed around his face.  He gasped, going in for another round of useless punches against his sister’s aggressive toes, but found his lungs filling up with the stale starch of lint and the unmistakable musk of Maggie’s noisome and swollen feet from the daily soccer practices.

                As Scott knew from personal experience, his sister had never been very good at washing her feet very thoroughly after a practice, and it seemed her sanitary skills had not improved significantly during his time away at college.

                And evidently, she hadn’t bothered to wash up after returning from last night’s party, either.

                He held his breath, trying to focus his energy on beating away the monstrous sock that was trying to consume him under its weight, but was unable to get the smack of fleshy grit from his nose, and coughed heavily, giving Maggie’s toes a momentary advantage.

                “Goooood,” Maggie drawled triumphantly, shifting her foot so that now the entire thing was being used to pin Scott down deeper into the couch cushion, her heel resting heavily on his thighs.  “Breathe it in all the way.  You missed it, didn’t you?”

                “Screw… you!” Scott yelped, unable to handle the sudden influx of added weight from his sister’s foot, and was barely able to fend off her big toe from curling down against his head as he sunk lower and lower into the fabric of his bed.

                “Of course you did, silly.  You’re like a little puppy dog around here now, and all puppy dogs like to smell the clothes of their…” she corrected, biting her lip almost suggestively before adding, “…owners.”

                “You don’t own shit, you stupid… stupid…” Scott grunted before deciding now to finish that sentence was in his best interests.  “Will you just take your stupid sock away from my face already?”

                “I will if you take it off for me,” Maggie answered calmly, fighting back a snicker.

                “What?”

                “Take off the sock for me, and I’ll get it off your face.”

                Scowling at her harder than he perhaps ever had in his life, Scott stopped punching his sister’s sock-coated toes, which finally relented in their assault on his body and simply hovered a few inches above his chest, waiting.  With a grimace as bitter as he could muster, Scott sat up and crawled a few inches across the cushion toward his sister’s ankle and dug his hands under the cottony band of the fuzzy footwear.

                Maggie kept her foot patiently held in midair just high enough for Scott to work without interruption.  With a tug, he managed to pull the sock down and around the rounded rim of her thick heel and continued.  As he passed into the deeper curved valley of her wrinkled sole, his fists pressed against the warm expanse of skin under the fabric for support, Maggie’s foot suddenly began twitching back and forth.

                “You tickle,” she snickered playfully.  “Stop it.”

                Grumbling, Scot continued, making sure not to run his knuckles along the soft ridges of his sister’s creased sole.  The sock began to tug easier, and he sped up, rolling up the spotted fabric as he went and dragging it under the ball of her foot until he had reached her toes.

                As he did a final pull to finish the job, Maggie’s toes suddenly curled to grip the sock firmly, and Scott found himself unable to budge it another inch.  He yanked harder, digging his feet and knees into the pliable surface of the couch cushion with all the strength he could muster, but it was no use.  It was like trying to drag a blue polka dot pickup truck with his bare hands.  She wasn’t going to release it.

                Before Scott could shoot her a dirty look, though, the five squat little troublemakers on the end of Maggie’s cruel foot suddenly relented, allowing the sock to bounce freely into Scott’s hands.  Because of all the tension from his pulling, the impact of it almost toppled Scott over when she finally let go, releasing like a baby blue springboard into his chest.

                The billowy sock sat heavily in his grip, deflating against his body like a sleeping bag fitted for sasquatch, before he threw it down to the side with disgust.  With the difficulty in getting it off her immense toes, the sock had been turned completely inside out, revealing the innermost fibers ravaged by multiple machine washes and, more dangerously, constant contact with Maggie’s repulsive foot skin.

                Crossing his arms in contempt, Scott did his best to ignore the gathering malodor cloud of dried skin and grime engrained between each colored fiber of the sock that was steadily inflating into an invisible smog of indescribable foulness.

                “Good puppy,” Maggie congratulated, clapping her hands together happily as she finally brought her heel down to rest on the cushion again.  “That feels a lot better.  Now you better take another deep breath…”

                “What?” Scott yelped as his sister’s newly freed bare foot abruptly tackled him back down flat onto the surface of the couch, pinning him down with full force as her sole spread itself comfortably across his body.

                This time, there was no fuzzy sock to act as a buffer between the puny twelve-inch Scott and his sister’s monstrous foot.  Maggie’s sole, radiating heat, bounced merrily on his stomach, scrunching every few seconds and bunching up the folds of his shirt in the deep, velvety wrinkles of her skin.  The ball of her foot planted itself on his chest, putting him in an instantly victorious hold like the world’s most rounded wrestler.

                Her toes splayed themselves prettily across Scott’s shoulders and chest, swatting at him continually before aligning her stubby big toe just above his face, as though threatening him with it.

                “Maggie!” Scott panted, his chest already sore from the feeling of his sister’s wide and heavy sole heaving up and down against it.  “I took your damn sock off!”

                “Yeah, so?  Do you want a trophy or something?”

                “You said you’d stop stepping on me if I did!” Scott protested, trying to move his head to the side.  Each time he did, though, Maggie’s big toe just shifted with him, ensuring his face was always under the shadow of her rounded digit.

                “Ohhhh, no, no, no… wow, you’re a bad listener!  And you’re supposed to be smart enough to be in college somehow,” Maggie tsked, waggling her finger as she continued writhing her toes across her pathetic brother, savoring the feeling of his feeble neck rubbing underneath the soft bridge of each mini marshmallow toe.  “I said I’d take my sock off of you, and I think I did that, didn’t I?”

                Mad enough to roar himself hoarse, Scott opened his mouth and wheezed just in time to watch a triumphant smile spread across Maggie’s lips as her big toe finally made good on its implied promise and descended onto his face, instantly plugging his nose and mouth with her filthy, peachy extremity, which to Scott was the size of a partially deflated basketball.

                “Yep, breathe it in.  Hard,” Maggie encouraged, bobbing her head and letting her blonde locks bounce in time.  “Get to know your new best friend better.”

                “Ggggrrrrtttt!” Scott sputtered incoherently with all his might.  Most of the sound was instantly absorbed directly from his lips and into the spiraled print of his sister’s gleefully applied toe.  However, his rage was great enough that he made himself heard.

                “If you insist,” Maggie said with a shrug, choosing to interpret the muffled peep as a call for an end.  She finally released the leaden weight of her foot on Scott’s body but took her own sweet time to do it, spending several laborious seconds unpeeling her toes from her brother’s defeated torso.  “I just hope you’re learning your lesson.”

