“God fucking damn it,” Garth howled quietly to himself as he rampaged higher up in the tree, his whole frame quaking. He seethed with desire for revenge on that unassuming young girl down there who’d snatched up his best friend, ensuring he’d never see him again.
What made it all the worse was knowing such a thing was absolutely impossible, as he wasn’t much taller than the end of the girl’s thumb.
Instead, he’d have to sit here on a branch, cowering just above their heads and waiting for them to finish capturing some the closest people he had to family and taking them away as possessions.
Garth often thought the funniest joke he’d ever heard was the concept of people who still worshipped a higher being somewhere up there. It was an unsolvable riddle unto itself trying to picture a benevolent deity who could invent such a world where frightened little people just trying to eke out an existence underground could, without a moment’s notice, rightfully become a living toy for some adolescent poser.
“See any more, Leann?” Savannah called out from the next tree over. “I want a little itty bitty one, too.”
“Not yet,” replied the girl who’d captured Tom as she crouched over some roots to search through them. She still had the poor shrinker gripped in her hand, and was gently kneading him between her thumb and forefinger like a coin, though from what Garth could tell, his friend at least wasn’t being compressed painfully by the doughy digits, simply withheld. That, in its smallest measure, gave him a glimmer of hope.
“I hope they don’t go running around like ants,” her friend sighed, twiddling with one of her bracelets as she hunched over a tall patch of grass. “I don’t wanna step on any of them and not get to keep them.”
“You can still keep them,” Leann giggled. “You just need gloves to hold them.”
“Ew, don’t be gross,” Savannah scowled, still breaking a smile. “No, I don’t want them to break. I want some for the new Shrinkatarium my mom got me!”
“What do you think I’m doing with this one?” Leann said with a smirk, brandishing Tom a little higher. “He looks strong. He’ll go nice in mine.”
At this, Garth was able to let his painfully tensed shoulders relax just a little. Shrinkatariums were the brainchild of the ShrinkSmart chain of pet stores, intended to serve as miniature living farms for shrinkers too small to handle conveniently on a regular basis. Most of them at least came with a few shelters, food dispensers, and methods for clean waste disposal, so owners could keep several shrinkers around the one to two inch range inside as a little community. Though far less preferable in Garth’s mind to living freely in the outdoors, it was, indeed, something of a step up from the other possibility of being eaten.
In fact, considering the staggering statistics that normally befell shrinkers small enough to kill with an accidental flick of the pinky finger, this was a little miracle. Tom, it seemed, stood a far better chance of survival. Perhaps, even, contentment, if Leann’s careful twiddling of his delicate form between her fingers was any indication.
Begrudgingly, the headstrong shrinker decided to relent a little on his earlier consideration about theology.
“Seriously, like, how do you make sure you don’t step on them?” Savannah pressed as she pushed aside a pile of leaves.
“Haven’t you ever had one before?” Leann snorted somewhat condescendingly.
“Yes, I have. But, like, I kept him in a box so I could always hear him walking inside. The grass here makes them too quiet!” Savannah retorted.
“How about this?” Leann said. Digging the heel of her sneaker against a root, she struggled to remove her cotton-clad foot, followed by its twin.
“What’s that gonna do?” her friend laughed, though she was already following suit, bracing herself against a tree for balance.
“You’ll feel one moving under you if you step on them, silly,” Leann teased as she finished peeling off her socks and discarding them into the lip of one of her shoes. Lifting one of her bare feet, she planted it in the soft dirt and scrunched her toes, letting the mud squelch into the fleshy crevices. “Just watch where you walk you’ll be fine.”
Garth clambered up a final tangle of twigs and stopped to catch his breath, shrouded in a thick cover of leaves that, most importantly, wrapped around the branch’s underside, so he couldn’t be accidentally found by one of the girls peeking into the upper reaches.
Which was good, because if he was discovered at this moment, his feminine foe would have him wrapped up in her titanic fingers and in her pocket before he could grab the next twig above.
Still, from his vantage, point, in spite of the pain he felt, Garth was confident there wouldn’t have to be any more losses. Having lived in this part of the orchard for several years now, he was fairly adept at spotting his compatriots from a long distance away, and after a few expert scans over the area with his practiced eyes, he determined that no one else was trapped in a tree. He sighed, at least relieved that others might be spared.
That is, until his gaze traveled a little further, between a few framing boughs on the other side of the tree, down to a mud patch the size of a pond to the shrinkers that had grown a little since the last rain a few days before.
Smack in the middle were four moving forms not much more than an inch in height, mere fumbling specks from Garth’s spot over six feet up in the tree, but distinguishable nonetheless. They were camouflaged by brown mud stains, but as they continued squirming about, the perched shrinker felt a twist in his gut.
What were those idiots doing?
There was a hole on their side of the tree, a mere pebble’s throw from the edge of the puddle. If the four would only start running now, they could easily make it before Leann or Savannah made it around the wooden pillar. If they would just-
“Oh my goooosh,” Savannah gushed, suddenly just below Garth’s branch. Rattled by the surprise volume, he nearly tumbled off his protective sphere of leaves, his heart stopping in his chest, before realizing she wasn’t exclaiming at him.
