Al loved baseball. The local ballpark was close enough to his house that if he missed a Friday night game, he could still hear the booming of the after-game fireworks. The ruckus frightened his cat, but Al found it reassuring. He liked thinking about all the families having fun a couple of miles away. That's why he felt safe when he woke up in a strange, reverberating bedroom decorated with furniture that was too big for him.
That was the last time Al felt safe, and the feeling didn't last beyond the seconds it took him to realize he wasn't in his bed. Outside, the world rumbled rhythmically. Thooms fell in place, all in a row, and Al understood that those sounds—the sounds that woke him up—did not come from fireworks.
When Al looked around, he recognized nothing about the walls and ceiling that contained him. He sprang out of the oversized bed and rushed to the single source of light in the room, a window. Through the plastic pane, Al wanted to see a street, sidewalks, trees, parked cars, and people. Beyond a plain of wooden floor slats, he saw the empty geometry of enormous furniture instead.
A bed and other furniture stood like buildings before the distant horizon of walls and the only source of light in the bigger room, a window the size of a city block. For a moment, Al had the terrifying thought that if he made his way to that window, he would see an even larger bedroom, just one more in an infinite number of rooms like nesting dolls.
That irrational fear was replaced by true horror when the ground quaked with greater intensity, and a gigantic woman entered the bedroom. She walked toward the dollhouse, and Al recognized her right away. Suyana. She said nothing as she opened the dollhouse by its hinges, wrapped her hand around his shrieking form, and used him like a sex toy.
Days turned into weeks, but Al couldn't get used to the pounding on the floor caused by his captor's footsteps, and everything she did to him. The last thing he remembered as a normal man was Suyana showing up at his house, uninvited, unexpected, unwanted. Al didn't have to ask why she'd done this to him. He figured it was because he fucked her before he told her he had a girlfriend. Suyana refused to explain how she'd shrunk him so dramatically, so he stopped asking questions.
But he didn't stop begging Suyana to return him to his former life. Every day, he asked her to grow him back. She never gave him an answer that wasn't rooted in sex. If he moved, she was bound to find the activity of his limbs attractive, so she shoved him into her panties for hours. If he didn't move, she was just as inventive about where she put him. If he shouted, she lifted him to her ear, like he was a seashell whispering calming secrets. If he was quiet, she dropped him into her panties and made him scream anyway.
When Suyana wasn't using Al to satisfy her sexual needs, she put him back in the dollhouse, which she continued to furnish with items too large for him. When Al was alone, he marked the days of his captivity with whatever ink nature provided. Suyana supplied no information about life beyond her walls, including each day's date. Still, there were forty-seven blood, vomit, mostly shit marks on one bathroom wall in the dollhouse. Al adhered to his manmade calendar more faithfully than he did the large wristwatch in the otherwise vacant living room downstairs.
Al recognized his own wristwatch the first time he gathered enough courage to explore the dollhouse and spotted it downstairs, propped against a wall like a grandfather's clock. It broke his heart to look at it. Suyana wound it every morning so it wouldn't stop ticking, as though she wanted Al to know she owned every second of his life. But the human brain gets used to almost anything, and he was grateful for his tinnitus, because it dampened the clock's incessant clicking as effectively as constant exposure to it did.
One morning, Al woke up in the dollhouse, and he seized the opportunity to make a forty-eighth mark on the wall. Instead of the smell of breakfast that wafted his way most mornings, there was a new scent in the air, one he recognized. It was the deep, earthy tang of leather. Al jumped out of bed and rushed to the bathroom. He climbed the working toilet made for people twice as tall as him, and he sat on it like a toddler. He felt guilty using it when he should have been pissing and shitting on every corner of his toy prison, but when he tried doing that in the beginning, Suyana became angry, and she punished him terribly.
Al dipped the tip of his finger in the stream of warm piss that left his penis and drew a short line next to the previous forty-seven marks. It would turn a soft but discernible yellow before long. To wash his hands, he stepped on a Lego ladder Suyana had built in front of the sink, and he worked a diminutive hand pump until a few drops of water dripped from it. The water felt strange at Al's current height. He had to dig into it with his fingers to break the surface tension of every drop, but once he did, he could clean himself the same as any other human being did. It was a great feeling, one that reminded him of showers. He always felt a bit normal after he washed his hands.
