Day One
Maybe we shouldn’t have been surprised that viral shrinking syndrome turned out to be an STD, but… hindsight is twenty/twenty.
Of course, at first nobody knew that some people could be carriers without actually shrinking. I’d had no way of knowing that Violet had been infected. For that matter, I hadn’t known that she’d been cheating on me, either.
It had taken only a few minutes of searching on medical sites and news stories on the internet to understand what had happened. And to be fair, she was distressed to the point of hyperventilation when she woke up to find me naked on her second pillow. I was barely an inch tall.
“I swear, I had no idea, but this is still my fault. I’m so… I’m so sorry. I’ll make sure you’re taken care of. I… I promise.”
The red, splotchy cheeks on her gigantic face were real. The beach ball-sized tears that drenched me were real. The warm, soft caress of her Olympian fingers when she lifted me up look me in the eyes was all too real. The chestnut rays of her iris shone out from the center of her eye, and it was beautiful. Her pupil was a deep, obsidian window into my girlfriend’s soul. It tightened in ever-deepening focus on me, and somehow, that – not the shrinking, not the colossus holding me – was the most surreal part of my experience so far.
“I’m going to keep you safe.” Her eye lost focus on me for a second, releasing me from its event horizon.
“I’m going to put you on the dresser and I need you to stay there, okay? I’m going to go out for a bit,” she said, her pupil contracting into a terrifying bead of concentration. “But after I come back, I’m not letting you out of my sight.”
Violet did exactly as she said she would. Two hours after she’d left me alone to sit and wait in her silent room, she entered through the door carrying a bag loaded with crafting supplies and a look of exhausted, steely determination. When she picked me up, I couldn’t help but notice that her hands had been rubbed raw and smelled strongly of soap. A little bit of dried, red crustiness stained a minuscule area beneath her thumbnail, apparently missed in whatever scouring she’d subjected herself too. I knew that the art supplies store whose logo was emblazoned on the bag was just a block away from Justin’s apartment. Justin, Violet had confessed, had been the other man. Justin, Violet had explained, must have had the virus and spread it to her. Justin must have also shrunk recently, but Violet hadn’t said so and I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to know where the crimson flecks falling from her nail had come from.
By the end of the day, she had rigged up a functional attachment for her earrings so that I could safely tether myself in her ear. She would be able to hear me, and I – microscopic and otherwise useless – could keep her company while she went about her everyday life. Until there was a way to reverse my condition, I thought it was a good enough solution.
Day 17
We went out to run errands for the day, and by the end of it she was tired. She asked me if I’d like to stop by the café next to our building for a hit of hot, black caffeine before we went home. The fact that I was small enough to swim in a shot glass – much less a venti-sized coffee cup – notwithstanding, I didn’t have a problem with it.
Violet sat at a counter, waiting for her coffee to cool and giving her feet a rest from the last few hours. I guess, with me in her ear, she wasn’t wearing headphones to ward off would-be conversationalists among the café’s clientele. If I hadn’t been secured to her earring, the next sound I heard would’ve made me fall out in shock.
“Hey, um… Violet, right?”
I couldn’t see well through a curtain of chestnut hair, but that was Camille.
My ex.
This couldn’t be happening. “Please don’t tell her about me,” I begged. She gave an almost imperceptible nod before turning to Camille, to whom she gave a much showier one (which, incidentally threw me to my feet).
“Mhm. Camille, right?”
“Yeah. Um… I don’t know how to say this, so I’m gonna do it quickly then go away forever.” She took a deep breath before launching into her anxious spiel. “I heard that Ivan left you and I’m so sorry and if I’d known that he was such a dick I definitely would’ve warned you and I’m so sorry and —”
Violet cut her off. I don’t know what it was – her tone, or maybe it was the rising flush of her ear that surrounded me – but she was definitely getting off on this situation. “It’s totally okay. It… was sudden, but it wasn’t totally his fault.”
Camille, her tumbling speech having been abruptly stopped before reaching the bottom, sounded confused. “It… wasn’t?”
“It wasn’t. It wasn’t even mostly his fault. It took some thinking, but I decided… I need to be the bigger person. I did what I did, and I need to own it.” Violet’s ear was definitely warming up.
Camille sounded uncertain, but apparently she was willing to let it go. “Are you sure? If you need someone to talk things through, just let me know.”
“Thanks, Camille. I will.”
When we got home, Violet said she needed to relax. She pulled out a skyscraper of a vibrator from one of her drawers after placing me on our bedside table. “Do you want to watch?” I said that of course I did. She had already accepted that I couldn’t really participate, so these mini-voyeur sessions were the closest thing to sex that we’d had since that day.
Because everything always seemed so much bigger it was hard to say for sure, but Violet sounded louder than usual this time.
