Chapter 9: The Collar
The world was a smeared, terrifying masterpiece of scale. Kimbella’s hand, descending from a pink sweatshirt sleeve that billowed like a parachute, wasn't a hand anymore. It was a fleshy, five-limbed creature, the nails like opalescent tiles, the skin a landscape of pores and fine hairs. It closed around me, not with the hard pinch of before, but with a terrifying, gentle finality. I was engulfed in a warm, slightly damp darkness that smelled of peach lotion and salt.
“See? Easy,” her voice boomed, a seismic event transmitted through her body.
I was airlifted across the kitchen, the ground a dizzying blur of linoleum canyons and dust bunnies the size of sheep. Then, the environment changed. The greasy heat gave way to cooler, perfumed air. The light softened, turning golden. I was set down with a slight, casual bounce.
My new reality resolved.
I stood on a vast plane of emerald velvet, stretched taut over an impossible geography. It was the seat of the oversized chair I’d glimpsed earlier, now a king-sized bed from my perspective. The velvet was dense, each fiber a plush stalk. Ahead, the chair’s back rose like a cliff face. To either side, the chair’s arms were distant, curved walls of polished mahogany.
And surrounding me, rising on all sides, were the slopes of Kimbella’s thighs. They were immense, covered in the same pink sweatsuit material, which strained and creased with every minor shift of her weight. They formed a valley, and I was at the very bottom of it. The fabric was warm, radiating a body heat that was immediate and invasive.
She hadn’t just put me on the chair. She’d placed me between her legs, on the seat itself, so her thighs formed a living enclosure.
“There,” she sighed, a sound like a heavy door closing. Her giant hands settled on the arms of the chair, framing me. “Now we can have a proper talk. Without you squirming all over my countertops.”
I tried to stand. The velvet gave way under my feet, spongy and treacherous. My legs, still throbbing from the unnatural compression of the shrinking, wobbled. I was a bug in a terrarium.
“Let me go,” I said. The words were wrong. My voice, which had always commanded rooms, was a high, thin reed in this vast space. It lacked bass, lacked force. It was the voice of a stranger.
Kimbella laughed. It was a low, rumbling tremor that moved through the chair and up my spine. “Go where, sugar? You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be. Auntie Roquita wants to meet her biggest fan. But I figure she can wait. You and me need to get acquainted first.”
A shadow fell over me. Tara’s face loomed into view from beside the chair, her grin a wide crescent of teeth each the size of my fist. “He’s so little now, Kim. Like a doll.” Her breath was hot and smelled of soda.
“He’s a person, Tara,” Kimbella said, her tone chiding but fond. “A tiny, handsome person. And tiny people gotta learn manners.” She shifted slightly, a continental drift. The valley of her thighs tightened around my space, the pink walls of fabric pressing closer. The heat intensified. “First rule of proper tiny-man etiquette is… you stay where you’re put.”
I took a stumbling step toward the edge of the seat, toward the precipice that led to the distant, hard-looking floor. Before I could take another, a fingertip, vast and soft, pressed against my chest. It didn’t push. It was just there, a wall of warm, living flesh. The sheer, passive weight of it anchored me.
“Uh-uh,” Kimbella cooed.
Tara giggled, a sound like shaking gravel. “He’s gotta learn! Hey, remember that thing we saw online?”
“What thing?”
“The thing for, you know, training.”
Kimbella’s finger lifted from my chest. I could breathe again, but the space felt no less confined. “Oh, right! The gentle reminder.” She snapped her fingers, the sound a small, shocking explosion. “Get my purse. The big one by the door.”
Tara lumbered off, her footsteps causing minor earthquakes. Kimbella looked down at me, her head a planetoid blocking part of the ceiling light. “You’re gonna love this. It’s top-of-the-line. Quiet, but effective.”
Tara returned, clutching a purse that looked like a leather boulder. She rummaged, the sound of clattering contents echoing. Then, she pulled out a small velvet box. To them, it fit in her palm. To me, it was a chest. She opened it.
Inside, nestled in satin, was a collar. It was sleek, black, with a small, silver disc attached. It looked like something for a very expensive, very small dog.
“Isn’t it cute?” Tara breathed.
Kimbella plucked it from the box with surprising delicacy. The collar dangled from her fingers, a loop of obsidian. “It’s got a little vibrator in it. And a receiver. So I can send you little… messages. From anywhere in the room.” Her smile widened. “Let’s see if the marketing genius can still think straight when his whole world is buzzing.”
