#2 - In Memoriam

He should’ve said something. He should have told his wife by now, but he was sure he would have more time than this. People went on about how it could take up to two weeks for the effects of the mark to kick in, yet here he was, after only four days, at a height of only two inches, cowering atop the cushioned bench at the local burger joint.

It wasn’t like Dave had been awaiting his eventual diminishment carelessly. He had spent the last few days pretty much magnetized to his wife Janice, just in case. Of course, it was just his luck that he shrunk the moment she went to the restroom.

When she came back, she looked around the room for her regular-sized husband, before sitting down in the chair across from him. She scrolled through her phone, waiting for her partner, who she assumed had gone to the restroom right after her. Dave was left with a humbling view of the world under the table.

Across from the cliffside end of his bench towered a pair of jean-clad lower legs, reaching up to the now massive thick thighs of the woman he had chosen to spend the rest of his life with. It had been years since he had felt this much reverence for them.

They were only in their early forties, yet their marriage had reached the stereotypical tired detachment of an old boomer couple. They had both realized their legal binding to each other was more so out of insecurity than any actual deeper form of love, and it had been that same insecurity that had hitherto kept them from divorce.

They’d fight, complain, and always wanted the exact opposite. It was this very same love-hate dynamic that made David worry about telling his wife. How could he open up about an impending powerlessness with a woman he could scarcely find agreement with? How would she even treat him once she had full control in their relationship?

He had no choice anymore, he had to call out to her now, but he was too little, too late. Try as he might, she couldn’t hear him.

After about twenty minutes Janice got up again, heading for the men’s room and calling his name. After not getting a response there, Dave could see her legs walk up to the legs of a young service worker, who wore baggy jeans, covered in front by a black apron. She was likely asking the girl if she’d seen him, even pulled out her phone to show her pictures.

His wife stormed back in his direction, marching past their table, as she walked towards the exit. He shouldn’t have stood so close to the side-edge of the bench, as the sudden gust of her quick movement created enough wind to knock him off the seat.

Sent into a freefall, he screamed, as the floor rushed towards him. He hit the ground with less force than he expected, due to his reduced mass slowing the fall. It still knocked the air out of him, but at least he didn’t splatter the way he would expect when dropping the height of a tall building.

He stood up and reoriented himself. He hadn’t just fallen right beside the bench, but his light weight had carried him further, out into the open walk-space between tables, and his dilemma only worsened when he saw the baggy pants of the girl his wife had just spoken to turn towards him.

As he looked up, he could read the text, “Service With a Smile,” displayed on her apron, before seeing the actual face above that expressing a tired frown.

The service worker was a freckled ginger girl in her early twenties; her rusty hair tucked into a black cap with the company’s logo. Her brown eyes looked devoid of life, and her pale face had this shiny layer of what seemed to be either sweat or greasy condensation from the kitchen fryers.

She looked like a mundane god, a titan walking his way, but not with the slow pace you’d see from a lumbering giant in the movies. She approached with the quick patting rhythm of a regular fast-food employee carrying a platter of junk food to one of the tables.

Dave screamed, waving his arms for her attention, but her face quickly disappeared like a setting sun behind the platter she was holding, as she came closer and closer. Her dirty, worn-out sneakers slapped the floor in quick succession, without grace, without care. The discolored white-rimmed monsters weren’t moving towards him specifically, they were impatiently padding towards a different destination entirely, he was just in their way.

Dave turned, he tried to run, but he could scarcely cross the length of a floor tile, before he heard the booming clap of rubber hitting the ground right behind him. He didn’t look back. He didn’t want to see, all he could do was hope the next step would land anywhere but on top of him.

He felt the air displace behind him before it hit, like the wind was trying to push him down, telling him to accept his horrible fate; to die, tread on by a grouchy-looking young service worker; to surrender all his being, humanity and personhood, and add himself to the collection of dirt on one of these cheap, ill-maintained pieces of walk-wear, as if he were nothing more than the rest of the grime beneath it.

He felt a push, a loss of control over his body, as he hit the ground, the side of his face pressed into the cold stone of a floor tile. He was forced to look across the vast expanse of the now alien-looking establishment, the chair legs like scattered monuments, the cold light of a winter’s day shining through the window. He could hear something crunching below him, a grotesque squishing sound, as he felt nothing but pressure holding him down.

He tried to move his head, to get back up. The sound of steps had subsided, and he was not enveloped by the darkness beneath the ginger’s shoe. If her feet had missed him, why couldn’t he get up? Why couldn’t he move? Why couldn’t he turn his head to look up?

“Oh, shit…” He could hear the voice of a young woman boom above him, as his vision turned hazy and he lost consciousness.

Robin was staring at her toes, holding her platter to the side, enthralled by the sight of a minuscule head poking out from beneath the tip of her sneaker, as a small puddle of blood spread out into the open. The face she had just seen in the pictures his wife had shown her lay on its side, looking across the floor, in a death mask of shock and confusion.

She had stopped mid-step the second she felt the crunch, ready to give Jerry an earful for not cleaning up. Stepping on leftover food that had found its way on the floor was a gross, common occurrence, but this, the fact that the gross bit of meat she stepped on this time was a sentient human being, that recontextualized everything.

