Part Two

I woke up on the floor of some metal room. Every inch of my body ached deep, like getting hit and hit and hit all over my arms and legs and back. I felt beaten up and half-smothered, just left there in the dark. My face and hands were still grimy and sticky from whatever I’d been sprayed with and it seemed like I’d been left for dead in some dark equipment tunnel, my body half covered in heavy canvas tarps with big hunks of metal here and there, looking like the parts left out in a shipyard or a construction site. Other than the tarps over me I was butt naked and felt bruised and abraded, like they had torn my clothes off of me. It feels like hours that I just lie there, curled up in pain before I even realize that the light around fifteen feet over must be a way out. I see something big blocking the way and hear a crazy distorted PA blasting something.

Barely conscious, eyes unfocused and still dizzy, my hands scrabbling at the cold floor, I crawl towards the light and just as I remember that I’m completely naked Anne reaches down and picks me up.

She’s huge, screaming down at me, her hands wrapping all the way around me, her palms the size of sofa cushions. She presses me too tight, and that hurts even more, and I squirm in her grasp while her huge face looms over me, enormous lips blasting me with things I can’t think straight enough to understand. I hang there, held two stories up in the air, my bare legs dangling. The only thing that I fear more than this vast thing holding me is that she’ll let me go.

I try to say something and my entire throat rips with new pain, leaving me unable to talk. Only the slightest sound comes out of my lips. I barely hear it, so she surely doesn’t. Each and every bone and joint screaming for relief, a strange tearing feeling seeming to pull at all of my skin; it’s all I can do to focus my eyes and look around. Oh Jesus! Anne hasn’t grown, I’ve shrunk. I look at the monuments that every little thing has become, the cliff sides of the desk beneath me and the enormous plain of metal I’ve been lifted from. My own skin seems to ripple and glow in some way that I can’t make sense of. My neck feels pulled back and forth with every move as these hands, suddenly the center of my world, lower me to a flat surface.

As the hands let go my legs give beneath me and I look far up to Anne’s face, fighting to understand what she’s saying to me. She says that we’ve just got to get out. This’ll wear off, we’ll do something, but for now we just have to get away unseen. I protest, surely something there can fix this. But with my voice a tiny squeak, rambling, incoherent, I’m ignored.

Looking around the room, she tries to find something to carry me in. She carries me in her hands, holds me out in front of her like a boiling pot of spaghetti. I’m lifted and turned around, raised and lowered as she holds me over drawers, bags, garbage cans. At last she grabs an instrument cart and empties out the largest drawer, shoving cables and manuals to one side, making room, then her hands come down again, lift me up, and push me in, closing the drawer, leaving me in the dark metal box. I hear the latch click shut.

My ears ringing from the terrible clatter around me as the cart is pushed, dragged, pulled right to the door of the lab. I’m pulled out of the drawer into the cold air and wrapped in her jacket before she strides as quickly as she can to the car, unlocks the door, and drops me onto the seat. I poke my head out over the lapel, my hands clutching the fabric, which feels like rough canvas. I see her looking down at me, my head, bare shoulders, and tiny hands just visible.

She’s talking to herself. Where to put me? Where will the guards not look? I’m crippled with fear and shock, letting out a peep of terror as she talks to herself about putting me in the trunk, under the seats, under her legs. She looks back and sees the gym bag with her sweaty workout gear, now mixed in with her dirty laundry from the last four days, and relaxes a bit. No male guard will want to look at that too closely. She pulls everything out and, mercy of mercies, gives me time to pull myself into the bag, before she covers me up with her clothes, putting her crumpled up panties on the top. Smiling, she opens up the glove box, pulling out tampons and maxi pads that she empties on top, sprinkling them across the top of the bag, half-zipped on the seat beside her.

I hide beneath, skin rubbed raw by everything and suffocated by the close, dank air filled with the stale smell of her days old sweat and fatigue. I can see almost nothing through the mesh on one side, blocked off by sweatpants and blouses that seem to weight tons. I feel the car stop at the front gate and hear her manage to sound calm. Just in to pick up a few things. Quiet day. Yes, the weekends do seem to get shorter every year.