A cold that had nothing to do with the room seeped into me. This wasn't just capture. This was instrumentation.
“No,” I said, backing up until I pressed against the warm wall of her thigh. “You’re not putting that on me.”
Kimbella’s expression didn’t change, but something in her eyes hardened. “See, that’s bad etiquette. ‘No’ isn’t a word a tiny thing gets to say to me.” She leaned forward, her face descending. The sheer scale of her features was hypnotic, terrifying. “Now hold still. This’ll only take a second.”
Her other hand came down. Not a finger, but her whole hand, palm open. It was a ceiling of flesh descending. I tried to dodge, but there was nowhere to go. Her palm covered me completely, a warm, slightly sticky weight that pinned me against the velvet. I was in total darkness, smothered by the scent of her skin. I heard the rasp of the collar, felt a brief, cool pressure around my neck, and then a soft click.
The hand lifted.
I was free, but I was collared. The band was snug, not choking, but inescapably present. A constant, tight reminder.
“There,” Kimbella said, sitting back with satisfaction. “Now you’re presentable.”
Tara clapped her enormous hands. “Turn it on! Just a little.”
Kimbella pulled a small, black remote from her pocket. She aimed it at me. Her thumb pressed a button.
A buzz started at the base of my skull. It was a low, powerful hum that vibrated through my jaw, my teeth, down my spine. It wasn’t painful. It was deeply, profoundly invasive. It scrambled thought, replacing cognition with a blanket of static. My vision blurred at the edges. I staggered, my hands going to the collar, but my fingers couldn’t find a seam, a catch. It was smooth, monolithic.
She released the button. The buzzing stopped. The sudden silence was a shock.
“See?” Tara said, her voice full of glee. “He’s all quiet now.”
My breath came in ragged gasps. Humiliation burned hotter than any anger. I was a product in a demonstration. A toy with a new feature.
Before I could form a word, a new sensation began, unrelated to the collar. A warmth, deep in my groin. Not the false warmth of the potion. This was a specific, localized heat, spreading outward. I ignored it, focusing on the giants, on my imprisonment.
But it grew. It shifted from warmth to a low, insistent burn, as if something inside me was being gently stretched, heated from within. I shifted my stance on the soft velvet, uncomfortable.
Kimbella was talking to Tara about ordering pizza, about what to get on it. Their voices were a distant rumble. My attention was pulled inward, to the strange, alarming sensation unfolding in my body. The burning intensified, becoming a dull, aching throb. I glanced down.
My tuxedo pants, already ludicrously baggy on my shrunken frame, were beginning to tent outward. Not with a normal erection. This was different. It was… lengthening. A surreal, slow extrusion of flesh that pushed against the fine wool fabric. I watched, detached in my horror, as the tent grew longer, the fabric straining.
“—extra cheese, definitely,” Kimbella was saying.
The process accelerated. The burning was now a bright, sharp line of heat. There was a soft, internal giving sensation, like a rope unraveling. My pants could no longer contain it. The fabric slid down, and I was confronted with the impossible.
It was my own flesh, but transformed. It had grown, lengthened to a ridiculous, impossible degree. It hung down, a pale, slender rope against the dark green velvet, reaching past my knees… past where my feet would be… a smooth, tapered extension of myself that seemed to have no end.
I tried to move, to step back, and it swung with a heavy, unfamiliar weight. A wave of nausea, separate from the earlier shrinking sickness, washed over me. This wasn’t me. This was a corruption.
“Hey,” Tara’s voice cut through my daze. She was pointing a sausage-sized finger at me. “Kim. Look. What’s he doing?”
Kimbella stopped her pizza debate and looked down. Her eyebrows, like two fuzzy caterpillars, rose. “Well, now,” she said, her voice a mix of curiosity and dark amusement. “That’s new. Must be a side effect of the stronger batch in the vial. Auntie did say some of the later strains had… interesting physiological augmentations.”
“It’s huge,” Tara whispered, her eyes wide.
“It’s disproportionate,” Kimbella corrected, as if discussing a faulty product. “Can’t be comfortable.” She leaned forward again, her giant face filled with a clinical kind of interest. “Does it hurt, little man?”
