In the heavens high above him, money flittered between the remnants of the pantheon; cities and towns rose from the earth at their command, or sank into ruin at their will; he'd round the four corners of his flat, little world and be greeted with a falling citadel, or humiliation in a giant's hands. The women had settled into a kind of split-awareness: their focus on the game was unerring, almost eerie--the banter and the laughter had dissipated--but their hands, when otherwise, unoccupied, or under the sway of some bespoke, gimmick card Kenzie had place in the deck, searched for him. Kenzie drew, "Avalanche! Sweet!" She showed the rest of them what was clearly a picture she drew herself of a large sheet of snow sliding down the side of a mountain; a tiny stick figure was trapped in the flow, one arm stretched out toward the sky.

"What's that mean?" asked Danielle.
"It means: who wants to play catch?"
"I do!" The others said in unison.
    
The first few tosses were a novelty too unpleasant to ignore. In fact, this new torment was the first thing in a while to break his concentration. Since his return from his sojourn with Cassidy, he'd adopted a new strategy; something in him had softened and that could only end in disaster. He needed to be able to brace himself against all possibilities, all threats.

He retreated inward. His limbs were independent agents and he was utterly calm. When, in the course of one toss, his face struck the side of Marianne's thumb at a bad angle, he didn't feel it. He didn't process when she, aware that his nose was bleeding, hugged him to her belly in a grand, mocking display of feigned pity. He barely realized it when'd been deposited back on the board. The game resumed, like the flow of a river freed from an obstruction, and he was swept helplessly in the froth and rush of its currents.

"Earthquake!" And they shook the table, dropping him to his knees.
"Tornado!" And Danielle blew a gust of wind, knocking him off his feet. She had whiskey on her breath.
"Tsunami!" And Jasmine enveloped him in her mouth, and rolled him all over that dark, moist place with her tongue.

Eventually, they noticed his stupor. The enormous, shouting faces of mountains bellowed directivevs for him to move, for him to do a little dance, or sing with that lvoely cororatura soprana they were sure he had. At one point, Danielle became visibly upset.

He thought about Danielle. She was his first girlfriend in college. After his doomed romance with Margaret, he wanted a change of pace. Danielle was a hard-drinking permaslacker with a good body and no ambitions; at the time, that was what he was looking for.

But he couldn't picture Danielle the way she'd been in the past. When an old memory crept up from his subconscious, he could it had been tampered with, altered. He was training her at the bowling alley; he was teaching her how to trigger the manual reset for the pinsetters in case something in the machines became stuck. But she was refusing to listen.

He was on the ground, no higher than the toe of her cowboy boots, jumping and shouting his instructions. But she wasn't listening; she plucked him from the ground and touseled his hair with her enormous thumb.

"I don't really see why I should have to take orders from you, bug boy." Her cheeks were rolling in and out and she blew a shiny, pink bubble, and it popped and he was suddenly covered in gum. She stuck him to the side of the bowling ball and said "Don't worry, I know how to spin it just right so you don't get crushed," and she rolled it down the lane; and he struck the pins and fell and fell and fell into a darkness with no end. The ball rolled back through the machine, travelled along the groove, and when it reached the end he was stuck to the top side and he saw her standing triumphantly over him, then, suddenly, tears were streaming down her face.

"Are you even listening to me?"

The bowling alley--the bowling ball, the memory--all dissolved away in an instant. He was balled in her fist. They were standing on the porch and she was crying. He did not know why.

"You could at least say something! This is it! The last time you're ever going to see me!"

He said nothing.

"I did so much for you. And it was always just this in return: silence. It's all I ever got. Kenzie says you chose to live in that box all on your own. I don't know if that's true but I believe it. You've always acted like a bug, now you just look the part. Always creeping aroound till you find some little hole to hide in. Turtling up inside your shell, like I ain't even here. Well." She drifted off, set him down on the cold wood of the porch, unlatched the front gate, and took the first step down the stoop. "Good riddance, and good luck getting back inside!"

The door behind him was closed, and he could only look forward in teh deep, dark wilderness beyond the porch. A chill wind blew and he grabbed his shoulders, his eyes widened, his knees trembled, and his teeth began to chatter. Wherever he had been, he was here now.

