I pulled into the driveway after another long day at work.  Including my commute, it had been thirteen hours since leaving home that morning, and I had been at it for two weeks straight, with another week looking to be the same.  The crunch before product launches was always bad, but this was the worst one yet. When it was finally over I would be glad, not just to have some free time again, but so I could finally spend some time with my wife.  She understandably felt neglected during this, and I felt terrible for it.

Ordinarily I would sneak in, heat up some leftovers, and collapse into bed to do it all over again.  Not tonight, though.  Lara was waiting for me just inside the door, arms crossed over her chest.  Her brown hair fell long and loose down her back, and her blue eyes were narrowed in a glare while her full lips were drawn tight.  She had on a red generic sports jersey and small black cotton shorts with white ankle socks, her usual house wear.  Fitness had always been important to her so she was in shape, and her tall frame made her muscles look long and lean.

“Hey, honey,” I greeted her.  “What’s wrong?”

“’Hey, honey,’ yourself,” she shot back sternly.  “Let me guess, another long day at the office?”

“Yeah, we still haven’t launched,” I replied, taking a cautious step forward.  “Where else would I have been?”

“Out with whoever you have saved as ‘Kate Love’ in your phone,” Lara answered.  I looked surprised, and she continued, “Yeah, I saw the texts she’s been sending you.  You’re fucking busted.”

I cocked my head to the side in confusion.  “Kate Love is the name of a contractor we brought on to help with the crunch,” I told her.  “There’s nothing going on between us.”

“Then why is she texting you late at night?” she demanded.  “Things like, ‘Can’t wait to see you’ and ‘You made me feel so good today?’”

“Because we have a good working relationship and I told her a funny joke?” I responded, not sure where this was coming from.  She had never been paranoid like this before.  “Look, whatever you think’s happening isn’t.  If you’ll give me a chance I can explain everything, but trust me, you have nothing to worry about.”

“I’ve got a better idea.”  Lara extended a hand toward me and held it palm up.  “Give me your phone.  Now.”  If it would help calm her down, I was glad to.  I dug into my pocket and grabbed it, and before I could give it to her she snatched it out of my hand.  Instead of unlocking it with my passcode like I expected, she set it on the shelf beside her head.  “Good boy.  I just wanted to make sure I can still use it later.”

“Lara, what are you talking about?  You’re starting to scare me.”  Instead of answering, she revealed the gleaming metal in her other hand.  At first I thought it was a knife, but as I saw more of it I noticed it was a was a dull cylinder.  She placed her thumb on the button, and I realized with horror she was brandishing one of those shrinking rods I had been hearing about.  I thought they had been recalled due to safety concerns, but she had managed to find one somehow.

I tried to get away, but she lunged forward and grabbed the collar of my shirt.  Lara yanked me off balance so I stumbled toward her, and shoved me back just before I collided with her.  She held me upright, and I could feel the malice as she stared down into my eyes.  “This should keep you under my thumb,” she said with a chuckle.  I tried to pull away, but she had all the leverage.

Lara jammed the rod into my stomach and pressed the button, sending a sharp electrical jolt into me.  It quickly spread throughout my body, and when it faded a strong tingle replaced it.  My heels lifted off the ground, then my feet, and I was looking up at her more than usual.  I kicked my legs in the air, trying to get free of her grip, but it was only getting stronger.  Desperately I clawed at her massive hand to make her release me, but by this point it was so big I could barely get an arm around it.  When I became too small for that I resorted to uselessly slapping at it, and then I could not even do that much.  My body dwindled to the point that it fit entirely in Lara’s fist and kept going, slipping deeper into the dark cavern that was growing around me.

A few seconds after I felt the shrinking wear off, the world tipped to the side so I was lying on her palm.  Lara unfurled her fingers, revealing the world to me, and I was shocked at how much had changed.  Her face alone was tremendous, dominating my view as it loomed over me.  Blue eyes half my size stared down at me, and I had to choose which one to focus on.  A nose over twice my height blasted me with hot air, and a mouth twice as wide as I was tall, easily capable of gobbling me up, hovered just a few inches away.  I wanted to flee from my wife’s now-horrifying visage, but there was nowhere for me to go but down.

With her free hand Lara reached toward me, and I flinched away as it passed over me.  She shoved my head forward with her thumb, digging the nail into my collar, then clamped down on the fabric with her index finger.  Her digits pinched hard so she would be sure of her grip, then she lowered her hand, leaving me dangling in the air.  Lara turned her wrist a little and chuckled when I tilted with it, a terrible rumble that emanated from deep in her throat.

“Let’s see if that homewrecker still wants you,” she boomed, and I clutched my hands to my ears.  She was painfully loud now, and her voice was so deep that each syllable made my bones shake.  Lara reached up and grabbed my phone off the shelf, then put in my passcode.  Her finger scrolled down my contact list until she found who she was looking for, then tapped to select it.  “She might have a change of heart when she sees your wife, and how puny you are compared to her.”

“Lara, I’m telling you, there’s nothing going on between us!” I shouted.  “We’re just colleagues, nothing more!”

