“CHEMICAL COUNTDOWN: ANOTHER ARTON VICTORY IN THE WAR ON SHRINKING”
Carly closed her eyes as she laid back again on the miniature cot in her glass prison, peering up to the tiled ceiling far above and inhaling the stagnant air of the government facility she’d been housed in for the past three months. The clunky bunny ear TV aimed toward her translucent cell had been going on about that headline for almost an hour now from its desktop perch, and she was just about ready to scream if it meant she could somehow drown out the anchor’s blasphemous prattling.
She supposed it was a “victory” for the people out there that her dad and whoever the hell was helping him had finally managed to, with some unexpected corporate funding from multiple sources, outlaw and slash from the market the innocuous chemical combination that she now understood was used to shrink Jack and herself not so long ago.
It didn’t matter. No one could change anything. Not the chemical companies, and not the two people who once called her their daughter before disowning her at the discovery of her favorite hobbies a year and a half before.
And certainly not her tiny brother, helpless and broken without her, wherever he was now.
The diminutive twenty-year-old ran her fingers through her shaggy dishwater-blonde hair, her once-glorious locks having lost their opulent silkiness from months of apathetic neglect. She slid her palms next down her slender neck, over the hills of her chest, and down to over her flat stomach, savoring the tactile tingling in her fingertips for all she could. It had taken a toll on her body and mind like she’d have never thought possible to be without him in her hands for so long.
Sometimes when she let her dreams take a deep enough hold, feeling his little naked body pressed against her palm and cradled in her fingers, it felt real enough that she could convince herself it had all just been a nightmare, and Jack was still hers. In those surreal reveries, she’d squeeze him to her stomach and guide him up to her chest, through the soft valley of her breasts, and feel his precious heartbeat accelerating to be so close to her again. Hers would pound with equal speed, and everything would become correct and beautiful again.
Carly’s vision stippled as she realized distraught moisture had welled in the few seconds she’d spent in darkness just imagining beyond the bounds of her vile reality. So much time had passed without seeing anyone she used to know, but the pain was just as sharp as it had been in that cataclysmic moment when her entire world was stolen away from her. A world that, by rights, had been hers and Jack’s since birth.
Of course, Carly knew she’d been happy as soon as she found her miniscule older brother huddled on the floor in a puddle of rainwater and terrified urine, stripped of clothing and reduced to a size more befitting his place on the planet. In fact, nothing had ever felt so aligned with her vision of perfection as she scooped him up and was able to see a new life for the both of them stretching out before her, full of promise. As she’d pinned his meek little frame beneath her toes, watched him struggle to pay homage to her soles with passionate kisses, and then slurped him between her lips and onto the altar of her tongue, every act only confirmed it further.
Still, something was missing. Things were never fully as they were meant to be, as Jack fought for almost five full years to avoid seeing the truth about where he belonged. Carly had been patient with him, playing with his body in all the ways they both desired, pleasuring him and herself, but still he refused to come around to her way. He’d never been willing to understand he was finally where he was destined to be: not on equal footing with his sister, but beneath her, where he could serve her and, in return, be shown the love of his personal goddess.
Until that moment when she’d swallowed him, feeling his tiny soul squirming down into her esophagus, made everything clear at last. When he’d emerged from her throat, as though being reborn in a baptism of her saliva, everything had finally fallen into place.
Carly’s happiness then transformed into a kind of ascendant euphoria as Jack proved his devotion to her once and for all, and the pair were entwined together at last. Her entire body had throbbed from head to toe with the need to consummate the new bond of deity and subject, and she knew he wanted it just as much. They were so close to having everything they’d ever wanted but never fully realized until then.
And then Sophie burst through the door of her college dorm room and brought it all crashing to the ground with a spritz of classroom chemicals and an overcharged taser.
The ensuing hours had faded into a stoic haze for Carly as both shrunken siblings were transported back to the house by the sixteen-year-old homewrecker to face judgment. As she and Jack had been placed upon the kitchen table while Sophie explained the situation as calmly as she could, with visual aids from the three-inch pair, everything in existence had more or less ceased to matter for Carly. Mrs. Arton’s howling shrieks of disbelief and eventual fainting spell, nor Mr. Arton’s rage and despondent shock, could summon a single line of defense from their newly reduced daughter. She’d even nodded in solemn confirmation when her hyperventilating parents, tears streaming down their quaking faces, had demanded to know if Sophie’s claims were true: that Carly had, in fact, faked her brother’s death in order to keep him as her personal toy and slave for the past several years. What was the use in denying it then, once everything had already been taken from her?
