“Scott.”

            The voice was filtered through a layer of soggy stocking fabric and squirming toes, but it cut through nonetheless. Its owner wasn’t one to let her words go unheard, no matter how deeply her audience was buried beneath her.

            “Scott. Are you listening to me?”

            More insistent now, the voice wouldn’t be stopped until a response was given.

            Scott Stevens turned himself about in the space, ignoring gravity and instead giving his vulnerably naked body to the squishy balance of taut nylon that imprisoned him so tightly.

            “I hope you know, sweetie,” Judy Stevens said with a sigh, once she realized she had her eldest son’s attention at last. Sitting in the driver’s seat of her car, she’d slipped her left foot lithely from the black pump and propped it over her opposite knee in order to get a more direct view of her shrunken offspring. “I hope you know I take no joy in doing this to you right now.”

            At this announcement, it took every ounce of strength Scott had left not to roll his eyes back into his head a full three rotations.

            Given his current position, stripped of all clothing, squeezed beneath his mother’s toes inside her stockings, and roasting in a stew of flesh and leather, only now given fresh air and sunlight after five hours straight in her shoe, it was tough to take her words at face value.

            Still, he concluded it was in his best interest to pay her all the attention she wanted now as she wriggled her toes up and down, continually wrapping themselves back over him in a muggy embrace and clamping him even further into the wall of moist nylon.

            He cringed as his crotch was teased against the doughy pad of Judy’s big toe.

            She certainly did nothing to shy from this discomforting offense. In fact, the grinding of anonymous body parts and skin seemed only to increase as Scott fought to cup his aching junk away from the hulking mass of his mother’s toe.

            Embarrassment was something of a foreign concept to the woman.

            The sticky summer heat was wearing heavily on both of them. Even with the car window rolled down, and for Scott especially, down in the trenches of his mother’s footwear, it was a very special brand of unpleasant. With skin on skin from nearly every angle, both bodies produced a steady flow of sweat thanks to the upper-eighties temperature.

            It was tough to even make sense of the sodden tangle of Judy’s toes and Scott’s limbs. Any logical person would’ve resorted to sandals on a day like today, and indeed the woman often did for fashion’s sake, but then again she had her reasons for this choice today.

            The hapless young man had luckily retrained himself to ignore the walloping stench of salty sweat and rancid foot skin hours ago. Still, every time Judy’s mighty weight would press him back into the stocking, stretching it out and releasing its sour musk anew, he was forced to experience every flavor yet again.

            Hot, balmy air, clouding each desperate inhalation with acrid moisture: so sickeningly familiar and yet simultaneously fresh. Scott was an old pro at breathing strategically while shrunken and trapped inside an enormous shoe; however, when Judy was this intent on awakening her son’s senses with each and every briny smash into her water-logged clothing, there wasn’t much he could do to stop her.

            He was going to take it, because she had decided he would.

            At just an inch in height, it didn’t take much for those meaty digits to exhaust Scott in more ways than one. Today, though, the reeking effluvium of Judy’s overheated dogs was the least of his worries.

            This particular stint in his mother’s heel hadn’t been a particularly restful one as she stalked about the house, barely avoiding putting full pressure on the front half of her foot. He was just lucky she didn’t put him under the appendage responsible for working the pedals in the car. Little mercies were few as it was.

            Even when she was sitting, though, Judy’s foot was constantly off the ground. It bobbed and rotated to the whims of her ankle as she hummed some jaunty older tune Scott didn’t recognize. Impromptu roller coaster rides were nothing new to the twenty-two-year-old shrunken house arrest prisoner, but considering he didn’t have to experience one in nearly six months, it was a bit of a shock to be plucked from the couch cushion between his mother’s fingertips, not only nude but half the length of a human thumb.

            He had been deposited into the cascading tunnel of Judy’s stocking moments later with nary an explanation. The rapid approach of her plush appendage into the nylon, filling the void with her wrinkled sole and powerful heel, was just about all the answer he needed to grasp her mad reasoning.

            Not that Scott could ever truly get used to being worn in the dark, musty depths of a shoe with a set of monstrous toes mashing him down again and again and again on every step. Especially since those toes tended to belong to a close family member. He suspected anyone in past, present, or future who could get used to such a thing had to have a screw loose.

            “I’m sure you must be disappointed in yourself right now, Scott,” Judy said after a healthy pause ensued. The inch-tall Scott simply stared up at the looming billboard-scaled face of his mother through the webbed fibers of her stocking.

            Concentrating on keeping his titanic parent’s big and second toes from pulling him completely into their doughy crevice was taking up most of his energy; defensive rhetoric wasn’t coming very easily. It wouldn’t have done much good, anyway.

            Though he didn’t want to admit it, Scott was indeed disappointed in himself, though not for the reasons his mother wanted to believe, and certainly nothing he’d ever willingly share.

            Judy Stevens leaned further back in the leather seat of her car, allowing her crossed leg a little more space before the steering wheel. She pursed her lips, trying to read her son’s expression.

            “After all…” she continued with incredible calm, even gentleness. The same sugary tone she always resorted to when disciplining her children, as though none of this tortuous fanfare was any more unusual than wagging a disapproving finger in protest. “…I thought we’d come to a little agreement the day of my campaign announcement. Was I wrong about that?”

            Her toes momentarily ceased toying with Scott’s flailing legs. This allowed him a moment to collect himself beneath the arch of his mother’s sweaty digits. The young man awkwardly fought against the damp fabric, eventually slipping further down the massive expanse of Judy’s slippery size-twelve and becoming pinned under the ball of her foot.

            Right where she wanted him, evidently. After a full decade of physically stamping the rebellion out of her son by shrinking and storing him in every type of footwear, Judy had become impressively skilled at changing his location on her body with barely any input. Especially when he was small enough to be overpowered by a single immaculately-pedicured toe.

            “Well?” she pressed, obviously expecting an answer. “Was I?”

            Holding the rest of his body as steady as he could, Scott rocked his head emphatically from side to side to signal a “no” but didn’t speak up otherwise. His throat was a little dry to conjure up a particularly confident verbal response. Dehydration had settled in by the fourth hour or so inside Judy’s pumps, and he didn’t feel like letting his mother see him as any weaker than she probably already did.

            “I thought so,” she said, nodding her head as though only just now confirming it to herself. As if she suspected for even a single moment she could be wrong. “I believed we could fix up any problems there are between us. That if you just showed some initiative and started working with this system that’s designed to improve you, instead of fighting it every step of the way like a child, things could work out for everyone. That we could both get what we want and finally have an understanding between us. That I could help this whole country, and you could be back on your own again. And I still believe all those things. Don’t you, honey?”

            Shaking his head this time would’ve been more difficult, as Scott was already finding himself pinched once again by his mother’s two largest toes. Their combined musculature was wrapping him into an especially pungent cradle. Judging by the aggressiveness of this new assault, the question was obviously rhetorical. In fact, it was as though the words were coming from the mouth of a completely different woman.

            Scott was rather accustomed to this kind of contradictory treatment, and hardly paid it any attention. To any outsider, though, it might’ve appeared backward as Judy rambled on so positively with that sultrily persuasive tone of hers that had made the forty-five-year-old United States senatorial hopeful a formidable opponent in any debate; meanwhile, her foot was hard at work preventing its tiny stocking passenger from making a single coherent response.

            These conversations between mother and son tended to be very one-sided. Even though Scott had been on his best behavior for the past year as he’d awaited his first disciplinary board review to determine the effectiveness of his shrunken house rehabilitation, he didn’t anticipate that dynamic changing anytime soon.

            Judy was not one to let someone else win, her children above all others, especially not when she possessed a legally mandated tool that could shrink them down to an inch in height, out of their clothes and quite often out of their dignity. The Portable Matter Reduction Device made for a nice bit of shorthand in their relationship.

            “I think you must believe in it, too,” Judy concluded for the both of them. The only sound in the car now was the soft scrunching of her nylons against Scott’s writhing, toe sweat-slicked body. “So it makes it all the harder knowing that I have to punish you now for your behavior, after you were doing so well for so long.”

            She glanced up to the rearview mirror, at last pulling her gaze away from the amusing sight of her miniaturized son struggling to remain upright in the grip of her toes and rumpled of stocking fabric. Judy brushed her carefully maintained blonde locks over her ear and wiped a finger at her recently applied rosy blush. She and Scott had to exit the vehicle soon and make a somewhat public appearance, and she was determined to look her best.

            The woman peered out the tinted window. Just across the walkway was the Adams Reduction & Rehabilitation Clinic, newly constructed less than a year prior thanks to the generous checks of the Techilogic Corporation and its industry titan CEO, Emily Brookes. The place was one of many acting as a shiny corporate-colored vessel for the various Shrink Act counseling services around the nation. They offered targeted group therapy and personalized corrective programs in exchange for legal recourse and other services.

            The building’s gleaming ceiling-high windows and silver pillars beckoned in shrunken patients consisting of adolescent deviants and hardened criminals alike, where they could be offered a safe space to talk and heal together through the process of their size-controlled probation. Or, if they were in need of just a little more aggressive education, they might be paired with a specialized counselor for some time in a shoe or any number of other uncomfortably cramped locations. If it wasn’t the most well-funded clinic in the country at present, it had to be near the top.

            Scott’s recent board review, his first after a long year at home, had ordered the young man report to weekly discussion and related activity sessions as part of a sentencing program that now allowed for more lenient hours out of the house.

            Still, even without this mandate, Judy would’ve been among the very first to sign her son up for the place.

            She’d been trumpeting the benefits of healthful reintroduction of shrunken offenders to society for nearly her entire political life. Plus, in her steadily ramping Senate campaign based on a growing effort to restructure the country’s penal system, it certainly didn’t hurt the family’s image. Her youngest, Kyle, was a bright sixteen-year-old already receiving early invitations to tour Ivy League colleges, while her middle child Maggie was lined up for a summer internship with the Adams Reduction & Rehabilitation Clinic itself managing shrunken inmates in “corrective” programming.

            All that was left to work on was Scott, and Judy had been busily molding him for the better part of his life.

            “I suppose you’ve had enough for now, honey,” Judy commented soothingly, looking back to Scott again and slowing her foot’s motion to a halt. She watched her son slide down the sweaty slope of her arched foot and into the cushy center of her sole.

            Before he could slip any further, she poked an index finger into his stomach, securing him squarely in place. He could practically melt into the malleable pink surface.

            She puckered her lips, blowing him a kiss with a smack of her red lips: “So maybe we’ll just have a little pep talk before your time-out is over, hmm?”

            Gritting his teeth, the shrunken boy looked up once again to the sweetly grinning countenance of his monolithic mother. He’d been engaged in psychological warfare for the past twelve months with the woman who’d given birth to him more than two decades ago, and his firmly held belief in freedom for himself and for his siblings was all that really mattered.

            What was one more little chat?

            Scott grunted, adjusting his already-shallow breaths as his mother’s enormous pointer finger pinned his helpless inch-tall frame into the doughiest arch of her nylon-clad sole. He allowed his arms and legs to splay out. Almost instantly he sunk into the smoothly wrinkled flesh as he had so many times before.

            “I don’t want you to think I’ve been discouraged about your progress after today, honey,” Judy explained calmly. A reassuring smile crossed her plush lips. “This was just a setback, and I had to correct you for the past few hours. But now we’re at the Clinic, because I and everyone on that disciplinary board wants to see you improve… to become a better person. That hasn’t changed.”

            Judy casually arched, causing the nylon to tighten against the underside of her foot. Immediately Scott was sandwiched even more firmly between skin and fabric, intrusively compressing down against his chest and painfully squeezing his manhood to his waist.

            Worst of all, though, this simple act of Judy’s ensured Scott’s nose was thoroughly buried between each delicately parted fiber of the stockings. They were caked liberally with gummy sweat, flecks of dry skin, and soaked lint morsels. And there was nothing to stop them from being inhaled.

            Though Scott tried to avoid, it was impossible not to get a wisp of fleshy salt and cotton specks sucked into his throat. The effect only amplified in the seconds that followed, as Judy’s finger refused to budge on her son’s abdomen. He sputtered, bowing his head out of necessity to pull his face out of the wet trap of her giant footwear.

            “So once we’re inside today, I don’t want you to feel like you have to focus on the negatives… the mistakes you made this morning, and what I had to do to you to make sure it doesn’t happen again. You slip up, you learn from it, and you move on,” Judy said, falling into a pattern of phrasings Scott heard echoed for his first several sessions in the Clinic. “Just focus on moving forward. Okay?”

            “Y-Y…” Scott coughed. He fought back the burning feeling of his mother’s sweat lingering on the back of his throat. The young man suspected it would take yet another fruitless evening of continually rinsing to remove the nauseating taste from his palate. Still, actually speaking up was imperative in this moment. “Yes. Yes.”

            “Good. I’m glad we’re back on the same page again,” she said with a self-satisfied nod. At last she removed her finger from Scott’s stomach. The buoyant wall of her sole flesh to sprung him back against the stocking. Leaning in closer to her foot propped up on her knee, then, the woman lowered her voice to a calming whisper: “Let’s just remember once we’re in that circle not to go embarrassing Mommy over personal things that we can just talk out ourselves. Okay?”

            Scott nodded grimly, upset by this reminder but nonetheless resilient to it, as he was firmly resigned to withstand his mother’s totalitarianism for the greater good. Judy was implying her displeasure with Scott becoming too open in the group counseling circle in the Clinic, where the majority of his session times were spent, much of it under her watchful eye. Even the occasions where shrunken detainees were allowed some time to speak freely without their enormous guardians holding them didn’t feel quite safe enough; there was no telling who that counselor was talking to behind closed doors, even with a good faith Hippocratic oath in place.

            Judy’s disciplinary practices were well-known by now and adopted by countless households of shrunken felons around the nation, but even so, she had a balance to maintain in her reputation. She wasn’t going to allow Scott even an inch on affecting it. And after the treatment he’d received for the past five hours, thanks to divulgence even more trivial than casual public mention of his mother’s decidedly medieval methods, the young man was in no mood to test his parent.

            “Things are so much better when we decide to agree with each other instead of fight, don’t you think?” Judy opined kindly. “Keep that in mind after I let you out now.”

            She pinched her fingers around the tip of the stocking. One inch at a time it tugged away, though she was in no particular hurry to get it off.

            Scott was dragged roughly along the sweeping ceiling of stretchy nylon. Over and over he found his face rolled hard into the expansive sole as his mother gingerly pulled back the layers of soft polymer to free her foot and tiny son at last.

            Even after the stocking passed completely over him, Scott remained glued to Judy’s foot by a gummy residue of sweat and lint. He made no foolish motion to escape. It didn’t seem to trouble the woman, either, as she folded her stocking up neatly and set it on the passenger seat, still clearly in no hurry.

            When Judy’s hand returned to her upturned sole, she took her time once again, curling her massive fingers demonstratively over Scott and bathing him in their shifting shadows. Tenderly she placed her pinky finger against his cheek, running her digit down the length of her son’s chest and down to his stomach. She stopped just short of stroking along his inner thigh.

            He shivered involuntarily at her cooling touch.

            Once satisfied, she gave his right leg a little squeeze between her thumb and forefinger and peeled her tiny son off her sole like a piece of flattened chewing gum.

            Scott once again let himself hang limply as his mother draped his miniature body over her thumb. She him closer to her face, though not quite up to eye level. A few stray blonde hairs caught up in the breeze of the car’s AC brushed against the boy’s back. For a moment his shoe-cooked body temperature was alleviated by the cool wind that only seemed to reach above average waist level for passengers. However, as Judy’s lips parted, exhaling an intentionally warm rush of air over her naked child, the relief was quickly cancelled out.

            “And even though I have to do this to you now, I don’t want you forgetting how proud I’ve been of you this past year, Scott,” Judy remarked. Her other hand appeared suddenly in Scott’s field of vision. A moist cleansing wipe was tucked between her fingers as it steadily neared him.

            The white towelette swooped over Scott like a blanket, mercifully covering up his mother’s looming face as though they were playing peek-a-boo. Judy’s fingers tenderly went to work scrubbing at his sore body. Amply experienced, she knew the correct amount of pressure to apply without inflicting harm. Slowly the grit and grime from her greasy stocking-clad toes was rubbed away.

            Scott simply let her do her work, lifting his arms and spreading his legs to make room. Wipes had been a mainstay of Judy’s purse contents for years. It was an unspoken backup in case an impromptu shower substitute was ever required for her shrunken offspring, as it most certainly was now.

            Through the damp paper, Judy’s thumb caressed over Scott’s hair, ruffling it to thin out as much of her dried sweat as she could. It then traced under his neck, down his chest, and into his thighs, where she ensured to thoroughly stroke the soapy material beneath his crotch. Scott, as usual, remained numbly still throughout the process of having his junk massaged by his mother.

            “All the support you’ve given me for the campaign when it’s most important… it hasn’t gone unnoticed,” the woman said. She spoke with genuine pleasantry rather than the candied tone she usually took on.

            The wipe was suddenly swept away, revealing her sunnily grinning countenance once again mere inches from the end of Scott’s miniscule nose. Her teeth stretched into that same broad victorious grin to which he’d been a personal audience so many times. She crumpled the towelette and discarded it into the cupholder between the seats. “So thank you.”

            “You’re welcome…” Scott said, matching her level of false civility. That answer was simply expected, rather than some act of wild generosity on his part. Watching Judy’s eyelashes bat several times in quick succession, obviously indicating anticipation, he tried not to roll his eyes: “…Mommy.”

Judy observed her naked inch-tall son slung over her finger. Satisfied that no further prompting was needed for him to address her by the proper title, her plush pink lips curled. She drew Scott in closer and tilted her head lithely upward. Propping up his body upon her thumb next, she was able to easily plant his petite frame into the moist pillow of her puckered lips.

            The suction of the giant kiss, already in full effect, was more than enough to keep Scott stuck to his mother’s lips as her finger marooned him on their soft surface. She kept her palm cupped just beneath her chin for safety.

            After a long intake of breath, where Scott found his limp body pulled against Judy’s immense mouth like a vacuum, her lips parted ever so slightly. Caught in his mother’s powerful, warm inhalation, the boy clung uselessly to Judy’s pink skin as his legs and member were swallowed up into her enormous mouth.

            He wasn’t fooling anyone with that apologetic pledge of his before, and they both were aware of that. Scott knew there would be consequences for his actions this morning, but that didn’t mean he regretted it, even now as he prepared to accept them. Considering the way things had gone earlier, he wasn’t at all surprised to find himself in this distinctly educative position, surreal and uncomfortable though it was. Frankly, the only shock was how long it had taken.

            A reporter and camera crew from ELA Channel 2 had stopped by the Stevens household promptly at 10 a.m. for an interview with Judy to get an update on the movement of her campaign, which had picked up immense speed since her announcement a year prior.

            Judy, as usual, navigated the questions like a champion, smiling wide enough to put a toothpaste commercial actress to shame. There were even a few questions reserved for the Senate hopeful’s thoughts on the new Reduction & Rehabilitation therapies currently sweeping the nation in light of, and especially, because of the popularity and attention Judy brought to it the concept in years past.

            And then, just for a few minutes, it was Scott’s turn. Dressed once again in his specially fitted suit and regrown to his maximum twelve inches in height, the twenty-two-year-old looked more than a little silly perched on the end of an armchair as the interviewer sat down for a firsthand account from the Shrink Act’s poster boy. Of course, Judy stood just behind the cameraman with her arms crossed and the most threatening smile glossed over her lips.

            “Now, Scott…” the ELA reporter began as she leaned in close enough with the microphone for her subject to be heard. “…we’ve been enlightened on R&R therapy by your mother, and we’re ready to hear the other side of the story. How has it affected your life?”

            What a question, to be asked how his life was affected by being shrunk, placed inside someone’s shoe, and being told it was therapy. Glancing up at Judy a final time, catching the expectant glint in her eye, Scott swallowed deeply and let his thoughts go to his siblings Maggie and Kyle, both of whom were counting on him without even realizing it. There was no benefit to even the most infinitesimal sabotage here. He sighed, reviewing the pre-programmed answer in his head before letting the words flow.

            “Well, it’s, uh…” he began. “…it’s something a lot of people might not understand at first. But… but it does help. Being like this, it… it gives you some perspective on what you’ve done wrong. And what you have to change to make it better. Kind of… monastic, almost,” he continued, a little proud of that word choice. “Mom just wants things to be better for everyone, to fix what’s wrong with how people are punished.”

            “The practices of R&R often involve correctional acts, depending on the program,” the reporter continued. “They can involve transporting shrunken individuals in pockets, withholding clothing, handling them in ways that might be deemed uncomfortable, or, in many cases, putting them in close and possibly dangerous proximity to a guardian’s feet. Even wearing them inside a shoe. Which I understand you’ve experienced yourself?”

            “Yes,” Scott said.

            “Frequently, even.”

            “Yes,” he responded with some hesitation. “Since I was thirteen.”

            Judy’s eyebrow raised, but she didn’t move otherwise.

            “And you feel that even this is beneficial to your rehabilitation?” the woman asked, keeping a neutral tone. As Scott looked her in the eye, though, he realized her own more liberal political leanings were trying to claw their way out without giving it away. He couldn’t help but envy her that kind of courage.

            “Yes,” the young man replied yet again without letting himself think about it for too long, no matter how loudly his subconscious screamed at him for this personal betrayal.

            “I see,” the reporter said, nodding as she grimly processed the information. She brushed her fingers through her black bob cut. “Now, there are opponents to the use of R&R. They say it’s no better than the treatment many people receive in prison. Perhaps, in some cases, worse. What would you say to that?”

            Scott’s ears perked up at this. He didn’t need to look up at Judy to know her expression had changed again; the interview wasn’t supposed to pose questions like that to him. This reporter must’ve gone off script for her own belief, probably even risking her job right now depending on who was listening. He had no doubt that Judy could pull some strings to get the woman canned if she had a mind to.

            And in that moment, Scott’s gut tightened just enough to give him the bravery to speak up a little louder. Taking a deep and bracing breath, he let the words roll off his tongue: “That’s their opinion, and they’re entitled to it. I guess they just miss the good old days when R&R meant rest and rehabilitation, not shrinking. The name fits though. It’s hard to rest when you’re getting walked around on by the people making the rules.”

            As soon as the words had left his mouth, Scott had some accurate predictions of how his afternoon would proceed. All the same, though, he couldn’t begrudge himself this fleeting moment of satisfaction in the public eye after spending so many months acting as Judy’s campaign puppet mascot.

            She could stick a finger into him and make him talk, but it didn’t always have to be exactly what she wanted to hear.

            Looking up, past the smugly vindicated reporter’s face and the surprised gaping of the cameraman, Scott was trapped in Judy’s aggressively beaming gaze. Her eyes bore right through him and into the chair. He knew in an instant exactly what was coming, and what was more, he didn’t care.

            And he smiled right back.

            So now here he was, nearly six hours later: the length of a thumbnail, stripped to his bare essence, defiant, and clenched gently between his mother’s massive lips as her passive-aggressive kiss sucked him into her mouth.

            Worth it.

            “Don’t worry, sweetie,” Judy whispered calmingly without letting her son slip away like a stray spaghetti noodle. “Your appointment isn’t for another fifteen minutes, and I think you could use a little exercise. And I have plenty of wipes. Now let go.”

            Sighing contentedly, the woman opened her lips just a little wider and slurped Scott back inside. He was dragged across the bottom row of teeth and onto the spongy bulk of her tongue.

            Now more relaxed than she’d felt all morning after the boy’s debacle of an interview answer, Judy pulled the car’s mirror compartment down. She set about adjusting her bangs so she’d look her best once they were inside the Clinic. They’d fallen a bit out of place during Scott’s pep-talk.

            Barely giving it a spare subconscious thought as she focused on her own appearance, Judy swished her miniature child back and forth around her mouth like a human breath mint.

            The boy, miraculously, was just as disengaged as his mother, even as she squeezed him against her mushy cheek and calmly sucked on his body. Even as his tiny face was slaked through a moat of saliva around her gums, choking her froth down his throat. Even as her muscular pink organ scooped him up and let him slide close enough to her throat that his feet kicked into her uvula. Even as his body baked in her syrupy juices while her tongue agonizingly stroked at his exposed member to ensure he was punished in every way possible.

            Scott knew very little in this world that was able to intimidate his mother, and with good reason: very little in this world was in any kind of position to intimidate her, especially now with the meteoric rise of her campaign. She may have stood at a mere five-foot-eleven, but for all the world, she might have been a thousand feet high.

            The fact that Judy felt the need to make this vigorous a point to her son meant his simple joke of an answer in the interview had frightened her.

            And that meant the fight was far from over.

            “Hi. My name’s… Cassandra. I’m seventeen, halfway through my junior year, and I’ve been under R&R for… four weeks now,” a teenage girl said as she perched at a modest six inches tall on her mother’s left knee.

            “Hi Cassandra,” droned her equally shrunken peers in unison from around the room as they all sat on the hand or leg of their legal guardians and/or wardens.

            The whitewashed group meeting room of the ARR Clinic swallowed up its inhabitants by more than just size. Pristine in its every detail from Bonsai trees on the floor-length crystalline windows to the spotless cream-colored chairs encircling the room, the place was almost too bright to look around. Eventually Scott’s eyes would adjust, but for the beginning, he felt as though he was being fried under the blinding interrogation lights of a new-age gulag.

            “Now, this is Cassandra’s first time with our group today,” said Val Richards, adjusting her ivory clipboard as she ran a finger down the attendance list. The curly-haired discussion monitor eyed the collection of shrunken outlaws in a round, her youthful freckled cheeks curving invitingly. “So we’ll have her go first for testimonials today and tell us a bit about herself. Is that all right, Cassandra?”

            The half-foot girl nodded meekly, having caught an expectant glance from her much-larger parent’s eye overhead. Satisfied, Val made a scribble on her accompanying note pad. Participation was optional, but especially for those present for therapy under court orders, it was greatly to one’s benefit to impress the monitor.

            Scott, now regrown to a respectable four inches and clothed in a miniature polo shirt and jeans, straddled his mother’s middle finger as she rested her folded hand atop her firm thigh.

            Scratching at a dried clump of Judy’s saliva in his hair, he shot a furtive glance over to the newcomer, as always intrigued to study the behavior of a fellow prisoner of society’s cruel joke of a punishment. Though tough to make out from a distance of several feet away, Cassandra’s arms were lined with tattoos of various flowers, and a few strands of crimson red dye coursed through her primarily dark brown locks.

            Looking especially reserved for her first time in group, Cassandra had folded her hands into her lap as her mother’s thumb descended on her, patting her shoulders, though whether it was for support or a reminder to stay good was hard to say. The woman, slender in the face with a few gray streaks in her hair, appeared to be focusing on Val and her directions for the group. As her fingers dabbed lightly at her tiny daughter’s back, the mother’s palm eventually opened up, wrapping around Cassandra’s back and plucking her up from the knee.

            Without taking her gaze off the next speaker, the woman spent a few moments brushing her shrunken child’s hair back over her shoulders: something Cassandra remained particularly limp for, hanging almost lifelessly in her parent’s grip as the job was completed. Clearly there was an expectation that she yield to any of her mother’s actions in public, even for something as trivial as having her hair brushed like a doll’s.

            The pattern of introductions continued around the room as each shrunken adolescent took their turn to speak up under the watchful eye of their colossal parent or in a couple cases, Scott guessed, older sibling. At last the circle around, and all eyes in the room fell to him, some with more apprehension than the rest.

            His story was well-known by now around the country, and he was aware of the vast range of opinions on him, especially by his reduced brethren. Those who had some idea of the measures Judy employed to tame her son looked on him with pity, while many seemed to be in a state of barely-contained fury, either for his drunken vehicular crime itself, or just for his association with the woman who had made all this dehumanizing madness possible.

            Scott didn’t feel that last one was a particularly fair reason, though, since it wasn’t exactly his fault he just happened to be birthed by a power-hungry matriarch hell-bent on building herself a litigious citadel atop the bones of the old ways. Still, he could understand their ire toward Judy herself, probably more so than almost any human being on Earth.

            “Your turn, Scott,” Val said needlessly, smiling again at him.

            “Right,” the four-inch prisoner said, coughing to clear his throat. As if to give him some extra prompting, Judy’s finger bucked him in the hips. Ignoring his mother’s unnecessary intrusion, Scott at least noted his gratitude for being allowed to wear pants into this meeting, and opened his mouth to speak.

            “Hi there. My name is Scott Stevens. Twenty-two. One year to go at university. I’ve been under R&R for… thirteen months now.”

            “Thank you, Scott,” Val said. “I believe that’s everyone, yes? Let’s go ahead and move into testimonials, then. Like I said, we’ll have our new participants go first, which I suppose is just Cassandra today. I’m sure we’ll all show her a warm welcome and listen very attentively to whatever she has to say.”

            This last mandate for manners was hardly necessary, given that every shrunken individual in the room was in such easy grabbing distance of their parent’s enormous, entrapping palms if great focus wasn’t displayed for every instant of the therapy. Nobody dared resist Val’s cheerily delivered directions. And those that did were often put in their place quickly enough to serve as an example.

            “Go ahead, Cassandra. Whenever you’re ready. Just start at the beginning and share whatever you’re comfortable with,” Val instructed gently. She folded her clipboard in her lap, devoting full attention to the tattooed teen.

            “Umm. Okay, sure,” Cassandra said, now seated in her mother’s palm and facing out at the group. “Well, I, uh… I started shoplifting when I was thirteen. It was just little things at first. You know, packs of gum, candy, movies. I guess that got boring eventually, so by the time I was… sixteen… I was taking bigger things. Universal remotes, phones, portable hard drives. I got caught like two months ago when I was, um…”

            The girl paused for a moment, perhaps collecting her thoughts, or maybe giving up on the account altogether. However, her mother’s thumb rose up once again, this time positioning the softly pedicured nail against Cassandra’s cheek. The girl visibly swallowed and continued on.

            “…when I was taking a car. And I was kind of already… in the car. Driving out of the show room,” she concluded.

            Scott couldn’t help but raise an impressed eyebrow at the girl’s reckless abandon. Cassandra had probably barely earned her driver’s license and already she was operating at the level of broad daylight heists. Knowing it couldn’t be condoned, he nonetheless admired her apparent conviction to whatever moral code she followed.

            “Holy shit!” a small but insistent voice called out in response to Cassandra’s story, echoing the silent thoughts of most every other shrunken listener. Scott didn’t even need to look over to know the owner of the voice was Derrick Tate, an especially outspoken commentator who’d earned his place in the group by diverting a week’s supply of sewage into the piping of a local Techilogic legal firm.

            Therapy had apparently been doing very little to improve his attitude or his vocabulary.

            “Derrick,” his mother snapped under her breath. Instantly her hand was around the eight-inch body of her son, scooping him up from her knee and up to her intently frowning countenance. Her fingers appeared to be squeezing into his stomach, perhaps hoping to limit his next response down to a meek apology. “What do you say?”

            “It’s just fucking impressive, that’s all!” he gasped with enthusiasm, obviously not giving two shits how he spoke in front of his mother or the professional responsible for reporting on his improvement.

            Val cleared her throat.

            “That’s enough for now,” Mrs. Tate reported curtly. Running a hand through her short hair in exasperation, the woman flattened her feet to the ground and slipped her right foot out of its foam clog. A deep, grit-encrusted imprint revealed itself in the well-worn footwear as she lowered her child down toward the floor.

            The loudmouthed teen made no further objections as his body was handily slid across the squishy insole of his mother’s clog, where his head fit snugly under the big toe strap like a dog collar.

            There was a very particular and threatening reason many of the parents wore slip-ons or sandals to these meetings, just in case some more forceful encouragement was needed for their child. Scott had yet to be turned into such a demonstration by his mother during these meetings, though that didn’t stop her from crossing her leg and rocking her foot from side to side whenever his discussion answers occasionally veered toward the liberal spectrum.

            Right now, it looked like Derrick’s mother was going to give the whole group a helpful reminder about what awaited even the slightest rebellion.

            “Yes, yes. Moving on now. We’re sorry about that, Cassandra,” Val said. She turned away as most of Derrick’s body disappeared beneath his mother’s somewhat pudgy appendage. The woman had to use a bit of extra force to cram her foot in when a shrunken inhabitant was already taking up some of the room, but she eventually made it work, sandwiching Derrick between heavy sole flesh and a spongy clog pad.

            The boy was given just enough wiggle room so that his eyes could peep out from under Mrs. Tate’s big toe as it mashed aggressively against his mouth and nose, ensuring he stayed silent from now on.

            After all, there was no reason why he couldn’t still listen as he was forcibly kissed again and again into the underside of his parent’s foot.

            “No, it’s all right,” Cassandra uttered, her bulging eyes still affixed down to Derrick across the circle as his dangling limbs were squashed beneath his mother’s hefty appendage.

            Scott held back a knowing nod as he straightened his legs across the length of Judy’s fingers. It was now clear the girl’s prior exposure to the “rehabilitation” part of R&R had been limited to being groomed like a living toy by her mother. While demeaning, certainly, it didn’t quite compare to watching a human being shoved into a shoe and stood upon like it was nothing.

            If Scott had to guess, this was the first time Cassandra had ever witnessed such a sight, and he couldn’t blame her for the shock. Even if his own experiences had made these kinds of acts fairly pedestrian for nearly half his short life. Frankly, he felt the urge to yawn as Derrick was mashed beneath the ball of his mother’s foot, though that seemed a little on the rude side, especially with Judy hovering so closely.

            “Would you like to continue?” Val encouraged.

            “S-Sure. Yeah. Yeah, I’ll, I’ll… um, anyway,” the girl muttered. She forced herself to tear her eyes away from Derrick’s mother, who was now casually bobbing her overstuffed clog up and down against the floor, egregiously compressing her son’s body and grinding her toeprint into his nose on every bounce. “Yeah, I, um… was going to go to juvy, but… this… thing with the Shrink Act came up, my parents and I heard it was working for some people, so I… went through it.”

            “And now?” Val pressed softly.

            “And now I’m just, uh… trying to learn, I guess,” Cassandra said, sounding more rehearsed now than she had yet. Scott couldn’t help but suspect a bit of pre-therapy coaching from the girl’s mother. It sounded like reading off a script. “Trying to… get into a better place… so that I can stop doing those things… that were hurting me… and others… once I’m back to normal size. That’s all.”

            “Wonderful. Thank you for sharing, Cassandra,” Val said. She flipped her notepad back over and scribbled some lines with a smile on her face. The woman loved being fed back those kinds of glossy garbage lines about “learning” and “getting to a better place” almost as much as Judy herself, so Scott stuck to these answers whenever possible.

            He hoped, for Cassandra’s sake, she’d pick it up just as quickly.

            “Thank you for sharing, Julian,” Val said with an identical grin as another shrunken incarcerate finished his tale. “We’re just about out of time for testimonials today. I believe we’ve heard from everyone so far except… Scott Stevens, yes?”

            Scott, draped over Judy’s knuckles, felt her finger rising again between his legs to get his attention. Quickly putting the involuntary tingling sensation out of mind as the woman’s digit prodded intently against his inner thighs, the young man looked out across the room of waiting eyes: fifteen pairs of normal-size and fifteen pairs of miniaturized.

            Unable to help it, he glanced back down across the room to Derrick’s body still wedged awkwardly and blushing like a piece of overcooked meat between Mrs. Tate’s foot and her now sweat-greased clog.

            “Scott? Would you like to share anything with us?” Val asked, breaking his concentration.

            “Uhh… sure. About what?” he said earnestly, hoping for some direction.

            “Well, I know you had your first disciplinary review board session a week ago. Why don’t you tell us a bit about that?” the monitor replied cheerfully.

            Judy’s finger remained poised between her four-inch son’s legs like a bronco, now rising and falling steadily in tandem with Scott’s breaths, reminding him what was at stake if his answer wasn’t up to code.

            “There’s, uh… not really much to tell,” Scott said, cracking the falsest smile he could muster.

            Twelve taut faces resting atop steepled fingers peered out at Scott over a magnificent mahogany table serving as the stage for this most momentous occasion in his shrunken incarceration.

            The Shrink Act poster boy himself, with his arms folded reverently behind his back, shuffled anxiously in his little suit and slacks as he stood upon the sheer surface, facing the people who just happened to be responsible for his personal freedom in the foreseeable future.

            He noted that his necktie had perhaps been tugged just a little too tight by Judy when she was personally dressing and grooming him two hours before like a personal doll, immediately following a vigorous bath in her sink. Of course he was far too fidgety now to correct it, especially with his mother seated immediately behind him. Occasionally her hands, folded neatly together on the tabletop, would stretch out and stroke on Scott’s back, reminding him to stand up straight and tall to look as little like a criminal as possible.

            For once, being touched by his mother’s enormous hands didn’t spook Scott; he had far more to fear on the other end of that table in the glassy, disapproving eyes of the review board.

            Almost all of them appeared perfectly willing to glance the other way if Judy were to, say, punt her son across the room like a football.

            His general public approval level was still working on crawling its way back above “pariah” after he’d drunkenly bulldozed into a pedestrian and violently terminated her pregnancy in the process of nearly killing the woman as well. Scott didn’t blame them for their judicial prudence in the slightest. If anything, he was even harder on himself, though these people now were giving him a run for his money.

            “Well, Mr. Stevens, after having some time to process the notes taken by your guardian over the past year, your own personal accounts, as well as the written testimonies of your siblings and others who’ve had close contact with you in the previous twelve months, I believe we’ve reached a decision that will be fair for all,” a greying woman in the center said, adjusting her reading glasses as she scanned her eyes over a document plucked from a manila envelope.

