My guess was correct. The moment her fingers released me from the softest total body grip you’ve ever imagined, I found myself on the floor of her room. Not alone of course, as next to me, she was standing up on her full, unimpressive to others, gargantuan to me, height. There is a slight rumbling on the floor: that is her toes gently wiggling as she’s looking down at me. Said toes are just a few inches away from me, the same ones that I spent yesterday’s afternoon and evening underneath their sweating, crushing weight inside Hannah’s shoe. The toes are small and dainty, just like her hands, almost doll-like but unmistakably feminine, not girly, at the same time. I know there are many different types of dwarfism in humans, ranging all the way from just super short people, to midgets, to people with misshapen bodies, to tinies like me. Her case is as she told me – at some point her body just decided to give up growing, and her features matured as they were. I look further up from her toes. She’s got a pair of light blue pants, that look suspiciously like the pair of the pajama top she was wearing earlier. I mean, the cupcake patterns betray that. They reach down to her feet, about half an inch of fabric simply resting on the floor, only the tips of her feet peeking out of the somewhat oversized clothing. However, since I was occupying her pajama top, she grabbed a t-shirt to throw on. It’s light green with some kind of drawing or lettering that I cannot see from my lowly vantage point. Her arms are protruding from somewhat loose sleeves, and her hands are resting on her waist. Finally, further up, past the small but noticeable bumps of her chest, I make eye contact with her as she’s still staring down at me.
“Took you long enough to see it all, didn’t it? Like what you see?” her thundering voice came from above. Even though I could hear her normal voice just fine from there, I guess she thought that my tiny ears couldn’t pick up the sound and she spoke louder than before. I try to yell an answer back at her, but she comically pulls her palm on her ear, pretending to try and listen harder. “I’m sorry, but I can’t hear you from my lofty tower of almost-four-feet-town.” Oh I can hear the giggle, however. “Do you still think I could give Godzilla a fight for his scaly money?” She barely lifts her foot and inches it towards me. Does she want me to run or sit and take a toe beating? I’m trying to think. But that moment of indecisiveness is all it takes for her to act she drops her foot a hair’s width in front of me. Her big toe dwarfs me, and the other ones do too – probably not the smallest one, barely.
“Don’t be scared, okay? I’m with the good guys, I won’t let the lizard eat you… but I need to cover you to protect you!” In a flash, she lifts up her big toe, pushes her foot just a tiny bit closer, and lowers the toe, taking me down with it. I’m smothered underneath my fleshy prison. She very gently taps her toe on top of me, hopefully enjoying the sensation.
“Watch out little things, as I run!” she yells. It is unbelievable to me, but her massive body shifts about as she almost carelessly pretends to run on the stop, her giantess feet crashing around me, left and right, again and again. She’s careful enough not to directly step on me, which I definitely appreciate – even at her relatively small weight, it’d still hurt to be stepped on full-force like that. The booming sounds and the earthquakes on the floor are deafening. My adrenaline is pumping. During my training, I was dropped in a floor of actually dancing, careless people, and had to survive the onslaught of feet much more enormous than those, enclosed in shoes much more punishing than this girl’s soft barefoot skin. My instincts tell me to run, to avoid her steps, find the little gaps that her enormous bludgeoning feet cannot easily step on. However, Hannah’s actually paying attention where she steps. I can’t deny my owner her game, and I set a straight course, running off. She picks up on that, and chases me around her room, if you can call it a chase: I run, run, and run some more, and then she takes one step, completely obliterating whatever distance I’ve put between us. We do that a few times, until I realize that I am slowly being steered to a dead end, as I find myself between her chasing giantess feet and the spine of a book that lies on the floor. “Gotcha” rings on my ears, and I do what I do best: I curl around in a ball and brace for the deadly impact of tons upon tons of barefoot flesh obliterating me like a bug. However, while the shadow of her foot covers me, she lowers it gently on me, and I end up being under the canopy of the space between her toes. She gives them a quick flex, and now I’m wedged between her second and third toe.
