I was hunched over my desk, poring through the medical article in layout, one hand on my keyboard. The professor who authored this piece was particularly precious about his work, historically unwilling to have any part of it modified as he was convinced of his own brilliance. However, I found a close read of his submissions turned up a few factual errors, ranging from switched-around medical citation to almost willfully misleading or outdated information. I could make changes as long as I substantiated them to everyone’s satisfaction, and so I scrutinized every implication, every insinuation, looking them up online, until…

“Got a minute?” My supervisor, Rosalee, rounded the corner. She had a tight-lipped expression and was looking down, not meeting my gaze. She held a job jacket before her, sloping down to show it off rather than read it herself. I told her to come on in, and she entered my office and closed the door behind her.

“I’m glad to see you before you took off,” I said brightly, trying to steer the conversation. “Congratulations on the new position! Where are you heading?”

She shuddered slightly. Her drive to come storming into my room was thrown off by my social cue for her to lapse into a short, rehearsed speech. Goddess bless the Cooperative Principle. Her thin lips almost pulled back into a polite smile as she went through the entire saga, without confessing to have been doing job searches for the past year, emphasizing this opportunity that just arose and nothing was sure until she was surprised by a phone call one night, right before bed. But the position sounded more in line with her skills, and good for her for finding a lucrative position at her stage in life. Switching careers is extremely risky as one gets closer to retirement.

“That sounds fantastic, Rosalee! I’m really happy for you.” And I was sincere. She was miserable here, had been for long time. “Please stay in touch and let me know how it works out.”

She swayed slightly, her urge to anger wrestling with her trained condition to please. “Sure, sure, I won’t be a stranger,” she said, laughing weakly. “But look, I’m just going through my office right now−”

“Oh, no! I bet you’re digging up all sorts of stuff in there, aren’t you?” I laughed, leaning forward and opening my arms on the desk, removing any obstacles between us. I’d glimpsed at the job she was holding and I really didn’t want to talk about it: it was a rush job from a demanding client who hadn’t given us enough time or materials to build it sufficiently, yet the hammer was coming down on my department. “You were nested pretty good in there, weren’t you? All those lights and portraits. And why shouldn’t you? We spend a third of our lives here in the office! We’ve got to be comfortable here. Please let me know if you need any help bundling it up or hauling it out to your car, okay?”

She nodded, her shaggy mane of ash-blonde hair shimmying around lightly tanned cheeks and a lightly wrinkled forehead, still smiling out of confusion. “Oh, no, no, that won’t be necessary. I’ve been packing it all up for a week, slowly moving it all out. Don’t know where we’re going to put it all. But listen, what I wanted to talk to you about−”

I laughed gently. “Working right up until the last minute! That’s very responsible of you. Anyone else would be one foot out the door, but not you. I hope the admin appreciate that.”

“Shut up! Shut up, shut up!” Rosalee’s voice was ragged, roaring at me. “You fucking listen to me, now!” Up went the job jacket, sending weeks of revisions and client feedback snowing around us. In the flurry of printouts I glimpsed the business end of a chrome, rippled chamber pointing dead at the center of my chest. Along its length, charge indicators streamed from bright green, bright yellow, to a flickering red.

Slowly I leaned back in my ergonomic computer chair. I controlled my voice to the low, even, pleasant tone I used on the phone with clients. “I didn’t know we’d attained a Quadrimetric Variance Gun, Rosalee. Or are you borrowing that from Shipping?”

The QV Gun trembled in her white-knuckled grasp, until she groaned in frustration and pulled the trigger. My vision whited-out, fringed in sparky, stabby purple aura. My hearing filled with a high-pitched whine that bled from my ears into my entire skull and upper spine. I cried out, clamping my palms on my ears and forcing my spasming chest to breathe.

