On a warm, sunny, August day, a late teen girl was reclining on a park bench, licking an ice cream cone with repeated, long, smooth strokes. This young woman was wearing a yellow tank-top, short hot pants, and tightly-wound shoes, and she was in utter bliss. Her reddish hair hung in curly bunches around her head, the product of many hours at the salon recently. Her name was Johanna, and she looked like she was having the utter time of her life.

Her arm was sprawled around another woman who was noticeably older, though no less attractive. This woman was Johanna’s mother. It was clear her daughter received her auburn hair from her, though no the older woman’s striking amber eyes. Perhaps unexpectedly, this mature lady was the more flippantly-garbed of the two; the woman was wearing merely a bra, a skirt, and high heels. And she was visibly, extremely uncomfortable. She too held an ice cream cone, but she did not feel the urge to eat any of it. Or eat anything at all. Her name was Susan.

Passers by glared at the pair strangely. It was no strange sight to see a mother and daughter enjoying a day out in the city sharing some ice cream together, but the image did raise a few eyebrows. Chief amongst them was the presumed mother’s risqué choice of outerwear. The second oddity was Susan’s jumpiness.

As a joke, Johanna decided to lightly, ever so lightly, drag her fingertips across the nape of her mother’s neck.

“Gasp!” The woman twitched, a dollop of ice cream falling on her bare belly as she realized her daughter had simply scratched the back of her neck.

Johanna snickered, side-eyeing her mother who chagrined, taking a bit of time to lean tentatively back into the bench and her daughter’s arm.

The heat was bearing down like a red-hot hammer, and sweat sheened off both women’s backs. The mother curled up, hoisting her feet to the edge of the bench, wrapping her arms around her knees. It was a hot pose to be in, but Susan’s discomfort at this exposure was almost palpable. This pose was familiar to her, and most importantly, it felt safe. There were few pedestrians to take notice, but those who did eyes Johanna with such a detached strangeness, bordering on suspicion.

“Hm? What is it?”

Her daughter spoke. Susan jumped again, feeling the warm, gentle touch of her daughter drag along the back of her neck, petting her like a stray cat. Susan shook her head, refusing to say anything that was more than a muttered mumble.

“I’m sorry, can you repeat that?” Another light pet from Johanna. It gave Susan chills, goosebumps that were exacerbated as Johanna nuzzled closer, her ear practically planted against Susan’s mouth, cheek inches away from her collarbone.

“N… nothing…” Susan relented.

“That’s right…” Johanna continued to pet her mother’s neck, grabbing a sprig of hair and twisting it between her fingers. She planted a kiss on her mother’s nose, playfully biting the tip. “You’re mine, aren’t you? You don’t have anything to complain about.”

Johanna’s fingers traveled down her mother’s back, finding themselves beneath the strap holding her mother’s bra together. Her fingers fiddled with the clasp as Susan’s breath quickened.

“J-Johanna, please…” she whispered through grit teeth, side-eyeing the family of walkers that was about to pass. “Not now… please.”

“Relax… I’m not going to do anything… yet.”

Susan closed her eyes, tears flooding them as the reminder of her own powerlessness came through her teenage daughter’s bratty lips.

Then, the bra came off. Johanna’s fiddling succeeded.

“Oops…!” Johanna whispered and winked before jumping off her seat, screeching, “OMG, MOM?! How indecent!”

Her performance could’ve won a Golden Globe, her yells caught the attention of those arriving and those who had already passed by as they all feasted their eyes on Susan’s mightily developed chest, spilling out as her bra cups fell into her lap. The woman yelped herself, lunging for the bra before it was caught by an especially strong and errant breeze. Already, the pedestrians were gasping, murmuring, gossiping, as Susan was forced to hold her own breasts by her hands, covering them up in the face of public humiliation.

“How obscene!”

“No, don’t look at her, Ronald. Shield your eyes!”

“I fear for this country if this is the example mothers set for their daughters these days.”

Susan looked around as the strangers sneered, judging her, and she became almost as red as her own hair. Susan wanted to open her mouth, say anything, but one glare from her daughter put her in her place, forcing the adult woman’s mouth shut. Susan’s inner burning and mortification made her want to run, to hide, to do anything, even as she waited for Johanna to potentially grab her bra, caught in a bundle of bushes. But she simply stood back, smiling as several of these strangers angrily announced they would grab a police officer to arrest her for public indecency.

Eventually, Susan’s unintentional flaunting had driven off all the common folk. This left just Johanna, peering from just out of the public consciousness at her mother, lonely on the bench.

She took a few steps toward the Susan, sitting down next to her and wrapping her arms around her once again.

“Not so fun, is it?” asked Johanna.

Then… Susan disappeared.

Johanna glanced furtively, ensuring that no prying eyes were watching. Out in the public park, the chances nobody saw were nil. But at the very least, there was nobody within her line of sight, and anybody paying good enough attention to see the disappearance of the older woman was far away enough for the visage to have seemed like a mirage, an addled hallucination.

But it was no hallucination. Johanna uncupped her hands. She took note of the tiny figure inside, gasping for air, on her knees within the massive logs that were Johanna’s fingers.

“Awwww… I can never get over get over how cute you look like this...~”

“J-Johanna!” screamed Susan. “You, what are you, why are you --”

Johanna heard voices. Law enforcement voices.

“Whoops!” Johanna cheered, plopping her mother straight down into the divide between her breasts.

The trip was quick, her plentiful boobs slicked by midday sweat. However when Susan reached the terminal point of her trip into her daughter’s tits, all she could even think about was trying to get another breath of clean air into her lungs. But that was impossible. Above her was flesh. Below her was flesh, tight enough she could not fall deeper, lest she wanted to truly suffocate between her daughter’s enormous mounds. Johanna’s deodorized scent had been all but completely counteracted by the midday heat, and as Susan tried in vain to establish some sense of stability, some sense of orientation, she was continuously, endlessly rammed with a steady stream of replenishing and replenishing sweat, barreling into her mouth that she was forced to either spit out or swallow.

“Goodness, you’re making quite the ruckus in there…!” Johanna whispered before suddenly standing up, turning to face a pair of individuals who had just sauntered up to the park bench. One was an indignant woman in a pixie cut, and she had in tow a man in a navy blue police uniform. “Good afternoon, officer! Anything I can do for you this fine day?”

The woman in front put her hands on her hips. “You know quite well what you can do! Tell us where that hag you were sitting with, flaunting her breasts so belligerently! I cannot believe what it is some adults feel is right to teach the children! Why in fact --”

The policeman held up a hand, silencing the pixie woman. He sighed, bored. “I was informed there was a public disturbance here? And it seems you may know where to find the source?”

“Hmm… a disturbance?” Johanna put one hand to her chest, kneading it, framing it as a nervous tic, sure she was sending her mother through hell. “I can’t say I rightly know what it is you could be talking about.”

“Of course you do, she was right next to you! I don’t know your relationship but I think I know damn well that you would’ve at least seen where she went!” The woman huffed.

“A… a relationship?” Johanna put her free finger to her mouth, looking whimsically to the sky as if in thought. “I wonder… could we be in a relationship? Do you think if I find that woman… we can be in a relationship… together?”

The police officer curled his expression. “So I’m to assume you don’t know where this woman went?”

Johanna shrugged, letting her breasts flop from their slight elevation, jiggling.

The woman rolled her eyes. The officer shook his head, and he said, “Well, if either of you see any disturbances, I’m here every day. No matter how much I don’t want to be.” And he turned around, returning from whence he came. Both Johanna and the woman watched him go before the woman turned again to Johanna, giving her a superior, snide glare, and she departed herself.

Johanna rolled her own eyes, mimicking the woman’s look and sticking her tongue out. Then she crossed her arms, tensing up her breasts as she stared down at them. “See? I told you I knew what I was doing! Now… as for growing you back… that’d be a bit too conspicuous.”

Susan could only barely hear the muffled ruminations of her daughter, masked by her pounding heartbeat, the rushing blood in her veins, the sweat that was clogging every pore in Susan’s body including her ears.

“Which means it looks like you won’t have to be doing any walking at all! I can carry you all the way home! All four miles! No need to thank me,” said Johanna smugly as she flipped her hair and began the long trek back to the house.

Each step brought a new cycle of discomfort to Susan, being forced upward, brought down, bounced, and settling into a stable position before Johanna took yet another step, and it continued on and on and on. Between the imposing boob-flesh, the constant trickle of perspiration, the discomfort and being jostled around like a pill in a bottle, Susan was forced to do anything, occupy her mind with anything at all possible to keep herself from losing it. Think of things. Think of the times before her relationship between her and her daughter had become this utterly demented, tarnished, occult facsimile of anything even approaching a healthy relationship. And to think… it only began scarcely two months ago.

Susan began to whimper, each sob and tear-streaked sniffle disappearing in the grunting and shrieks and slides and BA-bumps of this alien environment that had grown to encompass her entire life.

Three Months Earlier...

 “Not dressed like that, Johanna!”

Johanna stopped, foot halfway out the door, an annoyed scowl on her face. She turned to her mother, calling to her over the kitchen counter. “Dressed like what?”

“Like you’re preparing to spend the night canvasing for druggies outside of a strip club.”

Johanna looked down at her outfit, tank top, high-waisted hot pants. She groaned, screeching out, “But it’s the last day of school! Can’t I let loose just this once? You never let me, I’m almost seventeen years old! And you can’t keep babying me!”

Susan stepped from behind the counter, flipping her hair as she forced herself to turn on her mom mode. She seldom liked exercising parental authority against her daughter, but considering how much she’s started acting out of late, it tended to be a necessity. She crossed her arms and growled, “Johanna. Go to your room and change into something more modest.” She sighed, then squinted. “Is that… is that a hickey? Have you been spending time with boys, Johanna?!” Her mother incensed.

Johanna blushed hotly. “No?” she said truthfully, tugging at the lock of hair on the left side of her face where the mark her girlfriend gave her was situated beneath her chin.

Susan didn’t want to let it go, but time was running short. The bus would be here soon. In the interest of compromise, she said, “You can keep the tank-top, but if you’re not wearing pants or a skirt that goes below your knees, you are grounded. Understand? And when you get home, we’re going to talk about…” Susan gestured vaguely in her daughter’s face. “Whatever it is you’re doing. At length.”

“But Mom --”

“Ah-ah! What did we say about back talk?”

“I wasn’t --”

“Two weeks! No phone privileges!”

“Mom, I --”

“NOW, Johanna.”

Susan held out her hand expectantly as her daughter’s eyes teared up, before she angrily dug into her pocket, muttering something unladylike and deposited the iPhone into her mother’s palm. She stomped to her room loudly and passive-aggressively. Susan watched her go past, shaking her head. She’d been such a good child not so long ago… what changed? Was it the trials of being a teenager?

Susan resumed her housework, dusting furniture and sweeping floors, drifting from room to room, when the doorbell chime went off a few minutes later. Skittering to the window, Susan noticed her daughter walking up the driveway, just in time for the bus to pass by. She elected to wear a jacket over her tank-top, and her booty shorts had in fact transmogrified into jeans.

Susan sighed, upset that her daughter left without even saying goodbye. But despite everything, she still was obedient enough to at least change clothes when her mom said to. Susan felt in her pocket for her daughter’s smartphone, wistful. Perhaps she had been a bit hard on her…

***

A power-drill at full blast knocked Johanna out of her concentration. Seething, she stood up from her seat and shouted “Shut the hell up!” in its direction.

Across the library, a worker on a stepladder currently putting up a new bookshelf removed one muff of his ear protection. “What was that, Miss?”

Johanna blushed, then called out, “Is there any way you can be… a bit quieter?”

The worker chuckled nervously and replied, “No can do. Principal wants this up ASAP.”

Johanna snuck a glance at the librarian, a petite old woman clearly just as perturbed by the noise in the library as she was. Sighing, she looked at Johanna apologetically.

Johanna huffed, then took her seat, returning to her book. This encyclopedia-length treatise on the history of European art had been the go-to choice in the absence of a phone to kill time after lunch, but it turned out to be far more boring than Johanna would’ve expected. Sighing, she closed it, then looked to the shelf from which she retrieved it. Directly perpendicular from the wall currently being worked on. Johanna had tried her best to sit as far away from the noise as possible, but now she would have no choice but to venture back into the maelstrom.

Stowing the book beneath the crook of her arm and with her other hand in her pockets, she trotted to the non-fiction section, coughing as the miasma of dusty wood shavings invaded her lungs.

BRRRRRRRRRR!!!

The books rumbled on their shelves as the powerful mechanical tool bored another hole in the wall. Johanna’s teeth chattered as she waited for the noise to recede before sighing. Reaching up to the empty shelf, she placed it in before yet another:

BRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!

This one Johanna felt in her bones. And she wasn’t the only one; the books themselves all jittered and jumbled, so much so that as Johanna successfully pushed one such tome inside, another from high above managed to dance its way out of its crevice, falling down and knocking Johanna on the head.

“OWWWW!!”

Sent to the ground by the blow, the construction stopped as the adults in the room noticed what had just happened. The workers stared down with concern both for the student and themselves as the librarian pranced into the midst of the action, screeching, “Now, what is all this, now? Okay, that’s it, library’s closed! No students allowed until this renovation is over! Are you okay dear?”

The librarian took Johanna’s hand as she rubbed her head, still seeing stars from the impact. It throbbed. “Y-yeah… I think so…?”

“Don’t you worry, dear, I’ll take you to the nurse’s office,” the librarian cooed, trying her best to ease a very confused Johanna as she dumped the book that had fallen into her hands, mistakenly believing this was the one she sought to get. “Come with me, it won’t be long…”

Johanna followed dumbly behind, caressing the book for reasons she didn’t understand, keeping it for no real reason at all.