            Scott clutched his breath inside, every muscle tensing with more anxiety than he ever felt gazing into the awaiting shadow of a giant shoe. Frankly, he’d have taken being squashed underfoot a dozen times over than be made to stand here under the silent judgment of these people.

            “It is the opinion of this board that you will benefit most by remaining in the custody of your mother, Councilwoman Judith Stevens, for the next six months under the stipulations of the Reduction and Rehabilitation Act, at which time this board will convene again to discuss probation options, if indication of your personal improvement continues to be demonstrated,” the woman reported dryly, brushing a peppered bang off her forehead.

            Scott released the air at last, trying not to let his adrenaline-induced trembling show.

            It wasn’t the best outcome, but still much better than he was expecting. A glimmer of freedom, no matter how slight or distant, was nonetheless visible now. If only he could keep up this juggling act for another half-year.

            “In amending the parameters of your house arrest, as discussed earlier, recesses from the premises may now occur three times weekly for up to two hours, under the supervision of pre-approved temporary guardians other than your mother and two siblings. Is this agreeable to you, Mr. Stevens?” the speaker for the board continued.

            “It sounds like you’re making some very positive steps, Scott,” Val said when the young man had finished rambling through the explanation. “We’re all very proud of you, I’m sure. How do you personally feel about all of this?”

            “Uh, good… glad. I mean… glad to know I’m… making progress. And that the people… the review board sees it too,” Scott managed delicately.

            “One of the things I like to ask anyone I work with, whether they’re under R&R or not, is to reaffirm goals for themselves,” the woman said, twiddling her pen between her fingers. “Speaking them in front of a group can do some good.”

            “I couldn’t agree more,” Judy said, instantly grabbing the attention of every eye in the room with the commanding boom of her timbre still coiled in that sultry imperiousness. Scott had come to know and be chilled by that tone in the worst ways possible.

            He silently swallowed another lump as his mother’s finger rode particularly high up between his legs, casually pinning his family jewels up nearer to his stomach through his pants. A show of strength: she wasn’t in the least bit unnerved to make such a move even with everyone’s attention squared directly to her.

            Another warning, as if he needed one, to tread carefully, or else be treaded upon.

            “Yeah, I’m, uh… I’m sure it can!” Scott said. He fought back an especially feminine bleat from creeping into his words as the sensation of his mother’s finger squeezing against his crotch peaked with a twinge of pain before settling down again.

            “Good. Why don’t you share with us, then,” Val suggested coolly. “What, above all, are you hoping to get out of all this, Scott?”

            “Y-Yes. Yes, definitely,” Scott responded to the older woman’s question, trying not to sound too ecstatic. He needed to maintain a very precise demeanor here. For once, he actually wasn’t too ungrateful to have his parent’s fingers stroking possessively up his limbs, if only to keep him in a state of relative docility.

            After all, it wasn’t just the review board and his mother he had to impress. Given that this was the first review board held for the premiere Shrink Act house arrest case, there were a number of powerful players in attendance whose gaze Scott could certainly feel scalding through the back of his scalp from the seats located just behind the table. Figures from prominent advocacy groups both attacking and bolstering The Shrink Act’s country-sized controversy. News reporters and their accompanying equipment and flashing lights, perhaps almost as many as had been present at Judy’s fateful campaign announcement party.

            Even, Scott was fairly certain, another senatorial hopeful he recognized from the news named Theodore Darwin: a clean-cut fifty-something self-made billionaire East-coast native with a gleaming smile who just happened to command one of the few remaining technology corporations not yet bought out by Techilogic. His “smart” systems were currently being used to revamp and strengthen the security and stability of every major prison within range of the Atlantic, or so the news anchors enthusiastically spouted, putting him in direct opposition to Judy and company’s more unorthodox methodology for rehabilitating criminals. The man in his pressed charcoal suits was preparing to go toe-to-toe with Judy Stevens, which Scott knew from very personal and sweaty experience wasn’t always a good move, but he held out hope that he could root for the man. While Theodore wasn’t “on his side,” per se, it gave the young man comfort to know there was a presence in the room who potentially rivaled the strength of his mother’s, which was no small feat.

            Of course, that glimmer of a hope meant far more to Scott than escaping the toying clutches of his mother. He had put up with plenty throughout his life in her possession, and he was prepared to go through far more and far worse if it meant his real goal could be achieved.

            “Well…” Scott began, exhaling heavily as he stared across the room of blinking incarcerates and over to Val’s blankly awaiting expression. The true answer to her question remained lodged in his throat, and he finally succeeded in choking past it. Now wasn’t the time, especially not when he was perched directly on his mother’s knuckles.

            “Yes?”

            “My goal is… still to become a better person. To take the wrongs I’ve committed and just keep working at thinking about them, and using this new freedom in the program in any way I can to improve myself in mind and body.”

            He’d stated these same words of cookie-cutter remorse in some combination for what felt like roughly eight thousand times in the past year, and while he meant some of them, it left a bad taste in his mouth every time, but it was also the only surefire way to ensure Judy was kept happy.

            “That’s good, Scott. But I’m not just talking about the goal of self-improvement. Those are the kinds of points we cover all the time. I want to hear what you want,” Val said, and though Scott still hadn’t attended enough sessions in this whitewashed cell to detect how genuine she was, the half-curved smile on her face at least let him know that in this moment, she wanted exactly what she was asking for. “Where do you see yourself? What do you want to do? Finish school? Advocate? Travel?”

            “Right. Me,” Scott mumbled, still keeping the answer at bay, but nonetheless feeling a swell in his chest at the thought of it.

            Sure, he wanted to finish his degree, providing his school, or any school, would take him back. Sure, he wanted to continue reconnecting with Ella, assuming the strain of it all didn’t become too much to bear. Sure, he wanted to put as much mileage between himself and his mother’s claws as was geographically possible, despite knowing the woman could and would find any way she could to close the distance if she desired.

            But no, his true aims were laid elsewhere.

            As the board flipped through a few more pages of lesser measures to amend Scott’s sentence, he chanced a glance over his shoulder to a spot near the front of the spectators where his younger siblings were seated with hands folded in their Sunday best: Kyle, a lanky and bespectacled high school sophomore who’d pulled his nose out of his books long enough to come support the brother with whom he’d only recently become shakily allied again, and Maggie, a blonde seventeen-year-old high school soccer star who, despite being short for her age, could’ve once terrified Scott down to the marrow with a simple lick of her lips, but who now couldn’t have looked more conflicted than if she had a literal angel and devil perched on each shoulder whispering advice in her ears.

            Them. They were the reason he was going through all this now.

            They were the reason he was willing to sit on this table and lie through his teeth before God and the world about his belief in Judy’s fascist whims. If he didn’t stand for them, small as he was, no one would, because the longer they all remained in their mother’s mind-warping web, the less of them would be left by the end of it, and it wasn’t just their physical height that Scott was concerned for.

“We in this country are being subject to a sickness: an obsession with altering the very makeup of our fellow man. Judy Stevens would have you believe the most effective method for fixing the common criminal is to make him an ANT within it permanently. What will this do, other than develop an unhealthy fear of the world and an eye toward comeuppance?”

            Theodore Darwin’s droning voice suited his rigid face and obviously doctored lack of wrinkles. Still, in spite of these robotic predilections, Scott couldn’t help but be compelled to gaze up at the TV and drink in the man’s telecasted promise to fight tooth-and-nail against Judy’s proposed national growth of the Shrink Act. A flurry of press microphones fought for space under his chin as he laid out his goals to dismantle many of the maniacal punishments the matriarchal Stevens planned to visit upon the nation, if he was allowed to become senator in her stead.

            “Instead we need to focus on inviting those who’ve made mistakes back into our community of citizenship. It can’t happen overnight, I admit, but the approach to finding peace for everyone lies not in shrinking every single minor offender, but in giving them the chance to repent and, in the meantime, keeping them secure,” Theodore continued, re-centering the knot of his tie. The conversation then transitioned back into the advancements his company was making in surveillance technology. Finally, a couple of jokes regarding the man’s last name and the easy evolution-themed campaign slogans being pumped out.

            Not bad, Scott thought with a last glance at Darwin’s face. Better bring your A-game.

            Once the potentially empty yet nonetheless comforting campaign vows had ended, Scott rose back to his feet, grappling at the cushioned leg of the nearby building-scaled couch as he did so, and scooped up his handy Lil’ Fella Cleaner rod: a veritable Swiss army knife of maintenance devices intended for shrunken housemates on janitorial detail.

            Incidentally, it was the result of another ultimately helpful message that had originated from the TV during an infomercial one night when Judy was catching up on her crime shows after several weeks without a day off from work.

            Her mammoth bare feet were propped up on the coffee table with a hapless eight-inch Scott sandwiched between them on massage duty. Given how heavily his parent’s soles weighed upon his frame, though, the boy wasn’t so much providing the massage as offering up his body as a squishy tool by which the woman might knead her weary dogs together and get some much-desired relief. Which he was pretty used to.

            The gasp of delight she’d emitted when the plastic contraption flashed onscreen stopped Scott’s heart momentarily, as he briefly assumed all the rubbing she was doing had prompted an even more undesirable effect in her body. Instead she’d whipped out her cell phone to order the Lil’ Fella Cleaner trinket for Scott’s immediate use with priority speed, stroking her pinky toe through his mussy hair and offering him a wink as she spoke into the mouthpiece.

            Incredibly, the LFC was one of the few gifts Judy had given to her son in the past few years that actually was beneficial to his existence. And now it was time to put it back to use before the woman wandered through and thought him to be loafing during his normal work hours.

            Anyway, at six inches, it was getting a little tiring for Scott to crane his neck upward and witness the flaring screen in the living room. However, he was more than willing to put up with it after spending approximately seven hours of the previous day not only at one-sixth of this size but plastered to his mother’s doughy sole and flexed continually into the fibers of her soggy stocking. It was good to keep things in perspective.

            Scott’s incredibly kosher retelling of his first review board at the Adams Reduction & Rehabilitation Clinic to Val and his fellow reduced troublemakers had apparently put him back into his mother’s good graces, or at least her acceptable graces. She’d still made a point of depositing him back into her heel for the car ride home, grasping his head into the clamping crevice of her greasy toes every other minute.

            And now he had a brand new day to find all-new ways to test the limits of his patience and weigh the impossible moral question of whether it was worth it to wrestle his mother’s foot just for the privilege of maintaining some of his personal pride. At the very least, the high school had let out for the summer as of two days before, and with Kyle and Maggie home for a few months once again, Judy’s attentions might be more evenly divided. Not necessarily a good thing, but it inspired some hope.

            He meandered under the opaque overhang of the coffee table, switching the tool to its sticky lint-collecting head and plucked up some stray cracker crumbs and specks of fluff soon to become dust bunnies if he didn’t intervene.

            Truth be told, he was the only one in the house with the stature and vantage point to ever truly be inconvenienced by such low-tier detritus, but in the past year he’d noticed Judy taking more heed of the slightest imperfections in the upkeep of her home. She’d stated it was in case of impromptu interviews regarding her campaign, but he suspected it was primarily just to give him constant purpose. He was just lucky she didn’t try to rub his nose into the filth with the back of her thumb as she might a naughty dog.

            Satisfied with the state of the place’s foot-level ecosystem, Scott crossed the LFC over his shoulder like a bayonet and marched off the shaggy carpet of the living room and onto the hardwood of the hallway.

            He discovered a few errant flecks of crushed leaves and added them to his cleansing sabre without even breaking his gait. Passing by the glass door entrance to his mother’s increasingly ornate office, though, the boy was careful to tiptoe, grateful that the woman’s back was turned to her laptop. He was mere inches from reaching the first step of the staircase when the singsong order beckoned.

            “Sweetie, come here for a minute please,” Judy called.

            Silently huffing at the extra pair of eyes he was fairly certain his mother kept hidden on the back of her skull, Scott trudged back in the opposite direction, passing between the strategically cracked door he was now pretty sure she’d left waiting for her favorite houseboy to wander too near.

            As he cautiously approached the deeply imposing monolith that was Judy’s desk, flanked by crystalline pillars suspending it above, her eyes never broke away from the computer screen. Nor did her fingers cease scuttling at a rapidfire pace over the keyboard. The shrunken inmate did his best to avoid letting his gaze fall uneasily to his parent’s right foot. It was bared in all its usual glory and crossed over her opposite knee, bouncing airily overhead in time with each scrunch of her bulbous toes.

            “I could use a trim, as long as you’re down there. Left. Second toe.”

            Apparently that was all, because Judy returned to work after this cheerful request. Breathing a sigh of relief under his breath, Scott stumbled forward and, after tucking away the lint swab tool, replaced it with the combination nail-file/sander out of the LFC and approached Judy’s prodigious ped.

            Indeed, the second nail, recently painted a gleaming midnight purple, was looking a little mature. Now that he saw it, in fact, Scott recalled it appearing just overdone the day before as he was dangled nakedly between those squirming digits, but then again, it was hard to tell in the sweaty darkness where up was down, left was right, and his brain was toe-cooked oatmeal. So, it was understandable that he required having his memory jogged.

            The boy bowed down before Judy’s foot and wedged the rough edge of the implement against the rounded keratin. Next he set to gently sawing back and forth, powdering the tip of his mother’s over-long toenail into a fine dust that scattered quickly into the carpet and became lost, or at least those pieces that didn’t instead float to Scott’s pant legs and cling to the fabric.

            “Thanks, hon,” Judy intoned. She glanced briefly through the translucent surface of her desk and down at the eight-inch boy prostrated before her bare foot and tending to her every tiniest hygienic need.

            Scott nodded, rising off his haunches, but before he could leave he winced to realize two of his mother’s toes had parted and sprung forth. The digits clamped his arm between them and tugged him back down onto his knees. Careful not to struggle uselessly against the squishy flesh, the young man relaxed his limb into the doughy grip of Judy’s toes and looked directly above again to find his parent’s smugly hospitable countenance crooning from on high through the glass.

            “By the way,” Judy said at last, clearly intent on letting her toes do the talking first. They squeezed harder, earning a minute peep from their victim. “Friends from the campaign committee are coming over for coffee in about half an hour, so don’t go too far. Some of them might need you. Okay, sweetie?”

            Scott tried not to gulp too visibly and only bobbed his head again, and at last felt the pressure around his arm from Judy’s merciless toes loosening.

            They uncurled nice and slowly, of course, letting the pink color steadily pump back into the flesh over a few seconds before releasing completely. Immediately the digits scrunched back toward the carpet and then nudged the shrunken young man in the stomach, more or less helping him back to his feet.

            With no other apparent duties on the docket with regard to servicing his mother’s nude size-12s, Scot swung the LFC back over his shoulder and power-walked for the door before Judy could come up with more inanity for his time.

            Only half an hour. Great.

            Anything having to do with campaigns or committees was generally bad news for Scott. Especially since it almost certainly meant Nancy was coming over. And given that every time now that he was forced to look at that surgery-sculpted face of hers he was reminded of the previous summer when she’d forcibly stripped him down and used his head as her personal dildo in the poolhouse: a memory he wasn’t keen on reliving, especially since he’d already spent enough uncomfortable dreams doing just that.

            Plus, the way Judy had pronounced “need you” was troubling. As someone might refer to “needing” a cigarette after a long break, or vigorous masturbation following an intense blueballing.

            If he was lucky, he’d only be massaging the giant sun-baked pump-swollen bare feet of a roomful of middle-aged women with a bad case of the giggles.

            If he was lucky.

            “Kyle and Maggie’s rooms could use a going-over, if you’re looking for things to do before everyone gets here,” Judy sang out softly just as Scott slipped back through the doom-dwelling French doors of his mother’s office.

            Escape was pretty futile by this point, as his mother’s announcement of guests was a definitive command to be at the beck and call of the coffee hour, but that didn’t mean Scott couldn’t catch a short break now before the debauchery of soggy nylons and foot odor began.

            Reaching the base of the stairs again, the hapless incarcerate took hold of the rappelling line that ran along the wall and began bouncing his way up the steps toward his siblings’ rooms.

            Reaching the top of the stairs at last, Scott glanced briefly between the two open bedroom doors flanking the upper hallway.

            It wasn’t hard for him to decide to start with cleaning his brother’s room before his sister’s. Kyle was likely to completely ignore his very existence, which was just fine by Scott, letting him work in peace.

            Maggie, meanwhile, was much more vulnerable to fits of intense boredom whereupon she would interrupt or even blatantly impede Scott’s workflow, often by trumping whatever duty in which he was engaged in order to redirect his attention toward her soles and stubby toes, which were in near-constant desire of massage, especially given that soccer was in season now.

            At least in the past year she’d developed the decency of character not to trample him whilst doing so, a fact that was not lost on Scott, but kneading her enormous heels was still something the boy preferred to avoid when possible.

            But of course, if he addressed her room second, all he’d have to do to escape this additional bout with griminess when he had probably a dozen to look forward to in half an hour would be to let her know that Judy had pre-mandated his presence. Maggie wasn’t afraid to bend rules, but she knew better than to claim her brother when their lovingly tyrannical mother already called dibs.

            So, Kyle it was.

            The bespectacled sixteen-year-old was laid out atop his mattress, as he so often was, lanky legs crossed over one another while his laptop rested on his stomach. He glanced in Scott’s direction as the six-inch inmate padded across the carpeted threshold of the bedroom with the LFC in tow.

            “Does that thing actually help you?” Kyle muttered coolly, his eyes still glued to the computer screen.

            “The stick? Yeah, usually,” Scott said. He brandished it, knocking some of the chunkier dust particles down against his ankle. “Depends on the job.”

            “Uh-huh.”

            A silence followed in which Scott cleared his throat and set about mowing over the fluffy floor with his implement, dabbing at the occasional crumb or scrap of shredded paper.

            Slowly conversations were becoming more possible with his brother. At this rate, they’d be getting into full-blown normal-person topics by the next month.

            After all, the shrunken incarcerate had newfound reason to cling to hope.

            “Mr. Kyle Stevens?” the chairwoman of Scott’s review board called out, tracing a line with her finger down the stapled records. “If you’re willing, would you stand please for commentary?”

            Nodding, the youngest Stevens child, now tied for the tallest person in the house and still trying to catch up on growing into his own skin, stumbled up to his feet with a cough, hands buried in his pockets as he stared up at the table where his shrunken sibling stood with their mother.

            “Now, just to repeat, we have your written statement, and that will remain in our private possession for the time being,” the woman explained with a calm smile. “However, for the benefit of those gathered here and those involved in this particular case, we’d like to hear any thoughts you have in summation after today’s proceeding. I will emphasize that this is not to account for official testimony, and is merely an opportunity for those most closely associated with Scott Stevens to be heard.”

            “Just… anything…?” the teen mumbled, casting another glance to Scott that the older boy couldn’t quite read.

            “We have a couple of starters here. Feel free to answer at whatever length you wish, or not at all. Do you understand?”

            “Yes,” Kyle said. The room seemed to hold its collective breath, with only a creaking chorus of chairs behind the boy as they leaned forward.

            “Do you believe that your brother, Scott Stevens, is best suited to remain in house arrest custody at the current time?”

            “…Yes,” the teen said.

            Scott gnawed his lower lip, avoiding Kyle’s gaze. He was expecting that, especially with Judy and the whole room listening so intently. There was only one correct answer to that question. It still didn’t feel good. Without even looking up to his parent’s face, he could sense the radiation of her smile warming the room.

            “Do you believe that your brother, Scott Stevens, is being treated fairly under regulation of Reduction and Rehabilitation?”

            There was a pause. Kyle brushed the rim of his glasses further up his nose, rubbing at a fingerprint smudge he’d left on the lens. His Adam’s apple lurched visibly.

            “Sometimes,” he said. “Usually. Not… always.”

            Some stray mutters scattered over the gathered crowd, but the woman in charge drummed her fingers and order was quickly maintained.

            “Based on your personal experience and witnessing of Reduction and Rehabilitation custody in your own home, and only on your personal experience and witnessing, do you believe it to be a viable method by which to correct wrongful behavior?” the woman pressed.

            “I, uh….” Kyle breathed, puffing up his willowy chest, then on increasingly jellied legs, lowered back into his seat. “I think I’m done.”

            “What’re you working on? I thought you were done with school,” Scott asked his brother once he’d crossed the halfway mark in dust-picking over the bedroom carpet. He’d been listening to Kyle rapidly typing for several minutes now, and knew for a fact the boy wasn’t much of a fan of social media.

            “I am done,” Kyle confirmed, again without looking up. His fingers continued busily firing across the keyboard. “It’s… stuff for a project my friend David’s doing, trying to get us a spot on this… one magazine, I guess, so I’m doing some research about how matter reacts to size changes in, like, cold weather and shit. Boring stuff.”

            “Oh. Cool,” Scott replied with a bumbling nod of his head as he continued merrily on his way to the opposite corner of the room. Trudging overtop the cotton hills of Kyle’s discarded shorts and crumpled school papers, the young man swapped his LFC to a sandpapered tip and commenced scraping away some blackened residue from God-knew-what that was crusted on the lower carving of the floor seal.

            “It’s not a big deal,” Kyle emphasized, and at last, he laid a hand over the screen of the computer and snapped it shut, letting it plop into the rumpled sheets of his bed. He sidled off the frame and onto the carpet, careful to let his feet hit the floor with less of a pronounced stomp given his motion-sensitive guest.

            “Still, that’s awesome. You’re getting people to see your stuff,” Scott continued as he clawed away the final clump of wall gunk. He turned around as his brother strolled steadily across the carpet and toward his corner. Kyle kicked away the discarded clothing and chip bag obstacles his sibling had traversed to reach this distant corner of the room, leaving a broader path of carpet for an exit.

            “Uh-huh. You don’t have to sound all impressed or whatever,” Kyle said. He hunched down, lowering himself onto his knees, though still towered with a humorous height advantage over his decidedly less academic brother, as evidenced by the cast shadow that easily enveloped Scott. “I know you don’t really care.”

            “Okay, I don’t really,” Scott admitted with a shrug, knowing the boy was too smart to butter up so easily. He craned his neck, looking Kyle square in the eye. “But if it’s something you care about, I think it’s cool. Or whatever. And that’s not trying to “sound” like anything.”

            “Right.” Kyle scratched the back of his neck, the pair numbly suspended in a moment of awkward respect. “Uh, thanks, then.”

            “Sure thing,” Scott said, giving a final swipe to the carpet with his LFC before snapping it back into transport mode and balancing it across his trapezius. “Looks good to me in here. Did I miss anything?”

            “Nah,” Kyle said. He peeked over his shoulder, then dropped his voice into a mumble for only the six-inch individual to hear. “Listen, you know, if you need to take a break or something sometime and Mom says to come do stuff in here, I mean… that’s cool with me, if you want to just sit there. I can take care of it.”

            “Thanks,” Scott answered with equally genuine clarity. Shrugging, he extended his arm with a fist on the end, nodding at it indicatively for a bump.

            Confused for a moment, Kyle clenched his own digits into a fist that was nearly half as tall as Scott’s entire body and nudged the awaiting peace offering.

            “Do you need a ride back downstairs or anything?” the teen offered, lowering his closed hand to the carpet and opening his fingers into a gangplank. “I got you covered.”

            “No, I have to, um… get to…” Scott said, his gaze flashing to the wall that separated the boys from their middle sibling’s bedroom.

            “Oh,” Kyle said knowingly as he closed his fist back up. The boy cringed as he ascended back to full height and looked down upon his brother with a rare pitifully furrowed countenance. “Um, good luck. I’d, uh, you know, backup if you needed it, but…”

            “It’s okay. I’ll be fine,” Scott said with only about 42% certainty. Holding his shoulders up with an air of falsified confidence, at least somewhat emboldened by their conversation, the young man marched past his brother and back toward the door in the direction of Maggie’s awaiting fortress of sports gear and perfume samplers.

            “She… seemed like she’s in a good mood today?” Kyle proffered helpfully.

            “Yeah. That’s kinda what I’m usually afraid of,” Scott said through a plastered grin as he left the room.

            “Ms. Margaret Stevens.” The chairwoman spoke up again, reading from her script. “If you’re willing, would you stand please for commentary?”

            Scott’s sister rose to her feet with greater ease than their brother. She smoothed a hand down the folds of her dress hugging her athletic curves, obviously aware that all in the room could see her now. Her blonde hair, longer and better maintained than any of her previous teenage years, flowed evenly between her fingers as she combed absentmindedly. Those crystal-blue eyes, though, found a home squarely on Scott’s back as she nodded to the panel.

            “As I said to your brother, we have a written statement… a very thorough one, I might add… which remains private for the time being,” the woman repeated again. “However, for the benefit of those gathered here and those involved in this particular case, we’d like to hear any thoughts you have in summation after today’s proceeding. Again, this does not account for official testimony, and is just an opportunity for those associated with Scott Stevens to make themselves heard.”

            “Okay,” the girl said brightly.

            Scott could feel her eyes on the back of his head now. This time, he didn’t quite have the energy to look back.

            “Answer at whatever length you wish, or not at all. Do you understand?”

            “Yep,” Maggie answered. The room fell to a hush once again.

            “Do you believe that your brother, Scott Stevens, is best suited to remain in house arrest custody at the current time?”

            “Yes.”

            The question was hardly out before the seventeen-year-old responded.

            Scott shrugged. Frankly, he was pretty sure he could give Maggie’s answers for her and land with about ninety-eight-percent accuracy.

            “Do you believe that your brother, Scott Stevens, is being treated fairly under regulation of Reduction and Rehabilitation?”

            “Yes.”

            A pause this time, but still without the stammers Kyle had suffered. Scott wasn’t surprised in the least. While his sister certainly had more than a couple of good reasons to have her doubts about his treatment in the Stevens household, namely the occasion more than a year ago when she’d found him out in the poolhouse, the specificity of the question protected her.

            Regardless of her mercifully softened treatment of her pint-sized brother after this bizarrely traumatizing encounter, Scott was positive her faith in R&R therapy itself had only been strengthened in the intervening months.

            “Based on your personal experience and witnessing of Reduction and Rehabilitation custody in your own home…” the chairwoman continued. “…and only on your personal experience and witnessing, do you believe it to be a viable method by which to correct wrongful behavior?” the woman pressed.

            “Of course,” Maggie said.

            Scott could hear her lips curve into a self-righteous smile at this final testament.

            With his fists around the room-freshening spritzer he specifically designated for his sister’s room, Scott slid silently between the crack in the door. The longer he worked without interruption, the better his chance of leaving the girl’s room unmolested. So, careful to not let the pads of his feet land on the cushioned terrain too loudly, he set about aerating the ground upon which his little titan of a sister so often trod.

            The melon-scented aerosol was a temporary solution, Scott noted, because inevitably the hapless fibers of the bedroom carpet would once again be damp with dried sweat and trampled beneath Maggie’s oily post-game soles. The routine was now to mist her floor once a week with the citrusy solution, and as the boy was discovering now, failing to follow that strict calendar meant the odor was a little sharper today than usual. It was pungent work, but someone had to do it, or at least that was the explanation Scott was given the first time he was handed the perfuming device and instructed to sling it over his back.

            He was fairly certain he was the only one who was able to detect the remnants of his sister’s BO since his face was just a matter of inches away from the carpet. But arguing with Judy tended to prove unwise, so Scott had resolved to just hold his breath and roll with it. If all he had to do was allow his sibling’s hard-working and spicy musk to infiltrate his lungs rather than sample it directly with his face ground against her skin, he was in no position to complain. Literally.

            Luck seemed to be on Scott’s side today. Maggie was certainly present, the five-foot-four soccer star and once-virtual bane of her tiny brother’s existence sprawled out on her stomach in the center of the floor. A rare occasion of rest for the over-active teen.

            However, her back was to the door as she fiddled with her touch screen tablet, which was dispensing what sounded like elevator music and clinical dialogue that Scott couldn’t quite make out, nor did he care to.

            No, as usual, his attention was inevitably and utterly stolen away by his sister’s bare feet as they rested against the carpet, flexed soles squared to the ceiling.

            Those toes writhed in their usual slow rhythm, grasping contentedly at fabric fibers and then allowing them to release like stretched spaghetti from between her stubby digits. As her appendages clenched and then splayed out again on the floor, the contours of her insteps continually changed their geometry, reflecting those rippling wrinkles and the oscillating color of her flesh between white and healthy pink. Her exposed calves tightened and relaxed in steady fifteen-second cycles as she savored the relaxation of her usually overworked limbs.

            Scott gulped, reminding himself that the girl had the heavenly grace not to entrap him beneath the weight of her peds for a whole year.

            No, at most, he’d just be ordered to massage them while she entertained herself on the tablet, barely noticing his presence until she hooked his neck between her toes to the chorus of a soft and creepily titillated giggle.

            He pressed onward, sticking to the walls as he applied the odor-eater spray with a delicate hand, in case the mechanism became caught and made too loud of a noise on one of its spritzes.

            It was hard not to want to pinch his nostrils shut. The aroma of Maggie’s used scrimmage wear and barefoot efforts wafted from the carpet, released from their dormant state with each of Scott’s footsteps.

            By the time he’d made it about six feet into the room, though, he hardly noticed it. The smell of his sister’s exercise-drenched feet was one he once swore he would never allow himself to grow accustomed to, probably at a time when he was between squeezed between sweat-soaked sock cotton and his sister’s muscular toes. What a joke that was to believe such a thing.

            Occasionally Maggie’s hand would move away from the touch screen of her device, and for a moment Scott would freeze solid in place, hoping to be mistaken for a conspicuously placed doll in her peripheral vision. Serendipitously, though, her fingers would just find their way back into her silky tresses, tucking them back behind her ear and out of the way. The girl was a stickler for having any and all distractions out of sight, both on the soccer field and in her most private of moments, often in times past with her shrunken brother in her fist and at her mercy.

            By the time he was roughly aligned with Maggie’s hips at the corner of the room, Scott was beginning to contemplate whether he could get away with only spritzing this first half of the room, allowing him to avoid crossing into his sister’s line of sight. However, before he could think about sneaking back the way he’d come, the low volume on the girl’s tablet was finally clear enough to be processed in his ears.

            “…though you may find it difficult to display confidence at first,” a woman’s voice said onscreen. “It is vital for all Reduction and Rehabilitation therapists to project a tone of self-certainty for the entirety of the corrective procedure. A reduced subject put physically into place to learn a lesson is only half of the experience. Therefore, you as a therapist-in-training must learn to present yourself in such a way as to become an absolute authority figure in the eyes of your assigned shrunken individual.”

            Scott felt an uneasy sensation snaking itself into his intestines as he leaned against the wall, under the hopefully-safe shadow of Maggie’s dresser.

            It was a training video for his sister’s upcoming internship at the Adams R&R clinic. He’d heard snippets of this type of instructional tape before, usually coming from his mother’s office in the wee hours of the night as of late when she thought he was asleep. But never at such close range and, fortunately, never before for his younger sister’s educative benefit. Frankly, he’d been much happier remaining ignorant of the program’s exact contents.

            “The key is to be consistently professional and resolute,” the woman’s voice continued. “Conduct yourself calmly at all times, but never be afraid to let your assigned individual know when they have made a mistake and disrespected your position. Whether in rewarding or rehabilitating, always make clear that you are in charge during the corrective procedure. Repeat that to yourself with me, if you will. You are in charge.”

            “I am in charge,” Maggie uttered under her breath.

            Unable to help himself, Scott tiptoed nearer to the resting island of his sister. Just over the crest of Maggie’s tanned forearm, he could make out the colorful image of the woman standing in an all-white room, infomercial-style.

            “Let’s try out a couple of sample situations, shall we?” The instructor took a few steps to the right as the camera panned after her, a few digital animations surrounding her as the view zoomed in toward her hand, where a computer-generated shrunken individual stood.

            She stooped toward the ground, and as her fingers touched down to the white floor, the little CGI man stepped robotically out of her palm and onto the ground by her left foot.

            “For purposes of example, let us say that your subject currently stands at four inches in height. He or she displays no signs of prior injury and is placed beside your shoe, one that is low enough to the ground that he or she could enter without problem. You ask your subject to enter the shoe, place themselves at the very end, and await further instruction. However, your subject tells you in no uncertain terms that they do not intend to heed you. You have already asked him or her once to cooperate and they have refused. What do you do?”

            A series of blue ovular bubbles appeared onscreen for Maggie’s interaction.

            “Do you, A: try again to convince your subject to enter your shoe. B: place the subject into your shoe yourself and inform them that their actions have now increased the punishment period. C: select a different punishment. Or D: kick the subject into your shoe and follow through with the punishment as planned.

            Scott felt pins and needles forming beneath his skin, prodding at the anxiously numbed muscle, and he wasn’t even the one being quizzed. He watched his sister’s finger hover over the screen for a moment before she jabbed at her chosen answer.

            “Congratulations, you’ve selected B, the correct answer!” the woman said happily. “For review, A is never the correct answer. As we’ve already gone over, you are the authority figure to your subject, and failure on their part to comply with instructions is also a failure on your part to project a confident handler. C would also not be correct unless the circumstances were different, but as stated in the question, the subject is not injured, and should have no problem complying with your instructions to enter the shoe. To alter the task after a refusal would demonstrate a weakness to the subject, and make you a less effective therapist. Finally, D should not be chosen, as it could injure a previously uninjured subject, and not only impede their improvement, but make them less capable of performing instructions afterward.”

            Once the answers were all explained, the woman’s fingers reappeared on the screen, pinched around the sides of the shrunken man, and dropped him into her shoe. The visual effects weren’t quite convincing, but they got the job done.

            “Your punishment period has been increased,” the woman scolded coolly to her now-invisible prisoner as she slid her socked foot into the dark mouth of the shoe and wriggled it into place, feigning the usual dance.

            “Hi, Scott.”

            Maggie’s voice was amiable and inviting, without the slightest note of surprise, which told Scott she’d known he was present the entire time but hadn’t been moved to address him yet or, indeed, pause her video education/entertainment. It was hard to say whether that was good or bad.

            “Hi, Maggie,” he said at last. Scott tongued at the roof of his mouth, his eyes stinging from dryness as he realized he hadn’t blinked in over a minute as he’d watched the lesson quiz.

            She turned her head to face him, still without sitting up, and at last jabbed the pause button on her tablet. Her lips broadened into a smile.

            “Whatcha doing?”

            “Uh, cleaning the upstairs.”

            “Wanna take a break from that and come rub my poor little toesies?” Maggie wheedled. She cocked her head as those blue eyes darted to her upturned feet.

            Her soles arched and scrunched playfully as she tilted them in Scott’s direction. Her toes, advertising themselves, and still testing the carpet fibers, thumped and clamped together. They were probably imagining his hands already tucked into the velvety crevices between. Even when his body was longer than his sibling’s relatively petite peds, it wasn’t an especially comforting sensation for Scott to come face-to-sole with the undersides of those devious, soccer-worn peds.

            He blinked, momentarily transfixed again out of painful habit to watch Maggie’s pink skin, but managed to compose after only a moment of the much-taller teen observing him with apparent amusement.

            “I… I, uh… um, actually, Mom’s-”

            “I’m just kidding, little boy,” she giggled, pressing a soft fist to her lips as her eyes glowed with light from the open window. Her toes clenched closed again. “I know Mom’s got her meeting thingy with the people.”

            “Right. Yeah. The meeting thingy with the people.”

            “If you’re not too tired after playing on a bunch of gross old lady feet down there, though, you know where to find me,” Maggie said casually, as if such a thing should be considered a reward after his tribulations.

            “I’ll keep it in mind,” he said.

            “Pleeease? I’ll make you into your boring biggest size again if you rub them for a little while afterward,” she promised and, to her credit, Scott at least couldn’t say his once-duplicitous sibling had actually swindled him with other such offers in the past year since their silent truce in the poolhouse. He’d have to work for it, but she would at least give him a hand.

            Scott shrugged. There were certainly worse deals he could make, and he had a suspicion he was about to be robbed of even what little height he had now once he was back at his mother’s feet downstairs.

            Plus, there were greater things at stake. He had a date with Ella tonight, after all: the first occasion alone out of the house since his sentence began, now with his newly extended premise-exiting privileges. His entire body had been pre-emptively aching for this evening for the last month. If he had to buy back a little dignity courtesy of Maggie’s needy toes before some desperately necessary alone time with his girlfriend, it was worth it.

            “Sure,” he said at last, spying the digital clock across the room and realizing he’d need a few minutes to get back to the patio. “See ya.”

            Scott had only just reached the crack in the door and begun sidling through it when he heard one final reply from beyond, and it wasn’t the video being unpaused.

            “Your punishment period has been increased,” Maggie repeated in a mocking whisper under her breath that copied the instructional woman’s strange tone. Though this joking response warmed Scott’s fluttering heart only slightly, the triumphant giggle that followed couldn’t help but quicken his pulse again as he headed for the stairs.

            Judy’s coffee hour had quickly become a wine hour.

            And, from the looks of the ornate pewter-carved clock that hung on the patio wall, it was going to turn into plural wine hours.

            At least, that was the impression Scott had as he peeked awkwardly at the timepiece between the fleshy crevice of a middle-aged woman’s giant bare foot. It was hard to be sure, though.

            This one liked to wriggle.

            Not that he expected any less. This lady was new, he’d decided after he’d been doing his best to stroke her enormous finger-toes for the last fifteen minutes. There were seven women in attendance today, all of whom had toes he’d been introduced to at some point in the past year, except for this one.