Al wanted to keep feeling that way. Suyana would come for him soon. She would snatch him up, she would order him to eat, and then she would ravage his body for as long as it pleased her, without permission or consent. Maybe because Al wanted to keep feeling normal, he allowed himself to welcome that familiar scent of leather, before he reminded himself to enjoy nothing Suyana offered. Afraid of developing Stockholm syndrome, he didn't want to be comfortable. Anything she offered, Al refused on principle. Suyana didn't have to force-feed him anymore, but he struggled against her every advance. At every turn, he reminded her she had kidnapped him, shrunk him, and taken him from a perfect girlfriend, from a cat that needed him, from a paycheck every second Friday, from the ordinary life he chose.
Al was nonetheless curious, and he was surprised to find himself aroused. He didn't know what to make of it. He had not masturbated for at least forty-eight days. Forced to cum repeatedly in Suyana's panties, Al was a victim of the friction that existed between his body and her skin. The motion he endured every time she moved milked him dry every day; every unwilling orgasm compelled from him. Al wanted to stay hungry for freedom, but he didn't want to get hard every time he was reminded of his life's old pleasures. His leather shoes. His recliner. Home.
Home, he thought with a stab of longing so sharp he whimpered. A house he owned with his girlfriend, a problematic jumble of constant repairs that fell on him to execute because he was The Man of the House. Now he owned nothing. Al left the bathroom and labored down steps that measured a foot and a half to him until he reached the first floor. In the living room, a new fur rug decorated the floor, and a leather sofa, a loveseat and a recliner that took his breath away rested around its edges. Bookcases and tables filled the space smartly.
The ground pulsed as Suyana walked into the bedroom. The dollhouse shook in place until she stopped in front of it and submerged it in her shadow. The gloom shifted as Suyana dropped to her knees and elbows, and peered into the tiny living room she had built for him.
"Do you like it?" she asked. The wind of her question battered the living room windows as though invisible hands slammed them against their frames. Al looked at the single eye staring at him, but instead of making the usual obscene gesture with his hand, he sighed.
"It doesn't matter. None of this matters. You can fill this place with the most beautiful miniatures in the world, but that won't make it my home. My home is with my girlfriend, my cat, and my things."
"Yes, your things. That's what I got."
"What do you mean?"
"Look around you, silly! The end table, the bookcases, the dining set in the next room... I built them for you with papier mache I made using your books."
His heart started racing painfully. Fear punctured every part of him.
"My books? You told me you only had time to grab me. What did you do?"
Her eye crinkled at the corner, the way it always did when she smiled. There was love in that eye, but it was dissonant, her mind like an instrument that played a beautiful song out of tune.
"I brought you the things you love! Aren't you happy? I want to fulfill your wishes because I love you."
"I liked reading my books. I can't read them now. Look, I don't care about material things. I care about my cat and my girlfriend. Please, I just want to be with them."
"You are with them."
The idea of Suyana taking his books was alarming, but thinking she had shrunk his girlfriend and cat overwhelmed him with terror. He looked around for them.
"What did you do? Where are they? Please, I'll be good. I won't ask for anything anymore. I'll do everything you say."
"You are good! You are perfect. That's why I'm giving you what you want. I want you to be near those you love."
"Where are they!" he screamed at the top of his lungs. Suyana blinked once, and her eyebrow arched just the slightest fraction. Her gaze moved away from him and settled on the rug on the floor. Outside she nodded, encouragingly. Inside, he stared at the rug in confusion, until he recognized the fur markings on it.
Marilyn. His cat. Something cracked inside him, and he dropped to his knees. Within him, a wail grew until it escaped his lips a fully formed scream.
"Your cat's fur was tricky to cure," she said proudly. "I'm sure you can tell I didn't shrink her."
Al stopped screaming and looked at the giant eye, blurry through his tears. His thoughts focused on one word. Toughest.
"You didn't see the scratches on my hand after I brought you—"
Al doubled over and vomited bile on the floor.
"My poor little man is sick. No worries! Nothing a bit of broth won't cure. But let me finish telling you! I shrank your girlfriend, but not all the way. I wanted to have enough of her skin. Tanning your girlfriend's skin was just as lengthy a process as it was to treat your cat's fur, but I really wanted to make you a living room set. The couch, the loveseat, and your new recliner are all made with your girlfriend's leather."
There was a flourish at the end of her words, a way she said leather that drove him mad with grief. Through tears, he looked at the furniture that had once been part of his girlfriend's body.
"Poor little guy, I'm sure you're coming down with something. You'll be happy once you recover your health. You're with those you love now, and nothing will tear you apart. Your girlfriend will always be a part of you now that you've eaten part of her."
Al lost his mind then. Later, he didn't know he swallowed the warm broth Suyana fed him from the tip of her finger. He didn't know it tasted like pork.