                “Lesson?  What are you talking about?”

                “Don’t sound so stupid, little brother,” Maggie groaned, crossing her arms sternly.  “You didn’t go to jail after what you did to that poor lady and her baby.  But I’m gonna make sure you remember what you did.  You’re not getting out of it that easy.”

                “Wanna bet?” the finally freed Scott growled, far too pissed off to think clearly about what he was saying, as he stretched his achingly numbed arms and legs to regain feeling in them.

                “Yep!” Maggie chortled, reaching down and wrapping her fingers around her foot-tall brother’s arm. 

                Despite being at his maximum size, his younger sister’s fist encompassed most of his arm, and as she began to squeeze, Scott could feel the raw muscular power she had over him, lurking in each feminine fingertip, with the combined strength to rend his arm from the shoulder like a wishbone.

                “Maggie, let go of my arm.”

                “I want you to get up and follow me.  And I’m being reasonable.  Are you really not going to do it?”

                “Reasonable?  You just stomped all over my goddamned face!” Scott blurted.  “You’re going to leave me alone now.  And I’m going to go get this whole thing straight with mom.”

                “So, you admit it.  I’m telling you to do something, and you’re not doing it?”

                “Get… off… me!” Scott hissed through gritted teeth, knowing it was useless, as he poked needlessly at his sister’s firm fingers, which held unwaveringly like iron around his arm.

                “Awesome.  I’ve been waiting to do this for so long,” Maggie purred, her eyes glowing with ecstasy.

“What are you d… hey!” Scott yelped as he felt himself lifted easily off the chair cushion by his arm.  Lifting her brother’s squirming body up to about the level of her face, Maggie smirked with delight to have Scott dangling so helplessly, even at his maximum height of twelve inches.

                “You didn’t do what I told you, and you know what Mom said.  She said she told you the rules.”

                “Maggie, you’re… my arm…” Scott winced, feeling as if his shoulder was threatening to pop out of its socket at the angle the treacherous teen was handling him like a ragdoll.

                “Yeah, well, it’s not my fault you’re hard to hold when you’re this big.  I don’t even like you this big.  Believe me, you’ll be a lot easier for me to handle in a minute.”

                “Maggie, stop it.”

                “Nuh-uh, Mr. Criminal,” Maggie retorted childishly as she sauntered toward the kitchen.  She tucked her brother roughly under her arm like a football while still gripping him tightly around his arm and hugged him powerfully against her hip, steadily tugging him higher into the crevice of her armpit to make sure he didn’t slip.  Frantically, Scott kicked his legs out at his sister’s chest and shoulders, but made zero progress in altering the situation.

                The ominous silver case was snapped open on the kitchen countertop and the PMRD settings correctly adjusted.  Scott was positive she must’ve woken up early and been practicing operating it in preparation for this moment.

                He was plopped unceremoniously onto the edge of the counter, face-to-chest with Maggie, who had no intention of letting go of his arm as she scooped the device up in her other hand and aimed it without hesitation directly at his face like a shotgun.

                Seeing the ravenous gleam in his sister’s eyes as she pinned him under the device’s barrel, and the uncontrollably gleeful grin crossing her lips as she pulled the trigger with a girly giggle, Scott could sense in every fiber of her being that she had indeed been waiting years for his moment to arrive.

                He had been reduced in size innumerable times over his ruthlessly troubled teenage years, to the point that most of the humiliation had been molded into one stinging memory, but this was different.  The feeling of his kid sister’s fist growing larger and larger around his arm as he sank into his t-shirt and shorts, and the sight of her adorable grinning countenance becoming more overbearing and ominous, was somehow more hollowing to his very being than any barely-explained shrinkage his mother had afforded him before.

                Her enormous hand was the perfect and most terrifying gauge of his progress.  Her fist, which already engulfed his arm, was becoming more like a steel claw, clamped around his torso.  He felt her fingers seemingly expanding outward on his skin, until each of was the size of his arm and finally, as she released him gently into the billowing folds of his shirt, he himself was the size of one of her fingers.

                As he disappeared into the pile of clothes, Scott felt the familiar urge to dart in the other direction, but it was quickly replaced by the memory of his current predicament, as well as the fact that he was now marooned on the kitchen countertop he stood upon.

                Surprisingly, Scott found his clothes to be comparatively smaller at the end of the shrinking than he was expecting.  Evidently Maggie had gone easy on him and resisted the urge to reduce him to his minimum size of one inch.  However, there wasn’t long to contemplate this odd act of mercy as the teen’s massive fingers were digging greedily into the folds of the fabric, wrapping themselves around Scott’s bare leg and fishing him out the top.

                Scott, painfully nude, was dangled by his left foot upside down as he was drawn out of the folds of the now grossly oversized clothes and held a matter of inches away from the end of Maggie’s nose.

                Even though she had him turned away from her face as she dangled him, Scott could feel his sister’s eyes studying his every inch hungrily, no longer as a sibling, but as a science experiment in which she controlled every variable. 

                Uncomfortably, he felt the tip of one of her fingers brush up against his bare butt cheeks, but it was quickly retracted, followed by the inevitable mischievous chuckling that rumbled horribly in his eardrums, as though she’d dared herself to touch him.

                “So much better,” Maggie declared, satisfied, as she finally lowered Scott down into her cupped palm, just as the blood had thoroughly rushed to Scott’s brain.

                He was aware of the awkward feeling of his butt once again pressed against the soft center of the titanic teen’s hand, but as he clutched his temple in his fingers, he didn’t have the attitude or energy to care.

                “Now I can hold you the right way,” she murmured, her fingers coiling up like fleshy claws around Scott.  “Little baby brother.”

                Though he was dizzy, he could feel the rapid bumping through the skin of his sister’s hand as she marched victoriously through the house and toward the stairs, obviously heading toward her bedroom, where she could have some private conversation time with him.  Figured.

                Her fingers squeezed around him, compressing him against her cushy palm as she bounded up the steps two at a time.  The slam of Maggie’s bedroom door behind her and her enthusiastic bouncing flop onto her bed nearly rocketed Scott out of his feminine captor’s grip, but her fingers instantly caged around again him as she did so, instead causing him to thrash roughly around in her grip.

                “Well,” Maggie began happily as Scott carefully returned to a seated position in his sister’s hand, though he couldn’t bring himself to look into her eyes.  “Do we understand each other now?”
                “Yep,” Scott gulped with a grim nod, knowing by this point that it was far better for him to just go along with the situation than drag it out into more opportunities for foot wrestling.