The tears were trickling along her own cheeks now as Carly allowed herself to experience the same emotions for the thousandth time on the bed of her tank. Her hand trembled as it stroked up to her chest again, aware now of the hammering of her heart, and felt the hollowness of her fingers curling inward with no life between them.
Everything was so wrong now, especially after tasting what could have been. She’d achieved her own brand of nirvana with Jack, for however brief a time. Though it was over in the blink of an eye, Carly knew it’d been perfect, because it was the best ten minutes of her life to believe her little brother finally accepted her as the one who possessed him and could make his reality have meaning. They needed each other, she realized, now more than ever. No matter how often she dreamed it, the grief over that loss never became any less raw, and she knew she’d give anything in the world to have that feeling back even for a few breaths. Anything.
Blinking, Carly wiped the collected tears from her rosy cheeks. She peered through the opposite wall of the glass cell out at the security guard seated at a desk just across the tile canyon of the holding office, where the waspy bureaucrat was typing away on a keyboard and paying no attention to his shrunken charge. Scrappy and unfocused, he looked unfit to guard a rambunctious test rat, let alone the girl who had rapidly become one of the most nationally recognizable criminal faces in the past decade. Even in her depressed state, she couldn’t help but snarl at the sight of that sniveling human garbage out there, garbed in uniform and working to keep fate in a state of eternal perversion by preventing Carly from regaining her property again.
Stifling a cry of rage, she instead allowed her depth of field to drift back inside the confines of her glass cage as her vision settled on her reflection. Her blue eyes, cold and steely as ever, deadened as she gazed at herself lying humbled in the box. Even at this distance, she couldn’t recognize herself in the dim mirroring. The life and light her irises once held, crackling with electric desire, had been drained away, along with any shred of joy that remained. Her body, formerly sculpted and tanned by intensive training for basketball, had slimmed, her skin turning paler in the stale glow of this whitewashed hell.
Unable to look at herself either any longer, Carly lifted her leg, splaying her dexterous toes in the air, and smashed her foot hard against the glass, defiantly blotting out the echo of her body. For a moment she only sighed, tapping her soft digits along the smooth wall, and stroked the ball of her foot along the glass. It squeaked as she applied pressure to the surface, and though it seemed foolish, she imagined she could smear away both her powerless reflection and that costumed coward seated at the desk. From this far off, if Carly closed one eye, she could imagine her foot was large enough to crush the visage of the pitiful guard. She flattened her other sole against the glass, pressing with all her might, half-hoping that if she could just summon her former strength back into this damning finger-sized frame of hers, she could smash through these walls, throttle the life out of that twig of a man, and set out on a warpath to reclaim what was hers.
If only.
“You can go ahead and take lunch now,” a voice boomed, shattering Carly’s momentary illusion as another guard lumbered in, not bothering to soften her boot-clad footfalls as she entered the room. The windows of Carly’s prison rattled with each distant impact as her most hated overseer made an early appearance, ruining the meager girl’s morning even more than it already was.
“Really? It’s not even noon,” the man replied as his burlier coworker approached. The middle-aged woman slapped him on the back hard enough that he almost face-planted onto his keyboard.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ve got her covered,” the woman replied, chuckling with deep percussive chortles. She shot a seething glance to Carly as she wrapped a meaty forearm around the man’s shoulders and helped him to his feet, encouraging a hasty exit.
“Okay. Um, thanks!” he muttered as he was all but tossed out, his uncertain steps no match for the purposeful march of this leviathan of a warden. As soon as he was out the door, the female guard’s already imposing stature was dawning over Carly’s box, her broad shoulders as wide as the cage itself.
“Looks like you’re having a restful morning in there, Little Miss Sunshine,” the guard commented huskily as she glowered at the little prisoner, planting her leathery knuckles on her hips and tapping her pink-painted nails impatiently against her belt.
Carly had already shut her eyes, deciding her life was far less unbearable if she limited the number of seconds she had to acknowledge that giant bitch’s existence. She crossed her legs comfortably and laid her head in her hands, settling into the bed as though sunning on some distant beach beyond the reach of the law and preferably with her tiny brother straddling her tongue where he belonged. She even dared let a smile cross her lips, however false it was.
“Hey. Talking to you,” the woman barked, rapping a fist against the glass and vibrating the cage’s contents, from Carly’s bed over to the miniature spigot that served as a shower. “You’re gonna look at me when I speak to you, you little freak.”
Carly smacked her lips together and ran her tongue along her top row of teeth, groggily lifting her eyelids at her own leisure to find the massive sneering countenance of the woman who’d spent the past months unsuccessfully attempting to tame the little criminal into civil obedience.
Whether she was six feet or three inches, Carly Arton wasn’t easily persuaded to yield.