I couldn’t answer. The sheer absurdity of the question, of the situation, of the dangling, alien weight between my legs, stole my voice. I clumsily reached down, thinking I could somehow lift it. The skin was soft, warm. It was part of me, yet felt utterly detached. In a moment of pure, surreal instinct, I tried to manage it. I looped the excessive length over my shoulder, like a coil of rope. It rested there, a warm, flesish burden.
Tara snorted, then erupted into full, roaring laughter. “He’s wearing it like a scarf!”
Kimbella didn’t laugh. She watched, her head tilted. “Fascinating,” she murmured. Then, she shrugged. “We’ll figure it out later. I’m hungry. Let’s box him up ‘til the pizza comes.”
“Box him?” Tara asked.
“The decorative one. On the shelf.”
Tara waddled over to a bookcase and returned with a object. To them, it was a small, ornate wooden box with a latticework lid, meant for trinkets. To me, it was a substantial crate. She set it on the coffee table with a thud I felt through the chair.
Kimbella’s hand descended again. This time, I didn’t resist. The shock of my own body had drained the fight from me, temporarily. Her fingers closed around my torso, careful of the strange new appendage coiled on my shoulder. She lifted me, carried me through the air, and deposited me into the box through the lattice opening. The inside was dark, smelled of cedar and dust. The latticework above allowed slices of light in, and I could see their distorted faces peering in.
“Be good,” Kimbella said, her eye a monstrous moon filling one of the gaps. Then, the lid was closed fully, plunging me into near-total darkness.
I sat in the silent, confined space. The cedar smell was overwhelming. I carefully, gingerly, unlooped the length of flesh from my shoulder. It pooled in the bottom of the box, an unimaginable tangle of myself. I touched it again, a scientist probing a bizarre specimen. The burning had subsided, leaving a dull, full ache.
Then, unbidden, a new change began.
The ache focused, tightened. Blood rushed into the tissue, not with a normal swell, but with a profound, deep engorgement. In the absolute dark, I felt it happen. It began to rise, thicken, lift from the tangled pile on the box floor. It was no longer a limp rope. It was becoming a pillar. A tower.
It hardened, the flesh turning to iron, rising up and up in the dark. It brushed against the cedar lid of the box. I shifted, trying to avoid it, but it was unavoidable, a central fact of my new existence. I reached out in the blackness. My fingers traced its girth. It was thick, solid, and it soared vertically, taller than I was. My head didn’t even reach its midpoint.
I leaned back against the rough wood of the box. The vibration collar was still snug around my neck. The memory of the buzz was a ghost in my nerves. Outside, I could hear the muffled voices of the giants discussing crust types.
And inside, in the profound dark, I was trapped with this new, monstrous architecture of my own body. Confusion wasn’t the right word. It was a hollow, silent screaming dislocation. This wasn’t power. This wasn’t an advantage. It was a grotesque joke written in my own flesh, a punchline I couldn’t begin to understand. I closed my eyes, but the dark only made the reality more present. I was no longer just a tiny man. I was a tiny man with a ridiculous, impossible problem, caged in a box, waiting for a pizza to arrive.
The absurdity of it was a cold stone in my gut. I sat in the dark, my back against the rough cedar, the vertical mass of flesh an undeniable presence in the center of the small, dark space. It was a brutal parody of every confident gesture I’d ever made. I breathed in the dust and wood scent, forcing the panic down into a tight, hard ball. Panic was a luxury for people who had options.
I had a box, a collar, and a mutation.
Focus. The word cut through the static in my head. It was the same tone I used before a hostile board meeting, before walking onto a stage. I closed my eyes, making the dark absolute. I imagined the sensation not as part of me, but as a separate system. A faulty extension. The heat was still there, a deep pulsing radiance. I visualized drawing that heat back, pulling it inward along the length of the shaft, condensing it, reversing the unnatural expansion.
A tremor ran through the rigid flesh. A slight, almost imperceptible softening at the very base. It was working. Not my body listening, but my mind enforcing a new reality. I clenched my jaw, pouring every shred of will into that single, grotesque point. The contraction was slow, a reluctant deflation. The tower wavered. I felt a strange, internal telescoping, a slide of tissue and tension. It sank downwards, the proud, impossible column retreating, diminishing.
