Chapter 9: The Shrinking Awakening
The thin mattress on the floor felt like a slab of stone. Matthew hadn’t so much slept as passed through varying states of unconscious dread, each more porous than the last, letting in the sounds of the settling house: the groan of pipes, the sigh of the furnace, the distant, indistinct rustle of Chloe moving in her own room. He’d woken a dozen times, each awakening a fresh crash of disorientation—the unfamiliar floral wallpaper, the crack in the ceiling plaster shaped like a screaming mouth, the sheer, butter-yellow curtains glowing with the threat of dawn.
When true morning came, it was not with a gentle sunrise but with the sudden, precise click of the door opening.
Chloe stood in the doorway, backlit by the hall light. She was already dressed in soft-looking grey sweatpants and a loose white t-shirt, her hair damp from a shower. The clean scent of soap and shampoo wafted in, a cruel parody of normalcy. In her hand, her phone glowed.
“Rise and shine,” she said, her voice cheerful. It wasn’t the maternal voice. It was her own, bright and utterly in control. “I have news.”
Matthew pushed himself up on his elbows. Every muscle ached with a deep, psychic fatigue. The hollow, buzzing static from last night had solidified into a leaden weight behind his eyes. He said nothing. Words felt dangerous, potentially uncivil.
Chloe stepped into the room, her eyes scanning him with clinical interest. “You look like hell. Good. Means it’s working.” She looked down at her phone, a grin spreading across her face. It was the grin of someone reading a particularly delicious bit of gossip. “Hailey texted. The system update finalized overnight. She’s a machine, I swear. Never sleeps.”
She held up the phone as if he could read it from across the room. “The new parameter is live. Wanna hear it?”
He didn’t. The very word ‘parameter’ was a cold finger on his spine. He managed a faint, tight shake of his head.
She read it aloud anyway, her voice clear and precise, savoring each syllable.
“Per our discussion, the punitive-correlative link is now established. Each gaseous emission event, regardless of causative agent or volume, will now trigger an isomorphic reduction in subject’s vertical stature. Base metric: one inch per event. Cumulative. No ceiling set. Monitor and enjoy.”
The words hung in the sunlit room, technical and absurd. Matthew’s mind, still gummed with sleep and shock, tried to parse them. Isomorphic reduction. Vertical stature. One inch per event.
“She means,” Chloe said, translating with patronizing clarity, “every time I fart, you get shorter. One inch. Poof.” She demonstrated with a flick of her fingers. “Like a balloon letting out air. But you’re the balloon.”
The horror was too vast, too ludicrous, to comprehend all at once. It layered onto the existing dread, a new stratum of impossible wrongness. His body, already not his own, was now subject to a ludicrous, arithmetic diminishment.
Chloe watched his face, drinking in the slow-motion collapse of his understanding. “I know. It’s kinda poetic, isn’t it? All that wanting, that big, intrusive desire… now it just… leaks out of you. Literally. You deflate.” She took a step closer, her bare feet silent on the worn hardwood. “We should test it. For science.”
Before he could even form a protest, before he could scramble back or curl into a ball, she did it. It was casual. Effortless. A simple, slight tightening of her abdomen, a barely perceptible shift in her stance.
A soft, quick puff of sound escaped her.
Pfft.
It was almost identical to the first trigger in her bedroom yesterday. But the consequence was entirely new.
The wave of pressure that passed through him was not the crushing, somatic weight of before. It was something else. A deep, internal squeeze, a symmetrical compression that seemed to originate in the very center of his bones. There was no pain, not exactly. It was a profound, dizzying displacement. A sensation of his edges rushing inward.
The world lurched.
The ceiling, with its cracked plaster scream, jumped away, becoming farther, higher. The dresser across the room swelled in size, its proportions suddenly more imposing. The bed frame, which had been level with his mattress, now seemed to loom like a wooden wall. He looked down at his own hands, splayed on the thin blanket.
They were smaller.
It was undeniable. His fingers were shorter, the knuckles slightly closer together. His palms covered less of the blanket’s terrain. The watch on his wrist—a simple digital face he’d worn for years—now looked comically large, the strap overlapping.
A high, thin sound escaped him. A whimper of pure ontological shock. He was unmoored from reality. The fundamental, unchanging facts of his physical self were now variables in an equation he didn’t understand.
