An hour after his encounter with Farah, Kenzie gathered her guests into an adjacent room, and opened the closet door; the light flooded in through the holes again and he could see her reaching into the box. A moment later, he found himself in a mason jar on the living room table, veiled by a piece of scarlet cloth.  He sat against a wall of glass and waited and rolled a question around in his head. Farah, why was she here? She was an old flame. It must have been almost five years ago. They’d met outside ACL. She had been drifting from entrance to entrance, offering free bottles of water to festival goers.

He stopped and his group went on ahead of him. She was calling out to passerby in a rich, full voice he found alluring. He could not help himself. She had majored in media studies. On their third date, he took her to a French film on the theory it would make him seem cultured. She was fluent, he found out, in both French and film; he was not, and though the movie was subtitled, he couldn’t really keep pace with the flow of images. On the drive home, she expounded on the film’s troubled production, its formal innovations, its director’s licentious escapades. To another, it may have been endearing, but he resented his ignorance and found her passion grating. He felt small. When he snapped at her, she asked him why he took her to see a foreign movie if he didn’t think he’d like it. He stayed silent. Six months later, they made the mutual decision to break it off.

“I feel like you just can’t open up.”

There was a rumbling sound outside, and it gave way to a host of excited voices. The scarlet cloth, his only defense against the scrutiny of giants, flew off the jar, and the light flooded in, and his glass shield was made a zoo’s enclosure by the presence of onlookers. He was absolutely helpless. All around him rose laughing giants; they crowded shoulder to shoulder, forming a mountain range in his living room, obviously excited to finally get a glimpse of the night’s entertainment. A thin, ghostly pale, and deftly manicured hand dropped into the jar, and he was pinched between two baby-blue fingernails and dragged into the sky to dangle helplessly before two insatiably curious eyes. One blue, one brown. Marianne. She shook him around and laughed.

“Not your most striking entrance,” she said, curling her words into a contemptuous croon, “If you came into that party looking like this, I’m not sure you would’ve piqued my interest. In fact,” she lowered him onto the rug before her sandals. “I’m not sure I would have even noticed you.” She stretched—they all did—impossibly into the air. Until now, he hadn’t stood at ground level at this size. He wanted to curl up somewhere dark and hidden; he felt exposed. A mortal at the feet of goddesses, a paramecium under a microscope. A toy.

“I can barely see him down there! Put him back on the table!” said a voice with a slight rural twang. From his position, he could barely make out who it was that spoke, but he could see enough to begin to put the situation together in his mind. Danielle. He met her at the bowling alley they worked at in college. And beside her, in a black, shoulder-cut blouse: Margaret. A high school sweetheart he once (stupidly) believed he would marry. There was Jasmine standing beside Kenzie, no doubt undressing him in her head. She was on the sales team at his first real job after college. It was a dynamic competitive environment, but one thing was constant: on the sales leaderboard for any given month, her name was just below his. She both loved and hated him for it. Farah sat quietly on the loveseat, recovering from a night at the bar. Finally, returning from the kitchen with a plate full of cheese and crackers was Cassidy. They “dated” for a month in middle school. He left her for League of Legends and baseball and never looked back. Those laughing giants, to whom he was an insect, were not anonymous monsters summoned by Kenzie to torment him. They were instead a host of all the hearts he’d wronged. And they had become more while he had become less.

Suddenly, he began panic. He scanned his surroundings frantically, looking for her. But she wasn’t in the room, not yet at least. Insofar as he was inclined, he thanked the Fates that at least one secret of his remained beyond Kenzie’s reach. He, however, was not so lucky. Her hand swooped down and, in an instant, he felt himself cast back onto the table like a lucky die.

He landed on his back and groaned and stood up and observed the landscape. While he was on the floor, they’d placed a game board on the table. A deck of cards crashed down beside him with a resounding thud. Were he a few feet (i.e. inches) to the left, he would have been crushed. “If you’re not gonna help set up,” Jasmine said, “could you at least stay out of the way?”

“I guess he’s always been unhelpful, huh Jasmine?” asked Kenzie as she removed a set of silver game pieces from a small pouch.

“Always! I remember we had a rule for boardgame night: whoever won didn’t have to help put the game up. And guess who always won? How unhelpful is that?”

“Very unhelpful,” replied Kenzie. She blew on him and he tumbled in the direction of a square marked “Go.” This was her way of telling him to get a move on. “But I can’t say that was ever a  problem for me. We had that rule too, even for Siren, and I never even had to close the box. One time—I think this was like the second or third game he’d lost, so he was, what, a foot-and-a-half…” she suddenly burst out laughing. “Man, I can’t believe you were even that big! This size fits you way better.” Already exhausted from all the commotion, he stood, hands on his knees, catching his breath a short distance from “Go.” Cassidy gave him a calculated flick onto it and growled, “You’re taking too long!”

Wiping her eye, Kenzie continued: “Anyway, he had just graduated from fun-size to run-size…”

“Run-size?” Danielle asked. Evidently, she got to choose her game piece first; she plucked a silver cowboy hat from the center of the board and placed it next to him on the starting square. They were the same height. Another lost bet and it would dwarf him.

