“Oh. Hm. It wasn’t supposed to make you that small…”
The scientist scans her workplace, intent on locating any trace of you.
“You uh, are still here, right? I didn’t just poof you out of existence, did I?”
Was that a possibility? Is this woman even a real scientist? You guess this is just what happens when you call sketchy numbers on sketchier personal ads. Luckily, you aren’t quite gone from reality—just a tad too close to it for comfort. The shrinking should be reversable, and you wouldn’t have had any problems, if you stayed a manageable six inches tall. At your current stature, though, you’re easily dwarfed by the ridges on the massage table that passes for the scientist’s clinical bed. No bigger than a tuft of lint.
This absolutely isn’t the person you should be entrusting your life to, but what other choice do you have? You call, you wave, you scramble for dear life up the side of the textured plastic trench. But you’re too late. She’s already turning away, after only the most cursory scan. She seems entirely too comfortable with this little mishap, leisurely pacing off in the blurred distance as she brainstorms some lateral solution to finding you. Has this happened before? Surely no one else would have accepted the same ad you did. Surely, they wouldn’t have faced the same miscalculation. This… has to be her first time trying this, right?
A shadow falls over you.
“I don’t know if you can hear me, but… if you can, get out of the way, okay?”
She’s turned away from the table, but no, she’s closer than before. Lowering herself. She’s going to sit down! You can practically feel the atmosphere compressing under her, a khaki-clad moon slowly descending from orbit. With a final, desperate dive, you throw yourself out of her path, just in time for the displaced air to catch under you, lifting you into the air and tossing you a few vast inches further than intended.
“If you’re still down there, I’m going to give you to the count of ten to climb up onto my hand. Easier for you to come to me.”
Her hand thumps onto the table beside her, wobbling the ground so heavily that you fall to your knees. No time to stay there though. She’s already started.
“Ten… Nine… Eight…”
You stumble into a run, finding your balance over the course of your first few steps. Her words rumble in your head, counting down the stretch between hope, and a new life scrounged from the crumbs inside of a stranger’s home.
“Seven… Six…”
There’s another trench separating you from her. No way you’ll have time to climb through it. You’re going to have to jump.
“Five… Four…. Three…”
You grit your teeth, using the top of the slope to plant your foot at an angle, launching up and forward with all the force your miniscule muscles can muster.
“Two…”
You misjudge your weight, but thankfully, that works in your favor. You bound, flea-like, soaring through the open air. Her upturned palm lies before you like a crash mat, you just have to stick the landing.
“One.”
You crumple onto her palm, the uneven skin isn’t firm enough for you to land more gracefully. As you tumble, her hand starts to lift, palm tilting more than she probably realizes. Her face comes closer, glasses shining from the light above, but you’re already slipping. The muscles at the base of her palm funnel you towards her wrist. Behind you, the scientist makes her last attempt to free you from this fate. You slide into the dark of her sleeve, vanishing from her world as she becomes yours.
You settle at the inside of her elbow, which closes unknowingly around you. Her skin folds around you, pressed between her forearm and bicep, soft and smooth on every side. You can no longer hear her voice clearly enough to make out her intentions, but at least she isn’t squeezing you too hard.
With effort, you’re able to shimmy your way out through the narrow opening of flesh, and into the surrounding fabric. Maybe you can still get her attention if you can work your way back towards her hand. It can’t be too late to grow back, you have to try for as long as you have a chance. You start to climb towards the distant light poking through the top of the tower, clinging to the threads of her shirt.
Something shifts. Her arm knocks into your back unexpectedly. Its surface trembles and goes taut. You lose your grip, falling again. There’s a massive, strained vocalization somewhere beyond the walls of her shirt: she’s stretching, arms over her head, probably. Which means there’s no floor to fall back on. You plummet deeper, arms flailing in the dark for purchase. The further you fall, the slimmer your chances become. You’re desperately in need of a lifeline, Something, anything to hold on to—
You land in something unexpectedly fluffy, almost like the damp, humid underbrush of a rainforest. You’re lucky she doesn’t shave, and even luckier that she washes regularly. The smell of her sweat is heavy, but not acrid—it’s fresh, possibly a direct result of her nerves at having botched this experiment. Her arm comes down again, clamping you into a crevice once more. The walls are hotter, softer beneath the hair. The scent is intense, so thick it makes you dizzy. Trying to climb out will lead to certain doom, tumbling into the abyss, but you also can’t find any feasible way to higher ground. Until her body shifts again, you’re stuck here. Breathing her in.
You have no way to know how long it’s been. You haven’t needed much strength to hold on: the curl of the hair and pressure of her arm around you are holding you as easily as any other speck of dust. By swallowing your pride and nuzzling closer into to the damper skin of her underarm, you’ve actually managed to rest a little bit. The more you adjust to her atmosphere, to the swaying of her arms brushing metronomically around you, the more you start to entertain the idea of taking just a short nap…
Gravity starts to shift, and for once the chaos is welcome. Who knows where you might have ended up if you let sleep take you then? “Up” is now towards her front—she’s laying down! You aren’t sure you can trust the climb up her arm again, but her face is closer now, and potentially your ticket to freedom.
You climb out onto her chest, vaulting over the strap of her bra. Her lungs fill, in a sound you can now recognize as a yawn, the ground below you lifting, lowering. The steady thumping of her heart courses below with every step. Light filters in from the neckline of her shirt; a break in the clouds, the mouth of a cave. You climb towards open air.