We pull out into traffic and I scramble my way up to the opening, grasping for the brass cubes, the size of dice, that are the teeth of the zipper. I get a few minutes of clear air, looking up at her. With the wind whistling by I don’t even try to ask where we’re going. She looks down, sees me, and looking more annoyed than upset, pushes me back down like a foolish puppy before closing up the bag. The humiliation as I find that I am too weak to open the zipper is one thing too many and I cry like I haven’t cried in years. When the car stops one last time the bag is lifted with me in it and carried past a front door and through a house. I’m dropped what feels like yards. She opens the bag and finds me curled up in her clothes, arms and legs pulled in and crying uncontrollably as she picks me up and drops me onto her bed.

“I think that we’ve been through enough for now.” She says as she drops a scarf on the bed in front of me. I sniffle, sit up, pulling the scarf to me, still hunched over and aching. I’m almost too exhausted to care that I’m now covered in a pink scarf printed with flowers and butterflies. I shiver, freezing in the air conditioning, and wrap the scarf around me, layer on top of layer, trying to protect myself from what feel like storm gusts from the vents in the ceiling. I lie back down, and, too worn down to do anything else, drop off to sleep, seeing this woman who now shapes everything putting another scarf over me as I lose consciousness.

I wake hours later with her sitting by me on the bed, worried and tense. “Are you doing better?” she asks me and as she asks I realize that I’m no longer cold; I’m hot, burning with fever, with new sorenesses replacing the ones just starting to fade. I look up to her and croak out, my voice still a flattened chirp, “Please, take me to the bathroom?” She picks me up, still in her scarves, and as she carries me, my stomach churns and I vomit uncontrollably, on her, the scarves, the floor.

She puts me down on a clean spot on the floor and rushes out and as I sit there the spasms hit me again and I lose all control, shit and piss squirting out of me, leaving stains in the scarves and spreading around me. I spasm again and more comes out of me. She reappears down the hall, paper towels and cleaning liquid in hand, and sees me, twisting in pain and unable to meet her eyes. I gasp out an apology and she covers up her momentary disgust. “I hope this won’t last. Thanks to you my daughter’s away until Wednesday night, so we’ve got some time.” She picks me up and carries me to the sink, putting me in and running the tap over me as I flinch away from the torrent of water. “Just stay there; I’ll be back in a few minutes.” she tells me, pouring in some soapy liquid as she turns the water off. A minute later she ducks back in and grabs more paper towels, barely glancing at me.

I pull myself up and look over the edge of the sink, realizing that, slippery and weak, and twelve feet above a hard floor, I’m flat out unable to do anything. More pain and I soil myself and the water. I struggle to keep my mouth above bubbles the size of softballs and strong enough to push against me. My grip weakens and the bubbles get in and the taste of soap fills my mouth.

Waiting for Anne to come back I become newly afraid. Where is she? Where did she go? Hours seem to be passing and I start to worry; did they find us? Is she dead? Did she die before telling them and have I been left here, naked again and utterly cut off? Yet again my bowels loosen and brown tendrils drift up to the surface of the water. Ashamed, I try to rub myself clean, accomplishing little and leaving my entire body from the neck down smeared with revolting brown muck. The intense floral smell of the soap just makes the growing smell of my own waste worse and I try, with some success, to not vomit again.

This is what I’m reduced to: being proud that I only shit myself twice. Even worse, I am proud and I brim with the hope that when (oh, please, when and not if) Anne comes back I’ll be able to tell her of my new accomplishment. My shame broadens and somehow her absence begins to feel like my fault. What did I do to make her leave me here? All of my pathetic will focuses on my desire for her to come back.

Finally I hear her steps coming back and she comes in the door. She’s surprised and a bit confused by the relief in my still pain-filled eyes as she washes me “Are you done peeing and pooping yet? Good.”, dries me off, and carries me, this time with a sense of purpose to her step.

