Nov. 21, 2024: "Write about a moment of vulnerability—a time when the tiny man is physically or emotionally struggling, and the big woman steps in to help him in a way that only she can."
There was no knock on the door, no tone of the doorbell. Instead, Lara’s phone vibrated on the table, and she glanced up from her drawing to study it. It was a simple text of two words, but it prompted her to leap from her chair and rush toward the door. “Oh, honey, you’re all small again,” she cried.
At the door, unnoticeable unless one knew what to look for, was a tiny little man in miniature clothes. His outfit was soaked in rain water, his shoulders slumped, and his tiny head hung in defeat. Lara knelt quickly but slowly placed her hand, palm up, beside the little figure. He walked toward it, then dramatically hurled himself into the center of her hand, splayed and bedraggled. She cupped her other hand over him, slowly rose and turned, and brought him to the living room, where her ample hips sank slowly into the couch. She nestled into the pillows against the arm rest and dumped him carefully upon the sweater stretched over her bosom. “Please, sweetie, tell me what happened. You look miserable.”
The tiny man allowed himself to tumble from her hand, bouncing lightly upon the knit yarn stretched between her breasts. He lay there for a few moments, panting, perhaps muttering something, occasionally trembling. When he spoke, his voice sounded far away, a little high and thready. “This fucking day,” he started.
“Oh, Miles.” Lara brought her hand up and lightly stroked the tiny, cold, wet body.
“Work is just a shit-show,” he growled, as much as a throat of those dimensions can growl. “I won’t bore you with the details. It’s just that the other department has almost entirely new staff, and the one person who’s been there the longest is … I don’t know what’s going through his mind. He’s not teaching anyone anything, and hell if I can get him to respond to my emails or chats.” Miles balled the heels of his fists into his eye sockets. “I have a dozen unfinished projects, which makes me look bad to my rural, christofascist supervisor who doesn’t like me anyway, and it’s screwing up our delivery.”
He continued to explain the logistics, exactly as he said he wouldn’t. Lara nodded and made sympathetic noises, stroking his little body, subtly guiding the moisture out of his clothes and into her sweater. “You just don’t have any support there, Miles. It’s not fair. You’ve taken on so much—”
“I’ve taken on so much!” He flung his arms down in frustration, but they made no satisfying crash against the weave of her sweater. However, he did take the opportunity to spread himself out for the huge, warm, soft fingertips that sought his every line and curve. “And you know what I get for it, freakin’ bubkis. Not even a pizza party.”
“You’d think they could spare you a slice of pepperoni and a shave of cheese, if they don’t want to bump you up the minimum state-required rate for a raise.”
The illustration of this inequity caught him by surprise, true though it was, and he barked with laughter. “And then traffic. I was barely holding it together, staying full-sized, big enough to drive out of the ramp. It started to rain as soon as I hit the freeway, and then Maps said that a big orange bottleneck was forming, right after I missed the last exit for the back streets.”
Here was tricky territory for Lara. She was well aware of Miles’s pride over his driving prowess; she also knew how short-tempered he could get, and he had a low tolerance for criticism. “Those idiots,” she murmured, as she scraped the long fingernail on her pinky to flip the buttons out of their holes on his shirt. From there she could tug at his sleeves and remove his shirt and blazer. As for his belt and zipper, he had to do those himself. “And I bet there was no reason for the bottleneck, either, was there?”
He laughed again in place of swearing. “There’s something mystical about me, being able to attract the slowest, stupidest drivers in the state to line up in front of me. If only there was a way to monetize that.” He did not unbuckle his pants. His eyes flitted about, as though looking at invisible shapes darting around above him, not seeing his gigantic wife. “So we sat there in traffic, and people did what they do, you know, racing up and cutting me off because they don’t want to wait in line like decent, considerate drivers.”
She drew a long breath, avoiding their usual “zipper-merge” argument (he insisted this was only for construction), and the tiny man rose slowly, buoyed by the platform of her sweater, stretched taut around her large breasts, rising as though inflated by her breath. This had the intended effect on her little man: he paused mid-rant and extended his senses out of his body, feeling her ample chest lift him as though he weighed nothing. Lara smiled at this moment of peace, finishing it off with a gentle, warm gust of her own breath over his body. This, Miles loved, and his own tiny, bare chest rose as he sucked in her exhaust.
“There you go,” she whispered. She brought her index finger up to her mouth, gave the tip a wet kiss, then pressed the tip into his chest and abdomen. His tiny abs fluttered under her touch, because he was so ticklish, but he loved being tickled like this and she savored the subtle, barely perceptible twitch of his body. “There you go, baby, that’s right.” She whirled her finger very slightly, rubbing the tiny body with her fingertip, nudging him gently into the hammock of her knit sweater. “Anything else?”
“Just getting into my own neighborhood … so close, just wanted to get home …” His eyelids drooped and his head turned dreamily from side to side, as though he was searching for the angry, bitter thoughts that were now fleeing his head under Lara’s caress. “Slowest people in the world crossing the street against the light in front of me … legs moving, arms swinging, but they just weren’t going anywhere … one of them glared at me, and I nearly lost it.”
Miles had perhaps the world’s worst coping mechanism for stress. With other people, their veins bulged on the side of their head, or they lapsed into swearing and throwing things. For Miles, however, any intense confrontation immediately shrank him down to only a few inches tall. This was fine when watching a scary movie at home, but behind the wheel, in active traffic, it was disastrous. Their insurance company only begrudgingly accepted their implausible story the first time this happened, but they likely would lose their policy if he got into another indefensible accident.
Lara gasped, her mind flooding with images of their car rolling into an intersection with no one behind the wheel. “How close were you?”
“I saw my hands shrink on the wheel. I started trembling, and the wheel got thicker in my grip.” He turned away, fleeing the vision in his memory. “I did the four-by-four breathing and held it together just long enough to roll into our driveway. I’m parked badly, I’m sorry, you’ll have to take care of that.”
She sighed, giving him another ride on her bosom. “At least you got home safely, that’s all that matters. But you’re soaked …” The rest was apparent: he had just enough time to open the car door, and his shrinking body tumbled to the driveway. He was in poor condition to slog through the jungle of their front yard, in the rain, before squeezing under their front door and laboriously hauling himself up each carpeted step to their second-floor apartment. Their own door fit too closely for him to crawl beneath, and that’s when he texted to announce his presence. “Baby, you should’ve texted as soon as you pulled into the driveway, I would’ve gotten you.”
The tiny face screwed up. “I know, it’s just hard for me to constantly be asking for your help, for all these little things.” He drew a deep breath and cast it out fiercely. “I thought the walk through the grass or the labor of crawling up the steps would help me blow off some steam. Looks like it didn’t.”
Above him, framed by falling curtains of strawberry-blonde hair, his massive girlfriend’s thick tongue slid out and dragged across her puffy lips. “I think I know what might help,” she purred, and her fingernail flicked at his miniature belt buckle.