As you emerge, you make out her chin like the summit of a mountain. Tilted down, its softer skin creases with that of her neck. Only now do you consider how difficult it will be to make it to a point where she can see you. You couldn’t make it around the smooth overhang of her jaw, and her hair is tied up too far to use as a rope. You glance around, seeking other options. Her phone towers like a monolith further down towards her belly. She’s sliding her thumb slowly against its glass face, skimming a document. As you watch, her other hand migrates down towards her waist…
The ground tilts sideways as she moves to unhook her belt and unbutton her pants. She clicks back to the home screen, navigating to a browser. This moment is getting too intimate, you have to get her attention soon, while it’s still locked in one place. You make your way down again, over the shirt this time, as she pulls up a porn page. The bodies on the screen are still gigantic to you, who would only make up a few pixels in their image. Two women on the display look towards you. No, past you. At her, the woman who shrank you. The real audience. They’re gleefully gloating about how small she is with over-acted surprise and irresistible enthusiasm.
“What are you doing down there?” one of the women asks, aghast. “Were you spying on us?”
The other one gasps. “That’s so gross! I think we might have to punish it!”
The scientist huffs sharply, sending you sprawling, tumbling down her belly. As you pull your face away from the threads, one of the porn stars reaches towards you—no, the scientist. But it feels real. It’s hard not to flinch. For a moment, you feel like a part of the video, the pumping of the scientist’s arm further adding to the illusion of being bigger than you are, as if the pulsing landscape beneath you really is just a hand, rather than an entire torso.
You glance back at the scientist. She still hasn’t taken notice of you, and closes her eyes tight as she thrusts into the verbal degradation.
“How small are you, even? You’re like, the size of a doll!” Says the first woman.
“Or a dildo!” the other chimes in, deviously. They share conspiratorial glances. If only you were big enough to be used that way, you might not be in this predicament at all.
You’re close enough to the screen that you can barely make out the visuals anymore, like standing at the very front of a theater. Will the scientist even be able to recognize you this far away from her? You tap at the screen, too small for it to recognize your touch, no hope of stopping her video. She’s still taking it slow, intent on watching the video all the way through. You hear a hazy whine somewhere far behind you. She’s listening more than watching at this point.
Your best hope might just be to climb back onto her hand and wait it out. At least this time you have more than ten seconds to stabilize yourself between the bases of two of her fingers.
“Hey, I want a turn! Give it to me!” the second girl in the video says impatiently. The scientist gasps, letting herself flow into the action, swept up in all that attention. Would she treat you the same way, if the experiment worked as intended? Or were you just a test subject to keep her from messing up on herself? You don’t have much time to ponder this, as she props the phone up against her leg, and starts to bring her second hand down…
This could be a point of no return. Getting lost on her floor was one thing, but getting mixed up in her ambidextrous technique risks getting lost somewhere much more inescapable. But her fingers have closed, trapping you at the waist. Her hand descends, voices from her video fading into the distance.
Heat, darkness, atmosphere. It’s becoming unbearably familiar now. Each time though, there’s new layers to her. The vaguely floral tones of her skin, the deeper aroma of her sweat, and now brine, the slight tang of precum. You’re at the heart of her arousal, and her pace is quickening. You can make out fragments of moaning, muffled, higher voices from her video, but mostly you hear the friction of skin on cotton, the springs of her bed creaking, a soft, but unrelenting plap, plap, plap. Every thrust against her palm brushes something sticky against your back. All you can do is hold on tight. Don’t let go. Don’t. Let. Go.
Pushing.
Pulsing.
Grinding.
Trembling.
Spasming.
The scientist’s hands shake, as do you. You’re completely drenched, unable to tell how much is your own sweat and how much is her juices. Every muscle aches, you’re fighting at an aura at the edges of your vision, the need to give in, to rest, to surrender.
She withdraws her hand clumsily, shaking your arms loose. You lose your grip, too spent to fear the outcome. But you stay in place, so completely saturated that you stick to her easily, nestled into the base of her pointer finger like a persistent speck of glitter. You rise, in a slow, delicate arc, directly towards her face…
She stares at you with a deep glowing serenity, utterly unsurprised to see you clinging to her for dear life.
Because she doesn’t see you.
She doesn’t see you at all.
A heavy blast of breath. She sighs, sticking her middle finger deep against her tongue, dangerously, dangerously close to the crease that holds you. She relishes her own taste, head rolling to the side, and hums with satisfaction. The resonant blast rattles you, in your insignificance. Saliva clicks, the air past her lips swirls and amplifies.
She nibbles a little higher.
Her lip presses against you.
You stick to it.
The scientist throws her head back on her pillow, hot air rushing from deep within her, across your back.
In one swipe across her lip, she catches you on her tongue.
Atmosphere. Wetness. Every murmur of pleasure all-encompassing, you’re brushed across her taste buds, sinking in her spit. There are bubbles bigger than you are. You may as well just be another tastebud.
But you aren’t a part of her, truly. Not yet.
There’s an odd feeling of rightness as she swishes you idly back and forth, as you finally allow yourself to give in to the currents, to her pulse, her warmth. As her tongue pulls up, presses to the roof of her mouth, draining all of it, you included, down her throat, and into her depths.
The scientist revels in her afterglow, blissfully unaware of her test subject’s fate (though she’s certainly allowed her mind to wander about what could have happened, had it been her.) With her head now clear enough for logistics, she returns to her machine, and quietly adjusts her parameters for further testing.