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It was a nice night for a jog, though I wished mine had been voluntary.  For the past ten minutes I had been running down the empty streets, unable to shake the person pursuing me.  No matter how many alleys I ducked into or housing developments I ran through they inevitably popped up behind me again, moving at their same steady pace.  Even now I could see their outline in the distance, slowly drawing closer.  At this hour, and with no one else on the sidewalks, there was no doubt that I was their target for whatever reason.

 

Desperate to throw them off, I darted around a corner into a narrow alley, the only major feature an empty loading dock.  I sprinted up the ramp to a steel shutter that had seen better days.  Many of the slats on the bottom had fallen onto the ground, leaving a gap over a foot tall, and most of the remaining ones were so damaged they were useless.  Thankful for once that I had a slight frame, I laid on my chest and crawled through.  My would-be assailant was significantly larger than me, and I doubted they would fit in the opening.

 

Once inside, my eyes took a few minutes to adjust.  The only light came from a flickering bulb across the alley, further reduced by the few intact slats in the metal shutter.  When I could see again, I wondered how long this place had been abandoned.  There was a thick layer of dust on the floor, disturbed only by a set of footprints likely left by an urban explorer.  Aside from a pair of huge metal cisterns in the middle of the gigantic room it was empty.  Everything else had been carted away, and I suspected the colossal tanks only remained because they were too large to extricate.

 

Carefully I stepped forward, slowly setting my foot down in case some industrial debris was buried beneath the dust.  A cloud kicked into the air when my foot landed, but other than that I was safe.  Scarce light streaming through the dust particles made the dilapidated industrial building even spookier, and I cautiously advanced toward the tanks.  As far as I knew there was only one way in or out, leaving me trapped.  I might need to hide, and they were the only things that could provide me with cover.

 

I pressed my back against the cold metal and slid down it, throwing up another cloud of dust when I sat on the floor.  My breathing had just returned to normal when something hit the shutter with a loud bang, and I covered my mouth to keep my yelp silent.  They had caught up to me.  Something heavy slammed against the metal several more times, but the barrier held firm.  The gap was too small for them!  With a great exuberant exhale, I leaned my head against the tank while they futilely fought against the metal slats.

 

They continued bashing the shutter for several minutes, their irritation growing as it refused to give way.  Finally, with a frustrated groan they cast their instrument to the ground, and metal clattered on concrete as it rolled back down the ramp.  I had won simply by running away.  True, I had gotten hopelessly lost, but at least I would be able to greet the new day without a beating or worse.

 

The single light flickered and died, throwing the whole dilapidated factory into darkness.  Still, I could not leave.  I knew I was safe in here, and for all I knew this was a ruse by to person coming after me, trying to force me to leave.  It would not be for a while yet, but I would not leave until daybreak when the early morning sun should provide enough light to deter anyone from coming after me.

 

Several hours passed while I saw on the factory floor, still leaning against the enormous metal cistern, and I started to nod off.  Something huge slammed into the eastern wall hard enough to make the whole building shake, jolting me awake, and a loud creak resonated in the open air.  Daylight poured into the structure, a sudden shock from the inky blackness that had surrounded me before, and I blinked my eyes rapidly to help them adjust.  Had I fallen asleep and missed the dawn?

 

The cistern tipped backwards, and I toppled along with it.  Looking up the curved side, I saw it had a surprisingly fresh red label around the middle, with white lettering large enough to be read a quarter mile away.  Near the top, where it was capped with more red, something that looked like a human fingertip pressed against its wall and the cistern was dragged away, scraping against the floor.  As it got further away, I got a better look at the strange object, and saw that it even had a fingernail facing toward me.  It was bigger than me, though, so it must have been some strange machinery, finally come to reclaim the abandoned tanks.

 

The cistern lifted off the ground and seemed to drop through the pavement outside, disappearing from view.  With it out of the way, I could see that the entire wall had seemingly been pulled away and a tremendous face was peering inside.  It seemed to be a woman’s, with long blond hair pulled back and tied behind her head and pale blue eyes, their irises nearly the diameter of my height.  She had a slender, sharply sloping nose that I could lay across with room to spare, and a set of full, pink lips with a sharp dip in the upper one.  As I looked over her smooth, creamy skin, I shook my head in disbelief.  In order for this to be real, she would have to be almost a thousand feet tall and capable of ripping the wall off a building.

 

I turned away from her and saw an entire row of cisterns in front of me, lining the factory’s back wall.  They all had red labels as well, with bold white letters as tall as I was facing me.  They were plan and easy to understand, just a single word over a generic picture of a plant, though reading them made me less hopeful that this was a mere trick or illusion.  Cayenne pepper.  Cilantro.  Cumin.  While hiding, I had somehow been transported into this enormous woman’s spice cabinet and was in no less danger than I had been before.

 

She began swinging the factory wall, which I now understood was a cabinet door, shut, and I breathed a sigh of relief.  I had escaped her notice and could find a way out of here, maybe even reverse the process that had brought me here in the first place.  Before it clicked shut, however, she stopped it.  With no time to dash and hide behind the neighboring spice container, I hoped she had simply forgotten something.

