The light turns on in my room, and I can hear the creak of the door outside the house.  Great, time to get up again.  I’ll bet it’s even earlier than yesterday.  I climb off my matchbox, discarding the thick handkerchief off to the side and quickly slip into some new clothes before stepping into the plastic hallway, where Kelly, Brian, and Gina are already standing, wiping their eyes.

                “I swear, this is earlier than yesterday…” says Gina, yawning absentmindedly.  “I know, I think it is,” I say, leaning against the door frame.  Another minute passes and then Anna comes out of her room.  “Not ready…” she mumbles, her eyes still mostly closed.  We mill around for a minute.  Kelly places an arm around Gina, who looks a little sad this morning. 

Morning.  I’m assuming it’s morning.  I think the last time we saw the sun was a couple months ago.  Regardless, this is our morning.  Another moment passes and the little paper cup with the side chopped off for someone to stand in is lowered down from a cut hole in the roof above the hallway.  “I guess I’ll go first,” says Scott, stepping in.  The string attached to the cup is raised up and out the hole and Scott is pulled from sight.  The empty cup is then lowered down and we each take a turn stepping in, one at a time.  I go last.  I step in and am raised out.

I look up and the first thing I see are those familiar fingers, long and powerful, gripping the string tightly.  I come out and the cup is spun around, where I come face to gigantic face with Julia.  Her massive mouth widens into a smile, showing off her white teeth.  Her blue eyes seem to glow when I come into full view.  With her other hand, she pushes her long brown hair out of her face so I can get a fuller view of it.  The hand precariously holding the cup shifts toward her face, and I suddenly can feel her hot breath being steamed out her nostrils a little ways above me.  Finally her mouth opens, and a wave of heat rushes out at me as she speaks, her fingers gently reaching forward to wrap around me. 

“Good morning, Jack,” she says.

                I guess this needs a little explanation.  My name is Jack.  I’m seventeen years old, and I’ve been living in the carefully stowed dollhouse of one Julia Mack for the last two years, along with four others: Brian, Anna, Kelly, and Gina.  I’m the youngest of all us five, but I’ve been here the longest, although the others weren’t far behind.  Julia herself is actually only sixteen years old.

                I really am not an important person, or even a particularly interesting one.  I’ve lived in a foster home for as long as I can remember.  My “parents” aren’t really bad people, we just sort of ignore one another.  They sign a permission form here or there for school, they give me new clothes, they give me video games to keep me occupied.  Both are architects, and they spend all their time over blue prints.  Or at least, that was what they were doing last time I saw them.  I honestly have no idea what the world believes about my existence.  In all truthfulness they probably think I’m dead.  Hell, I might as well be for the trippy sort of situation I live in now.

                Anyway, Julia might be a year younger than me, but she’s one damn smart girl.  I have no idea how she got the whole thing to go down so well, but she managed to kidnap five people without a single suspicion being aroused.  And even if one was aroused, nothing’s come of it, because the five of us still live in a dollhouse and for weeks at a time don’t even leave Julia’s bedroom.

                It all revolves around Julia’s portable size alteration device.  To the uninitiated on this particular contraption, it allows her to use the on-board computer to set specifications about the size, then detach a hose-like apparatus, get a lock on the target, and send out waves that actually change the size of whatever it hits.  People are included in that category of “whatever,” obviously.  The details of how it happened exactly are a little fuzzy to me at this point, but I was in the same school as Julia and we were both in detention.  The teacher monitor had walked out for a smoke break, but had told us we could go at 4:30.  I had no particular reason to be at home, so I just sort of stayed and did my homework.  Eventually, Julia just up and started talking to me.  I had never spoken to her.  However, again, not having much of a reason or desire to do much of anything at the current moment, I started talking too.  I don’t remember what it was about.  I do remember it shifting to home life eventually, which is how she must have discovered I wouldn’t be particularly missed. 

At least she had the decency to do that: make sure no one would give a shit if I disappeared. 

A little bit later, she plopped her backpack up on the desk, and I saw a little blinking light from inside as I looked up.  A minute later, I found myself laying flat on the desk’s chair, probably only three or so inches tall; I of course couldn’t comprehend this fact at the time, as I was in far too much shock.  It might have been the fear of falling off the chair or just the sheer spine-chilling weirdness and surrealism of what was happening, but I stayed where I was, still not sure what was going on.  Julia, obviously prepared, swooped over, had me in her warm cupped palm an instant later, and deposited me quickly but gently in her jean pocket, where I stayed for another hour, rocked at regular intervals against the fabric made to feel tough by her thick quad until her nanny drove her home.

                Julia’s parents are pretty loaded, and both, as I learned from Anna after she was dropped in to this living hell, are extremely prominent lawyers, both high in demand and making millions annually.  If not for the altogether decent public school system and the complete lack of prestigious private schools in this area, I’d bet Julia would be up in some high and mighty prep or boarding school, but instead her parents just stuck her in my school. 

Just my luck. 

But anyway, she must not have a good relationship with them or one at all for that matter, because I’ve never seen either of them.  Hell, I’ve never seen the nanny either, I just know she has one.  She must have paid off the nanny or something to keep her out of her room, because no one other than Julia has entered this place for the past two years I’ve been here.   Once again, it’s my great luck that keeps coming back to bite me firmly in the ass.

