The hurt inside is fading
This shit's gone way too far
All this time I've been waiting
No, I cannot grieve anymore
—Korn
The woman sat on her couch. A few feet away from her, the TV screen flickered, and light and shadow played in the living room. The only other light source in the room was a lamp over which she had draped a scarf. Outside of her home, the world raged with war, hatred, and sickness. Indoors, it could be easily said that a third source of light in the room was the radiance that joy painted on her face.
"My name is Ivy, but you will always call me Owner," she said to the man she held between her breasts. She pinned him in place with the weight of her left forefinger's pad, which she moved to pet him in the slightest of fashions. The man, whose name would forevermore be Toy, was too tired to struggle. Barely audible over the voices streaming from the TV, he made himself heard.
"That is the ugliest name in the world. Your parents must have—"
"Hush," said Ivy. Her tone was invariably sweet, but her digit dropped on him with increasing pressure, emptying his lungs with that simple punctuation. "Don't speak about my parents unless you have something nice to say."
"I'm never going to call you Owner," he added with a couple of strained gasps as he burrowed his face into her skin. At that moment, that was the only way he could look away in annoyance. Ivy felt a cacophony of emotions stir in her chest and other places in her body. She let go of the remote she'd been holding for no reason at all, and she moved her hand over the curve of her thigh.
"Your heart is so loud. It makes your skin move so much. Can't you put me somewhere else?" said Toy.
"Are you sure you want me to put you somewhere else?" Ivy lifted her fingertip just a fraction away from him.
"Oh. No. No, no! Your chest is fine. I can barely hear your heart. I'm fine, just fine right here."
Did he just crack a joke? Nah. Just an hour ago, he was still begging for mercy, for me to stop-oh-my-god-stop what I was doing, thought Ivy. This is hopeful. Her free hand stopped short of reaching her crotch, and she made herself wait. There was something in the air, something different between them. As she felt it, she wondered if he did too. I doubt it. I know this little bit of flesh better than it knows itself. Still, she made a choice to use her words and not his body.
"You are going to call me Owner," she added and focused some of her attention back on the police drama she'd binge-watched the last few days. The rest of it was on the man she had shrunk so many months ago. The man she called Toy, after discarding his old name like garbage. "You will call me Owner, and it will feel right to you."
Toy stirred beneath the swirling marks of her fingerprint and aimed his burning gaze at Ivy. She returned it and felt her eyes cross as she made an effort to look into his eyes. She blinked and resisted the urge to laugh. She was sure she looked silly to him. She had no way of ascertaining the speed of his heartbeat. No way to detect how adrenaline shot into his bloodstream every time he looked at her face and found it competing winningly against the size of mountains. Toy was afraid. He'd been frightened from the moment she surprised him in a parking lot and distracted him long and effectively enough to inject something into his bloodstream.
The moment Ivy did that, he disappeared into his clothes, shrunk down so small he stood slightly taller than a Lego piece, not that she allowed him to stand for long periods. Most of his days were spent in the ever-changing vault of her panties or the grip of her hand as she held him up to her face and talked to him the same way young people address their teddy bears. Ivy was just as likely to pinch his body as she employed it as a vibrator, every move he made of use to her for the whole of three to eight minutes.
Even when Toy claimed to be too sick to move, she held him close and force-fed him broth and minute amounts of medicine. At the same time, one of her fingers massaged his groin and made blood splint what he had between his legs. She always kept going until he moaned his involuntary release. And another. And again, until she had enough. That number was still too many times. But now she looked at him, and in the canvas of her eyes, he watched the TV screen reflection play a double feature. He felt his head swivel in place so that he could look into both her eyes, and the knowledge that two much smaller versions of him existed in each plane did nothing to bring calm to his mind.
"I'm going to call you Ivy," said Toy, with an inflection that led her to believe he was trying to feel brave. She was going to have to nip that in the bud. At the moment, she was having too much fun listening to his words instead of his insults and threats. All the sounds he made, she muffled with her sexual advances like tides molding warm sand night after night, and like the tides, he felt her chest move as she inhaled and exhaled and waited for more words. Through that odd connection that had formed between them, Toy felt her expectation. He rose and dipped with the rhythm of her breathing, and he knew that the longer he spoke, the more time he'd spend not being used as a sex toy—the reason for his name.