            It was possible they’d met when he had a little more size on him, but the young man tended to have a good memory for feet by this point in life, and the woman’s fidgety activity suggested someone who had rarely if ever had the opportunity to pin a shrunken individual beneath the weight of her peds. As did her incessant and childish chuckling at his experience beneath her. No, this was certainly a newbie of some kind.

            The effect was only compounded as her wine glass had been refilled once by Judy, and looked to be getting low again. Her toes grappled a little more aggressively now around Scott’s flailing wrists as he rubbed the meat of her flesh. Plus, her skin was beginning to paint itself with a thin layer of alcohol-inspired perspiration, at least making the job a little more malleable for the young man, if not more unfortunately fragrant of leather and salt.

            “Enjoying yourself, Sylvia?” Judy questioned to the woman currently trampling Scott underfoot. She glanced with false pity down to her son, granting him a knowing and genuinely grateful smile, which he wasn’t quite used to seeing. This new woman must’ve been someone mildly important.

            “Oh, yes! He’s absolutely wonderful, Judith,” the woman apparently named Sylvia said, the remnants of a native southern twang embedded in her vocal cords. Her bulbous toes bunched tighter around Scott’s head at this declaration. “You’ve done a real good job with him. I’ve seen shrinkers who’re kept at double his size most of the time and I’ll tell you something, they can’t do half as good a job as he’s doing now!”

            Scott was back down to a conservative three inches tall now. He knew it was too much to hope for that Judy would allow him to retain all eight inches he’d possessed so proudly this morning. Unfortunately, to her hard-working clique of socialites and campaign workers, Scott was a sort of party favor to sweeten the deal of entering Judy’s house for a development session, and his mother was one who always repaid those she owed.

            “And that goes for you too, hon! I know it’s not just all your Mama’s doing, you being so talented at rubbing a hard-working lady’s foot,” Sylvia said gratefully as she leaned nearer toward the floor, shuffling her broad and shapely hips on the patio sofa. Her heavily manicured finger descended from above, the dark-berry nail polish allowing Scott to just barely make out a distorted reflection of his face between her toes as she gave him a thank-you tussle on the top of his head. “I very much appreciate it.”

            “No problem,” Scott grunted meekly as the ball of her gigantic foot caved down just a little harder on his lower body. At least his mother had allowed him the dignity of wearing clothes at this size before he was tucked under the first guest’s foot an hour and a half ago. Though he’d grown used to being naked in his mother’s company, the embarrassment was always refreshed when he was presented bare and bereft of size to a newcomer.

            Judy raised an eyebrow at his response, making the move in a sudden flash so only Scott noticed.

            “I mean…” he panted. “You’re very welcome, mam.”

            “Oh, Judith! What a sweetie-pie!” Sylvia gushed. She clapped her hands together with delight just before clamping her second toe over Scott’s head. It blotted out his view momentarily and replacing it with the musky dough of her digit.

            The conversation returned smoothly to Judy’s campaign. On the docket today was something to do with contacts in the state news, a couple of upcoming interviews, and a few more subjects difficult to hear beneath an armada of pummeling toes. It mostly made Scott queasy to have to listen to, even in comparison to the lightly sweating car-sized foot he was currently wedged beneath.

            The second bottle of wine was nearly dry, and soon his mother would leave to fetch more, which would intensify the bubbliness of the women in turn. And Scott never counted it as good news to be around anyone even slightly inebriated at this size. So, he simply preoccupied himself with avoiding the pad of Sylvia’s toe coming down against his face, an act she seemed at least subconsciously obsessed with achieving.

            “Listen, hon, if you ever want a vacation from around this place… I could use someone with your talents while I’m at my day job,” Sylvia said brightly, and it took a moment of wrestling her toe out of the way for Scott to realize she was addressing him again. She seemed to be making an effort to part them far enough for him to peep at her through the fleshy valley between the big and second digits.

            “Oh,” he said, wrapping a hand back around the length of the woman’s toeprint. “I, uh… think I’m only cleared to leave the house for a couple hours, three times a week.”

            The room had gone quiet in an effort to hear the boy’s response. It was followed by jovial, booming laughter from the circle of sandaled women all seated above Scott like mid-forties monoliths. Even Judy smiled. Sylvia in particular chuckled hard, her toes bouncing against Scott’s chest and sandwiching him firmly into the carpet imprint her weighty peds had been forming during the visit.

            “Sounds like he’s letting you know his schedule, Sylvia,” one woman said with a wink.

            “That little charmer,” another snickered.

            “Ohh, not too fast. I hear he’s got a little girlfriend. Don’t you, Scott?” Sylvia questioned pointedly.

            “Uhh, yes. I do. Yeah.”

            Another round of laughter was shared by all the regular-sized adults, most of it fueled by the wine rather than any intentional comedic timing on Scott’s part.

            “Well, isn’t that the sweetest,” Sylvia cooed as she gazed down between her thighs and toward Scott, whom she’d finally given a break from beneath her toes. Instead, she planted both mountainous heels on either side of the young man, framing him by her insteps. Her tone suggested she was congratulating a five-year-old on his kindergarten girlfriend.

            “They really are very cute together,” Judy announced. Scott supposed it wasn’t bad, exactly, to hear his mother reaffirm her contentedness with his relationship to Ella from time to time. The word cute was nevertheless off-putting.

            “Still,” Sylvia continued in a lower whisper. “I’m sure your lucky lady won’t mind if I borrow you a few times so you can make a few bucks? After all, I’m not talking anything untoward. It’s just my feet that need the work.”

            “S-Sure,” Scott agreed as he gazed up the fleshy canyon created by her supple calves, towering above him on either side. Out of the corner of his eye and across the vast circle formed by the patio, he could just make out Judy smiling at his answer.

            “We’ll find a way to work his schedule around yours,” his mother said. “Since you seem to have taken a liking to each other.”

            Scott blinked, more intrigued than anxious at Judy’s bizarre admission. His mother hadn’t lent him out to anyone outside the house for four years, and after how that occasion had gone, he didn’t anticipate her doing it much more. Susan’s vindictive smoker’s slur still rang in his ears from that one godforsaken evening, as did the sensation of her toes rigidly compressing him into a slipper against a radiator.

            For Judy to be willing to allow this, there had to be something special about this woman.

            Or, more accurately, something she wanted.

            Which was interesting, however little relevance it probably would ultimately hold for Scott’s life goals. He tucked a mental note between the cogs of his brain to keep his ears open for further developments.

            At least it sounded like he’d be getting paid this time. Which, as soon as he’d thought it, made Scott realize he was just a step away from being a foot-gigolo. He shrugged as he watched Sylvia’s mammoth toes arch up again, wriggling in a kind of devious wave goodbye as the grinning face of the woman was replaced in his sight by the gridded ball of her titanic foot, plastering itself over his entire body.

            Given his life’s current trajectory, it seemed like a pretty natural choice for a career to whore himself out to the wrinkled, bunioned feet of middle-aged women.

            “Could I have a turn, Judy?” a voice from somewhere above asked. It took Scott a moment to place its identity, as sound was now muffled mostly behind recognition as Sylvia’s sole bore around him in all directions, the cusps of her plush wrinkles only occasionally offering a reprieve.

            “Sure, Carolyn,” Judy said.

            Scott sighed, even as he couldn’t quite afford to lose the limited air beneath the mashing machinations of Sylvia’s bare foot. Maybe he could catch a break today.

            With some considerable regret, the sole peeled away from Scott’s clothes, which were now sticky with Sylvia’s summer sweat. He righted himself awkwardly, reorienting to standard gravitational rules and set off at a walk toward the center of the circle.

            The conversation had already resumed with its political planning, leaving Scott to reach his next client without further address, which he was grateful for. He looked up past the towers of bare legs as he passed two of the women and reached the one who sat to his mother’s left, Carolyn.

            A soft-spoken and gentle book-lover, but more importantly a long-time family friend, she had witnessed many of his adolescent shrunken repercussions, and seemed to have developed some pity for him over time, which Scott was certainly grateful for, because most of his mother’s friends didn’t have a sense of compassion beyond that which made them feel jealous when he was massaging another pair of puffy naked feet for too long.

            “Hey, Scott,” she whispered with a kind smile as Scott stood before the altar of her leather sandals, which she still had yet to remove after arriving at the start of the “coffee hour.”

            “Hi, Ms. Ferrell,” he said. His gaze fell to the woman’s toes poking through the front of her stylish footwear, which she seemed to be consciously restraining to a staid state. This, too, he was incredibly grateful for. There were few things as immediately embarrassing as being made to flinch with momentary fright at the sudden movement of a woman’s log-sized toe.

            Slowly, Carolyn’s toes were dragged along the foamy insole of the shoe, the sleek sound of her skin running against the material somehow calming to Scott after the overzealous stint beneath Sylvia. Her heel arched at the opening as she tugged it free of the straps.

            “Do you want to climb in?” she asked soothingly, and in the subtext of her voice Scott could tell she understand that, no, of course he didn’t want to, but it was a far prettier alternative than refusing and subsequently being claimed by another and probably more aggressive member of Judy’s campaign team. She smiled again, her hazel bob cut framing her looming but cheerful expression.

            “Y-Yeah,” he said, stepping forward toward his newest destination. Hand-over-hand, he ducked under the leather jungle gym of sandal straps and crouched over the black, greasy toeprint stains at the tip of the sandal. Then he held his breath, stretching himself out over the length of the five dotted fossils of the woman’s digits. He didn’t have to wait long before Carolyn’s toes delicately covered him up, first shifting him into a breathable position in the cracks before bestowing any weight at all on his fragile body.

            Today, Carolyn had chosen to wear some especially strappy and open-air sandals, which made entry all the easier to contend with. Ordinarily, the women who showed up at Judy’s door with the express intention of depositing a tiny twenty-two-year-old into their shoes chose footwear that required help to enter and, more importantly, help to leave. Just one more thing to control.

            Carolyn, however, had enough sympathy to give him the option to exit if it became necessary: a strangely motherly trait he wished Judy would someday pick up, probably only as a result of a lightning strike and an angel visitor. And Carolyn didn’t even have any kids.

            A solid twenty minutes of lovely break time followed beneath the woman’s toes. Carolyn, yet again acting as Scott’s secret savior, was making a special effort to keep her toes curved over his body like a coffin of flesh. It was warm, certainly, especially as he felt the grit of her insole soaking into his clothes, but required him to bear almost no weight from her foot. Certainly breathing wasn’t difficult. Still, her foot was shoved far enough into the sandal that it gave the appearance of keeping him sandwiched powerfully between sole and leather, which probably appeased Judy. It was a win-win, really.

            Of course, even as he let the minutes tick by in blissful silence beneath Carolyn’s toes, Scott couldn’t help but feel an anticipatory bulge in his throat, expecting one more hurdle to come before this little chore of an afternoon was done.

            The doorbell rang in the front hall, followed swiftly by the swing of the hinges and the domineering clack of implausibly high heels stabbing the tile floor on each mighty lunge forward.

            “Hellooooo, hot mamas!” Nancy Dugan bellowed as she entered the room, raising a cheer of greeting from everyone present, except for Scott, whose heart had already slid into his stomach to roast in the acid.

            Scott knew it was too good to be true. It was foolish to hope he could just coast out the rest of the wine hour(s) under Carolyn’s forgiving and, frankly, pleasantly violet-scented feet in her even more pleasingly unrestrictive leather sandals. No, there would be just a little more penance before he was rid of this mildly humiliating but, more importantly, mind-numbingly grating circle of middle-aged titanesses.

            “How are all of you sexy bitches?” Nancy demanded, moving about the room and exchanging cheek kisses with everyone. Scott supposed she fancied herself at least partially French.

            Nancy, despite being the oldest of the group, was still fighting tooth-and-nail to avoid her recent emergence into her fifties. A heavy haze of perfume was already filling out the room. From his vantage point beneath Carolyn’s toes, Scott could still very clearly make out the coat of golden-fake tan that painted up the towering pillars of Nancy’s legs. He could tell she’d been waxed recently, too, as not an inch of her exposed skin seemed to suggest her body was even capable of producing hair anywhere except on top of her head. Her auburn-dyed locks had been seemingly received another boost of color since he last saw her. Her outfit was skimpy on its red fabric and even skimpier on humility, though the woman at least knew how to wear something that was probably intended for someone at least twenty years younger, as it hugged her augmented but nonetheless considerable curves.

            Scott gnawed his lower lip and curled deeper into the curve of Carolyn’s digits, even pressing his forehead against the rotund ball of her foot.

            The woman was absolutely power drunk. Always had been, and probably always would be. She’d stripped him, forced him to lick the undersides of her feet, and in the end hadn’t even been afraid to rape the incarcerated son of her best friend. He hated the sight of her.

            And still Scott felt an instinctive, almost Stockholmian sense of bitter arousal flooding his bloodstream at the sight of her. Which, he realized, made it even easier to hate himself just as much as her. He did even have the self-preserving sense to be frightened of her. That was perhaps the saddest part of all.

            “Sylvia?” Nancy called out with a grin. “Did you get a chance to try out Judy’s little trooper?”

            “Oh, you bet your stars I did,” Sylvia crooned. Even at this distance, Scott could see her cheeks blush as she longingly squinted in the direction of Carolyn’s opposite shoe, probably having forgotten which one he was inside. “I’d love another turn, too, when he’s through over there.”
            “Think you’ve had your fill, Carolyn?” Nancy questioned sweetly.

            “I suppose I have,” Carolyn said. Scott could hear the regret rooted at the base of her words as she reluctantly parted her mature toes from their warm embrace around his sides. The sudden exposure to the open air again made him long for them to return, maybe even for enough time that he could catch a nap. It certainly wouldn’t have been the first time.

            “Got to let the newbie have another try, you know?” Nancy said. “After I’ve had a turn, of course.”

            “That sounds fair,” Sylvia sighed. “Judith, do make sure you let me know little Scott’s schedule, though, if that’s all right.”

            “Of course,” Judy said. “I’m sure Scott would love a break from being around here.”

            A break. Right.

            “You’re sending him out on house calls now, Judy?” Nancy balked playfully, gently shoving the woman in the shoulder with a doubly manicured hand.

            “We’re talking about it,” Judy said slowly, giving her friend a conciliatory nod, but luckily for Scott’s frayed nerves, she didn’t seem to be inviting further discussion of such a possibility for Nancy specifically. “Scott, sweetie, why don’t you come out from under Carolyn and come see us all again?”

            Grunting under his breath, Scott peeled himself away from the grimy though nonetheless emotionally comforting toe-stains that darkened Carolyn’s insole. He clambered back under the leather straps and made himself fully visible again, all three inches, and thankfully clothed as he gazed up at the new arrival to the circle.

            “Hey there, you little Casanova,” Nancy smarmed, her voice already deepening into a sultrier octave. “Come say hello to your Auntie Nancy.”
            Scott tried not to let his disgust twist into his face as he tramped unwillingly toward her. For God sake, she’d pushed his head into her vagina against his will. The least she could do was drop the familial nicknames. Somehow, though, he was willing to bet the idea of being related to the doll-sized boy she’d raped made the whole affair even more thrilling for Nancy.

            “Hello,” he said, eyes locked to her knees. He was afraid if he looked up at her face and its domineering smirk for too long, he’d either get angry or turned on, and it was hard to say which was worse.

            “Don’t just stand there,” she teased, her tongue flicking out the corner of her mouth like a snake’s. She planted both hands on her hips as she shifted weight from one foot to the other. Suction popped in her left stiletto as she tugged her heel free, followed her by slender toes along the insole. “Climb on in and say hello to the girls, too.”

            That was a new one: calling her toes the girls instead of her breasts. Truth be told, though, Scott was far more willing to be mashed up between the woman’s feet than what were most likely her surgically-hardened nipples.

            Eyeing his mother’s staid gaze from afar, Scott nodded as he stepped toward Nancy’s newly unoccupied wearable prison cell. He was still a couple dozen steps away from his destination when he was enveloped by the stench, billowing in ghostly droves from the pits of the woman’s footwear. It was easy to pick out the salty efforts of her latest hot-yoga class, plus some flowery odor-eater that wasn’t doing its job, in the cloud that now surrounded his head.

            Already he knew he’d rather go back to Sylvia, even, than this woman. Hell, he’d take all of them again, in immediate sequence, if it meant he could skip entering Nancy’s heel.

            But, of course, that wasn’t on the table. With some effort, he clambered up the felt tip of the stylish shoe, finding the angle just a little too hard to handle on his own. However, a quick sweep under his legs from Nancy’s swift toes, and he was tumbling down the damp insole and into the pungent darkness.

            “Sorry, hon, just couldn’t help myself,” she giggled, joined in by a chorus of chortles from the wine-buzzed room of middle-aged women. The laughter was quickly swallowed into a wet echo as Scott clunked against the toe-tip of the stiletto.

            He shut his eyes, going through the usual nasal song and dance of blocking out his olfactory instincts. There wasn’t much time to focus on this process alone, though, before Nancy’s toes were dipping into the heel and coming to meet him.

            They wrapped him into their grip with surprising grace, countered only by the strength of her digits as they squeezed him up into a coffin of slick, calloused flesh. Suddenly the difficulty in ignoring the nauseating, overpowering aroma of wilted flowers and old meat was much more difficult.

            Scott endured a few steps of pumping pressure down on his body from Nancy’s toes, though she seemed again to avoid harming him with her weight on his fragile form. It was nice, he supposed, while it lasted. In fact, by the sudden relaxing loss of intense pressure, it felt to Scott in the pithy blackness of his shoe-prison that Nancy had sat down and crossed her leg over her knee, giving him some room to breathe. Not that he especially wanted to breathe in more of her pumiced skin and porous excretions, but some air was better than no air.

            It didn’t take long for Scott to guess why Nancy’s exploratory toes were being so uncharacteristically kind today. As soon as he’d slid into an easy position in space, long-ways around the curve of the ball of her foot, the woman’s digits set to work. They scrunched and prodded, rotating Scott in the dark like a roast chicken in an oven.

            His arms and legs were twisted softly into the folds and crevices of her experienced toes, forcing him to face up against the soupy pad of her big toe, while his legs were squashed purposefully beneath her second and third digits. She had him perfectly spread-eagled, his clothes greasy with her late-May perspiration, and all he could do was inhale against the musky mass of her largest toe.

            Then the real purpose of her complex maneuvers began. Almost independent of one another, her second and third toes, slender and proud as the rest of her, began to grind together. Like fingers dreaming of a major payday, her toes clamped down over Scott’s already tightened jeans. They fondled expectantly, at first just rubbing together, coaxing out a reaction. As damp as the young man’s miniature pants had become with her leaked shoe moisture, plus the repetitive stampings of everyone else present but Carolyn, his hardened member wasn’t hard to locate through the tissue-thin material.

            Reaching awkwardly in the blank void was pointless for Scott; Nancy wasn’t going to give him even the smallest chance of readjusting. If anything, her sole had arched higher in the shoe, forcing the insole against his back to squeeze him tighter and flatter into the curve of her expert toes. He was pressed into a tube shape, his desperate erection raging against his pants, ripe for the woman’s toes to take.

            For a simultaneously grateful and horrified instant, the pressure relented around Scott and the suction popped once again in his ears. Against the blinding backdrop of the patio light that now crept into the shoe over the top of Nancy’s foot, he could just make out her index finger snaking into the tight space.

            “…and I just told them, I’m not taking no for an answer. Judy Stevens is a voice that must be heard by the people in this state, they deserve to hear her, and you’re going to feature her next week!” Nancy explained defiantly. Her limited audience outside clapped, cheering her on.

            Meanwhile, Scott was paralyzed with pre-emptive regret as he watched the woman’s finger slide between two of her toes and locate the beltline of his pants. She didn’t even need to halt her sentences to carry out this last act. With all the lubricant of both Scott and Nancy’s sweat, her fingernail easily slid beneath the fabric and tore them and his underwear away from his legs, leaving his bottom half utterly bare in the shoe beneath her toes. Then the darkness returned as the woman’s thieving finger retrieved his tiny pants from her shoe, allowing her foot to slide fully back in.

            As soon as they were alone again in the sticky darkness of the stiletto, her two toes had his bulge in their fleshy vice. No fumbling at all, just a quick grab and his heart was lodged in his skull as Nancy bestowed a feeling of infuriating euphoria on the young man’s body with the slightest tremors of her leathered toes.

            He might’ve hated the woman’s guts, might’ve hated every cruel word she’d said to him, might’ve hated how aroused her presence was making him, but at the very least, he couldn’t say she wasn’t talented.

            Breaths were coming faster now, weightier in his chest as she pumped. Unable to help it, Scott’s muscles synchronized with the motion of her toes. Soon, he was all but humping up against the woman’s dehumanizing digits. Trapped in blackness, clenched on every side by damp fabric and muscular toes, the huffed pockets of Nancy-flavored oxygen polluted his lungs.

            Scott felt his jaws open, almost as if she’d unlocked something inside him after so little satisfaction for so long a time. His tiny tongue lolled at the corner of his lip, dragged unavoidably along the globe of Nancy’s toe. The spice of her skin washed anew into his throat.

            He heard Nancy’s voice, low and hissed with its poisonous hint of sugar. Then laughter, louder and more consistent than before, rebounded off the walls of the shoe. It couldn’t have just been one joke. Was she giving them a blow-by-blow of this sick little game? Did she tell them he’d licked her toe? Did she tell them her toes were masturbating him in response?

            His baser instincts couldn’t have given less of a shit what she was saying, he was sorry to realize. In this deep, there wasn’t much he was going to accomplish by worrying further.

            Hips bucking a final time, he spasmed into the filthy melee of Nancy’s powerfully squeezing toes. She didn’t let up for a few more minutes afterward, stroking her toes around his sore member, almost taunting him for it.

            Already he was warming up for round two and despising his entire family tree for having conspired to allow for this moment. Miraculously, though, it came to an end. An embarrassing groan escaped his lips just as the light re-entered Nancy’s stiletto, followed by her finger, which casually flicked his pants back into the soiled cell for him to put back on himself.

            “I didn’t know you’d added tongue baths to your repertoire, honey.” Judy’s voice lilted as she eyed her diminutive son down on the carpet after the campaign club had finally departed. Her thick, purple-painted toes grasped at the tassles of the nearby rug. A smirk crept in at the corner of her lips. “You might’ve let me know, hmm?”

            “I didn’t on purpose,” Scott said dryly.

            “She said you were giving her a little service down there. And not for the first time,” Judy reported, cocking her head and combing through her blonde locks with her pinky. “But Nancy does tend to over-exaggerate things…”

            “Yeah. She actually just made me that time in the poolhouse.”

            The woman’s lips thinned as they pursed, her gaze unbroken on the miniature boy at her feet.

            “I see.”

            “Yeah.”

            “Did that bother you?” she asked, genuinely throwing Scott off his game for a moment.

            “Um… kinda, yeah. Yes.” He second-guessed the answer at least three times in the midst of saying it. Did she honestly believe he actually enjoyed licking the giant feet of her giggling wino friends? Or was this just another test, as per usual?

            “I’ll ask her not to anymore,” Judy said, giving a nod that Scott was dangerously tempted to believe.

            “Thanks, Mom,” Scott said, then corrected himself before the woman could rescind her good graces. “Thanks, Mommy.”

            “Of course, sweetie. I’m sorry that day turned out so upsetting for you, and I won’t be letting it happen again,” she said with uncharacteristic honesty in her voice. She lifted her left foot a few inches off the surface of the floor, letting the shadow of her writhing toes cast just a little closer to where Scott stood, then set it down again as she pivoted on her heel to exit the room. “Besides. You know I wouldn’t make you do anything you didn’t want to do.”

            Scott lapped at the stale flavor of Nancy’s big toe still clinging to the roof of his mouth and sighed, unsure whether to feel relieved or repulsed.

            Sure, he didn’t have to do anything he didn’t want to do. The trouble was, his mother had a knack for making him want to do things he didn’t want to do.

            Scott held his arms at his sides as he was bathed in the excruciatingly green luminescence of the PMRD barrel.

            He stood on the carpet of Maggie’s bedroom a few inches away from a discarded pair of azure flip-flops, so long-loved that the plastic toe thong was only hanging on by a few fragments of material. After a few seconds of the device’s imparted sensation, the height of the shoe’s foam insole descended from roughly shin height all the way to Scott’s ankles as he rose back to his maximum allowable size of twelve inches.

            “Somebody’s growing up so fast,” Maggie commented with a snarky giggle as she gave the trigger of the ray one last squeeze with her index finger. She lifted the barrel to her lips and feigned blowing away a puff of smoke, as if she’d fired a magnum slug into her brother instead of altered the physical size of his body at her will. Somehow, reality was still much scarier in that way.

            Scott leaned against the cloth backdrop of Maggie’s bedsheets, draped down to the floor from her mattress. He plucked at a stray piece of Sylvia’s mealy toejam that had become entangled in his hair, but found it was just a little too tightly coiled to grab without the aid of soap and water.

            “Looks like they had a lot of fun with you, huh?” the girl asked. For once, her tone didn’t mock at the very mention of Scott’s usual trials under the soles of their mother’s cronies. If anything, it indicated pity, if not also a confusingly contradictory sense of jealousy.

            “Yeah, pretty much.”

            “Were you three inches the whole time down there?”

            “Yep.”

            “But you’re not too tired to do a good job on me, right?”

            “Uh…” he sighed. He knew there was only one correct answer after she’d already willingly made him one foot tall, which probably went against every natural fiber of her queen-like being. He watched her toes wriggling hopefully against the carpet fibers, eagerly anticipating their service. “Nope.”

            “Good.”

            He looked up toward his monolith of a sister just in time to see her squatting down, her peachy palm bearing toward him.

            Her index finger and thumb hooked smoothly beneath her doll-sized sibling’s shoulders, cupping his chest against her palm as she hoisted him with the usual feather-weight ease. She gathered him up against her chest as she crawled atop the bed. The embrace found Scott somewhere between what could’ve been bizarrely characterized as a protective hug but still a restrictively domineering claim, as if he was a stray puppy she’d found wandering the streets and claimed for her own.

            Even as he wasn’t being squeezed against the mounds of her chest, he could feel her fingers coiling tighter into his back than was necessary. She could most likely feel his heartbeat against the gridded pad of her hand.

            Watching his sister’s soccer-hardened bare leg swing up and trounce into the plush cushioning, punctuated by the thump of her heel landing heavily by the foot of the bed, Scott allowed his head to loll against the downy fabric of Maggie’s shirt as she clutched him into the cradle of her arms. If he was being honest, there were worse positions to be in, after the exhausting afternoon on the patio. Not that he’d ever tell her such a thing, of course.

            “I’ve just been sooo sore after the last couple games of the season,” Maggie explained. She held Scott out at arm’s length now as she addressed him, letting his legs dangle over her outstretched thighs. “And my poor toes have missed your little hands on them.”

            “I bet.”

            The seventeen-year-old snickered one last time before setting Scott down in a burrow of blankets at the end of the bed. Flanking him on either side were her upturned feet, rosy and freshly plucked from socks and still flecked by damp lint. Their usually slightly rank aroma was softened today by a combination of stale fruity perfume that hung in the room’s atmosphere. At this unprecedented height of twelve full inches, Scott actually stood significantly taller than his sister’s feet, which only just reached his stomach from heel to toe.

            It was hard to imagine how often her relatively petite peds had haunted his existence, usually when he was about a quarter of his current size and being squeezed into a burrito of sweat and flesh beneath her digits. Right now, they would’ve almost been cute, if she wasn’t prodding them at his legs so expectantly for attention.

            “C’mon,” Maggie wheedled. Her toes curled as they turned toward her brother, her stubby big toe pressing into his thigh. “Get going.”

            “Sure,” Scott said blankly, resolved to get this over with. He wrapped both hands around the meaty big toe first, making a valiant attempt to pull it away from his upper leg while giving it a few starting pulses. However, this only caused her toe to crease higher up the length of his leg, until its doughy pad was flattened against his hip.

            “You can do better than that,” she chuckled. “And I know, cuz I’ve seen you do it, and you were way smaller, too. I’d think you’d want to convince me that you’re better at this when you’re bigger. Right?”

            She had a point.

            “Yeah,” he said. “My bad.”

            “Don’t worry about it,” Maggie answered. She scrunched her toes again, bunching up the material of Scott’s shirt and momentarily imprisoning him in her grip. The ball of her foot was pressed flush against his crotch.

            Gritting his teeth, Scott went delicately to work, massaging his tiny fingers into the plush flesh of each individual toe on his sister’s left foot as it rested heavily against his lower body for support. He dug with his trademark application of relaxing pressure, primping the bulbous end of each digit in his palms, then cupping his hands around the short shaft of the toe. Special attention was paid to the marshmallowy crevices between Maggie’s toes, where the skin was softest, usually still moist from their last entrapment in socks and speckled with toejam.

            “Oohhh… that’s it, Scotty,” she cooed. She’d shut her eyes, rolling her head back against her pillow as her fingers slid between the long, hay-gold strands of her hair.

            “Don’t mention it,” he mumbled. Stealthily, he eased back a step, hoping to get a reprieve from the heft of the ball of her foot. The pinkish mass of flesh only followed him, though, as her foot softly shifted to a sharper angle, now pressing her toes against Scott’s stomach. The hem of his shirt had become hopelessly tangled between her worming digits, ensuring he remained close.

            “Where are you going?” she questioned without opening her eyes.

            “Just changing position,” he said.

            “I liked that position, though,” Maggie whined. “Come back closer.”

            “Okay,” he obeyed with some disappointment. He inched forward again, toward the foot that already had his shirt tangled in its toes, and felt the ball of her foot settle comfortably squarely between his legs again. At this point, the pad just above his sister’s spongy sole was actively forcing his member down against his leg through the fabric of his pants. There was no doubt she could feel precisely where his miniature manhood was beneath her broad footprint now, though her half-napping expression didn’t change.

            “Good boy,” she replied happily. At the very least, her tone didn’t convey the same kind of doglike ridicule as usual when she made this underhanded compliment, which Scott supposed was a plus.

            The massage carried on in silence for a few more minutes. The shrunken house arrestee had found that by standing utterly still, he avoided the uncomfortable possibility of his member firming to life under the weight of his sister’s sole squashed so affirmingly against his body; he was testing fate as it was. He was able to relieve some of the pressure once he finally moved on to stroking the underside of Maggie’s foot. Her buttery sole wrinkles yielded so easily to his touch as he ran his fingers up and down the length of her supple creases.

            “Okay, that’s a good enough job,” she said after twenty minutes or so. “Other one, please.”

            At least she’d learned to say please in the last year. Scott was about to make the four-step journey to his sister’s opposite foot where it rested in the sheets beside him, but Maggie made the move for him, probably to ensure the angle was to her liking.

            The left ped was tugged away, but her right leg was already in motion, preparing his next patient. This time, she took a moment to alight her toes against Scott’s chest, splaying them out and running them down his stomach.

            With a groaning lurch in his stomach, Scott could feel the distinct flick of his awakened member against the pressure of Maggie’s toes as she dragged them down his torso: a clear biological sign of all the time he’d been deprived of time alone with Ella. He cleared his throat, hoping to turn the tide.

            “So… how was the end of school?” he asked cheerily, probably with just a little too much sunshine for his younger sister to take seriously.

            “Really?” she chuckled. The ball of her foot had now heaved itself down against Scott’s hips like the last, while her toes worked on fumbling with his shirt. The pad of her big toe was pressed against his bare stomach, the flesh cold and soft as his pillow.

            “Yeah.”

            “Um, it was okay! I got good grades, I think. Or good enough that I got to make all the tournament games.”

            “What’s that mean? B’s? B-minus?”

            “Some. Mostly A-minus. I’m not a dummy, you know.”

            “I know,” he said. This, in fact, was something he did know. Not that his brain was any spring chicken, but Maggie had for the most part presented herself in years past as a poor academic example for Kyle, generally prioritizing her social life and sports over her grades. In this past year, though, she seemed to have kicked things into higher gear. What was even funnier was that she seemed intent on defending her intelligence to him: a boy she had the legal right to shrink down to an inch and put inside her mouth like a lifesaver.

            “I made honor roll, too,” she continued. “High honor roll.”

            “I heard. That’s some good work. Congrats.”

            Confused for a moment, Scott realized after a minute of intensive mental processing that he felt a twinge of pride for the girl.

            He was experiencing pride at the accomplishments of a young lady who’d spent half of her entire life laughing and tormenting him in his generally shrunken state, stuffing him into sweaty socks and burying him under her soles. Not that she wasn’t still unopposed to at least one of those, but somehow it wasn’t performed with the same tangible malice. Maybe it was the tone of her voice, or the gentler touch of her toes, or simply the way she’d actually allowed him to be slightly larger than her feet for once.

            Whatever the reason, Scott was nearly bowled over to discover he was glad for her.

            “Why’d you ask, Scotty?” Maggie questioned suddenly, snagging her brother’s attention again as she propped her bare foot more firmly against his trembling body like a makeshift stool. As if her toes were insisting on a quicker response with their incessant nuzzling against his shirt. “About my school?”

            “Ermm…” he mumbled clumsily. Abruptly he remembered the original reasoning was to create a distraction from his mounting animal instincts. He peered down at his crotch with due discretion, as it was now lodged into the center of Maggie’s deep sole arch. It was a much more ideal location than having the ball of her foot constantly mashing his junk through the excruciatingly thin folds of his shrunken jeans.

            “What?” she repeated, this time with a hint of her usual suspicion. She’d opened her eyes again, resting her head idly against her hands as she studied him gently wrestling with her foot at the edge of the bed.

            “I just… you know…” he gulped. “I wanted to know how things were going.”

            By now, her toes had worked their way completely under his shirt, cooling his abdomen with the sheer surface area of her stubby digits. They seemed to be working on dragging him nearer to the fleshy underside, as if his entire twelve-inch body was a hand-puppet being worn by her foot. And it was almost too much.

            Already he could feel the cloth of his pants straining right between his legs as it was involuntarily prodded at the wrinkly instep of his sister’s massive bare foot.

            “Did Mom want you to ask me?”

            “Nope, she didn’t say anything.”

            “You’ve never asked about my school stuff before, though.”

            “I know. But there’s a first time for everything, though, right?”

            Maggie raised an eyebrow. Her toes crept higher on his torso, crawling their way up until half of her foot was shoved up his shirt, stretching the fabric with the bulk of her appendage.

            “You’re really warm,” she commented casually.

            “Yeah, no kidding,” he said, deciding to chance a more amicable comeback. “You’re… kinda cold. No offense.”

            “Mom turned the AC way up again,” Maggie said. She cracked a relieving smile. “I hate it when she does that.”

            “Y-Yeah, me too,” Scott chuckled, genuinely managing a smirk back, even as his skin was pricking with nervous goosebumps at the increased contact and pressure. Whether or not he wanted to admit it, and indeed he would’ve rather admitted almost anything else, he was still hot and worn after his forced dalliance with Judy’s friends; Maggie’s foot, meanwhile, was pleasantly cool, like a padded ice pack that could cover most of his body as it writhed and stroked itself along his arms.

            And unlike him, she seemed intent on at least somewhat enjoying the togetherness.

            His member was almost at full mast inside his pants, and it was taking most of his muscular control to avoid letting it be kneaded along the base of his most recent massage client.

            “Well…” Maggie murmured. She rolled her toes a final time against Scott’s chest, pointing them so high that he could see her pink digits peeping through the stretched neck of his shirt. The straining seams in his outfit were audible to both of them now. “Thanks for… you know, asking about it. I don’t know if you even mean it all the way, but-”

            “I do,” he promised through grinding molars. “I do, honest to God, mean it.”

            “I believe you, little boy,” she said, her blue irises unblinking as she stared him down. A giggle trailed on the end of her sentence as she gave her foot a final thrust up Scott’s shirt, until her big toe had sprouted out the top, allowing it to lay against her brother’s neck.

            The young man held his breath, nearly telescoping his spine in attempt to lean far enough back that his fully tented pants didn’t rake along Maggie’s heel. He could feel the gridded bulge of her digit nudging up against his chin, forcing him to look just a little higher up as she leaned forward again in her bed.

            “That was a nice job you just did. I still like when your hands are super-tiny, too, but you did good like this,” she said. “Give me a little good-bye kiss?”

            “Sure,” he huffed, grateful for any opportunity to end this increasingly awkward exchange. Without further hesitation, he planted his lips against the fleshy oval of his little sister’s enormous big toe. Fossilized flavors of fleshy grit and tangerine shampoo seeped into his jaws. He ended the kiss with a loud enough pop and just enough leftover moisture that Maggie would be unquestionably satisfied with this singular effort, rather than requesting a do-over.

            “Thaaanks, Scott!” the soccer star sang gleefully. At last, her foot dragged steadily back down the length of her brother’s miniature shirt, taking special care to dab her toes individually on his abs one last time before she relieved him of her cold but nonetheless sickeningly alluring touch.

            “No problem,” he shuddered. As soon as he was free of the giant foot shoved up his shirt, Scott slid smoothly down onto his haunches, allowing him to conceal his embarrassment. With careful timing, he was able to use her wriggling toes as cover for the instant it took to sit before Maggie crossed her legs together at the head of the bed.

            “Sorry if I kinda messed up your little shirt,” she admitted sheepishly. Once again, it took a moment to occur to Scott that his sibling wasn’t making fun of his newest minor predicament.

            “Oh! Yeah, well… you know how thin these are,” he said. He gathered the fabric in his fists, noting how the shirt would’ve now easily fit someone with close to double his measurements. Or, more specifically, fit someone with a gigantic naked foot pressed up against said someone’s torso in a tantalizing, secretly repulsive embrace.

