Ronnie’s eyes slowly, drearily managed to pry themselves open.

Ronnie turned. His blanket had only been covering 30% of his body, which was already bare save a pair of boxers. He was cold, hungry, and drowsy. A deadly combination. Ronnie reached for his phone… and it wasn’t there.

“Hnnggg…” Ronnie moaned.

Like a zombie, he scrambled with jerky blind motions – the source of the alarm. But though he could hear it, it wasn’t within reach.

Ronnie opened his eyes in full and groaned. His vision was congealed in a mass of uncertain shapes and uncommitted colors. He reached out and squabbled with the blanket, and he began waving it out in wide flaps. The blanket formed a series of parabolic arcs, and a large electronic tablet was flung from between their folds.

“My Switch!” Ronnie kicked himself. That’s what he’d been doing last night.

Ronnie hopped off the bed. The Switch hadn’t gone far, landing in a pile of clothes close to his desk. He reached down without bending his knees and grabbed it, his shorts imprinting within the lines of his slim buttocks. Ronnie tapped the power button and breathed a tentative sigh of relief that it still turned on despite taking a dive.

Ronnie was awake now, and he had a better idea of where the phone had gone. He flopped back on the bed and stuck his arm between the mattress and the wall, reaching down to the ground. There the phone was, perfectly thin enough to slide between the two. It might’ve been a difficult proposition to retrieve for anyone else, but Ronnie was fortunate. His hands were lithe, and his arm was slender enough that it managed to slide through and grab the phone with no issue.

“Ah, there we go.” Ronnie plucked it out and stopped the alarm, grinning as the sweet sound of silence greeted him once again. Blue morning light was gleaming through his window. The sun was shining, the birds were chirping.

Ronnie flitted through the phone and checked the Control App. Sure enough, it was still there. Ronnie didn’t precisely know why he checked every time he used his phone. It was a habit. It still didn’t seem real, the notion that an app could shrink a human being. It’s not like Ronnie’s phone was some sort of futuristic super-phone; it was the same cheap Chinese knock-off he’d had for the last several years. The idea that an app could do something like what it did several weeks ago was akin to magic. Well, no. Even magic had rules to abide by. But this… this was a method to circumvent reality itself. It felt like a dream. And every time he woke up in the morning, he rushed to ensure it was more than a dream. It was real. He had a power he never would’ve dreamed of.

All this ran through Ronnie’s mind as he opened up the app and raised the augmented-reality visor to his visibility. The occasional red dot peppered the white void in the background. Some near, some far. He still had only one credit.

“YOU HAVE ONE (1) CREDIT.”

“ACH!” That too, was a problem. No matter what settings he fiddled with, what options he changed in the menu, no matter whether his phone was on silent or Do Not Disturb, that stupid voice would always blare out and announce to the heavens above exactly how much ‘credit’ he had. It was annoying, and more importantly, concerning. The opposite of discrete. If Ronnie wanted to use the app again, he would have to be extremely discerning about where and when. No one – no one – will know about this.

Save for those he chooses to shrink, that is.

Anyway…

“Hey, Thing.”

Like clockwork. Ronnie glared through the phone screen down between his legs as they dangled off the edge of the bed. His rubbery toes scrunched and curled, their knuckles just barely kissing the hairs of the carpet as a bright, shining red outline on the screen trudged toward those toes at a snail’s pace. Ronnie peered around his phone, to the floor where the figure that had become Ronnie’s source of unmatched joy crawled drearily out from her roost.

Linda had seen better days. Her clothes, once freshly pressed and ironed, had become ragged tatters of their former selves, soiled from days and weeks without a change or wash… unless showers of Ronnie’s cum counted as a wash. Her hair was a tangled, crusted over mop. Her shoes were useless clumps of leather held together by nothing but prayer at this point. And whereas Linda had once been a virile young-ish woman full of life… now, her face held nothing. It emoted nothing. A vague sense of despair seemed to be the only spark behind her lifeless eyes, yet even that was snuffed out. To show emotion was to court death, thought Linda. It was easier to do nothing.