***

“Seems like a minor contusion,” the nurse, a young, stunningly attractive, incredibly affable woman barely out of her twenties, finished examining Johanna as she lay in the cot. In Johanna’s addled state, her only recurring thoughts were that the nurse very well could’ve been a model or an actress in another life. The nurse pulled off her plastic gloves, chuckling. “And the last day of school too. That’s gotta be a record, right? Just avoid any more head injuries for now. Maybe put some ice on it if you get any aches. If it gets worse, then call your physician.”

“T-thank you…” Johanna mused.

“You can stay here for the rest of the day if you like. Though I know that you students always have those big end of year parties on days like this.”

“Oh, oh no… not really.” None of the students in Johanna’s class were people she really cared for. And those she did care for, she was forced to meet with outside school.

“Well, looks like you just won a free pass for a breezy last day of school! I’ll pull out the TV, I think we have a few movies in here somewhere…” The nurse walked into the closet, door swinging closed behind her, leaving Johanna alone with the scent of latex gloves and cough medicine.

She groaned, exasperated as her senses were coming back to her. She wouldn’t have even been in the library looking for something, anything to entertain her if she just had her phone. But her dumb mom took it away. What kind of parent does that? What teenager is able to survive without a phone?!

And she was still bored.

“I could’ve sworn we had a copy of that new Avengers in here somewhere!”

Johanna sighed, realizing that her boredom might not be alleviated anytime soon. Perhaps she should just go back to class. After all, her head was feeling better than before…

Slowly, Johanna rested her cheek on the worn sheet of the cot. And like a magnet, her eyes gravitated to the book on the end table.

It was big and dusty. She couldn’t see the spine from this view, though she could see the pages, which were a deep, desaturated papery yellow, with black bits at irregular intervals between the edges.

“Eugh…” Johanna wasn’t exactly someone who liked gross stuff for the sake of gross stuff, but her curiosity would not let her open go a moment before seeing just what exactly this book is.

Johanna sat up, leaning against her pillow, and grabbed it. Immediately, she struggled, needing to use her second hand to pick it up properly.

The cover was blank. It was a dark, chocolate brown, and the binding was made of leather. Despite the book’s apparent age, the leather felt good as new. A little warm, in fact, as Johanna dragged her fingers across the bumps. Weirdly, the warmth seemed to come in waves or pulses. Warm, cool, warm, cool, every four or so seconds, ad infinitum.

Johanna opened the front, looking for the library registry. There was a registry indeed. An old one, decaying, in fact. But not a single person in the thirty years the school had been erected had ever checked this book out.

Johanna shrugged. Not too much out of the ordinary. There were plenty of books in that library that had been untouched for decades. She turned the page, looking for a title, but finding none. Instead, she was instantly transported to what appeared to be the main body of the text. More surprisingly, it seemed to be entirely handwritten. In ink. At first Johanna didn’t want to believe it, but the more she inspected each repeated letter, the more she realized they all had tiny imperfections that could only be the result of handwriting. Intrigued, she began at the beginning. The front page also included a math-looking diagram that Johanna didn’t know the meaning of. The text was a bit archaic, but with a bit of work Johanna was able to decipher it…

I am recording the results of my Crop in the event I am unable to Complete the work upon which I have been seeded to this Earth. Even now my soul demands egress from this plane. But I have discovered this world is built upon laws. And all laws, through the right Channels, may be bent, or rewritten Entirely.

Johanna was bored already. She flipped through the book, candidly waiting for something interesting to pop up when she stopped at a drawing of a frog. It was… not a very good drawing. It looked more like an artist tried to generally get the body of a frog right, but gave it a human-ish face and features. And that made Johanna laugh.

“Heh, that’s cute.” She read beneath.

WARNING: No reversal spell found thus far… I’ve discovered transfiguration to be amongst the easier of spells to commit. Should one desire to transform something or someone into something or someone else, they need only hold in their mind an image of their target and say these words. Once completed, state the name of that which you desire your target to transform into.

The words beneath were unlike any script Johanna had ever witnessed. It was like trying to transcribe the exact text one had seen in a dream. Johanna felt a deep discomfort looking at it, but she was unable to look away, and her heart began to pound. Her fingers tightened their grip on the book, and inadvertently her nails began to scratch at the paper.

Gasp!

Johanna was almost horrified at potentially damaging it. Smoothening out the slight gashes, she placed her finger at the beginning of the incantation text, thinking to herself…

“What kind of book… is this?”

Johanna’s mind raced as dragged her finger across the page, as though doing so might result in the knowledge of how to say it entering her mind. It did give her a bit more confidence. Upon looking at it again, the letters didn’t appear to be too dissimilar from Latin script. She tried mouthing the text, taking several tries to get something consistent exiting her lips. As she prepared to recite the incantation, she thought…

“Wait, am I really about to try to use a magic spell?” Johanna wasn’t exactly the most religious, but she was not completely without faith, mostly a result of her late father’s work. If the tome was real, she could be encountering some serious trouble in the afterlife. And if it was fake… well, then she would be a teenager, effortlessly tricked into taking a toy or role playing game manual seriously. So she figured, if she was going to use the spell, she’d want to test it on something small first.

Johanna looked around the room. She looked at the cot upon which she rested, its blankets. She looked at the end table. An IV drip, unconnected to anything, was in the corner. The bag looked murky, in need of a replacement. There was a desk at the head of the room, populated by a phone and a computer, and there was a whiteboard perpendicular to it too. Nothing of note though, nothing specific. Nothing that jumped out at her.

“Okay, Johanna, what do you think about The Dark Knight?”

Johanna almost jumped. She was so lost in her musings, she forgot she technically wasn’t alone. The nurse was still in the closet.

Suddenly… a devilish idea came to mind.

She glanced at the frog once again.

The nurse was real pretty. Maybe even… too pretty.

Slipping from beneath the sheets, Johanna walked silently to the door before yelling out, “Hey, do you have any Star Trek?”

“New or classic?”

“Doesn’t matter!” said Johanna as she quietly turned the lock, tiptoeing back to her bed for the book.

She got comfortable in her blankets, the page in the book saved. Then, she implanted an iron-enforced image of her nurse in her mind, reciting to herself slowly, patiently, the words in the book. She almost stumbled, catching herself on the edge of the syllables before finally finishing the short incantation, capping it off with the final piece: “A frog.”

Johanna felt a chill cycle through her, and immediately her fatigue returned, and she was forced to fall back on the bed, half-asleep, only barely able to comprehend as the minutes began to pass, the nurse nudging the doorknob, slowly realizing she was locked in, banging, loudly, incessantly, shouting, until…

***

RIRIRIRIRIRIRRRRRRIIIIIIIING!!!

“Schools out! Have a great summer!”

Even Johanna couldn’t sleep through the sound of the school bell. Her eyes fluttered open, and she comprehended the thunderous footsteps of students rampaging through the halls, ready to have their go at the freedom the newly-wrought summer would bring them.

All except Johanna.

Johanna slowly got her bearings, pushing the blankets and sheets off her pant-clad legs, trying to remember what had happened. She rested her chin on her palm, and she tried to move over to the side of the cot, swinging her legs over the edge as the thunderous din slowly began to trickle out, away, leaving only meager footsteps traipsing the halls, until… only a few strides at a time. Always decreasing in frequency, never quite disappearing.

Then…

Ribbit.

The sound of the croak of a frog was like a shot to the heart. Johanna’s eyes widened, became bloodshot. She whipped her head to the book, unable to find it. She clawed through the blankets, uncovering the leatherbound tome. Thankful, she clutched it, not wanting to let go, and turned to the locked door.

Johanna distinctly remembered an increasingly panicked banging and screaming coming from behind it. She had no idea how long it went… but the door was silent. Except for the faint, occasional sound of a frog croaking.

“Okay, Johanna,” she tried to convince herself. “There’s… no reason to believe this book was actually able to… do that.” She took a few tentative steps toward the door, holding the tip of the handle the same way one might hold a piece of moldy food, unwilling to position her body near it.

She opened the door. It creaked. Afternoon sunlight mingled with yellowing LEDs that streamed out, and a blurry fast green blob rushed past Johanna’s feet.

“Ah, no you don’t!” Johanna dove for the creature, sliding on her knees. She thanked taking her mother’s advice to wear pants, then sat back up, cupping the somewhat moist organism that she now had buried in her grasp.

“Ribbit!” The frog was fat, easily fat enough to take up the surface area of Johanna’s palm. And it was still on the move, hopping out of Johanna’s grasp before she was able to scoop it up once more, this time holding it in a grip with both hands.

“No… no goddamn way…”

The frog’s struggles were emphatic. Johanna stared into its eyes, and her heart pounded as the frog stared back, shaking its head, unable to verbally express the fear present in them. Whatever it was, she knew the nurse was still in there somewhere.

Maybe she just left.

Maybe she just picked the lock, silently, without waking Johanna, and then left without notifying the principal that their student just locked a staff member in a closet.

Or…

Maybe...

Johanna stuffed the frog into the side-pocket of her backpack, and she sidled outward, closing the door gently behind her.

***

“Thanks you, and I hope you enjoy your meal!” Nikki offered a short bow as the customer accepted his bag of chicken teriyaki and fried rice, heading to his table.

Nikki sighed graciously before the door to the eatery jingled once again. Nikki cursed as she straightened her back, preparing to meet the next customer when her eyes landed upon…

“Johanna!” She yelled something to the back before taking off her dopey looking hat and sidling out from behind the counter, ready to meet Johanna’s embrace and subsequent smooch on the cheek before the two left to take a seat at one of the open booths. “Haven’t seen you in a bit! You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Johanna said nothing, simply nodding as the two settled into their seats. Johanna waited a moment, slightly jittering as she tapped her fingers on the table.

“O….kay… Well, I called you a few times, but you didn’t pick up. Texted too. What gives?”

“No… no phone,” Johanna admitted, hoarsely. “N-Nikki… if I were to tell you anything, would you believe me?”

“I mean… it depends,” Nikki said ponderously. “What sort of… Why are you putting a frog on the table?”

Johanna had already unzipped the backpack compartment, grabbing the frog with her other hand and placing it down when the amphibian suddenly squirmed its slimy body from underneath Johanna’s palm.

“EEEEEK!” Johanna shrieked before Nikki slammed her palm upon the creature.

It was stunned, but overall it was fine. Johanna watched in slight shock as Nikki put her own hands over the creature, looking furtively over her shoulder as she whispered, “Johanna! Are you trying to get me fired?!”

Johanna said nothing. Instead, she reached into her backpack, removing the book and setting it on the table. She opened it, flipping through the pages gingerly before reaching the one that she had seen before casting the spell. The words still had their odd demarcations, as though every time one read the page, the precise lines transcribed on the incantation changed.

Then, Johanna pointed at the frog. She whispered to Nikki, covering her mouth, “What if I told you… that was my high school nurse?”

Nikki stared at Johanna for a moment, then she chuckled. “Heh… okay… sure.”

Johanna waited for a second. “Well? What do you think?”

“Are you going to finish?”

“Nikki! That thing is my high school nurse!”

Now Nikki’s eyes narrowed. “Not sure I follow.”

Taking a deep breath, Johanna explained everything from the beginning, from the construction workers in the library, to the book falling on her head, to the recitation, to passing out before waking up. All through, Nikki’s face remained stalwart and resolute, though over time it slackened to a more neutral face as she simply waited for the story to end.

“And that pretty much brings us up to now. So? What do you think? Do you believe me?”

“No.”

Johanna sighed. “C’mon!”

Nikki shrugged. “I’m sorry. But magic spells and incantations? I never knew you wanted to be a writer, Jo!”

Johanna huffed. “Definitely not.”

“Though…” Nikki pondered with her finger to her chin. “If you were to prove it to me, use the spell on something… maybe it’d be different.”

Johanna hardened. That was something she could do… and yet, when she performed the spell the first time, it almost felt as though she did something wrong. It had been a huge drain on her the first time, sending her to sleep. And besides, it was already going on 5 o’clock. Her mom expected her home by 4 usually.

“Oh, shit,” Johanna sighed as she recalled. “My mom.”

“What about her?”

“She’s been getting on my case lately. Dressing all ‘slutty’ and all,” Johanna emphasized her point with air quotes. “She’ll freak if I’m late home. We can talk more about this later.” Johanna slid out from the booth, thinking she may have forgotten something. Until, “Oh yeah, the nurse!”

Nikki awkwardly uncupped her hands from above the stunned frog, allowing Johanna to once again place it in her pack. As Johanna gathered her affects, Nikki decided to verbalize her thoughts, and said, “Well… have you tried using the book?”

“What, to get home?”

“No, bitch. To get your mom off your case.”

“My… mom?” The very idea of associating her mom with whatever powers this book possessed had never even broached her mind. It was… nigh unthinkable.

“That’s a big-ass book! I bet there’s a spell to get her off your case. Maybe even one to make her into your slave. Can you imagine that? Hahahahahaha!”

Johanna didn’t laugh.

Nikki sighed, reaching out to rub her girlfriend’s arm. “Not that I believe in this occult mumbo jumbo but I mean c’mon, the way you talk about her all the time… I dunno… almost sounds like she’s a pretty skank bitch.”

“N-not really…” Johanna and her mom did clash from time to time, but it’s not like she hated her. And besides, they used to be really close, at least before Dad died. That’s when she turned into a hardass all of a sudden.

“Well… if you do use the book… let me know. Because I wanna see.” Nikki leaned forward, planting a soothing kiss on Johanna’s collarbone that made her feel better. “So what’re you gonna do with the froggy there?”

Johanna glanced to her backpack pocket and smiled, watching as it puffed in and out from her repeated struggles. She appeared to have woken up. “I don’t know. I could just release her into the wild… though I’ve heard frog legs are a delicacy in certain places...” Johanna licked her lips. Something about doing such a thing to a creature that had once been a human just made her heart pound.

Even her Mom...

Nikki rolled her eyes. “Now I’m sure you’re just yanking my chain. Get out of here.”

“Thanks for chatting, Nik. I’ll think of something,” Johanna slung her backpack over her shoulder, pulling Nikki into another embrace.

“I’m sure you will. Love you,” Nikki smiled, letting go and watching as Johanna left the restaurant.