                Maggie flinched, clearly looking forward to disciplining a “no,” but instead shrugged and bit her lip playfully, obviously deep in thought on new ways to relish this ultimate moment of power.

                “That’s… good,” Maggie answered, frowning with something bordering on distrust.  “Mom told me the rules.  I know how it works now.  You be nice and do what I say, and I’m nice to you.”

                “You’re gonna be nice, hmm?” Scott answered, still looking down intently.  As he glanced around the restrictive landscape of his sister’s hand, he estimated he was around three inches tall.

                Considering Maggie’s usual tastes, it was a pleasantly conservative height.

                “Hey.  Eyes on me when you talk,” Maggie demanded with a snap of her fingers, sounding just a little too happy at finding something to complain about.  She tapped two fingers against her cheeks just under each eye, as though reminding him where they were.  “It’s the polite thing to do.”

                “Right,” Scott said, complying and looking uncomfortably up the fleshy bridge of Maggie’s arm that led toward her torso and her expectantly gleeful face framed by her gleaming blonde locks.  “So you’re gonna be nice if I’m nice.”
                “That’s right,” Maggie beamed, bringing a finger from her other hand down onto the top of Scott’s head, simulating petting in a way that mainly just negatively impacted the twenty-one-year-old’s already aching cranium as she aggressively bopped him on the head.  “Easy as cute little brother pie.”

                “And how, exactly, are you planning to… um… be nice?” Scott asked, still in the same dull tone, but wondering how Maggie, a girl for whom “nice” didn’t even belong in the English language, planned to treat him well in her own cruel logic.

                She certainly wasn’t off to a good start if his wake-up call was any indication.

                He had a feeling his mother, in laying down the rules, had at least accounted for legal safety by ensuring Maggie kept her crafty bitchiness to a sustained minimum, but also knew his sister could and would find a way around those parameters in almost record time.

                “Well, let’s start right now.  You do what I ask, and I’ll be nice by letting you make some choices by yourself,” she said.

                “Great.  And what would those be?” Scott asked, the sarcasm growing thick in his words.

                “Your clothes, for one thing.  Do you want some?”

                “Whatever,” Scott said with a shrug, in reality wanting them very badly, but knowing that displaying any enthusiasm for the idea would only prolong the amount of time Maggie spent teasing him with them for her own amusement.

                “Because a couple of my friends are coming over in a few hours, and, well… you might want to cover up for them.”

                Groaning, Scott knew Maggie had the upper hand in this round.  “Okay, fine.  Can I have some clothes, then?”

                “Hold on, Scott…”
                “I meant, can I have clothes please?” Scott corrected, wanting to skip the whole song and dance.

                Maggie giggled again, smiling cheekily.  “That actually wasn’t what I was going to say, but thanks anyway.  No, I was going to say, do you want to put it on, or should I?” 

                Plucking into a tiny pocket on the back of her shorts, Maggie produced a small pink princess gown made for a doll of roughly three inches tall, and suddenly Scott realized precisely why his sister had not shrunk him to the minimum size just to spite him.

                “Maggie, I, um…” Scott began, desperately mulling over how to play the situation, as his sister waited expressionless, the tiny dress pinched in her fingers, waiting for a reaction.

                “Yes, my little princess?” Maggie teased through an abruptly frosty expression, her eyes narrowed intently.  Having momentarily dropped the sugary-sweet act, she obviously wanted to make a statement.

                “Um, well, you said… you said I could choose, and… does that mean I can… not wear that?”

                Maggie nodded solemnly, setting the tiny doll dress beside her on the bed and instead tapping her finger thoughtfully against her chin.  “Yes, I did say that, didn’t I?  You don’t have to wear it if you don’t want to.”

                “Okay.  So, um… can I wear something else?”

                “Yes.”

                “Great.  Where is…”

                “Just wear what you already have on,” Maggie answered coldly again, shaking her head and silently daring him to defy her as her eyes ran disgustedly across the image of the cold and naked Scott.  “It goes perfectly with your personality.”

                With a thousand enraged comebacks itching to be fired off, Scott refrained from using any of them.  Instead he bit his lip and began casually popping his knuckles, avoiding his monumental younger sister’s imperious gaze.  He could feel the cold sweat on his neck already.

                This stoicism became more difficult to maintain, though, as Scott felt his sister’s hand rising higher and higher until he could feel the steaming exhalations from her nostrils billowing down onto his naked shoulders and back with each breath.

                “What’s it gonna be, little boy?  Are you going to be good and dress up as a princess for big sissy?” Maggie uttered under her breath.  “Or are you just going to keep being naked in my hand?”

                “I…” Scott mumbled, and biting his lip, realized the only way to extinguish his sister’s joy in the game was not to play at all.  “I don’t care.”

                Maggie flinched again, but continued sternly glowering down at the tiny life in her palm.  “You mean… you don’t want a choice?”

                “No,” Scott answered simply.

                In being honest with himself, he really didn’t give much of a shit.  He had already hit rock bottom plenty hard enough, and the sun was barely up.  Whether he was nude or in a bright pink doll dress, he was going to have the enraptured cackling of Maggie’s friends ringing resonantly through his nightmares for a while.  There was no getting around that.  In fact, with some bitterness, he guessed the doll clothes would make it even worse.  At least with nothing on, he could just stew in the same judgmental misery he almost always did while at this size.

                “Fine with me,” Maggie said, crumpling at the pink dress in her fingertips around the tiny cloth waist.  “I’ll just choose what my little doll is going to wear to play later.”  With a soft shredding crunch, the dress came undone, and Scott realized the upper part of the outfit was held to the long skirt by Velcro.  Cupping the upper part of the dress in her other palm, Maggie discarded the lower section of the pink cloth onto the floor, until only the top half remained.

                Oh, no.

                Shit no.

                Scott’s heart raced wildly, and he felt himself practically retching from anxiety.

                Maggie could see her brother’s day darkening by the second, and it filled her with gleeful rapture that positively glowed from her every pore.  The power trip surging through her was more potent than any quintuple espresso could hope to match, and she could barely manage to hold still from the simmering thrill she was experiencing in the tiny, breathing body lying in the palm of her hand.  Not wanting to let her living doll feel relaxed for even a moment, though, she refrained from displaying her happiness.

                “Now raise your arms up, little one,” she instructed.  “We’re playing dress-up now.”

