Your eyes boggle, drinking in the sight before you.  Having not fully laid eyes on another human being like this other than your sister in the last five years, the experience of seeing a human being taller than an office building is taking its toll anew.  For the first time in years, as well, you don’t feel dread and squeamishness at the initial vision of a towering youth large enough to stamp you into a crimson puddle with a single unintentional footfall.  Instead, you feel wonderment.  Awe.  It’s like watching some unimaginably powerful wild animal moving slowly about in its business, unaware of the pitiful life forms around it.  Like an elephant, or a blue whale, perhaps even some sort of mythical beast not adequately described by any existing creature.  So much raw strength and terrible destructive ability, distilled into the tanned, athletic, gargantuan body of your younger cousin Sophie, who happens to be the one standing in the doorframe of Carly’s bedroom.

                Reality comes crashing back to you in your mind, and you watch as the immense bare foot rises up again, suspended in midair for a few moments before thumping back onto the carpet.  The tremor of the ground beneath your feet is all that’s needed to get you moving again, and like a flash you’re off across the endless plain of carpet, headed for the bed.  It’s your best bet at this moment for taking cover.  Hardly daring to look over your shoulder, you sprint with all your might, feeling the approaching footsteps thudding and vibrating the floor beneath you, praying to the heavens that you haven’t been spotted yet.

                With every ounce of strength you have to expend at this moment, you thrust yourself under the loping curve of the corner of the bedspread, creating a makeshift cave of fabric for yourself.  If Sophie decided to stand on this exact spot, your defenses are at precisely zilch, but for the moment, you can breathe a sigh of relief.  Your chances of escape don’t seem to have been squelched yet.

                You peek out into the open again, the fear beginning to steadily rise in you.  Although your vision is filled mainly by the thick, muscular calves and soft, veiny boat-sized feet of your cousin at the moment, staring upward toward her towering torso far above you is all that’s needed to retrigger these feelings.  Despite her slightly darker dirty blonde hair and placement of a few freckles, Sophie is all but the spitting image of your sister.  And now, staring up at your cousin, who happens to be six years younger than you, you can’t help but feel an utterly crushing flashback of the past few years attack your psych.  It’s like looking into a time machine back at your sister a few dozen months ago.  And normally, if things were in this exact position, except with Carly stepping around the room rather than Sophie, you’d probably have reason enough to piss yourself with terror at the very thought of being found.

                Your memories of your family reunions are a bit foggy in moments like this, but as you stare upward at Sophie as she continues to calmly tread across the room like a lumbering titaness, you can’t help but be reminded of them.  You never really had much interaction with Sophie, mainly because the last time you saw her was when she was only eleven years old and preoccupied with more doll-oriented things than your seventeen-year-old self was.

                Unfortunately, though, your interactions with her weren’t as positive as you might have liked.  You remember Sophie admiring Carly greatly, and always striving to emulate her demeanor and actions; essentially, Sophie had been in training to be a mini-Carly for a number of years there, becoming more snobby, pious, and self-important with each meeting.

                You shiver as the possibilities finally begin occurring to you.  That was how things were five years ago.  Who’s to say things haven’t gone even further?  Who’s to say that by now, Sophie not only emulates your sister, but is the sixteen-year-old version of your viciously cruel and sadistic sibling reincarnated?  Who’s to say that, if you’re spotted right now, you won’t end up as the new captive toy of a far more immature and curious young girl?

                Hell, who’s to say that being under the repressive ownership of the sixteen-year-old goddess strutting around the room right now comparatively wouldn’t make being squeezed all day by Carly’s toes feel like a massage at a damned luxury hotel?

                Regardless of these questions, you know one thing for absolute certain: you aren’t willing to find out the elusive answers.

                You stare out, now trembling more fully, surveying the scene.  Sophie is now on the far side of the room, giving you a slightly fuller view of her towering corpus as it rises up into the sky, above the level of the dresser and vanity.  Sophie raises a hand up to her bangs, brushing them gently out of her face as she stares around the room with almost twinkling turquoise eyes.  After a moment, a victorious smirk curls itself into her lips and she begins walking back across the room, her feet seeming to land a little more violently than necessary with each step.