            “Ha. I did ruin it, didn’t I?” she sniggered, cupping a hand over her lips as she observed him pitifully tugging at the billowing shirt.

            “I got a bunch. Don’t worry about it,” Scott shrugged. He rocked back and forth, clenching his muscles in an effort to divert blood away from its current inconvenient location.

            “That’s nice of you to say, Scotty,” she said. “Tell you what: if you’re ever… really warm again, like after Mom’s friends are done being old and weird with you, and you’re wearing this shirt again…”

            By the cracking smile on the girl’s lips, Scott could tell the idea was mostly a joke, but he could also sense she was just serious enough that an offer now officially existed to, if he desired, have his sister plant the weight of her bare foot down against his body and, effectively, share his clothes. Thankfully, it had just been his shirt and nothing lower.

            “I’ll keep it in mind,” he said, forcing a harder laugh.

            “I’ve got some stuff to do downstairs. You wanna come?” Maggie’s hands were already outstretched toward her human doll, fingers primed to pluck him up by the arms.

            “No!” he choked, barely avoiding making it sound like a panicked order. He shuffled his weight, willing his member to flatten again. “Um, I mean… nah, I’m okay.”
            “Oh,” she said, wrinkling her nose slightly at his initially strange reaction, but seemed to shrug it off as she slumped off of the bed. “Well, it’s okay with me if you wanna take a little nap in my bed if you’re all tired from Mom’s friends. Just don’t sleep through your big-boy date with Ella.”

            “I’ll try not to,” he said with a grin. More than likely, his sister genuinely thought it was a possibility for him to have forgotten that he was allowed to leave the house for an entire two hours tonight, under his girlfriend’s solitary supervision. He’d only been dreaming of this moment for a solid thirteen months.

            “But if you do…” she chuckled as she made her way toward the door. “…I think I know a way to wake you up. A really cold way.”

            Scott watched his sister wave goodbye as she slunk out of the room, leaving him in a heap of woolen blankets with equal measures of satisfaction in a mostly successful interaction with Maggie, and simultaneously enough accidental sexual frustration to give any normal-sized human a migraine. Furious at his body, the young man thwacked at his shrinking pants tent with the back of his hand and rolled aggressively onto his side.

            Recollecting his scattered and at least mildly humiliated thoughts, he focused his attention to the prospect of being cradled in Ella’s elegant hands once again.

            Still, as he curled into the purple waves formed by Maggie’s bedspread, the young man didn’t quite allow himself the luxury of a nap. There were no chances being taken. And no matter if his relationship with his sister was at an all-time positive lately, he wouldn’t put it past her to simply sneak into the room, slide her enormous foot up his damaged shirt, and sink into a nap herself using him as her personal toe-warmer as the hours ticked on by.

            Scott yawned as he bumbled back into full consciousness. Curling into a ball in the sheets had been a mistake, as it seemed he had, indeed, fallen asleep like a napping cat at the foot of Maggie’s bed. Immediately sensation returned in the dimly lit room, and then he yelped meekly, jolted into awareness.

            As was giddily threatened before, he had a seventeen-year-old soccer star’s bare foot jammed back inside his shirt. Her now-warmer sole was molded around the curves of his abdomen, her toes contentedly resting on his chest. His skin had become more temperate as well. Weird as his sister’s logic was, she wasn’t quite wrong about the symbiotic effect of planting her cold sole down on her miniature brother’s body.

            Maggie was grinning ear-to-ear as she stood above him, her leg propped onto the bed. She was clearly almost dizzy with the humor of managing to shove her entire foot up the boy’s shirt without him awakening, at least not immediately.

            “Wakey, wakey, sleepyhead,” she chuckled. Her toes arched and splayed against the stretched neck of Scott’s shirt, slapping the fabric against his skin along with the doughy tips of her toes. “Told you I’d wake you up like this if you fell asleep.”

            “Yes you did,” he replied groggily. Scott attempted to rise up, only to find the weight of his sister’s foot still tucked against his chest made it impossible to shift. “What time is it?”

            “Oh, it’s seven-thirteen. Your date was supposed to start an hour ago.”

            “What?” Scott wheezed, thrashing awkwardly against his sister’s foot in a panicked attempt to escape the embrace of her sole. However, he only succeeded in becoming further entangled as her toes tightened around the cotton. The curved mounds of her digits rolled in flashes through the shirt as he struggled.

            “Just kidding, you little goofball, it’s only five-thirty-four,” Maggie cackled, throwing her head back and swatting her fingers through her hair. “I just wanted to see what you’d do.”

            “Oh,” he gasped. He exhaled, watching his sister’s eyes light up as she arched her sole, giving his stomach more room to inflate.

            It was a fresh and startling experience, having apparent in-jokes and harmless pranks with Maggie. Historically, the girl was only truly interested in engaging humorously with her brother if it meant she could trick him into believing she’d let him leave a room, only to find himself diving face-first into the twisted maze of a tube sock. And usually, she was the only one laughing.

            “Yeah! You thought I wouldn’t remember what time it was at and not wake you up?” she scoffed. “I told you I’m not a dummy.”
            “And I remember it,” Scott swore. He wrapped his hands over the bouncing bumps of Maggie’s toes beneath his shirt, trying and failing to get them to stop dancing on his chest. “Could you, uh…”

            “Sure,” she murmured with a final sly smile. Maggie’s toes released their iron grip on Scott’s shirt. Her heel dragged along his leg as her appendage peeled away from her brother’s tiny torso.

            “Thanks.” He stumbled to a standing position and moonwalked across the bed. “And could you give me a-”

            Barely having to begin the request, Scott found himself with his chest to his sister’s palm once again. Her fingers hugged him possessively and deposited his body back on the floor in front of her toes, which wriggled with a delighted hello at his arrival. It was bracing like little else to once again find himself still safely on time and mostly free of his sister’s interference.

            “Make sure you get dressed nice and pretty for Ella,” Maggie said with a wink. She took a few steady steps, circling around Scott before meandering toward the door. Her toes led the way, the balls of her feet bearing most of her lightweight as her soles arched toward the ceiling, well in Scott’s view. She shook her head. “Don’t you dare keep on what you have on now. Put that little sky-blue button shirt on that I like. She likes it too. I know, cuz I asked her.”

            “Thanks, Mags,” Scott repeated dumbly, still more than a little stunned by all this unusual goodwill and entirely unsure what to do with himself, his hands, or his eyes. Mind blank, he watched his sister’s wide soles flexing on the way to the door until she’d turned the corner and departed.

            “Welcome, sweetie!” Judy Stevens greeted warmly, plastering her practiced senatorial ivory-smile on. She held the door open, allowing in a gust of warm summer evening air as Ella crossed the threshold.

            Scott could feel his knee joints wobbling at the sight of her: her long, silky tresses draped over her shoulders and down her back, her gentle fingers peeking out the sleeves of her favorite indigo jacket, her tall black boots clomping softly on the hardwood, purely out of concern for his seismic status. How he’d managed to keep her coming around after all this time, particularly in the last year after he’d been shrunken and confined to the walls of Judy’s fortress, was a mystery to Scott.

            “Hi, Mrs. Stevens,” Ella said politely, allowing herself to be wrapped into a matronly hug and giving Judy a pat on the shoulder. “How have you been?”
            “Oh, just fine. Busy as ever laying out the political trail,” the woman chuckled. “How was graduation? I’m sorry we couldn’t get Scott’s off-site hours extended in time to let him come.”

            Scott felt his stomach flare with burning resentment for both his mother’s word choice and the reminder of his own missed educational trajectory. Neither was especially welcome when he wanted to be putting his best face forward for this hard-fought and newly earned privilege of seeing Ella alone, rather than hiding out in the basement of this house and praying that Judy couldn’t hear them necking. Already she’d thrown a minor wrench into his plans by informing him he would not be leaving the house at a size any larger than six inches; she’d informed him of this as she surprised him in his bedroom while he changed and pointed the primed PMRD into his eyes.

            So, he clenched his fists and dragged a grin across his lips. Confidence was key, which, with another gut-twist, he realized the word was only on his mind after he’d heard it spoken in Maggie’s R&R infomercial this morning. Perfect. Now he was unconsciously sympathizing with the men and women who were currently making careers out of wearing shrunken criminals in their socks and calling it corrective therapy.

            The evening was off to a smashing start, and he hadn’t even taken a single step into the foyer yet.

            “Oh, that sounds wonderful, Ella,” Judy said, the conversation having rolled merrily onward without Scott’s involvement yet. She’d wrapped an arm over the significantly shorter shoulders of her son’s longtime girlfriend. “And I’m serious about it: if you want to take a look at my copy of that book I told you about, don’t hesitate to ask. You can borrow the film clips, too.”
            Grateful to have missed hearing the title of that book, yet still shuddering at the thought of whatever “book” might also include demonstrative video samples for Ella’s enrichment, Scott stepped into the hall.

            “And here’s the favorite suitor,” Judy announced strangely, her jaws still squared into that sugary smile she had used to give Scott so many stomachaches in his life. “Honey, don’t keep Ella waiting. You know better.”

            “Right. I’m sorry,” Scott muttered sheepishly as he ambled across the broad span of the hall, toward the towering forms of his mother and lover.

            “It’s totally fine,” Ella relented.

            Already he regretted not standing closer to the door when his girlfriend arrived, as he had to watch both their pairs of eyes lock to him, then steadily descend toward their shoes as he approached. Both women were smiling, and while Ella’s was comforting and sweet as ever, Scott never could quite feel comfortable with the triumphant glower on his mother’s countenance as she gazed down at her little son on the floor.

            “Hey Scott,” Ella crooned as she stooped down to his level, cupping her hands around his sides and inviting him into her grasp. He happily accepted, sticking out his chin as he ascended in hopes that the spritz of cologne he’d smuggled from Kyle’s room would be detected. She wrinkled her nose as she brought him to her face, nuzzling her cheek against his head. “Long time, no see.”

            “You could say that again,” he laughed, recalling the long week-and-a-half wait he’d endured since being in her presence.

            “I’ll let you two cuties get to it, then,” Judy said, then added with a chuckle: “I guess this is the moment I should tell Ella to have Scott back by ten, but then that would be violating his off-site allowance.”

            “Ooh, right, I forgot to ask how that works?” Ella said. She snuggled Scott into her arms, cradling him against her chest. The folds of her jacket easily fell over him, allowing him to retain the warmth projected through her clothes.

            “It’s pretty simple. That old ankle bracelet Scott had to wear had that whole process of checking him in and out on the computer, but now that Techilogic’s replaced it with a chip, all of it is automatic,” Judy explained. “So you two just need to be back through this door before the two-hour mark.”

            “That won’t be a problem, Mrs. Stevens, I promise,” Ella said.

            “I’m sure it won’t,” Judy smarmed. Her pointed index finger hovered over Scott’s head, at last tucking her freshly filed nail beneath his chin.

            He knew she wasn’t making light of this one.

            “Oh - oh - oh - Scott…” Ella’s voice melted into the back of her throat as she sunk through the pillows arrayed across her mattress. She ran her palms up the length of her hips and over the rotund hills of her breasts, only one of which was still cupped by a half-discarded bra. Her fingers paused over her nipples, firm and cherried as she pinched them, rotating her grip as another wave of elation rocked her entire body from scalp to sole. “Scott!”

            Hearing was difficult for Scott as he squirmed deeper into the flowered canal between his girlfriend’s thighs. Only his lower legs still dangled outside her pulsing vulva; the rest of him was confined to the ribbed walls within. Again and again, his arms stroked as one in wide arcs along the tunnel. Invisible patterns were slaked into the curve of Ella’s pussy, constantly shifting in a circle around the tight space as Scott did his best to spread his uniquely delicate touch to every square inch. Dark as it was, the heady air of Ella’s fluids flooded his lungs, spurring him forward.

            Liberally, he lapped at what he presumed to be the base of the tunnel, even nibbling the skin, swollen by arousal and the flow of lubricant around Scott’s body. He’d swallowed several large mouthfuls already of the stuff; sour and sharp at first, it quickly became known to his system again, warming his belly with the memory of each stroke of his tongue.

            The next time his teeth clamped down, he felt the quake of her entire body around him. The tunnel momentarily squeezed around him in a sodden embrace before releasing again. Next came a vague appeal to a higher power, made out only just through the thin layer of oxygen allowed inside to the shrunken young man’s lips. Her voice was slight, but Scott could just make it out above the rumbling language of her body.

            “G- Oh, G-”

            Ella’s quivering fingers lingered above the fleshy petals of skin that had increasingly relaxed as the hour wore on, allowing Scott deeper entry inside her. She massaged her miniature boyfriend’s calves with ejaculate-drenched fingertips, painting the remaining parts of his body not yet coated in her juices.

            Playfully, he kicked back at her fingers, twisting his ankles around her thumb when the next chance came. She only obliged, collecting his legs into the fold of her fingers as dribbled fluid collected in the creases of her palm.

            Another low gasp was extracted from Ella’s chest into the otherwise silent space of her bedroom. She peered across the stippled lamp light cast between her bare breast and down to the tiny legs protruding from her pulsating mound and entangled in her fingers. While one hand continued distributing attention to each nipple, cresting beneath the cup of the bra when necessary, she culled Scott’s lower body deeper into her fist.

            Feeling the girl’s careful grasp tightening around his body, Scott allowed himself to be pulled an inch back out into the light. He gulped up a pocket of air that rushed into the tight tunnel. Knuckles trembled around his legs as she nudged him further in again. It was time he surrendered most of his muscular control back to Ella, even as his hands continued their sacred work.

            In every available moment of blind pause, his minute fingers explored the baubles and rippling interior of his beloved, savoring her shape and flavors as best he could, while she took perfect advantage of his size-related talents.

            With a firm hold on Scott’s legs, Ella smoothly pulled him in and out of her pussy, dragging him out all the way to his chest and then flattening her palm to his legs and shoving him gingerly back in all the way to his ankles. The flow of fluids had easily set the path for Scott’s limply tonguing body and Ella’s warm, trembling fingers. Her thumb found its way to the nub of flesh at the roof of her vulva and guided the grooves of her digit across it, alternating circles and swipes. All the while, Scott spread his arms wider and further then drew them back to his chest, making himself into an organically expanding dildo as Ella’s pace quickened. In the shortness of her breath and the sprinkling of sweat now caking her palm, he knew she was finally approaching release.

            Scott slid from the opening almost too easily in a spray of the young woman’s eager juices. His entire body damp and pruned with fluid, he couldn’t even open his eyes for the sticky coating webbed over his every inch. Nevertheless, he enjoyed the collection back into Ella’s hand as it caged back around him, the last embers of her moaning still trickling out of her lips.

            Even as she recovered, Ella still remained fully in control, which couldn’t help but easily perk Scott’s already blue-balled senses back up. He had another full erection even before she’d finished wiping him across the washcloth draped over the side of the bed. Detecting it against her palm, a low percussion emanated from Ella’s throat as she giggled from deep in her stomach.

            More than willing to demonstrate his continued devotion to the mood, Scott hugged Ella’s fingers tighter up against his stiffened member. She obliged, twiddling the pathetically dwarfed rod easily between her thumb and forefinger. In seconds, the young man was reduced to putty in her hands, letting himself fall against her palm as her fingers continued their gentle tweaking.

            As the final remnants of his expedition dribbled down from his neck and caked on his back, though, Scott could feel Ella’s fingers pulling away from his dick. It was just getting all the way worked up again. He almost wanted to cry out as she allowed him to flop untouched back into her palm like a dying fish, his erection sore and needy after a day of multiple missed opportunities.

            “P-Plea… please…”

            “Shhh…” she ordered quietly, rolling her head back against the pillows again as she drew her partner back up toward her chest. Intentionally dragging his cheek back along her exposed nipple, Ella giggled as he dutifully licked at her hardening skin.

            But this wasn’t the intention of the move. Scott felt his dick pass easily between Ella’s lubricated fingers, pinched lovingly into the crevice as she palmed him over her chin. He wrapped his arms around the spires of her fingers, praying what he thought was coming was coming.

            The wish was granted as Ella’s lips parted, teasingly slow at first, allowing a strand of crystal saliva to dangle across the expanse of upper and lower. However, she didn’t keep up the show for too long, after all the time she knew he’d endured trying to make sure she was taken care of first. Her tongue emerged from the darkness, circling once around the miniature prick that was fed between her fingers from above, then lapped it along the entire steaming red landscape of her muscle.

            For several passes, Ella’s tongue contorted about its tiny target. She slaked Scott’s body with both sides of her tongue, stringing continual ropes of saliva up and down her lips. Eventually he was lowered down to her mouth, which puffed and wrapped around as much of his quivering erection as they could against the expanse of her palm. She only had to suck for three pulses.

            “Babe…” he grunted. “Babe.” The word repeated several times, each one growing softer as he lost control and ejaculated into the broad cavern of his girlfriend’s glistening mouth. Her fingers clutched back around him as he went soft in her grip, transporting him back above her heart.

            “New Zealand?”

            “Yes.”

            Scott tried not to look too utterly crestfallen, but he had a feeling he was failing by at least ninety percent right now. He could already sense his features sagging at the mere repetition of those two words. Bracing his palms against his cheeks at least helped conceal the effect as he perched in Ella’s hands atop her mattress once they’d both been suitably refreshed for normal human interaction.

            “That’s… that’s amazing. El, I’m… I’m just shocked. I mean, that’s so cool, and I’m so… you know, proud of your-”

            “T-Thanks,” she said. From the sound of her voice, Scott might’ve assumed she’d just gone out and murdered someone in cold blood, rather than earning a prestigious academic post-grad scholarship for sixteen months across the ocean.

            “Why do you sound like that?”

            “Because you sound like that.”
            His shoulders slumped. She had him there.

            “I don’t mean to. I seriously am super fucking blown away by this. Like, all the time you put in studying and doing those internships, and now-”

            “I know, I know, it’s… it’s a great opportunity, and… a lot to take in. And I know you must be mad that I’m bringing it up now, but-”

            “Babe, how can you say that?” Scott gaped. He knew precisely how she could say that, actually, but he wouldn’t forgive himself if his guilt trip was the reason she missed out on a major episode of her future. “Look, I’m not gonna lie and say I wouldn’t miss you like goddamned crazy while you were gone… cuz I would… but you’ve gotta be able to do your own things. Away from me. Don’t you…”

            “What?”

            “Don’t you want a break?” Scott gulped. The painful second implication of such a question weighed heavily on his heartstrings, but he held firm.

            “Scott-”

            “Not from us. From me,” he insisted. He stroked her fingertips as they curled in to meet him in the center of her palm. “It’s totally different.”

            “I… I know it is, but…”

            “But what? There’s no buts here.”

            “Will you be… all right?” she managed, her throat growing thick with remorse, her eyes beginning to glaze over between the strands of hair tangled into her vision. “With…”

            In the instant Ella’s lips sealed shut again to consider her answer, Scott was already able to run through an endless catalogue of her possible next words.

            With even fewer opportunities to escape the imprisoning walls of his mother’s house as a reminder that life still went on outside?

            With the mind-numbing amorality of scheduled shrink-therapy that required him to nurse every last screaming self-doubt in his mind?

            With regular visits to his home by a cadre of giggling middle-aged wine fans whose idea of a good time was sticking twenty-two-year-old strangers under their feet?

            With an overactive self-appointed princess of a sister who was rapidly being molded into a miniature model of her mother?

            With a power-starved politician for a parent who was ready to put him into every pair of shoes in the United States if it meant she could secure a Senate seat?

            With a psycho-sexual plastic old lady-rapist who still made regular house calls to toe-fuck him in the dark?

            There literally was almost nothing that couldn’t fit.

            “…without me,” she managed to say at last, resolving to skim over the metaphorical elephants in the room. Her face dipped in lower over her palm that still contained her crouching lover, until the bridge of her nose pressed against the top of Scott’s head.

            “Absolutely,” he lied for her sake with unflinching conviction as he planted a kiss on her lower lip. “Perfectly.”

            The last crack of fading daylight still peeked between the trees on the sidewalk trek back to Scott’s front door. Ella had him back across the threshold, as promised, in under two hours. One hour and fifty-four minutes, to be exact, which ordinarily would’ve made him nervous to test his judicial leash so blatantly.

            However, after the bittersweet news of Ella’s scholarship abroad, followed by the crushing realization that he would have to convince her to go if their relationship was to stay intact for the foreseeable future, Scott doubted much else could touch him these evening. And that included whatever kind of punishment his mother would inevitably cook up if he’d been more than four picoseconds late past the court-mandated curfew.

            No one was present when Ella returned Scott to the Stevens foyer, but the spare key under a stone urn allowed them to make the time even without a greeting. The young man was glad for this, as it allowed for a much more passionate farewell between him and his comparatively gigantic lady. Their make-out lasted for a solid fourteen additional minutes neither had expected to have, but eventually the time came to part regardless of solitude.

            “We’ll get one more in,” she swore as she deposited the six-inch loner on the living room couch. “Before I go, I’ll see you one more time. Even if we have to sneak around in your room like we used to.”

            “How about two more?” Scott smirked, wiping layers of Ella’s saliva off his chin.

            “How about three?”

            A last kiss and a serious promise to try for at least two visits later, and Scott had to watch Ella abandon him in his house once again, perhaps for the last time in a long time.

            It was only a year apart, he told himself. A little more than a year. That was all. What was that? Sixteen months? Sixty-eight weeks? Four-hundred-seventy-six days?  Eleven-thousand-four-hundred-twenty-four hours?

            Scott was already knocking his head against the wall. It felt like an eternity and she’d only just shut the front door.

            Sunken blearily into the couch cushions, he had only just propped his chin up against a pillow and unconsciously wondered where his keepers had gone when he heard the garage side door creaking open.

            “Helloooo!” Maggie called out as she entered the kitchen beyond. The clomping of her hard-soled sandals was followed by a second pair of feet that rang even louder in Scott’s ears. Which was strange, because as he listened to his sister and the unseen individual walking past the room, he could hear the telltale rubber slap of flip-flops against bare soles. The person wore soft shoes but still landed with greater impact, not the more ponderous footfalls of a heavier person, but simply one who intentionally placed their shoes back on the earth with impressive force. A trait his sister once prided herself on, but had mercifully softened over the past months.

            Scott actually opened his mouth instinctively to respond to the bellowed greeting, but quickly shut his lips again. Something told him it was best to go incognito in this moment.

            At least, that would’ve been the theory if he didn’t suddenly look up to see his sister’s grinning face looming above the back of the couch.

            “Hey, Scott,” Maggie smarmed. Her fingers appeared over the back of the cushions, waggling in a slow wave.

            “Hey, Mags,” he sighed.

            “C’mere a second,” she requested, though her palm was already open and en route to her six-inch brother below. “I want you to meet somebody.”

            “Okay,” he mumbled as his sister’s fingers curled around his sides. With a start, he realized his hair was probably still a little greasy with residue from Ella’s pulsating vulva. However, Maggie already had his arms pinned to his sides by her softly clenched digits. There would be no combing it out now.

            “Scott, this is Bailey,” she said, hoisting the boy up off the couch and propping him against her opposite palm. Her fingers remained closed around his sides, her curved pinky finger slumped awkwardly against his thighs and crotch. “Bailey, this is my big-”

            “-don’t you mean little brother?” the stranger interrupted.

            Scott stewed. Boy, wasn’t that one getting more original with every fucking repetition he had to hear of it?

            “Yeah you’re right, I guess little brother now,” Maggie said.

            “He looks even smaller than in the pictures you showed me,” the stranger replied, a casual smirk creased into her lips. The girl appeared to be roughly Maggie’s age, though she had maybe an inch and a half advantage in height over Scott’s sister, as most did at least. Wavy dark-chocolate hair hung loosely by her shoulders, framing a pale porcelain face punctuated by pinched lips, which Scott imagined she’d learned by seeing a few too many lingerie ads. Her raven eyes hardly bothered to cast down at the kindly imprisoned twenty-two-year-old, instead remained trained to the other normal-sized human being in the room.

            “This is nothing,” Maggie giggled, her fingers rumbling around Scott’s chest. “You should see him when he’s an inch. It’s adorable.”

            “Can you do that now?” Bailey asked, her eyes widening. “Can you shrink him?”

            “Um, I’m not sure where Mom put the PMRD. It’s usually in her room, but…”

            “Can you go see if it’s there?” Bailey requested. Her arms, which had previously hung at her sides, arched up suddenly with her hands outstretched. Her thumb and forefinger paused an inch away in midair, causing Scott to flinch in his sister’s hands. “I want to see him this big.”

            This too was somewhat inexplicable. He’d met many a new pair of hands in his life, after all, many of which also were curious enough to want him in their clutches. Still, he couldn’t help but recoil at the sight of those pearly fingers clawed out for him.

            The way her fingernails flinted with almost the same kind of luster as her greedy dark eyes, as though she was able to see him through the tips of her fingers, made Scott’s skin crawl.

            “Sure!” Maggie said brightly.

            “I can hold him while you’re gone,” Bailey said. Her smile widened as she cupped her hand expectantly below her friend’s fist.

            “Oh,” the girl replied, glancing down to Scott at last. She pried her thumb against the shrunken incarcerate’s cheek. “Whatcha think, little boy?”

            Puzzled, Scott struggled against the strength of his little sister’s thumb to look up. He could see in her face the question was genuine. Since when did Maggie give a shit what he wanted in these kinds of situations?

            “I’m good here,” he replied

            “Ooh, sorry, Bailey,” Maggie giggled. “He can be a little shy sometimes, and he likes his big sissy.”

            “I’ll bet he does,” Bailey said coolly, her gaze flashing accusingly to Scott as her hands returned to her sides.

            Shrugging off all this usual talk that treated him more like a helpless floundering toddler, Scott lolled his head back against his sister’s tightly cradling fingers. At least he wasn’t in the newbie’s grasp. The jovial pounding of footsteps picked up again below as the pair of seventeen-year-olds made their way toward the stairs with their intended target in tow.

            “Did Coach say who she’s putting in first for scrimmage this weekend?” Maggie asked. Her fingers worked their way around her brother’s body, twiddling his limbs between her fingertips absentmindedly.

            “Yeah. And she’s benching me for first round,” Bailey groaned. “The bitch. I told her I was sorry for the thing.”

            So that was the connection. Another soccer player in Maggie’s league. Scott frowned, wondering why he hadn’t heard of her before.

            Then it occurred to the young man that he probably would have met this girl before, if not for the abrupt and silent changes made in the past year by his sister. He’d managed to meet most if not all of her teammates at the numerous games he’d attended in the prior season, usually while he was being gloomily peeled away from his sister’s swollen bare sole after a good three or four sprints up the pitch.

            Thus, he’d come to know most of her friends as the blurry-lined teenage leviathans that towered above somewhere in his periphery, many of them grinning at the sight of adorable little Maggie Stevens shoving her drunken criminal of a brother back into the sweaty hell of her socks. Those that didn’t were the rare and angelic exceptions, like the soft-spoken Libby, or that other forward living with her own Shrink Act incarcerate, shockingly enough.

            Everyone else was just an accessory to his sister’s former bratty queendom. In her bizarre set of new mercies, though, Maggie had since ceased taking him to soccer games, which was a blessing Scott did not count lightly.

            “Mom usually keeps the shrinker on top of her dresser when nobody’s using it,” Maggie said as she peeked into Judy’s master bedroom. The silver container gleamed in its usual spot. “I just see the case, though. The PMRD’s not in it.”

            “Can we look for it?” Bailey questioned impatiently. Her eyes fell hungrily to Scott again, still trapped in his sister’s fingers.

            “I guess,” Maggie said. “It could be anywhere around here, though. Sometimes Mom just takes it with her in her purse while she’s gone, too.”

            “But I wanna see if he’ll do any of the stuff you’ve said before.”

            “What? You mean like the-”

            “When we were at drills that one Saturday on the cross country track, and you said that you wanted to know what it felt like when he-”

            “Oh!” Maggie spat, a string of rapidfire snickers following. Her hands vibrated around Scott’s body again. “That was a joke, Bailey. That would be… ha-ha, wow.”

            Scott swallowed hard as his sister’s thumb crested beneath his chin and laid itself against his neck. Her digits had slowly become looser around his body while she’d toyed with him on the way up the stairs, and he now was essentially using her pinky finger as a banana seat, which was not ideal for the young man.

            Probably still more ideal than whatever concept Bailey was reminding her of, though. His stomach couldn’t help but churn with the imagination of it. Especially considering in times past, Maggie was completely comfortable putting his naked body into her mouth and sucking on him, yet this mystery suggestion was something with which she wasn’t comfortable.

            Fantastic.

            “Well, okay, then,” Bailey grumbled, clearly still convinced of the idea’s validity. She thumbed at her lower lip, nibbling at it as she studied Scott with deepening pupils. “I still want to see what he feels like under my toes, though.”

            Scott’s heart thumped up another ten beats per minute at the sound of Bailey’s request. He leaned forward in his sister’s palm, still firmly restrained by her caging fingers.

            “Right now?” Maggie giggled. “You want to play with him on your feet now?”

            A lump traveled through Scott’s throat. Blinking, he peered anxiously down below at Bailey’s bare feet in her purple flip-flops. Her slender toes bobbed violently against the foamy base of the shoe. Doubtlessly already picturing his head being mashed beneath them.

            “Why not?” Bailey pressed. “See? Look at him, checking them out. He’s probably curious, too.”

            “He’s proooobably not. He was under a lot of gross old lady feet today,” Maggie said.

            “Well, that’s why this is better,” Bailey insisted. She paused in the carpeted hallway outside Judy’s bedroom, arching her sole against the floppy footwear. “Cuz I don’t have gross old lady feet. Why’d he wanna be under a bunch of gross old lady feet in the first place?”

            Scott gnawed his tongue, resolving not to make an embittered outburst regarding the fact that he obviously had no choice in the matter. Regardless of Maggie’s more generous mood toward him lately, that didn’t mean Bailey wouldn’t eventually get him underneath her heels. And in that scenario, he’d probably thank himself for having made an optimal first impression.

            “Mom’s friends all came over to talk about campaign stuff,” Maggie said. “That’s just what he does when they’re here.”

            Scott tried not to roll his eyes. Would it have been too much for his sister to note that it wasn’t his choice? Not that it mattered either way.

            “Oh, I see how it is,” Bailey said, eyes narrowing as her smirk curved wider. Her hand hovered above Scott’s head, her fingertips grinding together. “That makes more sense.”

            How the hell did that make more sense?

            “He’s good at it down there,” Maggie said helpfully, offering her brother such an encouraging smile that Scott realized she truly believed it was a compliment. That she actually thought he’d be happy to hear he made a useful miniature masseuse.

            “So I’ve heard,” Bailey said. She pinched the thong of her flip-flop between her big and second toes, dangling the footwear off the floor. “But I’ll believe it when I feel it.”

            “I bet you will,” Maggie laughed.

            “How about it? I’d rather he was smaller, but I can make do,” Bailey said. She opened her palm again, clapping her fingers against the creased center. “C’mon. Please?”

            “Hmm…” Scott’s sister splayed her fingers out at last, releasing her affirming grip on the young man’s limbs.

            “If you want, you could show me how it’s done first,” Bailey suggested.

            The hammering in Scott’s chest hastened again. While Maggie might have had enough preservation sense to avoid handing him directly over to a new handler, she was also personally notorious for a near-constant willingness to place his shrunken body under her soles. And clearly, Bailey was wise to this weakness.

            “He does look a little sleepy…” Maggie sighed, turning Scott over in her hand. Her fingers wedged under his stomach, flipping him at the hip. “Might not be as good at rubbing.”

            “So what? He looks pretty strong… for a little guy, anyway… I bet he can handle it. He’s in college, right? Or was in college. He’s probably used to working late.”

            As warm as Scott had become in his sister’s hands, his veins chilled at Bailey’s tactical reasoning. She certainly worked fast. Already he could see Maggie’s lips shifting back and forth in thought. Pivoting on her sandaled heel, she briefly turned away from Baily, bringing Scott up nearer to her mouth.

            “Tired?” she whispered, so low the sound of her moist lips brushing together almost drowned out the word.

            Scott nodded.

            “Tomorrow,” she uttered. “Just me?”

            Scott shrugged and nodded again. The second not-unreasonable deal his sister had posed today. It was the handiest way to avoid an almost-certain roughhousing under Bailey’s peds tonight. Plus, Maggie might even agree to make him twelve inches tomorrow. How could he refuse?

            “Maybe another time,” Maggie said back at regular volume, turning back around to face Bailey.

            “Aww. Seriously?” Bailey moaned, letting her body sag dramatically. She jabbed a long finger beneath Scott’s chin. “Did he talk you out of it?”

            “No,” Maggie scoffed with a smile. Her fingers folded back around her brother’s body. “He’s not exactly good at talking out of things, if you can’t tell. That’s why he’s the tiny one and I’m the one that can change his size whenever I want and put him in my shoe.”

            “Uh-huh,” Bailey said, unconvinced. Miraculously, though, her flip-flop touched back down to earth with a sound slap against her giant sole. “When was the last time you put your brother in your shoe, anyway?”

            “Two days ago. For four hours, actually. Why?”

            Scott felt the impaired air in his lungs deflate with relief at last. Maggie was just putting on a show. He supposed it was just to maintain her reputation. In reality, she hadn’t worn him in her shoe for a year, and he was eternally grateful for it. And luckily, Bailey seemed to have bought it.

            “Let me see him, at least,” Baily requested softly, her gaze imperious upon Maggie’s baby-blues. Her fingers parted again above Scott’s head, her thumbnail cutting a path through the wisps of his hair.

            “Okay,” Maggie said happily. Her palm heaved beneath Scott’s back. “C’mon, little boy. You’ve had enough finger-cuddle time. Say hi to Bailey.”

            Forcing himself to be glad that his sister had at least spared him an introduction to the new girl’s feet if not her hands, Scott awkwardly went limp and allowed himself to be passed between the palms of the overbearing teenagers. Instantly he felt the cold of Bailey’s skin compared to Maggie’s, shivering a little as a sly smile accompanied her closing fingers.

            Within a few seconds of taking control of Scott’s body, Bailey’s fingers made themselves at home. Rather than merely snaking about his limbs with the mere intention to contain, as Maggie’s had, the girl’s thumbs were making their way up Scott’s shirt, tracing a line to his chest. He winced as her lengthy manicured nails tested the give of his skin.

            “He’s kinda fussy,” Bailey commented to Maggie.

            “Yeah, no kidding.”

            “Just hold still,” Bailey instructed clinically to her prisoner. Her iron fingers tightened their grip around the young man, fastening his thighs down to her palms, while her thumbs continued their investigation of his torso. The cold imparted to his skin, rippling goose bumps up along his body beneath her gridded touch. It was a rather unfortunate contrast, even from his sister’s more possessive grasp, and especially after the care and attention he’d been shown by Ella earlier in the evening.

            “Careful,” Maggie giggled off-handedly.

            “I always am,” Bailey defended. Her thumbpad squeezed on Scott’s abdomen. For a few seconds, she only seemed concerned with playing with his breathing supply, pumping up and down on his stomach. However, her expression had changed, a wrinkle forming in her nose as she drew him closer to her face.

            “What is it?”

            “His skin is sticky all over under this shirt,” she said. “Ewww…”

            “I didn’t have time for a bath after Mom’s thing,” Scott said instantly in his sister’s direction. He huffed, gasping up another chance for breath as Bailey’s fingers collapsed into his tiny stomach again.

            “God, that’s nasty. Do you not even think about the people that have to pick you up and carry you places, little person?” Bailey demanded with sickly melodrama. She stretched each syllable out, letting her tongue click against the roof of her mouth. “You must not be learning a whole lot from all these “lessons” you’re getting.”

            “He did take a bath, though,” Maggie commented, her brow furrowed. “Mom gave him one. I saw her doing it in the bathroom sink. And she always cleans him all the way.”

            “Wait,” Bailey said. “Where was he before we got here?”

            Scott’s gut lurched, and not just because he had an enormous dark-haired interrogator clenching the oxygen out of his body. This wasn’t a conversation he was in the mood to have.

            “With his girlfriend,” Maggie continued, perking up at the mention of Ella. “She’s super cool and super pretty. She’s probably out of his league, honestly.”
            “Girlfriend, huh?” Bailey said, a mischievous glow alighting in her eyes. Her grin broadened into its widest position yet. “I guess somebody was getting busy tonight.”

            Scott’s cheeks flushed red in spite of his current captor’s frigid digits. Sure, he’d experienced many indignities worse than this, far too many to count, but there was a very special kind of awkwardness reserved in a sleeping corner of the heart for when one’s sibling became aware of one’s sexual activity. It couldn’t have been much more humbling than if Maggie had discovered this information when he stood at his real height of six feet. For once, his embarrassment was one he felt he could share in solidarity with most of humanity.

            “Huh?” Maggie murmured.

            The sexual deviant watched his sister’s face contort with confusion. Idly, he wondered if she was actually struggling with the concept of her brother having intercourse, or if she was attempting to determine the actual mechanics of it for a six-inch person. More likely it was the latter, which was doubly as humiliating.

            Though, frankly, it was probably a fair natural consideration. It had certainly taken him and Ella a few tries to figure it out.

            “What, you can’t tell?” Bailey snorted. She pressed her nostrils down against the top of Scott’s head, inhaling in one long draw that partially sopped his hair into the entrance of her nasal cavity. The tip of her tongue pressed through the barrier of her lips in the corner. “He was up in that business. All the way up in that business, I bet.”

            “Ohhh…” Maggie drawled, her tongue curled up against the roof of her mouth as her crystal irises widened to dinner plates in view of Scott. He genuinely couldn’t read her tone as shifting more toward disgust or curiosity.