Day 69
When she went out today, Violet kept me in her purse. It was dark, and noises were loud and indistinct.
She had, at least, placed me in a small inner pocket so that I wouldn’t have to jostle with the bag’s other contents. Sometimes she would drop me in without paying any attention to where I’d land. Those days could be stressful.
But today was going well so far. It wasn’t even two hours before the sky opened up and light poured into the purse, although it was promptly eclipsed by a gargantuan, heavily made-up face. Violet was grinning like she did whenever she’d had more than a little alcohol. She was a bit of a lightweight in that regard, although at this point I wasn’t able to judge. Even ignoring the obvious, I’d lost a decent amount of weight since I’d shrunk. Not only was my life more athletically strenuous at an inch tall, but I didn’t control my diet anymore and, proportionately speaking, I had lost some weight. As a result, on the several occasions where Violet had decided it would be fun for me to go swimming in a glass of Riesling, I would get tipsy just from inhaling the fumes alone.
As she loomed over me, her breathy giggles forcibly reminded me of the last time I’d swam laps.
“Hey, me and Camille are at the club. Want to come dancing?”
Before I could respond, she’d plucked me from the purse and into the open. My sudden exposure to the fluorescent glare of the club’s bathroom blinded and stunned me. I felt her fingers force me between cold metal bars, which was when I realized what was going on. She’d put me in a miniature birdcage she’d built, dangling from the end of a fine silver chain around her neck. By the time I’d regained any sort of composure, though, enormous, ebony-painted fingernails were manipulating, with surprising delicacy, the cage door in order to lock me in.
“You can dance with us now, Ivan!” she tittered. No doubt to transfer her enthusiasm to me, she pressed her breasts together, squeezing me between hot, soft, and terrifying walls of flesh. The birdcage, which was protecting me from her worst, was quickly rising in my esteem. “It’s like a little go−go cage!”
There went my esteem.
The dance floor was a nightmare of sound, strobing, and seismic stomping. It was a miracle I could spot Violet from the distant reaches of her chest, much less anyone else, but at the very least it meant that Camille couldn’t actually see me.
“Hey Violet!” Camille shouted over the godawful din of decade-old party music. When she failed to overcome LMFAO’s magnum opus playing only at only slightly higher volume than a rocket launch, Camille moved in closer to Violet. Strands of honey-blonde hair fell into Violet’s cleavage, idly violating the safety of my cage. “Violet! I love your necklace!”
Even here, even now, I could feel Violet’s heart quicken beneath me, the rising heat impossible to ignore.
“Oh my god! Thank you! I’ll let you borrow it sometime!”
Day 204
It had been a while since Violet had let me watch. She said that she had more fun when all three of us could participate at once. Of course, it was harder for her to keep me a secret when I was intimately involved. I’d been inserted inside vaginas, assholes, and mouths; I’d been kneaded against ears, clits, and nipples; and, almost mystically, Violet had managed to do all of that without letting Camille know I existed. Violet had insisted that she wouldn’t give up my privacy to Camille. I’d long since given up trying to make sense of it.
She had said I could sit this one out. Last night had included vigorous, gymnastic sex between my two most recent partners. Both Violet and Camille were divinely beautiful, devilishly creative, and – to me –almost literally goddesses. Last night had also included, for my part, especially vigorous… watching.
We woke up the next morning to discover that Camille had shrunk to a statuesque two inches.
Violet looked distraught. “I swear, I had no idea you weren’t immune. It’s been so long that I just assumed…. But I’m… I’m so sorry. I’ll take care of you. I promise.”
From my vantage point of the bedside table, the tears that fell down Violet’s enormous splotchy cheeks looked real. The gentleness with which she picked the tiny woman up couldn’t have been faked – I’d had too many unfortunate handling experiences to be unable to tell.
But even from here, I could see Violet’s eyes. Her gaze was focused and steady on Camille, who was standing in the middle of a giant palm and rotating slowly in a daze. Violet’s pupils were tight, enraptured pinpricks. With an overwhelming sense of déjà vu, I felt like I was looking into the windows of her soul. Then Violet raised her hand to her face, forcing Camille to pay attention to her. “I do have some good news, though.”
I was too far away to hear Camille, but she looked like she’d perked up at that.
“I’ll show you.”
Before I could react, Violet had swung herself around to face the bedside table and lowered her passenger to a spot just inches from where I was.
My ex-girlfriend stared, dumbfounded, down at me. She was naked and twice my height. I was, uncomfortably, face-to-face with her vulva. For some reason, I thought it would make me feel better to move my line of sight to Violet. It was a mistake.
She was staring intensely and silently down at the two of us. I tried to meet her eyes, but after half a second it became too much and I had to turn away. I had looked into a black hole: it was dark, and infinitely deep, and, somehow, even more hungry.