I’m dreading what comes next and somehow I’m not surprised when I’m lowered onto a changing table and she starts to put oil and powder on me, treating my balls and penis as matter-of-factly as a pen or a sock. “Well, now I’m glad that I kept this stuff from when Becky was a baby.” she says. It starts to become real to me that none of these decisions are mine anymore. She pulls out a box bigger than I am and the shadow of it over me for a moment is almost worse than when she pulls out a diaper and fastens me into it, turning me over one last time, sitting me down, and settling into a nearby chair to look at me.

I’m still sick and after a minute I vomit up a bit of saliva. She reaches out with a baby wipe and cleans off my face without even asking. “I can do that myself” I tell her and she sardonically sits the baby wipe box down next to me, so big that it comes up to my waist, and watches as I try to pull a wipe loose. Struggling, I get one wipe half out in five minutes, my hands keep pulling loose and hitting my face. Finally she reaches out again, pulls the wipe free and hands it to me, bigger to me than a small blanket and so wet that I feel soaked and immediately start to shiver again.

Taking this cue, she pulls out a large cardboard box from a jumble that looks just dropped there and starts to hold up baby clothes towards me. I watch as well as I can, calling out when something looks possible. She brings over a T-shirt, plain white. I briefly see Baby Gap on the label, and she ceremoniously hands it to me. I take it and only then see a little frill of lace at the neck and edge of each sleeve. “I can’t wear this.” I say, my heart expanding back with my having been at long last asked my opinion. She looks at it again, shrugs, and digs until she finds a plain T-shirt, not so clean, and hands me that. I’m the right height, but much narrower, so the shirt hangs loose on me.

Pants are no better. She starts out asking me but neither of us can judge what will and won’t fit and I’m helpless with fastenings heavy as shot puts and meant for full-sized hands. After a while she just pulls out each likely pair, dresses me in it, picks me up, looks as me, sometimes asks how it feels, and finally settles on a pair of baby jeans overalls that stay on but stretch only past my knees. I start to complain about the flowers embroidered on them and the rabbits on the buttons. For the first time the fatigue that she’s been holding back shows on her face and she, without a word, picks me up, turns me over and spanks me hard, once, then puts me back down. I only cry a little.

Over the next few days my fever gets worse and I vomit and shit constantly. Anne did get to grab some binders on the way out and they explain what’s happening to me. She says that the process has a second stage, a virus, that shrinks you down a further twenty percent, pulling off body tissue, a little bit everywhere, even somehow softening and shrinking bone. All of this has to come out somehow and I exist, tossing and turning, in a painful haze of my own spasms and outpouring waste.

My hair has all fallen out. Anne tries to explain something to me about boundary layer stresses but all that I know is that my now bare arms and legs get even colder when the chills come and that with this constant fever it won’t grow back. My pubic hair is all gone and I get cold even faster. Anne jokes that at least it makes cleanup easier.

She keeps me mostly in a crib, having now moved it and the changing table into her bedroom. The sides of the crib are up, trapping me in. With my constant tossing and turning it’s the only way to keep me from falling the crippling distance to the hardwood floor. She tells her friends that she’s caring for a sick baby with a contagious disease that Anne’s immune to. In a rare moment of open anger she takes things from my wallet, which she had also grabbed, and makes them into a mobile that she suspends far above my helplessly reaching hands.

In my more coherent moments I scream at Anne, convinced that if we had only stayed a while longer perhaps the whole thing could have been reversed. She does as much research as time allows but stops even telling me how it goes as each update sets me off again. My little bird voice, which I realize is not from my being sick but from my vocal cords now being as small as the rest of me, just enrages me further. She mostly tries to ignore me, treating my rants as just a symptom of the fever. Frustrated, my tiny piping gets flat out abusive. I call her foolish, tell her that her panic has killed us both, berate her for not getting me access to my consulting resources. She is tolerant until one night I let out what she now already suspects, that I had seen bullet holes at Jimmy’s and hadn’t told her. She also realizes now about the other deaths and is astonished that I had risked getting us killed. She is even more pissed when she figures out that her daughter’s now at risk too.