                Good God, she even has the same mannerisms as Carly.  You gulp hard, trying to stave off the nausea, as well as the frustration at the fates that seem so hell-bound and determined to conspire against you.  Bitterly, you shake a fist at existence itself.  Why couldn’t it have been your mother walking through the door?  Surely, the shock of seeing your parent standing so powerfully above your naked, less than three-inch-tall form would have been wholly overwhelming, just as it was seeing Sophie, but you would have been able to rush forward into the opening, screaming for help, waving your arms, without any fear of imprisonment.  Your mother is an observant person, and you know that you could have ended all of this right now.  Five years of pain and torture, ended easily in this instant.

                Tears well in your eyes to imagine the relief you would feel to curl up safely, at long last, into the warm palm of your mother as she gently lifted you from the ground, to protect you like a building-sized angel of mercy from the raging goddess of your satanically-suggesting sister.  The thought is mind-blowingly wonderful to you.  To you, at this moment, as awkward as you know it should seem to anyone else in the world besides someone in your position, your personal heaven is the idea of laying calmly and safely in the soft, tender flesh of your mother’s hand, knowing no harm would come to you while there.

                With an angry snarl, you know that, as usual, fate has taken a dump on your fortunes, forcing you to make do with the horrible dealings you are left with.  A moment later, Sophie comes back into view, clutching what looks like a tube of lipstick in her left hand.

                Good.  Maybe she’s leaving.

                A moment passes idly as Sophie treks steadily back across the carpeted floor, which to you looks like a mile-long snowfield.  She arches her right foot absentmindedly against the floor, bending her flexible toes against the beaten fabric of the carpet, stretching the wrinkled flesh of her sole out slightly in response.  She wriggles her toes thoughtfully against the carpet, roughly twisting the ball of her foot against the ground as if about to start dancing.  She suddenly stops dead in her tracks, then, slamming her foot flat against the carpet with a full-bodied thud.

                Come one, come on.  Go already.  Go.  You can practically feel yourself shouting out the words, but you don’t dare risk it, not even at this size with such powerless vocal cords.

                Finally, your heart begins regulating again as Sophie resumes her long, powerful strides across the carpet, heading back for the door and out.  Waiting for a few more seconds to pass before peeking again, you duck out from under your little tent of bedspread fabric.  As much as you feel the need to stop for a second and recuperate to come up with your plan of attack, you know you don’t have the time to afford yourself such luxuries.  At any moment, Carly could come dashing back into the room, no doubt with the intention of flicking you in the balls or something equally vile, to find her purse prison to be missing a key inmate.  By that point, your chances of escape would be all but gone and you’d be running on a significantly shortened lifespan.  You know beyond a shadow of a doubt that, at this moment, as far as you’ve gone into your “escape plan,” Carly’s rage would be at a point even the cruelly calculating and methodical girl would be incapable of keeping in check.  That, of course, could lead to any number of unthinkable possibilities, from having your limbs snapped like toothpicks under one of Carly’s thumbs, to having your entire body dragged wetly down your sister’s all-encompassing, mucus-clogged gullet once and for all.  Neither of these ideas, nor anything else in between, are things you are particularly inclined to spend much time deliberating on at the moment.

                Don’t fuck this up, you repeat to yourself again, blinking a few times.  Don’t fuck this up.  Taking a deep breath, you dash outward like an Olympic sprinter hearing the firing of the pistol, beginning the race.

                You can feel your heart pounding in your chest, wind whipping past your sides, as you sprint with all you’ve got across the inconveniently wide plain of carpet.  At this moment, in particular, you are incredibly vulnerable, not just to being accidentally destroyed by an unsuspecting party, but to being easily spotted by the keen eyesight of your sisterly captor.  With so many years of practice, you nod with a grimace to yourself, Carly is well skilled at picking out her weak and nude little toy from a room full of equal-sized trinkets.

                Reaching the dresser, you duck headlong underneath it, into the relative safety of the darkness beneath the wooden tower containing Carly’s hot air balloon-sized clothing articles.  Allowing your breathing to slow down somewhat before continuing on again to the closest cover, you reflect on this last bone-chilling realization. 