“Y-yeah, love you too,” Johanna said over her shoulder. She hadn’t put her book inside the bag. She still had it out, glancing down, thumbing through pages...

***

The city buses left early, and when she flagged down her first taxi, Johanna was halfway home before candidly mentioning her age, resulting in the driver turning around, kicking Johanna out of the vehicle, and leaving her on the side of the dingy road. When Johanna got home, night had fallen. She pulled her jacket a little tighter against her body, surveying the house. It appeared dark on the inside. There was always the chance her mom had gone to sleep early… though it was doubtful. Johanna rolled her eyes; if she had a phone, she wouldn’t need to be doing this clandestine spy reconnaissance. Then again, if she just obeyed her mother…

Johanna shook her head. She was sixteen. Practically an adult at this point – she even had the boobs to show for it! Her Mom can’t micromanage her every lifestyle choice forever. Still, at least for now… her mom was the one who held the power… right?

Johanna clutched her book tightly as she waddled down the driveway, sliding up to the front door, looking for her house key when…

“Oh no.”

Johanna patted her pockets. She checked her backpack. She took off her jacket, flipping it upside down, waggling it around, spreading loose coins and spare change from broken 20 dollar bills at the Hardee’s all across the front lawn. But no sign of her house key.

“No, shit!” Johanna crawled across the ground, feeling the grass between her fingers, but was unable to find anything, when…

The door opened.

Crouched on the ground, jacket off, digging through the yard for scraps, she turned with slow, trembling fear to face her mother, still in her own nightgown. Her breasts were practically overflowing, requiring an expertly tied belt of cloth to prevent their encumbrance from bursting through the silk garment as she crossed her arms, staring very sternly down at her daughter.

“Do you have even the slightest idea how late you are?”

Johanna brushed herself off, carrying herself up to height to almost look her mother in the eye. “N-no?”

“Oh, I’m sure. Johanna… When we had our agreement this morning, I thought we’d come to an understanding. I thought you had finally started to mature. But then you go and do… this… coming home in the dead of night…”

“M-Mom, it’s only 7:30 --”

“No, shut up! Just SHUT UP!” Her mother screeched, livid, face red. “You cannot continue to disobey me, in my house, coming home this late, when… is that… is that lipstick?!” Her mom lunged for Johanna’s collar, easily pulling down her tank top, exposing her cleavage as well as the smooch mark formed from Nikki’s earlier affectionate kiss.

“Mom, stop!” Johanna pulled away, but her mom refused to let go, the two tugged against each other, both screeching obscenities until --

RRRRRRIPPPPPP!!!

Johanna pulled herself away to the ground, her tank top ripped to shreds as her Mom held scraps of fabric in her talons, having inadvertently ripped it apart. Tears flooded Johanna’s eyes as she tried to block her bare exposed breasts from flopping out past her crossed arms. She beheld her mother, a woman who even now seemed to have had no idea this would be the result of her actions.

But Susan gulped, tossing the scraps away, and returned to her stalwart expression. “Get inside.”

“Mom, you --”

“NOW, Johanna! Get inside!”

Whimpering, Johanna waddled to collect her discarded backpack, jacket, coins and the leatherbound book all sprawled across the ground.

“Johanna. I am not going to ask again. If you do not enter this house right now…”

Johanna had just grabbed hold of the book, mumbling, “I-I just need to…”

“Okay,” her mother sighed, grabbing Johanna’s arm and yanking her past the threshold, even as she screamed in protest.

“My stuff!” she yelled, before being thrown into the house, half naked, holding onto nothing except the book.

“Johanna, when I ask… stand up. NOW, Johanna!”

Johanna watched her mother, and as tears streamed down her face, she stood to full height. The nightlight was the only thing that illuminated either of them.

“When I ask you to do something and you don’t do it… you cannot even begin to imagine how much that disrespects me. I’ve worked my entire life to support you. And I never asked for anything in return. And for you to… completely ignore me like that?”

“M-m-m-MOM, I’m sore--”

“No, we’re past that. We’re too late for that. I’ve let you run around like this wild child for long enough. Starting this summer – starting tomorrow, we’re instituting new rules. Phone, TV, computer, hell, even books!” And she snatched the book out of Johanna’s hands, holding it above her head as Johanna leapt for the tome, shouting out in fear.

“Mom, mom, please! Don’t touch that!!”

“So this is what was so important that you didn’t feel the need to listen to your mother immediately?” Susan said, flipping candidly through the pages. “Some sort of fairy tale shit?” She chuckled before tossing the book to the ground, where it landed open face-down with a SMACK!, the leather bindings struggling against the pressure.

“Don’t even think about leaving this building tonight. Tomorrow, we’re going to have an extended talk about the direction of your life.” And as Johanna quietly wept, Susan walked away, carelessly stepping on the book as she went, without a word or glance to her daughter.

Johanna was on her knees as she watched her go, up to hearing the door slam with an intense THUMP! Snot and tears were collecting in a puddle beneath her…

She remained there, for long after her mother left. Allowing the sadness, misery, grief to siphon out of her.

And in her calcified heart, a seed of contempt grew.

She crawled toward the book, propping her back against a nearby counter, and turned it over.

The page it had landed on depicted a human figure trapped in a birdcage while a much larger silhouette looked upon them with a vague smile.

The text read:

If one desires complete control over another individual, they need only recite the following words while imaging the individual in question in their mind.

Standing up, Johanna studied the incantation’s vague sequencing as she retreated to her room.

***

Susan remained up, even after disrobing, lying in her bed. Her heart beat wildly. As much as she needed to portray the image of the stern parent… her head just wasn’t in it.

Susan had always been the fun one. She’d always been the one that would look the other way while Johanna snuck an extra Oreo from the pack. The one to take her out to ice cream after the dentist visit. Susan hated being the bad guy, with a passion. She hated the look in her daughter’s face when she yelled at her.

Tears began to leak out of her own eyes. The look on her daughter’s face.

She’d humiliated her… outside. At night. The chances anyone would’ve seen were nil, but… still. It made Susan feel so dirty. Going from her parental protector to… whatever it was she’d just become. It made her feel a chill. A deep chill all the way to the depths of her soul that almost reduced her into a sniveling wreck as it chattered and chittered from the tops of her hair to the depths of her bones.

And as Susan began to recover from the episode in a cold sweat, drool leaking from her mouth, eyes finally able to see in color again… she sat up. She rubbed her head, realizing that perhaps the guilt was a bit much for her. And after once again putting her bathrobe on, she stood up to visit her daughter in her room. All she wanted was to prevent her daughter from growing up too fast, turning into a thirty-two-year-old mother of a sixteen-year-old. She didn’t know if she would deliver an apology… but she would deliver an explanation.

***

Johanna laid on her back, utterly, completely still. Her blankets were atop her, baking her in heat, but she dare not move. Her book had been safely stowed beneath her pillow. Whatever happened… whether this worked, or not… she didn’t want to leave anything to chance. She could only hope that a poor recitation of the spell didn’t accidentally turn her mother into a werewolf or anything.

Suddenly, the creaky sound of old floorboards began to rattle through the scaffolding. Her mother had gotten up.

Interesting, Johanna thought, as her heart pounded. She’d been waiting for around 15 minutes for… something to happen. But she didn’t really know what. But now it seems her mother was walking around the house. Closer… closer… closer to her own room, until…

Knock, knock, knock.

Johanna said nothing.

“Johanna, look… can I come in? Would you mind if I come in?”

Johanna did nothing.

“Johanna, I know you’re still awake in there. Please? I’d like to talk. Just for a minute, I promise.”

Johanna awaited the sound of footsteps foretelling her mother’s departure, but none came. For a few moments, she could be sure her mom was standing outside.

If she wanted to test that the spell worked, she should try something that her mother wouldn’t do normally, but was also detectable from behind the door. Taking a deep breath, Johanna whispered, quietly, gently, to none but herself… “I want you to stomp your foot.”

Johanna waited, and waited, and waited… until…

“Well, alright. Have a good night. And, just know… I love you. You know that, right?” And she pivoted, creaking the floorboards even more as she began to leave.

Johanna’s mouth was agape. Did the spell even work? There was practically no difference she could discern between her mother’s normal acting vs her mother under the spell! What was it she needed?

Pulling the book out, she shook her phone twice, activating the flashlight and flipping through to where she found the page. It was easy as the book now wanted to open here on account of the spine being bent. She squinted as she read, even as her mother now called out, “Johanna, I can see your light in there! Can you just let me in, please? I promise, I’m not mad at you.”

Johanna tried to ignore her, reading instead the text and context of the spell, cursing these 19th century witchcraft practitioners for being so unscrupulously vague in their verbiage. Abandoning the textual summary, she turned her gaze to the illustration.

A figure inside a birdcage…

A figure inside a birdcage…

Control… complete control…

Shrinking someone down was a good way to establish control over them. Could it be… the purpose of the spell was to shrink someone down?

***

Susan watched as the light in Johanna’s room shut off, and she cursed to herself. “Dammit.”

Susan sighed as she turned to leave. If she didn’t want to talk, she didn’t want to talk. Better to simply wait for tomorrow and make her case then. If anything it --

“ACH!”

Susan hunched over.

For a moment, she felt as though something alive and angry were trapped inside her skull, and it was trying very very hard to get out.

“Ah-ah-ah-AH!” Susan began to hyperventilate, wobbling and tripping to and fro, leaning against the wall as she felt a need to use both hands to scratch at her cranium, dragging her fingernails across her temples. The magnitude of this pain was something that could only be approached by that of the birth of her child. But the specific sensation of this pain was something wholly new: a fire, burning brightly in her mind, searing and hot, spreading out to deliver jolts of utter numbness to the rest of her body. As Susan vocalized unintelligibly, the faint part of her mind that was still functional briefly wondered whether she might’ve been suffering a stroke, a heart attack, a brain aneurysm. As spittle leaked from her mouth however, that functional last few brain cells began to reel in shock as Susan realized…

The room was getting bigger.

Her head clicked as it barely spun like a rotating fan held in place by a curious child. But the hallway was clearly, clearly becoming a larger space. She wanted to attribute it to vertigo, or even the angels of death finally spiriting her away form her body. But before long the effect became too much, too big to ignore. And it was only as she was reduced in size to less than that of a doll did she realize… she was less than the size of a doll.

Thoom…

Thoom…

Thoom…

Oh no.

Susan tried to move her arms. Her legs. She was propped against the baseboard as though it were the backboard of a bed, and her daughter’s room door loomed high into the sky before her. And behind that door… something was coming.

Click!

Creeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaakkkk…!

Susan gulped, gasped, as her daughter, now in a nightie that covered her breasts properly, opened the door, massive feet parking close to Susan, the teen glancing every which way for something. Seizing the opportunity for help, Susan tried to vocalize this plea, but was only able to produce a weak hiccup.

It seemed to do the trick, however, as Johanna’s gaze was pulled downward, scanning the floor until… the two locked eyes.

Oh, thank God, thought Susan. Help. Rescue.

Until… her daughter didn’t seem to be in a big hurry. In fact, past the first locking of eyes and raising of eyebrows… she didn’t seem to be too concerned at all.

In fact…

Was that… a smile?

Susan’s heart sank. And fear blossomed.

Just as the feeling began to return to Susan’s catatonic body of its own accord, Johanna reached down, her own nightgown nearly bursting against its seams from the stretching maneuver. She carefully cupped Susan into her hands, grinning all the way, as Susan could only twitch, trying in vain to move her mouth, say coherent words as her tiny little heart rushed to deliver live-sustaining adrenaline to her limbs. From this close, Susan was all too able to see the ridges carved into her daughter’s cheeks by her tears.

Almost robotically, Johanna closed her hands, completely concealing her mother from sight, and backstepped into her room. She turned on the lamp with her elbow, bathing the room in an orange glow. She sat in her desk, the rotating seat causing her to drift for a bit before stabilizing herself with her feet on the floor. Using her forearm to slide the underwear and discarded Takis bags from the table top… Johanna opened her hands again.

“Whoa…” Johanna whispered, careful to caress her mother carefully in her hands. “It… am I dreaming right now?”

“Ah-ah-ah…” Susan stuttered, shivering as her daughter looked at her, inspected her, examined her like one might examine a neat bug plucked from the bottom of a moss-ridden rock. “Ah, ah, AHHHHHHH!!!” She was unable to contain her screams, barely noticeable to the awestruck Johanna.

“This is no dream…” Johanna whispered with an ethereal excitement, picking her mother up by the leg and dangling her above the surface.

“AH, AH, STOP, PUT ME DOWN!!!”

Johanna leaned her cheek on her palm, staring down at her mother smugly, and said to her… “Or what?”

Susan’s own nightgown fell upside-down, revealing her mother’s bare privates. “JOHANNA, I SAID TO PUT ME DOWN THIS INSTANT!!!” Susan tried her best to inject some form of authority into her voice, but the blood was already flooding her brain.

“Yes, I know. I heard.” Johanna checked her nails. “And I said, or what?”

“I-I-”

“What are you going to do, huh? Ground me? Rip up my book? Take away my phone? Hey, where is that, by the way?”

Johanna smirked as her mother’s pitiful whimpers slowed to a halt, and she simply stared at her daughter with a terrified, confused expression. “W-what are… what?!”

“Don’t you get it now? I’m in control.” And Johanna unclenched her fingers, allowing her mother to fall to the desk, landing in a crumpled heap.

Susan coughed, sputtering as she crawled away from the direction of the titan above her. She didn’t know where she was going, or what she was doing, but all she knew was that she’d need to get away as quickly as possible.

“You could try,” Johanna said as though she read her mom’s mind, chuckling as she stood up from her seat, seeking to grab the book and peruse it some more. “In the meantime…” Johanna thought to what other fun things she could try with her mom as a shrunken tool in her possession. So much payback… years’ worth of payback. The only real problem was that she wished it hadn’t shrunk her mom to barely two inches tall. Having her a bit bigger would be…

CRASH!!

