Scott cowered meekly on the edge of Maggie’s desk, still aching feverishly from the wallop his sister’s thumb had delivered so easily to his crotch, and still reeling with degradation at how close his member had come to betraying him when pressed up against her fingertip. He clutched the edges of the doll dress she had forced onto him, not necessarily for comfort, but to stop himself from trembling harder.
He watched blankly as her enormous hands scuttled busily over her laptop keyboard, tapping and clicking away with great practice. It seemed to happen so quickly, though he knew the speed had no bearing on whether or not what she was doing was indeed going to happen.
He saw the screen flash suddenly with the image of himself in the dress slung awkwardly over the perch of Maggie’s magnificently sized thumb. His face, though slightly blurred in the picture, looked almost as dead as he felt inside at this moment.
He stared ahead as Maggie casually uploaded the photo to her Instagram account, captioning it with “Big brother finally is grown up enough to play dolls with his little sissy. Yay!”
A day before. A single day before this, and Scott would’ve gone into a murderous rampage without a second’s thought. Even at this size, he would’ve pounced forward with every ounce of energy he had and set about like a rabid lion throttling his little sister’s powerful thumb, or whatever other part of her he could get ahold of. She would have him pinned to the wooden desktop with only the slightest tap from her pinky finger, of course, and she probably wouldn’t even have to look at him to do it. But he would’ve have been deterred. Punching, kicking, even biting uselessly at her thick skin, all while screaming every wrathfully bitter insult he could think of. He wouldn’t have given a single thought to the consequences, and would’ve genuinely believed that with enough perseverance, he could stop Maggie’s heinous actions. His anger would not be silenced. A day ago.
A single day.
He remained silent now, averting his eyes and clasping his hands together to keep them from shaking as best as he could, though it was a tough task. Scott could also feel his throat getting caught up and the damning welling of moisture in his eyes from the abject powerlessness in his being at this moment.
“Sorry if I hurt your itty bitty balls when I had to cover you up, little boy, but you know how social networks feel about nudity,” Maggie giggled, not even bothering with a feeble attempt at putting authenticity into her apology. “Plus, it’s not like you’ve got anything worth showing off to people down there.”
Her words barely even registered as ones of intended harm. She had already done all the damage she could to him for now. No amount of explanation or joking on his part could undo what was already done and surging through the internet onto the computer screens of dozens upon dozens of gossipy teenagers, her legions of lackeys wasting no time in laughing and passing it on. By the next day, given the size of Maggie’s extensive network of friends, he had a feeling those pictures would spread to half the high schools in the county. And given how public his misdeeds were, he had absolutely no reasonable expectation that anyone seeing the picture would do anything but applaud for Maggie’s stance on her brother’s intolerable crimes.
“Wow, somebody’s popular,” Maggie opined, crossing her arms with satisfaction as she watched her laptop screen. “Already 17 likes. No, wait, 18. Now 19.”
That was just about all Scott needed to hear for the tears to be on the verge of letting loose down his cheeks, no matter how hard he pinched himself or clenched his eyes shut to prevent it.
Suddenly, though, from the back of the room, Scott heard the bedroom door swing open, and the familiar sound of Judy rapping her knuckles against the wooden frame to announce her presence.
For a moment, a glimmer of hope alit in Scott’s heart. He blinked, somehow willing himself back to full consciousness, daring himself to believe that his mother could save him right now.
Scott felt no shame in admitting to himself that in exchange for this moment he would gladly go back between Judy’s toes for the rest of the day, no matter how damp and dank they’d become overnight. He would rub them until Judy herself told him she wanted him to stop. Hell, he’d lay a kiss upon his mother’s gigantic toenail and be happy for it if she could only bring a merciful end to the silent torture his sister was currently wringing him out through with each passing second of torment.
“You two playing nice?” Judy asked with enthusiastic sunshine in her voice.
“Oh, yeah, Mom, Scott’s just taking some selfies with me for Instagram.”
