“Why are you still screaming, little boy?” Grace questioned quietly as her palm loomed with outstretched fingers over the picnic table and the quarter-inch-tall teen again, bathing him in menacing, moving shadow. “Nobody can hear you but me.”
“JUST LEAVE ME ALONE!” he squealed at the top of his lungs, still at a full sprint as he hopelessly watched the titanic young witch’s hand lower toward him like a fleshy storm cloud covering half the sky.
There was zero hope of getting away from it if she truly wanted him back in her clutches, but he tried all the same. He had to, for his dignity, or what was remaining of it, at least.
“All I wanna do is share some of it with you, though,” she said with a lithe giggle, eyeing the sticky residue of peanut butter on her digits licked off a few seconds before. “You might as well stop running. You’re gonna tire yourself out so fast. That’s why I made you this small. So you’d know it was pointless to try.”
Suddenly, the girl’s hand ceased lowering like a UFO toward Jay and hovered, inflicting just enough surprise to give him pause to catch his breath with a disgruntled pant.
Maybe she was giving him a break?
In the flash of an interim, a finger the size of an office building barreled toward him, glistening with slick saliva for what seemed like miles from the last few bites the girl had sucked away, and a blob of nutty spread clinging to the tip of it, nearing him like a salty missile.
“And anyway, since I’m sharing some of my snack with you,” she drawled uncaringly as she struck terror into his tiny heart. “…it’s only right you share a little of… you… with me.”
He only managed to take a few frantic steps backward before the wall of peanut butter wrapped around the tip of his monumental tormentor’s index finger collided with his quarter-inch body, instantly losing him partially into its gooey mess that clung to him like flypaper.
She had him. And then he was rising, higher off the picnic table and out of the shadow provided by Grace’s hand. He soared past the cliff-sized face of her bright yellow tank top that nearly blinded Jay with its immediate sheen.
There was no time to even feel vertigo or become aware of the fact that he was comparatively shooting up taller than several skyscrapers stacked atop one another. Were it not for the thick warmth provided by the gooey substance, the cool air would’ve nearly whipped him into hypothermia. Everything was a blur as he struggled to regain control of his limbs in the messy trap the girl had so easily cornered him into like the flea-sized being he was.
Grace’s towering index finger, with the beige blob and its unfortunate passenger at the summit, halted at the level of her mouth, just an inch away. Even from this distance, he could feel the hot exhalations billowing from her nostrils above, but of course this wasn’t what entranced him by necessity. She’d brought him close enough that Jay was forced to observe every detailed line and curve in the pink lips he knew he’d soon be venturing between, no matter how hard he prayed to any god.
Or, indeed, no matter how hard he prayed to this young witch, who surely would listen with even more apparent disinterest in his desires than a true deity.
“Your m-mom and dad wouldn’t let you d-do this!” he cried out after a fearful gasp, trying not to get lost in the pattern of watching his massive captor’s skin shifting with every twitch of her lips. “They’d t-take away y-your-”
“Well, lucky for me, my mom and dad aren’t here now, are they?” she interjected with a snicker. “But there’s no need to worry! When I made you this small, I also made sure you have extra protection. It would barely even hurt if I sneezed you off the table right now. You know I wouldn’t let anything bad happen to my precious little guy, right?”
“Stop fucking calling me that!” he shouted indignantly, fighting uselessly against the thick miasma of peanut spread. It was yet another struggle he hadn’t a hope of winning.
“What was that?”
“STOP FUCKING CALLING ME THAT!”
“Hmm-hmm,” she chuckled throatily, letting a warm mist emanate out from her lips as she grinned, displaying her glistening pearly whites for him in all their titanic glory. Every breathe released a heavy fog, sickeningly redolent of the salty substance as well as a few other foods she’d sampled earlier in the day, and it was nearly enough to put Jay’s senses over the edge. “Naughty-naughty, using words like that. Didn’t your mommy teach you better?”
“Damn it, just let me go,” he grunted meekly. His volume registered like that of a petulant ant whose crumbs had been swiped away by a hawk.
“I think you should say sorry for using words like that,” her voice boomed.
“I’m sorry!” he yelled, rapidly trying to switch tactics, all the while knowing how little it would actually do. “Please stop calling me that.”
“You might be older than me, but since I can make you whatever size I want, whenever I want, I think this name fits you better, don’t you?”
Jay observed the mighty lips, smeared uncaringly with stray butter from earlier bites as Grace sucked her fingers and the heel of her hand of every gooey scrap of the stuff, lifting and pressing together with every smack, spitting blaring syllables out at him with godlike precision.
It wasn’t fair. It simply wasn’t fair.
He’d started developing his own powers even younger than Grace had, until he’d turned seven, and it was discovered a curse lingering in the bloodline would probably stunt his powers for his entire life. He could still perform simple levitation and self-healing acts, but he was unlikely to advance in his abilities any further: a damning sentence for anyone in the magical community, particularly one so young.
Grace, meanwhile, was a bona fide prodigy, performing spell-casting feats at a level at least ten years ahead of her actual age. Frankly, even when Jay was around her at his normal person-sized stature, he felt anxious and unfathomably weak. She was just a small child when she was able to match his abilities, and had just been improving exponentially in the time since.
The girl had mastered size manipulation at the humble age of fourteen, and had taken an immediate shine to it, despite being capable of several far more complicated tricks, which let Jay know she at least didn’t do this out of hubris.
She truly just… enjoyed it.
Grace had held a fascination with Jay since his curse became known. Her acquaintance started as a mere annoyance to him when she first started playing magical pranks on him at a skill level he was unable to match, forcing him to ask her politely to free him from iron-strength vines or other hazards she had conjured.
That irritation over the past few years had developed into legitimate intimidation as Grace’s abilities heightened, coupled with her warped sense of the world’s order.
Her actions were never performed out of malice, as she had never physically harmed Jay or even allowed him to be put at risk while toying with him. The power had simply been going to her head since the first time she shrunk him as an experimental gag that ended three exhausting hours later with Jay dangling stickily from the end of her tongue at a half an inch tall, and she’d only been testing his limits even further ever since.
He was powerless. She wasn’t. And that was all there was.
She never tired of it, and Jay’s own bitter embarrassment and stubborn pride at being manhandled by the girl ensured he’d never ask for help from his family or hers, no matter how bad it got. He knew it was foolish, and recognized that it could be put to an end if he’d only humble himself enough to speak up to someone with the power to stop her, but he just couldn’t. It was an endless cycle.
There was so much power lurking inside this girl who wouldn’t have looked out of place on the cheer squad of the local high school where the humans attended. A girl who wasn’t bothered by the mess of peanut butter spread over her mouth and hands, too immature to think or care much about the effects of her mighty actions, too young to have experienced more than a fraction of her life. And how did she choose to use that power?
By shrinking him to the size of a grain of rice, embedding him in an asteroid-sized ball of peanut butter, and setting him adrift in the frothy tide of her saliva.