It passed, the pain passed. Cool blood flowed into my muscles as the tension released, and I lay gasping upon my puffy red IKEA seat cushion. That is, the whole of me lay upon one stuffed lump in a small landscape of lumps, my arms and legs hanging limply into the buttoned depressions in the fabric. My vision returned to see Rosalee slowly stalking around my desk to loom over me.

“So many years, picking up your slack,” she growled. The menace in her voice was heightened by the long shadows down the front of her body, cast by the overhead lighting. “Cleaning up your messes. Watching out for you to fuck up, as you always did, again and again.” She booted some sheets of paper around on the floor and rested the QV Gun on my desk with a heavy cla-clunk. Now her thighs pressed against the end of my seat. She was massive and powerful, huge legs like pillars supporting the temple of woe that was her upper body. The middle-aged belly poking against her floral-print blouse, her heavy, round breasts causing three or four buttons to strain: attractive on any other day, a pleasant distraction in meetings, but now Rosalee was all threat, all peril.

I struggled to sit up, my tiny-fied body just a speck in her shadow, almost crab-walking to the back of my computer chair. But the gigantic woman was too quick. Snarling, she spun around, long and sinewy fingers seizing my arm rests as her big, round butt swung into place. I’d admired her rear for years now, glimpsing its heave as she strutted past my office, sometimes lucky enough to follow it swaying down the hallway or, heavens be praised, churning up the staircase before me on the rarest of occasions. Now, of course, this plump and padded posterior was a weapon to be used against me. “Hi-yaah!” she barked, thrusting her ass upon me, driving her full weight upon me, too impatient to let gravity steer it down.

I hadn’t time to cry or fling up my arms, could only watch as the weave of her tight jeans stretched taut at the seam running down her crack. Darkness was upon me, as well as several hundred tons of seasoned woman-flesh. One buttock and then another bounced upon me, shoving me harder and harder into the IKEA seat. Flashes of artificial lighting revealed the massive, swelling ass that lofted just long enough to reposition itself and crash into me, over and over again. The darkness showed me that I was beginning to emit a faint purple light, a violet aura pulsing slowly, glowing against my supervisor’s pants right before she collided with me. It was useless to crawl away, it was impossible to draw enough breath to scream. All I could do was trust in the cheap seat cushion to diffuse most of the impact and wait until she was done.

Which wasn’t long. Rosalee heaved herself up and turned upon me once more. “You wretched little creep! Do you know how much work you cost me?” Her hand flew out of nowhere, and those strong working-woman’s fingers bound me like iron. She scooped me out of the cushion and held me before her fierce expression: her long, straight, perfect teeth were especially intimidating now. They could snap my arms, crush my rib cage without a moment’s resistance. Her upper lip twitched with micromuscles, exposing perfectly pink, smooth gums and a canine slightly yellower than the surrounding incisors.

“I put in so many late hours, covering for you!” She spat her words at me, flecks of her saliva streaking my cheeks, soaking into as much shirt as poked out above her clenching thumb. “No, not covering for you so you looked good. Covering for the department! Making sure we didn’t look like idiots! I worked weekends, I stayed up past midnight!”

“I know, I got your emails,” I moaned. My tiny hands pushed against the first, stoutest bone of her thumb, but it wouldn’t budge. My forearms pulsed with purple light, a little quicker than before.

Rosalee’s eyes were huge, glistening, and fiery. I could see my reflection in her lenses, flashing purple, looking all the more pathetic for the fish-eye effect. “It wrecked my health! My husband, he could barely deal with me! My poor kids!” Her long, wide nostrils flared just above me. Tiny pale hairs stuck out, lining the narrow corridor into her skull. How her lips danced, writhing, stretching tight over her gnashing teeth as she chewed me out. “I fell behind on my own work! Everyone looks down on me now, because of you!”