                So then I found myself in a dollhouse, and I had Julia explaining a particularly twisted set of “rules” to me. 

Obviously, she had thought this through for quite a while. 

This was my new home.  I would still “go to school” (I found out what THAT was a bit later) and grow up right, but just in this room.  If I ever disobeyed I would be punished severely.  She said all this with such a calm I realized escape plans should be held off, at least for a bit.  The bitch was downright insane, and I could tell that very early on.  No doubt, this realization saved me from ending up a flattened, bloody pancake within those first couple of days.

                Not long after, the others showed up.  It might have been a month or so later, each separated by roughly the same length of time, I’m not entirely sure.  First Brian, then Anna, then Kelly, and finally Gina.  Brian’s 26 years old.  He was a new teacher at our school.  It was easy to figure out how that one went down.  Anna is 28, our oldest one.  She had just started at the local law firm Julia’s parents owned.  Another connection.  Kelly is 21.  She was in college to be a nurse.  Finally, Gina is 18, a year older than me.  She went to our school too, although I had never spoken to her until she was plopped into the dollhouse with the rest of us.

                We’ve all become pretty close, but I guess that’s understandable when you’re all in what is pretty much a concentration camp, minus the visible fire and whippings.  Not that we aren’t aware of what awaits us if we step out of line.  There used to be a sixth one of us.  Jim. 

Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid Jim.

                We still had Jim with us a few months ago.  He was the oldest one; I think he was 30, and he was done with this shit as soon as he stepped into that dollhouse. 

I mean he was DONE. 

The thing with the rest of us was that we had been here longer, and I suppose had created some sort of mental block to prevent going crazy.  Survival instinct.  Mine was strongest, I had been here longest and knew the rules.  It was just a reality I had learned to deal with for the time being (or at the very least, trained my brain to create an impressive block of convincing doubt). 

Jim didn’t. 

He stepped in and went insane almost immediately, saying he was going to kill Julia and a bunch of other fanciful ideas.  We all tried to quiet him, telling him we just had to keep our heads down for the time being and survive. 

He didn’t listen. 

He tried to get out. 

And, well, long story short, in a public display (probably as a warning to the rest of us), Jim found himself first beat mercilessly with the thumb of Julia’s right hand.  It started off slow, with her knocking him over, but eventually, with him pinned down, she started jabbing pretty hard down on his gut, legs, and arms.  It was scary to watch, he was struggling at first but after a while gave up hope that his arms would be able to actually stop the onslaught of sheer muscular advantage training down on his small form.  Then, with him severely weakened and probably several bones broken or at least twisted, she did a little oxygen deprivation by dunking his body, clenched in her fist, into a filled sink.  By that point he was about spent and probably ready to adopt our quiet and obedient lifestyle, but Julia wasn’t going to let this one slide. 

We all did a little bit of pleading for Jim early on in the beating, but from the look on Julia’s face it quickly became apparent that we were up on the chopping block next if we didn’t shut it, so we did.  I had the vague sense some of our humanities were stripped away from us at that point.  Hell, it had probably been gone for a long time, it’s just that something like this had yet to happen.  Somehow, none of us were surprised by it anyway.

                Jim went into this hysterical fit of apologizing.  At first, it looked like it was working.  Julia stopped dunking him, held him in her hand without clenching it, and asked him to strip down so she could look him over and make sure he didn’t have any permanent damage.  He did so, although he couldn’t reach all the way to his feet to pull his soaked pants off because his back was probably out at that point, so she helped him out, plucking them off and putting them on the table.  Of course, a second later, with two of her fingers she snatched him up by the dick and held him upside down for twenty seconds or so, above her head in the air.  He was screaming bloody murder, and his voice had just given out when she let go, allowing him to plunge what felt like two or so stories down to the sink.  He landed hard and started splashing around weakly, trying to swim away. 

He didn’t have long, though.  Julia had picked up a clear glass cup used for tooth brushing and was already scooping into the water.  He was inside it a second later, and she held it up, smiling, her pinkish hand flesh smooshed against the clear glass of the cup, surrounding Jim’s view.  He came to the surface and looked out of the cup at her, pleading some more, fully exposed in the water, so close his view was probably all her face.  It looked like he had pissed in fear in the water.  Julia’s face curled into a frown, and she pressed her mouth against the cup, blocking off air flow and creating a suction effect so that what she said next was difficult for the rest of us to hear clearly.

                “You’ve made me do this, you little bastard,” said Julia darkly before tipping the cup over her lips.  Water rushed inward, and Jim tried to clamber back out but it was no use.  He slipped over her huge pink lips a second later and disappeared as she closed her mouth, licking her lips and swallowing hard, forcing the hapless Jim into a slimy road down her digestive tract.

                And that’s really all the reason the rest of us need to lie low.  Torture and a painful death, completely at the mercy of this sadistic teen?  None of us wanted to be here, but that was the worse alternative.  We had of course, thought to consider what would happen when Julia was old enough to go to college.  Would she take us with her? 
                Or just get rid of us? 
                We didn’t linger on this topic long.