            “Bet you didn’t know that was happening,” Bailey suggested truthfully. Her fingers removed themselves from beneath Scott’s shirt, and instead coiled back around his sides into a powerful fist. Her free index finger snaked up into her closed hand, out of Maggie’s sight, and prodded sharply at his member through his jeans. “But I guess your little brother is growing up after all.”

            Scott squinted in the dark up toward the living room ceiling, tucked beneath the blankets of his armchair bedding. Sleep had nearly overtaken him in the lovely rare quiet of the Stevens household. It was only just half past eleven, but after he was given the chance to leap for bed, he’d taken it without a second thought. Bailey had mercifully departed the house shortly before, leaving him back in the relative safety of his sister’s grasp.

            “Remember our deal tomorrow,” Maggie said brightly as she’d propped her six-inch brother against her stomach, giving him a bizarre upward view from the bottom of her torso. “I got you out of rubbing her toes, so you gotta come rub mine now.”

            “I will,” he promised.

            “Sorry about the super-random things I said about putting you in my shoes and stuff. She’s just used to hearing me talk about it.”

            “No problem,” Scott mumbled, finally adjusting to being taken aback by this incomprehensibly considerate version of his sister. He held his breath, selecting his words carefully at this opportunity for a look into his sister’s consistently evolving moral code. “You… talk a lot about this kind of stuff to them at practice?”

            “I don’t know. Sometimes. Why?”
            “Just curious.”

            “It doesn’t mean anything… me telling them what I do with you or not. It’s just for fun.”

            Scott seriously doubted the veracity of the idea that it didn’t mean anything, given the going-over he’d just received in Bailey’s hands, but at least his sister didn’t seem to take it too seriously.

            “Yeah,” he agreed. “I guess you don’t really… do that anymore.”

            Maggie smirked. Her thumb and index finger closed together around the back of Scott’s shirt, plucking him out of her palm. A moment later, he was dangling prone in her grasp just around eye level.

            “Why do you mention it?” she asked calmly. “Do you want me to?”

            “Not really.”

            “You sure?”

            “Um… yeah. I am,” Scott continued, careful not to let his tone become patronizing, despite the fact that he was having to defend himself against such a ridiculous claim.

            “Well, I don’t know,” she shrugged. She’d exited the foyer and made her way into the living room, leaning up against a plush couch armrest as she eased into the seat. Her fingers continued to dangle her toy sibling. “I’ve never done it.”

            “It’s really not fun,” he said neutrally.

            This was as big of a protest as he was likely to allow himself while Maggie held him so precariously. It felt strange, declaring such a thing to his sister. It occurred to him that he’d never really flat-out admitted this, obvious a fact as it seemed.

            “Uh-huh,” she replied, somehow still with some doubt infused into her tone.

            “You don’t think so?”

            “It’s just some stuff I’ve read about for my internship this summer…”
            “What stuff?” He tried not to sound too desperate.
            “Like, it talks about how people who have had a lot of R&R-type stuff… people who’ve been in people’s shoes for a long time, like years… people like you…” Maggie explained. “They can start to, I don’t know… be sort of okay with it? Like, maybe even be more comfortable there than some other places.”

            “More comfortable… getting worn in somebody’s shoe?”

            “Yeah,” Maggie said with some of her usual snide haughtiness, as though the answer was the most natural thing in the world. “Trust me. It’s a bunch of doctors who did studies and wrote all this. They’d know what they’re talking about.”

            “I gotcha,” Scott said, deciding to quit while he was ahead.

            “It’s not the same for everybody, obviously,” she continued. She twirled a finger through her blonde locks with the opposite hand, occasionally flicking the silky end of the tuft at Scott’s head. “But if you ever… you know, start to feel different. Even if it’s pretty embarrassing for you to say… well, you can tell me. And…”

            “…y-yeah?”

            “I’d help you out, of course,” Maggie said. Her lips puckered as pressed her fingertip into it, then transferred the air kiss to the top of Scott’s head. Promptly, her hand lowered down to the cushions, setting her six-inch brother down between her newly liberated bare feet. “Anytime.”

            The young man spent an awkward few seconds fumbling in the buoyant terrain of the couch cushions while his sister’s tanned peds trounced playfully about in the softness. He was powerless to the motion of the ground decided by his little sibling’s feet. Her toes danced with cheerful glee, bopping playfully at his legs and arms on every unsuccessful attempt. Every time he thought he was about to be able to stand up, the balls of Maggie’s feet would sink into the fabric, shuffling its shape yet again. In the end, he was only able to get his balance by propping himself up on his sister’s big toes, which flanked on either side.

            She beamed with pride as she allowed him to stand below her crouched form on the couch, bulbous toes flexing beneath his miniature hands. When he started to slip, forcing him to wedge his arms into the fleshy crevice between her digits, she happily hugged his limbs into the plush grip of her skin and stood him back up again. At last seemingly satisfied with their gentle game, Maggie pressed the tip of her finger between her lips and then brought it to Scott, this time delivering a much wetter good-night kiss.

            “All you gotta do is ask,” she simpered. Maggie slipped back into the hall and switched the light off as she went, leaving Scott in thankful blackness.

            Huddled beneath the blanket, conflicted by a day full of increasingly troubling developments, Scott buried his skull in the armchair cushion.

            What all now did he have to be newly concerned about? It was practically migraine-inducing to recall.

            A newcomer to Judy’s campaign with a clear and vocal desire to borrow him for some literally one-on-one attention. A reappearance by Nancy, who now clearly had a mind to reserve Scott for her own session somehow or other. A girlfriend who was about to be on the other side of the globe for a year and a half, far too far to rescue him from his life’s underfooted woes. A cold-eyed seventeen-year-old with the desire to spill his secrets and store the rest of him in her shoes. And finally, a sister who was evidently hoping and praying he would willingly ask her to make him her personal toe putty.

            That Sylvia woman was the only glimmer of a hope in Scott’s mind, and an anonymous one at that. Being trampled under her muggy feet hadn’t exactly been a pleasure, but it was informative. He still couldn’t grasp Judy’s sudden willingness to rent him out to her in particular. Whatever the reason, though, it was worth finding out, by most means necessary.

            Not all, though. That would’ve been excessive. There were far too many “means” available to Scott to consider using all of them.

            A series of ticking creaks from the garage door interrupted his worrying. The softer slam of the car door and the lack of key fumbling at the entrance told him it was his mother returning, as if he couldn’t guess by the clack of her heels on the hardwood. Judy wasn’t the type to enter a room without making herself known until she was really ready, and by then, there was no chance for anyone to focus on anything else.

            The sound of her shoes echoed sharply in his eardrums.

            Lights in the kitchen clicked by on. Scott remained still, wrapped into a ball and monitoring the speed of his rising and falling chest. Life would be much easier if he could just allow this day to end. He always dealt with his mother better after a good night’s rest; it wasn’t by a huge margin, but it was enough.

            “Scoooott…” The crooned call was sweet as a childhood lullaby, and yet it made Scott go rigid in his bones. So much for the good night’s rest. He held motionless as the blanket was pinched in the corner and unfolded away from his body, revealing Judy standing above him with a hand on her hip and a tired smile on her face.

            “Hi, Mom-” he slurred. “-my.”

            “Were you asleep already, sweetie?”

            “Almost.”

            “I’m sorry,” she said, cocking her head as her index finger descended to pet Scott’s cheek. “I just wanted to say thank you for doing a good job today during my meeting. I think you made a nice impression. Keep it up, and you’ll keep getting my permission to leave with Ella.”

            “Thanks. Actually, she’s-” he began, stopping short of revealing the upcoming impossibility of this luxury.

            “She’s what, honey?”
            “She’s helped me stay focused,” Scott said. “I know I tripped up earlier this week, and seeing her was a nice reminder that… well, I’m on your side.”

            Judy nodded, a smile creeping over her lips as she stroked her son’s hair.

            “I’m proud of the progress you’re making. Just keep thinking that way, and everyone will get what they want.”

            Trying not to loathe himself too much for his yes-man mode, Scott motionlessly allowed his mother’s giant fingers to caress his back like a guinea pig. He even pretended to relax a bit under her touch, sinking lower into the cushion. Judy’s fingers followed, continuing with their attempt at soothing, although it came off a bit more like a reminder.

            “Where’d you go after Ella and I left?” Scott asked, emboldened by his mother’s good mood.

            “Oh, a couple of meetings with backers, and just one Representative. Some of the ladies from this morning came too for a cocktail party after. Nothing I’m sure you’re interested in, honey.”

            “Ah.”

            Did “ladies” include Sylvia?

            “Why do you ask?”

            “You just look tired,” he said gently, daring to follow up with a playful smirk as he stared up at his mother through her fingers. “No offense, obviously.”

            “Of course,” she chuckled. “It has been a long day. For both of us.”

            Judy arched back to full height again, at last relenting the weight of her fingers on her son’s back. She stretched, sliding her palms along her hips and rocking side to side in her notably towering heels that easily bumped her over the six-foot-tall mark.

            Scott peered over the edge of the couch, watching his mother’s feet flex in the prisons of the heels. Slightly swollen from labored walking on the spikes, her skin was flushed and weary as her feet were at last pried out of their adornments. Judy sighed deeply, releasing the tension as her nude feet lurched over the carpet.

            At the same time, a probably-doomed idea popped in the back of Scott’s mind. And suddenly, he couldn’t shake it.

            “If you wanted, um… you know, if you’re tired and want to kinda… relax, or something…” Scott began, feigning awkwardness as he knitted his fingers together. “…I could… you know. Help.”

            “Oh?” Judy’s lips pursed for just a second before puffing again, offering a silent kiss to her son between a breath. “You’d do that, honey?”

            “Yeah.” Scott kept his face frozen in an earnest state of neutrality.

            Both mother and son understood perfectly well that he’d “do” that whether or not he wanted to, if Judy demanded it; the real surprise for the woman was that he’d volunteered at all.

            And consequently, Scott knew that his parent was already scoping for potential trickery, even as she smiled with such unrivaled joy at his revolting offer. God, what a heel he was.

            “Well, that has to be the nicest thing anyone’s said to me this month. Sweetie, I would love that,” Judy said. “You really are making such wonderful growth.”

            Judy leaned down, collecting her six-inch son into her broad palm. The journey to her bedroom was a slow and deliberate one as she studied her offspring, her fingers smoothing down his hair and tickling his stomach.

            Meanwhile, Scott uncomfortably pondered what his mother’s version of “wonderful growth” meant. Because if the probable-future Senator Stevens had her way, he imagined she wouldn’t be happy until every child in America was shrunken at the feet of their mothers, requesting the opportunity to prostrate, heart and sole. 

            Scott clutched the flowing bedspread beneath his back as he felt the rolling of weight in the earth. The sheets billowed above, flushing warm air scented of Judy’s leftover perfume into his dim airspace. When at last they settled, the young man bit his lip, preparing. He’d made a plan and he was sticking to it.

            The terrific mass of Judy’s size-twelve foot swooshed between the fabrics as she stretched. Meaty toes flexed, instep arched, the pale wall of skin flecked with lint and pump calluses. The hem of the woman’s summer nightgown clung to her mighty exposed thigh to its full extension. A yawn and a relaxed moan followed from beyond.

            Her sole located Scott in record time, molding itself above him. Even at his size of six inches, the sheer volume of her appendage swallowed him up beneath.

            For a moment, Judy merely utilized her son’s body as a massage tool, mashing him deeper into the mattress. And Scott took it. He’d spread his entire body out, making a face-forward snow angel into the expanse of his mother’s foot flesh. It was all but possible to feel the steam emanating between their pressed skins as her hot, weathered sole worked itself over his considerably colder form.

            Sickening as it was for him to admit, it wasn’t the worst thing he could’ve experienced. Her skin was soft enough after a day of cooking in her heels not to chafe. Her wrinkles were pronounced but malleable, allowing the doughy section of her sole to settle in softly against his entire front side without too much extra weight. The sour odor of her shoes was omnipresent, as always, but became less noticeable after Judy had a chance to rub the aroma thickly enough into her son’s body instead, oiling his skin. If anything, he could feel his own muscles relaxing just a bit beneath the calculated pressure of his mother’s bare foot.

            In very little time, Scott’s own body temperature was synchronized with Judy’s sole, sharing a comfortably warm equilibrium. When at last the woman seemed satisfied with the initial intensity of her massage, she straightened her leg out once more. Her foot peeled itself away from Scott, who automatically sat up in the woolly darkness of the sheets to follow its domineering shape without even thinking.

            It was hard to make out his own position amidst the undulating sheets as Judy rolled from side to side, getting comfortable. Every few seconds he could make out the geometry of her leg swaying one way, her toes dancing against the silhouette of the sheets. The lights in her bedroom had dimmed as she prepared to settle in for the night. Already, Scott could tell she wasn’t planning on giving him a lift back to his couch bed downstairs. Which more than likely meant she intended for him to spend the night in this exact location.

            “Mom…” Scott spoke up as he sat slumped in the muggy seat of bedsheets, unsure even if she could hear him. “Are you-”

            His words were cut off by a plump, wriggling big toe colliding playfully with his head. The motion nearly toppled him back, but he held firm, bracing himself back against the uneven surface of the mattress as Judy’s digit drilled softly against his face. Grumbling softly to himself, he allowed his mother to toy with his face and hair against the gridded curve of her toe, while he wrapped his hands around its juicy girth and began to rub.

            “Mmmm… that’s it, sweetie,” she sighed from above. Either he’d chosen a poor time to try talking, or she’d heard him start and decided she’d prefer he talk to the toe.

            Scott sighed, feeling his breath fog against the spongy pad of his mother’s toe that was just barely wider than his entire face. The appendage squirmed, seemingly reacting to the feeling of his exhalation against its peachy terrain, and pressed in again. The young man barely had time to gulp down a swallow of toejam-flavored air before Judy’s toe was making itself a mask for him again.

            So, back he went to the ridged shaft of the toe. The monstrous things wouldn’t pamper themselves, after all - which he knew well, given how many times in the past Judy had informed him. He dug his fingers as deep as he could into the supple flesh and the crevice between the digits, which had become a bit brinier after such a long day in shoes.

            After a few more minutes of personal attention paid to her big toe, Judy seemed content to let him move on. Taking the lead, she smoothed his legs down with the row of her bulbous digits, and then planted her thankfully smaller second toe into his lap.

            The bulk of it prodded uncomfortably into the area between his legs, causing him to flinch. He quickly took her meaning and propped the toe up in his own hands, bringing it up to his face like water drawn from a stream. He puckered his lips and blew cold air across each handful of toe. It wasn’t ideal having his mother’s giant toe brush coyly against his lips every few seconds, but it was far preferable to letting it rest a couple inches lower on his shrunken frame.

            The cycle continued down the rest of her toes. With each transition to the next digit, Judy’s foot itself would ride a little higher up on Scott’s body. By the time he was primping and cupping her pinky toe into his palms, the ball of her foot was effectively squashed down on his entire lower half, making itself comfortable and Scott decidedly the opposite.

            A flicker of light followed by a grateful gust of AC breezed under the blankets as Judy’s manicured fingers lifted them up. Her eyes weren’t quite visible to Scott as he was pinned beneath her foot near the bottom of her bed, but he could certainly make out her ever-broad smile sending him a clear message of customer satisfaction.

            “What was it you were going to say before, sweetie?” she questioned at last. “Sorry if I interrupted. I just really needed to break down some of the tension first.”

            “Oh. Yeah,” Scott gulped, carefully trying to unwedge his crotch from beneath the hefty ball of his mother’s naked foot. As he expected, it was entirely unsuccessful. He only hoped she didn’t move too much now.

            “Don’t let me stop you, though. You can talk and help me at the same time.”

            “Ah, yeah, you mean-”

            “You’re so cute. You do always forget, don’t you, that-”

            “-you have two feet,” he repeated back in the least patronizing way he possibly could, despite this being essentially a direct quote he’d had parroted to him many times over the years whenever he’d seemingly neglected his mother’s other appendage.

            Judy’s smile glistened into a pleased grin. Her hands clasped together, wringing in delight.

            “Exactly. But go ahead and talk, if you still want to?”

            “Sure, sure, yeah… it wasn’t anything important or anything…”

            “I can decide that for you, honey.”

            “Gotcha. Um, I was just curious what the thing today was for?”

            “You mean the meeting you helped me host today?”

            “Yes,” he said, trying not to snort at his mother’s definition of “host.”

            “You’re interested in my meetings?” Judy chuckled. Her hand released its grasp on the tucked sheet and instead folded the entire mess of blankets back, bringing Scott into the light, along with both of his bare bedmates. The one he’d just finished working over, considerably looser and less pink now, finally lurched off of his body, but the second was dragging across the sheets toward him.

            “I guess a little bit. Since it all kinda affects me, right? It just seems good to… you know, take an interest in how it all works,” Scott explained, selecting every phrase with the utmost precision. He could see the gears turning in his mother’s brain, despite her unmoving and gently derisive smirk.

            “Well, that’s very mature of you, honey,” she said. Her gaze narrowed as her tongue flicked at the corner of her lips, studying him as her unattended foot approached. “Mostly we were talking sponsors. Not just financial, of course, but people and groups that can make a difference by helping educate and spread our message.”

            “Gotcha.”

            “…which is part of why I love that you’re so cooperative during those meetings. It helps to let them see a great, living example of one of the most important programs. Especially people newer to the campaign who haven’t really had the chance.”

            “You mean that one lady? Si… Sidra?” Scott asked, purposefully forgoing the correct name. He ran his palm along the bell of his mother’s pinky toe, coaxing the words out like notes from a harp.

            “Sylvia. Yes, she’s a new partner. She’s got some wonderful connections to some citizen action groups, the kind of people that can get some ground swell going in places where I’m not… or, not as well-seen yet. People that not even Techilogic can…” Judy meandered dreamily, melting lower into the bed as Scott played her toes. On these final whispered words, though, her lips closed, forming back into the smile of before. “…well, there’s no need to bore you with the minutiae. The point is… I’m grateful to see so much progress in you, Scott.”

            He nodded, careful not to let the intent glow too brightly in his eyes.

            “Cool,” he droned, hands still moving methodically from nailbed to nailbed. “Thanks, Mommy.” He didn’t skip a beat.

            “Sleep well, sweetie.”

            The lights clicked off a few minutes later and the twenty-two-year-old settled in for a probably restless night of sleep snuggled against Judy’s even more restless naked size-twelves. Already her soles had made a warm sandwich of him a few times, indicating even a cat nap would be close to impossible, but for once, Scott didn’t care. Though he’d only received the barest snippet of information, he’d learned much more from the tone of his mother’s voice and her careful omission of explanation. There was more at stake here than she was letting on.

            And there had to be a way for him to use it.

Scott sat numbly on his mother’s knee like her personal hand puppet. That, at least, was how he felt whenever he was required to sit in these group therapy sessions in the searingly white-washed walls of the Adams R&R Clinic, with a lie of a smile stretched on his face and carefully scripted words coming from his mouth.

            Though, he supposed he had to be grateful his mother never thought to take “hand puppet” to its logical physical conclusion. Ouch.

            Only a matter of weeks had passed since his first review board meeting, but it already felt stretched into half an eternity.

            “We’ve got some new faces here today,” Val Richards announced obviously with a clap of her hands. Her curly brown locks bounced on her shoulders. The counselor gazed around the room at the circle of parents and guardians holding their shrunken charges: a circle which seemed to expand its circumference every passing week. “And we will be hearing from each of them, but first, I think it might be helpful to hear a little from some of our “veteran” group members, to give our newbies a feel for the lay of the land.”

            Scott tried not to budge at this announcement. He was pretty sure his mother could feel the goose bumps on his back, though, as her fingers coyly fingered the hem of his shirt, stroking the small of his back. Judy’s thick quadricep bulged beneath her son’s rear end.

            “I’m sure Scott would love to take a turn,” Judy volunteered. She wrapped her palms around her twelve-inch boy’s hips.

            “Thank you, Mrs. Stevens,” Val said cheerily, stopping herself short from calling the woman Councilwoman Stevens after a previous request the week before. “Anyone else?”

            “Me,” said Cassandra sheepishly, raising her hand so she could be seen despite her nine-inch size. Her voice was noticeably more docile than it had been the first day as she sat on her mother’s lap. She nervously twirled her fading red-dyed bangs around her miniscule thumb.

            “And Derrick, too. Right?” Mrs. Tate said, clearing her throat expectantly. She gazed down at the floor at her usual pair of white foam clogs. Her loudmouthed nineteen-year-old son was sandwiched beneath her pudgy bare foot and the shoe, as he so often was during these sessions. Clearly, she was making a probably-futile attempt to prove to the group that she wasn’t in possession of the least-well behaved shrunken dependent. But Scott already had his doubts.

            “Uh-huh,” the boy piped loudly from under his mother’s meaty toes. He coughed as his face was wedged back into the gritty flesh.

            “That should be just fine. We have three volunteers,” Val said. “Who’d like to go first?”

            “I can,” Cassandra said with greater confidence than before.

            Scott was grateful; he assumed Judy would’ve jumped in for him given another nanosecond of dead air.

            “Thank you, Cassandra,” Val said. “Why don’t you just tell our newcomers a bit about your experience here with the group and your R&R therapy at home? Specifically, what’s something you wish you could tell yourself back when you began?” She opened a hand, indicating toward the four newest individuals in the group: the guardians all sitting up ramrod-straight with rigid faces, their shrunken criminals all slouched depressively atop their knees and half-hiding their tiny faces.

            They would’ve been easy to pick out of a line-up of new and old shrinkies, even if Scott hadn’t been so experienced by now at spotting it.

            “Okay. Sure,” Cassandra said. She glanced upward at her mother’s quietly anticipatory expression above.

            The woman took to combing her daughter’s hair with her long fingernails while the seventeen-year-old car thief began to speak. Again, it looked more like the middle-aged woman was grooming a favorite doll rather than her child.

            “I had a hard time with this at first. I really did,” Cassandra explained. “Sometimes it’s hard to sleep, and then when I wake up, it takes a second to realize that he room around me didn’t get a ton bigger, I’m just… well, I’m not the same now. But it’ll get better for you. You just have to stay focused. That’s all.”

            Scott swallowed. That moment of waking realization Cassandra described was something he’d adapted to around age fourteen. And given how young he was when Judy first shrank him, he was something of a late bloomer. He watched the girl’s face, smiling without twitching. It was like looking at a different person, in everything from her demeanor to her hairstyle, from that first time she’d joined the group a couple weeks back. He couldn’t help but wonder what was happening at home besides hair-brushing to keep her in line.

            “Thank you, Cassandra. Derrick?” Val asked, looking innocently down at the floor in the direction of the entrapped teenager beneath his mother’s foot. “Would you like to say a few words next?”

            Mrs. Tate clutched both hands beneath her hefty lower leg and hoisted it up in the air as high as she comfortably could, the low-worn treads of her clog pointed out toward the center of the circle. At the crest of the shoe, from beneath her worming toes, Derrick clambered carefully up until he could look out over the group, his arms resting atop the rubbery upturned rim of the shoe, while his legs looped comfortably around the toe thong. The boy was comically dwarfed, half-undressed and prodding humbly from beneath his mother’s plump bare foot as she held it up for all to see.

            Scott didn’t turn around to look at his own parent’s face above him. Somehow, though, he could feel the aura of her proud smile. It was a display Judy approved of. He just hoped she didn’t get any ideas from this particular mother-son team.

            “Well, uh… you know. Here I am,” Derrick said casually, forcing a smile. In a previous life, he was clearly the class clown, but the laughs weren’t coming easily now from his audience. His mother’s toes grappled idly with the bottom half of his tiny body, pinning him in place. “I’m, uh, getting pretty used to seein’ the inside of people’s shoes, ya know?”

            Against all odds, a couple muted chuckles rang out from around the circle. Scott couldn’t be sure if they originated from shrunken incarcerates or appointed guardians, and neither was especially comforting.

            “But… but what I mean is, uh…” Derrick continued. He grunted as his mother’s big toe squeezed against his shoulder blades, compressing his chest into the foam of the shoe. “Maybe take me as one of those, uh… whatchamacallit? Cautionary tales. I’m a cautionary tale, kids.”

            Scott observed the four newest recruits to the group, who were watching all of this with horrified fascination he recognized well. From his best guess, the newbies were: a mother and college-age daughter, a father and teen son, a young woman probably in her early twenties holding a possible-sister who actually was her elder by a few years, and a well-manicured older woman holding a man in his mid-twenties. Maybe a mother? Of course, there was no way to be sure of any of that yet.

            “That’s a mature perspective to have, Derrick, and reflects well on your own progress, I think,” Val said, who always seemed to find the painfully positive in everything, even when reality wasn’t quite so sunny. “Do you have anything else to say?”

            “Um… oh, yeah. I do,” Derrick said. He was beginning to sink back into the shallow abyss clenched between his mother’s sweaty sole and the dirty clog. “Pro-tip: get good at meditating. Especially if whoever’s-in-charge-of-you figures out they’re into having you down there a lot.”

            Scott flinched sympathetically.

            “Okay, I think that’s enough, young man,” Mrs. Tate snapped. She abruptly let go of her leg, allowing her shoe to clomp back to the floor. Her son grunted, expelling air in a heavy heave. The abundance of cushy foot flesh and padded flip-flop were ironically his only saving graces for such a fall.

            “Meditating…” Val said, taking the baton of the conversation and running with it before awkwardness could settle in. “…is, indeed, a very useful technique for anyone who spends their R&R time in… potentially uncomfortable or claustrophobic environments.”

            Scott had to stifle a snort at this. That was one way to put it.

            His mother’s broad hand, now tucked fully beneath his shirt, was laid flush against his back. The goose bumps returned beneath her cool palm.

            “By that token, in future sessions, we absolutely will spend time practicing meditation and mindfulness with all our reduced group members,” Val explained. She clasped her hands together again with delight, suppressing a wry smile. “However, today is already pretty packed. We’ve got introductions, followed by an… educational opportunity, unique, even, to this group.”

            Scott crossed his arms, feeling mildly strained by the increased tightness of his shirt as Judy’s entire hand was being worn inside his shirt. However, just as stealthily as she’d put it inside, her fingers slid back out.

            “And Scott?” Val said pleasantly.

            “Yep,” he said, not skipping a beat. He waved to the new shrunken prisoners. “Hey, guys.”

            A mumbled greeting arose in unison from the four newcomers across the circle.

            “Um, well basically… if you don’t know me, I was… the first one,” Scott said. “The first Shrink Act kid.”

            There were a few nods of recognition from the parental figures who clearly were already aware of this, and a couple widened pupils from the tiny teens who obviously weren’t aware of this tidbit yet.

            “So I guess you could say I know my way around this kind of thing by now. But my mom is…” he continued. “…is really dedicated to me getting better and learning from my mistakes. So are my brother and sister. The sooner you can wrap your head around that in your own house, with your own… family, then the easier it gets. Just follow directions and think about what you’re doing. Trust me.”

            Val nodded and reclaimed control of the discussion. Scott gave a polite bow of his head to the group as he finished, tingling with an uncomfortable cocktail of regret and satisfaction with his ability to toe the line. Soon after, his mother’s fingers caressed their way back up his shirt again. He could feel her beaming at him from above.

            The introductions followed. Scott had been right about both the mother-daughter pair and the father-son pair. Though clearly embarrassed at their presence, both the boy and girl had each committed relatively minor crimes, and there was no ominous glint in the eyes of either normal-sized parent that Scott could detect which suggested they were coming around to the Gospel of Punishing Tiny Helpless Children.

            Which was encouraging to witness, certainly. He just had to hope Judy didn’t try to offer them any informational books or video content.

            Next was the youngest guardian in the room, a twenty-two-year-old girl who was supporting herself independently and was taking charge of her older cousin’s, rather than her sister’s as Scott had guessed, shrunken rehab. With no obvious guardians for the twenty-five-year-old serial shoplifter, the young woman had swooped in and saved her cousin from prison time on the condition that they attend these sessions.

            Finally came the older woman, the great aunt of the adult man she held in her polished fingertips, not a mother. Her smart pantsuit suggested she was at least two social classes above most of the people present in the room. Through a demonstration of the Shrink Act’s bizarre legal wiring, the twenty-six-year-old had been passed to his wealthy aunt after he’d engaged in some “creative” bookkeeping at work, and his parents had both resigned from any responsibility for his rehabilitation. Rather than go to jail, he’d chosen custody with his elder relative, whose dedication to civic progress provided her an interest in his personal improvement. From the look in his tiny eyes as the woman’s spindly fingers worked their way constantly around his body, though, Scott couldn’t help but guess the man was having second thoughts.

            “And now for that surprise educational opportunity I mentioned earlier,” Val said. She stood up, peeking through the window leading to the hallway of the clinic. “Ah, perfect timing. Looks like my colleague is coming right now.”

            Scott, even at his full twelve-inch height, couldn’t quite make out the figure of the approaching woman until she’d entered the room. He felt his mother’s leg muscles firming beneath him, as if she was preparing to stand up. Judy’s fingertips laid against his thigh.

            “Everyone, this is Olivia Blackwell,” Val said. “Along with her duties as a counselor, like myself, she spends her time here at the Clinic in our training facility. She specializes in honing and improving the rehabilitation techniques of our guardians and caretakers.”

            “Good morning, everyone,” Olivia said, grinning as she scanned the room around her. Silky, straightened hair framed a dimpled face, belying experience in the twilight years of her twenties. In one hand, she carried a lumpy black duffel bag. “Today, we’re going to be working to ensure everyone, especially our newcomers, have successful rehabilitation sessions with their reduced family members and friends. I’d like to start by going over the new R&R smart phone app, which allows you to schedule, train, track, and compare improvement sessions with others under the umbrella of the program, and we’re very excited about this newest tool by Techilogic. Then, the real learning will begin.”

            Scott raised an eyebrow. He’d heard of this woman. She was Maggie’s instructor for her summer internship. Over numerous dinnertimes in the past two weeks, he’d listened to his sister excitedly prattle on to their mother about the young professional’s grace and precision as a teacher of R&R therapy. And Maggie wasn’t easily impressed.

            “But of course, I won’t be working alone,” Olivia said. “Seeing as we’re in the presence of Shrink Act royalty, in a manner of speaking, and a major contributor to this entire program. Judy? Scott? Would you give me a hand, please?”

Scott inhaled delicately through his nostrils as his face was caved against the muscular, peachy ball of Judy’s bare foot. She gave her powerful ped another wiggle, and it was smoothly fitted into the shoe with her two-inch son inside. The usual aroma of summer grime and balmy flesh greeted his olfactory senses; the same flavors were teased against his tightly clenched lips. His back creaked as it was bent into the shape of the arched stiletto she’d placed him inside of for demonstration.

            He didn’t even have the gumption to feel angry about this. Sure, he hadn’t even done anything wrong to earn this latest foot-sandwich atrocity. Sure, Judy could’ve mentioned to him that she’d volunteered the pair of them to make a special presentation in group today. Sure, she could’ve told him that Olivia Blackwell, the resident R&R therapy session guru and expert in all things shrunken torment, would be bringing in some special tools to make his winnowing all the more public.

            Would it have softened the blow at all to know these things before? Scott didn’t think so.

            The stiletto had emerged first from Olivia’s black bag of tricks. It was made of a rather ruthless vinyl substance that put some particular pressure on Scott’s limbs as his mother smeared him length-wise along her sole. Worse still, though, the shoe was entirely translucent. After he’d managed to wrestle his cheek to the side of Judy’s crushing sole, Scott could get a surprisingly clear look at the outside world beyond the glassy confines of the shoe.

            Which could only mean everyone out there could see him clearly, too.

            They were certainly trying to, anyway. Most of the shrunken individuals, all standing at varying sizes ranging from six to twelve inches, were placed on the floor. The young people were crowded in terrified wonderment around Judy’s proudly posed leg, towering above them like a beacon of their upcoming emotional doom, with the poster boy of their woes visibly splayed inside the see-through prison beneath the woman’s massive foot.

            The parents all took the opportunity to observe, too. They all stooped low to the ground before Judy, trying to get a good look at the underside of her borrowed stiletto. Group members both shrunken and not all knelt before the glass altar of the shoe, watching Scott’s silent struggle with baited breath. Judy herself only smiled as she rotated her ankle to provide an underside perspective to all parties present.

            For his part, Scott was just focusing on gasping up regular breaths. There was hardly time to be humiliated by the audience he was forced to play to now just beyond the tight glass walls of the shoe. After so many years of being stuffed into Judy’s heels, Scott had a certain knack for adjusting his oxygen intake within two minutes of entering the hole. However, that only worked when the shoes were fitted specifically for his mother.

            These vinyl training tools of Olivia’s, clearly intended purely as demonstrative tools and not to be worn outside the Clinic as normal shoes, were a different story. Ordinarily, Scott had at least enough room to wrestle his body into a new position after a few minutes of wrenching himself against the ceiling of feminine foot flesh.

            That luxury was not afforded today. There was well and truly nowhere to go as he was plastered flat beneath the unbelievable weight of Judy’s foot. His every joint and bone was putty under the thankfully forgiving mass of his mother’s pink sole. If not for the handy air holes poked modestly along the seam of the plastic instep, Scott surely would’ve suffocated.

            Space was only the first concern, though. There was a prevailing odor of chemical surface cleaner, probably after multiple uses by other Clinic members, to avoid the passage of germs. It was only somewhat successful, though, as Scott could detect numerous other remnants of smells trapped in the shoe which didn’t belong to Judy. There was a definite note of aged lotion, crusty and floral in its gooey affectation, most likely when an older woman used the shoe. There was also a hint of something sour and grassy from a younger, athletic wearer, probably a girl even younger than Maggie. Of course, all of these minute flavors were trumped by Judy’s insistent size-12 foot, which flooded every square millimeter of the training footwear with its physical shape and its atmosphere. Her skin was hot and lightly greased, only warming Scott’s body further beyond comfort with its tepid scent. And it was getting harder to keep his lips closed as they were forcibly ground against the gridded ball of her gigantic, moist foot.

            “Doesn’t that hurt him?” a voice of one of the mothers asked. “It looks like she’s crushing him.”

            “Well, as you can see, by Judy’s example…” Olivia explained, waving her hands in a steady dance like she was a game show presenter, “…it really is quite possible to wear your charge in footwear even as restrictive as this, providing accommodations are made, such as breathing holes, which I assure you are providing Scott here with plenty of air to stay healthy and conscious.”

            “Still, couldn’t he break a bone?” one of the fathers asked.

            “Safety is a concern in any given situation. Taking a shower in your home bathroom, for example, is statistically more dangerous than what’s happening to Scott now,” Olivia said almost instantly. Her smile widened. “The short answer is, yes, he could break a bone. But there are plenty of reasons why, just as surely, he will not.”

            “Such as?” another parent asked.

            “First and foremost, training will take you a long way in learning precisely how to handle your child or other charge. I can guarantee you that Mrs. Stevens has had enough years of experience in this practice that she could wear each and every one of the reduced individuals here today in these same heels, and they would be infinitely safer than one of our newcomers wearing their child in a fluffy house slipper,” Olivia said.

            Through the air holes, Scott picked up enough pieces of the conversation to follow along. Sick as it was, Olivia was right about Judy. She was a true maestro when it came to keeping her shrunken shoemate alive and unbroken.

            “Like this,” Judy said simply, planting the foot in the translucent trainer heel upon the floor. Next she shifted her weight from one leg to the other, and actually picked up her opposite foot from the floor, centering her entire body’s mass down into the single glassy prison in which Scott was incarcerated.

            He barely had time to widen his lungs. Scott broke his cardinal rule and opened his lips, gulping an emergency gasp of sour-flavored air. His teeth scraped softly against the rotund globe that was the ball of Judy’s foot. The salt-and-vinegar tang of it burned against the inside of his cheek. All around, the pressure increased uniformly. His whole body was on the verge of losing feeling, but he’d managed to keep himself spread wide.

            “As you’ll see, if you’ll take a look down inside…” Olivia continued. “…injury will be avoided when the subject is just as well-prepared as their handler.”

            Faces both small and normal-sized crowded around the plastic slope of the shoe, peering in at Scott’s miraculously mashed body as his mother’s whole body weight was trained atop it. The group had to take turns, backing away so others could stoop down to the floor and get a glimpse of the master-class in shrunken shoe rides. Despite the humiliation of it, Scott couldn’t help but feel grateful in this moment that his mother hadn’t chosen to strip him naked before making this demonstration.

            “And just as easily, I can assure you that Scott down here is just as experienced in his own role as his mother is in hers,” Olivia continued gleefully. She looked to Val, who nodded, encouraging her to carry on. “Judy, why don’t you show us how easy it is to walk without harming our helpful little volunteer?”

            The request was barely out of Olivia’s mouth before Judy was on the march. Her heel spikes clacked in rapid rhythm across the floor of the room as she paraded for the group, which followed slowly after her, trying to catch a glimpse of her tiny passenger.

            Scott adjusted accordingly, glad at least for some occasional lapses in the pressure as his mother’s giant foot rose from the ground for another step. Her sweat-slicked skin squeaked all around him on every shift of her deep arch. At the very least, he was lubricated enough in her filth that he could move in pattern with her sole. While the translucent trainer heel was still a purer and more painful form of this activity than he’d experienced in a while, his instincts allowed him to recover relatively quickly from the brain-deadening numbness of being stood upon on one leg. By the time Judy had walked five laps around the entire room, with the impressed crowd of parents and tiny teenagers filing behind, he’d dutifully fallen back into form.