Chloe’s laughter filled the room. It was a rich, genuine sound of delight. “Oh my god! Look at you! You’re… compact!” She stepped right up to the edge of his mattress, looking down at him with blazing eyes. “Five-foot-seven. Congrats. You just lost an inch in the blink of an eye. Or, well, the puff of a cheek.”
He stared up at her. From this new, lower perspective, she was taller. More monumental. The power dynamic, already skewed to the point of madness, had been given a physical metric. She had grown relative to him, without moving a muscle.
“This is incredible,” she breathed, tapping rapidly on her phone, doubtless sending a reaction to Hailey. “The look on your face. It’s not just fear. It’s… cosmic confusion. Your brain is trying to reconcile the new spatial data. It’s failing miserably.” She put her phone away and clapped her hands once. “Up. Up you get. We have a long, productive day ahead.”
The command held the same absolute authority. The conditioning enforced it. But his body’s response was jangled, uncoordinated. He moved to stand, and his limbs felt wrong. His center of gravity was off. He rose, and the room tilted. He was distinctly, palpably shorter. The top of his head, which yesterday would have been level with her eyebrows, now came to the bridge of her nose. He had to look up to meet her gaze.
She assessed him, a gardener inspecting a pruned shrub. “Yep. Definitely shorter. Your clothes are gonna start looking baggy soon. That’ll be funny.” She nodded toward the door. “Bathroom’s down the hall. Clean up. You smell like fear and stale sleep. Then meet me in the kitchen. We’re establishing a routine.”
He shuffled past her, the hallway feeling like a canyon. The doorframe to the bathroom, which he’d passed under without thought yesterday, now seemed to demand a slight consciousness of clearance. It was a subtle, whispering threat. Inside, the bathroom was a chamber of new horrors. The sink was higher. The mirror, which yesterday had shown his familiar, exhausted face, now reflected a man who was… less. Not just demoralized. Diminished. His features were the same, but the scale was wrong, as if someone had taken a photograph and reduced it to ninety-five percent. The effect was deeply uncanny, a violation of a lifelong self-image.
He splashed water on his face, the cold doing nothing to anchor him. Every movement felt tentative, as if he were piloting a new, smaller vessel that hadn’t been calibrated.
The kitchen smelled of coffee and toasting bread. Chloe was at the counter, spreading butter on a bagel. She glanced at him as he entered. “Coffee’s in the pot. Get yourself a mug. The mugs are in the cabinet to the left of the sink.”
Her tone was mundane, instructional. She was playing house, and he was the dysfunctional resident. He moved to the cabinet, his smaller reach requiring a slight, humiliating step onto his toes to retrieve a plain white mug. The coffee pot was heavy, and pouring required concentration his rattled nerves couldn’t spare. Hot liquid splashed onto the counter.
“Clumsy,” she noted, without turning around. “Spatial recalibration. It’ll take a while for your motor functions to adjust to the new dimensions. Clean it up.”
He grabbed a paper towel, his smaller hands fumbling with the roll. As he wiped the spill, she turned, leaning against the counter, eating her bagel. She studied him as he worked.
“So,” she said between bites. “Routine. You’re here to be useful. And to provide data. So your days will have structure. Mornings are for light chores. Starting today, you do the dishes from the night before. You take out the trash and recycling. You wipe down the counters.”
He finished cleaning the spill, tossing the damp paper towel into the trash can under the sink. He stood there, waiting, his untouched coffee cooling on the counter.
“After chores,” she continued, “we have our first session of the day. Usually in the living room. That’s when we work on your… conditioning. Your reactions.” She took a long sip from her own mug. “Afternoons vary. Sometimes more chores. Laundry. Vacuuming. Sometimes you just sit. And listen. And exist. Evenings are for… reflection.” Her eyes gleamed. “And then there’s the new variable. The shrinkage. That’s an all-day, asynchronous event. It’ll happen when it happens. We’ll track it.”
She finished her bagel, brushed the crumbs from her hands into the sink, and then, quite deliberately, shifted her weight. It was a slow, almost sensual roll of her hips against the counter’s edge.
A low, deep rumble vibrated from her, a contented, post-breakfast sound.
Brrrrrrmp.
The compression hit him like a phantom blow to the soles of his feet. That deep, internal squeeze, a crushing inward pull from his scalp to his heels. The world surged upward again. The countertop climbed another inch toward his chin. The light switch on the far wall seemed to recede.
