It was a big house, with more than enough space for the six of them. It belonged to the hostess Christine, and her fiancé Tyler. In celebration of settling the property she had decided to arrange a small housewarming dinner party for friends of theirs who lived close enough to the city to make it.

It seemed like everything had been meticulously thought out; the food was finishing up as the guests arrived and filling the house with smoky woodfire aromas. It was laid out in the dining room, which was warm and glowing with orange spots of candlelight, but otherwise dark around the corners of the room, and made Christine feel like they were all going to break out an Ouija board as soon as the sun went down. She personally would not have kept it so murky but tonight it was necessary.

The long mahogany dining table was covered in a tablecloth but only barely. It was instructed not to drape to the floor. This was to prevent it from creating a passage to the carpet – the carpet was out of bounds. The tablecloth also had to be jet black, which was personally a little dark for Christine’s taste; she would have preferred an indulgent, lustrous color, maybe red, but red was completely out; it was only a shade away from pink, and pink was a ‘problem’ color.

Added to that, they had all agreed to wear black – more tablecloth logic. Christine and her two female guests had all agreed to wear the same style dress: a black, long sleeve, form-hugging cocktail dress. It had to be skin tight and short-skirted; no ruffles, folds, or long flapping hemlines or anything that tiny objects could get lost or concealed inside. Their legs were covered by black pantyhose and they each had left their shoes at the door.

For Christine, who liked bright and pastel colors, all the black was a bit of a bummer. And, for that matter, she would have raised an eyebrow at the notion of identical dresses, but after everyone had turned up at the house and jokingly complimented each other’s senses of fashion, she had to admit it was kind of fun in a strange way, like they were all members of a secret club or coven or something.

The guys were also instructed to wear black, wearing snug black turtlenecks. The neck rolls infringed on the ‘no folds‘ rule, but it would probably be okay, as long as they didn’t roll their sleeves up and create folds in contact with the dining table. It was harder for the men to find formal shirts that were slim-fitting enough. But at least the guys did find things to wear in the end. Well, almost all the guys.

All of this slim-fitting apparel; Christine could see where it was leading and it brought her a pang of regret. The prohibition on long, hanging, draping things: it meant no jewellery. And what a shame: she had an eye-catching pair of dangly gold and crystalline drop earrings she had been planning to pull out for this very occasion. On the other hand, maybe it was better to keep the gold toned down with all the black, to avoid looking like an Egyptian funerary priestess.

She was wrong about the jewellery.

Dangly earrings? Her advisor interrupted. Great. Necklaces. Bracelets. Rings.

Why?

It’s climbable.

‘Climbable’? To Christine, this was already starting to sound like it was going to be a very interesting evening. She knew exactly what all these idiosyncratic precautions were for – had been thoroughly forewarned – and the mental images she was getting with evocative words like ‘climbable’ were utterly surreal. She had to confess she was even growing excited. Over the phone, she was reassured her expectations were probably inflated; that everything would be surprisingly more normal than feared. But it was hard for her to wrap her head around it.

All of this prior planning had required a long, engaging phone consult with her old boarding school friend to walk her through exact specifications, and it was probably one of the strangest phone conversations she’d ever had in her life – and considering who she’d been talking to, that was saying something.

*

“I wasn’t sure if other people still did this anymore,” said Christine, looking around the table at the others, illuminated by the warm candlelight. She had let her guests finish their meals before trying to make another serious attempt at conversation.

“Do what?” said one of the men. It was the older, Levi. Tyler had just disappeared into the kitchen to clear away plates.

“Invite friends over for a dinner party,” Christine answered. “It’s not too lavish?”

The others murmured no, and mentioned how thoughtful everything was, how smoothly it was going. If unusual.

Tyler reappeared, putting another bottle of wine on the table before returning to his seat.

Christine took the wine and went to top up the girls’ glasses. Tyler and Levi had already fixed themselves with a couple of Heinekens. Without thinking, she was about to chide them for failing to bring out a third bottle but caught herself.