                Scott was about ready to burst into tears, but he knew refusing to obey his sister would only end with him dangling upside down as he was lowered down into the costume by a single ankle, and that was if he was lucky.  He hung his head in defeat and held his arms in the air like a mini marionette.  

                A moment later, he felt the itchy ruffles of the dress pushing down around him, flattening him into his sister’s palm.  Realizing the difficulty of the task, he could feel Maggie’s fingers curling around his back and squeezing around his thighs and butt far more aggressively than before, inching him through the arm holes until the top of the dress was on, leaving his lower body still exposed, as it was clearly going to remain as long as he was in Maggie’s care for the time being.

                “Oh, wow,” Maggie cooed kindly, putting on an air of sincerity intended to make her brother squirm even more.  The girl gazed lovingly upon her twisted craft project, with the absurdly poofy dress covering Scott’s torso not even coming close to covering anything below his waist.  She prodded a fingertip at his little butt cheeks again, making him instantly crumple to his knees in surprise and embarrassment.  She knew exactly how to push his buttons, and savored the trembling she felt in him as she continued holding her finger against his skin.  “Scott?”

                “What?” he groaned after a short pause, clenching his eyes shut as he continued kneeling in his sister’s hand in an unintentional bow, the cold yet soft touch of her stubby finger still jamming insistently against his one of his butt cheeks to keep him in line.

                “You’re so adorable like this,” she whispered even more softly, pursing her lips and blowing another stream of warm air down onto his face while also blustering the folds of the dress.  She traced a pointer finger along the ruffles of the dress just under Scott’s chin, then gently stroked along his stomach and down his calves, as though discovering him for the first time.  “My perfect little dolly.”

                Scott could feel the numbness pouring destructively into every corner of his mind like pure acetone.  The feeling was all-encompassing, such that he didn’t even find himself caring much that his sister’s fingers were still prodding around his thighs and rear end to keep him still.

                And this time, his surrender had not originated from the exhaustion like he’d faced between his mother’s toes the previous evening, but this time simply from the lack of will to act in the face of such malevolent creativity on Maggie’s part.  How long had she spent dreaming up this moment?  How many countless class periods at school had she used wishing she could dress up her older brother in doll clothes?  How many nights had she laid awake plotting out a way to get him into this position not by her own choices, but his own, just to put the final nail in the coffin?

                His sister had him slipped easily into half of a doll dress, through his own refusal to choose, with her friends on the way to see him, and it wasn’t even breakfast yet.  Where else could the day go from here but straight down to hell or even lower?

                “Now,” Maggie sighed.  “Little brother.  I’ve got another choice for you to make.”

                Scott could only manage a hushed “oh.”

                “I need you to put your hands on your crotch.”

                That was almost enough to shake Scott from his stupor for a few brief seconds.  “Why?” he croaked, fresh alarm ringing in his heart.

                “You heard me,” she smirked goofily, her eyes widening momentarily at the delicious scandal of it and the tip of her tongue lapping playfully across her upper lip.  “Cover up your embarrassing little dick.”

                “I… I…” he started, unsure where even to begin trying to comprehend the intense emotional cruelty of his sibling captor, but his throat had gone dry once again.

                “Don’t make it weird,” she instructed with a condescending frown, as though trying to convince him of how pedestrian a request she was making of him.  “Just put your hands over your balls so I can’t see them anymore.  Trust me, you don’t want them showing for this.  But it’s your choice.”

                Scott only looked at her, shaking his head back and forth in the negative, not so much out of the hard defiance he felt only a short time ago this morning, but out of veritable ambivalence to the situation.  What else could she do to him, after all?

                “Fine,” she said with a nonchalant shrug.  “Then I’ll do it.”

                And before he could even open his mouth to react, Maggie’s thumb swooped into her palm and thrust itself against his crotch without a moment’s extra hesitation.

                Scott’s jaw dropped, though no sound escaped, as he blinked down in stupefied disbelief at the sight of his sister’s gargantuan thumb jammed directly against his sack.

                It was the first time she had done so to her tiny brother in so direct and intentional a manner that didn’t involve accidentally brushing between his legs while picking him up or curling her toes around him in her socks.  There was no mistaking this.

                There wasn’t a trace of shyness in it, either, as her thumb forced its way between his legs so hard that it felt akin to a swift kick in the groin for Scott.  He managed a grunt of pain as the hollow agony ripped through his body for a few endless moments, his feeble member pinned against the lower part of his stomach from the sudden application of pressure.

                Maggie didn’t seem to have any qualms with making her finger right at home.  She ground her thumb back and forth against her tiny captive’s junk, using her finger like a cradle for his package while still clasping effectively enough that his dick was squeezed painfully under the mass of her thumb.  Scott could even hear her humming a tune lightly under her breath while she so casually dug her finger against her shrunken brother’s naked privates as though it was the most natural thing in the world.

                Then, in that old familiar way that caused Scott untold distress in his youth, he felt the stirring between his legs, his hair standing on end and his skin prickling with involuntary warmth.  He had faced this same compulsory crime of biology several times before, amongst a sea of bubbles when his mother forcibly bathed his shrunken body, and when a friend of Judy’s had unabashedly jerked him off between her toes in the sweaty confines of her heel.

                But this was different in its deliberate focus.  The massive pad of thumb flesh currently rocking back and forth with aggressive resolve against his dick, powerful and intimidating though it was in its capacity to ball bust him, was also tender and arousing in such close proximity, and though he hated himself for it with untold passion, Scott felt his member hardening obediently at the attention it was receiving.

                How many more seconds could he last before he was hard enough that Maggie would notice?  How would he be able to stop himself from vomiting in stark shame once he was outed?  What could he possibly say to diffuse the situation, to any member of his family?  And, perhaps worst of all, what if Maggie had noticed it already but had no problem in watching him squirm under her touch?

                Thankfully, Scott didn’t have to answer those questions.  When Maggie was finally satisfied with her thumb’s position against Scott’s delicate goods, she gave one final hard squeeze against them that rendered a yelp of breathless agony from Scott, who practically flopped over incapacitated, his boner over-effectively discouraged by this last gesture before it was even noticed.

                “Should’ve taken the choice I gave you…” the conniving blonde sixteen-year-old whispered under her breath while shaking her head with feigned disappointment.

                Having gotten a good enough underside grip, Maggie’s finger then steadily began to rise off her cushy palm, keeping the shaking and pain-wracked body of her three-inch-tall older brother draped loosely over the edges of her thick digit, her skin still pressed up against his abused miniature stones.