Johanna heard the sound of wood colliding with more wood, and turned rapidly. Had something gone wrong?

Immediately she saw the problem, and realized in terror: her mother was growing back! Was the spell wearing off?!

Susan realized it too, though the desk had already been overturned by her weight by the time she could do anything. Now on the floor, she slowly hobbled to her feet as Johanna realized with fear that she was staring at her not like she was a daughter… but like she was a witch.

Susan wasted no time. She’d been blessed with her full height once again, and she would not let this opportunity go to waste. She lunged for Johanna, claws extended, preparing to claw out her eyes if possible, restrain her, get the book away, and call the police for whatever it was her daughter had just done.

“AGH!!” Johanna dove out of the way, and her mother crashed into the bookshelf, depositing numerous hardcover books on her own head. She rose from the pile, seeing stars, but the visions of tomes floating around her head made her realize something… the book.

The creepy book she found amidst her daughter’s belongings.

It defied all logic, but logic had long since gone out the window. The source of this occult tomfoolery must be that book.

Susan wobbled, still unused to gravity at her natural height, as she turned to the bed, clawing away at the sheets, finding the book. She grinned maniacally as she then held two halves of it, trying to tear it apart by the bindings.

“Mom, NO!” Johanna had no idea whether the book itself had any power or if the spells and words themselves were the source of change, but either way she couldn’t let the repository of knowledge go to waste.

Susan didn’t stop, and in a jolt of panic, Johanna could only think about stopping her Mom when…

She began to shrink again.

“Oh… oh my God…” Johanna whispered.

“Huh? What?!” Susan exclaimed, trying hard to rip it apart with the few feet she had left, until at last the book became too heavy, falling out of her hands. “No, no, no no, no, NO! God fucking DAMMIT!!!”

Once again at two and a half inches, Susan saw Johanna coming for her. She looked around, diving into a pile of dirty clothes only to be fished out by Johanna’s prowling fingers once again.

“It doesn’t just let me shrink you…” she began, examining her mother once again as order was restored. “It lets me control your height! Hey… I wonder if…”

And, thinking to herself, Johanna willed for Susan to grow. She did, her whimpering ceased, and finally it was as though Johanna were holding a Barbie doll one foot high.

“This is so fucking cool…” Johanna whispered.

“J-J-Johanna…” Susan had been humbled by the display. For the briefest moment, she’d been gifted her height back. For the briefest moment, this nightmare seemed truly, finally over. Only for her to be jolted awake. And her daughter’s giant, giddy face was greeting her. “P-p-please, put me down?”

“Oh… oh, that is rich! You get the shit beaten out of you, I shrink you again, and somehow you think that asking nicely is going to undo the years of pain you’ve put me through, when it didn’t even work the first time?!” Johanna was practically laughing now, her own spittle flying in her mother’s face.

“I-I am your Mother… and I demand you put me down… n-n-n-now…” Susan had never been so scared in her life. Parenthood was already uncharted territory, and now she was venturing through waters no parent had ever gone through before.

“Hm… you know what? Sure! I’ll put you down…”

And Johanna dropped Susan.

The journey from her fingertips to the hardwood floor felt like it took an eternity, and when she hit the surface, Susan let out a sharp and pained grunt, as this doll size made her large enough to still feel pain from high drops. As she rolled, trying to get her bearings and stand up again, she was suddenly overtaken by a shadow, casting her in yet more darkness from the twilit room. The underside of Johanna’s foot.

“I have a feeling this isn’t what you had in mind, huh?” And Johanna stomped down.

“P’FWOHHH!!!” Johanna ground her foot down, though she was careful at all times not to break anything. It was a trial, though. She really really wanted to. The idea of turning her mother into a paste stain was beyond intoxicating, especially after today’s episode. Besides it was quite likely the book contained medicinal and regenerative spells, right? But Johanna’s better judgment argued against it, not wanting to increase the chances of unwanted side effects from a misincantation.

Susan, meanwhile, was having the time of her life being rubbed underneath her daughter’s rubbery sole, having to fight off the battering, probing toes, getting scraps of dead skin and toe jam stuck in her mouth, forced to swallow the excess she wasn’t able to spit out, and overall being diluted by the scent of her feet, still ripe from a long day of taking public and private transportation. Every word she tried to let loose was only superseded by a cough or groan to expel the waste her foot produced that entered her body. This went on for probably a far shorter time than it felt like, as Johanna only stopped once she got bored of this continued grinding of her mother against the dusty hardwood.

“This feels incredible…!” Johanna said, still awestruck. She was using her own mother as a Ped Egg. It made her feel… powerful.

As Johanna’s kneads became less forceful, more casual, more instinctive, she let up just enough pressure for Susan to get a word in edgewise, managing to sputter out a spare “PLEASE!!” or “CAN’T BREATHE”, though it wasn’t until she’d completely gone silent even then that Johanna decided to remove her foot from the body of her mother.

“Awwww… look at the itty bitty Susan…” Johanna chided, reaching down to pluck her mom’s limp body off the floor like a rag.

She held Susan by the scruff of her nightgown, and the woman hung, depressed, defeated.

“P...please...” she stuttered, tears mixing with spittle.

“Don’t you get – ah, shit.” Johanna swore as the nightgown between her thumb and forefinger unraveled.

Susan didn’t even stir as she fell. Though at this size, any fall would’ve had minuscule effects, Johanna still lunged for her anyway. She didn’t want her mom to get brain damage from a concussion. She still needed to be able to pay bills. Go to work. It was neat and all having her Mom at her beck and call like this, but she still wanted her to remain in her life.

Johanna held her mom in her hand, looking at her own naked body, her well-endowed tits.

She looked down at her own breasts, chuckling. That’s where she got them from alright.

Maybe her mom could remain in her life.

But whatever form that took, it would be under Johanna’s rules.

For now. For tomorrow. Forever.

“Nope… nope… dammit…”

Johanna dug around the closet, on her knees, rummaging through the spare paper and empty shoe boxes. Prior experience told her that her phone could be located in easy-to-reach places such as this. It’d already been almost a week and she was itching to tell Nikki everything that happened. As apprehensive as she was about unveiling the true scope of the book’s power to her only friend… scratch that. Nikki was more than her friend. She was Johanna’s everything. If Johanna couldn’t tell her anything… Johanna had nothing. She would be nothing, except a warden. A super-powered warden with magical abilities, but a warden all the same.

Johanna cursed, tossing another shoe box over her shoulder. She then glanced behind her, noticing that her mother’s room had fallen into disrepair of late. Candy wrappers littered the floor, as did Doritos bags. The remnants of half a dozen Uber Eats orders created a moat of trash about the perimeter of the bed, yet to be ferried to the kitchen trashcan. The bed itself was unmade, and it was due for a wash even before Johanna appropriated it on account of her mother being indisposed at the moment.

Still though, her Mother did one thing pretty well. When she said her phone was gone, she meant it.

Johanna had tried all week different ways to get her mother to divulge its location. At first, it seemed as though Susan was still in shock, and Johanna was willing to cut her a bit of slack, avoiding banging her up too much. Now, though, the defiance had set in. A dry defiance, left out on the counter overnight, but defiance all the same.

Johanna sighed. Time to pay her mother a visit.

Standing up, she left her mother’s room, instinctively closing the door behind her as the floor creaked.

She opened the door to her own room. The first hints of the morning rays were just streaming into through the windows, and the room itself was already lit by the faint glow of Johanna’s lamp. Susan, however, would not be privy to these little wonders of life on Earth. Not yet, at least.

Johanna grinned, taking a seat on her desk. She’d since cleaned much of it, so now the austere writing surface held nothing save a pencil and notebook, her lamp, and a single bottle labeled with a brand for Vitamin C, smack in the middle.

Johanna placed her wrist on the table in front of the bottle, bracing her forefinger behind her thumb, until…

PLINK!

A tinny little shriek echoed from its confines, and Johanna snickered. She grabbed the bottle, giving it a short shake to and fro, just for funsies. She then pressed down on the cap, pushing and turning to overcome the child-lock.

The bottle opened. Inside there lay a woman, though any similarities she had with the strong, confident mother Johanna once knew were now superficial. The bottle was not large enough in any direction for her to completely unfurl her body, so she was forced to curl into a fetal position to get some semblance of sleep. Her hair was stringy and dilapidated. Her eyes were sunken and hollow, nothing more than slight slits, crusted over in the darkness as they became nigh unusable. Her nightgown was torn and ripped, becoming little more than a rag to hide only the most private of privates allotted to someone who quite frankly was still quite the bombshell. Almost cuter now that she was all trapped and confined like that. It made Johanna feel oddly tingly, something that’s been happening for a while now whenever she thought about the particulars of this arrangement too much.

Susan turned her head, glancing toward the sky occupied by Johanna’s face, but not truly seeing anything.

Johanna chuckled, and she said, “Wakey, wakey, eggs and bakey!”

The horrid figure within split her mouth slightly, before breaking into a coughing fit. Johanna cringed, holding the bottle away from her as she waited for her mother to finish. Then she said, “Damn, don’t aim that at me, okay? Anyway, did you think any more about my request?”

Susan managed to pry her eyes open, and the moment she did, it was as though she was reminded that she was, in fact, in hell. There in her little capsule, she saw the face of her only daughter once again, and she immediately sought to shrink (figuratively) back into the safety of her uncomfortable little jar. “P-p-p-p-please…!” She repeated this mantra, over and over as Johanna rolled her eyes.

“You’re still on that ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ crap? I told you it was simple. Tell me where my phone is… and I’ll consider letting you grow back.”

Susan listened as Johanna seemed to portray herself as being completely reasonable, and not a demented abductress who had used unholy magic and gained some unknowable power upon another human being, much less her own mother. Something completely unheard of, Susan never could’ve imagined anything such as this were ever a reality outside of movies. And yet, here she was, on the receiving end of her daughter’s most furious ire. It was the crushing truth of her existence now, but every time she threatened to acknowledge that truth at face value, it threatened to tear her brain in half. It was much easier to retreat into her jar, where things were simple. The floor was flat, the roof was flat, the walls were curved. These were all verifiable truths. As uncomfortable a sleeping arrangement it was, at least this was something she could know ontologically.

But still, Susan wasn’t stupid.

She knew there were things that she could provide that Johanna simply couldn’t do herself.

Yet. Who knew if there were a spell to print money somewhere in that devil book of hers?

But for the time being, it was Susan’s money that kept the lights on, that kept the water running, that kept the gas hot. These were all things that more or less would continue for at least the next month before anyone found out she was missing.

But the phone was an urgent need. Without a phone, a teenager was nothing.

So Susan couldn’t give it to her. At least not that easy.

Johanna sighed again as her mother shook her head, searching deep within herself for the faintest seed of defiance.

“Still not going to obey me huh… c’mon, don’t you see that you’re not in charge anymore? I own you!” Johanna kicked out from her chair, standing up and putting her hands on her hips. “I can do anything I want with you, now! Don’t you get it?”

Nothing but a few squirrelly head-shakes.

“Oh, for the love of…” Johanna didn’t want to have to do this, but desperate times called for desperate measures.

She reached her thumb and forefinger into the jar, grabbing Susan by the shoulder, a move that elicited many shrieks and grunts as she tried and failed to push Johanna’s massive anaconda-like fingers away.

“Johanna, Johanna!” Her mother screamed back, finally waking up out of her depression-induced slump, the will to persist on her own terms fulfilling her. “Put me down, t-this instant!”

Johanna did nothing of the sort, holding Susan in front of her face, her dangling vantage point giving her a perfect view of Johanna’s steely eyes.

“You know I could crush you right now, right? I could smash you between my fingers, reeeeeally rub your remains hard so you become nothing but a red splotch on my palm. Like that,” Johanna snapped her fingers, startling her mother.

“I could step on you. I don’t even have to give you the dignity of crushing you beneath my bare feet, I could put on my chunkiest boots and stomp you out right there on the pavement… wouldn’t it be fun if I, like, gave you a head-start before I crushed you? That’d be kind of cool, huh?”

Susan watched as her daughter delved into thought, and only became more frightened. Her daughter tended to be a bit of an alternative girl, but these were… especially violent scenarios. Either she’d thought of stuff like this before, or she’d spent a looooong time mulling over the most creative ways to snuff Susan out since her shrinking. And Susan didn’t know which possibility was scarier.

“Or, hey! You know, I could totally just eat you right now! I could just swallow you down! You’re so small – I could make you so small – I wouldn’t even have to chew! Though I could… could you imagine that? Getting chopped in half by my incisors? Having your limbs crushed to paste by my molars? Ripped to shreds by my canines? See?”

Johanna hooked one finger inside her cheek, pulling at it to reveal her dazzlingly white teeth, seeming all the more sharp as she blew a huff of humid air back at Susan’s cringing face.

“I could do all of these things. All of them. Mother.”

Susan’s sniffs got louder. It was coming. She couldn’t take it. Breaking down into yet another panic induced series of sobs, Susan said, “J-Johanna… d-d-do you h-hate me t-that m-mm-much?!”

Johanna sighed again. “Quit blubbering,” she said, and she lowered Susan to the desk, dropping her on its surface and eliciting a slight “Oomph” as a result.

Johanna then took her seat, leaning her head on her palm. “As much as I hate what you did… I… don’t hate you.”

“Then change me back to normal!” Susan seethed, breaking out of her tears just long enough to sound intelligible. “Johanna please!”

“Let me finish.” Johanna injected a paralyzing authority in her voice, reminding Susan of her place. “I was saying… I don’t hate you. That’s why I don’t do these things. I don’t actually want to hurt you…”

Susan began to feel hope. Her daughter was expressing… restraint? That restraint could be weaponized. Maybe even modified into its cousin, remorse.

“Yes. I do still love you, Mother,” Johanna continued, sneering down and watching Susan’s slight smile melt away. “And that’s why I need you to finally learn who you are now. And do you know what that is?”