Levi’s girlfriend, Katie, was still taking occasional sips of her earlier wine so Christine refilled Jennifer’s glass and then her own. With her big eyes, Katie had a girlish look, and a subtle shade of red hair which could pass for brown, particularly in the dim lighting.  People always complimented Christine’s honey blonde hair, but she personally envied the way Katie could get shades of lipstick to match the locks and eyebrows.

As for Jennifer – her long hair white-blonde, unlike Christine’s honey gold – well, she had dyed her hair now since Christine had last seen her, which was several years ago. Most of the hair length was dyed a lustrous midnight that shaded into the natural pale blonde at the tips. Not something Christine would have tried for herself – she was not nearly adventurous enough – but Jennifer was an exotic beauty; a striking blend of undefinable ancestry and her features enabled her to pull off the dual tones simultaneously.

And yet the hair dye wasn’t even the most striking thing about her old friend tonight.

The guys were now murmuring about something that had happened at Levi’s workplace, freeing the women to remark amongst themselves for the moment.

From her place at the table, Christine had a view right through the dining room and into the kitchen, to the window above the kitchen sink. Night had fallen outside; the window now glassy black. The same glossy bottomless color as, she observed idly, the ring band Jennifer was wearing. And Christine hadn’t been the only one to find herself drawn to staring at it, in lulls between conversation.

“I know I’ve said this already,” said Katie, the youngest woman of the three, turning in her seat to face Jennifer, the second youngest, “but I am in love with that ring.”

“You didn’t tell us where it came from,” added Christine, glad to let the conversation splinter off from whatever the boys were talking about. “It looks custom made.”

Jennifer straightened her hand flat upon the table, and the other two women leaned closer to admire it. The hunk of transparent, crystalline rock planted atop the black band was carved in the shape of a wild cat’s head.

“It is,” she replied. “They had to hollow out the head to create a little inner chamber.”

“That had to be a steep premium,” Christine said with a twinge of regret.

“Jerry bought it for me,” Jennifer answered, adding coyly: “Let his accountant deal with it.”

“Who’s Jerry’s accountant?”

“Me,” said Jennifer.

There was a titter of contained amusement.

She continued:

“Have to confess, girls: I might have been twisting his arm a little negotiating figures – metaphorically, of course.”

I would certainly hope so, Christine thought.

“He proposed?” Katie’s voice piqued with excitement.

“It’s not an engagement ring,” said Jennifer. “This one’s a little heavy on the tinsel.”

“Even for you,” Christine said, a little wry.

“Lara Croft wouldn’t have the ambition to steal that,” Katie chimed in, then looked across at her boyfriend, “—Levi, did I get that reference correct?”

“Nailed it,” he said, barely a pause from the conversation he was having with Tyler.

“He’s the gamer,” she explained, looking back at the other two women.

“I knew it wasn’t an engagement ring,” said Christine, shaking her head. “The black band.”

“Shouldn’t it be the other way around?” Katie piped up. “A black panther head on a light ring band?”

“The head had to be clear all through,” Jennifer explained, “otherwise Jerry wouldn’t have been able to see anything. Ladies, come on, function first.”

“Mmmm,” Christine said under her breath, not entirely convinced that ‘function’ had unquestionably dominated the purchase, particularly where Jennifer was concerned. “Classic Jen,” she looked away with understated amusement. “Fierce animal head, fierce price tag.”

“As long as it does what we got it for,” Jennifer said with finality, “it doesn’t matter what it looks like or how much it cost. When it’s on my finger, it’s priceless.”

“I think it’s romantic,” Katie admitted. “It must look gorgeous on the inside.”

“It is gorgeous,” Jennifer mused, as they all stared down at it. “And the ring isn’t bad looking, either.”

Tyler had caught the tail end of the discussion and now jumped in with question:

"But how clearly would you be able to see, anyway? The stone would refract the light and cause photo-visual distortions – wouldn’t it?”