“Hold on there a moment”, I hear from above. She starts … she starts walking. I immediately grab onto her toe, as they start turning and twisting as she walks. Normal people don’t really appreciate how much do toes move and shift in their joints as they walk, but I can tell you, it’s a world of difference. I cling on for dear life as Hannah walks a few steps across the room, my tiny head barely sticking above the gap of her toes, watching the environment zoom by in a blur. When her foot lands on her destination, we are back by Hannah’s towering bed. I look up and see that it’s indeed set up a bit too high, and that she has to hop on it every time she wants to get on it, instead of just sitting on the bed like normal people do. It suddenly reminds me of my bed in the shop, even if that was for people at least eight times as big as me, while Hannah’s bed is just uncomfortably tall instead of towering.
She wiggles her toes softly until I let go and drop on the floor, where I am greeted with the ball of her foot, aimed straight at me. She steps on me, even though I can tell she is not putting her weight on me. She very gently rubs me on the floor in a gentle twisting motion. It doesn’t take long until she lifts it, and announces that it’s time for a protective circle, whatever that is. She lowers her body, depositing her (relative to me) massive butt on the ground, causing a massive quake on the floor, and forms a literal circle around me with her enormous “long” legs. Her feet slam together, and I’m enclosed in a circle of fleshy walls, covered in enormous cupcake on blue tapestries. I can see that she’s inspecting me. I am standing firm, and there is no bruise or abuse on me, and it doesn’t even hurt. She played with me amazingly gently for that level of pretend roughness AND for being a first timer. “I am sorry, little one, I did not see that you got caught in my big ol’ toes as I ran to chase the monster! My bad”, she laughs. She then whispers softly, showing me a temporary out of character insight: “I practiced with gummy bears before, you know. Else I’d be too scared I’d squish you.” I could write an essay on how gummy bears are not really substitutes for me: they are twice as tall, they are soft, they are inanimate, but I won’t ruin her fun. Whatever she practiced on, her method works fine on me, and I won’t complain.
Hannah wastes no time, and swipes me under my feet on her fingertip, bringing me at her feet, where her toes are touching each other. I look down at the ten fleshy digits wiggling, writhing, almost like teeth expecting their meal. “To the vault, put the innocents in the vault so that Godzilla can’t reach them!” she exclaims as I drop right between her big toes. The two big toes grab me and start gently rubbing me between them. I try to breathe every moment I am not squished between the moving wiggling toes. She carefully, even masterfully, drops me between the balls of her feet, enclosing me in the warm gigantic flesh, as she keeps rubbing her feet together. There are a few dust particles here and there that are stuck to her otherwise freshly washed feet. I don’t mind a change from yesterday’s sweaty drive. As she keeps rubbing me between her bare feet, I slowly drop even further, until I find myself massaging her heels. The skin there is just slightly more tough than the rest of her foot, but even there it’s one of the softest heels I’ve ever had the chance to step on me. I eventually slip on the floor, and I look up at her towering feet. They might be quite small for a human, but they are still almost eight inches tall as they rise up as towers from the floor, topped with toe-turrets and battlement gaps between them, easily at least twenty times as tall as I am. The soft flesh is pink and relatively free of any imperfections or marks.
As I am still amazed by the enormous feet ahead of me, one of them gently moves toward me. I take a step back, trying to avoid being overrun by her massive heel. “Hey, over here”, she calls softly. I turn around, leaving her feet and walk towards her body. I walk until I can see straight ahead of me the seams that connect the pant legs in front of her crotch – and that is still fairly above my point of view as I stand in front of her mountainous torso. Close to the seam is another one of those enormous cupcake shapes. I could still get easily lost in it, if it were real, I remind myself. Finally realizing what I’ve been staring at, I look quickly away from her covered womanhood though, and back to her face. “Hey, can you hear me now?” I yell up at her.
“Yeah, I figured the mountain would have to move for your prayers to be heard, little one. I grant you an audience.” She raises her finger and brings it down, pointing at me, but not touching me. She’s completely engrossed in playing her role, and I can’t fault her. I’m sure this “brand new toy” period will end at some point and things will go to normal. I just hope she doesn’t get bored of dominating me too easily before I end up in some kind of second hand shop.