Now tired of considering my welfare at the sake of hers, Anne also figures out that she’s got to put in an appearance at work. The last thing that we can afford is for her to look conspicuous. She leaves, saying that she’ll be back in a few hours. I’m pleased as it gets. I’m feeling much better and have been hiding it. Anne had found that the virus pushes out waves of growth hormones occasionally to give the bones time to adjust and clearly the first of these has come. When she leaves I start the hour-long process of wriggling past the mattress and springs and dropping to the floor. The past days have left me fragile and shaky, the strength that I had always counted on seems like a distant myth.

She now dresses me every morning which leaves me warm enough to try this. I’m grateful for my fresh diaper, tight and in place. Anne’s daughter is away for the day so I have the run of the house. The bedroom door is open a bit so I can make my way out to the hall. My bare feet feel for the first time the bumpy surface of her wood floor. I pass the spot in the hall where she had put me down and for a moment my shame at my new life overcomes me. I’ll make it. There’s got to be a fix. I just need to reach the computer.

It takes me ages to find the living room, crouching down in fear every time I hear a neighborhood cat or dog, afraid that a loose kitchen door will let one in. I can hear scratching sounds, some sort of scrabbling, but it doesn’t sound right. For a while I hide behind a planter and wait but my eagerness gets me moving again. This is never going to end until I get connected, find out what’s going on.

I’m a third of the way across the living room when I see a trail of ants. They’re huge, each as big as my thumb, and even from here I can smell sort of acidic chemical reek. They’re jerky, freakish movements, familiar from a hundred nature videos, are still alien, utterly wrong. I shiver and shake as my brain struggles with caveman urges of fight or flight. And all this while I watch them, fascinated, and they each make their way along. I wait, trying to think my way around the problem while reflexes from deep within me scream, “enemy! danger! evil! kill!, run!” I’m paralyzed and more than a bit crazy and that, finally is what snaps me out of it.

No, I think. Not me, you evil fuckers, I think. This isn’t a B movie and they’re not the size of a pickup truck. They’re just fucking small rats, I tell myself.

Just rats with shiny shells and bigger teeth and legs I can rip off and tear apart. I can do this. I need to do this. I can’t afford to not get across this floor. I look for a weapon but there isn’t one. I’m just going to have to sneak right past them. I stiffen myself up and take one more step. My feet don’t want to move. Oh god, how aware I am of my bare feet, my bare shaky legs, my aching, sore arms, m empty hands. Another step. Another. I can do this.

And one turns its head. And stops. And another one does. I take one more step and they’re headed my way. Shit! You fuckers! Damn you! No! Don’t you fucking

dare! I back up a few steps and now tey’re clacking and hissing their way as fast as they can. I start to run and realize they’re catching up. I turn, face them, they come at me, i reach down and grab one, its jaws snapping and I’m slamming it against the floor over and over when the other one comes at my leg. I try to step on it but it’s way too big, the shell too thick and strong. It tries to move aside, my foot slides off, it snaps at my leg and gets my foot. Agh! the pain! You fucker, no! Gonna get you! It snaps at me, backing off a bit. I grab at it and miss, my leg exploding it pain, burning and cut. I reach, it snaps, I stumble forwards but get it, grabbing it in the middle. It tries to turn its head and bite me and I hit it against the floor. again and again, the reek of it drenching me. Finally I can see that it’s dead and a dozen others are looking up, around. I run, going back the way I came.

I reach the hallway and keep running, picturing a ripping, killing, acid dripping nightmare right behind me, a hundred vicious little shining black monsters about to rip me open and eat me alive. In a little while I stumble, fall over, land on the floor. I look up, there’s nobody there but me. I’m all alone. I lie there and catch my breath. My foot hurts, bleeding a bit, the pain getting worse and the skin turning red. I’m past fear, past anything but awareness of the pain. It’s all too much. I lie there, silent, curled up, pressing my foot to me, not knowing what to do, not thinking much of anything.

