“Okay, Mom. The joke’s super funny, but I’m not laughing anymore,” Maggie Stevens announced. She stood, arms crossed and heel tapping impatiently, naked at a single inch tall on the frilly carpeted floor. The teenage soccer star was just about on her last nerve.

            The shrunken girl glared with renewed vigor as a bare foot the size of a city bus crashed lovingly into the floor a stone’s throw away. Boulder-like toes writhing at the carpet, purple-painted nails flared with refracted sunlight, the pale sole flattened into the carpet.

            Judy Stevens, in all her five-foot-eleven glory, rested her chin on regal fingers as she gazed down at her tiny daughter down on the ground. The woman sighed from the throne of her office chair. And if it wasn’t conveyed yet by the mere fact she’d shrunken her daughter, her favorite child, with the PMRD, it was clear in her posture that Judy was unhappy. Disappointed, in fact. Which was even worse.

            “I’m not laughing, either, sweetie,” Judy replied. “But then maybe you shouldn’t have been following your older brother’s example and sampling beverages not meant for children. Then neither of us would be disappointed.”

            “How did you even know about-”

            “I have my ways, dear. I think you know that.” Judy’s hands crested over the smooth hillock of her knees, her fingers drumming on her shins. She stretched forward, digits spread apart to pick Maggie up.

            “But this is what you do to the boys, Mom. Not me!” Maggie protested. She winced as her mother’s spiral-printed thumbpad and forefinger surrounded her. “C’mon, it’s me! I thought you were… you know, cool with me having some fun so long as nothing bad happened.”

            “That’s the problem,” Judy said. “All bad things start out as someone just having fun and refusing to think about the future consequences.” Gingerly, she pinched her two fingers together and plucked her puny, nude daughter from the floor. The ascent was slow such that the girl’s head wasn’t left to spin, but it wasn’t exactly gentle, either.

            “Erghhh! Jesus, Mom. Okay, what do you want? I’ll even say I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Happy?”

            “Not yet,” Judy admitted. Her hand cupped just below her chin, where she deposited her middle child into a sprawled genuflection. “But I will be soon, I think.”
            “What the crap does that mean?” Maggie tried not to let the trembling in her knees show. She wasn’t scared of her mother, nor of just about anything on planet Earth, but even she wasn’t above feeling intimidated. Warm air steamed from Judy’s pursed lips just above and wafted down in a fog.

            “It’s like I tell Scott, honey,” Judy continued. “You commit a wrong, and it takes an opposite right to put things back where they belong.”

            “Huh?”

            “You obviously weren’t concerned with what you put inside your mouth,” Judy said. She exhaled slowly. Her pink-flushed lips puffed from inside. “So I’ll demonstrate for you a great deal of concern for what I put in my mouth.”

            “You’re kidding me, right?” Maggie gawked with revulsion. “This is just to scare me straight or whatever? Mom, honest to God, I will not drink another sip of booze until I’m twenty-one.”

            “I know you won’t, my darling,” Judy informed her daughter. “Especially after this, right now.”

            Instinctively, Maggie crawled backward in the broad plain of her mother’s peachy palm. Not that it could’ve made any difference to avoid what was coming. Judy’s lips creased and unfurled. In a fresh billow of steam, the mammoth muscle of the woman’s tongue, seething with glistening saliva, crossed the pink border. It pressed against the heel of her hand, licked forward, and clobbered Maggie beneath its dripping weight.

            The inch-tall girl ripped loose a scream of utter disgust. The roiling weight of her mother’s living organ shifted and squeezed all around her. Taste buds like suction cups plastered to every square inch of her exposed body. In a flash she was sticky with strings of thick saliva. In another flash, Maggie realized she was rising. Her body weight surrendered to the easy pull of Judy’s tongue.

            No. No, no, NO. There was no way this was actually happening. To her.

            Maggie quaked partially with nausea at all of this slimy contact, but mostly in righteous fury. This was not how things worked in this house. Her brother Scott was supposed to be the misbehaved one who always caught Judy’s wrath from all the combined tensions of the household and political business. Her brother was the scapegoat. The criminal. The toy. The one she and her mother could bond over by laughing as he was plopped in the tip of a shoe and forced to watch his giant family’s titanic toes barreling inside.

            Did that bond mean nothing to her mother?

            Judy’s tongue lapped away from her palm, with her miniature naked daughter adhered to the rubbery tip. She slurped both tongue and brat over her teeth, and next thing Maggie knew, she was lying face-up on her mother’s hot, worming muscle and staring up at the ribbed palate above. What tainted light made its way inside glinted sickly off Judy’s back molars and undulating cheeks like the interior of an underwater cave.

            The air was hot and humid, flavored of tangerine, mouthwash, and ghostly morning breath. However, the breathing conditions were the least of Maggie’s problems. She watched, in bitter disbelief, her mother’s lips approaching from above and below to meet. A crystal rope of saliva hung at the corner of the giant woman’s lips: an automatic response to feeling the insignificant but potentially edible weight of an object inside her jaws.

            “MOM!” Maggie screeched. She lunged forward on the slippery pad of the tongue, but was halted as the red muscle curled upward, squishing her in the face and matting the shrunken blonde’s hair in damp, haphazard strands. “DON’T!”

            Either Judy didn’t hear or simply didn’t care for the poor manners of speaking with one’s mouth full, though, because the woman’s lips finally smacked together with moist satisfaction. Maggie was completely marooned in the pitch-dark of her mother’s warm, slimy mouth. The girl held her hand up in front of her face, determined she couldn’t see it, and slid it on her neck just to confirm her senses still worked. Of course, she only came away with a fresh caking of spit down her chest, so she quickly abandoned that method.

            Long before the hapless shrunken teen could begin either a hopeless escape plan or impassioned rhetoric, Judy’s mouth set to work. The broad slab of the tongue ascended, with Maggie still centered, and pinned her to the roof of the woman’s mouth. Next she was squeezed sideways into the spongy wall of her mother’s cheek. She couldn’t hold still for long enough to attempt a foothold anywhere against tooth or tongue.

            “Mom! Mom, stop. Please!” the girl squealed. As if her voice could be heard at all.

            Judy’s mouth compressed like a deflating weather balloon. From cheek to cheek, Maggie was traded, face-planting into the soppy curvature. Her nose, lips, and eyes stung with the inescapable flood of hungry saliva. Her arms flailed and her legs kicked desperately for purchase, but on each casual bounce, only Judy was in control. The muscular peak of her tongue aided in the swishing, pressing itself to her daughter’s back on every repetition.