Scott couldn’t be sure, but he was pretty positive that there was no feeling in his life he had appreciated more than the sensation of lying down at the end of the day, the coolness of the woolen floor under his neck inviting him aggressively into a deep, exhaustion-induced sleep.

                Having spent the entire evening at an inch tall and wedged tightly between his mother’s toasty toes trying to massage away her blister in an act of simultaneous mind-numbing discomfort and stark shame, Scott had a feeling his house arrest had started as it intended to go on, and then some.

                At least Judy had kept her word and returned him back to a foot tall at the end of the evening, after Maggie had already left for her party, giving him some temporary peace before the next fully shrunken storm he knew was waiting for him the next morning.  Of course, the limited downtime before had left him in a mood for little else than collapsing from tiredness.

                Judy had given Scott a necessary break at dinnertime to scarf down a thick ball of peanut butter and bread, along with a few pen caps full of soda, but immediately afterward he was whisked off to her office, where she had a mountain of paperwork waiting for her since Scott’s case was finally closed and she could return to her regular assignments. 

                The shrunken twenty-one-year-old found himself quickly nestled back between his mom’s busy toes and tucked underneath her desk as she got to work, ignoring him for the time being except to occasionally hug her toes tighter around his body in seeming gratitude for his services.  No longer even needing prompting, Scott had rapidly returned to work massaging the swollen blister on the side of Judy’s monstrous big toe.

                The three-hour mark passed without any form of communication between mother and son, save for a few token squeezes of Judy’s toes.  Scott perceived the sunset and the darkness filling the window frame of the office, though he couldn’t see it directly with his mother’s mammoth foot blotting out the last of the light.  Judy had been on and off her cell phone almost continually while she worked, answering questions calmly and even chuckling at whatever was being said over the line, all the while dangling her thumbnail-sized son underneath two of her naked toes.  Scott was beginning to wonder if he’d been forgotten entirely as he clung tightly to his mother’s doughy skin to avoid tumbling out onto the carpet far below.

                However, at ten o’clock, a half-asleep Scott was lowered back toward the carpeted floor and released from between Judy’s toes, his arms so sore from rubbing that they felt like they had tensed into pure cartilage.

                He barely even noticed as a cheerful Judy, with her extensively pampered toe blister finally softer and on the mend, zapped him with the PMRD back to a respectable twelve inch height.  Placing it back in the case, Judy leaned closer to the carpet so the obliterated little boy below her could hear.

                “You’re free to go, honey.  Take the rest of the night off.  You’ve done a good job for your first day living with us again,” she informed him.

                Of course, as tired as he was, Scott gave no response, simply nodding.  All he really wanted to do was take in the relief and ultimate relaxation as he felt the warmth of the carpet against his aching back, his body no longer squeezed between a pair of absentmindedly writhing toes, grinding against his sides with gleeful abandon, and flicking him between the fleshy folds like a forgotten ball of malleable lint.

                “Scott?  Did you hear me?”

                Seeing her son lying motionless on the carpet below her, Judy cooed quietly, clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth.  She lifted her foot heavily off the ground, her toes lithely wriggling, and gently stroked her pinky toe along the side of Scott’s head in an attempt to rouse him from his collapse.            

                “Scott, honey?” she called down to him while placing all of her completed paperwork back into drawers and folders, soon to be snapped back into her leather briefcase.  When he didn’t respond, she rubbed her pinky toe against the top of Scott’s head, ruffling his hair lovingly.  “I’m all done up here.  You can take a break and go to bed if you want.”

                Words were never so unnecessary in the wiped-out Scott’s ears.  Sleep came on almost immediately as he remained sprawled on the floor under Judy’s desk, transporting the weakened home-and-shoe prisoner gratefully into a place of fitful rest.  His mother could only chuckle to herself as she bent down under the desk and scooped up her son’s doll-sized body against her chest in a careful embrace to carry him to his bed.

                Scott squinted, his knees wobbling a little, as he came to, practically drowning in a heavy glow from above.  The floor beneath him sagged and caved with each twitch of his feet like sand, though aside from this, empty air surrounded him on all sides for several football fields.

                And then he saw her, though it was difficult to tell from the distance.  A few second’s glance confirmed his curious guess.

                It was his mother.

                Or, at least, it looked like his mother as he strained his neck upward to see her face so high above that he had to squint to fully make out her visage, made fuzzier by the gleaming halo of blinding light from the kitchen bulbs so far above they might as well have been separate planets to Scott.