He gasped, stumbling back a step. He looked down. His sweatpants, which had been snug yesterday, now pooled slightly around his ankles. The waistband felt loose. He brought a hand to his chest, to the fabric of his t-shirt. It was definitely baggier.
Chloe had pulled out her phone, tapping the screen. “Okay, logging Event One for the morning. Subject displayed pronounced disorientation and minor locomotor instability. Visible clothing misfit confirmed.” She looked up, smiling. “Five-foot-six. You’re shrinking fast, Matt. At this rate, you’ll be a garden gnome by dinnertime.”
The casual cruelty of it, married to the bland routine, was breaking him in a new way. There was no audience here, no performance. This was simply the new logistics of his existence.
“Dishes,” she said, pointing to the sink where her plate and mug sat. “Use the green sponge. Water shouldn’t be too hot.”
He moved to the sink, his movements stiff and careful. The faucet handle was larger in his grip. The plate felt broader. He was a child pretending to do adult chores. He could feel her eyes on his back, watching the way his now-ill-fitting clothes hung on his frame, watching his every hesitant move.
He was rinsing the butter knife when she spoke from right behind him. He hadn’t heard her move.
“You know,” she said, her voice conversational, close to his ear. “The really interesting part isn’t the physical change. It’s the psychological erosion. Your height is tied to your sense of presence in the world. To your authority. To your masculinity, if we’re being crude about it.” She paused, and he could feel her heat, her proximity. “Every inch you lose is a piece of that crumbling. You’re becoming less of a person. Literally. You’ll reach a point where no one would take you seriously, even if you could speak. You’ll be a punchline before you even open your mouth.”
As she delivered the last word, she let out a soft, almost thoughtful sigh that bled into a quiet, sustained release.
Tssssss…
Another inch vanished.
The compression was a nauseating drop in his stomach. The sink rim jumped up to meet him, now pressing against his lower ribs. He dropped the knife into the basin with a clatter. He was 5’5”. He gripped the edge of the counter, head swimming. The world was not his world anymore. It was a oversized diorama built for someone else.
Chloe laughed, a light, airy sound. “Whoops.Sorry. That one just slipped out. Thinking out loud, you know?” She patted his shoulder, a gesture that was both condescending and proprietary. “Finish up. I’ll be in the living room. Bring your coffee if you want it. Though you might want to switch to a smaller cup soon.”
She left him there, clinging to the counter. He waited for the dizzying sense of spatial wrongness to subside. It didn’t. It was his new normal, a normal that was deteriorating by the hour.
Somehow, he finished the dishes. Draining the sink felt like a monumental achievement. He turned and surveyed the kitchen from his new altitude. The table was taller. The chairs were like monuments. He picked up his now-cold coffee and walked to the living room, his gait careful, conscious of each step as a calculation of reduced stride length.
Chloe was on the sectional, her laptop open, typing. She didn’t look up as he entered. “Sit. Same spot as yesterday.”
He sat on the very edge of the cushion, his feet now barely touching the floor. He held the mug in both hands, for stability as much as warmth.
“Session One,” she announced, still typing. “Objective: to establish a correlation between the maternal-disappointment vocal tone and the shrinkage trigger, measuring for compounded psychological distress.” She finally looked at him, her expression one of mild, professional interest. “We’ll start simple. I’m going to use the voice. You will sit and listen. You will not make a sound. You will not move. Any vocalization or significant movement will be considered a failure of compliance, and we will extend the session by fifteen minutes. Understood?”
He nodded, a tight, terrified jerk of his head.
“Use your words, Matthew.” Her voice was still neutral.
“Yes,” he whispered.
“Yes, what?”
He swallowed. “Yes, I understand.”
“Good.” She set the laptop aside and composed herself. She straightened her posture, her face settling into that mask of weary, profound disapproval. The transformation was instant and chilling.
“Matthew,” she began, the mother-voice washing over him, cold and dense as fog. “I have been thinking about your situation. All night, in fact.”
A pause. A slow, shaking of her head. The disappointment was a tangible force.
“What a mess you have made. What a selfish, little mess.”
On the word ‘little’, she emphasized it, leaning forward slightly. A short, sharp sound accompanied the emphasis.
Pik!
The compression. The inward suck. Another inch gone.
He flinched, a full-body shudder, but he made no sound. He clenched his jaw so hard his teeth ached. He was 5’4”. The couch cushion swallowed more of him. He was disappearing into the furniture.