Christine noticed the men had been taciturn on the topic up to now. Or, when they did remark, it was on the practical details, as if keeping the interpersonal side of it at a distance. She wondered to herself if there wasn’t a little insecurity from them on the entire arrangement; possibly mentally substituting themselves into the picture and finding it distasteful to their male egos. The fact that both men were taken in by Jennifer – yes, even Tyler, she’d seen his eyes creep from pantyhosed leg upwards the moment Jennifer had walked in the door – made it even more amusing. And that made her think of a tiny Tyler; he sure wouldn’t make so much mess around the house.

"Jerry can see through it,” Jennifer replied, “but if it’s too bright, then yeah, it apparently creates optical illusions. He said it’s like looking at a Rubik’s cube through a kaleidoscope.”

 “Oh!” Katie exclaimed with recognition. “It’s like a prison.”

Christine’s lips pursed in a faint smile.

“I think you mean ‘prism,’ sweetie.”

“Yes,” Katie nodded, “that’s the one.”

After a moment, Jennifer added:

“I know it’s a little showy, but I don’t wear it in the daytime because it gives him migraines.”

"Oh," said Levi, waving a hand straight up over his head, "that's why the ceiling light is off."

"Yes," Christine nodded. "And we lit up the candles."

"I thought the bulb must have blown and you guys were being too cheap for an electrician," Levi joked, and Christine made a sound of feigned disgust.

"I just thought the candles looked pretty," confessed Katie.

"No to the electrician and yes to the candles," Christine said. "But the main thing is that poor Jerry isn't having seizures while we're all admiring Jen’s ring."

"I couldn't do it," announced Levi. "I couldn't be attached to my girl at the teat like that, no offence, Katie—"

Katie shook her head at his choice of phrasing as if to say ‘knock it off.’

“How does the air get inside?” Tyler asked, trying to keep the discussion moving.

“They drilled a tiny hole under the panther’s mouth,” said Jennifer.

“You said it opens?” said Christine.

Jennifer nodded, capturing the panther head between her forefinger and thumb and stroking it affectionately, as if the feline were a living housepet. Her long nails gleamed in the candlelight, and Christine recalled something Jennifer had said earlier upon having her nails praised by Katie: that they had never looked better since she’d started dating Jerry again.

“The head unscrews from the base,” Jennifer replied.

“That’s one way to save the jeweller from jimmying around to reset the stone,” Christine remarked.

Now that dinner was finished, the fine wine had been praised, and the pleasantries and catching-up conversation had passed, the talk was heading in the direction they had all secretly been hoping it would go in, from the moment they had all arrived.

Of course, they hadn’t really been staring at the sparkling panther head, but had been in awe of the tiny smear of shadow barely visible within, naked, huddled up inside the transparent stone’s inner chamber, almost as if he was sitting on the panther’s silicate tongue, locked away behind its teeth…

. . .

The conversation thrummed through the dining room’s vast airspace. Every time someone spoke, the acoustic waves rattled the air. Voices beat back and forth like bees passing right by my ears, but magnitudes louder, deeper, and with the ‘drop everything’ immediacy of an earthquake. I was lucky if I got two seconds to breathe and put a coherent thought together in my head, let alone find some way to send my frail voice out into the immeasurable ether beyond the deceptively-angled glassy box that enclosed me, like a strange magician’s prop.

From inside the crystalline panther head, soundwaves were more reliable than light. Jennifer had not been lying when she’d said I could see out of the gemstone, but she had not specified whether I could comprehend what I saw.

The world arrived to me in a collection of fractured shards, which magnified objects from some angles and minimized them from others, while all things were silhouetted in a spectrum of shifting colors, and the flickering candlelight turned it into a wavering lightshow like some psychedelic James Bond opening sequence.

The fractured shards resembled how I imagined a fly saw the world; its compound vision a disorienting array of tessellating grids like rainbow-tinged fish scales. The allusion to an insect was an unfortunate coincidence, but wholly apt in my current predicament.