Susan didn’t want to entertain Johanna’s sadistic mind games. It wasn’t until she BANGED on the table with force that Johanna scrambled back up. “W-what?!”

Johanna giggled. “You’re my bitch! Isn’t it obvious?”

“I-I…”

“Face it.” Johanna flipped her bed-headed mane. “I have more power over you than you ever had over me. What, you thought keeping a roof over my head was power? I can turn you into a living dust mote. You literally cannot live without me! Hell, I haven’t even read the entire spellbook yet. I bet I could just make a new mother just like you and nobody will be able to tell the difference! And you could spend the rest of your life in a terrarium.”

Susan was once more taken aback by her daughter’s callous suggestion of supernatural forces to erase her from greater existence.

“It’s this… love,” Johanna practically spat out the word, as though it were physically painful to say, “that keeps me from doing that.”

Johanna exhaled, crossing her arms as she prepared her final thesis. “Mom, I could grow you back. We could be the family we were always meant to be! We could go out together, we could bond more than ever! And all it would take… is accepting me. As your master. That’s your first choice.

“Or…”

Susan shivered as Johanna’s huntress eyes narrowed on her.

“I could crush you like the bug you’ve become. And wipe you out of my life. So, what’ll it be?”

Susan waited for a long while, and Johanna never took her eyes off her. Johanna patiently rapped her fingernails on the desktop, a maneuver that made it difficult for Susan to stand. She wholly expected Susan to give her answer then and there. A final ultimatum that would decide the duration of Susan’s remaining life.

Susan balled her fists, staring down at her body, barely covered only in the most critical places by scraps of fabric tied about her. She unclenched, gritting her teeth before saying, softly, gently to the floor…

“No.”

Johanna’s eye twitched. “I’m sorry?”

“J-just kill me.” Susan slumped down to her ground, hugging her knees, rocking back and forth slightly. “Just kill me.” Susan was numb. Nothing made sense. It would be easier to die than to live with the pain that everything in her entire being had been upheaved.

Johanna looked down at her mother’s pitiful curled up state. Johanna didn’t want to kill her, that was the entire problem! Was I too harsh, thought Johanna? No, of course not. She’d been quite reasonable; she’d even dropped bread crumbs into her pill bottle every breakfast, lunch, and dinner! Her mom must’ve been weaker-willed than she thought.

If Johanna wanted to keep her mother as a pet, she would have to remind her of what it felt like to be alive.

“Okay,” Johanna said, smiling.

“W-what?” Susan asked, looking up from her depressed glare to see her daughter’s fingers coming toward her.

“If you want to die, who am I to deny you?” Johanna winked, plucking her mother up once again, squirming, writhing, before popping the two-inch woman in her mouth.

Johanna’s jaws shut as her teeth snapped closed, locking her mom in a wet cave. She woman was battered continuously as Johanna’s jaws adjusted themselves, her slimy tentacle-like tongue battering the screaming woman consistently as she tried to bang against the walls of Johanna’s cheek and gums, doing nothing but being beaten back by their saliva-coated patina. This made Johanna laugh.

“Mm, hm-hm-hm-hm-hm…!” Johanna had never felt this way before in her life. She had a live, human person in her mouth, being completely covered in her spit, fighting for her dear life, trying and failing to overcome the eldritch environment of Johanna’s jowls. It was an incredible experience, feeling someone struggling against you so helplessly, so fruitlessly.

It reminded Johanna of... that feeling. That feeling that’s been coming to her in recent days.

That tingly feeling of power.

Slowly, Johanna’s hand began to travel to her crotch, feeling the warm wetness as she traveled beneath her bathrobe.

Susan, meanwhile, was feeling the suffocating compression of her daughter’s mouth. The initial experience was traumatic enough, but now it seemed as though Johanna was merely flipping her around, gumming her like a piece of rubbery candy. Her entire body was coated in the sticky stuff, sticking her hair to her face and eyes, her hands too unable to get a grip. Susan shut her eyes, her mouth becoming a thin line. You asked for this, she chanted in her head. You asked for this… so take it!

But then…

Susan started to get smaller.

“No, no no!” Susan screeched, as her body began to get even more minuscule, traveling from two inches, to one inch, half an inch, a quarter of an inch, a millimeter… all the way down to a measly half a millimeter, not even as big as an ant. Johanna kept her cheeks slightly puffed, the meager translucent light filtering through them giving Susan the appearance of a slightly pulsing, dark cave, lined by impassable gates of pearly teeth.

But as Susan sat helplessly on Johanna’s tongue, she realized the next danger: the saliva.

Drips of it were inching down the flesh walls, but what were once annoyances in comparison to her had now become massive trials, pond-size boulders of sticky liquid that were filling the cavern quickly, daring to slowly overcome and drown Susan before long.

Drowned in her daughter’s own saliva.

“Help, help!” Susan screeched as Johanna’s tongue shifted, dropping her is the thick soup. The cavern shifted, and gravity began to flow backwards, toward that damp dark tunnel headed by the ever-pulsating uvula. Susan had to hold on to the rough taste-buds of the tongue to avoid being swept away into the deluge of her daughter’s mouth. “HELP! HELP! HEEEEEEELP!!! I DON’T WANT TO DIE!!!” The existential fears of drowning, of darkness, of death, of being devoured, digested. They felt insurmountable as she struggled to stay afloat, to stay grounded, to avoid the oh-so-easy slip up that would send her plummeting down the tunnel of the esophagus. Susan’s tears evaporated into the rainy spit soup as she manically called for someone, for anyone. For a god or gods, for mercy. But only one creature in her entire life had the power to grant her mercy, and Susan hadn’t done a very good job of earning that creatures favor.

Not now, maybe not ever in her life.

Johanna meanwhile, was having the best time of her life.

Flopping supine on her bed, she was driving her fingers deep into her pussy, unable to moan, unable to even swallow, for fear of her inadvertently sending her mother plummeting to her death in Johanna’s stomach. She didn’t even want to think about what would happen if she grew her back then. But it didn’t matter, her absolute, overwhelming power over her mother was enough to drive her over the edge, even if her self stimulation was helping her along.

Johanna squirmed, feeling the slight, pebble-like entity in her mouth get tossed and turned against absolutely cavernous walls. She could scarcely even imagine what it would’ve felt like in there. Dark and scary, warm, utterly sopping wet? Johanna shivered, imagining it, imagining what she was putting her mother through… She rubbed her fingers over her clitoral hood, alternating between that and stuffing them in her vagina, massaging her bare-breasted nipples all the way as her entire body had been exposed in her expression of self-love.

Johanna removed her hand from her crotch, seeing it in front of her face, moistened and slickened with sticky juice of their own.

Johanna planted her left index finger inside her mouth, poking it through her lips, tasting it, allowing the salty ejaculate to mingle with her increasingly oceanic saliva, further torturing her mother as she was forced to contend with the hot, musky fluids. This torture was neverending as she was continuously swept away, all the while Johanna had already returned to getting herself off again, unable to stop, toes curling, back arching, finally breaking out into a harmony of moans, still never stopping, going even faster and faster as she rode her orgasmic high, spilling countless drizzles of her cum onto the bed, until finally, her fatigue caught up with her, and she fell back, winded, legs spread into a “V”. She allowed herself to open her drooling mouth to catch her breath, and a dangling Susan was once again allowed to see the faintest semblances of light as the morning sun finally drifted into Johanna’s room in its full glory.

Susan saw this opening, and she didn’t even hesitate. She tried to get any bit of purchase on Johanna’s inner gum walls, but always found herself sliding down, erasing any progress she made, landing on her daughter’s sideways tongue.

As Susan tried again and again to escape… she realized at once what she was doing.

Susan was laying there, in the wake of her latest failed attempt, trying to climb out of her daughter’s mouth.

She didn’t want to live like this. But it was evident she feared dying just as much.

Susan tried to sigh, but instead coughed out several globules of saliva in a hacking fit.

“Johanna…!” Susan tried to call out, weakly. “JOHANNA!!!” She called again, breaking into another fit. As she cupped her mouth preparing to shout once more, two long, slender fingers began to invade the sinkhole from above, and Susan felt a warbling in her stomach as she began to expand once again, just enough for the diminutive woman to give Johanna the purchase she needed to grab her.

A strand of sticky spit was still connected to Susan by the time she was pulled out of Johanna’s bubbling mouth, the strand breaking and coating her lower lip like a ring. Johanna was now sitting up on the bed. She smiled at Susan, who hung limply again, completely naked but now with eyes wide, full of clarity as she stared at her daughter who was almost equally nude, save a single black choker.

“Did that trip give you some perspective?”

Susan nodded frantically.

“Well then! Have you changed your decision in any way? I really hope you did, because I swear to God I will literally chew you to bits if you still try this whole ‘defiance’ bullshit.”

Susan nodded, slightly less frantically.

Johanna giggled, reaching down and placing Susan on the floor at the foot of the bed, a small puddle of drool forming beneath her as she tried and failed to stand up.

“Prove it,” Johanna said. And she snapped her fingers, and before she knew it, Susan was back, at normal size, completely naked, the saliva that once coated her now simply a thin wet shell, evaporating in the ambient air in only an instant.

The crouching Susan didn’t even have the time to truly appreciate her return to full size before Johanna shoved her foot in Susan’s face, arms crossed.

“Prove to me your devotion. Worship me.”

Susan was assaulted by the foot’s slightly musty, dusty scent, the consequence of back and forth trips between two rooms on hardwood tile halls. She backed away slightly, still crouched, but unwilling to truly give in, just yet.

“I’m waiting.” Johanna chided Susan, who turned white with fear. She’d only just been blessed with her former size once again, she couldn’t squander it, this gift, this life. Not now, not so soon.

Susan looked up at her daughter. Even here, just out of bed, in the morning light, she looked regal. Susan always thought her daughter was beautiful. The most beautiful creature in the whole world. But now, as she held her foot out to her mother, the pit in her stomach began to disappear, and she started to see her daughter in a… slightly different light.

Even now, in the back of her mind, the seed of defiance was chastising Susan for even thinking this way. For daring to think this was an acceptable result of everything that had occurred over the past week. For daring to give up hope.

But… what hope was there?

If Susan did this, there was hope. Hope for a life free of fear. Hope that she could live as a full human.

Hope that her daughter would love her again.

Johanna truly did own her. What point was there in resisting? And would it really be so bad, in the end? Giving her everything for the person she loved?

Isn’t that what parenthood was all about, anyway?

And so, Susan took Johanna’s foot in her hands, and she planted a kiss on it, directly on the bottom of the sole. The kiss was long, but felt far longer to Susan, who began to convulse as she neared her oxygen capacity threshold until finally letting go of the smooch, leaving a wet spot in the ball of Johanna’s foot.

“V-very good,” Johanna sighed, feeling a convulsion of her own come on, as she began to once again plant her hands in the middle of her snatch. “Keep going.”

Susan was well familiar with the sound and scent of female masturbation. Somehow, the fact her daughter was literally getting off at her expense was enough to make another barrage of doubt batter her mind. But this was her one second chance at a first impression. She had to suck it up.

Susan kissed Johanna’s foot again.

And over, and over, and over again, as Johanna stretched out, laying down, playfully twisting and curling her toes in her mother’s face as she continued to masturbate.

“Ahhhhhhhh... this is so… so good,” Johanna breathed in between strokes. Her sore labia didn’t take much to achieve a shivering, minor orgasm, one that inadvertently kicked Susan in the face slightly as the winded Johanna stretched out to once again regain her breath. Susan accepted this, waiting until Johanna finished reeling and resting for more orders.

Once she did, Johanna wheezed out a chuckle, propping herself on her shoulders to finally look down at her mother’s tear-stricken, crying, pitiful face, awaiting its orders like a dog.

“Ah, ah-ha! Ha! You fucking did it!”

Susan sniffed in response, silent.

Johanna looked down with a smile tinged with pity. Then she leaned down, planting a kiss on Susan’s hair.

“Mmmmmmm’wah!”

The move startled Susan, who shrank back slightly. Johanna smiled at her, and pet her hair.

“Good girl.”

Johanna stood up, still keeping her eye on her mother as she sauntered nude, hips swaying, breasts swinging, to the other side of the bed, grabbing the spellbook. “And just so we’re clear, if you ever, ever try to disobey me and take this?” Johanna brandished the book. “I am going to make you so small that you can live a hundred lifetimes on the ridge of my toe and never travel farther than a nanometer. M’kay?”

Susan shivered, still keeping her eyes low.

Johanna grabbed a handful of clothes from the floor and stuffed them underneath the crook of her arm. She picked up her panties from the previous night, still slick with cum that was just beginning to crust over, and she tossed them to her mother, where they landed on her shoulder.

“Feel free to get familiar with that scent. You’ll be seeing a lot of it. But in the meantime… this is your room, now.” Johanna felt a rush as she delegated her tiny room to her mother. The twin-size bed sheet was still soaked in Johanna’s own cum, a deep dark spot that still had a silvery pearl of incandescent fluid in the middle where it had yet to absorb.

“Tomorrow we’ll have a lengthier conversation about the location of my phone. I’ve got a lot of things to tell Nikki. And hey, maybe if you’re really good, we can finally sleep together in my bed…” Johanna smirked before turning to open the door. “Ciao!”

Johanna left through the door.

Susan stayed there, crouched, in the ready position for a few moments when the knob turned again and the door creaked open. Johanna popped her head in, slightly apologetically. “Oh, almost forgot! Mom?”

Susan craned her neck up to look at Susan.

“I love you.” She blew a kiss to her mother and then closed the door once again.

Like a loose rubber-band, Susan suddenly flopped to the floor, limp in a heap, sobbing silently as she slowly reckoned the reality that would be her new life.

***

Johanna clutched the doorknob. She kept it turned, holding it stiff, gazing through the seam of the door. She watched as her mother collapsed into a pile, whimpering a quiet, pitiful whimper.

Johanna smiled, slowly, painfully slowly, turning the knob back, ensuring it didn’t squeak or creak by the speed of her movements. The door closed, Johanna decided to give her mother a bit of alone time. She’d earned it, after all. In a sense.