            As Judy’s sole grew softer and more malleable from the canned heat of the shoe, Scott could feel his body sinking upward into the mushy island of his mother’s skin. Practically melting into her. It was only when he was laid out in Judy’s palm, with cold wind being blown on him from between her lips, that he fully realized he’d been removed from the shoe finally. Surrounding him on all sides were the faces of his audience: a group of nineteen pairs today, but in practice, representative of so many more that his mother wished to reach.

            “Class dismissed,” Val said happily, golf-clapping along with the rest of the group for Olivia and Judy. Scott only looked on blearily from the exposed center of his mother’s palm, where he was marooned.

            He’d told himself he’d go along with this entire months-long flagellation of his self-worth with the silent dignity of a martyr. For the sake of his siblings and their future liberties from their totalitarian parent, which he was determined to help them earn. On days like today, of course, that cross was an especially heavy one to bear.

            Particularly when Judy stood on one foot.

            Judy’s long fingers were draped possessively over Scott’s shoulders as she cradled him against her right bosom on the walk up the cobblestone path to Sylvia Lockwood’s house. The driveway itself was a winding rope of a road that twisted between several patches of tall oaken trees, ensuring the residence wasn’t even remotely visible from the street. It wasn’t until Scott, seated in his childhood car seat behind his mother for safety purposes, was unclicked from his straps that he could even get a good look at the place.

            “I can’t wait to hear all the good things she’s going to tell me about this visit, sweetie,” Judy said. Her broad thumb curled under his narrow chin. “I really can’t.”

            “Neither can I,” Scott said.

            The façade of Sylvia Lockwood’s home was smaller than he’d been anticipating. Humble, almost, with a small upper floor and old rain-eaten fencing surrounding the back yard. One-car garage and ample flower and plant life in the soil beds surrounding the foundations. The palace-esque homes of Judy’s other friends and political contributors were proudly displayed from the grass-shaven curbs of their expensive neighborhoods; Sylvia, though, seemed to prefer a quieter abode. What that meant, Scott couldn’t say; all he knew was that Judy was willing to literally hand-deliver him to this woman for solitary time together on one of his weekly mandated outings, and that made her significant in his mind.

            “C’mon in, you two, don’t be shy!” Sylvia beamed as she threw open the front door. The knob was turning before Judy even had a chance to reach out for the doorbell. The dark-haired woman’s gaze fell almost instantly to the twelve-inch-tall young man curled up in his mother’s arms like a newborn.

            Scott immediately offered a smile and a friendly wave as he was carried into the foyer of the house. He was well aware of his expected performance this morning in Sylvia’s home, because Judy had spent the past few days carefully rehearsing it with him. He was to be polite, complimentary, and kind as he’d been during the last coffee-wine hour, which was what had attracted Sylvia to the idea of a personal visit in the first place. This wasn’t an outright political ad, this was a buttering-up. Simultaneously, Scott was to avoid any and all attempts at cheeky commentary of his own on his legal and personal circumstances. Not a drop of passive-aggression. When asked about his current home life, he was to offer up nothing but glowing praise, which Judy had helped talk him through and even memorize by offering a mock interview with herself in Sylvia’s place.

            Of course, Judy had been thorough in the authenticity of the mock interview by seating herself on the living room couch and resting her bare soles on her son’s miniature body while firing questions at him. Odds were, his morning in Sylvia’s custody would proceed in a similar manner. He would need, Judy insisted, to be prepared to answer under literal pressure.

            The inside of Sylvia’s house certainly matched the exterior. Most of the furniture was made of some kind of reclaimed wood, and what wasn’t wood was trying very hard to give the impression of polished junk, like something from a barn, minus the cow smell. From the limited knowledge gleaned from the various house-decorating reality shows Maggie had forced him to watch while playing with him in her lap, Scott would’ve identified the place as shabby-chic.

            “You’re looking well this morning, Sylvia,” Judy said. Her arms rocked back and forth, but she showed no signs of putting Scott down yet. “You’ve been putting in time with that pilates streaming program that Nancy went on about, haven’t you?”

            “Oh, you’re too good to me, Judy,” Sylvia said with a blush, resting her hands on her curvaceous hips. “Not as much as I should have, but Lord knows if I could have a figure half as svelte as hers, I’d be putting in the hours. You can be sure of that.”

            Scott watched the woman’s hands moving as she jabbered to Judy for a couple minutes. No rings, as far as he could see. It seemed likely she wasn’t married or even necessarily in a relationship, from the kind of secluded residence she kept. He estimated her to have a few more years on her belt than his mother, though she still hadn’t peaked fifty yet.

            “I hope you didn’t have any trouble getting up the drive today,” Sylvia said. “There was a lot of wind coming through last night, thought I might’ve had a tree down. I keep telling myself life would be easier if I left myself live closer to my neighbors, with a place that doesn’t blend into the trees.”

            “I wouldn’t be too hasty,” Judy said. “I sometimes envy you the privacy.”

            “I’m sure you do,” Sylvia said. Her attention drifted finally away from Judy’s face, the twinkle of her eye instead refocusing to Scott. Her smile grew ever broader. “But now, who do we have here?”

            “Just a little special delivery,” Judy joked. Her fingers tucked under Scott’s chin again, forcing him to look directly up at Sylvia’s face. “What do you say?”

            “Hi, Ms. Lockwood,” Scott said cheerily. He struggled to sit up higher in his mother’s arms, but only succeeded in sinking deeper against her chest as Judy clutched him closer. Rather than try to rebalance himself, though, the young man bit his lip and accepted the obedient, doll-like face he’d sworn up and down to maintain in Sylvia’s presence.

            “Oh-oh, looks like you could use a hand there, cutie-pie,” Sylvia cooed. She reached forward, scooping both hands under Scott’s rear end and back, and drew him up from against Judy’s cleavage. “Or two.”

            Scott yielded into the woman’s curious grasp. Even at his largest size, her hands were broad, rivaling his mother’s for sheer scale. She held him with a certain assurance, accepting him into the cradle of her arms almost immediately, where he found himself in a regretfully warm embrace. At the very least, he could say he felt safer than when Nancy or most of Maggie’s friends held him.

            “I’ve got a couple of errands to check off the list. I’ll be back in an hour and a half, so we have plenty of time to get him home,” Judy said. She fumbled through her purse slung over her shoulder.

            “Take your time,” Sylvia joked.

            “I can go ahead and put him down to an inch or two for you,” Judy offered, that sly smirk crossing her lips as she drew the PMRD out of her bag. She pointed the dull green barrel at Scott’s head, her fingers already poised over the trigger for firing.

            “Mmm… I thought about it, but I think we’ll give “tall Scott” a try first and see what he can do,” Sylvia said. She brushed her bangs out of her eyes as she gazed down at the young man cuddled against her breasts. “But keep it handy for next time, ya hear?”

            “Suit yourself,” Judy chuckled as she tucked the device back into her purse. She turned back toward the screen door. “I’ll be back in ninety, all right?”
            “Sounds wonderful. And thank you again for the delivery,” Sylvia said, wagging her fingers as Judy saw herself out the door. “Feel free to drop by a little earlier. I make a mean mango iced tea.”

            Scott watched his mother descend down the cobblestone and drive off down the long entrance road. He took a deep breath, mentally preparing himself for the next hour and a half of semi-revolting drudgery. After the strange conversation he’d had with Judy two weeks before at the foot of her bed while she trampled him into the mattress, there was more than enough reason to believe there had to be something useful he could get from this woman. But he’d have to work for it, as always.

            In times like this, it was necessary to remind himself that Judy had once sent him off on an overnight with a woman who wore him for ten hours in her slippers, spending some of that time with her feet propped up on a radiator. That one would be hard to top as far as rentals of his body went.

            “Well, hon, looks like it’s just you and me now,” Sylvia said, the soft southern twang of her voice infusing her words with an unearned charm. She palmed Scott below his legs, letting him balance atop her hand.

            “Yep.”

            “Let’s not waste our time, though, seeing as we’ve only got a couple hours of it,” she said, narrowing her gaze as her smile creased again. “I’m eager for another round from those famous little hands of yours.”

            Scott was more than relieved, an hour into this visit, to find that things could be much worse. Certainly there were more comfortable positions to be in, but he was making do.

            Sylvia had taken him almost straight away to her office in the basement of the house, which had a cheerful view of the trees out above her work space beyond the glass, a view which Scott was unable to experience as he was deposited onto a pillow laid beneath the desk. He hardly had time to roll onto his back before the middle aged woman’s plump bare feet were fighting each other for space on the boy’s body. Eventually a compromise was reached, where the toes of one foot took to idly grasping and playfully flexing against his head, with the warm ball of her foot slumped against his chest, while the sole of the other ped was splayed square across his stomach and hips. Her instep rolled casually back and forth down against his crotch, creating more than a little friction, especially after it kept up for more than a few minutes at just the right amount of gentle pressure that Scott’s deprived body was getting the tingles in some unfortunate zones.

            Still, the pillow was a thoughtful touch. Most people didn’t think to put down a pillow.

            Her skin was surprisingly soft today, with a velvety texture that reminded Scott of newly frozen ice cream, as did the sweet scent of artificial grapes and peonies. Her toes were as exploratory and friendly as last time, poking and prodding at his cheeks, running the grooves of her toeprints dangerously near his lips, but she didn’t go in for the chokehold that so often happened when the owner of dexterous digits toyed with him for long enough; most giants, upon discovering their new power, often experimented with this hold. His tiny neck was an easy target.

            The pressure of both Sylvia’s feet in tandem was strong, certainly, but not unbearable, and in fact the pillow below was plush enough to take some of the weight of her creamy peds. All things considered, there were worse people who could be standing on him.

            And many of them had.

            “Whew,” Sylvia sighed. The incessant tapping of her laptop keyboard above had stopped for the first time in the last hour. “That was a pain the patootie, you know what I mean, hon? Work, work, work.”

            “Yeah, I do,” he said, wrestling to shift her toes aside from his head well enough to answer.

            “Of course, work does seem to go a lot faster and smoother when I’ve got you around. You must be like a little good luck charm,” she remarked, her head cocked. She tucked her black locks behind her ear as she stared down at him, trapped in the fabric hill of the pillow beneath her twin soles.

            “I’ve got that effect on people,” Scott said, working hard not to sound sarcastic. It was tricky.

            “I’m sure you do,” Sylvia continued. By the smirk on her lips, she seemed to accept that he was genuine. She’d slid a few inches further away from the edge of the desk on her wheeled swivel chair, but kept both feet firmly in place upon her rental boy. A frown etched into her forehead. “You’re looking a little warm down there, sweetie-pie.”

            Scott pressed the back of his hand to his cheeks. They were indeed warm, courtesy of all the toes crowded around his head, not to mention the comparative tons of foot-mass piled onto his person. There wasn’t much cool air to be had down here.

            “Yeah.”

            “Well, don’t feel you have to be uncomfortable on my account. You’re doing me a huge favor, after all. Go ahead and lose some of the drapings.”

            “You… mean my shirt?”

            “If that’s all that’s warming you up,” Sylvia replied languidly. She rested her chin in her fingers, winking at him. “Wouldn’t bother me in the slightest, hon. I lived out in the country for most of my life. In summers like this, we’d walk around at least half open to the sun.”

            “I see,” Scott said. She’d already seen him like that, after all, albeit when he was just small enough that his finer details were a little harder to make out. And he was here to make a good impression, both because Judy demanded it of him for her political advancement, and because he had a feeling there were only useful things to come from getting on Sylvia’s good side, whatever it was she had that Judy wanted.

            In the back of his mind, the young man noted that it would be nice to live in a reality where he wasn’t regularly hit on by giant forty-something women stricken with almost pubescent lust. Then again, he didn’t get to choose his reality.

            “Go on,” Sylvia encouraged, gently waving her hand. “Nothin’ under there’s gonna shock me, hon. Honest-to-God. That is, if you want to.”

            “Sure, sure,” Scott said. Easy enough to believe.

            He laid his hands to the side as Sylvia’s looming bare feet finally dragged themselves off of his body, giving him room to disrobe. His shirt was tugged over his head and thrown aside, leaving him only in his shorts. It was so foolish to have believed this outing would stay PG-13. This was one of his mother’s friends, after all, even if she was new, and even if she was ostensibly giving him a choice.

            Sylvia raised an eyebrow. “That can’t feel that much better, hon. You sure? C’mon.”

            “Maybe not.”

            “Lay back,” she instructed, leaning against the back of her chair and knitting her fingers together across her stomach as she reclined. The seat creaked softly. “It’ll be a nice little challenge for me.”

            Getting more into the groove now, Scott resolved to more fully embrace that shrunken gigolo destiny he’d ironically foreseen for himself. He flopped back against the pillow, even laying his hands above his head, inviting the woman back to his shirtless form.

            Sylvia’s peds were only too happy to comply. Her toes flared out as they lowered back onto their target. Those digits, bulbous as they were, managed to worm their way in under the beltline of his shorts, giving her a firm grip, while the other foot was anchored against his shins, keeping him in place as she delicately yanked the pants down to Scott’s ankles. The underwear, the only remaining barrier afterward, was even more easily removed as Sylvia hooked her toe into the front and slid it down his thighs.

            Her warm toe brushed hard along the shaft of his member as she went.

            “There we go…” Sylvia crooned, smiling broadly at the sight of her handiwork below. Her feet rested back in their previous positions, her left one leaned liberally against Scott’s naked junk until his dick was molded into her doughy sole. “Bet that little girlfriend of yours can’t do that, can she?”

            “Probably not,” Scott breathed. He was beginning to get a serious case of déjà vu from this whole affair, back to a particular day one year before when he was left alone in the poolhouse with Nancy. The proceedings held a sickening similarity, if only different in the approach of his gigantic admirers. And this time, his mother wasn’t even remotely on his side.

            Scott gritted his teeth. Whatever was happening with this woman, whatever she wanted, whatever it was, he realized he was probably prepared to deliver. It made him more than a little sad to realize, yet also strangely empowered.

            He knew getting an upper hand on Judy was never going to be easy.

            Pleasantly enough, though, compared to where his mind had instantly leapt, Scott found he was “treated” to another full-body massage. Of course, this time with everything displayed and ripe for caressing by Sylvia’s playfully curling toes. Scott couldn’t even guilt himself when he felt his member stiffening against the length of the woman’s mature though considerably more lotioned sole since last time. Her big and second toes occupied themselves above his face, occasionally toying with the young man’s hair, but not doing much other than offering a window above as she returned to her work.

            Hoping not to jinx himself, Scott prayed that Nancy hadn’t been too vocal about his accidental tonguing of her toes during the coffee hour, in case Sylvia decided she had a similar curiosity. Not necessarily out of revulsion at the idea itself, but because Scott knew if she requested it, out of his desperation to find or hear the tiniest whisper of an advantage over his mother, he’d have his lips on the gritty underside of this woman’s big toe before she even finished phrasing the question.

            Such a fate would be the infinitely preferable option to any other ideas Nancy may or may not have given to Sylvia. After all, it was easy to wash foot-flavor out of his cheeks after a few rounds of mouthwash and toothpaste. It was a little trickier getting the vinegary stench of advanced womanhood out of his skin.

            “Scott?”

            “Yes?”

            “I have a question for you that might sound loaded, seein’ as where you are at the current time, but I hope you could answer it honestly. Think you could try?”
            “Sure,” Scott shrugged, deciding it wasn’t quite possible for him to be any more bare underneath this woman as her toepads flicked his cheeks while her naked heel gently squashed his family jewels.

            “What do you suppose prison would’ve been like for you?” she asked.

            “You mean-”

            “If things hadn’t gone the way they’ve gone for you.”

            Scott pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth, furrowing his brow. The Mother-Approved answer to this question wasn’t difficult to surmise. But maybe there was some way to jump that hoop without completely burying his principles.

            “I really don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never been to prison. But I know I was afraid of going after what happened. I know I thought my life was over.”

            That sounded good enough.

            Scott was careful not to add the sneaking sentiment that such a fate as prison just might, in hindsight, be preferable. You could count on metal bars to stay consistent; giant spindly fingers forming an impossible cage, though, were harder to predict.

            “I suppose that makes a few licks of sense,” Sylvia responded. Her foot swished in a slow sway along Scott’s bare chest, smearing her sole across his skin. “Though I imagine your current situation’s got its share of downsides, too.”

            “You can say that,” Scott said.

            What a bizarre woman. Was she really not uncomfortable having this conversation while he was exposed like this?

            “Sure I can, but I’m the one sitting up here,” Sylvia responded. “Could you say that, hon?”

            Scott bit his lip, accidentally letting his tongue flicker over the cusp of his mouth. It dotted a groove of Sylvia’s big toe, which shuddered accordingly at his incidental worship.

            “I can,” he sighed. “But I guess it’s meant to, right?”

            “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Sylvia said.

            “What makes you ask?” Scott wondered. His body tensed at this question, knowing full-well he might have already overstepped the line even to inquire after the woman’s intentions when he was really just here to provide a naked footrest.

            At this, Sylvia peeked directly down at her attendant through the fleshy valley of her toes. She brushed her black bangs away from her forehead again and, to Scott’s relief, smiled.

            “I have my fingers in a whole lot of pots, hon. I’ve talked to a lot of people on both sides of the fence. But it’s not always so easy to get an answer that I’d call mint.”

            “Um, you mean…”

            “Not everybody with similar… stature as yourself is so willing to spill any beans. Surprise, surprise. Can’t say I blame them or you.”

            “Me?”

            She smirked. Her foot arched higher over Scott’s lower torso, pinning his crotch against his waist as her instep smushed overtop his thighs. “I’ve been around the block a couple times, sugar. I know when I hear something real and when I hear something read off a crib note.”

            “Oh.”

            “You may not have a good reason to speak in this room. Maybe I make you nervous. Maybe you’d just like to keep your head down until they let you out from under your mother’s roof,” Sylvia drawled. She spread her hands wide, fingers unfurled in showmanship. “All I want you to know, hon, is that my ears are always open. Not just as a new friend, but a woman with a long reach and numbers on my speed dial that’d make you think I was playing a joke. Above all else, I like hearing the real things. Not the crib notes. I’d consider it a favor.”

            Scott couldn’t help but go a little pink, which was significant, considering where he was right now and how little he was wearing. The woman’s feet had slowed their playful pouncing at his body, giving him pause to chew over her words. He averted his gaze up through the crevice of Sylvia’s digits, instead shifting his eyes to the side, focusing intently on the spiral pattern of her toeprint. His thoughts were in overdrive, and few of them cohesive.           

            Either his mother had engineered her most complex ploy yet to test his loyalty with multiple layers of deception involving multiple parties, or he was being offered a chance to speak his mind.

            Or someone was just trying to use him for their own advancement for only the one-hundred-and-seventieth time in his life. Strictly speaking, just because someone wasn’t in his mother’s pocket, didn’t mean they were on Scott’s side, either. He knew this all too well.

            And still, as Sylvia returned idly to tapping away at her laptop as though nothing at all had been said, Scott was left holding his breath, and he doubted he’d really be able to inhale again until he understood this woman any better. He returned to his previous task of massaging her toes and digging his knees into her gigantic high arch, but was now severely distracted with a sickly hope. Whatever was going on here, it was worth keeping the worm on the hook.

            “I… don’t want to sound like I’m being over-the-top about it. Since you have to look at the same walls every single day,” Ella said.

            “Seriously, I’m begging you. Give me a mental vacation. What’s it like?” Scott held the earbud speaker up to his head as the crackling volume slithered out.

            “It’s… amazing. My room’s got a view of the water, and all the shops are just down the block. And I’m working about ten minutes away,” she explained through the grainy filter of the webcam. The glow of Ella’s face was enough to keep Scott warm as he stared up at the laptop screen, despite the cool shade that surrounded him otherwise beneath Kyle’s bed.

            “Can I see the water?”

            “Yeah, just a second.” Ella disappeared to the side of the screen, though her golden locks hung over the camera in wisps as she lifted her computer up and propped it against the window sill of her room in New Zealand. Crystal-clear water twinkled in the fuzzy draw distance, just past the sand-patterned cliff’s edge. Scott could barely make it out, but it was plenty to make him jealously wistful.

            Had he not taken that drink on that night two years ago, he might have been there right with her now.

            “It’s amazing,” Scott said.

            “I know.” Ella’s face returned to the screen as she observed her six-inch tall boyfriend on the opposite side, worry etched into her forehead. She brushed her fingers over the camera screen, her digits briefly expanded to comic proportions, though ironically Scott felt it was closer to his reality.

            She’d only been there for three days and already Scott was nauseous with the threat of looming time that stretched before them so endlessly. Sure, he’d convinced Kyle to let him use the webcam under the teen’s bed on pretenses of performing personal chores for the least-needy Stevens family member. But it wasn’t anywhere near the same, and Scott knew the toll would only get worse. In college, he’d gone months at a time without seeing Ella, and they made it work, but this was different.

            It was these walls. Like Ella said, they were the same. He couldn’t change them. Not for another year, if he was lucky.

            “I better get going,” Scott sighed, constantly anxious at the idea of this secret webcam privilege being discovered and stripped away before he’d even had a chance to take it for granted. He reached up on his tipetoes, brushing his hand along the webcam lens in answer to Ella’s digital touch. A grin forced itself on his lips.

            “All right. Take care of yourself,” Ella whispered in nervous demand. “Seriously.”

            “Seriously, I will,” Scott said with a nod, trying not to think of the various invisible responsibilities currently weighed on his shoulders, not the least of which being the dubious gamble of the truth offered by Sylvia Lockwood. It was best that Ella didn’t have to think of those things, too, for the time being.

            Ella smushed her lips up against the camera. Then call came to an end, taking Scott back to the heartbreaking menu screen of the chat program. He let the earbud fall from his hand and made the shambling march out from under the bed, head hung by almost irresistible gravity. His body hadn’t felt this heavy since he was six-foot-two.

            “Done?” Kyle mumbled from where he sat on a beanbag chair in the corner of the bedroom, headphones draped over his neck to give his brother privacy even while he remained in the same ten-foot-vicinity.

            “Yeah,” Scott said quietly, barely looking up at his brother as the youngest Stevens sibling rose from his seat and padded quietly to the bed, stooping down to drag his computer out from under the dusty space.

            “There’s been some weird stuff in the news about Dad,” Kyle said suddenly as he fished for the laptop. “Has Mom said anything to you about it?”

            “As if she would,” Scott said. “What do you mean by weird?”
            “I mean, they keep bringing up his next trial dates, but they never… say anything about it? You know? Nothing about what’s happening with it, or even what Mom’s been doing there. It just feels off. Like, none of them say anything. And I’ve looked around.”

            “Sounds about right,” Scott said. He knew perfectly well Techilogic had to be tucking nice wads of bills in its media friends’ pockets. “Hey…”

            “Yeah?”

            “Thanks. For… you know, letting me talk to Ella in here.”

            “Not a big deal,” Kyle shrugged as he stood back up with the computer tucked under his arm.

            “It kind of is. You know it is,” Scott said, at last looking directly at his little brother. “It means a lot.”
            “Okay, Princess Feelings,” Kyle chuckled. “I’ll tell you if she messages again.”

            “Yeah, yeah,” Scott said, daring to allow himself a smile, in spite of his shapeless grief.

            “Just saying. If you’d said something like that… I don’t know, two years ago, I don’t think I would’ve believed you weren’t on something.”

            “Two years ago I wasn’t in hell,” Scott replied neutrally before he even realized the words were processed in his brain. His finger flinched. “No offense.”

            “None taken,” Kyle said as he curled back into his beanbag chair.

            “You know what I mean.”

            “Not really, but I can imagine living here like this is the shittiest thing ever for you.”

            “Yeah, something like that.”

            Kyle adjusted his glasses on the bridge of his nose, looking pointedly back to his six-inch-tall sibling idling in the middle of the bedroom floor with his tiny hands in his pockets, appearing even lower spiritually than he stood physically. The twenty-two-year-old looked like he might melt into the floor.

            “Well, uh…” Scott continued after an aching pause. He cleared his throat of a morose scratch, rubbing at the back of his neck. “Do you… actually want me to clean something up in here, just in case Mom asks later, so you don’t have to lie?”

            Snorting softly, Kyle threw up an ironic pair of peace fingers.

            “No, you can scram,” Kyle said as he stood up from the beanbag. He opened his mouth to speak, only to sharply intake air rather than utter any words. He swallowed, mustering an uncomfortable smile. “Keep it together. Or whatever.”

            Scott nodded, amused at how much he and his younger brother sounded like the same flavor of clumsy when they were trying to tactlessly communicate something genuine. He shrugged and ambled toward the door, waiting for his brother to turn the knob and let him slip through the crack.

            “Oh, there you are.”

            Looking up just as soon as he passed through the hinged barrier, Scott found himself standing before the freshly purple-painted toes of his mother’s enormous left foot. Her big toe drummed thoughtfully on the rug, vibrating Scott up through his shoes.

            “Hi,” he said, trying not to look too inherently guilty. The LFC tool was brandished behind his back. “I got the living room and kitchen picked up. And dusted on the floor seal in your office like you asked.”

            “I saw. It looked just fine to me. Thank you, honey,” Judy said. She was facing him as she loomed above, hands on her hips as per usual, but her gaze was flitting back and forth between her diminutive son and the newly closed door of her youngest child. Her eyebrow arched. “What were you up to in there?”

            “Ahh… well, you know how you always say be proactive about keeping the place tidy,” Scott said, smoothly improvising. “And you know he doesn’t really… always do it himself, especially in there.”

            “That’s true,” Judy said with a nod, though her tone suggested she wasn’t quite on board with the story. “So you picked up his clothes and trash on the floor?”

            “Well, some of it,” Scott said, nibbling the corner of his mouth and pointedly clearing his throat. His mother wouldn’t be above pushing the door open just to call his bluff if she felt like it. “There’s still more to do. But I guess he wanted to have the room to himself again or something.”

            “Oh, I see.” Judy’s lips then. “Then… maybe I was mistaken.”

            “About what?”

            “Well, the thing is, honey, that with all my new responsibilities as a candidate and representative, my backers have taken great care to make sure I’ve got all the latest conveniences available in the house, including network sharing and monitoring… just so I can make sure everything is going smoothly in real time with everyone I’m in contact with.”

            For all his mother’s business speak, Scott felt the swelling of a cubic lump in his throat, expanding beyond the capacity of his airway. He knew perfectly well where this was going; why was she dragging it out so far?

            “And… well, it just so happens that all the devices in use under this roof use the same network, just to be on the safe side…” Judy’s hand rose from her side, unholstering a cell phone, which she dipped just low enough for Scott to make out the call records screen illuminated above. “So I couldn’t help but feel a little curious to see Kyle just now, sharing a video chat with Ella?” Her toes drummed in unison now before her six-inch son like war instruments.

            “Ah.” Scott didn’t attempt to hide his attitude with a dramatic presentation of false shock. He knew Judy would’ve only taken it as an insult. He tucked his hands into his pockets, bowing his head slightly, but kept her stare.

            “Now, sweetheart,” Judy intoned, almost mocking in her artificial empathy. She cocked her head as she gazed down at the pitiful little twenty-two-year-old caught in his minor deception. “I understand perfectly how you’re feeling now, being so far away from someone you care about, knowing she won’t be back for so long. That’s not what upsets me. What upsets me is the need to keep it hidden from me for some strange reason which I couldn’t possibly fathom.”

            “Yeah, I can see how that, uh… might look a little off,” Scott agreed, already resigned three times over to whatever was incoming. There was no cause to be anxious, really. It was almost like breathing at this point; frankly, getting to speak to Ella and see her face was more than worth whatever his parent was about to throw at him, no matter how sweaty, painful, and oxygen-depriving.

            “Don’t sound so flippant with me, young man,” Judy snapped. “Because what I especially don’t care for is you using your brother, the brother who’s actually putting in effort to make something of himself, to further your own selfish aims.”

            “Yeah…” Scott shrugged, indeed feeling some genuine remorse for Kyle’s association with this comparatively small infraction.

            “So if you don’t mind, we’ll get this settled nice and clearly before we decide what we’re going to do with you so you have time to think about being more selfless in the future.” Judy stepped forward, the ball of her foot landing heavy on the rug a few mere inches from Scott, the wind force nearly staggering him back as he now stood between his mother’s massive insteps. She extended a fist and rapped on the door of her youngest child.

            Kyle answered the door almost immediately, and by the way his headphones hung limply around his neck, the muffs pointed outward, Scott was willing to guess his brother had them off for the last minute or so and was, in fact, listening to the exchange right outside his door.

            “Hey, Mom,” the teen said, glancing down at his half-foot brother a few inches from the tips of his sneakers and cowering by nature of scale between Judy’s imposing bare peds. Kyle scratched the back of his head. “What’s, uh… what’s up?”

            Judy only furrowed her brow, holding up the phone and displaying the incriminating call list to her other son.

            “Ooohhh…” Kyle said, fidgeting with the bridge of his glasses. “Yeah.”

            Scott tried not to chew his fingernails as he looked up, attempting to limit the view of his face to his brother rather than his parent. Subtly, he nodded to Kyle, hoping to convey his insistence that the youngest Stevens absolve himself from blame, as guilt had already been pre-determined for Scott. There was no need for them both to get in trouble, especially when Kyle had so skillfully avoided his mother’s wrath for at least a couple of years now. That was a record Scott could only dream of.

            “Have you got something to say about this?” Judy asked calmly.

            “It… was just a call,” Kyle said, his voice muffled slightly. “It was only a few minutes. It didn’t seem like a big deal.”        

            “I don’t believe it’s your decision to determine which privileges for your brother are a big deal or not,” Judy said, looking only narrowly downward at her youngest, whom she dwarfed by barely an inch in height. Scott knew that slight difference had to be killing her just a little bit.

            “Ah.”
            “Do you have an apology to make?”

            “I…”

            Scott kneaded his forehead, hoping to conceal the look of pleading encouragement on his face from Judy as he looked up at his brother from between their mother’s feet: a silent statement that he was already claimed and incarcerated by them for his wrongs. Kyle finally cast longer than a glance from the corner of his eye down to the six-inch young man; he lingered, a frown etching into his countenance. His Adam’s apple bobbed. Then he looked back up to Judy.

            “No,” Kyle said, savoring the word so that the distinction of the syllable couldn’t be mistaken. “I don’t have anything to apologize for.”

Scott watched his brother, previously a five-foot-ten mountain by comparison, diminishing in the blink of an eye and a flash of that famous poison-emerald green down toward the floor. In a few seconds, Kyle was staggering to his feet, a mere three inches, barely at the level of his older brother’s waist.

            At least, that was the case, until Scott experienced the familiar chill beneath his skin himself, and suddenly he was bumped down from six to three inches, putting him at eye level with his accidental partner in crime.

            He hadn’t felt so close to his brother since that time they’d unsuccessfully tried to sabotage the PMRD four years ago while Judy was out of the house. At this memory, Scott welled with a guilty mixture of pride and relief, even as he felt mounting worry for his sibling. Whatever was coming couldn’t be good.

            Judy stood quietly above, contentedly putting the shrink ray back into sleep mode after she’d handily reduced both of her sons to mere fractions of their previous height. She even hummed a cheerful tune. Barely acknowledging the pair of them marooned below on the carpet like action figures before her bare feet, the woman padded back to her bedroom to replace the device in its silver case, her footsteps thundering back.

            Kyle, clearly still not even remotely adjusted to his new size, tripped onto his side with a pathetic thump as the rumbling of the earth from their parent’s mighty steps caught him off guard. Scott, more than practiced with his shrunken sea-legs, wandered toward his prone brother and offered a hand to rise.

            “Fuck,” Kyle breathed as he grasped his brother’s hand.

            “Yeah. Fuck,” Scott nodded, deciding to spare his sibling the sugar-coating. “Why’d you do that?”

            “It’s… wrong,” he whispered in their fleeting solitude as he stood back up. “It’s wrong how she acts.”

            “You’re telling me,” Scott said, rolling his eyes. “Thanks all the same.”

            “I kinda feel like I might regret this,” Kyle said as the rumbling footsteps returned.

            “Count on that,” Scott hissed out the corner of his mouth just as Judy re-emerged from her bedroom, her attention now devoted squarely to the pair of three-inch offspring trapped on the floor beyond and left to stare directly into the path of those oncoming toes. From one hand, two periwinkle fuzzy house slippers dangled between her gargantuan fingertips.

            For a few tension-rich instants, she simply loomed above her two sons, letting the slippers hover like a baby’s mobile from her hand. She shifted her weight from one heel to the other, alternately clenching her meaty calves, and twirling a finger through the end of her blonde hair. Judy’s lips puckered, not quite into a kiss, but a predatory appraisal of her easy captures below. If nothing else, she seemed to be milking for all it was worth the chance to recalibrate her younger son’s brain to view her no longer merely as his taller-than-average mother, but as a veritable landscape of hard justice and raw power: a feminine symbol of self-imposed righteousness. Possibly even more than that.

            Then Judy’s arm swung forward. It was with enough speed that Kyle flinched, nearly tumbling backward again onto his rear end. Scott only watched with stoic surrender as Judy’s fingers released their soft grip on the cottony mouth of the two slippers, allowing them to fly forth, landing on the floor in spitting distance of her tiny sons.

            “Well, don’t make me wait,” Judy sighed. She crossed her arms, looking with some self-serving pity down on the miniature boys. She nodded toward the disregarded footwear. “Choose one each. Both of you. And get inside. Chop-chop.”

            Scott turned around to face his brother again, recognizing in his face the congealed fear and revulsion he knew he once wore at least once a week some years back, around the same age. In spite of himself, he tried to smile, outside Judy’s line of sight.

            “Uh…” Kyle drawled.

            “Go in the left,” Scott uttered under his breath to Kyle, too low for his mother to hear so far above. He grabbed his brother’s shoulder and gave him a necessary shove forward, putting the gangly sixteen-year-old into motion. The pair began the short but nonetheless harrowing stroll across the carpet span which separated them from the slippers.

            “You can go ahead and leave your glasses on the ground, honey,” Judy said with a note of sharpness to her youngest. She pursed her lips to the side. “We wouldn’t want them to get broken, would we? I’ll get them for you.”

            Kyle, by now just going with the flow, removed his glasses, not even bothering to fold them over the lenses as he set them down and continued striding. He approached the left slipper, as recommended by his brother, and with a last look of forlorn yearning toward Scott, clambered awkwardly over the fuzzy clog platform of it and crept into the musty darkness.

            Only then did Scott, confident that Kyle wasn’t going to cause any larger problems for himself than he already had with his act of rebellion, follow suit. Stepping up toward the right slipper, the one Scott knew statistically to ensure more of a roller coaster ride once their mother neglected the existence of two shrunken lives beneath her feet, he slid inside.

            The wait was a little longer than anticipated. Gentler footsteps sounded outside as Judy got herself into position, but no linebacker-sized toes came crashing in just yet.

            Scott crouched against the broad-toed habitat of his mother’s mercifully empty slipper, getting himself settled into the mushy geometry for a long haul. He laid himself down into a position for optimal acceptance that would limit the strain of the upcoming embrace against the underside of his mother’s giant bare foot. Regretfully, he realized it might have been prudent to try and relate a couple of pointers to his brother on the way to the shoe, but knew this would’ve been impossible. Judy, surely, wanted her youngest, even more than Scott, to experience the distinct sensation of anxious novelty for his crime.

            Beyond, he could hear the telltale cue of Judy’s toenails scraping softly along the roof of the fluffy footwear. She was entering Kyle’s temporary abode. There was no immediate reapplication of pressure, though, as she tangled her toes around her youngest child. Scott barely noticed the tremor as she at last settled her weight down into the unseen slipper, no-doubt with her usual golden-boy ensnared securely, his face caved into the fleshy crevice of the nearest set of grabby toes. He heard Judy sigh with no small amount of joy as she prepared herself for a relaxing hour or three, courtesy of her shrunken son’s body beneath her.

            Her right foot came for Scott next, and unlike with Kyle, it was not nearly so reverential in its entrance. As expected. Scott threw his hands up only just in time to lessen the brunt of his mother’s monstrous size-twelve ped barreling into her slipper and pinning him into the dark wall by a line of muscular digits, bulbous and pulsing with anticipatory vengeance and velvety perspiration.

            Time passed at its usual cruel crawl within the grimy purgatory of Judy’s house slipper. Scott was willing to bet they were nearing the end of the second hour, but it was hard to be certain. Sometimes, it was easier not to try and guess; it made the wait to the end feel twice as long. Occasionally, the young man made himself useful, wrapping his hands around the bulb of Judy’s nearest toe and primping the grooved flesh against his palms, but she didn’t seem especially interested in receiving a massage.

            More often than not, Judy simply rammed him into the plush ceiling of the shoe, which at least was less tiring in the limbs, if not the lungs. Today, she was making an example. No bones about it. No pretentions to courtesy or giving him practice in etiquette to his superiors. Which, all things considered, Scott wasn’t ungrateful for. All his mother’s baby-talk and inflated lies about moral fiber and self-improvement grated the nerves even more so than her pruny toepads grated his skin with their sod and salt. Sometimes, he just wanted her to be straight with him.

            And she was. With both of them, it seemed.

            Curiously, there hadn’t been much activity above, at least that Scott could detect. Ordinarily, Judy’s time in her office was punctuated by phone calls, video chats, or at least runs to the kitchen to put on a fresh pot of coffee. But there was only the pattering of her keyboard and the occasional double-click. Whatever she was working on, the woman was focused in ways she wasn’t usually, and had no intention of allowing or creating distractions for herself.