                Despite the incredible itching the pink doll dress top was causing his upper body, all Scott could focus on now was the nearly unbearable stinging still tearing through his body from when her thumb had first belted him in the rod.

                Ironically, he had been saved from a very difficult conversation when she had given that final thrust that stopped his pre-emptive erection in its tracks, as he felt his loins wilting with pain again.  All things considered, a humiliating catastrophe had been so narrowly avoided, had Maggie been paying better attention, Scott was sure he’d be suffering the consequences of his own uncontrollable hormones at this moment.  Still, the cramping lingered persistently from the heavy pressure of the girl’s thumb, and he considered rolling off to the side to escape the sensation.

                Before he could make a decision or convince any of his strained muscles that moving was a good idea, Scott was abruptly drowned in a blinding flash of light.  Thrashing with surprise, for a chilling second he assumed his sister had retrieved the PMRD with the intention of reducing him down to her preferred height for him of one inch, but this light lacked the green hue of his family’s favorite discipline tool.  Blinking away the fogginess burned momentarily into his vision, he looked up and realized the source was not the shrinking device, but simply Maggie’s cell phone camera, glowing with baneful promise.

                Scott assumed he would never see the day that he was more afraid of any piece of technology in existence than the PMRD.  But as he glanced dumbly back and forth between his half-nude attire and the incriminating communication device grasped in his younger sister’s other hand, he knew his previous assumption was wrong, and immediately his blood ran cold enough to be melted by ice as realization dawned on him.

                “See?” Maggie drawled slowly, glancing with a girlish snicker at the screen of her phone to make sure the picture came out well and nodding when it did.  “This is what I have to do with you when you’re being annoying.  And we both need to get one thing straight, so that dress doesn’t go to your head.  You may be a princess in my room, little brother, but in here, you also need to remember…” she gushed, opening her mouth and nonchalantly sliding her slimy teenage tongue along her glistening palate.  “…I’m your fucking queen."

                Her giggling seemed to go on ceaselessly, even devolving into cackling, as she casually lowered her thumb back into her other palm and allowed her brother to tumble backward into his fleshy cupped prison again, while she brandished the cell phone far out of his reach from above.

                “God,” Scott thought to himself with a painful swallow as he lay in a state of miring darkness, barely able to process his own conclusions despite the blazing flash of clarity from the camera.  “She really does believe it.”

                “And just in case you were wondering, Princess Scott,” Maggie added with a wink as her firm, log-like fingers snaked and squeezed their way back around Scott’s fragile form without delay, her eyes aglow as she gazed adoringly at the picture on her phone.  “I’ll make sure to let you know how many likes this gets on Instagram.”

                Scott cowered meekly on the edge of Maggie’s desk, still aching feverishly from the wallop his sister’s thumb had delivered so easily to his crotch, and still reeling with degradation at how close his member had come to betraying him when pressed up against her fingertip.  He clutched the edges of the doll dress she had forced onto him, not necessarily for comfort, but to stop himself from trembling harder.

                He watched blankly as her enormous hands scuttled busily over her laptop keyboard, tapping and clicking away with great practice.  It seemed to happen so quickly, though he knew the speed had no bearing on whether or not what she was doing was indeed going to happen.

                He saw the screen flash suddenly with the image of himself in the dress slung awkwardly over the perch of Maggie’s magnificently sized thumb.  His face, though slightly blurred in the picture, looked almost as dead as he felt inside at this moment.

                He stared ahead as Maggie casually uploaded the photo to her Instagram account, captioning it with “Big brother finally is grown up enough to play dolls with his little sissy.  Yay!”

                A day before.  A single day before this, and Scott would’ve gone into a murderous rampage without a second’s thought.  Even at this size, he would’ve pounced forward with every ounce of energy he had and set about like a rabid lion throttling his little sister’s powerful thumb, or whatever other part of her he could get ahold of.  She would have him pinned to the wooden desktop with only the slightest tap from her pinky finger, of course, and she probably wouldn’t even have to look at him to do it.  But he would’ve have been deterred.  Punching, kicking, even biting uselessly at her thick skin, all while screaming every wrathfully bitter insult he could think of.  He wouldn’t have given a single thought to the consequences, and would’ve genuinely believed that with enough perseverance, he could stop Maggie’s heinous actions.  His anger would not be silenced.  A day ago.

                A single day.

                He remained silent now, averting his eyes and clasping his hands together to keep them from shaking as best as he could, though it was a tough task.  Scott could also feel his throat getting caught up and the damning welling of moisture in his eyes from the abject powerlessness in his being at this moment.

                “Sorry if I hurt your itty bitty balls when I had to cover you up, little boy, but you know how social networks feel about nudity,” Maggie giggled, not even bothering with a feeble attempt at putting authenticity into her apology.  “Plus, it’s not like you’ve got anything worth showing off to people down there.”

                Her words barely even registered as ones of intended harm.  She had already done all the damage she could to him for now.  No amount of explanation or joking on his part could undo what was already done and surging through the internet onto the computer screens of dozens upon dozens of gossipy teenagers, her legions of lackeys wasting no time in laughing and passing it on.  By the next day, given the size of Maggie’s extensive network of friends, he had a feeling those pictures would spread to half the high schools in the county.  And given how public his misdeeds were, he had absolutely no reasonable expectation that anyone seeing the picture would do anything but applaud for Maggie’s stance on her brother’s intolerable crimes.

                “Wow, somebody’s popular,” Maggie opined, crossing her arms with satisfaction as she watched her laptop screen.  “Already 17 likes.  No, wait, 18.  Now 19.”

                That was just about all Scott needed to hear for the tears to be on the verge of letting loose down his cheeks, no matter how hard he pinched himself or clenched his eyes shut to prevent it.

                Suddenly, though, from the back of the room, Scott heard the bedroom door swing open, and the familiar sound of Judy rapping her knuckles against the wooden frame to announce her presence.

                For a moment, a glimmer of hope alit in Scott’s heart.  He blinked, somehow willing himself back to full consciousness, daring himself to believe that his mother could save him right now.

                Scott felt no shame in admitting to himself that in exchange for this moment he would gladly go back between Judy’s toes for the rest of the day, no matter how damp and dank they’d become overnight.  He would rub them until Judy herself told him she wanted him to stop.  Hell, he’d lay a kiss upon his mother’s gigantic toenail and be happy for it if she could only bring a merciful end to the silent torture his sister was currently wringing him out through with each passing second of torment.