“It’s cute that you think I can understand you,” Lara replied, bringing up the camera.  “Your voice is just a little squeak to me.”  She swapped to the front-facing camera, and turned me toward it.  On the screen, I could see how tiny she had made me.  Compared to her I was minuscule, dangling helplessly from her fingers while every feature of her face dwarfed me.  “Say cheese!”  Her thumb tapped the button, capturing the moment forever, and she went to type a brief message to go along with it.

He’s mine

k… does this mean you won’t be at work Monday?

This is his wife.  Be here in an hour or you

won’t see him again.  I suggest you bring a

shoe box.

This is inappropriate, please don’t text me like this.

You thought it was appropriate when you

were texting him last night.

I’m going to pretend this didn’t happen.  Good night.

Lara tried to send another message, but it came back as undeliverable.  “See?” I said.  “Now do you believe I’m not having an affair?”

“’Squeak squeak squeak,’ that’s all I hear,” Lara replied.  She set my phone back on the shelf, but kept her eyes on me.  “It looks like the two of you collaborated on what to do if you got caught.  It’ll take more than that to convince me, though.”

“Are you listening to yourself?” I yelled.  “It sounds like you’re having paranoid delusions!  Please, just grow me back and we can talk about this like adults!”

“Your voice is so annoying now.  I wonder if I could still hear it if you’re on the floor?”

“Please don’t –“ Lara opened her fingers, releasing me from her grip so I plummeted to the ground.  I hit the tile hard, but not as hard as I expected from a fall of what looked like several hundred feet.  In reality it had only been about five, not nearly enough time to gain any real speed.  Still, I sprained an ankle when I landed, and fell forward onto the tile.

I looked at Lara and understood what bugs saw.  She was a colossus, towering over me like a titaness of myth while I was a supplicant at her feet.  Her big toe alone was taller than me, and the cotton sock pulled tight around it made its outline easy to see.  Getting to her ankle would be a trial in itself, and climbing up her smooth shin to her knee would require gear I did not have.  There was a vast expanse of thigh to her shorts, which were so tight her skin looked like it bulged where they started, and her loose shirt hung over her like a tent.  As she glared down at me, I found it difficult to imagine she could differentiate between me and any small bits of debris on the floor.

“Well, go on!” she roared.  I had no trouble hearing her from this distance, though her voice was heavily distorted now.  “Say something so I know if I can even hear your pathetic little voice anymore!”

“Come on, this isn’t funny!” I protested as loud as I could.  “You’re not like this!  Grow me back, or at least pick me up!  It’s too dangerous for me to be on the floor!”

Several seconds of silence followed, then Lara grinned.  “I guess that means I can’t even hear you anymore,” she declared.  “No more pathetic little squeals stabbing my eardrums.  What should I do with you now, though?  You’re pretty much a bug now, right?  A bug who’s been cheating on me.”

I stared up at her in stunned silence for a moment.  “I know what you’re thinking, and please don’t do it!” I begged.  “I wasn’t cheating on you, I swear, we can work through this!  Plus, you sent a picture of us to Kate!  That’ll be evidence!  They won’t just write me off as a missing person, they’ll come after you for murder!”

“I’m not a big fan of bugs.”  She really could not hear me anymore.  “I do love stepping on them, though.  They make a nice crunch.  I hope you make a crunch.”  Her laugh chilled my blood, and the twitch of her enormous toes filled me with a primal panic.  Lara had made up her mind, probably back when she bought the shrinking rod, and nothing I could say or do would dissuade her.

She lifted her foot slowly, drawing it out to make it more menacing, and I tried to run.  As soon as I tried to put weight on it, however, I remembered my sprained ankle, and I could barely hobble.  If I were uninjured it would take minutes for me to get beyond the range of her legs, and I barely had seconds.  There was no way I could escape, and we both knew it.

A large shadow fell over me, and I looked up to see the sole of her mammoth foot looming overhead.  Lara laughed cruelly, more of a low rumble, and began bringing her foot down.  I limped forward as fast as I could while the shadow grew more focused around me, though I knew I could never escape the length of her huge foot.  Her toes dropped into view, and I saw the weave of individual threads on her sock pulled tight.  The ball of her foot hit me and forced me to the floor, pinning me beneath it.

I struggled to get free, but her foot weighed hundreds of pounds to me.  She pressed down, increasing the pressure, and my ability to move became even more limited.  By the time her foot had me completely frozen in place, I could not do anything more than wiggle my fingers.  My bones creaked, and in a single agonizing surge pain spread through my body.  Her foot effortlessly obliterated me, and I was little more than a red stain that quickly got soaked up by her sock.

Lara grabbed her husband’s phone and unlocked it, then forwarded the picture she had taken to herself.  She had been keeping much closer track of shrinking-involved deaths than he had, and she knew they were rarely investigated as murders.  As soon as she burned these socks, in fact, there would be no evidence to tie her to his death beyond the shrinking, and she could pick whatever story she wanted for his tragic crushing.  Maybe something fell onto him from the shelf, or he was standing too close to the door when she got home – someone had gotten off with time served for that, since they could hardly be blamed for it.  Meanwhile, she would get much more out of life insurance than she ever would have from divorcing her philandering husband, who would become just another statistic in the risks of consumer shrinking devices.