Ronnie’s toes barely reached the floor of his elevated bedframe. They danced across the carpet, and Ronnie chuckled as Linda finished emerging, turning around like a soldier at the end of his training march.

“Thing. Lick,” Ronnie said, cocking his head just a tad. His cock was already becoming stiff, amped up by his morning wood.

Linda obliged. She knelt down and picked up Ronnie’s big toe off the ground, facing its bulbous, smooth, silky mass beneath the toenail. Much of the smell it accrued during the previous day had wafted away as they laid bare during the night, though faint hints of Ronnie’s acrid sweat still settled into the grooves of his toe print, calcifying overnight and giving the boy’s toes that characteristic sheen that Linda had become familiar with.

There were so many parts of this child’s anatomy that Linda was now intimately associated with. So… so many.

N-no, thought Linda as she dragged her tongue across Ronnie’s toe. No thoughts. Nothing.

That was how she managed to persist.

It was difficult to empty her mind of absolutely everything, but the lengths people will go to for survival are unparalleled. It was hard for Linda to forget everything related to her home life. To forget her loving boyfriend. To forget the numerous close loved ones she made during her four years at business school. To forget the family she who loved her, cherished her, raised her. To forget the life she had left behind so quickly, so inadvertently, so utterly.

It just… wasn’t fair, thought Linda, before quickly scrubbing those thoughts away. No thoughts. But, it just wasn’t. What had she even done to deserve this?

Had she been a little callous? Sure. Had she been sort of a narc? Perhaps. Had she misgendered a teenage boy? Yeah, accidentally.

But there was no way this punishment was commensurate with that list of offenses. She had been flogged with endless humiliation for weeks. The sun was a scarce luxury to her, always filtered through windows, or through the linen cloth of Ronnie’s garments when she had so “earned” the privilege to go out in public with him, stowed away in his pocket during the best of times, in his shoe during slightly worse times, and in his underwear when…

Linda shuddered.

“Thing, you’re not being very diligent today. Is something going on?”

Ronnie bent forward and reached down, and Linda instinctively dove toward his toes for any sense of comfort. His feet were her place. As perverse as it may have seemed, they provided a sense of sanctuary, and if hiding beneath the banner of his sole would shield her from his looming… terrifying… cherubic visage, Linda would gladly stay there for life. It was far easier to believe that she’d been granted this sentence by a sentient, fleshy mountain than by an actual fellow human being.

Ronnie giggled. “You’re cute sometimes, Thing. You know that?”

Ronnie dug beneath his foot, fingers wrapping around Linda and plucking her up and off the carpet. Weeks ago, Linda might’ve fought to escape after having been grasped. Not anymore. Now she simply shut down. And she waited until she was addressed, or until she was set on whatever surface she was heading toward.

“What’s wrong?” Ronnie asked as he set her in his palm. Linda collapsed in a heap, twitching slightly as she slowly rotated to face Ronnie’s expression. It was twisted in a version of sympathy, yet beneath it all, Ronnie knew that he was the giver of life, the keeper of death. Every emotion Linda was capable of experiencing in this demented hell, Ronnie had the capacity to take away or increase tenfold. If he wanted to make her feel pain, fear, despair, he could. And now that she’d been so completely broken, Ronnie too had the power to give her joy, if only that fleeting joy that is a result of one’s situation not being as shitty as it could be.

Linda could tell Ronnie truly wanted to know what was wrong. She could try to formulate words… but when she opened her mouth, only a frog’s croak came out. Even language was a chore for Linda to grab hold of. Not that Linda had forgotten how to speak, no. Rather, it was such a momentous task to even attempt to commune with this giant being like they were equals, Linda would’ve preferred not to bother.