But it’s actually not that bad. The pain fades, I lie there, in a while I sit up. I sit there and just breath. The pain is bad and I’m still bleeding a bit but my mind is back. Nothing has changed. I’ve still got to reach that computer. I get up, limping, and make my way back to the living room, looking around all the time, expecting a wave of tearing insect jaws to appear at any moment. I reach the end of the living room and realize that there’s a way past the evil fuckers anyway. The trail of ants is thinning and it only crosses along one corner. If I go the long way around I never even need to get near them. No question, then.That’s what I’m doing. So I take my time ad work my way around and as the desk gets closer, the whole horrible experience fades away as this long-desired connection to the outside world calls to me.

I finally reach the computer but how am I going to get up to it? It’s on and I know that Anne’s web connection is one of those high-speed always-on things. I’m maddened all over again as I try one thing after another to get up to the desktop and fail. I pull loose thread from a rug and try to make a rope but can’t find anything on the desk that I can throw it up to, only managing to knock little things off the desk and onto the floor. I can climb up her chair, but it’s pulled back too far across the room. I eventually climb the side of a big wicker basket, tearing bits loose as I go to get better hand holds, and pull myself up to the desktop from there.

I walk over and sit down in front of the keyboard and mouse. Almost there. But not. Nothing I do will open a browser. Every time I try I get some sort of error message. I can’t get past it and as I sit there I hear Anne’s car pulling up.

From the desktop I can see plenty of ways down so that’s not too bad, but when I get down I find that I can’t run. The diaper bunches up between my legs and my attempts to run are more waddle and fall. The jumper I’m in makes it worse, designed for a baby not yet walking, it pulls at my legs. So that’s how she finds me, falling down on my face in the hall, trying to run away, my jumper all askew and my flailing arms trying to catch my fall.

“What are you DOING out here!?” “How did you get out of that crib?!” Can’t I leave you alone at all?!” She grabs me up and her yelling just gets louder as she sees the state of the living room, the rug torn up and bits of pottery where I knocked over a pencil jar. When she realizes what I was trying to do all of her accumulated anger and frustration come out. “Don’t you think I tried that? How could you? You’re gone. Your records are gone, your money is gone. It’s all gone. Your big bad firm says you never worked for them and there’s a warrant out for your arrest. Do you WANT them to find out what we did? What we saw?” “From now on you wlll pay attention to me! You will do as you are told when and how I tell you! The food that you eat and the bed that you sleep on are provided by me! Everything keeping you safe is ME! Do as I tell you and I’ll take care of you until we can work this out. Don’t and I’ll see to it that you’re sorry! You’ve been acting like a child so from now on you’re going to get treated like one!”

And as I twisted in her hands, kicking and trying to get away from what I knew was coming, she pulled down my pants, pulled off my diaper, and spanked me again and again while I cried out through the tears that came all too quickly that I was sorry, so sorry and would be better if she would please, please just stop. By that night the fever was back and I was more helpless than ever, lying limp in a barred crib while she worked on papers on the other side of the room.

When she was changing me later she saw the ant bites and as she put lotion on the bites told me that I had been lucky. Some of the local ants were poisonous and at my size I could have been poisoned and overrun. She said that this just proved that I couldn’t ever again be left alone.

Two days later she brought me back out to the living room and sat me on the desk. I looked up at her, watching her face, eager to be good and for the first time physically afraid of what would happen if I wasn’t. She started by saying that from now on I had to follow house rules. I was to call her Mrs. Thomas unless she allowed me to do otherwise. If she gave me something to eat I was to eat it without reluctance or complaint. No foul language. Any four-letter words or anything even close and my mouth would be washed out with soap. I was to be respectful and never interrupt. If I was bad and had to be punished, resisting or acting sullen would just make it worse. The list went on and I can tell you that I paid attention to every word.

All of this was leading up to something but I now knew not to question. But it was bigger than I expected. She paused for a bit and then told me that she wouldn’t be able to watch me all the time and so it was time that somebody else share the responsibility.