            Which intrigued Scott. At least, he assumed it did; it was hard to tell, when, in the third or fourth hour of in-shoe prison time, he generally just had to pick a mental topic and stick to it with ferocious interest, lest he succumb to the madness of being continually prodded and sponged by omnipresent surfaces of soggy, linty insole matting and his mother’s greasy, naked toes.

            Scott sighed, the sound lost amidst the squishy white noise of Judy’s digits flopping him about and underneath the gritty ball of her foot. He wondered how his brother was doing. As he’d predicted, more often than the other way around, Judy had her right leg propped over her left beneath the desk, meaning this slipper was the one she absentmindedly bounced and dangled, leaving her elder son in a slick world of constantly uncertain gravity and energetic toe scrunches around his head which felt akin to having his face submerged in a bucket of hot vinegar.

            Still, Kyle had to be faring worse than his older brother, just by nature of lacking experience. It had been two years since the youngest Stevens received any treatment approximating the current situation. In fact, Scott hadn’t even been present for it. And from the sound of it, the offense was nearly as innocuous as what happened today.

            Nearing the end of his first year of college, Scott had rather courageously ended a phone conversation with Judy in some certainly time-out-deserving terms. All that miraculous geography between his campus and his mother’s home filled him with invented confidence. Far enough away that she couldn’t punish him immediately, and just proud enough that she wouldn’t reveal he’d gotten to her. By the time they saw each other again, she’d have settled herself. It hadn’t occurred to Scott that there were still two people within her line of fire when he made such callous comments, and one of those people, he was fairly certain, she saw as the true apple of her eye: her protégé and successor. Maggie wasn’t in any real danger of shrinking.

            Which left Kyle to receive the punishment Scott had earned.

            It was coming together with a little too much clarity for the increasingly dizzy Scott.

            Of course that last shrinkage of his brother had been his fault. How could it not? Scott felt sick, a triple-knotting in his intestines. And it wasn’t from all the crushing weight of those mammoth toes, nor the sensory-cracking barrel rolls beneath Judy’s sole as she utilized the length of his body as a massage rod.

            In this moment, it was difficult to argue with the logic of his mother’s sweltering, handsy digits. He probably deserved it, he decided, if only in spiritual payment for that occasion two years ago that he’d never thought to consider until this precise moment. As the toes reared up for a fresh assault, probably not even noticed by Judy as she casually tossed her foot crossed above her knee, Scott allowed them to grapple him at whatever awkward angles they came. His fragile limbs were pinched into the doughy crevices, his spine bent along the crest of her wriggling, pudgy foot like a misshapen toe ring. His face was ground and dragged along the swampy, well-worn base of the shoe, until it was gasped up into the bottom of Judy’s arching sole.

            Through the layers of skin, scruff, and darkness that pervaded on all sides, Scott could just make out sounds of distress below. Heavy breathing, a cry of surprise, and gagging as Kyle vomited amidst the relentless wrestling of their titanic warden’s motherly toes.

            There was certainly a learning curve here.

            “I suppose we’re learning lessons all over the place here today,” Judy declared with tangible satisfaction and a sunshine-eating grin as she sat regally upon the towering throne of her office chair, gazing down upon the floor. “Aren’t we?”

            Her audience, the pair of her three-inch sons, for their part, nodded in some combination of neck-bracing enthusiasm. No head bobbing was ever enough for her. They rested on their haunches on the carpet below, each standing before the altar of the individual enormous bare foot they’d just spent nearly three hours each coddling and compressed beneath. Her long toes occasionally flexed before their little faces, but seemed content to let them rest for now.

            Kyle was still pale and shaking from the nauseous experience of losing his lunch to the fight, his stomach not quite accustomed to being flipped, smashed, and generally ensconced in a fog of musky toe flesh. His body heaved every few seconds: a byproduct of the shock.

            Scott remained still, hands folded at his waist, almost in a state of self-imposed meditation. He didn’t look up at Judy.

            “I’m sorry you didn’t take to that so easily, honey,” Judy said genuinely as she directed her attention specifically to her youngest. “I know it takes some getting used to. But that’s why we’re here. To make sure the message sinks in. Now, do you need any more water?” She brandished the water bottle cap full of cool liquid between her thumb and forefinger.

            “N-No,” Kyle said bravely, shaking his head.

            “Drink it,” Scott hissed.

            “He’s a growing boy, sweetie, Kyle can decide for himself,” Judy fired back instantly in her most frosting-coated voice. Her big toe flicked forward, nudging Scott in the ribs with its peachy pad.

            “Oh… ok-kay…” Kyle breathed, shaking his head. He pressed his fist against his clammy forehead, gazing up the length of his mother’s building-sized leg as he prostrated meekly before the statuesque row of her burly toes. “I’ll… take some water. Please.”

            “Please what?”

            Scott felt an itch in the back of his throat that made him want to hack and sputter, and it wasn’t just because of his own latent motion sickness after the long lurching ride in his mother’s slipper.

            “P-Please… Mom.”

            “…my.”

            “Mommy,” Kyle finished piteously.

            “Good boy,” Judy cheered. She beamed in that broad, self-congratulating way she did whenever she’d achieved a true victory of body and soul. Leaning down toward the floor, she deposited the translucent lid up against the grooved rim of her big toe, which held steady. Her fingers parted and her index beckoned, pointing at the liquid, in case her son was too delirious to recognize the gift.

            Gratefully, Kyle crawled forward, dipping his lips down into the miniature saucer like a dog and slurping the water up to calm his burning throat. All the while, Judy watched with hands on her knees as the gentler of her three-inch children quenched his desperate thirst from a source she’d placed before the very same humongous, heat-swollen foot which had driven him to sickness a mere fifteen minutes before.

            Scott gritted his teeth. His knuckles tightened. Even if he’d required refreshment as catastrophically as Kyle did at this moment, he was fairly certain he wouldn’t be able to take a sip. The sight of his brother enacting it was too much. To let that purified water into his throat would be more damning than the salty licks leaked from Judy’s toe pores which so inevitably found their way past his lips. At least with one of those, he had a choice.

            “That’s it, honey,” Judy encouraged in a soothing whisper to Kyle. “Drink up. I want you to stay strong and clear-headed, so everything I’m teaching you today stays sharp and at the front of your mind. Go on, take another sip.”

            Kyle wiped his mouth, slumping back to his knees as he finished drinking his fill. Contented, Judy leaned down again, taking ample time to let her palm open and loom over Kyle’s vulnerable body.

            “Moooooom…” The lilting voice boomed through the walls, dauntless as ever, and carried easily into Judy’s office. The French doors beyond creaked as they were pushed open, followed by the thumping footsteps Scott knew were coming.

            “Yes?” Judy responded to her daughter without turning around. “You’re home already?”

            “Yeah, they let us out early. All done with R&R training stuff, but I need Kyle to help me set up some of the new software crap on my tablet, but I can’t find him. Have you seen-”

            Scott let his gaze wander upward at last, in time to see his sister looming over the shoulder of their seated mother: the only way she actually held the height advantage with their parent. The girl, dressed in her Clinic-appropriate taut white polo and faded jeans, was just brushing a few silky dishwater-blonde locks over her ear when her sights at last snagged on the view before her. Her baby-blue eyes bugged momentarily, drinking in the vision of her two brothers, both older and younger, bowing before the twin queens of their mother’s bare feet.

            Maggie’s tongue flickered at the corner of her mouth. She shifted her weight, arching the rubber sole of her birkenstock sandal against the office floor. The leather squeaked low against her summer skin.

            “What happened?” the seventeen-year-old shrink-rehab intern questioned slowly. Scott was having a hard time reading her tone. Somewhere between concern and curiosity. Her gaze flipped equally between him and Kyle.

            “Oh, we had a… miscommunication,” Judy explained. She threw her hands up softly in feigned abandon, as though the reasoning for this scene were utterly mysterious to her. “And you know I have a strict honesty policy in this house, honey.”

            “Yep,” Maggie confirmed.

            “So that’s all. We’re just having a review right now of the kind of expectations I have for you three kids,” Judy said. She shrugged gently, smiling sincerely to her daughter.

            “Well, um… I guess I’ll just… leave you guys,” Maggie said with half a smirk, though she was blinking more times than necessary. Scott wasn’t sure if it was the previous sensory deprivation he’d experienced or simply blind optimism, but he was pretty sure he detected a tic in his sister. A flinch in her jaw. Her fingers, dancing just a little too restlessly as her hand laid against her hip. Her eyes were no longer splitting time between her brothers, and instead she’d focused her gaze down on Kyle, though the pitiful boy didn’t seem to recognize it.

            “Hmm? Don’t be silly, honey. The boys and I are almost done here, and I haven’t seen you all day because of your training. Come on, pull up a chair,” Judy loudly insisted, pointing to the other swivel chair parked along one of the office countertops.

            Scott looked to Kyle, who was visibly soothed at the mention of their being almost done here. Of course, it was difficult for the elder sibling to feel the same muted elation. He knew his mother too well to believe her definition of the word “almost.”

            “Okay!” Maggie rebounded easily, snatching the back of the chair and dragging it with generous purpose across the floor. She laid her work bag back against the wall. The roll of the chair’s wheels echoed in Scott’s eardrums until the nearest leg of the thing spun to a stop mere inches from where he sat before Judy’s toes. She sunk into the seat, adjusting the handlebar height to its tallest position, and pried her heels out of the sandals. They clunked somewhere behind the chair as she discarded them and laid both freshly freed feet happily by her mother’s, ensuring her oldest brother was now confronted three gargantuan, silently expectant peds.

            Scott remained stoic, deciding his odds of remaining disengaged were better preserved by avoiding reaction. Maggie, content either way, savored the increased liberty. She sighed, stretching and arcing her toes, rubbing her heels along the reddened strips where the straps of the footwear had worn on her flesh after a full day of training at the Clinic.

            “Good day?” Judy questioned.

            “Yeah. We learned some new stuff and got to practice it.”

            “Oh? Such as?”

            “Uhh… some new stuff with a couple different kinds of shoes… how to move faster without doing anything, you know, bad to them… stuff I’ve been good at for a long time, so that was kinda boring. But it got better later,” Maggie said, brightening at this final mention. She grasped at the carpet fibers with her toes, inching the tanned mass of her foot itself forward, nearer to Scott. “We did some stuff with… accessories, Olivia called them. You have to have the tools, but if you do, you can do some… interesting things. To teach.”

            Scott saved himself the eye-roll. It was almost too predictable to feel disappointment. He’d only have been fooling himself.

            “Well, honey, since the theme of today, according to your brothers, seems to be making sure lessons have sunk in, I wouldn’t be very fair if I didn’t extend the same challenge to you. So why don’t you give us a demonstration of what you’ve learned today?” Judy suggested pleasantly, folding her hands in her lap with palpably tingling eagerness. Her toes curled. “I’m sure we’re all very curious.”

            Scott had been placed in some pretty compromising situations in his life by his younger sister. The most recent a year before involved her tricking him into stripping naked for a ride around the inside of her dark, moist cheeks, and a month before that, even, a social media blunder where she’d posted him half-bare, half-frilled in doll’s clothes for all her friends to see. Naturally, he’d built up a pretty thick skin, and so couldn’t say he was feeling much trepidation right now, when weighed against those prior experiences.

            But still, this, by Maggie’s normally earthier standards for humiliation, felt just a little bizarre.

            Reduced down to an inch, Scott crouched calmly inside the tight squeeze of the clear plastic marble-like “accessory” his sister had fished out of her bag, at Judy’s insistence. It took a little finagling from his sister’s massive thumb to wad his body fully inside. But she’d managed, of course, as she always did.

            The view of the expansive office beyond took on an even more disorienting sight than normal for Scott once he was filled inside the ball. Every surface was distorted, creating the impression of staring out at the world through a fish-eyed telescope. If anything, the world seemed even larger now.

            On all sides, the soft skin of his sister’s palm was smushed against the tiny sphere containing its prize. Her fingernails worked delicately to screw the top hatch of the marble back into place, ensuring there was no way for Scott to get out until someone released him. Once satisfied, she gave her miniscule sibling a smirk, one last clicking tap with her index fingernail against his translucent prison, then deposited him in his cramped hamster ball back on the carpet.

            Scott did his best to get his bearings as he patiently awaited whatever demonstration his sister was preparing for their delighted mother. The tasteful office space had swelled yet higher, the walls curved and dipped in unknowable concave shapes by the circular view of the marble. Just in front of him, at the sight of Maggie’s bare foot on the carpet, unpainted toes casually bouncing, her ped appeared even wider than normal at his smallest size.

            Up above, Kyle was secured into a similar marble, though from Scott’s vantage point, he noticed Maggie took a few extra seconds placing her younger brother inside than she had with him. Rather than jamming her thumb against his back, as Scott experienced, she used her pinky, prodding insistently but without shoving to place Kyle inside. If anything, encouraging him to make the transition himself, without physical coercion.

            Holding the marble, the size of a healthy cherry tomato, against her palm, Maggie screwed it in place with a fingernail, then lowered Kyle toward the ground as well between her massive thumb and index fingers.

            A few token airholes were all that connected Scott texturally to the world now. He supposed there were a few benefits to such a state of being. Especially after the working-over he’d just taken in his mother’s giant slipper.

            “All right, I’m seeing the potential, honey,” Judy boomed. Her voice was thickened and aqueous in Scott’s ears: almost as if he was hearing her through an old-fashioned sea diver’s helmet. She sat facing her daughter, her even-more enormous toes thumping possessively at the floor and rattling the pair of marbles, just to ensure her sons didn’t forget her presence, despite the fact that they couldn’t turn around to see her.

            Awkwardly, Scott shifted his neck enough to the side to make eye contact with Kyle, resting in his own marble a few inches away. The teen looked more bewildered than ever, still somewhat pale from his upchucking beneath his mother’s sole. He’d buried his face in his hands, though Scott couldn’t guess whether it was from embarrassment or motion sickness.

            “Now what?” Judy questioned.

            “Well, there’s a few things you can do,” Maggie explained. She straightened her back against the swivel, laying her forearms regally on the supports on the side of the chair like a throne. Her thighs came together until they touched, her muscular calves folded against one another, and both big toes pointed at the floor with the same graceful intention.

            Scott could almost see his pitiful glassy prison reflected in the funhouse mirror of his giant sister’s shimmering toenail.

            But not quite. Thank God.

            “Looks like they might make for a nice little massage,” Judy remarked. She, too, sunk into her chair, extended her left leg outward, her broad sole hovering inches over Scott’s marble. The wrinkles of her instep were warped almost beyond recognition.

            “That’s true, yeah,” Maggie giggled. Her toes crept across the carpet, the ball of her foot arching up just above Kyle’s sphere. She rested the peachy hill of her bed down against her younger brother’s container, though it didn’t budge other than the initial trembling under the considerable weight of her limb. She was in total control of the pressure.

            “But that’s not all, I gather?” Judy asked.

            “Nope,” the girl grinned. She rolled Kyle’s ball down along the slope of her sole. He made two full rotations before he reached her heel, whereupon she allowed his marble to slide out from under her foot. “Watch this.”

            Scott blinked, somehow almost grateful to see his sister’s two largest toes separating as her enormous foot lurched forward. Neither woman was exactly trustworthy at this height, but it was easier to put his faith in the girl who’d been dedicating internship hours to this exact science. With Judy’s size-twelve behemoth still hovering above and so severely limiting his view to the sky of mature foot flesh, Scott was soon walled in as Maggie’s smaller, stubbier toes snaked underneath her mother’s sole.

            “Hey, are you stealing him from me, sweetie?” Judy chuckled. Her foot instantly came down with a heavy slap, the bulwark of her sole skin contouring around Scott’s marble. Before she could, though, the middle Stevens child had shoved her own foot in underneath her mother’s and sunk Scott’s marble into the creamy crevice between her toes.

            In an instant, Maggie had claimed both tiny brothers between her digits.

            “Maaaaaybe,” she sang. “You gotta be quicker.” Her two toes danced around their victory prize.

            “Are you sure you’re interning over at this internship I set up for you, or are you just sitting around playing with the little ones you’re supposed to be teaching a lesson?” Judy joked. The woman rocked her foot from side to side, casting only thin slivers of light along the sole wrinkles that continually mushed and deepened above Scott.

            Still, Maggie’s meaty big and second toes remained firmly grasped around the sides of his globe. Almost in a dance of gentle wrestling to retain possession of Scott’s marble from their mother.

            “How about a little of both? They’re barely paying us anything, anyway,” Maggie snickered. The joints of her toes whitened, flushed of color by exerted pressure as she waged playful war with the monstrous mass that was Judy’s foot. Eventually, the dark sky fell away, and the girl’s foot emerged triumphant, Scott’s marble gripped haphazardly between her two toes and braced against the ball of her foot for support.

            Maggie hummed to herself as she settled into a relaxing yoga-esque exercise, keeping her leg locked out as she raised and lowered her bare foot with elegant slowness.

            Trying not to let himself get too seasick as he watched the ground zoom into the relative distance, Scott made an effort to remind himself that things could, and had been, much worse in the past. He’d ridden inside his sister’s cleats on multiple occasions while she kicked game-winning shots on the soccer pitch, after all. Motion was on an advanced level of theoretical nausea there. Despite this, it was a different ballgame to have to look down at the ground while it drew nearer then pulled back, as though he was continually scrolling in and out of an electronic world map.

            The only real respite during the intervening seconds was for Scott to crane his neck back and face the other direction to limit how much shifting earth he was forced to watch.

            Of course, that just meant he had to look directly at the pale valley of soft flesh currently wedged in a vice around his temporary prison by two mammoth toes. Which he imagined was how his sister wanted it anyway. She certainly seemed to smirk wider when she noticed him craning to face her foot in the cramped sphere.

            “This is certainly a useful exercise,” Judy said from somewhere beyond. Each word entered Scott’s marble in echoes of various pitches, as he continued to ride the wind up and down along Maggie’s foot.

            “Isn’t it?” Maggie said. “Olivia is always talking about improving our - what’s the word she uses? Dexterity. She always says it’s the most important thing to learn about these types of lessons. It helps the little person… acclimate, and it helps you improve, too.”

            “I couldn’t agree more.”

            “Make sure you keep Kyle upright, Mom. It’s easier to balance the weight if he doesn’t roll as much.”

            “I’m sure I can handle it,” the woman said, chuckling again. She extended her leg up, with her youngest son’s miniature form wadded up in the ball and between her toes, though not quite as high as her athletic daughter. “Don’t you remember who taught you how to handle a person at this size?”

            “Oh, I remember, Mom. But now I’m taking the master class. So I can teach you a thing or two.”
            “I suppose you can, honey. And I look forward to more.” The pride was so evident and swollen in Judy’s voice, it carried easily to Scott’s ears, even in spite of the whoosh of the improvised roller coaster and his sister’s gritty toe flesh smeared across the marble’s airholes. He could practically taste Judy’s satisfied egoism. Unironic joy in her daughter, who was rapidly molding into a true protégé of this twisted art Judy had designed. Though the concentrated, stale air inside the marble was now thoroughly tainted with Maggie’s rubbery toejam aroma, Judy’s tone was the most potent thing in the air for Scott.

            And it made him just a bit sicker than he imagined his brother was after emerging from their mother’s topsy-turvy footwear.

            There really had to be something he could do.

            The demonstration carried on for several more minutes primarily in silence, save for the occasional little peal of laughter from Judy or Maggie. The two Stevens women, each with one of the shrunken Stevens men jammed in their marbles like human truffles, savored the quiet might of their quadricep stretches. Even as sunlight cast through the window and across their faces, both Judy and Maggie kept their eyes glued to their tiny targets below.

            “All right, dear, I’d better take a break from this soon, or I won’t be able to get out of bed in the morning,” Judy said at last, caressing both palms along the thigh she’d been working this entire time. Her foot lowered back to the carpet a final time, where she released Kyle onto the floor. Before he could enjoy his freedom from her toes for too long, though, she rolled him back beneath her sole for the massage she’d hinted at earlier.

            “Well, you know, it’s not like this is the only thing you can do with these accessories,” Maggie said slyly. Her foot continued to hover in air, with Scott suspended face-to-toe with the gridded underside of her largest digit. With her opposite leg, though, she casually slid her instep along the carpet, approaching Judy’s weary foot. In another skillful swipe, Maggie’s toes darted underneath Judy’s sole, and suddenly Maggie had Kyle’s marble pinched between her opposite set of toes.

            “Now that’s just not fair,” Judy smarmed, planting both hands defiantly on her hips and fighting back a jovial smile. She watched her soccer-star daughter gripping both her shrunken brothers between her toes, and finally beamed with adoration. “Didn’t I always teach you kids to share with others?”

            “Only if it doesn’t get in the way of self-improvement,” Maggie sounded off as though she’d read this rule from an encyclopedia written by their mother.

            Scott couldn’t help but grimace. All the Stevens children knew perfectly well that Judy’s definition of “improvement” was more akin to “advancement.”

            Judy, at a pleasant loss for words, only smiled and shook her head. “So what is this other use you were going to show me, honey?”

            “Oh! Right,” Maggie said. She stretched her leg across the narrow gap between her own chair and Judy’s, setting her heel down against her parent’s knee. Kyle’s fetal-positioned body in the marble was proudly displayed in the grasp of Maggie’s pink toes. “Just put him against whatever muscle’s tired, and try rolling him around a bit.”

            “If you insist,” Judy said. She plucked her youngest son’s prison from between her daughter’s toes and deposited him down on her thigh. Next, cupping the base of her palm around in orbit, she proceeded to roll him in an ovular track along her sore quadriceps.

            Scott cringed. That couldn’t be doing great things for the poor little guy’s stomach, though at least Kyle was above ground again. The air flow would be more regular and potable when handled by Judy’s fingers rather than her toes.

            “But if you still gotta have the massage, too, well then…” Maggie began. Her other foot, still hoisted in midair, shifted downward, and that was when Scott realized with a roll of his eyes that he was being offered as tribute. His marble was plunked softly on the ground mere inches from Judy’s toes.

            Luckily, his mother was more than willing to make up the space difference as her sole arched above, swallowing him up in shadow and flesh simultaneously for a vigorous puttering back and forth. After a few rolling revolutions from the ball of her foot and on down to her thick heel, Scott had a feeling his brother was currently on the gentler ride of the two.

            Which was something, at least. The kid deserved a grace period to figure things out. And Scott was willing to bet Maggie had very strategically chosen where on their mother’s person to deposit each of her hapless brothers. Which, also, was something.

            “Honey, you just might have completely changed the way I work in this office now,” Judy said with another burst of pride in her daughter as she massaged her pathetically tiny sons along inner thigh and lower sole.

            Scott ambled along the floor-level leather flap of the nearest living room armchair, digging his LFC rod beneath to collect dust. He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, trying to puzzle out a drum solo he’d gotten stuck in his head several years back but now couldn’t summon for some reason. It just wasn’t coming to him.

            Beyond, seated on the metallic curved footing of the glass coffee table, was Kyle, arms crossed over his chest, and eyes glued to the carpet fibers below. The room was quiet, save for Scott’s unsuccessful percussion memories. Saturday dawn sun spread thinly through the drapes.

            “Sup.” Scott cleared his throat as he neared his brother, the spotless space beneath the chair dusted to his liking. He snapped his fingers. “Hey. Earth to Kyle.”

            “Yeah?” Kyle flinched, scratching at his scalp as he looked toward his brother. The pair now stood at four inches in height, quadruple the scale spent during the previous evening, but it still took some getting used to. The teen’s glassy eyes were more than a marker of this.

            “How ya doing?”

            “Uhhh… well, you know. I’ve been better,” Kyle groaned. “It seems pointless to tell you that this… kind of fucking sucks.”

            “Maybe. I don’t mind, though. Actually makes me feel validated or something, almost good like that,” Scott said, pausing to find the words. “No offense.”

            “None taken.”

            Another bubble of silence. Someone’s tiny throat was cleared again.

            “So this is what it’s actually like? All the time?”

            “Not all the time. Just when I fuck up,” Scott shrugged. “Which is less than I used to fuck up, but you know her. She finds a way.”

            “Yes she does.” Kyle eased off of the brass leg of the towering coffee table. He dusted the grit of it from his fingers. “I don’t even know what I did, really. I mean, I know what I did, but not… not to get this. Compared to some of the stuff you’ve done? No offense.”

            “None taken,” Scott said.

            He frowned. Kyle was right; the elder Stevens son had practically made a career out of talking back to Judy and in general bending the household rules. It was only in the last couple of years she’d taken to punishment mostly out of habit and, he partially assumed, motherly revenge for all those years of disrespect. Thus, it came as something of a quizzical turn when Kyle’s simple one-worded resistance the day before had earned them both such swift and thorough retaliation.

            The initial trampling beneath Judy’s greasy toes inside her slippers was definitely the meat-and-potatoes of the time-out; still, it had extended into an almost twenty-four-hour affair now. After Maggie’s marble demonstration, Kyle and Scott spent a couple of hours being utilized as massage tools for their mother’s tired thighs and weary soles. Even after a mercifully uneventful dinner, when they were set free to sleep on the couch bedding and catch a little late-night TV over Maggie’s shoulder, Kyle seemed too preoccupied to set his eyes on the screen. They’d spent the night at four inches, and there was no clear sign of when Kyle would be returned to his full stature.

            Whatever was happening here, whatever Judy’s reasoning, Scott knew it couldn’t really just be that Kyle had talked back. Something more was going on in her head. Something to do with him.

            “Good morning, boys,” Judy called out, hands spread wide as she thundered into the living room with casual footsteps. She was dressed in one of those smart business suits and dark nylon/sky-high pump combos that never failed to put a mass in Scott’s throat and, he expected, the political players she was aiming to intimidate. A designer overnight bag was slung over one shoulder, bulging with the woman’s personal effects.

            Maggie followed slowly behind in her oversized pajama t-shirt and orange track shorts, her hands folded behind her back. Her lower lip was sucked beneath her upper, almost as if she was withholding herself from speaking. Those baby blue eyes crackled with energy nearly on par with their mother’s.

            The two women stood in the doorway of the living room for a moment, briefly taking in the sight of the miniature brothers sprawled on the floor by the table, hardly distinguishable from action figures at this distance. In this moment, Scott felt an inkling of recognition forming in the back of his brain. He turned his back to their mother, standing diagonal to his brother.

            “Punch me in the shoulder,” Scott whispered under his breath, too quietly to be heard by the looming women.

            “What?” Kyle’s lips barely moved.

            “Mumble something and punch me. Do it now.”

            Having apparently learned to trust his brother’s occasionally strange instructions in this cowardly new world, Kyle reacted instantly. Muttering, too low for Judy to decipher. He planted both hands on Scott’s shoulders and gave him a good hard shove, then followed up with a punch, enough that Scott was almost doubled over; the older boy responded quickly though, spinning on his haunches and launching back up and planting his own palm against Kyle’s forehead, retaliating with an almost disrespectful lack of strength that nevertheless nearly toppled the considerably less-muscled sibling.

            “Boys, boys… c’mon now, after you two were so willing to get along yesterday…” Judy drawled happily. She entered first, the spikes of her heels stabbing into the carpet. Maggie padded softly behind.

            “Sorry,” Kyle mumbled. He backed several steps away. Recognition glowed in his eyes now, too. “I just… can’t listen to more of him.”

            “Hey, what can I say,” Scott said. “Just trying to give him some advice!”

            “I’m sure you’ll find a way to co-exist,” Judy said. “Now, you two, I’m already running a little behind, so I’m going to just give you the quick version, and your sister can explain the rest if she wants.” She twirled a key ring around her thumb, taking a deep breath. “I’ve got a plane to catch for the final day of the tr… your father’s trial this afternoon. I should be back no later than Monday morning.”

            Scott raised an eyebrow. He couldn’t remember the last time his mother had verbally acknowledged their scoundrel of a father’s existence, at least not by name. Had she ever, even, in her children’s presence?

            “Now, I was thinking about bringing one of you with me,” Judy said, and Scott couldn’t help but notice her gaze had flashed to Kyle, the only one who could legally do so. “…seeing as how your punishment period isn’t quite finished yet, but now, well… I’m thinking some more time together would do you good.”

            Just as Scott suspected. It wasn’t Kyle’s latent rebellious side she was trying to quash. It was their brotherhood: their friendship, partially mended after two years. How could he not have seen it before?

            He was just lucky he’d put it together just as their mother entered the room. Otherwise Kyle would’ve been spending an entire two days in a hotel room, crammed under Judy’s sole while she flipped through the suite cable and eating leftover room service from between her toes.

            Scott shrugged for their mother, while Kyle only grimaced, turning his back once again.

            “I expect to hear that you two played nice while I was gone,” Judy said. “Your sister and I have had a long talk this morning, and we decided the best thing for everyone is for her to… chaperone some extra lessons for the two of you this weekend.”

            “What?” Kyle muttered.

            Maggie beamed from behind their mother, at even more of a height disadvantage next to their mother than usual with the added height of those pumps. Of course, those kinds of differentials didn’t matter much when Scott was still staring his sister straight in the ankle. Everyone might as well have been the size of the Chrysler building.

            “You heard me,” Judy said regally. She twiddled her car keys around her fingers. “I think there’s a lot to be learned for everyone here. Scott gets to carry on this kind of training so he can help inform his groupmates at the next clinic session. Maggie gets some real-world experience for all this hard work she’s been putting in at the clinic. And Kyle, honey? You get a crystal-clear picture of why it’s not wise to so roundly disrespect your mother in the future.”

            “Oh.” The word barely registered in Kyle’s throat; he sounded empty.

            “Believe me, sweetie,” Judy whispered as she lowered herself down to her haunches, palms pressed to her knees. Her vision was zeroed to Kyle, and him alone. She brushed a golden lock out of her eyes. “We don’t want you to end up down the same road as your brother, do we?”

            Maggie followed suit from behind, but still remained above, draping herself lazily over the arm of the couch and cupping her chin in one of her hands. She smirked, her eyes instead locked to Scott a few inches away on the floor.
            “I guess not,” Kyle grunted, recalling the impression he needed to give his mother to ensure he was allowed to stay here over the weekend. Whatever was coming, it had to be better than the alternative, right?

            “Now that’s a good boy,” Judy congratulated in a low timbre. Her free hand extended, fingers parting, as she collected her youngest son into her palm. She lifted him up a foot from the ground, brought him to her puckered lips, and planted a loud kiss atop his hair. “Just think about that, and when I get back, I’m sure we’ll have a very conscientious and mature young man waiting for us.”

            Kyle nodded as he was set back down beside his brother on the carpet. He wiped a hand through his bangs, coming away with smeared nude-lip gloss.

            “Now, obviously,” Judy continued. “Maggie’s capacity to… teach is a little more limited, when she only has the clearance to change Scott’s size, so…”

            Scott’s stomach lurched.

            “…I managed to get an early trial period for her with a new ‘privilege’ system on the PMRD. A case-by-case functionality that will allow her to affect Kyle’s size, too, for two days only.”

            Maggie finally let her blushing cheeks broaden with the open-mouthed smile of pure, unadulterated, biblical pleasure she’d seemingly been holding back earlier. Her molars were just about visible, even from down below. A low snicker emanated from her stomach.

            “I’ve got to run now. I’ll call you when the plane lands, honey,” Judy said, turning to her daughter as she rose back to full height.

            “Thanks, Mom,” Maggie beamed. Her gaze had yet to break from her two brothers below. Scott wasn’t even sure she’d blinked since entering the room. The euphoria was practically seeping off of her in gaseous form, or maybe that was just the flowery citrus of her body wash from the shower. “Oh, Mom?”

            “Yes?” Judy turned, having already taken several steps toward the garage door.

            “You told me when I take them to the clinic gym, I should try out one of the new protocols. Did you have one you wanted me to use?” Maggie was making no effort to keep her voice low or conceal this news flash in any way as she sprawled onto the couch, lying on her side as she peered down at the four-inch boys below.

            “Hmm, let me see… there’s model B2A3, there’s B3A1…”

            “How about B2A4?” Maggie giggled.

            “No, no… I don’t think that’s what’s called for here. It’s not enough,” Judy sighed, tapping a finger at her chin. “Oh. I know, honey. Why don’t you give B3A2 a try?”

            If Maggie’s eyes were bright and big before, at least to Scott’s view, they were absolutely bulging now. An ocean practically visible in her irises, her pupils wild and alive. A near-silent exhalation escaped her lips and a shudder ran through her body.

            She was surprised.

            Why was did that seem so, so bad to Scott?

            “Okay,” Maggie said softly. “You got it. B3A2.”

            “I look forward to hearing how things are going for everyone,” Judy said. She waved, her fingers waggling above as she peeked over the arch of the couch one final time. “Be nice to your sister, boys!”

            “I bet that won’t be a problem, Mom,” the titanic seventeen-year-old cooed as she at last drew her other hand out from behind her back, revealing the PMRD primed and coded already. She pointed the barrel down at her two tiny siblings below, closing one eye for careful aiming, and alternated targets between the two without firing. She lowered both feet back down against a pillow, toes plucking at the seams. “I’m sure everything will be very nice for everyone.”

            Scott slumped in the rainbow-colored baby car seat, the seatbelt strap digging at his neck, but he resolved not to make any comment as the road whizzed by outside the tinted wall of Maggie’s car. After his sister had taken such extensive care to get him situated there, delicately fingering the buckle and tucking it down against his chest, he didn’t see the need to repeat the process.

            On his opposite side, across the backseat divider, was Kyle, laid in his own baby seat dug out of the attic half an hour earlier. The teen had yet to speak up either in the middle of his first-ever humiliating baby seat ride post-toddler years. It almost seemed like some sort of rite of passage to Scott, if that half-joke of a concept wasn’t so sad at the same time. Still, there were ways things could be worse right now.

            He was somewhat shocked, really, when Maggie’s initial use of her newfound powers over both of her brothers’ sizes led her to grow each of them back to a full twelve inches. Scott had watched his grinning sibling expand outward all too many times amidst that emerald glow of the shrink ray as she put him down to an inch; to see her actually get comparatively smaller as he regrew was a rare treat.

            Still, they were a little more than massively dwarfed. Maggie happily tucked one brother under each of her armpits like footballs as she skipped through the hallway and back upstairs to get changed for the day and, more importantly, their reserved time at the Adams Clinic R&R training room.

            Scott realized he was going to see the training space for the first time. All these times at the clinic, and Judy had yet to escort him inside. Frankly, it was something Scott felt he’d be perfectly happy going his whole life without seeing. After the previous therapy session, though, when he’d been volunteered as a demonstrator for those translucent shoes and been granted an unfortunate audience as he was squashed into the very matter of his mother’s sole, he figured there couldn’t be much more he was missing.

            Right?

            “We’re aaaalmost there, guys,” Maggie announced, more for Kyle’s information than Scott’s, as the latter of them had taken enough trips there from the house to have the route memorized. “We gotta keep it moving, cuz we only have a couple hours, for Scotty’s out-of-the-house thing, but this is how long you’d have anyway if you were just being signed up for a session at the clinic. So it’s okay.”

            The explanation was delivered with the same pomp and polish as that eerie video instructor Scott had spied on his sister’s tablet several weeks back. It seemed to have done its job on her. Judy would be pleased.

            “Cool,” Kyle muttered, clearly eager to escape the confines of the multicolored safety chair strapped into the upholstery.

            “Somebody not comfy back there?” Maggie giggled.

            “Not really,” Kyle admitted truthfully.

            “We’ll get ya out soon,” she promised. “Don’t get your boxers in a bundle.”

            Scott didn’t let his face reflect it, but always found a way to be surprised at the alien rapport his younger siblings held. Almost normal: a little teasing, not quite content, but normal. Every other statement wasn’t some sick, cryptic joke at the other’s expense. It made some sense, he supposed, that they’d be closer to each other than he’d ever been; he was five years older than Maggie and six more than Kyle, after all. A few years past that and he might’ve even been seen by them more as a weird immature uncle than an actual brother. Scott couldn’t help but wonder how life would’ve been different if he’d been born just a few years later than he was, or vice versa.

            Would he even be sitting here?

            “I hope you boys are all limbered up and stuff,” Maggie said slyly as she turned the wheel, swerving the car into the entrance lane for the Adams Clinic. “Cuz we’re all gonna be putting in work soon.”

            Scott shrugged. What wasn’t work at this size, really?

            Maggie parked, plucked the keys from the ignition, and hopped to Scott’s side door. As when they were preparing to leave, she took her time undoing the latches on the belt. A broad palm flattened down against Scott’s legs, collecting them into her grasp. Her thumbs ebbed and squeezed her brother’s ribcage, only enough that he had to hold his breath to avoid increased pressure, but not enough to inflict pain. It tended to be a different story if his mother had been merciful enough to transport him somewhere at twelve inches in the baby seat, her often-much longer fingernails digging at his skin, and not entirely by accident.

            Releasing the last buckle, Maggie scooped her first doll-sized sibling up and bundled him up against her chest. By nature of being handled with just one palm beneath his rear end, Scott was forcibly embraced into the curve of the girl’s modest but nonetheless omnipresent bust. It, regrettably, wasn’t a location he was new to being held, nor was it one he especially wanted to return to. The warmth of her breast through the fabric of her shirt was just a little too informative.

            Not the least bit self-conscious about gripping Scott in this manner, of course, Maggie clambered halfway into the backseat, bracing herself against her elbow in an effort to reach and undo Kyle’s seat straps. Apparently not content to let go of her first passenger, though, the girl cupped Scott harder up against her abdomen.