                There was truly nothing to compare her to.  Until this point, his mind would’ve been unable to conceive of something so large, and calling her large wouldn’t even be fully justified.  Words like titanic, or perhaps even godlike, were the only ones that clung to his quaky thoughts, as Scott gawked upward in sheer awe.  He could truly conceive of nothing greater.

                Sure, there were things this immense that he had seen before, such as mountain peaks that stretched so high they were wreathed by clouds and snow.

                But she was different.

                This monumental colossus of his mother was in a different league altogether.  Every movement, every puff of her cheeks and rise of her chest as she simply inhaled looked to Scott like a living landscape that stretched up toward the heavens coming terrifyingly to life.  Clear with a single glance at her was her potential destructive power to wipe out skylines with a single flick of a manicured finger or a cyclonic exhalation between lips wide enough to swallow a yacht as easily as a potato chip.

                How could this be possible?  This had to be something his mind had cooked up: a hallucination brought on by his overtaxed body.  Even at his minimum height of an inch tall, Judy was far smaller than this, and considering how Scott was dwarfed embarrassingly by his mother’s toes in that scenario, this was truly an exception.

                At his current height, Scott had no doubt that he could easily crawl under his mother’s toenail without even being detected, if the dastardly ascent up the print-ringed cliffside of her digit didn’t kill him first.  She had to be at least ten times bigger.  There was no way it was real.

                And yet, the image didn’t go away.  It was like a mirage that didn’t have an end on either side of his vision.  Besides the ground around him, brown and muddied, it was only Judy’s torso that made up Scott’s view, the edge of the wooden horizon making up the kitchen table ending a little below her abdomen.

                Of course, if there was anything else even there to notice, its significance would’ve been easily made invisible by the sheer magnitude of any given part of Judy’s body, such as her Superdome-sized breasts jiggling so high above behind a thunderous wall of her machine-knitted skirt long enough to cover several neighborhoods, holding a deep blue hue that made it look like an ocean flipped entirely on its side.

                Her eyes seemed almost to have a light source of their own, profoundly infinite and capable of swallowing up the mind anyone of Scott’s size foolish enough to stare into their crackling abyss for too long.  Her limitless gaze seemed fixed to some point miles beyond Scott’s reach, and he could tell she had absolutely no idea he was there.

                The sudden fear and anxiety he should’ve felt for his own safety in the presence of such a colossal goddess-on-earth that was unaware of his existence was nowhere to be found.  He knew he should’ve been cognizant and horrified of the fact that at any moment, Judy’s fist could lower toward him, far too long in either direction for him to get away from the damning shadow, and in seconds flat he would be no more than a crimson squelch between the folds of her cataclysmic fingers, probably not even noticed as he was rinsed away amongst foamy suds resembling a blizzard the next time she washed her hands.

                He should’ve been horrified at the possibilities, but he wasn’t.  So great was his fantastical wonderment and reverence at the unbelievable size of this woman who just happened to be his tyrannical mother that he could feel nothing else.  It was admiration and apprehension rolled into one complex emotion, practically bursting from his chest and yet still shocking him to his core, cementing his feet firmly to the ground out of a kind of respect for the power before him that no one witnessing it would be able to comprehend.

                In Judy’s gargantuan hand was a fork.  A simple kitchen utensil, though when gripped so casually in the hand of someone so unthinkably massive as Scott’s mother, it was like an instrument of war too large for the biggest fleet of helicopters to transport alone.

                Finally managing to pull his stingingly unblinking eyes away from the magnificent tower of Judy’s upper body sitting at the kitchen table, after so much time with all his senses locked to the sight of her, Scott became aware of where he was.

                Or what he was on, specifically.

                The ground, whipped in jagged points of curled husk, was littered with soft chunks of earth the size of boulders.  Everything in sight was sopping with something oily and darkly golden, pooling in liquid wells at various points across the ground, yet still sticky enough to hold like gooey threads of spider web, and as Scott looked down upon his body, seeing the goop smeared across his chest and down his legs, he inhaled.

                The scent was unmistakable.  Sweet, almost sickly so, thick with the remnants of sugarcane but still with a tang of molasses.  He didn’t even have to put his face closer to know that it was syrup spread liberally around to every inch of ground he could make out.  In the seconds following, it took even less comprehension to fully understand that he was standing atop a stack of freshly made pancakes, set before his mother on a plate the size of a race track circuit.

                It wasn’t until the towering tines of the fork collided seismically with the surface of the pancake, at long last connecting his feebly microscopic form in some way with the titaness that was his mom, that it became real at long last for Scott.  Instantly, he could feel the spongy ground between his feet, sluggish and claylike though it felt to him, rippling easily with each earthmoving tug from the strength of Judy’s hulking fingers anchored at a palm enormous enough to clasp around an aircraft carrier.