Robin immediately forced herself to recall what her step had felt like, the soft easy crunch and squelch of it against her toes. She told her mind to inscribe it, so she’d never forget. She could not stop the feeling of blood rushing to her cheeks, as an involuntary smile spread across her lips.

“The car is still outside,” Janice said, as she stepped back into the burger joint and addressed Robin.

The girl who she had asked for help just a minute ago, was distracted by something on the floor. She saw the freckled young woman raise her eyes toward her. The frown of an unhappy employee was gone, replaced by a barely subdued, thin-lipped grin.

“I think I found him,” Robin said, in a dissociated voice, the platter she was holding, shaking in her trembling hands.

Janice followed the girl’s eyes, as the service worker looked back down at her foot. Robin raised the front of it, letting her foot rest on its heel, presenting the woman with the gore of her husband stringing between the floor and the toe-end of her sneaker.

Janice’s jaw dropped open, letting out a screech of disbelief and terror.

~~~~~~~~~

It had been almost a year since the incident, and Robin had never told any of her friends about it.

She still remembers it all vividly, along with the screaming and crying that followed. The woman had threatened; told her she would rot in jail for what she did. She stated that the smirk on Robin’s face was enough to prove she had massacred her husband with sadistic glee. Robin’s manager came to her defense, and explained Robin’s morbid smile away as a shock response to a traumatic experience.

Like every other accidental death involving tinies, there were no consequences. Robin even got to keep the sneaker with which she had so humiliatingly snuffed out Dave’s life. She’d kept it in a separate shoebox ever since, not wanting any of the human gunk still embedded in the grooves, or the blood on the toe-end rim to fade by continuing to wear it.

In the days following the incident, Robin got the full names of the couple, by putting on her best face of remorse and asking her manager, who was still receiving threatening phone calls and emails of the grieving widow.

She used that information to quietly stalk the dead man on social media, finding pictures, personal information; like where Dave grew up, what schools he attended, where he’d been employed, his favorite sports team and his passion for fishing.

Everything she could find on his life, she printed out on two sheets of paper, which she folded up and put into the shoebox. Along with it, a printed picture of him and Janice, from their vacation to Spain, each smiling at the camera with a pair of sunglasses, happy and blissfully unaware that the picture they were taking, would find itself kept beside the grimy shoe that ended Dave’s life.

To Robin, the box served as a shrine, not in memoriam of Dave, the individual, but in fetishistic memoriam of his cruel end. Every now and then she’d open the box to look at that picture, to look at bits of him she got to keep, and read all the personal info she had on him to remind herself of his humanity, his personhood; the spice that made the sweet memory of his demise feel like all the more meaningful. It made everything feel personal. After all, he was her first and only tiny victim.

The fact that it had been an accident held great importance in her mind. She had never outright killed someone, big or small. The law agreed with what she had to convince herself of; this incident didn’t count, she hadn’t crossed that dreaded line, she hadn’t become a monster, yet.

And so, she allowed herself to bathe in the delight of that memory, to be happy that it happened, while promising herself to never act on the aching longing she felt, to have it happen again.

When she’d encounter a tiny in her day to day, she’d give them a wide berth, whilst trying to avoid looking at them, lest her creative mind would conjure up another intrusive thought.

Her fantasies were best kept to late night browsing of morbid video content. There were many fake videos involving tiny actors, who weren’t really being harmed, using fake blood and food products to simulate the effect of real gore. It was nice knowing she wasn’t the only one fantasizing about these sorts of things, and there was at least a somewhat healthy outlet for people like her.

At worst, she would get off on videos of real-life accidents, which often resurfaced, despite websites playing whack-a-mole to keep that content off their platform. There was a lot of CCTV footage of people checking their shoes upon realizing, or videos of bystanders filming the aftermath freakouts, and the horrified faces of people who realized they had just ended a life. The most famous video was of a streamer elbow grinding her boyfriend into a bloody streak across her desk without even noticing, until her chat told her.

There was only one thing Robin tried to stay clear of, the genuine tiny snuff videos made with intent to harm, which weren’t easy to find, but still accessible on the surface web. It wasn’t like the allure wasn’t there for her, it was, but to her, it would not be far off from crossing the line. She couldn’t be part of the consumer market for those videos. It would make her responsible for the creation of more.

At all times, Robin held her humanity over a raging fire of sadistic desires, and it was up to her to keep her fingers clenched, now more than ever, as those same hands would soon be holding the people she cared about.

As Robin stared at her old, bloodied sneaker, her phone rang, it was Jade.

“Hey, you got everything you need?” Robin said.

“Yeah, everyone has packed. Did you even check the group chat?”

“Half a box per person,” Robin said. “I mean it, there’s barely any space here as is.”

“Yeah, chill,” Jade said, “Time to do your rounds again. Pick each of us back up.”

“Kay, I’ll be right over,” Robin said, knowing none of her friends could risk driving at this point.

She took one last look at the contents of her shoebox shrine, before closing it, and shoving it under her bed, where she hoped none of her friends would ever find it.