Not my name, he growled to himself.
"How come you told me your real name? I've demanded to know it for months, and you just kept telling me to call you ‘owner'." Toy's neck twinged with pain, having craned for too long in one of her many directions. He looked down and began to roll his head and shoulders to work off the muscle stiffness.
"I told you my legal name, but who I am is Owner."
"No one is called 'Owner.' That's just some S&M shit you want to impose upon me, and I won't have it," Toy said. He almost added, my name is Zachery. I'm a man, and you shrank me against my will, but every time he breached that subject, Ivy lifted him to her ear so she could listen to his pleas and protests while she masturbated. When she came, her laughter always made his ears ring harder than any punk-music concert he had gone to when he was her size and taller. So, no, he didn't say any of that. He didn't call her terrible names, and he didn't demand to be regrown and returned to the parking lot where he was sure his car was no longer waiting for him.
"I'm not ‘called Owner.' I am your owner. You are my toy."
"No, I am not! Why do you imagine anyone would want this life?" Shut up, shut up, control yourself. Calm down and make her see reason.
Ivy reached for the remote and muted the TV, and all her attention was on Toy. "This life? You mean a life of freedom from responsibilities. You don't have to work, or do yard work, or clean after yourself. I play the bills, feed you, and—"
"Clothe me?"
"Sex toys don't need clothes."
"I'm a… I'm not… I don't see why I can’t take my showers alone. And you treat me more like a washcloth than someone that needs cleaning, by the way."
"It's more fun that way!"
"For you, maybe! I love to take showers, but you have taught me to fear them, the way you soap me up and make me glide all over you."
Ivy didn't tell him that the tiny shower in the dollhouse she had built for him worked perfectly. That information was a privilege he had to earn. He wasn't there yet. Not yet.
"Do you have any complaints about the food I give you?"
Everything Ivy fed him was made fresh, from scratch. She grew her own vegetables and visited a farmer's market every weekend. Sometimes he caught the whiff of ripe peaches and just-picked corn ears as he rode the dampening gusset of her panties, surrounded by dozens of people that never heard him scream for help.
"I'm not talking about that. I want the freedom to eat frozen pizza if I want to... or a fast-food burger. That freedom is precious. People kill for it. They die for it, and for a good reason. I want to make my own choices—"
"What a pile of shit," she said, in that tone of voice that always sounded like she was telling him she loved him. "I don't deny there is a biological imperative to making your own choices, but to what end? How does the human experience benefit from your holding an extremely stressful job that brought you more daily misery than most occupations?"
"I don't care about the human experience. I just want to sleep, eat, and fuck when and if I want to. What you did wasn't right. You committed a crime, and you know it. You want to talk about the human experience?" Toy's composure shattered. He couldn't help it. There was too much emotion, too much loss. "You broke the most basic human laws when you poisoned me with whatever was in that syringe. How did you get it? Who are you, really? You must work for the government if you have access to chemical weapons like that."
Ivy stared at him and smiled. She moved her forefinger over Toy and caressed his back from head to heels. He tried to turn over, and when she pinned him in place, he tried to slap away the girth of her flesh, wider than his shoulders, and far longer. He accomplished nothing, and she kept caressing him as though he was a purring cat.
"I'm an architect, Toy. You ride my panties to work every day. I don't know how much you can hear through the walls of my labia, but you must know my job is just a job." Exhausted, Toy panted and felt pressed flat on her soft skin wherever her finger happened to be. The effect was magnified by the way that smooth skin thumped beneath him and the way it telegraphed her words like a talking earthquake. It didn't shock him as much as what Ivy said next.
"And there was nothing in that syringe but water." Even though Toy was quite small, she thought she felt his body tremble. Is my little toy afraid? No, this is probably disbelief.
"That's impossible. People don’t simply shrink. You must have done something to me!”
"Yes, I did. I shrank you, but only because you are meant to be small. I don't have any special powers. I've never done this before, and I never will again. It only worked with you because this is the life you need to live. Your purpose is to be small and to make me happy. And I am. I'm immensely happy because of you. And you… you haven’t been sick once in all these months."
Toy would not believe her words for a while, but as they replayed in his mind, he realized he was enjoying the perfect health Ivy described. A sort of calm washed over him, and he yawned. Ivy’s face stretched with her own yawn, and she let him sleep.
For a while.