“That’s more like it,” the titanic woman spat. Her bulky claw descended into the cage, her thick fingers unfurling as they neared their vulnerable target. Carly, by now more than used to this kind of treatment, only yawned as the guard’s fingers flicked her out of the bed. She rolled over several times before plopping to an unceremonious halt in the center of her glass cell. Undeterred in her new life’s mission of not giving a solitary shit about what anyone tried to do to her, Carly barely paid half a notice as the powerful palm, scented strongly of motor oil and cheap wine, closed itself around her body.
The guard held a comparable lack of affection as she clenched Carly into her fingers. Balling her prize into the warm center and tightening the iron grip of her vengeful digits, she lifted the prisoner from the box. The story of Carly’s torment of her brother for all those years, public as it had become now, had affected the nation at a variety of emotional levels. As the youngest Arton had discovered, this beast of a woman in charge of monitoring her doll-sized penitentiary had not taken particularly kindly to hearing about the sordid tales. Much as the media had sensationalized the parts of the story that were leaked, to Carly’s quiet amusement, most of the truth of her five-year TLC with Jack was still unknown.
She could only imagine how tightly this woman might squeeze if she were to discover even half of the games Jack was actually forced to play under his sister’s foot. Carly doubted she’d still have intact ribs, were that the case.
“Did you see the tube?” the warden demanded, repositioning her hand so that her thumb propped under Carly’s chin, forcing the girl to look at the television while her limbs remained pinned into the guard’s palm. The news was still flashing variations of the earlier headline. “You understand what that means, right?”
Exhaling with bitter irritation at the discomfort imposed on her neck, Carly nodded as best she could with the giant pad of a thumb, callused as it was, squeezing hard enough into her throat to cut off the flow to her windpipe.
“It means no one can try to copy you and whatever goes on in that fucked up little head of yours,” the guard whispered as she drew her fist closer to her lips, flecks of victorious spittle flying into Carly’s face as she was brought under the awning of the guard’s tacky frizzed tresses. “I guess there goes your last chance of being famous, huh?”
Carly, still wrestling her way into a position between the muscled fingers where she could breathe regularly, heaved her leg over the guard’s thumb. Trying not to cough as an oppressive fog of the woman’s coffee breath settled like a disease into the shrunken girl’s lungs, she at last granted her petty tormentor the honor of eye contact. The enormous orbs of the caretaker’s eyes, wrinkled around the corners from stress and caked with poorly applied black liner, narrowed in on the toy-sized young woman in her best attempt to intimidate. Carly knew it must’ve worked on countless full-sized prisoners before, but her own heartrate still hadn’t risen any higher since she laid down for her siesta earlier that morning. With a giant finger poised over her chest, she knew this was what the guard was vying for: despair, in any measure. She would not be receiving it this day, or any.
“Actually,” Carly sighed with childish disdain, casually batting her blonde locks and resisting the strength of a hefty index finger as it shoved into her shoulder. “I think I’m still gonna be pretty famous anyway.”
The guard’s lip curled, revealing yellowed teeth as her tongue lurched forward for a scathing rebuttal and, more than likely, a bruise-inducing constriction around Carly’s hips from a palm that had undoubtedly single-handedly crunched a vast number of shotgunned beer cans in its day. Her exposed bicep bulged into a rocky hill beneath her skin as her entire hormone-riddled body tensed, unable to fathom her lack of effect on this slender little psycho.
Utterly unfazed, the diminished prisoner let herself go limp in the woman’s hand, a smile on her face, reveling in how easy it was to push buttons. The power she was able to exhibit even now was more than worth whatever questionable policing tactics were about to be used. Tightening her wiry frame, Carly huffed with unshakeable resolve, prepared for retaliation.
But it never came. No fingers squeezed around her until her back cracked and no glob of spit expelled from the guard’s throat, as had happened in the past weeks. There wasn’t even a boot coming unzipped for Carly to be inserted, as had been threatened so many times by her charmingly uncreative warden. Instead, a moment of cumbrous pause settled in as the pair glared into one another, ignorant of the sterile space around them. A creak of the door and a barely audible zap were accompanied by the pungent scent of burnt flesh.
The guard’s lips drooped, drool spilling from the corners, and suddenly the room seemed to be collapsing in a spiraling rush of wind and gravity. The baritone amazon crumpled toward the floor in a heap of over-tanned skin and tight fabric. They were falling. Carly wriggled free from the closed cage of fingers, tumbling down for part of the journey at complete peace with herself as the ground rapidly approached.
Rather than meeting a skull-shattering end, though, the girl instead collided with the leather padding of a black glove that seemed to materialize from out of the ether, or even perhaps further beyond than that. The dark fingers coiled instantly, trapping Carly in and cradling her with the tenderness of someone nursing a live grenade.