The feeling returned twofold when he realized she was instead looking down at the puddle.
“What?” Leann asked excitedly, turning the corner and gasping in kind. “Oh, wow.”
“I know, right?” Savannah said, crouching down closer to the mud. “Look at them all, just… like, sitting there stuck.”
If the four shrinkers down there weren’t aware of their towering visitors before, they most certainly were now. Garth heard a few noises, muffled as they were in the breeze from all this distance, crying out in shock and terror. He saw the four little bodies fighting valiantly toward the edge of the sloshing filth closest to the tree.
The goddamned morons.
Why couldn’t they watch where they were going? What were they doing, putting themselves in such a vulnerable position so early in the day?
Why couldn’t he have just stayed in fucking bed and let Tom alone?
Why hadn’t it been him that had been snatched up instead for his vanity and refusal to see the world’s risks for what they truly were? If anyone deserved to spend the rest of their life in a Shrinkatarium, it was him.
No, even that was too easy. He deserved to be in blindly broiling in a dark stew of Leann’s stomach acid.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Savannah cooed down to the shrinkers. The slender brunette’s arm lowered toward the puddle, and for a moment Garth assumed she was just going to fish them all out of the muck like stranded ducklings. Obviously such a task could be accomplished with decent accuracy even if the girl had her eyes closed, judging by how much of a shadow she cast over the mud just by crouching near it.
But she didn’t. Instead, she scooped her hand down into the mud, causing a small wave to ripple through and push the hapless inch-tall shrinkers back toward the other end of the puddle. At least two of them were momentarily submerged in the liquid onslaught.
Garth’s blood boiled.
Wasn’t it enough that she’d cornered them? Made them feel helpless, and forced them to come to terms with the fact that they, too, wouldn’t get to see their friends ever again before disappearing into the girl’s fist?
Lowering her hands for support onto the roots behind her, Savannah arched her left foot out over the puddle. Her toes, painted with a partially chipped sparkling sequin hue, squirmed eagerly in preparation for the dive. The shrinkers, seeing this looming development, dove further away to the opposite end of the puddle. They reached it just as the girl’s foot splashed into the mud, sending a larger wave over her prey, who struggled to help one another stay afloat. Not content with this, even, Savannah set about churning her foot slowly through the puddle, caking it in mud and nudging the shrinkers with her powerful toes, causing a few of them to plop again onto their backs. By the end, all were coated in the soupy dirt.
Garth couldn’t remember a point in his life where he’d wanted to strangle another human being as much as he did these two mountain-sized girls that he wouldn’t be able to put a scratch in with all the steroids in the world at his size.
“Don’t drown them, Savannah,” the curly-haired informant of the shrinker colony giggled.
“I won’t. I’m just, like, playing with them a little. They’re gonna be mine, I should be able to do that, right?”
Leann snickered, then tapped her friend on the shoulder, uttering in a whisper: “Hey. Have you ever tried…”
“What?”
“…sucking one?”
Both Savannah and Garth winced at this suggestion.
“Doing what?” she laughed.
“You heard me. I don’t mean, like, eating one. That’s gross,” Leann explained. “I just mean, like, putting them in there and swishing around a little. It doesn’t hurt them.”
Somehow, Garth had serious doubts about that.
“Why would I wanna do that?” Savannah asked.
Shrugging, Leann lowered herself onto her haunches next to the puddle as well, observing the petrified shrinkers where they now stood motionless in the waist-deep mud. “Trust me. You get to feel them moving all around in there, trying to get out. It’s super fun. You just have to give them air sometimes.”
“Huh. I never thought about it!” Savannah said.
“These ones are good for that. They don’t look very old, either. Younger ones are always best for it. It’s like, they can handle more,” Leann explained, then added snidely: “Plus, they usually taste a little better, too.”
Even from this height, Garth could hear wailing coming from the shrinkers down below as they listened to the two young girls casually discuss the possibility of forcing their victims to wrestle a king mattress-sized tongue. Despite his anger at their stupidity, he felt for them, especially since, as he listened to the pitch of the cries, he noted that Leann was correct: the shrinkers down there were probably only around thirteen or fourteen years old.
“These are all so dirty, though. I don’t wanna taste their dirtiness,” Savannah said.
“Don’t worry, I brought my water bottle. We’ll just rinse them off,” Leann reassured her friend, gripping the plastic container and wrenched the lid off. “Why don’t you choose one and pull the stupid little clothes off so we can clean it off for you to try?”
Garth’s fists clenched and cracked.
That was it.
Gripping the knob on a twig, he pulled himself onto a branch and fought through the defensive leaf brush until he was exposed and teetering on a balance beam of a branch high above the heads of the girls, walking himself further and further out into the light.
Inhaling what he fully accepted as his final breath as a free man, Garth opened his mouth and bellowed at the top of his tiny lungs.