It took minutes of silent, sweating concentration in the pitch black. Finally, it was over. I reached a hand down, my fingers encountering familiar, proportionate dimensions. The relief was so profound it felt like a secondary sickness. I slumped against the box wall, breathing hard. The vial had done this. The knowledge was ice in my veins. It wasn't just a shrinking agent; it was a chaos serum, rewriting my biology on a whim. But I could influence it. The control was fragile, a shaky truce with my own cells, but it was a data point. A lever.
Outside the box, the world of the giants continued. I heard the crinkle of paper, the greasy slap of cardboard on a table. “Pass the garlic knots,” Tara mumbled, her voice thick with food.
“You ate half already,” Kimbella shot back. There was a wet, chewing silence. Then it came. A deep, guttural rumbling that built like approaching thunder. The air in my box seemed to pressurize an instant before the sound hit.
It was a seismic belch, a prolonged, house-shaking eruption of digested bread and cheese and soda that vibrated through the very boards of my prison. The latticework lid trembled. Dust sifted down onto my head. It seemed to last for ten full seconds, ending in a satisfied, sighing groan.
Tara giggled. “Damn, Kim. Warn a girl.”
“Shut up,” Kimbella said, but there was no real malice. A silence fell, broken only by the sound of more eating. Then her voice dropped, becoming a confidential, greedy murmur I had to strain to hear. “Look at him in there. Quiet. He’s better than a doll.”
“Your cousin’s gonna be pissed if we’re late,” Tara said around a mouthful.
“So?” Kimbella’s chair creaked under her weight. “She wanted him delivered. She didn’t say how fast. I’m… inspecting the merchandise. Making sure he’s presentable for family.”
She paused. I heard the suck of a straw in a cup. Her next words were lower, a private venomous thrill. “I can’t wait to play with him. For real. Not just this little test. I might just tell my cousin he fell down a sewer grate or something. Keep him for myself.”
The words hung in the greasy air, seeping through the lattice. They carried a finality more terrifying than any shouted threat. This wasn't a spontaneous kidnapping anymore. It was a plan coalescing. Roquita Tinykins, the architect of this nightmare, was a distant, abstract danger. Kimbella, with her vibrating remote and her custom chair and her slow, digestive noises, was the imminent, concrete terror. She wasn't a gatekeeper. She intended to be the warden.
In the dark, my hand went to the smooth, unyielding band around my neck. The collar was a chain she could yank without touching me. The box was a cell. My own body was a rebellious, unpredictable weapon. But her casual sentence had just redrawn the entire map of my captivity. Escape was no longer about getting out of this room. It was about avoiding becoming a permanent, secret fixture in her cluttered, perfumed world. The pizza eating resumed. Each muffled chew was a ticking clock.
Each muffled chew was a ticking clock.
Then, a sharp, metallic click directly above me. A slice of blinding light cut through the cedar-scented dark as the latch flipped. The ornate lid yawned open. The perfumed, grease-thick air of the living room flooded in.
Two vast fingers descended, blocking the light. They were slick with an orange, glistening grease, dotted with flecks of herb and cheese. The smell of garlic and cheap pepperoni was overwhelming. They plunged into the box, closing around my torso.
I was hauled into the light, dangling. Kimbella’s face filled the world, her lips glistening. A strand of melted cheese stretched from her chin to her chest. “Naptime’s over, handsome,” she said, her voice a syrupy rumble. “Mama’s bored.”
She held me aloft, turning me slowly like a specimen. Grease from her fingers soaked through my torn shirt, warm and sticky. “Tara, look. He fixed his little… situation.” She sounded almost disappointed.
Tara lumbered over, wiping her mouth with the back of a hand the size of my entire body. “Boring. The big thing was funny.”
“This is better,” Kimbella purred. She carried me away from the coffee table, her gait a rolling earthquake. “Now he’s just a perfect little thing. No distractions.” She stopped before the giant velvet chair. But she didn’t put me on it.
She lowered herself into the plush depths instead, the furniture groaning in protest under her immense weight. She settled, a mountain of pink sweatpants and satisfied hunger. Then she brought me down, not to the chair, but directly onto the sprawling landscape of her stomach.
It was a soft, yielding plateau beneath me, rising and falling with her slow, deep breaths. The heat was immense, radiating through the fabric. I stumbled, my feet sinking slightly into the softness.
“Sit,” she commanded, a lazy threat in her tone.
I remained standing, swaying with the rhythm of her respiration. The visual was surreal: the ruined tuxedo, the vibrating collar, standing on the summit of her gut while she looked down from her distant face.