I currently stood no more than one centimeter tall.

Any time I tried to speak, my voice got trapped with me inside the iridescent chamber, fading away with a chiming echo. Throughout the evening, the droning conversation, as well as the deafening clatter of cutlery had effectively dampened any hope I had of being heard.

But I could hear the other guests with perfect clarity, as if an orchestra of human voices played right outside my prismatic cell. The problem was the sounds played within the hollow of the gemstone with horrible clanging effect. The big bright sounds bounced around the interior and resonated through my internal cavities as a medium; every single uttered word vibrated my insides like I was being played as a percussion instrument. The sensations this produced varied depending on the mood in the room; quiet murmurs were merely irritating and ticklish, but if the conversation grew lively, this became sensitively painful for my diminutive frame until I had to jump up and start shaking my limbs and bouncing on my toes as my bones twanged and my muscles started to feel like they were crawling around like worms, and a scream built up in my head.

Earlier on, one of the men had muttered a joke between bites of his meal, and there was a sudden explosive bloom of extended laughter in response. While their vocal amusement had rippled around the table, I was on my hands and knees gagging with giddy agitation, my organs twitching like dying insects.

After a blissful moment of quiet, a female’s great voice broke into the silicate walls through the hole of the panther’s throat, with that tuning fork chiming quality all sound produced when filtered through the cut, hollowed rock. The voice sounded like Christine, the hostess. She was a friend of Jennifer’s from high school, which itself was interesting.

Jennifer had a history of tending to drift somewhat capriciously between female friendships, as if she quickly grew bored of the company of other women, or the converse; the women felt ‘unsafe’ around her. Either explanation was equally likely. So, for one of her few female friendships to have endured for several years was, to me, a feat in itself, and I had been interested to come and meet this exceptional female. Though I couldn’t help but think she was probably just as interested to meet me, if for an entirely different reason.

Since arriving in her home, I hadn’t even seen what Christine looked like, except as a series of disconnected, glittery flashes of black fabric, and briefly, the porcelain shine of giant fingernails. But since the women were all wearing the same outfit, I couldn’t even be sure whether the fingers I’d glimpsed belonged to Christine and not the other guest, Katie.

From the conversation around the dinner table, I’d pieced together that Christine and Tyler were partners, and Katie and Levi were boyfriend and girlfriend. The latter couple seemed to have an age gap; boyfriend Levi sounded older than Tyler (and me) while girlfriend Katie sounded younger than Christine and Jennifer, who were almost the same age. Tyler sounded my age, but was apparently younger than Christine, meaning he was younger than me, but probably not by much. He sure wasn’t the shorter of us.

Obviously, I hadn’t sighted the men any better than the women, and couldn’t tell much else about them from their voices, except that they were evidently taken by Jennifer, though they tried to conceal it – with their own women present in the room, if for no other reason. I’d heard it in their voices when they’d been introduced to Jennifer by Christine. That didn’t take me by surprise; it was not my first ‘rodeo’ being out and about with Jennifer, I knew the game by now.

Her throaty purr was working its magic on them, even after they must have steeled themselves against her knockout good looks. She knew how to work her disarming voice like she was letting you in on a private joke, and it made grown men giggle like little girls at things that weren’t even remotely funny.

Eventually the guys’ voices had become a murmuring drone as they shared a discussion between themselves. Maybe they wanted to have a talk without the risk of one of their voices cracking.

After Christine started to speak, an instant later my brain was frantically interpreting her blaring articulation into something more resembling speech:

“JERRY’S BEEN SO PATIENT. YOU ARE INTENDING ON LETTING THE POOR LITTLE GUY OUT FOR LITTLE STROLL AT SOME POINT,” she was saying, “AREN’T YOU, JENNIFER?”

She had a warm, sparkling voice that was kind of motherly, even if her words had become loose and uninhibited. But then, fortified with wine and beer, everyone was relaxed and happy, and the conduct around the dinner table was becoming bolder, increasingly unchecked.

