Richard laid on the kitchen table, held down by the might of his daughter’s massive fingers that easily kneaded her five-inch father’s body.

Never had Julie ever used her size and strength advantage to impose her will in any but the most innocent of finger wrestling games as a young child.  For a moment, the now-distraught Richard was taken back to those times, watching as the young girl learned how much force she could use without harming her tiny parent, and then immediately releasing the pressure and scooping him up to bring him in for a kiss on the top of his head.

Somehow, this didn’t fall into the same emotional category.

“Julie,” he uttered, his voice a gentle whisper now, almost like the lullabies he used to sing to her.  “Please don’t feel like you have to do this.”

“I don’t have to do anything, Daddy.  That’s the point,” Julie informed him, keeping her fingers pinned to his chest.  They didn’t hurt, but they were certainly firmly there, and the man wasn’t going anywhere unless she wanted him to.  “And I definitely don’t have to do anything you say.”

The trio of garishly dressed and immaculately combed teenage onlookers snickered, still heartily under the influence of whatever they’d been drinking before stumbling inside the house in front of their new friend.

“Tell him, Julie,” one of the girls commented encouragingly.  The guy had wrapped his arms back around his mate’s back and hugged her into him, and looked like he was considering nibbling at her neck, though his eyes remained on the family drama unfolding at the kitchen table.

“He’s so fucking small,” the girl laughed as she allowed the guy to explore her skin.  “Shouldn’t it be the other way around?”

“Maybe he should start doing what you say instead,” the other girl said, petting the underside of her chin contemplatively.

“Yeah,” Julie said, somewhat uncertainly, but forcefully nonetheless.  The idea was obviously new to her.  She leaned in closer to the table, casting her shadow over Richard and blotting out the dim light of the small glass lamp over the table.  Her lips curled upward.  “How about that, Daddy?”

Richard gulped, saddened, but remained defiant.  He’d had a damn rough life, especially before he’d escaped his brother and sister’s torment years before and been found by Carol.  There had been numerous challenges all the along the way, both to his personal safety and his honor as an organism.  Right now, Julie was obviously in the midst of some kind of social crisis, spurred on by her new drunken friends.  It pained him deeply to imagine the sort of mental twisting that had to have occurred to bring her to the point where she’d pin him down just to impress some well-dressed strangers.  He had a duty as a father to not crack under the pressure and do whatever was necessary to bring her around.

“Make him say he’s a dirty little shrinker,” the boy suggested before he locked lips with his girlfriend and ran a hand through her hair.

“Yeah,” the other girl agreed.  “Do it, Julie.”

“Daddy?” Julie drawled.  “Why don’t you say you’re a dirty little shrinker?”  She blinked as soon as she’d said it, entirely unaccustomed to such verbal abuse, but remained focused.  Her hot breath, lightly redolent of lemonade and vodka, clouded around her father’s face, causing him to cough.

“This isn’t you, Julie,” Richard said softly.  “You don’t have to prove anything to anyone.”

“Are you gonna say it or not?” she pressed.

“No.  I won’t say it,” Richard responded.

The trio let out a few sarcastic “ooohs” before splitting into more drunken chuckles.

“Okay, then,” Julie said.  “I guess I have to teach you a lesson now, Daddy.”  The words were robotic, almost scripted, like she’d thought them through before entering the house: certainly not her natural, carefree voice.  Her fingers lifted up from his body at last as she let her arms hang at her sides.

“Or you can stop now and ask your friends to leave, and then we can talk about this,” Richard offered as he pulled himself to his feet and massaged the sore spot on his abdomen where Julie’s fingers had pinned him like a pair of fallen telephone poles.

“I don’t really feel like talking right now,” Julie commented.  “You know, it’s not cool of you to treat me like a kid.  I’m not a little girl any more.  Especially not to you.”

You’ll always be my little girl, Richard thought to himself.

“Show him your new boots, Julie,” one of her friends commented, peeling her face away from the boy’s.  “I bet he’ll like them.”