But now I have doubts about this. Her previous outburst of sincerity, when she spoke so quickly and changed subject so many times is still on my mind. She’s already invested a part of her soul in me, she won’t make me food for a lizard any time soon. Suddenly she pokes me, barely enough to shake out of my endless internal monologue me but not enough to topple me. “I said, I grant you an audience inside the castle of legs. Speak!” she orders in mock commanding voice. I’m lost for words; I’m not sure what role am I playing any more or what she expects me to say. So, I try my best.
“Um, is Godzilla gone? Is the town safe?”
“Ayup. He’s gone. I got tired chasing him, but the deed is done. Give your savior a little kiss, will ya?”
I make a fake bow, and then stand up again, blowing a kiss up at her. Hannah’s smile softly erodes from her face, replaced by concern. She brings her hand next to me, gently cupped and slightly tilted towards me, my sign to hop on that I’ve learned by now. I climb her soft hand and walk to the middle of her palm. Even though I’ve walked on the uneven soft skin before, I can feel her pulse underneath my steps, I can feel the rivers of blood pushing through the pipes under her skin. She brings me close to her face. “I feel bad making you play along like that, my little. I mean, I just treated you like a toy, a prop in my silly scene. You’re a person though. I took you out of home, stomped on you, had you sleep on me, toyed with you, and demanded you blow me a kiss on top of that. You probably hate me by now. I’m sorry.”
I’ve initially no idea where this is coming from, but I should have guessed that this girl has more insecurities than just about her height. How many times have I felt worthless because I was the runt? Somehow, now my role is to be the bigger person in this delightfully absurd relationship. It’s time for some brutal honesty.
“Look, Hannah. You paid for me, you own me, okay? If you ask me to do something, I’ll do it for you. If it’s to blow you a kiss, that I’ll do. If it’s to eat toe cheese, that’s what I’ll do. It’s my part in this. I’m too small to be your friend, your real friend, at least. I’m a toy you use to feel better. So … stop worrying and use me to feel better, whatever it is you need me to do.”
Mistake. Mistake, mistake, mistake. I just made a big one. I can almost picture the little heart being broken by my words. Words that I don’t want to believe, because, dammit, deep down I’ve actually had fun the last few minutes, and it did not feel like I was just obeying orders from my owner.
I expect tears, or anger, or defeat. However, I did not expect what actually came from her lips.
“Yeah, I own you. Yeah, you don’t have a choice, because if you hop off my palm, you’ll either starve on the floor, or if you escape my room you’ll get vacuumed up or stomped on by any of the girls in the corridor. I bought you for two thousand dollars, money that my family barely has, but they gave to me in hopes I can feel better. And it’s your job to make me feel better, but…”
Brutal honesty from her as well. I’m amazed at the range of emotions this girl can show. If anyone had to keep reminding themselves that they are not dealing with a child, but a rational adult, there is no doubt anymore.
“… but the way this will work is if we at least maintain an illusion of this being more than just me bossing you around like someone bosses a dog for treats. Yes, technically I own your almost invisible ass. But I won’t hurt you or punish you if you don’t want to do something for me. Please. Try and be comfortable, and just be yourself. You were probably trained to obey, but unless your life is in danger, I don’t want you to blindly obey. Be yourself. I want to meet you, little one. I want us to be friends, and not toy and master. Got it?”
I stand there, looking like an idiot on the girl’s palm. There is a little voice inside me telling me that there’s still a good chance she’s just toying with me, but I don’t listen to it anymore. I slowly bow down, on my knees, and bring my head on the soft skin floor. I place the tiniest kiss on her palm. I look up back at her as I am still down on all fours. “This is not because you asked me to, but because it feels right.” For my whole life I’ve been almost tortured into absolute submission, but in this one, this Hannah, that has in her littlest bone all the force needed to squish me, I think I have found something stronger than fear. I have found respect.