“Oh, that doesn’t sound good… Is something bothering you, Thing?” Ronnie raised an eyebrow.

Linda shook her head, a movement that devolved into a violent shiver.

“You sure? It sounds like –”

Knock, knock, knock!

Ronnie stuffed Linda in his boxers. Before he had the chance to say “Come in”, a disheveled woman wearing a bathrobe opened his door and peered inside.

“M-morning…” Ronnie said.

Ronnie’s mother looked at Ronnie’s burning red face, mostly-bare body, and she made a weird face. She faltered at first when she started to speak, but then shook her head.

Ronnie’s cock tingled and twitched with the squirming of the occupant stuffed inside his pants, and with a (definitely not) discrete maneuver he shifted on the bed, body aiming away while his head was turned to face his mother. “Did you need anything, Mom?”

Mrs. McIntyre blinked twice before she started. “Were you talking to anyone?”

Ronnie brandished his phone in-hand. “Just some friends off Discord.”

“It’s too early for you to be getting on social media. Staying on your phone day-in-day-out hurts your brain. If you don’t put a stop to it, I might have to revoke some privileges.”

“C’mon, Mom… my grades are good, aren’t they?” Ronnie pleaded. Every second he spoke with his mom was a struggle to keep a straight face.

Mrs. McIntyre scowled. “Yes, and I love you for it. But there are other extracurriculars at school to worry about besides grades. Anyway… come ride with me to the coffeeshop. You can pick up my beverage.”

She closed the door to a crack and left down the hall. Ronnie at first breathed a sigh of relief… then he had an epiphany. He leapt up from the bed then cringed, knees buckling as Linda’s incessant struggling intensified. He couldn’t go to his mom like this. So instead, he yelled:

“Uh, Mom?”

“What is it, sweetie?” the voice came back, faint after having travelled through the wall.

“How about I go pick it up myself? It’s just around the corner!”

“You want to drive?!” she asked with an incredulous tone.

Ronnie groaned silently, thankful she couldn’t see his face. “I can walk! It’s a ten-minute trip!”

Ronnie counted on his fingers for a few moments as his mother didn’t say anything. Eventually, Ronnie sighed. He reached into his boxer shorts and pulled out Linda’s form. Now free from her captivity, she had reverted to her dead-eyes state of acceptance as she awaited her next directive. Her own smell had long since been superseded by Ronnie’s overpowering musk. Ronnie looked into her eyes curiously… when his door opened again.

Plop!

Ronnie had just barely stuffed the woman into his mouth by the time his mother laid eyes on him again, brandishing her credit card.

“You can get something for yourself, too. Just make sure…”

Ronnie’s left cheek was stuffed like a chipmunk as he tried to pin Linda against the walls of his mouth with his tongue. Her twitches were a problem, but from the distances at which Mrs. McIntyre witnessed them they could be attributed to Ronnie sucking on whatever item he’d smuggled into his room.

“Please, Robin,” Mrs. McIntyre put her fingers to her forehead as she prepared to scold Ronnie. “No eating in your room! How often do I have to tell you this?”

“Ph’shorry…” Ronnie spoke out the side of his mouth. Somehow despite her son’s immaturity, seeing him like this couldn’t help but charm Mrs. McIntyre.

“If you’re that hungry, I guess you can get two things as well.” His mom smiled. She put the credit card on his dresser before leaving and shutting the door behind her.

F’pwah!

Linda came out shivering in a globule of drool on Ronnie’s palm. She wasn’t a complete stranger to being inside Ronnie’s mouth, but seldom so suddenly, so violently. It somehow summoned the light back into her eyes, to be so close to death once again, completely at the whims of this high schooler who could send her into the acrid abyss of his stomach any time he wanted.

Ronnie looked down at Linda with love and fascination. His pet brought him no end of joy.

You can get two things, Ronnie recalled his mother saying.

Yeah. I’ll get two things.

One mocha Frappuccino… and one girl to go.