[Shifted] The Midnight Snack

The fluorescent light in the kitchen hummed, a low, lonely sound that filled the silence of the late hour. Quinn Carter sighed, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. He had only wanted something simple; a late-night snack to stave off the hunger that always seemed to arrive when he was most tired. He had prepared a hot dog, the mustard drizzled in a yellow streak across the bun.

As he walked back from the sink after washing the stray bits of condiment from his hands, a terrible disaster was about to unfold.

In the shadows beneath, a group of figures scrambled through the darkness. They were A.N.T.S.: individuals whose very biological signatures had been fractured by a malfunction from their size devices. They were survivors of a technical catastrophe, now scattered like debris across a vast wasteland.

They had sought refuge in the air conditioning vent, but a sudden burst of air from the vent grate had blasted them out into the open, scattering them across the room like autumn leaves…

On the floor, A man, his eyes wide with terror, gripped the hand of his girl. He pulled her behind him as his breath came in ragged gasps. He looked behind, and his heart stopped. Above them loomed a gargantuan, rubber-soled mountain, the underside of Quinn’s sneaker, descending with the force of a falling meteor.

“Run!” he screamed, but his voice was a microscopic squeak against the thoom of the approaching shoe.

The woman stumbled, her tiny feet slipping on the smooth, cold surface. She was terrified, her eyes wide and reflecting the distant, looming shadows of the kitchen furniture. She glanced back once, and her heart seized.

“Don’t look back!” the man urged, his muscles screaming as he tried to pull her forward. He felt a surge of desperate strength, a need to protect her and get her into the safety beneath the table.

He felt a sudden resistance as a crash exploded behind him. He tumbled, his weight shifting violently. In that split second of imbalance, he continued to never let go.

The man sprawled forward onto the cold floor, his face pressing against the grain. He looked up ahead, eyes wide with a sickening realization…

The light of the kitchen flickered overhead, casting a harsh glow on the floor. There, directly in front of him, was a gruesome, unrecognizable smear. It was a dark, glistening pile of viscera and gore, a tiny, broken ruin of red and pulp that seemed far too mangled to have ever contained a person.

His hand, still gripping tight as he could were trembling, clutching nothing but a single, pale, severed arm a limp, tiny relic of the girl he had been trying so hard to save. The man stared at the mess on the floor, then back at the limb in his hand, the silence of the kitchen now feeling heavy, suffocating, and utterly permanent.

Nearby, trapped in the middle of the chair’s seat, another man sat frozen. Another A.N.T. who had been caught in the shadow of Quinn’s descent. He couldn’t move; he could only stare up at the massive, denim-clad expanse of Quinn’s thighs as it moved toward the seat.

The man’s eyes locked onto the descending weight, a silent prayer dying in his throat as the heavy fabric of Quinn’s jeans blotted out the light…

The man could hear it: the low creak of the chair’s internal structure under a mounting, gargantuan weight. Each movement from the giant above sent tremors through him. It felt as though an earthquake were occurring within the seat itself.

The man looked up, his eyes wide, staring at the underside of Quinn’s denim-clad thigh. The fabric was so close now that he could see the individual, thick weaves of the thread, looking like massive, braided ropes. The weight was immense, a crushing, suffocating pressure that only got worse as the moments passed.

He felt the air being forced from his lungs as Quinn’s ass compressed around him. There was no escape, no way to signal for help; how could a person scream when their entire world was being flattened by the simple act of someone sitting down?

He gripped the fabric of his pants, his tiny fingers digging into the threads, but it was useless. The pressure increased, a slow, agonizingly steady descent of mass that made his bones ache and his vision blur. He felt the heavy, warm weight of Quinn’s body pressing down through the padding, a literal weight of existence that was far too much for a single, tiny soul to bear.

The man closed his eyes, waiting for his inevitable end. The last thing he heard was the mundane, heavy sigh of Quinn Carter, a sound of a man simply settling in to eat his snack, completely unaware that beneath him, a life was being extinguished under the weight of a casual, unthinking moment.

On the counter, a woman, coated from head to toe in a thick, viscous yellow substance, struggled to pull herself from the mound of mustard. She was screaming, her tiny hands clawing at the air, trying to signal the giant looming above. “Hey! Down here! Please!” she shrieked, but to Quinn, it was nothing more than the faint squeak that wasn’t even audible in the slightest.