“Yeah.  Especially the lining,” the other girl said slyly.

Julie stiffened again, then bowed her head a little, mulling.  Next she was kneeling on the ground and digging her thumbs into the opening of the nearly knee-high leather footwear, working her heel out.

“You’re in over your head, shrinker,” the boy said with a snicker as he turned back to his girlfriend and kissed her neck.

“You don’t intimidate me, son,” Richard said boldly, which to the dismay of the attention-receiving girl, earned the focus of the teen right back.

“Why not?” the boy asked.  “You’re a shrinker.  You’re the kind of thing we fuck with on the weekends for fun.”

“Maybe I am,” Richard said.  “But that doesn’t mean you scare me.  My body may not be mine, but my mind is.  And that makes you powerless.”

The boy frowned, looking like he was considering walking over to the table and taking a swipe at the loud-mouthed thirty-nine-year-old, but quickly thought better of it after he took an unbalanced step and slid back into the waiting arms of his hammered beau.  “Whatever,” he grunted.

“What do you think of them, Daddy?” Julie questioned as she stood back up with one of the boots in hand.  Scented of fresh leather and colored like milky coffee, the empty footwear was slammed onto the surface of the table hard enough that Richard almost lost his balance.

“What happened to your other pair?” he said.

“I stopped caring about everything being pink.  That’s what,” Julie snapped.  She tilted the boot onto its side so that the leathery tunnel formed a hill laid out before her five-inch father.  “So you can have one more try now.  Say you’re a dirty little shrinker.”

Richard took a deep breath, composing himself as best he could, even as his heart rattled inside his ribcage.  “No, Julie.  I’m not going to say that, and nothing you think you can do to me is going to change that.”

Julie puckered her lips, weighing her options again with fire in her eyes, and then exhaled heavily.  “Wanna bet, Daddy?”

Her clawed fingers descended again, this time forming a cage around Richard’s abdomen as she bungled him into a fist and lifted him off the table.  She hadn’t picked him up like this since she was six years old at one of their first meetings, before she’d learned to think about his safety or comfort.  Richard squirmed awkwardly in her grip, at least reassured by the placement of her fingertips that she had a secure hold on him.  It was awkward to sit like this, and scary like it had never been before, but even now, he could tell she had the experience to prevent harming him.

The trio kept quiet, fighting back giggling.  Richard looked down to see his legs dangling over the black mouth of the boot, which Juliet had propped open with her other hand.  Suddenly he was dropping again, still buoyed by his daughter’s fingers as a quick breeze whipped by his cheeks.  A moment later the kitchen disappeared and all he could see was the winding darkness of the boot’s furry lining as his child reached her arm deeply into the boot.

Julie’s fingers at last released Richard once he felt his feet kicking into the narrowed toe of the boot.  At this depth, the heat immediately became apparent, and was already at work cooking the air tainted with the aroma of worn-out socks and fleshy grime.  It was a scent the shrinker was well-acquainted with due to the time he’d spent on the floor around the feet of normal-sized people, though he’d never sensed it in such concentrated form, where every breath filled his lungs with the sour stench.  He gagged but kept strong, huddling his arms against his body and waiting as he felt the shoe dangling in the air again, refusing to shout despite his desire to do so.

He would not turn on his daughter with a monstrous rage during what was quickly becoming apparent as her greatest hour of need.

The light spilling in from the opening, already feeling so far away, was squelched away as the boot made rocky contact with the kitchen floor.  Richard rolled over onto his side and struggled to crawl forward in the tight space, but immediately found himself disoriented in the pungent darkness.  A last few rays made their way in around Julie’s descending ankle and heel as she slid her foot back into the boot.

What little air remained was immediately boxed in as the eighteen-year-old’s bare foot slid forward across the soft surface.  After a second of nervous anticipation, Richard was bumped by his daughter’s curled toes and shoved onto his stomach, where he became pinned into the pointed crevice of the tip by the sweaty, faintly violet-scented digits.