            In practical terms for Scott, this meant being cuddled upside-down like a baby koala to its mother’s stomach. The weight of the girl’s chest, even restrained by her sports bra, hung heavier down upon Scott’s body like a pair of oversized gymnasium medicine balls. Her palm, strong and confident beneath his back, squeezed him up ever more firmly for added leverage. The twin pillows of her breasts through the cottony shirt would’ve begun to smother him if he hadn’t managed to burrow his fists up against the strap of her bra for support.

            Cradling Kyle along her other arm now, Maggie backed herself out of the car and laid both brothers in a V-shape, her hands meeting at her stomach. Each boy was cushioned up into her chest, their heads laid back against her firm biceps. Satisfied with her balance, the girl locked up the car and walked across the parking lot toward the Clinic.

            For the briefest instant, most-likely brought on by recent sleep deprivation, Scott was oddly reminded by this particular stance of a mother breastfeeding twin children at the same time. As soon as the image was formulated in his mind, though, he rapidly forced himself to other thoughts to avoid the next logical conclusion. This day was going to be unfortunate enough as it was without his brain playing mean tricks.

            Maggie’s dirty-blonde locks bounced above as she passed into the shade beneath the overhang of the building, then gently elbowed her way inside the foyer, careful not to jostle her brothers too hard. Which was more than Scott could say for Judy, once again.

            Scott looked across the expanse of his sister’s torso to his brother facing him on the opposite arm. Kyle looked more than a little despondent, and no longer with the same sunken-cheeked nausea of the day before after emerging from Judy’s slippers. He just looked about done with the day already.

            By force of will, Scott hoped to silently remind his brother of the very-real alternative he would’ve been facing at this instant. No-doubt stowed in Judy’s high heel while the plane took off, entangled in increasingly steamy nylons for the entire ninety-minute trip to the capital. He smiled at Kyle, though it went unnoticed.

            “All righty, let’s get going,” Maggie said, somewhat needlessly, as she passed by several milling visitors. By a glass door two hallways past, a dark-haired teen of roughly the same age as her sat behind a desk, wearing the usual Clinic business-casual white polo and jeans.

            “Hey, Lyndon,” she sighed. Maggie brandished her brothers, hiking them higher up her arms and squeezing them nearer to each other in a half-hug, half-display mode that also managed to clenched her breasts just that much nearer. Scott could feel the plush weight of one more than ever caving on his back.

            “Hi, Maggie,” the kid said. He nodded at her, clearly noting her street clothes. “Off duty today?”

            “Yep,” Maggie said with something approaching pride. She smiled cheekily.

            Lyndon raised an eyebrow, his gaze falling to her arms. “Uh, Kyle?”

            “Hey, dude,” Kyle muttered. He didn’t look directly at him.

            “Sorry…” the teen coughed as he looked to his desktop computer screen. “Uh, are you… going in there for reserved time?” He pointed at the handle of the glass door which, Scott now realized, was labeled TRAINING CENTER in silver block letters above the frame.

            “Uh-huh,” she confirmed. “My mom should’ve put us down for-”

            “Whoops, sorry. Yeah, I see it now. 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM,” Lyndon said. He dashed something off on the keyboard, then looked to Maggie again and nodded. “You’re all clear. It’s kind of a slow morning, too, so you should have most of the space open for whatever you want.”

            “Cool, awesome. Thaaaanks, Lynd,” Maggie sang in her trademark tone that no-doubt had managed to casually titillate multiple dozens of listeners in her lifetime, if not hundreds. The door to the training center buzzed unlocked and she entered with Kyle and Scott still cuddled to her chest.

            Certainly the room, or more accurately the hangar, of the training center fit with the décor of what Scott had already witnessed. Like the blinding blankness of the group therapy rooms, this space was spare, albeit more utilitarian and decorated for its creepy purpose. Standard exercise machines lined the mirror-plastered wall, all with touch screens attached. Various mats and “accessory” checkpoints dotted the floor, creating clear paths between the training stations. While anyone wandering into the building without context for its uses might’ve mistaken the place as some strangely arranged workout room, the gurgle in Scott’s intestine told him it was so much more, and more frightening, than that.

            To Scott, it was like entering a medieval torture chamber designed by a colorblind modernist. Already he wished it was time to go, but as the clock above the mirror wall indicated, it was actually only 9:56. Plenty of time left to go for whatever this “model B3A2” was.

            Scott supposed he had to count himself lucky that the tiny-tormenting instruction procedures his sister was practicing had such innocuous numbers and letters for names. It might give him more time to stew if they were, for example, named instead “model Tie-A-Tiny-To-Your-Shoe-Laces-And-Run.” Why spoil the surprise?

            Hopefully Kyle was faring better in the anticipatory build-up, though he doubted it.

            Lyndon was right; the place apparently wasn’t popular bright and early on a Saturday morning, which Scott considered lucky. Two other people were already present, but no more to share the wide space. A man wearing earbuds was spraying and wiping down the tools. There was also a woman in the back corner utilizing one of the curling machines for god-knew what purpose; Scott didn’t watch for long enough to develop any theories about how a shrunken individual was involved.

            Sunlight spilled through from skylights, but for the most part, the room was self-contained and private, with the door the only way in besides a fire exit on the opposite wall. A small mercy, really. No audiences, unless those audiences were also present for the same reason.

            “Well, boys,” Maggie sighed. She gazed down at the two shrunken troublemakers in her arms, beaming. Her fingers tightened around their narrow ankles. “Let’s get to work, shall we?”

            She approached the nearest empty work surface, secured safely to the floor. A tray of neatly arrayed accessories laid off to the side of the cleared platform. Scott recognized several sets of the clear marbles he and Kyle had been subjected to beneath their mother and sister’s toes the night before; with the other tools, though, he could mostly just guess about their purposes.

            Maggie set her brothers softly down on a folded towel to the side of the accessory tray. From there, she was able to slump her Clinic duffel bag off her shoulder and set it on the floor. She stooped, briefly dipping down to eye level with her hapless siblings as she rooted through the bag.

            “What the crap is B3A2?” Kyle hissed into Scott’s ear.

            “No idea,” Scott answered genuinely as he watched his sister draw the PMRD out from its case within her bag. A smile was already playing on her lips as she caressed the trigger. “But it’s probably not great.”

            Scott prepared for another necessary expulsion of his lungs. He sucked in his gut. He flattened his hands against across the smooth formation of the earth above him, and clung tight to the coiling fibers as everything around him lurched forward again with monumental effort.

            Maggie’s sock was splayed beneath his lower body, binding him to the back of her calf. It was like being covered in a popped chewing gum bubble constructed of worn sock. The briny threads ground against his back.

            And again, Maggie concentrated her body weight plus the additional steel heft of the machine’s bars into the balls of her feet. She grasped the side handles in clammy palms, gritted her teeth, and pushed outward again up the track.

            Instantly her sock constricted back around her taut limb. Scott was compressed into the malleable slope that was Maggie’s leg. The now-soggy fabric of the sock strained itself by default down against the buffer of Scott’s two-inch body, pinned at the top. Coughing was just about out of the question now if he didn’t want another breath of air like dirty bathwater. Thin, glazed drops were already traveling down toward him from her inner thigh.

            Even as Scott endured the first stint of being stored in any of Maggie’s footwear in an entire year, breaking a record he hoped would never be reached, he couldn’t help but think of Kyle.

            Kyle, strapped to his older sister’s opposite calf, most-likely being put through his paces all the same, and perhaps worse: warm putty for the constantly transforming muscle mass above, and a human sponge for whatever array of viscosities couldn’t be absorbed by the sock. Experiences like this didn’t exactly come easily, even after a day of foreplay inside slippers and marbles. At least they had light and air, however tainted.

            Certainly the geometry of this situation was unique, even if not the sensory concentration and cocktail of foul, zesty odors clogging Scott’s brain stem. It was still strangely new. He couldn’t recall a time when he’d been stowed on the back of his sister’s leg while she exercised; in times past, he was down below in the trenches, tending to her worming toes and only making educated guesses about what was happening to his body at any given time. Right now, the weight was entirely allayed, most-likely because he and his brother would legitimately die if placed under Maggie’s soles while she used a leg-press weight machine.

            It would be akin to being stood upon by a giant version of the seventeen-year-old soccer star while a clone of her hunched on that one’s shoulders, with all the combined weight and presumed humiliation piled and centered on his singular corpus. His body had endured a lot at this size, but that would probably go further than even he was capable of.
            Maggie had taken a brief break from pressing upon the platform, possibly to give her brothers a breather, or maybe just because her overworked thighs were getting worn out. Scott hoped it was the latter, because he trusted his sister to be much more cognizant of her own bodily needs before that of her helpless, shrunken sibling-toys. However, with a creak of the machinery and a shift of her muscles beneath the skin clasped to Scott’s back, he had a feeling she was starting again.

            And start she did, for one final set. The girl was really putting her all into it this time, seemingly attempting to squeeze in a post-soccer season workout at the same time as “training” her tiny brothers in discipline. If anything, this practice seemed to have greater benefits for her. It was a chance to fully explore the feeling of weight on her back and how much she could resist up through the balls of her feet, feeling the shape of her brothers’ tiny bodies glued by sticky sweat to the back of her tanned legs. It was educative in useful ways for her chosen summer profession.

            Scott and Kyle, meanwhile, were mainly just getting light heads and the occasional dastardly drip of musky discharge between their lips. Being the much more practiced of the two, Scott was able to minimize this unfortunate occurrence, but he had a feeling his brother wasn’t quite at the top of his game when it came to defending himself from intrusions. Inevitably, the younger of them was probably just focused on still breathing even as drop after drop of their enormous sister’s balmy sweat passed down his gullet like rotting broth.

            B3A2, apparently, for all the build-up, was just a whole lot of bluster. From the glint of glee in Judy’s eye before she’d left, Scott had been preparing his heart for something truly demoralizing, even when he had precious little moral left to give. The sad part was, back in his especially rebellious teenage days, Scott would’ve cut off a finger to receive this comparative walk-in-the-park procedure rather than be deposited for the hundredth time into one of his giant smirking family member’s insoles.

            Not literally, cut it off, of course, but not entirely virtually, either.

            Still, between the angle and the feeling of loping gravity in a losing tug-of-war with Maggie’s sock, the experience was beginning to turn stomachs. Just when Scott was beginning to seriously worry about how well his brother was holding up, though, the sensation of oscillating weight and regularly straining cotton fibers came to a splashy halt.

            Patiently, the two-inch Scott remained fastened in a tangle of squishy matting on the broad isle of Maggie’s calf. Her sock was unpeeled down to her ankles; when Scott was finally released into her waiting palm from the rolled patterns, he was grateful to see she’d freed Kyle first, who was seated back on the accessory table, awkwardly hacking to catch his breath. The teen wasn’t quite as the same asparagus-green as the day before, but he looked the worse for wear.

            “Not so bad, right?” Maggie shrugged as she deposited her second tiny brother back on the table with a final pat of her thumbpad on the top of his head. She smiled with no small amount of pride at them, brushing a few damp locks of hair off her forehead. “I’ve been practicing that one for a couple weeks with some of the little practice dolls, making sure they stay where I put them and don’t slip down and inside. That’s why you guys stayed put, too.”

            “Can we have a… minute before the next bit?” Kyle huffed. He pressed his fist up against his jugular, muting a belch.

            “Sure, I guess. But not suuuper long. We’ve got lots more stuff to get through, you know?” Maggie said. “Scotty doesn’t have all day.”

            “Is there an… easier one we can do?” Kyle mumbled. He hacked through something lodged in his throat, his back heaving like he was seconds away from the heaves, but he held it together. “Please?”

            Maggie blinked. Scott watched the corner of her cheek crease beside where her dimples normally formed. She chewed the inside of her cheek. Almost full facial paralysis, just for an instant.

            Had that worked?

            Her gaze held on her younger brother for another stony minute before it shifted to Scott, and then her blue eyes narrowed in a far more familiar fashion.

            “Oooh, sorry, lil’ guy, but you heard Mom. That was just part one of model B3A2. See?” Maggie scooped her cell phone out of her pocket and palmed it in view of her brothers, only long enough for them to be stunned by the brightness of the backlight. Scott was pretty sure he could make out the sight of a list not unlike one on a weight-lifting trainer app: a series of numbers and cartoon diagrams, but he couldn’t puzzle out anything specific before the phone was whisked away.

            Of course Kyle’s little beg hadn’t worked. What, did Scott truly believe his sister was soft enough to be cracked by a single pathetic please from her sibling? To underestimate her in that way would be the most dangerous thing possible today, even after all the moderate progress he’d witnessed in his sister this year.

            This was still his sister, after all. Maggie: the apple of Judy’s eye, the one who’d never been shrunken before despite every bratty or self-serving decision she’d made, the one who’d tossed him in socks and over tongues, the one who’d made him conclude mad power-hunger was a genetic trait.

            “Can we see what else is-” Kyle began.

            “I don’t think so,” Maggie interrupted. She pocketed her phone again.

            “I feel like we deserve to know what’s going to happen when you-”

            “You’re here to learn a lesson, remember? Part of that is just taking what comes and being okay with it, not making a big deal out of it,” Maggie snapped. “Otherwise, depending on who you’re dealing with, your… punishment period might be increased.”

            Scott’s spine tightened at the recollection of those words. All that training wasn’t just integrating into her thoughts; it was seeping into her speech as well. Come to think of it, just how much of what his sister had said this morning was in her own words, and how much of it was memorized from her broad-grinning Clinic idols?

            “Maggie? What are you doing here! I thought you had Saturday off?” Olivia Blackwell called out as she entered in full trainer’s regalia, tying her hair into a ponytail and landing with confident steps on the rubber floor that somehow managed to rattle the accessory station upon which Scott and Kyle stood despite being secured to the floor.

            Speak of the devil. The training counselor was here.

            “Hey, Olivia,” Maggie said, perking up from her previous stupor of standing above her brothers. She waved, and instantly put on her usual smile and baby-blue spark of self-assurance. “I do have Saturday off; I’m just here for me. What’s up?”
            “Just came in to plan out Monday’s morning training cycle. I see you came in with your little brothers.”

            The way Olivia pronounced “little” without the usual requisite, punny irony, Scott wondered if she wasn’t actually saying it to demean him, and in fact believed Maggie was the older sibling. He considered speaking up to correct this fact, but quickly reminded himself how silly such a display would come across when, standing at full two-inch height on the tabletop, he wasn’t even quite staring Maggie in the belly button.

            For all intents and purposes, with all the powers vested in her today by their mother, Maggie was the older sister. Any passerby would have no reason to suspect otherwise.

            “Yep, I’ve got both of them today and tomorrow, all to myself, and Mom wanted me to get in some training with them. So here we are,” Maggie explained. She turned, reaching down, and cupped Kyle into her palm. It was a decidedly gentler pluck. He was seated safely in the center before he’d even realized her fingers were coming.

            With an instantaneous bulldozing move, though, her digits were swooping in under Scott, until he was tumbling up against his youngest sibling in the center of their giant sister’s hand.

            “Now, from what I’ve heard, this little guy is usually on his best behavior,” Olivia commented, prodding her index finger at Kyle as he shuffled into a more secure position on the platform of flesh.

            “Usually. He kinda slipped up yesterday. We’re gonna set him straight today, though,” Maggie said knowledgably. She stroked the bulb of her pinky fingertip across Kyle’s hair.

            “I’m sure you are. Are you just giving them a… tour of the equipment right now?” Olivia chuckled. She pulled her phone from her pocket and scrolled through something on her screen, though her eyes darted back and forth to Maggie enough to indicate she was listening.

            “Actually, we’re following one of the new training protocols right now,” Maggie announced nonchalantly, though by the forced-cavalier flavor of her words, Scott suspected she wanted to impress this woman who’d been so instrumental in her work at the Clinic so far.

            “Is that so?” Olivia said, shifting her gaze more permanently from the phone to Maggie. “Which one?”

            “This one,” Maggie said, holding up her phone too high for either of her tiny siblings to see.

            “I see,” Olivia said. “Well, absolutely feel free to say no to this since you’re not on the clock now, but if you’d like some company, I’d love to see how you’re coming along with your training, outside work hours.”

            “Oh,” Maggie said. Her smile, ever-constant, didn’t even tip enough to shallow the girl’s dimples, but Scott knew when his sister was off-guard, because it happened so infrequently, and right now was one of those times. “That… sounds great.”

            “Good,” Olivia affirmed, a shadow flinting past her eyes as she leered down into Maggie’s palm again at the pair of two-inchers awaiting their fates. She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth, idly bending her thumb back against her opposite palm until the joint popped loudly enough to echo across the room. “Let’s see you teach your brothers a couple of life lessons.”

            Scott had a feeling he wasn’t going to enjoy whatever was incoming when he’d seen Olivia Blackwell enter the training room.

            That feeling became a certainty, though, when he watched the young woman’s hands sink into that black duffel bag of hers and emerge with long, neon-orange rubber bands draped in her palms.

            These bands weren’t quite as horrifically mysterious as the glass marbles from the day before; Scott had seen, and used, such equipment in the gym to increase his resistance a couple years back at normal height. Somehow, he doubted he’d be receiving the same benefit from their use now, at this particular size, with biceps flimsier than the tips of his sister’s fingers.

            “Ooh, great idea!” Maggie sang. Her fingers thumped excitedly against the table upon which her weary, sock-scented brothers sat in waiting for her next command.

            “Hey, it’s not my idea,” Olivia shrugged. She grasped each end of the bands and stretched them out, elongating them with each pull of her shoulders, to test. A smirk crossed her lips. “That’s just what’s next up on this protocol.”
            “Oh, is it? I didn’t even see,” Maggie insisted. Sliding open her phone again, the towering teen scrolled through Techilogic’s tiny-training app. “Yep, my bad. I see it now. Guess I’ve gotta look these over more, huh?”

            “Don’t feel bad, these are the new ones, remember?” Olivia soothed. She gave the two bands one last snap. “Besides, you’ve got weeks to get these down pat. Just try to absorb it all.”

            “Got it,” Maggie said. She turned, looking down to her siblings again, her smile renewed. Her fingers took turns tapping on the table at the feet of her miniature brothers, vibrating their tired bodies with each landing. “Ready, boys?”

            As if that was a question and not a declaration she’d already decided. Odds were, it was just another chance for Kyle to make a second emotional plea if he was about to be sick. Any complaints other than outright physical illness were likely to go ignored.

            “Yeah,” Scott said calmly for both. Kyle still looked too shell-shocked from being tucked into his sister’s socks for that first exercise.

            “There are some other protocols I only know because I did come up with them, of course,” Olivia teased. She handed the bands off to Maggie, who accepted them happily. “We’ll probably get to talking about some of those later this month. There’s some pretty creative ones, if I do say so myself.”

            “I’ll bet,” Maggie said. She gave one last glance to her phone for a clear idea of the next step in the training protocol, then set her phone down on the table with a loud clack, blacked out, that rattled her brothers again.

            “But I’d also bet you have a few up your sleeve that could make a pretty good protocol,” Olivia said. She brushed her dark bangs back from her eyes and set about tying her hair back into a high ponytail. “With how many years you’ve had of experience with this?”

            “Yeah, it’s… been a while,” Maggie said.

            “No kidding. I think I started helping my parents discipline my sister when I was… maybe eighteen? But you were… what?”

            “Thirteen,” Maggie commented shyly, though the pride in her voice still shone through. Scott watched his sister twiddling with her fingers behind her back, possibly in memory of the first time he was placed in her hands with the intent to punish. “I was technically eight when Mom first let me… spend some tiny-time with Scotty, but yeah, thirteen when Mom gave me a job to do with him.”

            “A lot of responsibility to have back then, huh? And look at you now. You’re here, really turning that skillset into something you can use. It’s pretty cool, I have to say.”

            “Really?” Maggie muttered hopefully, clearly drawn deeply into the praise of her Clinic idol.

            “Hell yeah, it is, girl,” Olivia encouraged with some over-exaggerated hand gestures, though her expression was also sincere. “All right, enough chit-chat. These boys are probably starting to sweat over there, and we haven’t even gotten started with them. Why don’t you get them strapped in?”

            “Sure.”

            Scott raised an eyebrow, somehow both desiring to and feeling sickened by the idea of sneaking a peek at what was on that protocol list Judy had requested specifically for them this morning.

            He needn’t have wondered for long. A few seconds later, he and Kyle were bathed in the emerald light of the PMRD as their sister fired it upon them. Incredibly, though, rather than shrinking lower, they found themselves actually rising higher. Higher still, until Scott determined he and his brother were a full twelve inches in height. A minor miracle, really.

            Then came the aforementioned strapping in by Maggie. With the same care and attentiveness she used to load her brothers into their baby car seats, the girl cupped the doll-sized Scott on the small of his back, her fingers traced casually over his rear end and down to the backs of his thighs. Her thumb fingered the hem of his shirt, the pad of her digit cool on his skin. Which, unfortunately, wasn’t entirely unwelcome.

            The first orange rubber band was coiled neatly around his hips and shoulders, distributing its massive potential energy over his frame, which he was grateful for, even not yet understanding the exercise. Next came Kyle, who was tied in with greater grace and time than Scott.

            And then they were placed on the floor, the long exercise bands draped comically like flowing capes behind each boy. Scott took a couple tentative steps toward his sister’s ankles, his face level with her bare shin.

            “Um… what are we…”

            “Hold your horses, Scotty,” Maggie chirped.

            Olivia was rooting through the duffel bag again. In another second, the woman drew out a pair of what looked like boxing gloves, complete with padding and cherry-red color scheme, albeit in more of an oblong shape. The mystery of the objects wasn’t kept in suspense for long, though, as both Olivia and Maggie hunched over, wrapping one padded boot each around their right foot, still in its trainer.

            “Oh, good,” Scott muttered under his breath, too quiet to hear. He looked to Kyle, who still hadn’t quite puzzled out the game, despite the evidence.

            “Okay, boys, this is pretty simple,” Olivia explained, hands on her hips as she gazed down at the twelve-inch shrinkers at her feet with a beaming smile beside her considerably shorter intern. “We’re gonna get you both a little exercise. This is about creating a balance of tension and distance. You’ll get the hang of it more from practice than from me explaining it, though.”
            “You guys could use some exercise, probably,” Maggie commented cheekily. Her hands mounted similarly on her hips. “Since I was doing all the work on that last one.”

            Scott heaved a sigh.

            She wasn’t wrong, exactly.

            “Better get moving, boys!”

            Scott pressed the heel of his hand against his neck, popping the joint, and took off at a run. Or rather, the closest approximation of a run he could enact with a heavy rubber band knotted at various angles around his torso, the stretched end of which was slung around the ankle of Olivia Blackwell several feet back. Beside her on the lined sprint track of the training facility floor was Maggie, with her foot-tall younger brother leashed to his own band.

            After more than four strides, Scott could feel the resistance building up. He dug his heels into the ground, but with one more step, the band snapped back and he totaled to the floor.

            “Good effort, Scott,” Olivia encouraged, not bothering to hide her snickering other than with a token caging of her fingers around her curled lips. She arched her colorfully soled shoe against the ground, arching her calf. “Now get back up and give it another go.”

            “Will do,” Scott mumbled, resolving to avoid any intensifying of the exercise resulting from protest. He was fairly certain there had to be ways to answer a lack of cooperation, maybe by tying another length of band around his body to increase the difficulty. So, he pressed back to his feet, and took two strides.

            And smacked straight back down again as Olivia shifted her foot backward with a simple swing.

            “You have to be ready for those kinds of moves, Scott. This exercise relies on a connection between the handler and the shrinker. You have to watch what my legs and feet are up to, so you know where you can move, too.”

            “How silly of me,” Scott replied dryly.

            “Wasn’t it, though?” Olivia grinned, swatting her ponytail to the opposite side of her head. “C’mon, kid. Up and at ‘em.”

            Kid? There couldn’t have been more than five or six years separating their ages.

            With a soft groan, Scott clambered back up and followed the rather demeaning directions, at least glad not to be jammed back into someone’s sweaty sock while this activity was completed. No matter how many times Olivia yanked him off balance, the greater access to fresh air and cool AC made this activity infinitely preferable to the last. If anything, Scott was surprised to find such a relatively merciful activity following up the previous one. Maybe it was just ordered that way to grant a break? It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility, but Scott somehow doubted his mother would’ve chosen this particular routine if there were breaks involved.

            Yet again, the dreaded B3A2 hadn’t measured up to its ominous reputation. What about it had filled Maggie and Judy with such revere?

            “You got it, Kyle,” Maggie encouraged, a lilt in her voice indicating how much fun she was having. She rotating her foot at the ankle, then arced her leg forward, taking a step. “Keep in time with me!”

            Kyle, indeed, kept time. He stumbled at first, getting over the residual nausea of the last activity, but soon he had the rhythm. Their sister would take a few steps back, then a few steps forward, a skip and a hop off to the side. The soccer star might’ve appeared to an outside observer to be following a TV exercise routine, stretching and reaching every which way, except for the doll-sized boy looped around her ankle by a powerful rubber band.

            Scott rolled his eyes, for once wishing he was over with his sister than his current trainer. At least Maggie seemed to be having enough fun that she was willing to provide clear directions which, if followed, allowed Kyle to remain standing. Clearly the fun for her was in watching Kyle scuttle about at her whim, rather than Olivia, who was apparently more focused on coming up with reasons to trip him.

            “Ooohh, almost had it there. Seriously, I think I’ll be sending one of these bands home with your sister for some extra practice,” Olivia informed him, bending down ever so slightly from above. She cupped her hair over her ear, watching as Scott sprawled on the floor. She tapped his back with the toe of her tennis shoe. “You could really use the boost in your reflexes.”

            “Can’t argue with that,” Scott uttered too low to hear.

            “What’s that?”

            “Nothing.”

            Olivia smirked to the side of her lips, shaking her head, then crossed her arms. She arched back to full height and tapped her sole against the ground: a drum roll.

            “Get up. Now,” she instructed with a cool professionalism practiced over multiple years of experience in R&R training, tinted with just a note of venom belying her true love for this career. “And follow me.”

            Scott stood, dusted himself off, and followed after Olivia’s steadily tramping shoes, just about level with the back of her healthily rounded calves. Within seconds, her pace at picked up, forcing him to jog to keep up with her confident footsteps. Just when he thought he’d gotten the hang of it, though, Olivia came to a jarring stop, planting her foot down on the navy-blue floor with a seismic thump. Unable to stop his own momentum thanks to the rubber band, Scott was flung forward like a slingshot pellet, his body colliding with and instantly coiling clumsily around Olivia’s leg.

            “Well, that’s a start,” Olivia sighed. She gave her leg a shake, causing Scott to tumble down the front of her shoe and plunk back to the floor in a heap.

            Scott felt the blood rushing back to his head, then rolling right back out as the incline shifted again. He levitated higher, his skull angled toward the ground, before he was tipped in the other direction. All the while, his shirt tightened and loosened around the bulging form of Maggie’s bare foot, jammed yet again up her tiny brother’s shirt. Her sole, cool and smooth as a newly churned milkshake, post-workout, was flush to his chest.

            Across the way, on his giant sister’s opposite foot, Scott could see Kyle in the same position: their middle sibling’s athletic, mildly pudgy appendage stuffed down the lankier boy’s clothing. She wore each of her nine-inch brothers like slippers, their lower bodies serving as the back flap as her heel rested comfortably across each of their thighs, applying weight in multiple unwanted ways to multiple unwanted areas on their person. Their shirts, of course, were handy straps to keep them attached and hugged to the bottoms of her feet as she sat on a bright red exercise ball in her bedroom, casually scrolling through her social media above while dangling her two shrunken siblings from the ends of her legs.

            Scott realized it was probably foolish to believe the routines would quit once they were finally home, relieved of Olivia’s overbearing presence and apprenticeship to their impressionable sister. They’d nearly completed the list on the R&R app, according to their handler, but the clock and the reservation were up, and so it was time to depart.

            Maggie purposefully left both of her brothers atop the kitchen counter when they returned, ensuring they’d remain where she left them while she bounded upstairs and took a soothing thirty-five minute shower: a luxury both boys were, perhaps gratefully, deprived of.

            As much as Scott longed for some ice-cold relief, it seemed like a bad idea to request a cleaning from her; he had too good of a feeling that she’d gleefully oblige. After a whole morning of being “trained” like a show dog by his sister and her teacher, being stripped down and scrubbed clean by her curious hands was going to be too much of a capper. Not that it was his choice, either way.

            Of course, as it turned out, Maggie was feeling just as backhandedly generous as she was earlier this morning. She knew cooling was on the brain of both. Upon returning in fresh clothes, hair glistening wet from the shower and a smile on her face, she tucked one brother under each arm again and hustled them upstairs. She stopped not at her own bedroom door, but at each of theirs, releasing them into the space but not budging from blocking the door, just in case they got any clever ideas about trying to dodge past their leviathan sibling.

            “Get the shirt, Scotty,” Maggie instructed winningly. Her voice assigned “the shirt” a kind of particular importance. A gleam in her eye. No other instruction was needed. “And Kyle? Get a… bigger shirt. If you have one.”

            And now here they were, on “cooldown,” literally. Each of the overworked and over-warm brothers, inverted and slung around Maggie’s soothingly cool naked feet like saddlebags. Worse, at least in Scott’s mind, it was painfully easy to enjoy. In fact, within a few minutes of it, he was actually experiencing gratitude: a rather sickening revelation.

            Maggie’s toes, like insulated pillows, kneaded at his upper chest and neck, massaging him just via their usual scrunching. Goose bumps rippled up his skin, which she could almost certainly feel, because he heard a throaty giggle just about every time a new batch ran down his stomach. Her sole continually arched and flexed, relaxing just for herself, but also serving to continually refresh the low temperature beneath her skin. The wrinkles of her peachy flesh provided more than enough leeway to simultaneously cushion and flatten for maximum effect of her lowered body temperature, courtesy of her shower.

            Scott looked over to Kyle again. After a morning full of new humiliations, the teen seemed more than content to outwardly enjoy this period of relaxation. It was commensalism in the weirdest way possible, and Scott was just glad he didn’t have their mother here to get inspired.

            No, they were simply two shrunken subjects, lying at the feet of their queen-for-a-day while she unwound. In the meantime, their bodies were being steadily returned to normal stasis: in a way, healed by continual, playful contact with Maggie’s under-soles.

            She arched both feet in unison again. Her heels shoved hard down against both boys’ thighs, forcing their legs apart as she wedged her heavy pink heel between each of their limbs. Scott bit his lip, then glanced to his brother again. The boy’s eyes were bulging with surprise and discomfort as his giant sister’s heel dug at his junk. He was probably experiencing this sort of casual disregard for his general anatomy for the first time in his life. Undoubtedly, he was at this moment, just as Scott once was, faced with the warped philosophical question of whether being treated this way by a giant being was more a method of cruel and unusually stimulating teasing, or simply a dehumanizing lack of consideration for his body’s general shape.

            Scott couldn’t help but nod. Those questions he could read in his brother’s face now were all-too familiar to him, after years of practice. The only unfortunate thing was that he was never any closer to an answer.

            “You guys are so toasty. Like you were in a microwave,” Maggie commented. “You really needed this, I can tell. Feels kinda good to me, too. Warm little boys, keepin’ me nice and even after all that training. Scotty knows that, though. Don’t you?”
            “Yep.”

            “I’ll just bet you do.”

            That was when the doorbell rang.

            “Oooh, there’s our first guest!” Maggie announced. She lowered both feet toward the ground, gently squashing both brothers down in the carpet beneath her feet. However, she was careful to still maintain the majority of her weight in her butt on the rubber exercise sphere. Scott sputtered only momentarily as the ball of his sister’s foot flexed with possessive heft down against his abdomen. However, the pressure was quickly alleviated, as the girl plucked at the shirts of both brothers and slid her feet out of her organic slippers.

            “Guest?” Kyle gulped. He squinted up at his sister, clearly at something of a loss for the world around him without his glasses. Perhaps foolishly, he’d been counting on the privacy of his humiliations staying in the immediate family this weekend.

            “Yeah! Since it was just gonna be us three here tonight, I figured we could use a little company, ya know? It’s not a big deal, just a couple people,” Maggie insisted. She closed her laptop upon the desk and rolled the exercise ball back into the corner, leering down at her sprawled brothers with a smile. “We’ll find you some, uh… smaller shirts in a minute, m‘kay?”

            Scott and Kyle sat up and shared a knowing look as their sister joyously skipped out of the room with thunderous footsteps. They each lifted the hem of their shirts, both stretched to parachute size beyond recognition by the girl’s creative use of them.

            Far more relaxed than he anticipated could’ve been possible a mere sixty seconds earlier, Scott curled silently into the baby-cradling arms of Libby Hammond as she drew him up against her breast. Within moments of entering the room, the redhead had crept toward Scott by the desk and cheerfully offered to pick him up if he wouldn’t mind. Her toes scrunched busily and, Scott suspected, anxiously against the rubbery basin of her sandals as the question was posed.

            “It’s, uh, nice to see you, Scott!” Libby commented just a little louder than was necessary, most likely overcompensating for her obvious nerves as she took her friend’s doll-sized elder brother into her arms.

            “Hi, Libby,” Scott said politely, clearing his throat as he was wedged not immodestly up against the girl’s chest. Even through the layers of shirt fabric and bra, he could’ve sworn her heartrate had already hastened in the intervening seconds as she scooped him into a gentle hold.

            The past year had certainly been kind to Libby, whom Scott couldn’t help but notice had “blossomed” just a little later than most of her similar peers. She’d stretched out a little further into her body, bypassing Maggie in height by nearly three inches. Her adorable bright-auburn locks hung lower over her shoulders, sleeker than Scott was used to seeing it tied back for soccer. And though it could’ve well-been the added pressure the girl seemed to be applying as she cuddled Scott into her bosom now, he was pretty sure she’d bloomed out further in a couple other areas, too.

            Were it not for Libby’s mild but still-evident social anxieties and the tiny mound of puppy fat still present in her midriff, Scott would’ve sworn he was being swaddled by a completely different girl than the one who, just one year ago, had rescued him from the unearthly and spit-slogged humiliation of being sucked like a human life saver between his sister’s giggling cheeks.

            Somehow, after he’d been held in the center of the redhead’s palm at a pathetic one inch height, stripped of his clothing and soaking in hot saliva, there were no more barriers of awkwardness to cross. Though he would’ve never asked had Libby not offered herself, subconsciously at least, Scott knew that her caring grasp was probably where he’d be most comfortable.

            “You look good,” Libby commented quietly with a half-suppressed smile. “How’ve you been?”

            “Uhh, about the same. How about you?”

            “Just glad the school year’s over. Maybe I can come visit you guys here more often.”

            “Yap, yap, yap. If I didn’t know any better, Libby, I’d think you came here just to see my itty bitty brother and not me!” Maggie teased, jostling her friend in the shoulder with a sporting elbow. “Oh, wait, what am I talking about? We both know that’s exactly why you came!”

            “Ha. Ha. Ha,” Libby groused playfully, rolling her eyes. Her cheeks were flushed a few shades pinker.

            “Actually, I guess I gotta be more specific tonight, since there’s two itty bitty brothers running around here,” Maggie shrugged. She crossed her arms and stared down at Kyle on the floor, still seated obediently by the leg of the desk chair. Her foot arched from the carpet, her big toe pointed and prodded in Kyle’s direction, though she withdrew it before it could make contact with his body. Still he flinched.

            “I guess you do,” Libby said quickly with a light chuckle, clearly intent on changing the subject. Her fingers idly tapped against her opposite arm as she snuggled Scott in nearer to her shirt, possibly without realizing.

            “Ooh, I’ve got an idea,” Maggie enthused. “Kyle can be Itty Bitty Brother #1, and Scotty can be… Itty Bitty Brother That Libby Wants to Go Sit In a Tree With!”

            Scott almost winced from secondhand embarrassment for his handler. He felt the thin hair prick up on her arm, along with a layer of goosebumps. If her cheeks were rosy before, they were nearing the hue of her red hair by now.

            “Ohhh, relax, I’m kidding, Libs. You know I just like to see my brothers put on the spot,” Maggie laughed, nearly doubling over for the show of it. She sunk into her desk chair, then stooped down, scooping up Kyle by his back like a discarded doll and forming her hands into a makeshift chair as she leaned back. She twirled her younger brother’s arm around a curious index finger.

            “Yeah, yeah, totally,” Libby mumbled, alternately stealing confused glances at Scott before her gaze darted back to the giggling blonde who so clearly had everyone in the room wrapped around her little finger. Nine-inchers and regular size alike.

            Scott looked up at Libby’s face from the corner of his eye, not wanting to make her feel the increased heat of extra attention, but he honestly couldn’t tell if the girl was feeling put-upon by the joked implication or if she was just trying to hide a hopeful glint in her eye. If anything, he’d be surprised to learn it wasn’t the latter.

            The doorbell rang again.

            “There she is!” Maggie chimed. She bounced up from her seat, keeping Kyle hoisted at stomach level, but still firmly throned in her palms. Her voice took on the mocking twang of an older relative: “You two better not do anything I wouldn’t do while I go get the door, you hear?”

            With that final snickering simper, Maggie was bounding down the stairs with her younger brother, leaving Libby and Scott in the odorous air of strangely unearned shame. This time, the girl’s only response was to wrap her hand tighter around Scott’s shoulders; her lips parted briefly, but no words escaped, and she quickly redirected her attention to the empty doorway. Her eyes darted about, avoiding his.

            Scott held his breath as he rolled his cheek against the warm hill of Libby’s left breast. Somehow, he didn’t anticipate going two-for-oh on friendly house guests tonight.