“You see?” the mother-voice continued, as if nothing had happened. “Even now, you’re reacting. You’re so focused on your own… physical discomfort, that you can’t even hear the truth I’m trying to impart. This is your central flaw. This self-absorption.”
She shifted, crossing her legs. A longer, softer release followed, like a period made of air.
Poo.
5’3”.
A small, choked gasp broke from him before he could stop it. It was purely instinctive, a reaction to the relentless, dual assault—the psychological lashing and the physical rewriting.
Chloe’s eyes, within the mask of motherhood, flashed with cold victory. “You made a sound, Matthew. That’s a failure. Session extended.” The maternal tone deepened, becoming even more stern. “You can’t even follow the simplest instruction. I ask for silence, and you give me… that. A pathetic little squeak. Is that all you have? After everything?”
She let the question hang, and with it, a low, rolling emission that seemed to last for three full seconds, a cascading dismissal.
Brrrrr-oh-oh-uhp.
5’2”.
He was now a foot shorter than her. He was looking up at a severe, disapproving maternal giant. The coffee mug in his hands was like a soup bowl. His feet dangled well above the floor, a child’s feet. Tears of helpless terror spilled over, tracing hot paths down his cheeks. He couldn’t stop them.
“And now the tears,” the voice sighed, a universe of exasperation in the words. “The performative tears. Do you think they move me? Do you think I see a man in pain? I see a boy. A selfish, stunted boy who cried until he got his wish, and now cries because he got it. You are the author of every single inch of this misery.”
She uncrossed and recrossed her legs, a swift, fluid motion.
Two quick, successive pops.
Pft. Pft.Two inches. One after the other.
The world became a funhouse. The compression was a violent, double punch to his core. The room elongated, the ceiling soaring away into a distant, impossible height. The coffee table was now a plateau. The television on its stand was a monolith.
5 feet even.
He was vanishing. The evidence was in the fabric swallowing his limbs, in the vast distance to the floor, in the colossal scale of the woman lecturing him from what felt like a mountain of cushions. The maternal archetype before him was no longer just a psychological trigger; she was a physical giantess, her disapproving face looming like a moon.
The conditioning held him in place, a prisoner of his own terror and the wish’s civil obedience. But inside, something was fracturing along a new seam. This was beyond fear of punishment. This was erasure. He was being unmade, not with violence, but with a terrible, casual inevitability, one soft, scornful puff at a time.
He was being unmade, not with violence, but with a terrible, casual inevitability, one soft, scornful puff at a time.
The maternal mask on Chloe’s face shattered. It didn’t slip or fade; it exploded into glittering, malicious delight. The performance was over. The raw, unfiltered experiment could now begin. She leaned forward, her giant’s face inches from his, the last vestiges of fake disappointment replaced by a vivisectionist’s glee.
“Five feet even,” she chirped, her own voice a shocking return. “A nice, round number. Milestone achieved. But we’re just warming up, Matt. Data needs volume. Repetition. We have to stress-test the system.”
She didn’t move back. She held her position, a predator savoring the prey’s frozen confusion. Her abdomen tightened visibly under the thin cotton of her t-shirt, a deliberate, muscular clench.
The first of the dozen was a sharp, percussive bark.
Pak!
The compression was a kick to his spine. He felt his vertebrae compact, a sickening crunchless collapse. The world yawed. 4’11”. He let out a strangled yelp, more surprise than protest, his hands flying to armrests that now seemed as distant and high as balcony railings.
Chloe laughed, a single “Ha!” that was itself a punctuation. “Four-eleven. You’re in the fours! Say goodbye to the fives, little man.”
She didn’t pause. She took a short, sharp breath and released two in quick succession, a brutal one-two punch.
Prrt. Prt.
The sensations overlapped, a nauseating double-helix of inward suction. His vision swam, the room stretching upward like taffy. His sweatpants, already pooled, became a denim puddle around his hips. He had to hunch his shoulders to keep the collar of his t-shirt from slipping off. 4’9”.
“Clothes are a total loss,” she observed, not even bothering to look at her phone now. She was watching him, her eyes drinking in every twitch, every wide-eyed glance at his own shrinking form. “You look like a toddler playing dress-up. A very, very scared toddler.”
Another trio followed, a rapid fusillade. They were drier now, quicker, like impatient sighs.