 

When the door opened again, she was looking right at me and my hopes were dashed.  I tried to stay still so she would overlook me, but she knew she had seen something.  Her shadow grew longer as she leaned forward, completely enveloping me while she took a closer look.  It took all of my nerves to not break and run, knowing that would tip her off if she had not been already.  The tip of her long nose grew closer, and I gazed up into the enormous blue eyes staring down at me.  She was gorgeous, but I knew she could obliterate me with a mere twitch and did not want to attract her attention.

 

Suddenly she pulled back and fixed me with a steely look, as though discovering someone inside her spice cabinet were an everyday occurrence for her.  I stood and held up my arms, ready to plead my case, but she was having none of it.  She reached into the cabinet and extended a finger toward me, and I braced to be squished like the bug she thought I was.  Instead, it passed over me and set down on the floor behind me.  Grateful for the stay of execution, I opened my eyes and got ready to greet her.

 

The opportunity would not come.  She swiped the finger forward, and the fleshy pad of her fingertip slammed into my back.  It lifted me off the ground, violently pushing me toward her while I screamed as loudly as I could.  Her finger curved upward, taking me with it, and I was pressed into her skin hard enough to make a small dimple.  Simple momentum had pinned me against her finger and there was no way out.

 

Her finger suddenly stopped, and inertia launched me into the air.  As I soared in a low arc toward her face, I tried in vain to steer myself with my arms and legs.  I was moving much too quickly to effect any significant changes in my course, and her broad, pointed chin rapidly grew larger in my view.  My scream continued until I crashed into the soft skin and the breath was knocked out of me.  Momentarily I was stuck inside the small indentation I made like a cartoon, then gravity took over and I fell backwards off her face.

 

The world rapidly flipped as I tumbled along her body, my view changing between the floor and ceiling, with her tremendous body dominating my view of both.  I landed on a vast green field with a steep slope – her hoodie – that I desperately tried to claw my fingers into so I could arrest my fall.  Unfortunately, I was moving too fast, and my fingers slipped uselessly off the threads.  My desperate slapping did nothing to slow my body as it rolled helplessly down her chest, a helpless prisoner of gravity and her breasts.

 

I reached the edge and plummeted off the precipice.  Still falling head over feet, I dropped toward the floor with remarkable speed, seeming to fall hundreds of feet in a fraction of a second.  It was like rather than her being gigantic, I had somehow become tiny.  That was the only way to explain the unusually strong pull gravity had on me as I raced past her waist and fell beneath her knees.

 

I landed on my back, dazed.  Luckily, a floor mat cushioned my fall so my body was not splattered on the tile.  From my vantage point, I got a full look at the gigantic woman looming over me.  Her grey house shoes were enormous, with the gentle arc on the brown sole bringing her toes far above my head.  Black leggings clung tightly to her skin, making her thighs and calves look slender and toned, and a non-descript green hoodie was pulled to several inches below her waist.  If I had not in fact been shrunk, about a thousand feet seemed like a good estimate for her height.

 

To my dismay, her blue eyes were locked on me, as though they had followed me for my entire descent.  I tried to get up so I could plea for help, or at least give some sign I was a person, but my legs could do little more than twitch.  All I could do was beg.  “Please, help me!” I shouted up at her.  “Help!”  My life had never depended on begging someone to notice me before, so I was unsure what to say.

 

Either I was too small for her to hear, or she did not believe her ears, but either way she was unmoved.  Wrinkles appeared in her right shoe, then it lifted off the ground where she held it high in the air.  The brown sole moved over me, and I became even more desperate.  “No, don’t step on me!” I exclaimed.  “I’m a person, just very small!  Please –“

 

Her foot raced down, cutting my last pleas for life short.  The shoe quickly eclipsed everything else, and all I could see was the flat brown sole.  It landed with tremendous force, making a bang that blew out my eardrums and causing the floor to tremble with horrific tremors that made my very bones shake.  Unfortunately, the mat’s cushioning worked against me here by softening the stomp.  Instead of being immediately smashed, I was forced to linger under her foot while it crushed me.

 

The gargantuan foot made it impossible to move, even to breathe.  I could not even squirm, and struggling against it was pointless: her foot easily weighed thousands of pounds by itself.  Her heel lifted, and the already unbearable pressure atop me increased as she put even more weight on me.  She rotated her show on the ball of her foot, forcing my body to move with it, and that was the end for me.  My body gave out beneath the astounding pressure of her titanic shoe, reduced to a red smear that quickly got ground into the mat’s fibers.

 

She dragged her foot backwards, scraping the paltry, smashed remains off the sole of her house shoe.  That was the third bug in as many weeks she had discovered in her spice cabinet!  Oddly enough, just like the others, this one bore a remarkable resemblance to a man, even standing on two legs.  Maybe it even was a man.

 

With a shake of her head, she forced the thought from her mind.  She had seen many people much smaller than her, but it was simply not possible for a person to be the size of a particularly small insect.  At best, it was a new species, and some of its members had decided to take up residence in her apartment.  Making a mental note to call someone in the morning to check it out, she got on with making dinner.

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