                “You two playing nice?” Judy asked with enthusiastic sunshine in her voice.

                “Oh, yeah, Mom, Scott’s just taking some selfies with me for Instagram.”

                “That’s nice.  How are you holding up, honey?” Judy asked slowly of her elder son, and despite the sweetness of her question, already in her voice Scott recognized something that struck almost as much terror into his heart as the idea of his half-exposed, half-princess-dress-clad body becoming famous through a cackling teenage girl’s Instagram account.  Her words to him were sugary and affectionate as they so often were, but there was no hiding it from his practiced and abused ears.  He could hear it clear as day.

                Indifference.

                “I’m wearing half a dress,” Scott drawled as calmly as possible, still having to fight back the tears from what his sister had just said to him to clinch his social destruction.  In reality he wanted to scream the words out in order to make his mother feel his agony in some twisted, parallel universe way, as though she would be able to sympathize with this shameful moment of unadulterated defamation above all the others she herself had put him through in the past.  He could feel his voice beginning to quaver on the verge of dry sobs again, so he kept his words short.  “Half a dress.  With nothing underneath.  In the picture.”

                There was a pause.  Clearly she’d heard him, and even had time to mull it over.

                “Make sure you cover him up for the Internet, sweetie,” Judy instructed kindly to her daughter without missing a beat.

                “Oh, I WILL, Mom,” Maggie exclaimed joyfully, clearly acknowledging her victory in the matter as she scooped up her limp brother in a fist and brandished him like the trophy he was to her.  She rippled her fingers around his legs, causing him to wobble in her grip, but she held him firmly while plastering a grateful smile on her lips for her mother.

                “I’m glad to see you’ve found something you can do together,” Judy said with a smile, stepping back into the hallway.  Before she disappeared from sight to leave her tyrannical daughter to her own devices with Scott, she winked back at them.  “Just don’t wear him out too hard, hon.  He’s got to last us, after all.  Play gently.”

                A cold silence fell on the room as Scott, descending with sharp immediacy back into his emotionally catatonic state, sat limply in his little sister’s grip as her palms sandwiched him like a ball of Play-Doh, pressing and twisting against his torso just hard enough to spin his world with each thrust from the firm heel of her hand.

                “Hear that, shrimp?” the ruthless teen hissed through wicked lips.  “Mommy says we have to play gentle.”

                Maggie’s fingers curled around her brother’s bare legs, moving them in and out like scissors, while her thumbs drummed against his chest.  Satisfied with this, she pursed her pink lips into an open pucker and began exhaling a focused typhoon of cold air centered on Scott’s tiny face, tainted with her sour morning breath and a few flecks of froth from the back of her throat.

                In a painful flash, the pieces of Scott’s new home life crashed together in a detestable collage of sickening reality.  He got it now.  He finally understood it.  The only wonder was why it took him so long to realize it so clearly.  His mother had inflicted no harsh words or reprimands upon him for his destructive atrocities, nor tacked on additional cruel explicit stipulations to her discipline system, for one simple reason.

                Because she didn’t need to anymore.

                For years, Judy had tiptoed along the cusp of child abuse by taking the fullest advantage of a discipline law she herself had put into effect.  Though she held the legal right to shrink her children, Scott was always protected on the sidelines by the very system that had allowed Judy to shrink him at will.  As thin a defense as it was, it was there before.

                Today, though, she no longer had to tiptoe along that cusp.  She no longer had to explain her actions or utilize Scott’s sinful ways as a means to her own end.  She no longer had to fake some sort of carefully constructed punishment system for her son under the guise of bettering him.

                The both of them knew very well that his wild ways would never stop no matter how often she shrunk him.  Just as they both knew very well that even if Scott had reformed himself into a perfect angel as a result of the childhood lessons, Judy would always find a reason to nestle her favorite shrunken son between her toes in the deepest crevice of a black pump.

                Perhaps worst of all, she no longer stood alone in her desire to shrink her son.  She had an entire court and city behind her, wishing passionately for her to wedge Scott under her heel in a used stocking and never let him out.

                She could do anything she wanted with him, and so could his sister and anyone else his mother would entrust him to in her house.  In her prison.

                In her shoe.

                Judy would never have to overstep a single loose boundary to make Scott feel her authority squeezing around him from every angle.  All she had to do was sit back and allow her children to bond in whatever way the ones with the height advantage chose.

                Scott lay sullen and slack as a ragdoll, cupped in the powerful palm of his little sister as her predatory fingers caged back around him and began closing in for a squeeze that would undoubtedly leave him gasping for air in her soft grip, which she would of course only grant him when blacking out was eminent.

                It all made terrible, savage, crystal-clear sense now.  Kyle wasn’t going to have anything to do with him, and the best he could expect from his mother would be occasional oxygen breaks when tucked under her toes in the tip of a leather pump.  There was only one outlet left.

                In that moment, the three-inch-tall Scott realized his only salvation was in this young girl who had spent over half a decade joyfully stripping him down and stuffing him inside the dark cavern of her shoes, and had only just now jammed him inside half a dress and snapped selfies with him without wasting a single moment of her valuable time to weigh his pathetic and irrelevant feelings on the matter.

                She was a monster and his last hope, and he was in her feminine, manicured talons.  As her fingers finally squeezed back around him, twirling between his legs and flicking his arms back and forth as easily as leaves in the breeze, he was reminded with muscle-straining rawness that there was no escape unless she wanted and allowed it.

                With each passing moment, Scott felt himself becoming more and more afraid of his little sister like never before.  In years past, he’d always had reason to be wary of her fingers, her toes, her socks, as he so often found himself pinched amongst them at her will, but this was entirely different.

                Now, he was afraid of her mind.  She was sixteen, not even halfway through high school yet, and yet she held absolute power over the life of a young adult man in the palm of her hand, and she chose to toy with it endlessly for her own amusement, when the complete emotional destruction of her brother just wasn’t enough.  Though only five foot four tall and capable of achieving no higher than B’s in school, she held more authority and more might than most people her age and even many adults.  The cute little blue-eyed, blonde-haired, soccer-loving high school sophomore was omnipotent now.  In her room right now, with the door closed, and the blessing of her own mother and society itself, she was a goddess.

                Yet Scott knew he had to try to get through to her.

                What other choice did he have?

                “Maggie,” Scott piped when he’d finally gained enough oxygen back after being squeezed so aggressively in his sister’s fingers, knowing it was only a matter of time before she did it again and stole his ability to speak.  “Maggie.  Please.”