He considered the difficulty of descending the stairs. No doubt he could fit through the bars of the gate; he was small enough for that. The possibility of freedom was right before him. Just creep beneath the gate (a high, metal valley), climb down the steps (steep, flat cliffs), and cross through the yard (the jungle). He looked up at the stars. He felt small. He'd always been small, the thought occured to him; present circumstances had merely made his body comport with his soul. Minutes passed. A golden line angled across the bars of the gate; it opened wide and wider, and an enormous figure cut in shadow in the widening light stepped onto the "Home Sweet Home" mat in front of the front door. A darkness descended over head, and he flew through the air. Someone——Farah——had come out to retrive him.

"She just left you out here huh? That bitch," she said playfully, "Don't worry, I'll take care of you."

Inside, the game had advanced considerably. Kenzie was using a small toy soldier in lieu of her "thimble." Farah dropped him near his substitute, and a moment later Kenzie tossed it off the board and across the room. It crashed into something a mile away from where he stood, and he winched when he heard the impact; he imagined his own body breaking against the wall. "Finally! My luck was beginning to turn without you, bud," said Kenzie.

"Hey, Farah," said Marianne, taking her turn, "How'd you and the little guy meet?"
"Oh, I haven't told y'all yet? Huh. Well, it was a few years ago, and he wasn't a little guy just yet."
"If I can interrupt," began Kenzie, "why not embellish it a little bit?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean... look, I've been telling tales all night about him, how small he's gotten, how much fun it is to have a little bug boy walking around and your complete mercy." Her lips curved into a mischievous grin as she spoke the word "mercy."" "So why don't you try it? Just tell us about you all's time together! Only make him puny." She held her thumb and pointer finger a small distanct apart. "It's not that big of a change at the end of the day; we're all pretty much in agreement that he's always been like this from a certain point of view. It's not like he'll speak up to correct us. If we could even hear him, that is."

Farah drummed a row of fingers along the table in a cascading motion. "Sure, why not. Hey, we're just having fun."

And so she told the story of how they met, albeit with a certain amount of poetic license. It was at Austin City Limits, and he was dodging around people's ankles, trying to avoid being crushes. Eventually, she claimed, he was standing at her feet, hunched over on his knees and panting; she whispered "poor little guy" to herself and lifted up her foot with the purpose of putting him out of his misery. He jumped and screamed and waved his arms in protest, and she——whether out of mercy or pity she did not know——relented and placed her foot alongside him. He pointed at her water bottle, and once she realized what he meant she poured it over him and laughed. She lifted him up onto her palm and up to her face. Safe, hydrated, but wet and angry, he crossed his arms as she examined him. No bruises, no bumps. A toy in good condition: he might be good for something. He explained (for this was before his long oath of silence) that he'd agreed to be reduced so a friend could sneak him into the festival; poor guy couldn't afford a wristband. That friend had flaked on him, leaving him stranded and puny in the great, green expanse of Zilker Park--oh, what heartless giant could forsake him then? Farah, because she pittied him, and because she could think of more than a few good uses for a tiny man, agreed to take him through the festival and keep him safe; and, if he was lucky, he'd have a place to sleep that night: on a box of Kleenex by her bed.

"Okay okay, I like it so far," said Kenzie, "though it does beg the question of how he got so small. Like how did this flaky friend shrink him? And how small is he, anyway?"
"Hmm, I don't actually know. I was basically just improvising with his size. And as for the how of it, I guess I'm not familiar enough with the process. I mean, how do you do it?"
"Nuh uh, a magician never reveals her secrets! At least not until the grand finale."
"Okay, well, magic then. And the friend never came back, I guess."
"Or how about the friend tricked him! Hoping he'd get trampled in the park. And not even a friend, a girlfriend, trying to get rid of him."
"Ooh, I like that. Adds a bit more spice."
"Who would it be? Who'd he hook up with before you, Fair?"
"I think it was Marianne."
"Marinne, nice! How bout that Marianne, you tricked him into shrinking at the park, then abandoned him! Seems like something you'd do."
"Well," said Marianne, "it was better than our actual breakup, so sure."
"So, Marianne left him tiny and stranded at ACL, and then he met you, and then you..."
"Had a wonderful time at the festival. We saw Animal Collective, Foster the People, Ghostface had a solo set... oh, and Taylor Swift was there that year. I remember asking him if he wanted me to throw him up on stage. I was ready to do it. I had him balled up in my hand and ready to go, but I could feel his little feet kicking in fear so I decided not to. Then, once we got home..."