Well then, thought Johanna.

Time to check on her other new tenant.

Johanna strolled through the house, the living room, to the kitchen, completely and utterly free. She absentmindedly scratched her buttock, finding her way to the counter where a large glass jar filled with twigs, leaves, and clumps of grass was situated next to the microwave. Inside a small mottled-green frog was lying still, silent, only stirring at Johanna’s presence, staring at her with big, bug eyes.

The frog croaked a pitiful croak.

Johanna snickered, grabbing a slice of bread and breaking it up into pieces over the mouth of the glass enclosure. “What to do with you… I’ll figure something out. Trust me.”

The frog hopped around, taking brief, depressed pleasure in the arrival of its food as Johanna winked, leaving it to its own devices.

“I could always use more toys. And once I get my phone back… you’ll all have a new owner to be toyed with.”

Candles lined the bathroom. Counters, floor, the edge of the tub. Their fragrance wafted upward, filling the misty, steamy quarter with the scent of pumpkin spice and autumn.

The tub was a mass of bubbles, shifting and jiggling in that precarious way bubbles are wont to do. Amidst the soapy smokestacks, a tray floated on the surface of the water, upon which laid an open book.

It displayed a middling page. The words were scrawled hastily, and the archaic format and aged paper made it difficult to discern whether some instances of illegibility were the result of poor handwriting, or whether they were written that way as a method of communing with the dark magic this book seemed capable of tapping into.

The water stirred and bubbled. The tray upon which the book floated began to shift. Like a kaiju awakening from the deep, the reddish-brown head of a young girl poked through the surface, shimmering with the silky shine of a long time in the bath. Her eyes were rendered shut, as was her mouth. When at last her entire torso, fully adorned with a pair of heavy, flopping breasts rose from the depths of the water, only then did Johanna allow herself to take a breath of air.

GASSSSP…!

She looked back at the book hesitantly. The illustration portrayed what seemed to be a man enclosed in a sphere of water. Air bubbles lifted from his mouth. The instructions impressed upon Johanna that if this incantation was activated correctly, she would be able to breathe underwater for a few minutes. But though Johanna had recited the spell and felt the surge of power shiver through her bones… there was just something about putting your faith and breath in the hands of unknown forces that repelled her. Suffocation was an ancient fear, older even than that of wild animals, thunderstorms, poisonous snakes, maniacs. Humans take their breath for granted. So ubiquitous is the blessing of air, but when confronted with even the possibility it could be taken away from them… it was enough to make even the bravest men uneasy.

Johanna scoffed. How did scuba divers do it?

Oh well. She’d test it some other time. Johanna shifted her legs, each one displacing cloud-like mountains of built-up bubbles that floated gently across the surface of the pool. Her toes clutched the cool, smooth ceramic that made up the bottom of the tub, and Johanna rose to full height. Water and foam cascaded off her body like a Gen Z rendition of The Birth of Venus, and her pale form was perfectly accentuated by the orange glow of the candles in her midst. Johanna spat out a spritz of soapy spit, and it dribbled down her chin.

She lifted her leg out of the pool with care and deliberation, and she was struck by how cold the air felt despite the candles’ presence. She took one step on the bathmat, and then another. Her body was soaked in water droplets.

Johanna examined herself in the mirror. She turned, looked at her smooth back, her pert buttocks. She held her breasts in her hands, clutching them and suspending them before letting them bounce back. The soapy mounds jiggled. Johanna laughed.

She looked to her face. It was the perfect picture of a mature woman. Her hair was in wet streaks around her forehead, and her freckles only just barely could be made out in the low light. But they were there. The familiarity was two-fold. Johanna was many things, but she was her mother’s daughter first and foremost.

Ding-dong!

Speak of the devil.

Johanna smiled. She grabbed a towel from the rack, and without pausing for even a moment to dry herself off, Johanna walked out the door, slinging it over her shoulder as she sauntered into the master bedroom.

Johanna had taken it upon herself to straighten the place out these past few weeks. Of course, she had to do away with those drab and grey sheets and bedspread that once populated her mother’s former bed. Now, hot pink was the new wave. Pastel polka dots speckled the pillowcases. Floral-scented air fresheners gave Johanna a fresh hit of dopamine every time she drew a breath. Her books had already been transplanted from her old room into this swanky new one where they took up about a quarter of the space on the massive bookshelf at the east wall. Of course, despite having ample space for it on the shelf, Johanna only very rarely parted ways with the mysterious spellbook that now languished in her bathroom. She wouldn’t leave it unattended unless the very remote possibility of its pilfering was completely done away with. By now, though, nobody in the household even had the drive to attempt it.

Johanna continued through the hallway, leaving soapy wet prints with every step she made. She continued through to the living room, where the television was perpetually set to one or more of Johanna’s favorite romcom marathons. She proceeded into the kitchen, spic and span without a scrap of dirt or dust anywhere. Until finally, she stepped into the main foyer and reached the door.

Susan was standing outside, well-dressed, fidgety, nervous, attentive. She straightened out the buttons on her blazer and was just beginning to wonder whether she should ring the doorbell again when it suddenly opened. There, plain as day at the threshold, Johanna stood, smiling, nude as the day she came out of the womb, still sopping with soap bubbles.

Susan wanted to roll her eyes, but Johanna’s gaze had become sensitive to such gestures. Susan fought the urge and waited. And waited.

Johanna waited too, overlooking her mother’s restless form. Susan clearly wanted to look behind her, see if anyone had noticed this naked teenage girl displaying herself as readily to the entire world as she would her first lover. But Susan didn’t take the bait. She remained focused on Johanna. And she waited.

Finally, Johanna stepped aside. “You can come in.”

Susan almost leaped into the door, closing it behind her as she let go of a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. She set down a briefcase next to the door and looked at her daughter, naked and wet. “Do you really –”

“Stop.”

Susan stopped.

Johanna’s word was law in this house, and in life.

Now that they were both in the house, the slight incline Johanna had above her mother was gone. They were once again eye-to-eye, with maybe a slight favor to Susan. Still, the very fact that Johanna had somehow gained the confidence to walk about naked and in the open with only a towel slung over her shoulder as a garment was intimidating enough.

Johanna grabbed the towel and shook off some of the ambient water it’d collected. And she held it out to her mother. “Dry me.”

Susan gulped, and she nodded as she took the towel. Johanna went to the most open part of the living room, her wet feet continuing to make sticking and unsticking noises. She stood, legs together, and held her arms out in a “T” position. Susan was apprehensive, but for the most part she was thankful. Drying her naked daughter was far from the most unusual thing Johanna had requested – nay, demanded – her mother fulfill now that their relationship dynamics had shifted. She started with Johanna’s torso, dragging the towel in a gentle scrub across her back, sides, and breasts before winding it around her shoulders and arms. Much of her had apparently air-dried in the walk over here, which made this easier at least. Johanna’s rear was as pert and toned as it’d ever been, while her vagina was itself still the budding emblem of femininity that for the most part hadn’t been brandished to Susan now that she’d been reduced to a servant. Susan had no reason to believe Johanna would ever do such a thing… but then again, she had no reason to believe she was capable of anything like what she’d done thus far.

Once her lower body was complete, Susan wrapped the towel around her neck. For this, she was extra careful. Johanna had given Susan access to a device more than capable of choking her. Fortunately, Susan would never even think of choking her own daughter… anymore. Anyway, onto her hair. It was still a bit damp by the time Susan was finished, but for the most part it was now back to the voluminous amber locks that turned the heads of boys (and some girls) everywhere.

“Stop.”

Susan stopped. Her arms hung limply at her sides.

Johanna experimentally ran her fingers through her hair. They came out slightly damp. She turned her head, glancing at Susan.

“I did the best I could –”

“Stop.”

Susan stopped.

“If I want you to speak, I’ll address you. Come on, Mom,” Johanna gave a funny grin. “It’s first grade!”

Johanna turned in place again, looking at her body. Indeed, it was dry. Evaporation would get the rest. As she was twisting in place, she said, “You did a good job.”

Susan was silent.

“You can speak now.”

Susan’s shoulders were allowed to relax. “Oh, t-thank you… sweetie.”

Johanna pulled her mother into a squeeze, standing on her tippy toes as her bare breasts flopped and flooded about Susan’s collarbone. Their warmth was jarring to Susan, who only barely managed to reciprocate some nascent semblance of a hug before Johanna pulled away, seemingly undeterred. “So how was your day at work?”

“Oh… it was… work.”

“C’mon!” Johanna jeered, sinking into the couch. She rubbed the spot next to her as she cocked her ankle on her knee. “Spill the juicy deets! Any drama happening that I should know about?”

It was just like… before. Before they’d grown apart. Before this magical bullshit ever happened.

“Well… my boss is kind of a pain in the ass. She’s been getting on my case ever since I had to take that… vacation.” Susan sighed and seated herself on the couch. Johanna snuggled up next to her, wrapping her arm around Susan’s shoulder. Her skin was warm, and it made Susan feel good, just a little bit. “I’ve got a bunch of take-home work to finish. I probably won’t be able to make dinner tonight.”

“Wow…” Johanna said, her eyes widening. “You know, I’ve still got the book. If you want me to do something funny to your supervisor, all you have to do is ask. Like, hmmm… I could shrink her! Or maybe I could put her under some sort of mind control. Maybe I could flay the–”

“Johanna…” Susan was pale, and she shook her head. “P-please.”

Johanna was a bit flummoxed. She unhooked her arm from her mother’s shoulders and leaned against her knees. “Alright then.”

The two were silent. Susan wanted to get up, but she hadn’t received a directive. These times were dangerous. Johanna was prone to long fits of deep thought, yet for her it felt as though only a few moments had passed. Moving against Johanna’s whims during this time could break her out of the stupor, yet was a sure way to incite her wrath. At first, Susan thought it was just her losing herself in her own head. But after one such instance lasted for nearly 20 minutes, Susan… had to wonder. What could cause her daughter to change in that way?

Thankfully, this fit only lasted five minutes. “I know! My girlfriend Nikk–” Suddenly, Johanna put her hand to her mouth. Despite being naked, it was this slip-up that caused her to become mortified in response to her mother’s stern glare.

Susan was a bit relieved that even at this advanced stage of their relationship, she still had the power to influence her daughter in ever-dwindling ways. She held onto this relief and used that to channel confidence. “What do you mean by ‘Girlfriend’?”

“She’s…” Johanna rubbed her hands along her thighs, avoiding her mother’s gaze. “My friend. Who is… a girl…”

“Johanna, please. You are too young to be engaging in these relations!” Susan was getting back into her stride. She was in her element. She stood up, causing Johanna to shrink back. “Do what you want with me, but I’ll not sit back idly while you find yourself neck deep in things you should have nothing to do with!”

“But M-mo–”

“I’m talking!” Susan snapped.

Silence.

The two stared each other. Susan had a lifetime’s worth of experience staring people down… but Johanna was her mother’s daughter. She wasn’t backing down. And rather than shrink like a mouse at Susan’s denigration… she stood up and looked her mother in the eye.

“No,” Johanna said.

“No?” Susan tried to sound more indignant, but she feared it came across a bit more chirpily than she would’ve liked.

“Yes,” replied Johanna. “No.”

Susan was just getting comfortable in the role of mom again, and it was already slipping away. She couldn’t let it… but whatever she did, she had to do so carefully. “Well, as your mother, I –”

“No.”

There was something in Johanna’s voice. Something… behind it, and it shut Susan up. Johanna herself felt a bit startled she’d made such a sound with her mouth, despite the fact nothing outwardly wrong seemed to have been in her tone. It was just… an unsettling noise. Vaguely unsettling.

Once she’d gotten over it, Johanna continued, her voice now normal, yet no less intimidating. "I find it... amusing how bold you’ve been getting… but now I fear I’ve kept you on too long a leash.”

Susan knew she had to respond to that slight. No matter how much she didn’t want to. “A leash? I –”

Smack!

Tears flooded Susan’s eyes, not least of which from the assault on her cheek she’d just suffered. Johanna was looking at her own palm, red from the strike, somewhat mystified. Then she turned back to her mother, confidence renewed. Susan stayed silent.

“I’ve let your transgressions slide for the past few days. But it seems to me like you need a bit of reconditioning.”

And Susan started to shrink, clothes and all.

“H-huh?! Johanna… Johanna, stop! Wait! Please, please don’t… Johanna, Johanna please…” Susan pleaded all the while as Johanna simply grinned, reducing her once proud mother to a speck on the floor, only capable of facing Johanna’s toenail in the eye.

Susan had almost forgotten what it felt like to be small. She had only been shrunken down sparingly since that first hellish night when her daughter had revealed her new powers. And that book. It was almost too terrible a memory to hold onto, but as much as Susan wanted to suppress it, it haunted her dreams every night.

“In fact…”

Johanna’s voice reverberated down to Susan’s core, sending her to the ground where she was forced to look up at her daughter’s nude body, sparkling gently as it steamed off the last traces of bathwater that Susan missed. She hung in the air like a Greek colossus ready to pass down judgment.

“…I think I may have outgrown you, Mother.” And Johanna raised her foot. It cast Susan in eclipse. “We’ve certainly proven that I’m more than capable of living on my own. Do you have any last words? Rites? Little jabs you wanna get in so I’ll regret this even less?”

“JOHANNA, JOHANNA PLEASE, STOP, PLEASE!” Susan threw herself to the ground beneath Johanna’s foot, her pitiful cries barely able to penetrate the massive ceiling of supple flesh. “I WAS WRONG, DON’T KILL ME, DON’T KILL ME… please…” Susan sobbed in the carpet as her life flashed behind her eyelids, every bit of pain and pleasure she’d experienced, that all led to this most undignified death.

Johanna smirked.

And suddenly, Susan was groveling at normal size. Her head was being kneaded by Johanna’s sole.