                “What’s up, little boy?” Maggie asked calmly, not slowing her pace at all as she continued working her brother over between her palms like a piece of putty.  Her fingers took turns wrapping themselves around his frail limbs and binding him more tightly to the warm, creased flesh of her expansive palm as if pinning an insect to a display.  “Not being gentle enough for your weak little arms?”

                “N-N-No…” Scott sputtered, the full brunt of his newfound terror in the hand of his sister settling in with hopeless potency.  “T-That’s not it.  I… I just wanted to… to…”

                Before he could stammer through another awkward beginning, Scott’s mouth was immediately covered up by his sister’s cool pointer fingertip, splaying itself like a fleshy punching bag squarely onto his face, only tilting up just enough for him to breath little gasps of air under the duct of skin.

                “To-to-to what?” Maggie mocked, hardly able to hold back her laughter, as she pressed her miniscule brother’s head harder down against the squishy surface of her hand.  “To-to-to-to drop the bass?”

                Undeterred by his sister’s ensuing laughter, Scott pressed his fists into her colossal finger and began pushing upward as hard as he could in order to free his lips and begin what he was certain would be a tenuous but necessary process of redeeming himself in the eyes of his sister.

                Clearly, he was off to a rough start.

                “Oh!  Push, little brother, you’ve almost got it!” Maggie cheered disingenuously as she continued applying pressure from her finger onto Scott’s little face.  “Can he do it?  Can the tiny little strong guy beat up his baby sister’s finger?  I don’t know, folks!”

                With a determined growl, Scott spent his final burst of strength in pushing Maggie’s finger away.  Of course, it wasn’t really enough to actually succeed, but luckily the towering teen girl had become bored with this game and released her finger from his face, though her triumphant gaze on him was unbroken.

                Scott opened his mouth to speak, psyching himself out for the desperate apology and plea he was prepared to make to his sister over whatever extended time period was required.

                Unfortunately, any sound he made was covered up almost immediately as Maggie’s cell phone began to rumble on the desktop and echo with the latest over-sugared pop song rocking the airwaves. 

                It was almost like Maggie had been slapped back into consciousness with a wet fish.  She had become so focused on overcoming Scott’s feeble attempts to speak that her eyes were barely taking breaks to blink, and her lips were curled into such an intoxicated smile that Scott doubted she would be able to frown at anything short of being stabbed in the chest.

                At the sound of the second and third rumbles from the phone, her milky eyes darted over to it, with her fingers still tangled around her tiny brother’s dangling limbs, and she bit her lip.  It was obviously a tough debate for her to answer at all, giving how much fun she was having.

                The caller wasn’t giving up, and with an irritated groan and a roll of her eyes, she released one hand from Scott, instantly cupping him into her other palm and caging her fingers around him before he could even move a muscle, squeezing him across the middle with a powerful thumb.  Her other hand quickly snatched up the phone and brought it to her ear.

                “Hey, Sarah,” she huffed dryly, clearly trying to fight off inherent hostility at her friend for interrupting her activities.  “Yeah, I’m still here at the house.  What?  Oh, sure,” she cooed, her tone abruptly changing at the mention of whatever had been suggested.  “Yeah, I’m totally down.  Absolutely, girlie.  Sounds fun.”

                She snapped the phone shut and slid it back into her pocket before leaning back in the chair, trying to suppress another grin.  Slowly, with Scott still balled into her fist, she brought him up toward her right eye, close enough that it was all he could see through the small opening of his sister’s curled fingers.  “Good news, little princess,” she said brightly, lapping her powerful tongue back across her lips.

                “What?” Scott peeped, now inhabiting his own little world entirely for the moment.

                “My friends aren’t coming here.  They want me to go meet them at the park.”

                “Oh.”

                “And you’re coming with us, with your little beeper thing,” she declared proudly before frowning and tilting her head in puzzlement.  “Although I guess that means no more dress-up time for my little princess.  After all, I don’t want to get it wet if there are any puddles out there today…”

                “M-Maggie, please, just… just let me say something…” Scott chimed fearfully as he was plucked back up again by the itchy hem of the doll dress and squirmed out by the practiced motions of his sister’s doughy thumbs.

                “What already?” she blurted, discarding the dress and plopping her newly stripped prize back onto the desk next to her computer.

                “I…”

                “You may want to turn around, bro,” Maggie suggested as she hopped spryly from her desk chair and skipped over toward her closet, her hair bouncing merrily behind her as she interrupted Scott again.  “Things are about to get PG-13, or maybe R, depending on how my bra goes with this shirt.”

                Ducking and covering, Scott turned himself around to face the wall just as his sister threw her pants to the ground around her ankles and stepped out of them to change.  For a few uncomfortable moments, he listened to drawers slamming and clothes rustling up and down the expanse of her toned teenage body, until he was startled again by the feeling of her warm fingers snaking back around his unsuspecting form.

                As he found himself turning to face his sister again in a fresh blue top and revealing cut-offs, Scott had to at least be mildly thankful that she had chosen to fully garb herself again before scooping him up.  Though she had no problem, it seemed, incidentally groping his bare doll-sized body, he hoped she never got to the stage where she was comfortable stripping herself down in front of him, too.

                Somehow, though, with a baseball-sized pit in his stomach, he had an overwhelming sense of foreboding that such a time would arrive sooner than he was expecting.

                “Now, try it again, but without stuttering like a stupid little boy,” Maggie whispered softly, lifting her brother from the desk and cupping him close to her chin.

                “I just wish… wish I could make you understand…” Scott meandered, knowing almost anything he said would fall on deaf ears.  “I wish I could make you understand how bad I feel.”

                “Yeah?  Well, I wish I had you in my shoe,” she butted in again before he could get the rest out, savoring each word.  Her phone was already sliding back into her pocket, and her fingers unfurling around Scott’s little body as her other hand reached toward the carpet below for something Scott couldn’t quite make out from his position, though he knew what it was before his sister even opened her mouth.

                “Maggie.”

                “And guess which one of us gets her wish, short stuff?” she snickered, lowering her arm closer and closer to the ground below.

                Maggie’s fingers tipped over to deposit her brother into his transportation for their morning out.  Scott grasped instinctively for the soft flesh of his sister’s palm to save himself, but the decline was far too steep, and he tumbled head over heels into the waiting opening of the shoe below.