I couldn’t understand who it could be when she said that it would be her five year-old daughter Rebecca. She would be told that I was a very special toy and that if anybody else ever found out about me I would be taken away. I was to be respectful and polite and always call her Miss Rebecca. If I ever told her anything at all about my life before that day I would be instantly handed off to somebody far away as she would not have her daughter endangered any further.

She then dressed me up more formally then she ever had before, going so far as to try to find shoes that would fit, finally settling on a big pair of patent leather shoes held on with three pairs of socks. I was placed on the floor and warned once again to be obedient and respectful or I would be made very sorry. My hands reflexively reached to protect my backside as she said that last and I gave all of my somewhat fever-addled concentration to being just what she wanted. When she told me to stay where I was I did, waiting as she left the room until I heard her coming back accompanied by the sound of an eager child. The door opened and Mrs. Thomas came in holding the hands of a girl trying to look serious and grasping her mother’s hand. As soon as she saw me she rushed over and picked me up, crushing me in her arms, still almost twice my height and strong enough to crush my chest, leaving me gasping for breath as she swung me around.

“Now remember what I said. Be careful with him. He’s fragile and very valuable.”

“He’s great! he’s great! I want him I want him I want him!!!” What’s his name?”

“Well, huh, I don’t know.” What do you want to call him?”

“Look at his big shoes!” Aren’t they cute?!” I’ll, um, I’ll call him Bootsie!”

“Bootsie! Bootsie! Bootsie!”

“Sweetie, I’m not sure that that’s a good name for a…”

“Bootsie! I LIKE Bootsie! He’s GOTTA be Bootsie!”

“Why not? Bootsie it is.”

As I hung there in her arms being shaken up and down by her manic enthusiasm I had looked up to Mrs. Thomas, ready to be protected from this new threat and saw only pleased tolerance for her happy daughter. My danger, overwhelming to me, slipping to the very edge of her awareness.

Miss Rebecca was delighted with me for hours, as I became the best doll that she could imagine. Watched over by Mrs. Thomas, Miss Rebecca had me bow, dance, sit, stand, over and over, getting angry whenever I slowed down. I feared Miss Rebecca in ways I never had her mother, who had saved and protected me. Miss Rebecca’s gleeful experiments that day had me as their primary prop and the combination of the fumbling of a five-year old over twice my size with a strength that swept me over and pushed me down. She hurt me in big ways and little ones and she left me afraid and anxious every minute, always cowering a bit before her.

It felt wonderfully safe and familiar when Mrs. Thomas at last told Miss Rebecca that we had to stop for today and brought me back to the bedroom. Miss Rebecca was brought along to watch and begged to be allowed to change me and put me to bed. Mrs. Thomas handed me back to Miss Rebecca and set up a stool by the changing table for her.

As deep as my shame had been being reduced to helplessness in the hands of a grown woman, it was nothing to the utterly humbling experience of being stripped naked by a child and lectured firmly by her about my incontinence and weakness. I could only give in to her as she turned me this way and that, patting me on the head, making a child’s mistakes; washing my face with a wipe that she had just used on my bottom, missing spots and leaving me feeling still soiled as she dressed me in a new diaper. As she experimented on me, trying first one thing and then another, Mrs. Thomas stood back, speaking gently not to me but to this overpowering giant before me.

When she dropped a bottle of baby oil on me I started an angry response that I instantly regretted as she leaned in, wagging her finger at me and telling me not to be bad or she would have to punish me herself. I heard Mrs. Thomas’ voice past my confined view as she praised her daughter for her scolding and giving suggestions on what to say next time. Next time? My situation further sank in as I saw that this child, younger that shoes that I owned not too long ago, a girl who couldn’t even read, could casually force me to do whatever she wanted whenever she wanted. And worse, she clearly intended to.