She put him to work, all night long. She kicked off her shoes, broke out the nail polish, and sat on the bed; she placed him on the floor, right beneath her toes. She was intent on being pampered. "I don't want a normal paint job, come on," she said, "I want some detail! Do a nice little pattern or something!" And of course, his artistic work was mediocre at best. She noted his subpar handiwork and caught his head between her toes. Then she kicked out her leg and gingerly tossed him with her feet into her hamper. "Where he would stay until I thought up something else."

And she did.

Intermittenly, she'd removed him from her pile of worn clothes and place him to work on this or that task. Fetch a sock from under the bed, she said. Here, take this needle and run it through that hole, you're hands are way smaller than mine, she said. Keep Phlegm, the hamster, company while I smoke outside. Hey, I'm about to take a shower, come with me and be my loofa, will ya? At one point, he was covered in dish soap and forced to crawl around the bottom of a stock pot; it was a far more effective way of cleaning every nook and cranny of the thing, and she didn't have to lift a finger.

"And, I'll be honest, girls, at this point, I wasn't really sure what he was good for," Farah said, "but then..."

He had been laying atop the pile in the hamper, utterly exhausted, when the light suddenly went out; a new set of clothes had fallen into the hamper and smothered him. After he crawled from underneath, he realized they were the clothes she'd been wearing the whole night. She instantly materialized over the top of his enclosure, fully naked and flashing a broad, terrifying grin. A tallow hand slithered down after him, and a few seconds later, he was standing on her bare stomach, staring through the valley of her breasts towards that mocking, radiant smile.

"Oh wow, didn't know you'd go there so quickly." said Kenzie.
"Well, I was just having a little fun."
"And what about him," asked Jasmine, more intrigued than she had been, "was he having fun?"
"Dont know, to be honest. What was it like for you, Kenz-" she stopped herself. She had almost forgotten the point of this exercise. "Actually, I don't know, because I don't care," she said with confidence, "he was just a toy. Whether he was having fun or not, wasn't my problem. Anyway, after I got let him have a good look at me..."

Her phone vibrated and she took it out and looked at it. There was silence for a few moments. "Yeah, then what?" asked Marianne.

"Yeah, yeah, I wanna know!" said Jasmine.

"Actually... if it's okay, I need to head out."

"What?" said the others in unison, "What's the deal, you were getting to the good part?" said Kenzie.

"Yeah, yeah, guess I was. It's just that my work... you know the law firm, they just told me they're putting me on some client's case? And it's kind of a bigshot case, and I didn't think I'd get it, and now I have to get a deposition the day after tomorrow and now I really need to-"

"Don't worry about, Fair. I could tell you were out of ideas anyway." Kenzie winked.

"Well, you know," she was packing up her things, "performative cruelty isn't really my thing. Not sober anyway. Though if you ever wanna send the little guy around while I'm smashed, I wouldn't say no."

"What about the competition? Don't you wanna be the one to take him home?" asked Jasmine, apparently appalled at Farah's sudden disinterest.

"To be honest, not really. I mean, thanks for putting this on Kenzie, and I'm not gonna lie, the longer I went on the more I could see myself enjoying having a little pet. But, you know, it would still be him? I'd prefer to keep him out of my life, frankly. Hope whoever gets him has fun, though. Bye girls! Keep in touch!" And she was gone, like the sun past the horizon. He was struck by how quickly, almost eagerly, she left, and by how little she seemed to care. He tried to draw up that memory once again, of the two of them in the car after that French movie he could not muster up the will to feign he enjoyed. That was, he speculated, the last genuine conversation they'd ever had, hostile as it was. Everything afterward was a long stagnation, filled with strained moments of quiet and perfunctory remarks. Something deeper than silence set in between them; it was almost a blessing when she finally broke it off. He tried to picture that memory again, that car, that argument. Only this time he was an insect: she stuffed him in the glove compartment and drove home, humming to herself the whole way. When she got home, she cast him into the kitchen garbage bin and forgot about him the next morning, and every morning after she forgot about him again, till the only thing resounding through his head was the buzzing of trapped flies.

"Well, shit. She was winning too. More for the rest of us, I guess. How should we split  her money?"" asked Jasmine.

"Usually," began Kenzie, "I'd take a handicap and let you two split it between yourself. But——and I hate to say this because I feel like we're becoming such good friends——we're in the end game now." She turned around to face them, "And I don't plan on losing!""