Instead, Quinn leaned forward, his glasses sliding slightly down his nose. His eyes had caught a movement next to the plate. A speck quivering on its surface.

His brow furrowed. He leaned in closer, his massive face looming like a celestial body over the table. “What is that?” he muttered, his voice a low rumble that vibrated through the very wood the woman stood upon.

The woman was paralyzed. She was trapped in the middle of a vast, dark landscape. When the shadow fell over her, it felt more like a fleshy, mountainous eclipse. She looked up, and instead of the ceiling, she saw the underside of Quinn’s chin, a landscape of skin so vast and textured it looked like an alien planet.

Quinn reached out, his massive, blunt fingertips approaching her. To the woman, it was a descending pillar of flesh. She could see the deep, canyon-like ridges of his fingerprint, looking like colossal, terrifying valleys of skin. She scrambled backward, but there was nowhere to go…

The woman looked up, her eyes wide with hopeless terror. She saw the tip of his fingers hovering just inches above her; a massive weight that loomed like the end of the world.

Quinn pressed his fingertips together, intending only to grab the “speck” for closer inspection.

The impact was instantaneous…

There was a simple, tiny, microscopic pop, a sound so faint it wouldn’t have even registered to a nearby insect. The woman’s entire body compressed. The immense, soft pressure of Quinn’s skin met the fragile, puny resistance of her tiny frame.

Quinn pulled his finger back, a look of mild confusion crossing his face. He held his hand up to the light, squinting through his glasses at the tip of his finger. There, embedded in the deep, fleshy whorls of his fingers, was a dark, wet, unrecognizable pile of mush. It was a tiny, glistening smudge of viscera, a microscopic ruin that looked more like a bit of damp debris than anything organic.

“Could it be…?” he whispered, the thought of a Tiny briefly crossing his mind like a passing cloud. But then, he looked at the meaningless stain on his skin and shook his head. His lack of confidence, his habit of dismissing the very thought, “Nah… too small…”

He rubbed the tips of his fingers against the table, trying to wipe the “dirt” away, discarding the remains of a life as if it were nothing more than kitchen grime, leaving the woman’s memory to vanish for good…

Hungry and distracted, Quinn picked up the hotdog…

A sudden upheaval sent her tumbling into the dark, warm maw, plunging her into a claustrophobic darkness. She was trapped in a tomb of processed meat and bread, the scent of salt and vinegar overwhelming her senses.

Around her, the heavens roared… Wet crunching that vibrated through her very marrow. She felt the immense, crushing pressure of Quinn’s teeth through the soft mass of the food. Each bite was a pulverizing force that threatened to flatten her along with the meat. She screamed into the darkness, but there was no one who could hear her, only the wet mastication of a man enjoying his late-night snack.

Then came the descent…

A sudden, powerful surge of muscle swept her downward. The world became a dark tunnel of heat and pressure. She felt herself being pushed through the tight, muscular canal of Quinn’s throat, a terrifying, suffocating transit that left her gasping for air that wasn’t there.

Finally, she emerged into a new kind of hell. She tumbled into a vast, churning lake of warmth. The environment was dark and utterly alien. The liquid around her was thick, heavy, and intensely hot. She struggled to move; her limbs were trapped in the thick, semi-liquid mass of the chewed bolus that had carried her into this hell.

Then the heat began to intensify… The gastric acids, potent and hungry, began to seep into the mush surrounding her. She felt the liquid begin to soak through her tiny clothes, a searing, caustic burn that ate at her very skin.

She tried to push herself upward, to find something solid to cling to, but there was only the heavy, undulating weight of the digesting food. The acid was everywhere, seeping into the cracks of the bread, swirling around her in the dark, pulsing chamber. It was a slow, agonizing dissolution.

As she drifted in the darkness, the stinging pain became an all-encompassing roar. She felt herself becoming part of the very thing that was destroying her, her edges softening, her strength fading, as the biological fire of Quinn’s digestion continued to melt her essence away into nothingness….

With a small burp, Quinn sat back, patting his stomach, feeling a slight pang of indigestion. He looked around his quiet, empty apartment, unaware that he had just become the architect of a small-scale apocalypse. He felt a momentary sense of peace in what he thought was his solitary room, never realizing that a world had been crushed, eaten, and erased beneath his view.

 

Commission for @VekelM