Pff. Pif. Puff.
Each was a distinct, separate theft. His height was peeling away in layers. 4’6”. The coffee table was now at his eye level when sitting. The patterned rug’s details swam into microscopic focus, each thread a cable. He was shrinking into the texture of the world.
“Four-six,” Chloe sang, her voice light and tuneful. “You’re shorter than a lot of ten-year-olds. I bet you were a cute kid. Before you became this… this lonely, desperate thing.” She shifted, rolling onto her side on the massive cushion, propping her head on her hand. She was a colossus lounging, studying an insect.
The next one was longer, wetter, a dismissive raspberry.
Thbbbbbt.
4’3”. The compression now carried a phantom wetness, a visceral internal squelch that made his stomach heave. He gagged, doubling over, his forehead nearly touching his knees, which were now drawn up high on the huge couch. The scent reached him—not the old, complex perfume of her dominion, but something sharper, more acidic, a chemical declaration of the process actively digesting him.
“Getting queasy?” she asked, genuine curiosity in her voice. “The vestibular system is probably in chaos. Your inner ear is screaming that down is suddenly there.” She pointed vaguely toward the floor, which now looked like a cliff drop. “It’ll give up soon. It’ll accept the new scale. Your brain will rewire itself to fit this dollhouse.”
She delivered another without ceremony, a compact, efficient poot.
4’1”. Three feet, eleven inches. He was sub-four-foot. The number echoed in his hollowing mind. He was leaving adult dimensions behind, crossing into a realm of furniture specifically built for others. A profound, cosmic loneliness washed over him, colder than the fear. He was becoming a visitor to the human scale, an outsider in a world of giants.
Chloe finally picked up her phone. She didn’t type. She held it up, pointing the camera at him. The red recording light glowed like a malevolent eye.
“Documenting,” she said, her voice cool and clear for the microphone. “Subject has passed below the four-foot threshold. Marked proprioceptive disassociation observed. Clothing is non-functional. Physical presentation is now explicitly childlike. Emotional response is transitioning from acute terror to a catatonic dissociative state. Note the vacant ocular focus.”
As she spoke, she let out two more. They were softer, almost gentle, like a final, condescending pat on the head.
Feh. Fff.
3’11”. 3’10”.
The recording light held him. He was data, captured in high definition, crumpled on a vast beige landscape of cushion, drowning in fabric. His own voice, when it came, was not his own. It was a high, reedy, prepubescent squeak, ripped from a place he didn’t recognize.
“Stop.” It was a whisper, a plea from a child’s lungs.
Chloe’s eyebrows shot up. She lowered the phone, her grin wide and dazzling. “What was that? That noise. It was like a mouse stepped on. Say it again.”
He couldn’t. His vocal cords felt strange, tight, incapable of his adult register. He just shook his head, a small, desperate motion.
“You have to speak up,” she chided, her tone mock-stern. Then she let out the final two of the dozen. They were deliberate, powerful, conclusive. A deep, resonant brooomp that vibrated the cushion, followed instantly by a sharp, slicing pik!
The double compression felt final. Like a door slamming shut at the end of a long, shrinking corridor.
3’8”.
He was three feet, eight inches tall.
The world was monumentally, oppressively huge. Chloe, reclining beside him, was a leviathan. The ceiling was a distant, white sky. The journey from the couch to the floor was a plummet. He clutched at the cushion, afraid he might fall into the vast canyon between the furniture and the rug.
Chloe set her phone down. She didn’t laugh this time. She just stared, her head tilted, her expression one of pure, awestruck fascination.
“Look at you,” she murmured, no mockery, just sheer wonder. “You’re tiny. Actually, legitimately tiny. I could pick you up with one hand.” She reached out, not to pick him up, but to place her hand, palm down, on the cushion beside him. Her hand was longer than his entire torso. Her fingers, splayed, were as thick as his thighs.
He stared at her hand, this fleshy continent beside him. The reality of his scale was now inescapable, a fact more terrifying than any pain the cage had ever produced. The cage itself, that dormant, scarred sun of agony, was now a laughably large, irrelevant artifact in a miniature body. His once-prized anatomy was a ridiculous, oversized toy on a doll.