“Run-size as in, when I came stomping by, he’d better run. Or better yet, he’d better run to follow me out of the room before I close the door on him. He was just about too short to reach the doorknobs. Not that it stopped him from trying. Girls, there’s few things more entertaining than watching your little man take these cute, little leaps towards a doorknob and fail and fail and fail. Better than a cat chasing a laser-pointer. But I keep getting off-track. We’d played a game, and he lost—that’s how I found out about you Cassidy, by the way—and he became even more of a runt, and I said ‘Alright, standard rules apply. Put the game up.’ And he said that wasn’t fair because his widdle arms weren’t big enough to even open the box. And yes, it’s true, the deluxe edition I bought after our first game was a little harder to open than the original, but so what? Rules are rules. I watched him climb the couch so he could jump to the table. I thought it was so cute I had to see it again, so I picked him up off the table and placed him on the floor, and he hopped up and down at me and called me things not fit for polite company. I said I was so, so sorry, and that I wouldn’t do it again as long as he let me record him doing it. And he could’ve just scrambled over to the bedroom and sat and pouted in a shoebox or something, but ladies, male pride does not die with male dignity. So he did it, and I have it right here…” She showed them the video on her phone.

“Look at him go!”

“So resourceful!”

“Doesn’t look so bad to me!”

“And he still couldn’t open it! I just watched him try and try and try to get it open. Don’t have it on video, unfortunately, since he didn’t give me permission to record that. And he was so annoyed that he couldn’t do it that he challenged me to another game right then and there. He raised his tiny fist and said, ‘I want a rematch!’ Always so eager to prove he’s better. I’ve been playing Siren since I was a little girl, and he thought he could close the gap in a few games. You see the results now, ladies. The gap only got bigger.”

They had all chosen their pieces by now, and silver shapes surrounded him on all sides. He was boxed in. The car, the hat, the ship… no thimble, though. She’d lost it a long time ago.

“That night, I learned about you, Marianne. He was really hesitant to give up your name. Don’t know why.”

“Probably ‘cause he ghosted me. Apparently, he never got over the fact that we met at a party, so when he was ‘done partying,’ he was done with me too.” said Marianne.

“Well, that’s shitty. You’ll be happy to know he slept in a dollhouse that night. Still a little too big for it, but he wouldn’t be for long.”

He was trapped between what should have been miniscule chunks of cheap plastic, and he burned with rage. She was wrong, in so many ways. He wanted to correct her. He had gotten a door open, once, at that size. It took some time, and, yes, he did have to leap, but while she lay on the bed, laughing her head off, he put in the effort, and he got results. And the so-called “deluxe game box” wasn’t a game box at all! It was a heavy-duty storage trunk she strained to lift onto the table, which she bought for the express purpose of humiliating him! She never asked for his “permission” to record him, and she did, in fact, record him trying fruitlessly to open the box, she just told him it was “for her eyes only.” And he did not sleep in a dollhouse! He was too big. He slept on the bed and had to contend all night with her “accidently” smothering him as she tossed and turned. One side of the bed touches the wall, so when morning he came, he found himself trying to climb her ass so he could get off the bed. Instead, she audibly laughed and turned and “accidently” nearly smothered him beneath it.

Marianne was wrong, too. Yes, they’d met at a party. Yes, he’d given up partying. But that’s not why they broke up: his job had moved him back to Austin without warning! And he didn’t ghost her… no, he didn’t ghost her. He could’ve sworn he’d told her once that he’d sworn off long-distance. He had tried it once and it didn’t work. And he could’ve sworn that he’d texted her that he was moving, but maybe it didn’t go through. And maybe he wasn’t as thorough as he could’ve been, and maybe he was too eager to move-out, and maybe his aversion to long-distance was irrational, but he did not ghost her. She was lying through her teeth, he swore.

Yet the entire time, the others were in rapt attention. They might have known that they were hearing fabrications or exaggerations or outright lies, but they didn’t care. Why? Something in those fictions was undeniably compelling to them. What was it? He couldn’t guess. Regardless, they would never hear his side of the story—his voice could not rise above an unintelligible squeak. At first, he tried to communicate with Kenzie, but his squeaks were only “cute,” or “adorable,” or “puny,” they were not understood. So, he spent his days in silence; at long last, she’d taken his voice from him. His life had withered into a collection of secrets he had no power to reveal.

“Hey, did you pick your piece yet, Kenz?” asked Cassidy, “I’m rearing to go, go, go!”

“Oh, I always let him decide. And wouldn’t you know it, he’s chosen the thimble.”

“Uh, thimble? There is no thimble.” said Farah, who was distributing the money.

“What do you mean? The thimble was the first piece on the board.” said Kenzie. The others hesitated for a few seconds, then laughed. “I just thought we trying to scare him with our big ol’ game pieces!” said Cassidy, “But that’s a way better idea!”

“He does look a little hopeless trapped between those big, scary pieces,” said Kenzie, “You girls mind if I go first? Let’s give him a chance to stretch his legs a little.”

The dice between her palms rose into the air and crashed against the board with the thud of two heavy stones. The game had begun.