                Looking around, Scott could see a perimeter stretching for dozens of yards in either direction shearing along in an avalanche of squishy crumbs as the piece of pancake the fork was stabbed into was steadily torn away from the surrounding area.

                And Scott was right in the center.

                He immediately began running hard through the thickness, stomping into the pulpous surface of the sweet morsel and yanking his foot away hard enough to break free of the gooey pull of the syrup.  It wasn’t more than a few steps before the strong pull of the sticky stuff relieved Scott of his shoes, which he abandoned as he continued taking strained lunges for the edge of the pancake bite.  His socks were lost in the dark brown puddles of goop only a few steps later.

                He forced himself to continue onward for a few more seconds, even as he watched the pancake panorama he had previously been attached to fall away below him as the fork rose higher and higher into the air, its prize bite of breakfast in tow.  Little more than a second passed of ascending upward on the power of the fork and Judy’s fingers before Scott knew the fall would kill him, even if he did manage to reach the edge of the pancake bite and jump to escape.  So, he stopped moving and lowered himself to keep balanced, letting the strands of syrup tug him lower and lower into the moldable surface on this sugary plain of breakfast food.

                He watched his mom’s thumb, itself the size of a freight train to him, as it pressed down into the soaring aisle of metal that made up the utensil she was gripping so eagerly.  Even as he remained practically kneeling into the steadily sinking miasma of syrup and shredded pancake crumbs, so far below the mighty fingers holding up the fork currently hoisting him toward palpable doom, nothing was secret to him.  He could make out the hexagonal skin cells along the surface of his mother’s thumb, the minute imperfections that caused her mostly softly tanned skin to darken with birth marks or the tiniest of freckles, and the transparent hairs even shorter than himself dotting the skin like sparse grass.

                It was then that he forced himself to turn around full and look up to his destination, though some part of him wished he had simply closed his eyes and waited for the end.

                Judy’s mouth gaped open like a canyon on the intricate globe of her head.  Her pink lips, like a cushioned fortress wall, stretched so wide that they appeared to welcome the pancake and Scott into the entrance to hell itself.

                Rolling heat waves blasted out in cruel storms that were already hovering around the edges of the fork and Scott’s syrupy grave.  At his size of roughly a tenth of an inch, his skin was sensitive enough that even the feeling of the heat from this far out away on Judy’s bite caused Scott’s body to sting with the sudden change in temperature.  He curled himself deeper into the mess of syrup and crumbs for protection, gasping in pain, and the bready ground seemed only too willing to invite him lower into the mess, so much so that it seemed it would’ve taken a horse to drag Scott out from the squishy hovel of the pancake now.

                Judy’s tongue, the size of a sea serpent as it emerged violently from the darkness, rippled and twisted hungrily while teeming with thousands of colonies of saliva and bacteria thriving between each rounded taste bud the size of basketballs to the tiny boy.  Flushed red and dripping with delight at what was to come, it lapped playfully against the end of the fork’s modest catch like something out of a twisted legend.  It seemed to beckon on its mountainous slope downward toward the nothingness that waited between rows of perfect ivory teeth sharp enough to grind apart army tanks like Skittles.

                Scott had never seen anything like his mother’s tongue at this scale, and as he marveled in unparalleled shock as it moved closer and closer until the chunk of pancake was plopped onto the very tip of it in an unceremonious spray of syrup and spit that splashed across the ground mercilessly like sticky rain, he still felt none of the terror or dread at what was coming that he should’ve.  Only esteem, veneration, and even, for the privilege of witnessing what was the closest thing he’d ever see to a mythical monster, gratitude.

                Yes, it was definitely that.  Gratitude that something as insignificant in size as him, made pathetic looking even next to a pancake crumb, would be able to witness this otherworldly and even divine sight before it was brought to an end.

                “Thanks, Mommy,” Scott stated simply, a smile on his lips, as he lay in the spongy tomb of pancake and allowed the gooey tendrils to congeal over him, savoring the last view of his mother’s holy mouth as a few stray cracks of light gleamed along her towering jawline.

                Steaming darkness swallowed him up as his mom’s colossal teeth clacked shut and the fork slid noisily along the vice of the house-sized jowls.  Her tongue flipped the bite of pancake along the magnificent ridge of her molars, unknowingly thrusting her son into a violent typhoon of swirling saliva and sugary syrup that tugged him deeper and deeper into the blackness.