I couldn’t say anything. Partially I was devastated by the revelation of how deep her suffering ran; partially because I was about to pass out due to asphyxiation. So when she muttered, “But now I’m about to be rid of you, you little curse,” I could only stare at her in a half-dazed state. She slowly raised me above her, tilting her head back and opening her jaws extra wide. The fluorescent lights illuminated everything in her mouth: the glassy threads of saliva that ran from molar to molar, the glistening bed of papillae that heaved like the ocean, the fuchsia and salmon-colored curtains in back that flexed, trembling with anticipation, gliding shut and springing open with every hot, humid breath.

“So many ways to end you,” she said, pausing to snap her teeth at me. Proud, powerful incisors clashed against each other, as she shifted her grip from a full-bodied clench to a ginger thumb-and-forefinger pinch around my torso. My legs dangled above her enormous maw, swinging in the space above her lascivious tongue and the folds of throat that laughed at me, promising swift delivery into the core of her being. I had to trust that she wouldn’t; my weakened arms draped around the second knuckle of her thumb in a palsied embrace.

Sneering, Rosalee held me away at arm’s length. “Like I’d want to taste a piece of shit like you.” Her words stabbed at my heart: all her negative messaging, all the discouraging private meetings we’d had, they all compromised my own self-esteem. I couldn’t tell her how I questioned my competence, how I wondered whether all my life choices had been a mistake, every time I walked out of her office and away from yet another dour conversation. So when she splayed her fingers, I didn’t even try to grasp at them, resigning myself to spinning slowly through the cool office air as I plummeted to the industrial carpeting.

It was rough against my skin, and months of dust and dirt assaulted my nostrils. I examined my right arm, raising it above me where I lay: the purple light was quicker now, pulsing steadily in time with a rock ballad, I supposed. Beyond my spindly arm was my titanic supervisor, now tugging one of her cowboy boots off. Her long toes flexed and stretched in the fresh air. I’d never seen her feet before, never caught her in sandals: she had really attractive toes. “Cute” wasn’t a good word, because these were mature, meaty toes that had seen decades of wear and development. At my size, I could almost envision cozying up to them, taking up one or two in my arms, hugging her rounded toe-tips to my chest. They’d be substantial to hold, to lie against or within.

Instead, I lay there on the scouring field of carpet as Rosalee bared her teeth in a savage grin, raised her long foot up, and slammed it upon me without restraint. There was a flash of pale, wrinkled sole right before a wall of coarse leather covered me, striking me like an 18-wheeler. This wall of flesh began to spin, rotating upon my chest, dragging my head and arms back and forth, abrading against the carpet. Her skin was musty and hot from being in the boot half the day, so between the cultures formulating between her toes and the unvacuumed carpet, there was no supply of clean, healthful air to be had. I tried to drive my arms up, to grab with tiny fingers the webbing between her toes, in an attempt to spare my arms from being ground over the artificial fibers of the floor, but it was hopeless. She only laughed throatily, grinding me into the floor, stomping on me occasionally. She didn’t wiggle her toes at me, she didn’t hover her foot tantalizingly, it was only another weapon to bash me with.

Beneath the callused ball of her foot, I could see my body was flashing quicker now, quicker than disco, about as quick as EBM. The grit in the ridges of her sole’s print glowed lavender or indigo. I could see the flaw in her sole where she’d perhaps cut herself on a piece of glass, where the fine parallel ridges were interrupted.

Rosalee set her foot aside and glared down at me. One bare foot squished onto the floor to my right; one hand-tooled and well-worn cowboy boot curved to my left. Above me, strong and full calves stretched the denim sheaths that ran up to ample, powerful thighs, meeting in a darkened crotch below her blouse. The blouse gave away nothing, hanging freely, swaying as my colossal supervisor steadied herself against my desk. Then she rose and her blouse lay against her bodyscape of small mountains, and her fingers quickly flicked open her button-fly. She grunted as she bent over, shoving her jeans and panties impatiently down her thighs. Heat wafted over me from the piles of fabric upon my legs, in the second before she snatched me up again and threw me to my computer chair.