“Gotcha,” Johanna said cheekily, and Susan tried to respond, to aim her gaze upward, but all she got was a face full of foot as Johanna burst into giggles.

“Oh man, I wish I had a better view of your face. You really thought I was gonna do it!” Johanna nearly doubled over, still absentmindedly rubbing her foot on her mother’s awestruck, shellshocked expression. She… she was kidding?

“It’d be too much of a pain in the ass figuring out how to pay off the mortgage, so you’re safe for now,” Johanna said, relaxing back in the sofa. “But don’t make that mistake again.” Her eyes narrowed.

Susan nodded rapidly.

“Good. Now go ahead and give me a quick foot rub. I’ll call Nikki and see if she’s down to make something. She’s a fantastic cook, so it shouldn’t be a problem!” Johanna shoved her feet in her mother’s face ever more as she rattled off the to-do list for her and her mother. Susan’s hands went on autopilot, beginning their work of kneading into Johanna’s ultra-soft wrinkles. Johanna sunk back into the sofa. She would never admit it, but her mom’s touch was a source of comfort, and she genuinely loved these massages. She’d never get rid of her… unless she could find a suitable replacement of course.

“I just need to figure out how to introduce…” Johanna gestured vaguely. “All of this.” As Johanna pondered in thought, she suddenly raised the question. “Hey, do we still have Max’s old collar and leash?”

Susan grimaced.

***

Nikki was buzzing with both anticipation and nervousness as she wheeled her 2006 Toyota Corolla into Johanna’s twilit driveway. Once she put it in park, she stayed there for a moment, resting her forearms on the steering wheel as she took in Johanna’s normal, single-story brick house. A bit small, but more than enough space for two people. Certainly better than Nikki’s apartment, anyway. She liked it! She would love to live in a house like this with Johanna someday.

Of course, there was more to it than just the house’s appearance. Truthfully, Nikki was a bit concerned. She hadn’t physically seen Johanna in weeks, and the conversations they did have through text were slight and curt. Nikki at first couldn’t shake the fear that Johanna didn’t want to see her anymore, which would’ve been quite the gut punch. But to suddenly be invited over for dinner? It was an odd, out of the blue request, but Nikki jumped into action, making enough teriyaki skewers for five people, and seconds, and a side salad to boot. Not that she’d ever tell Johanna how much getting her call meant to her. She had to play it cool.

And then there was Johanna’s mom. Nikki had never met the woman, but based on Johanna’s description she sounded like all the worst aspects of Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Attila the Hun combined. Or at least, an unpleasant, conservative mother to live under. She’s exactly the kind who would’ve flipped the moment Nikki introduced herself as Johanna’s girlfriend -- if not for the fact she was a lesbian, then because of the fact she was a sophomore at Pine University. Nikki still wasn’t sure about any of this, but Johanna had been insistent. And when Johanna’s insistent, Nikki just can’t say no.

So, she removed her key from the ignition and put it in her leather jacket pocket. After taking a brief glance in the mirror to check her makeup, Nikki scooped the bundle of plastic grocery bags within which the food was encased in one arm, and she clutched the tiny potted bamboo in her free hand. Opening and closing the car door was a struggle, but she managed, and she hobbled up to the front doorbell, pressing it (or, more accurately, bumping it) with her elbow.

Not long after, Johanna opened the door in a pair of hot denim pants with a bra and cardigan. Her eyes lit up. “Nikki!!!”

“There’s my little Jo-Bear!” Nikki cooed. Her arms instinctively wanted to reach out and hug her, but they were otherwise indisposed.

Johanna noticed this and immediately grabbed the various trays of food, trotting through the foyer and putting the food on the kitchen counter. “Oh my God, this smells absolutely incredible. And it’s still warm, too!”

“Aw, it’s nothing,” Johanna said, stretching out her arms now to get rid of their soreness. She followed Johanna into the kitchen. “Just a little something I threw together. Where do you want this?” She brandished the tiny potted plant.

“Oh, it’s adorable! You can put it over there,” Johanna gestured vaguely at the counter, in the same direction as the plastic enclosure that currently held a ribbeting frog.

“Ohhhh, hey!” Nikki laughed and walked up to the enclosure, putting a finger against the clear plastic. The frog inside followed the finger and looked at Nikki with a depressed, anthropomorphic gaze. “I remember this little guy! What’d you name her?”

“Hm? Oh…” Johanna put a finger to her mouth. “I, never actually… huh. I never got around to it.”

“It’s a fat little one, isn’t it. Maybe… Chubster? Or Twiggums! Maybe Swampy! Or, hmm…” Nikki glanced at Johanna for affirmation and noticed she had a very odd expression on her face. “Oh, hey, what’s wrong?” She approached her and put her hands on Johanna’s shoulders as Johanna looked askance. “Jo-Bear… sweetie… what’s wrong?”

“It’s nothing… I’m just… nervous,” Johanna admitted.

Nikki’s eyes widened in understanding, then narrowed in confidence. “I see… well, don’t worry. We don’t have to worry. Because I don’t give a shit if your mom doesn’t accept us.” Nikki pulled Johanna into an embrace, plunging Johanna’s face into her chest. “We accept us.”

Johanna accepted the hug for a time. Her face was coated in the scent of Nikki’s perfume. “Right, right… it’s just…” Johanna struggled to find the right words. Then she looked up into Nikki’s eyes. “Just… I need you… to keep an open mind, okay? About her?”

Nikki giggled. “Sure, okay.”

“I’m serious!” Johanna’s glare hardened.

Nikki rolled her eyes. “I mean, c’mon. I’ve dealt with my fair share of prudes in my life. I don’t think your mom can do anything that can surprise me.”

Johanna’s lip quivered as she tried to put on her most intimidating face. Even then, it still turned out adorable to Nikki.

Finally, Johanna sighed. “Okay. I’ll go get my mom.” She marched to the hallway. “Oh, feel free to sit anywhere, by the way.” And she disappeared into the rear bedrooms.

Nikki stood tall and bored in the kitchen. She glanced at the living room couches and trotted to take a seat, but upon noticing the carpet realized she still had on her shoes. Unlacing them, she set them neatly against the wall and planted her socked feet in the soft fibers of the carpet before sprawling out on the couch.

“Ahhh…” her stress was melting away. Nikki looked at the end table and saw a sweet family photo of Johanna and her mother in front of a mountain vista. Recent, by the looks of it.

Nikki whistled. If nothing else, at least Nikki knew where Johanna got her looks from. And her breasts.

There was activity deeper in the house. Voices were being raised. Some yelling. The wall muffled most of it beyond comprehensibility. Nikki cringed… she wouldn’t have been so eager to come here if she knew she wouldn’t be so welcome. She considered letting Johanna know she’d come back another day… when the voices suddenly ceased. Odd. Nikki raised an eyebrow. Had they made up? Or had a nerve been hit so strong that the conversation hit a dead stop?

Footsteps. Nikki sat forward. Had they made up?

A shadow appeared in the hall. Johanna’s shadow. She came a few steps forward, and was holding a leash in her hand. She smiled at Nikki briefly before tugging at it, and out came… a woman.

Nikki had to rub her eyes to make sure she wasn’t hallucinating or having some kind of dream. Nikki’s girlfriend was dragging a naked adult woman on a leash through the house. She was glaring down shamefully at the ground as she put one hand in front of the other, her knees grateful to be on the carpet. A blue collar was around her neck; the name “Susan” was scrawled on the pendant in marker.

Johanna gulped. “Nikki… meet… my mom!”

Johanna presented Susan as though she were the prized thoroughbred at a dog show.

Susan simply cringed, still avoiding Nikki’s gaze.

Nikki looked at Susan. Then she looked at Johanna. Johanna began to sweat.

“We used to get into it… still do, really. But we’ve finally reached an arrangement that’s agreeable to both of us,” said Johanna. “Right, Mommy?”

Susan opened her mouth, but nothing came out. She nodded faintly.

Nikki opened her mouth. “You’re fucking with me.”

And she stood up, grabbed her boots, and started to walk away.

Johanna’s eyes bulged. She dropped Susan’s collar and darted after her. “Nikki, wait! Where are you going?!” Johanna grabbed at Nikki’s shoulders keeping her from clutching the front doorhandle. “Don’t go! Please! I-I know it seems weird, but if you just let me explain…”

“Look,” Nikki said, glaring down at the younger girl. “I was all set to meet your mom. Have dinner, maybe? I don’t know who this is… but hiring some hooker to play to a sexual fantasy to make me feel better? Not how I wanted tonight would go. And let go of me.”

Johanna let go, then jumped in between Nikki and the door. “It’s not! I’m trying to demonstrate that –”

“You’ve demonstrated enough,” Nikki snapped. “If you just wanted this to be a casual fling, that’s fine. But I wanted it to be a bit more. I wanted to get to know you, your mom. I wanted to let her know that we… we wanted to be a bit more… permanent. Regardless of the consequences. And get out of the way, please?”

Johanna fought off the urge to hyperventilate. “It’s real! Please, Nikki, if you just let me explain everything. I want this to be permanent! I want for –”

Johanna stopped.

“What?” Nikki said, hands on her hips. “You want what?!”

Then Nikki felt a touch on her shoulder. She turned aggressively, and Susan, still stark nude, shrank from her aggressive rotation. Nikki was a fair bit taller than them both, and taller still when she had on her boots. But Susan didn’t speak; her lip was quivering, and she was holding a picture frame. The same family photo that beheld both her and Johanna. She held it out to Nikki, who took it tentatively, suspiciously.

Nikki studied the photo. She looked back at Johanna, who had to stand on her tip toes to look at what was in the frame. She turned back to Susan, ever bashful.

Susan opened her mouth several times, but only after a few failed attempts was she capable of talking. “I… I’m… I am… Johanna’s mother.” She gestured to the photo in Nikki’s hands.

Nikki looked back at it. Then she peered at Susan, who became even more red under scrutiny. But the hair was a match. The eyes. The breasts. This was definitely the woman in the photo, if nothing else. And there was no reason to believe the woman in the photo wasn’t Johanna’s mom.

“I…” Susan nearly choked on her own words out of fear. “I-I-I know,” she croaked. “I know that this m-m-may seem… odd… but… p-please stay. Please.”

Johanna looked past Nikki, in her mother’s eyes. She could see the nervousness in them. Susan saw Johanna’s gaze and met it for a brief moment before turning back to Nikki. “Please. She loves you very… very much.” Susan collected her voice as she finished, finally coming into her own. “And I would be honored to have you for dinner.”

Nikki took one more look at the photo before turning back to Johanna, sporting an aggressively pouty expression. Nikki sighed. “I’ll go wash up. Where’s the bathroom?”

“Oh, you can use mine,” Johanna said. “The big room at the end of the hall, then the door on the right.”

Nikki nodded curtly, then took off her shoes and disappeared deeper into the house.

Johanna and Susan were alone.

Johanna let out a massive breath and then tackled her mother into a hug, surprising the older woman, who accepted and reciprocated it.

Johanna’s gratitude was muffled into Susan’s collarbone. “Thank you, thank you, thank you…” She patted Susan on the head and gave her a kiss before letting go, skipping past her to set the table for dinner.

Susan stood still in the foyer.

“Oh, feel free to wait in the living room!” Johanna called.

Susan obeyed.

The skewers went quick. Johanna let Susan change into a blouse and some sweatpants, and once the three of them were seated at the dining room table, the tantalizing smell of reheated meats and salad allowed them to occupy their mouths and avoid the need for conversation. Susan’s appetite was so-so, though after a bit of thought she realized that in such a precarious situation it was in her interest to get all the calories she could get. And make no mistake; Johanna was right. Nikki was quite the chef.

Nikki was more than happy to eat from her own prepared food, too. However, perhaps out of a desire to more readily believe the story that Johanna had delivered to her in truncated form, Nikki suggested the group broke out the vodka. Susan opened her mouth to oppose this, but after one of Johanna’s patented death glares, she backed down and was in the presence of increasingly tipsy young women scarcely forty minutes later.

“Okay, okay…” Nikki closed her eyes briefly before she began. “So, you’re telling me… that spell book fucking worked? It was real?”

Johanna nodded wildly. “Yeah, yep! All of it was right on the money… I can control her height, now, hey, watch.”

“Johanna, wai–!!” Susan screamed as Johanna adopted a crinkle-faced focus gesture. Not a moment later, it seemed as though Susan was gone.

Nikki’s eyes widened. “Holy shit.”

She lunged upwards, propping her arms on the table as she reached over to see. There on the chair, Susan was standing wide-eyed, hugging herself with her hands out of a perceived feeling of exposure.

“And…” Nikki started. “That’s why she does whatever you say?”

“Mm hmm! Hey… Ma!” Johanna said, turning to the nearly-empty chair just next to her. “I want you to… hmmmm… roll over.”

“I-I-I…” began Susan, her voice almost indescribably tiny. She was being peered over by Nikki’s own massive face, looming out over the edge of the table. Her daughter meanwhile was still seated, reducing her profile. But it was still quite the intimidating sight, as it always was. And considering she had yet to truly reacclimate to the feeling of shrinking (and that her stomach was full of beef chunks), the nausea almost made it too hard to stand, much less listen to what Johanna was saying, and much less obey such degrading commands.

“ROLL THE FUCK OVER!!” Johanna screeched down, and suddenly Susan dropped to her knees and laid out on the ground. She rolled around, back and forth, several times against the hard wood of the dining room chair. Susan could smell the treated mahogany.

Susan continued to do so ad infinitum, occasionally peeking upwards only to see Johanna continuing to glare down expectantly, and Susan returned to her duty. Nikki’s eyes could only continue to widen, the reality of the situation finally breaking through the haze of vodka.

“Damn, girl… I knew you were a bit of a dom… but this is something else.”

Johanna giggled. Then she called down, “Stop!”