“That’s nice. How are you holding up, honey?” Judy asked slowly of her elder son, and despite the sweetness of her question, already in her voice Scott recognized something that struck almost as much terror into his heart as the idea of his half-exposed, half-princess-dress-clad body becoming famous through a cackling teenage girl’s Instagram account. Her words to him were sugary and affectionate as they so often were, but there was no hiding it from his practiced and abused ears. He could hear it clear as day.
Indifference.
“I’m wearing half a dress,” Scott drawled as calmly as possible, still having to fight back the tears from what his sister had just said to him to clinch his social destruction. In reality he wanted to scream the words out in order to make his mother feel his agony in some twisted, parallel universe way, as though she would be able to sympathize with this shameful moment of unadulterated defamation above all the others she herself had put him through in the past. He could feel his voice beginning to quaver on the verge of dry sobs again, so he kept his words short. “Half a dress. With nothing underneath. In the picture.”
There was a pause. Clearly she’d heard him, and even had time to mull it over.
“Make sure you cover him up for the Internet, sweetie,” Judy instructed kindly to her daughter without missing a beat.
“Oh, I WILL, Mom,” Maggie exclaimed joyfully, clearly acknowledging her victory in the matter as she scooped up her limp brother in a fist and brandished him like the trophy he was to her. She rippled her fingers around his legs, causing him to wobble in her grip, but she held him firmly while plastering a grateful smile on her lips for her mother.
“I’m glad to see you’ve found something you can do together,” Judy said with a smile, stepping back into the hallway. Before she disappeared from sight to leave her tyrannical daughter to her own devices with Scott, she winked back at them. “Just don’t wear him out too hard, hon. He’s got to last us, after all. Play gently.”
A cold silence fell on the room as Scott, descending with sharp immediacy back into his emotionally catatonic state, sat limply in his little sister’s grip as her palms sandwiched him like a ball of Play-Doh, pressing and twisting against his torso just hard enough to spin his world with each thrust from the firm heel of her hand.
“Hear that, shrimp?” the ruthless teen hissed through wicked lips. “Mommy says we have to play gentle.”
Maggie’s fingers curled around her brother’s bare legs, moving them in and out like scissors, while her thumbs drummed against his chest. Satisfied with this, she pursed her pink lips into an open pucker and began exhaling a focused typhoon of cold air centered on Scott’s tiny face, tainted with her sour morning breath and a few flecks of froth from the back of her throat.
In a painful flash, the pieces of Scott’s new home life crashed together in a detestable collage of sickening reality. He got it now. He finally understood it. The only wonder was why it took him so long to realize it so clearly. His mother had inflicted no harsh words or reprimands upon him for his destructive atrocities, nor tacked on additional cruel explicit stipulations to her discipline system, for one simple reason.
Because she didn’t need to anymore.
For years, Judy had tiptoed along the cusp of child abuse by taking the fullest advantage of a discipline law she herself had put into effect. Though she held the legal right to shrink her children, Scott was always protected on the sidelines by the very system that had allowed Judy to shrink him at will. As thin a defense as it was, it was there before.
Today, though, she no longer had to tiptoe along that cusp. She no longer had to explain her actions or utilize Scott’s sinful ways as a means to her own end. She no longer had to fake some sort of carefully constructed punishment system for her son under the guise of bettering him.
The both of them knew very well that his wild ways would never stop no matter how often she shrunk him. Just as they both knew very well that even if Scott had reformed himself into a perfect angel as a result of the childhood lessons, Judy would always find a reason to nestle her favorite shrunken son between her toes in the deepest crevice of a black pump.
Perhaps worst of all, she no longer stood alone in her desire to shrink her son. She had an entire court and city behind her, wishing passionately for her to wedge Scott under her heel in a used stocking and never let him out.
She could do anything she wanted with him, and so could his sister and anyone else his mother would entrust him to in her house. In her prison.
In her shoe.
Judy would never have to overstep a single loose boundary to make Scott feel her authority squeezing around him from every angle. All she had to do was sit back and allow her children to bond in whatever way the ones with the height advantage chose.
Scott lay sullen and slack as a ragdoll, cupped in the powerful palm of his little sister as her predatory fingers caged back around him and began closing in for a squeeze that would undoubtedly leave him gasping for air in her soft grip, which she would of course only grant him when blacking out was eminent.