I was too weak to move, too weak to resist. I could only gape in silent witness to my own demise. Rosalee simply turned once more, swiveling her immense, bare buttocks at me. The crack of her ass was impossibly black, as the light glared off her fair skin, wending down to a furry grove between her full thighs. This grove stretched and exposed itself to me as she slowly folded herself in half, letting light seep into her chasm, illuminating her asshole and thick cakes of flesh protecting her vagina. Without so much as a chuckle, she descended upon me, her buttocks swallowing me whole.

My tiny body was wedged deeply inside her, immediately sweltering and fetid. Her anus flexed and nudged at me, excited about something, clearly. Scraggly, coarse hairs scrubbed at my legs as she pinched me in her crotch, dragging me back and forth: the IKEA seat cushion flowed over my back as her prehensile hips seized me and took me with them. I whimpered in the darkness, unable to take much more, unable to move an inch. Her immense buttocks throbbed around me, hugging me tighter and tighter, as she bounced gently upon my chair. Where could it go from here? The violet light I emitted flickered quicker and quicker, casting her puckering anus in a strobe light. Hot fluid began to soak my trousers, and her hips rammed into me harder and harder.

There was another brilliant flash. Immediately I was compressed on all sides by hard, solid objects. My head was bent at an uncomfortable angle, my arms pinned to my sides at the shoulder, and a heavy weight bore into my chest. But at least I could breathe.

My vision returned as Rosalee awkwardly climbed off my chest, hastily pulling up her panties and then her jeans. I drew a long, shuddering sigh, pried myself out of my chair, and stood shakily beside her as she fished her long, pretty toes into her boot.

All the aches and pains were gone, all the abrasions were healed and restored on me. My pants still bore a telltale aroma, but I could avoid my coworkers for the next two hours, easily. “That was pretty close, that time,” I said, turning away to pick up scattered papers.

Rosalee blushed prettily behind her draping blonde hair. “Pretty close, yeah. You okay?”

“I’m great. That safety threshold on the QV Gun was a brilliant idea.” Once shrunken, the structural integrity of objects was indicated by a quickening, flashing light, to prevent people from being too rough with tiny objects. When critical integrity had been exceeded, the items were restored to normal size and in perfect condition. A truck driver prone to banging up his shrunken cargo in shipment would be in for a nasty surprise.

“Well, uh, that’s all I had to talk about.” Rosalee accepted the papers I handed her, piling them into the job jacket. “I don’t care about this job, you shouldn’t either. The client’s going in another direction with it.”

I laughed, overly eager. “Of course they are! How could it go any other way.” My former supervisor smiled at me shyly, then turned and started for the door. I grabbed her shoulder, the first time I’d touched her as an equal in several years of spending our lives together. “Hey, Rosalee, hang on.”

She hung her head. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to get carried away.”

“No, I’m sorry for all the trouble I’ve caused you, seriously. I had no idea it was this bad.”

“Well, it was.”

“I know that now. I’ve grown a lot under your charge, I want you to know that. I’m better than I was before, and I appreciate that.” I smiled at her and she reluctantly nodded. “Do you feel better now? After all that?”

She laugh-sobbed and said she did. “I’m just a little embarrassed, that’s all.”

“Nothing to be embarrassed about, Rosalee, seriously. I understand. Maybe we should’ve done that a long time ago, not let all this stress build up in you.”

“I’ve actually thought about it a lot.” She laughed and raised her face to me. “Shrinking you down. Having my way with you. I can say that because I’m on my way out.” Then she laughed at my own reddening cheeks.

We slightly raised our arms, showing we were open for a hug, then embraced tightly for a long time. “I really wish you had,” I whispered in her ear. “Often and often.”

She laughed again, steaming my shoulder and bouncing deliciously against my chest. “Guess we have to work on our communication skills, huh?” I nodded, stepped back, and opened the door for her. She gave me a little wave and slipped back to her office. I slumped in my chair, frowning at the chilly dot of moisture in my shorts, wondering how I was going to be able to do an ounce of work for the rest of the afternoon.