                Time was running out.  The familiar blackness and rank stench of sweat soaked like clockwork into the fibers of the insole greeted and swallowed Scott up again like something from a childhood nightmare.  As he rolled down into the darkest corner of the flat from the momentum of his fall, Scott immediately pulled himself onto his haunches and launched back toward the mouth of the shoe in hopes of climbing out and making a new appeal to Maggie.

                Just as he reached the lip of the shoe, though, the sight of his sister’s fingers pinching the edge of the shoe caught his eye, and he had just enough time to flatten himself for balance against the inscribed felt base of the shoe before he was rocketing upward back toward the desk.

                “If you were planning on asking me something, little brother,” Maggie said, clearing her throat, as she peered victoriously into the open mouth of her shoe clasped against her palm, her eyes restless and yet still unfeelingly frigid, like something off of a totalitarian propaganda billboard.  “Now would be the time.”

                “I just wanted you to… know,” Scott grimaced, swallowing hard, not so much from the difficulty of the words, but in fear that they weren’t going to be nearly enough to save him.

                “Know what?” Maggie chuckled.  “That you don’t like this shoe?  Count your blessings, I could’ve worn the flats that I got like 5 years ago and don’t really fit anymore.”

                “I just want you to know… how sorry I am,” Scott wheezed at last, releasing all the tension in one fell swoop.  “I’ve been… a jerk to you, all your life.  From the time we were little kids, and I don’t know why.  But I truly am sorry.  For everything.”

                Maggie paused and frowned, clearly trying to discern any sarcasm or falsehood in her diminutive toy brother’s words.  When she didn’t seem to find any, her expression softened, and for the briefest moment, Scott’s heart rate managed to descend to a healthy level.

                Maybe he’d done it.

                Maybe he’d gotten through to her.

                “That’s really nice to hear.  I’m glad you at least realize what kind of person you are,” Maggie acknowledged with a nod as her hand descended back toward the ground.

                “Please, just… just give me a second chance.  That’s all I’m asking, Maggie, I-”

                “But we’ve got a loooooong way to go before you’ve made it all up to me, little Scott,” Maggie interrupted matter-of-factly, crossing her arms and bouncing her golden locks over her shoulders which practically twinkled in the sunlight of the window’s rays.  “You’ve got lots of sorries to say.”

                “I’ll say them all.  Right now.  Really.  I will, watch me!” Scott cried so earnestly that he sounded on the verge of total intoxication.  Hoping to gain a few extra seconds to plead his case, he threw his arms over the lip of the flat to begin pulling himself out to safety.  “Please, I-”

                “If you get out of my shoe right now, Scott, I swear to God I will tape you to the bottom,” Maggie spat with so much feral ferocity that the room itself seemed to swim in a haze of unsteady rage.

                “I’m sorry!” Scott croaked more pathetically than he meant to, scrambling back into the stagnant insole of her flat so fast that he almost toppled over backwards.  An instant after he did, his sister’s foot arched majestically above the edge, her thick toes alighting weightily where he had tried to escape just a second before.  “I’ll say sorry as many times as you want, for as long as you want.”

                “Yeah, umm… about that,” Maggie drawled, rolling her eyes as her toes danced merrily at the rubbery mouth of the shoe, clearly eager to dive in and overtake their new roommate.  “That’s gonna be kinda pointless, seeing as how you’re about to be under my cute lil’ toesies, where I can’t hear you.”  Her eyes flashed with inspiration.  “You can go ahead and practice saying sorry to my toes, though!  Then you’ll be all ready for whenever I decide I care what you have to say.”

                With that, all the towering titaness of a teenager did was grin smugly and daintily wave her fingers goodbye to her brother.

                Evidently, he had not gotten through to her.

                Scott opened his mouth to speak again, unsure of what he might possibly say to remedy things at this point, but was silenced inevitably as the sadistic shadow engulfed him, like it always did. The wriggling toes juggling light from above between the fleshy crevices of each one, until the entire cleat-swollen foot was squeezed against every corner of the shoe.  The heavy heel, flecked with dry skin and sock fuzz, settling down with a soft thump into the base, followed by the meaty feminine sole sliding fluidly into place and arching rhythmically.

                Then came the last part, what Scott referred to with all the cynicism in his mind he could conjure as “the lowering of the casket.”  He instinctively crawled further back into the darkness of shoe’s tip, hoping to prolong these last few moments of freedom.

                The monstrous toes flicked against the roof of the shoe and then unceremoniously flopped down, burying him under squirming animalistic layers of smelly flesh and speckled toejam.  They shuffled him for a moment, arranging the position of his body to Maggie’s liking, until he was poised horizontally under the arch of the stubby digits.  In the darkness, under the back of his head, Scott could feel a deep imprint exactly where his sister’s big toe always laid, and in an instant he knew why she was setting him in this exact way.

                He sputtered powerlessly as his face was smushed squarely into the marshmallowy flesh of Maggie’s big toe print like an air bag in a car crash.  In his gasps for air, his wet lips brushed the oily flesh of his sixteen-year-old sister’s unwashed foot, still glazed with fresh night sweat from her recent slumber and sour ardor from her exploits at the party the night before.  He coughed as the inescapable taste of his sister’s foot against his mouth only slipped further down his throat, causing him to gag.  This only made breathing faster and more labored as his lungs silently begged the dead air for relief that simply was not going to come as each inhalation pumped in more gaseous odor leaked from between his sister’s toes like toxic fumes.

                Satisfied with his position, the big toe began bouncing up and down against Scott’s face, intermittently giving him a few seconds to gasp up the poisonously stale oxygen tainted with moist salt from the girl’s wrinkled sole, before again having his features cushioned into the pillowy force of nature that was his sister’s biggest toe.

                Gasping quietly from equal parts defeat and equal parts disgust at the putrescent flavors being teased aggressively against his lips like a drunken kiss, Scott frowned bitterly and bit his tongue to prevent the tears from flowing.  Even though there was no one to see them, he didn’t think he could stand to remain conscious and still let himself cry while this happened.

                Instead, keeping his eyes closed and his breathing to a measured minimum, he began whispering, over and over again, without irony or malice: “I’m sorry.  I’m sorry.  I’m sorry.” 

                Not only to his sister, his brother, his mother, the victim of his violent idiocy, or the law, but to the old Scott that had been overtaken by wild rebellion in his youth.  Clenching his teeth and balling his hands into fists, though he continued writhing in the hell of being his sister’s toe toy, from deep within himself, Scott could feel a flame of resolve intently kindling like he’d never experienced before.