“Three-eight,” she said softly, logging it into her memory. “From five-eight to three-eight in, what, twenty minutes? That’s a foot of height gone. A whole foot.” She finally looked back at his face, and her wonder curdled back into cruel amusement. “How does it feel? To be so small? I mean, you were always small, inside. A small, mean little heart full of small, mean little desires. But now… now the outside matches. That’s what the wish does, Matt. It makes the inside… manifest.”
She swung her legs off the couch and stood up.
From his perspective, it was a seismic event. A tower of flesh and fabric rising to an impossible height, blotting out the window light. She loomed over him, a skyscraper of a woman, her sweatpants seeming to fill his entire field of vision. He craned his neck back until it hurt, just to see her face, far above in the atmosphere.
“Chores are overdue,” she announced, her voice booming from the heavens. “You can’t do the dishes. You couldn’t reach the sink if I stacked you on a chair. So we adapt.” She pointed a gigantic finger toward the hallway. “There’s dust along the baseboards in the hall. You will crawl along and wipe it. With this.”
She bent down, a terrifying bowing of the world, and picked up a discarded white sock from the floor. She dropped it. It landed on him like a soft, smothering shroud, smelling of laundry detergent and her. It was as big as a blanket.
“Use the sock. Inch by inch. I’ll inspect your work later. If it’s not satisfactory, we’ll have another session. And Matt?” She leaned down, placing her colossal hands on her knees, bringing her planet-sized face a little closer. “If you try to hide, or stop, or do a lazy job, I will find you. And I will sit on you. Not to hurt you. Just to… feel what it’s like. I bet I wouldn’t even notice you were there. You’d be like a loose button under a cushion.”
She straightened up, turned, and walked out of the room. Each footstep was a distant, floor-shaking thunderclap that vibrated through the couch springs and up into his brittle bones.
Silence descended, a silence filled with the enormity of everything.
He lay there for a long time, buried under the sock, in the valley of the cushion. The urge to weep was gone, replaced by a blank, hyper-real awareness of space. The weave of the couch fabric beside his cheek was a topographic map of canyons and ridges. A single stray thread was a rope.
Moving was a calculated, perilous expedition. He pushed the weight of the sock off, gasping in the cool, vast air. Getting to the edge of the couch was a journey. He slid on his belly, peering over the precipice. The floor was a tan desert far below, strewn with dust bunnies that looked like tumbleweeds. The drop was dizzying, at least four times his own body height.
He had to do it. The command was iron in his tiny, re-wired mind. He turned, gripping the rough texture of the couch fabric with his small fingers, and lowered himself legs first, dangling. He let go.
The fall was brief, terrifying, and he landed with a jolt that sent shocks up his shins. He collapsed onto the rug, the fibers now as thick and springy as a forest floor. He lay there, breathing in the scent of dust and old wool, staring up at the continental shelf of the couch looming above.
The baseboard was a white, sheer cliff face running the length of the hall. The sock was a massive, burdensome sack. He began to crawl, dragging the sock behind him. It snagged on the rug’s terrain. Every few inches, he had to stop, bunch the colossal fabric in his arms, and wipe it against the white wood. It was utterly, absurdly futile. He was a grain of sand trying to clean a beach.
The scale broke his mind in quiet ways. A spiderweb in the corner was a gleaming, intricate palace. A dead fly was a grisly, bird-sized carcass. The sound of Chloe moving in the kitchen was a series of distant, tectonic booms and clashes.
He made it maybe three feet along the endless cliff face before exhaustion, not physical but existential, overwhelmed him. He sat with his back against the baseboard, the sock in his lap, and stared across the vast plain of the hallway floor. The distant kitchen doorway was a golden archway a world away, from which emanated the sounds of his giant.
He was not a man. He was not even a pet. He was a diminishing spec, a disappearing footnote in Chloe’s dissertation on control. The fear had mutated into a kind of awful, serene acceptance. This was his universe now. These dust fibers. This looming baseboard. The distant, booming footfalls.
He heard her stop moving in the kitchen. A new silence pulsed.
Then, a sound carried down the hall, clear and deliberate. Not a trigger. A message. A long, satisfied, rumbling declaration of her presence, her power, her ongoing, normal digestion.
Broooooaaaaap.
It didn’t shrink him. The parameter had been met, for now. But it echoed in the vast space, a thunderous reminder that the engine of his unmaking was always on, always working, always turning his very being into nothing more than a measure of her casual, biological truth. He pulled the sock over his head, hiding in its soft, scent-filled darkness, and waited for the next quake of her approach.