She chuckled. The laugh vibrated through me. “Stubborn.” Her right hand, the one not holding me, came to rest on her stomach next to me. Her index finger, alone, was taller than I was. She tapped it on the velvet of the chair arm.
Buzz.
The collar at my neck erupted. The violent, brain-scrambling hum returned, a physical shock that blurred my vision. My knees buckled. I collapsed onto the warm, curved surface of her belly, the world reduced to a single, maddening frequency.
It stopped.
“Sit,” she repeated, soft and firm.
I pushed myself up, my muscles trembling. I sat. The velvet of her sweatsuit was abrasive at this proximity, each fiber like thick cord. I was a figurine placed on a shelf of living flesh.
“Good boy,” she cooed. Her greasy fingertip returned, but this time it didn’t tap. It stroked the length of my body from head to toe, a slow, crushing caress. The pressure was immense, flattening me momentarily against her. The smell of pizza sauce was suffocating. “See? We can have nice times.”
Tara slumped into the sofa opposite, making the floor tremble. “What kinda fun? He’s just sitting there.”
“You have no imagination,” Kimbella sighed, her finger idly tracing circles around me, hemming me in. “It’s not about what he does. It’s about what he is.” She leaned her head back, looking at the ceiling. “He’s mine. A little, beautiful, talking treasure. I could just… keep him here.”
Her finger stopped circling. It settled in front of me, a greasy wall. “Talk. Say something pretty.”
I stared at the monumental fingerprint whorls, like dried riverbeds of oil and salt. My mind, trained for boardrooms and keynotes, scrabbled for purchase. Charisma was a tool for equals, or for manipulating inferiors from a position of perceived strength. This was different. This was performance for a capricious god.
“This… is a unique vantage point,” I said, forcing my voice past the tightness in my throat. It still sounded reedy, insignificant.
Kimbella’s belly jiggled beneath me with a silent laugh. “He’s doing his commercial voice! Talk about the concentrated luxury of my living room, Mr. Executive.”
The humiliation was a acid wash. I saw Seraphina’s smirk, Anya Voss’s assessing gaze. They were playing chess. I was a piece in a toddler’s mouth. “The scale is certainly impactful,” I heard myself say.
“It sure is,” she agreed happily. Her other hand came into view, holding her smartphone. It was a vast, black obelisk. She fumbled with it, then aimed the camera lens at me. The glass eye was as wide as my head. “Smile for my story. Let’s see… caption.” She giggled, typing with a thunderous thumb. “‘Picked up a new accessory. Self-cleaning. Talks back sometimes.’”
The flash exploded, a supernova bleaching my vision. I blinked spots away, a fresh, deeper horror taking root. My image was now in her world, on her device. A digital record of this ownership.
“Let me see!” Tara boomed. Kimbella turned the screen. They both laughed, a sound that made the air tremble.
This was the fun. This casual, utter consumption. I was a living doll, a conversational pet, a photo prop. The vibrating collar was just the remote for my obedience. The gala, the autograph hunters, their dirty whispers—they were a preview. This was the main event.
Kimbella lowered the phone. Her expression shifted from amused to something more contemplative, more possessive. “You know,” she said, her voice dropping to a confidential murmur that I felt in my bones. “I think I will tell Auntie Roquita you got lost. She’s got plenty of tiny men to experiment on. She’s got whole labs full of ‘em.”
Her fingertip returned, this time prodding my chest, pushing me over onto my back. I lay staring up at the distant, shadowy ceiling of her chin and the vast cavern of her mouth. “I’ll just keep you right here. You can be my little secret. My personal… distraction.”
The finality of it was a cold stone in my gut. The puzzle pieces of my new hell snapped together. No corporate rescue. No negotiation with Roquita. Just this box, this chair, this stomach, forever. The panic broke through my controlled facade, sharp and animal.
I tried to roll, to get my feet under me. Her fingertip pressed down, a soft, inescapable pin holding me to the heated valley of her stomach. “Ah-ah,” she chided. “Where do you think you’re going? You’re not going anywhere.”
She leaned forward, her shadow swallowing the light. Her other hand came up, not with the phone, but empty. She hovered it over me, a fleshy ceiling poised to descend. “In fact,” she whispered, her breath a warm, garlic-tinged wind. “Let’s make sure you’re really, really comfortable.”