                A few years ago, in order to ensure she’d be prepared in the event of your attempted escape, Carly actually set up an exercise for herself to improve her ability to find you.  Placing old dolls and random items of approximately equal size on her bedroom floor, Carly played a fear-inducing game of hide and seek with you.  Placing you seemingly fairly into the furthest corner of the bedroom, your sister turned her back for a moment, counting to twenty and allowing you the chance to hide.  From there, it became a game of cat and mouse as you did your best to follow the instructions given to you by your sibling: make it to the bedroom door without being found.  Using most of your available energy, you did your best to obey, actually making it to destination.  Of course, in frustration that she had failed at her own test, Carly had scooped you back up into a firm, clammy fist, accusing you of actually trying to escape during the “exercise.”

                Typical.  Your next thirty minutes directly following that little activity involved being tied upside down by your ankles in Carly’s dirty clothes hamper, forcing you to fester in the decaying smells of sweat, grime, and body odor ingrained in her used shirts, socks, and panties.

                Of course, at the end of that repercussion, Carly set up the game again, setting out the same conditions.  This time, of course, your sister had wised up to your tactics, and not even a clever hiding place on your part in the darkness under the bed could save you from the horror of your sister’s firm fingers grasping roughly in the darkness, her palm sliding across the carpet, preparing gleefully to grab you with no possible escape for you.  The sight of her hand growing larger and larger, outstretched, preparing to consume you into a sarcophagus of warm, punishing flesh.

                “I won,” Carly had proclaimed proudly, smirking at you curled helplessly in between her probing fingers.  “And you lost.”  With that, she had proceeded to press your face against her lips and blow a vibrating, moist, loud raspberry obnoxiously against you until flecks of her cold spittle had encrusted into your hair.

                With a shiver and another frown, you brace yourself.  You know what you’re up against.  Carly is ready for this, and any lapse, even for a moment, in your tactics within the next few minutes could spell the end of any future escape attempts.

                It could spell the end of your life, come to think of it.

                Another deep breath, and you’re leaping out of your hiding place under the dresser and back into the warzone of your sister’s bedroom, this time going for the door.  You can feel your skin shivering, not just from cold, but from the tingling sensation that can only be described as the equivalent of having multiple laser scopes settling their sights on you from unseen snipers.  You can’t see it, and yet you have the ominous feeling it’s coming.  Your doom could be seconds away, and there’s nothing you can possibly do to prepare yourself for it.

                Your breathing is getting heavier as you continue in a full sprint over the majestically skyscraper-high doorframe of Carly’s bedroom, continuing along the hall carpet.  So far, so good.  Your eyes dart around frantically.  You’ve tested the waters too long; it’s time to get into a new hiding place before all this effort and exhaustion becomes nil.  Your pupils settle quickly on the laundry closet directly across from the stairs leading to the main floor of your house.  You can hear muffled voices conversing, with a few laughs tossed in, as your extended family interacts in the kitchen and living room, completely unaware of your plight at this moment.  Forcing yourself to focus rather than try to decipher what’s being said, you continue in full, exhaustive sprint for the closet, your chest heaving against your sore bones.

                Almost there.  Five more seconds of sprinting and you’ll be able to duck under the dark, protective barrier of the closet door in order to catch your breath before making your next move.

                Footfalls begin slamming on the base of the stairs, getting louder and louder with each thud.  Even being so far apart, you can feel the vibrations rattling through your body.  Your blood turns to ice.  You’d recognize that walking pattern anywhere.  Somehow, you manage to put a little extra juice into your sprint, rolling onto your side and ducking under the closet door in one move just as the terrifying, crashing steps of the leviathan feet behind you reach the top of the stairs.

                Your lungs rail painfully against your ribs as you attempt to catch your breath from the unhealthy amount of speed running you just did.  You double over, clutching your stomach and gasping, before hearing a sound far worse than the heavy thuds of colossal feet slamming into the carpet behind you.

                The squeak of the closet door handle.

                Scrambling back to your feet, you dash forward in the darkness, feeling yourself crashing into a high pile of softened denim.  Probably clean clothes folded up and waiting to be claimed by their owners.  Having no other time to look for a hiding place, you clamber over a layer of fabric and burrow into the first indent you find like a mouse in a garden just as you feel the overpoweringly bright lights of the hallway beaming into the closet as the door is swung open.

                You hardly have time to get into a safe, fetal position before the clothes begin to ruffle around you, gravity slamming you hard into the walls of fabric surrounding you.  You can hear the loud patting of wide hands slapping at the jeans absentmindedly, flattening them as they are scooped up into the air.

                Damn it.