Susan stopped. Johanna reached her finger down, and Susan got up and trotted to it, on instinct. She hugged her arms around the long digit, waiting for Johanna to transport her to somewhere else, whether the table, the floor, Johanna’s own shoulder or elsewhere on her body. Sometimes this was what she did, though after a long time of Susan becoming accustomed to this routine, on occasion, Johanna would simply allow her mother to hug her finger. And when enough time passed that Susan realized Johanna wasn’t prepping to take Susan anywhere, Susan would realize she enjoyed it. The hug. The connection. Somehow, through Johanna dipping her finger down and grazing the seat of the chair like an inverted tree trunk, she was connecting with her daughter. Susan could hear the blood pounding from her palm above. They were blood. Family It was always these fleeting feelings of connection that made Susan stay, that made her accept this. For just a little while longer.

Nikki fell back off the table and stood up, walking around to the other side to get a proper look. Her gaze was firmly trained on the little woman. It was just starting to haze, and briefly Nikki wondered if this was just some sort of hallucination. Reason returned. She needed something more.

“Can… can I…?” Nikki began. She trailed off slightly, her voice low.

“You want to hold her?” Johanna asked, as though she were talking about a palm-sized pet.

Nikki nodded.

Johanna curled her finger, and Susan held on, locking her legs around the digit as well. Johanna lifted her half-clenched fist up, dangling Susan above Nikki’s awaiting palms. She opened them, and Susan remained there, still trying to hang onto Johanna’s outstretched fingers.

“Johanna…!” Susan looked past Johanna’s palm, past her arm, up toward her face, shadowed by the light of the chandelier. “Are you sure? About this?”

Johanna rolled her eyes, and despite their difference in size, Susan somehow gleaned that Johanna wasn’t looking at Susan like a pet in that moment, and more like a friend who needed a bit of goading to get along with the party without killing the vibe. “She’s not gonna hurt you or anything. Right, Nikki?”

“Oh, yeah,” Nikki said, scratching her temple before quickly repositioning her hands to catch Susan’s impending fall. “That’s right.”

“Nikki’s like, my best girlfriend,” Johanna said in a droning way. “She’s good for it, you know? Now let go, Mom.”

Susan refused. But when Johanna’s smooth thumb positioned itself to simply flick Susan off like the remains of a crushed gnat, Susan acquiesced, and she dropped into Nikki’s pale, slightly sweaty hands.

Johanna turned to Nikki. "Now,” she said. “There are some rules.” Johanna poured another shot of vodka. “Feel free to ask me to change her size, by the way. Now, whatever you do, you can not…” Johanna drank. She cringed as the vodka burned down her throat. “You can’t… swallow her… you can’t… crush her… you can’t… damage her… and try to lose her – try not…” Johanna sighed as she caught herself. Susan looked as if her soul had nearly left her body. “Try not to lose her. But everything else?” Johanna flashed the o-kay sign.

Nikki looked down tentatively in her open palms. Susan looked from Nikki to her daughter fearfully. “For real? Everything?”

“Go crazy! She’s technically yours now, too. If we’re going to be… you know…”

Suddenly, Nikki noticed Johanna’s face twist. That same twisty expression she got when she had just finished gulping down a Super Gulp Cup of Arctic Fizz at the cinema.

She pushed her chair away from the table and stood up. She wavered. “Excuse me,” she squeezed out. And she hobbled through the dining room, kitchen, living room, and then into the hallway to the bathroom.

Nikki was now alone with a tiny person in her palm.

Susan shivered, suddenly very cold. She tried to stand to height but fell down amidst Nikki’s clammy hands. She looked upward, above the crest formed by the meat of Nikki’s palm, and she saw Nikki… a leather-clad colossus rising up in the sky.

It wasn’t the first time Susan had been reduced, of course. But it was the first time she had been put in such a state without the presence of Johanna. For all her quirks, psychotic and otherwise, Johanna was her offspring. Flesh and blood. Susan could… more or less… rely on Johanna to ensure her safety when she was small. She had no clue what compunctions Nikki may have had, or lack thereof. And considering Nikki’s alt stylings, her ear-piercings, her black goth-lite outfit, the dyed streak in her black hair, and the tattoos that were peaking from underneath her sleeves, Nikki did not strike Susan as a particularly chaste woman.

Nikki, meanwhile, was blinking the blurriness away. She was able to hold her vodka better than most, so she could count on herself that what she was seeing was truly there. She actually was holding a small woman in her hands. It was a surreal feeling… she had to really make sure it was real.

Nikki suddenly and abruptly picked Susan up by her arm.

“Ah, ach!” Susan eeped out as she was now dangling by a single limb. Suspended, Susan ascended rapidly, as though on a carnival ride, until she reached eye-level with Nikki. Her massive emerald eye moved so rapidly, Susan could hear the wet schlicks as it slid within its socket, pouring over every inch of Susan’s skin. Nikki carefully grabbed hold of Susan’s other arm and examined her from the other side. She manipulated her, grabbing her leg and spreading it, only stopping once Susan protested aloud from the pain.

“Oh!” Nikki ceased her examination and deposited a panting Susan back on her palm. “Sorry ‘bout that. But holy fuck, this is insane…”

Nikki tried to search for Susan’s eyes, hidden somewhere in that head of reddish-brown hair of hers. It was difficult, but they eventually locked.

“N-Nikki…” Susan said.

“What?” Nikki responded. Susan cringed, and Nikki lowered her voice. She raised Susan up closer to her face, just barely within the corner of her left eye.

“Nikki… please… help me.”

Nikki stopped for a moment. “I’m sorry?”

Susan turned her head, awaiting Johanna’s return. At her size, she could feel all sorts of vibrations with better efficacy than when full grown. Johanna’s signature was faint, and far. They were safe, for the moment. She turned back up to Nikki’s puzzled face, and she briefly retreated into herself. Susan had spent more than a month of her life acclimating to Johanna’s rule. When she behaved, it wasn’t a bad life.

But the fear. The fear wouldn’t go away.

The fear that at any given moment Johanna could squash her like a gnat, or devour her whole. Or lose her out in the wilderness and leave Susan to fend for herself amongst blades of grass the size of skyscrapers, and millipedes built like double-decker buses. Knowing her life was in the hands of a teenager was an ever-present, excruciating worry, and Susan hated it.

It was a risky play. But somehow, Johanna dating a college student provided Susan with an unexpected opportunity. If Johanna wouldn’t see reason, perhaps appealing to her girlfriend would. Someone with the perspective and foresight of an adult.

Susan gathered herself as she stood to height, mustering up the first traces of her dignity she’d managed to in weeks. “You have to… get the book. Or something. Please – please, Nikki! I can’t live like this… you have to…”

Nikki looked at the crumpling little figure in her hands. It was depressing, on a certain level, seeing a grown woman reduced to a sniveling little doll. “I… I don’t understand…”

Susan fell to her knees. “Please! She’s keeping me… she won’t listen to me. But she’ll listen to you. That’s why, y-you have to do it!” Susan glared upwards.

Nikki was shivering slightly. “I have to do what?”

“Convince her, or something. Get the book. Go to the police, do anything to get me –”

“Wait, wait,” Nikki said. “The police?”

Susan paused for a moment, standing up and beginning to pace on Nikki’s delicate skin. She tripped a bit in Nikki’s heartline before she continued. “Maybe… I don’t know! I just, I can’t do this on my own… if anyone can help me, save me…”

Nikki looked at Susan again. This really was a human woman. More than that, this was her girlfriend’s mom. The novelty of the situation was beginning to fade, as was the better part of Nikki’s buzz. It was dawning on her that this wasn’t some sort of funny prank, or a sexy roleplay. Johanna had learned black magic was using it to essentially keep a human being hostage. At a whim, this woman could be reduced to nothing. Just a toy. A plaything. A doll to be manipulated and prodded, licked and stomped on, dominated, a servant to glean worship from. And nobody would ever know.

Except Nikki.

Go crazy! She’s technically yours now, too.

That was what Johanna said. Johanna had accepted Nikki’s role in her life and confided her greatest secret with her. She had done it at great personal risk – Nikki now understood the massive anxiety associated with allowing Nikki to be privy to this. This was beyond science, beyond understanding. And for now, this belonged to only them in the world.

If that wasn’t love, Nikki didn’t know what love was.

Was she really going to uproot that? Uproot it all for this “skank bitch”, if Johanna’s words were to be believed (and they always were)?

Nikki closed her eyes for a moment, and opened them. She glared down at Susan. Their gaze pierced to the depths of Susan’s soul with something unfathomable, and Susan’s pacing steps wavered in place, as though only a look from Nikki was enough to cause physical damage. At their sizes, that might’ve been true.

Susan didn’t know for sure what this look meant. What it symbolized. But her hopes began to grind into dust as Nikki lifted Susan into the air once again.

“W-what are you doing…?” Susan had only just regained enough grace and self-confidence to feel worthy of speaking so candidly to giants. She was between Nikki’s two fingers and steadily climbing, at first thinking she was soon to be situated before Nikki’s eyes, only to stop abruptly, prematurely. In front of her mouth.

Nikki opened her mouth.

“No, no, NO, STOP, NIKKI, PLEASE!”

Nikki peered at the woman; a cruel goddess ready to listen to her subjects’ prayers.

“Why should I?”

Susan’s body nearly shut down. It was in her nature, against beings so much bigger, so much more powerful than her. The idea of combatting them, whether through force or through what she hoped was intelligence, was futile. But this was the last chance, her last chance at anything approaching some kind of freedom. She had to try.

“I-I-I… I helped you… remember? W-with… my daughter… I l-let you –”

“Fucking save it,” Nikki spat, venom dripping in the spit. “You didn’t care. You never cared. You just wanted to save your own skin.”

“That’s not true! It’s not!!” Susan screamed. And it wasn’t. Entirely. It hurt her seeing her daughter so distraught. That wasn’t something Susan had seen before in a long time. Anger, frustration, fear, sure. But never such… bereavement.

“Oh yeah?” Nikki responded. “Tell me, if you weren’t the size of a mite, what would you think of our relationship? Would you sing all kumbaya, then?”

“I-I-I-I…”

Susan faltered.

Nikki saw her hesitation, and she scoffed. Somewhere inside her, Nikki had hoped Susan might’ve been different. That she might’ve learned something from Johanna. That she might’ve understood. But she was just like the others.

“Yeah. That’s what I thought.”

And Nikki opened her mouth in a wide “O” shape, bringing the itty-bitty mommy closer and closer to her fate.

Alcohol rolled off Nikki’s tongue in a faint, thin mist, enough to addle Susan’s pleas into a jumbled garble. She barely even comprehended the shift from lamp-lit dining room to the dull red throbbing cavern that was Nikki’s mouth. Nikki’s lips closed on Susan halfway, and her legs were held out, their kicking clamped down by Nikki’s fingers as she sucked on her head like a lollipop. Nikki rolled Susan around, her tongue squirming all throughout Susan’s face, torso, neck. The saliva collected in semi-solid clumps dripping down Susan’s upper body in long strips before depositing into the basin of Nikki’s jaw.

Nikki thought as she sucked on Susan. The taste of human was somewhat subtle, though not quite to the point of blandness, so there was some carnal enjoyment to be found from sampling her. Still, it wasn’t exactly a delicacy. She wondered. She tried to get into Johanna’s mindset. If Nikki had shrunk her own mother and had her at her disposal, what would she do?

Nikki didn’t even have to think.

She’d kill the bitch.

Stomp her, crush her, flush her down the toilet, mangle her into a million pieces and swallow her down, painting her teeth red. It didn’t matter. For what Nikki had been through, such fates were mercies to her own mom.

Briefly, Nikki considered it. To crush, to chew, to tear. And her heart swelled with a powerful emotion. For that brief time, this woman inside Nikki’s mouth was her mother. And Nikki’s teeth shifted in position, her ivory incisors finding their way, the guillotine at Susan’s neck.

Her screams kicked into overdrive, a shrill, throat-shredding sound that easily pierced the gelatinous bubble of Nikki’s puffed-up cheeks. Suddenly, Nikki came back down to Earth. Her teeth abated, but rather than remove Susan from her mouth, Nikki instead used her further in, sending her into the goopy, soupy basin between her jaws and her tongue, allowing her body to become utterly saturated with saliva.

Nikki took a few breaths through her nose as she settled back into the chair. Jesus Christ, she thought. That was something else.

And that was when she realized. The damp spot that had been forming in the depths of her pants for some time now.

At that point, Nikki knew.

More than knew, she now could understand. She understood Johanna on a deeper level than she ever had. And all it took was the woman who made their relationship possible.

Nikki shrunk her mouth around Susan, swallowing down the excess saliva and leaving her tongue in that somewhat grainy state, just as the sound of water rushing through pipes graced Nikki’s ears. The bathroom door opened on the far side of the house, and soon, Johanna came back, wiping her wet hands on her shirt.

“Oh, jeez…” Johanna said as she trotted back to the dining room, twirling as she entered. “So, what’d I miss,” she asked, peering at Nikki. “She give you any trouble?”

Nikki smiled and didn’t say a word, beckoning Johanna over with a single finger.

Johanna tiptoed ever closer, and closer, and closer, until their faces were only inches away from one another.

Nikki opened her mouth, revealing a sobbing, sopping Susan, forced to lay on Nikki’s tongue like a bedspread. She was shivering, shaking, and blinded by the light.

Then Nikki forcibly grabbed Johanna’s head and pulled her into a kiss, their tongues snaking around each other with the woman caught in the crossfire. Nikki dug her hand into her own pants as she bucked on the chair, Johanna’s own knees wavering as she melted into her girlfriend lap, straddling her as she accepted her mom’s transfer between their two interlocked mouths like she was a piece of gum.

Soon, they began to wind down, faces still sealed together, squirming, seeking the vestiges of one another’s love. As Johanna’s lips unpuckered, there between them, she realized, was her mother. A sloppy, saliva-coated bridge that connected them. Nikki’s face was still glazed over as her hips bucked against Johanna’s.

And that was when Johanna realized. She’s had her suspicions, but it wasn’t until now that she knew. Nikki was the one.

Susan was no longer hers. Susan was theirs.