I was the only one still sharply, painfully sober, not by choice but because no one had yet been able to figure out how to enable me to take alcohol in a safe, measured way. Tyler had earlier suggested I be allowed to swim in a shallow serving of wine inside one of the glasses, to drink however little I could manage as I waded around, but Christine had shot that down, stating I was a guest, not a goldfish, while Jennifer had worried about the risk of me drowning – and I was too small for CPR.

Christine’s voice broke out again:

“I THINK WE’RE ALL LOOKING FORWARD TO A PROPER FACE-TO-FACE INTRODUCTION,” she said to Jennifer. “AND SO FAR I BELIEVE ALL YOU’VE GIVEN US IS A FACE-TO-SPECK INTRODUCTION.”

Another woman might have been patronized by the facetious intent behind these words. But not Jennifer, who, if anything, was every bit on Christine’s wavelength. She was, after all, the one exhibiting me on the tabletop as if I was nothing more than the jewellery I was contained inside. At my previous mouse size, I had bemoaned the sense of dwindling to the status of something like a keyring. With a shock, I realized even a keyring would be a step up from where I now stood. I might as well be a tiny, exquisite jewel set inside the stone.

At this point into the night, even I was keen to venture out into the wide wilderness outside the rock, if only to escape the echoing walls of the interior ring, which made sounds clang my nerves. But I had very little say over whether I left the rock or not, it was up to Jennifer – as almost everything concerning me now was these days.

Maybe Levi had been joking when he’d alluded to me being attached to Jennifer’s ‘teat’, but it wasn’t far off. I was practically as reliant on her as a tiny embryo. My previous mouse-sized self might have been horrified (to say nothing of my previous normal-sized self) by this extreme incursion into my independence, but at this infinitesimal size, personal liberties were luxuries that did not rain generously from the sky. Higher priorities prevailed. Like staying alive, for instance.

I depended on her virtually every waking minute, for everything: from transportation, and food, to physical protection. I would have loved to have added ‘physical affection’ to that list, but we were still negotiating how to do that safely at my size. So far, virtually all of our physical contact had been either for the purpose of my transportation, or to enable Jennifer to bring me close so she could make out my pinprick features and decipher the tiny squeaks of my voice.

But inconvenient lustful urges did not simply evaporate.

One time I had caught her looking at me (it was unavoidable, her face filled my visual field), her features caught on an expression that I recognized as a spontaneous desire to kiss me. Or, more specifically, it was the expression she had  been wearing on past occasions a moment before spontaneously kissing me: a look of lingering, thoughtful eye contact and slow, half-lidded blinks. As she seemed to teeter on the impulse for more than a second  – pausing for a moment too long as if she was seriously considering it –I felt myself staring in the face of two forking paths and utterly powerless which one I was destined for.

One of these paths ended in my death.

When Jen kissed she did it with passion or she didn’t do it at all. If she chose the wrong path, it was virtually certain her passion would be my reaper; in my mind’s eye I saw myself getting squeezed flat by the vacuum pressure of her lips, or getting sucked clean through their pucker, and down her throat to gargle and drown in her frothing stomach juices. And as she'd deliberated down upon me, the blood had rushed out of my face, the dread of imminent accidental consumption spiked, I let out a tiny whimper and wet myself. My stream must have been invisibly thin, because she didn’t notice. I was lucky that day: she had made the right decision; the lethal impulse had been curbed.

We hadn’t even talked about sex yet.

How could we? I was so small I was literally at the risk of being inhaled, if the force of inhalation was strong enough. To think the gravity keeping me tethered to the Earth could spontaneously reverse because Jennifer had indulged in a big yawn was a petrifying thought, enough to have me bolt upright awake at the sound of her quaking nocturnal sighs as she rolled over in half-sleep.

But this ever-present panic was necessary to keep me on my toes any time I was tempted to shrug off my humility and go flexing my individual rights far beyond the reasonable limits imposed by my puny height.