After that time, my time as Miss Rebecca’s toy defined my days. I was the center of her tea parties and the reliably entertaining game of her idle summer hours. I was also her servant, helping to clean her room and being given a small brush to brush her hair while she watched television or played with something else. It didn’t take long for her to discover that I fit far better into doll’s clothing than the baby clothes that I had worn up until then. I spent many hours being dressed up in ball gowns, party dresses, summer frocks, most of which still had fasteners too large and tightly in place for me to do or undo. Sometimes Miss Rebecca would order me to take some item of clothing off or on and when my small weak hands failed me she would delight in patiently explaining to me what I had done wrong.

Mrs. Thomas was very happy about all of this. She had been told by the workers at a childcare center that her daughter was too withdrawn, wasn’t coping well with her father’s death and acted threatened around other kids. Mrs. Thomas loved seeing her daughter talking, doing things, coming up with games and with tricks for me to do; she set the loosest possible terms on Miss Rebecca’s play. I found out fast that if Miss Rebecca did something do me it didn’t do any good to tell her Mrs. Thomas because she would always believe her daughter before me.

When my hair, just starting to grow back in, turned out to be a color that Miss Rebecca didn’t like she tried coloring my head with felt tip pens, wanting me to be a redhead and then a brunette. When she wasn’t happy with that, hair from another doll was glued to my head. I went along, afraid of what she might do to get it off more than the discomfort of her attempts to fix it.

As the weeks passed I was taught more complicated tricks. Her obedient pet, I was trained like a puppy to beg, roll over, point, heel. Enjoying the training far more than wanting the results, Miss Rebecca kept making the standards higher and higher, insuring many scoldings and punishments. I was always eager for her approval, because her punishments were harsher than her mother’s. A “good dolly” became a great treat and I looked forward to a small crumb of cookie or chocolate if I was really good. Later on, I was trained to act like a circus animal, walking on top of a rolling ball and jumping through hoops. At family meals Miss Rebecca kept me on a seat beside her or in her lap, having me beg for my food, leaving my diet mostly composed of brussel sprouts, rejected bits of sandwich and the other things she didn’t want to eat and Mrs. Thomas said were okay for her to feed me.

Miss Rebecca was a smart girl and she started coming up with other ways to punish me. The rare times that I started to say anything about my old life she would push my head into a dish of water, holding me down for as long as a minute, telling me to wash my head out. I became afraid to even think anything that might bring me so close to drowning. She also found a few things by accident, discovering that, especially if I was wet, nine-volt batteries from her toys could make me do a lot. She was all-powerful in my small world and like a puppy, I watched her all the time. Only two things mattered - making her happy and doing as I was told.

After that time I’d tried to use the computer, they made sure I couldn’t get out again. A thick slab of wood was put under the mattress of my crib and unless I was being actively watched, my wrist was chained to some nearby object, using a length of chain picked out at a jewelry store by Miss Rebecca and locked with a matching clasp. When Miss Rebecca played with me in the living room Mrs. Thomas always kept an eye on me, telling her daughter not to ever let me out of her sight. I had now shrunken to not much over a foot in height so Miss Rebecca got in the habit of putting me in a purse that she carried with her, even to the bathroom, and locking me in it whenever she thought best.

With the school year starting and my sickness subsiding I hoped to finally get some time alone, at least in the crib. Instead, I found that Miss Rebecca spent even more of her time with me when she got home, eager to tell me about all of her new friends and how her day went and determined to do even more in what time she had.

At this point Miss Rebecca decided that I was, in fact, her baby. I was kept in some variation on baby clothes almost all the time and told to call her mommy. While she didn’t completely stop my mealtime begging she now started asking her mother how to feed me from a bottle. Now that I could keep food down I was being fed all the time she was there, as bottle after bottle was pressed to my mouth, Miss Rebecca fattening me up so that I would look like a “real” baby.

And I did. The hair on my head was still short and there was so little you could see through it and the hair on my body was all gone everywhere. She loved holding me up to a mirror to see myself like I was, all big and fat and helpless, with just a diaper on and maybe a bonnet and it felt so scary that I couldn’t stay still so I’d be moving a lot in her hands and her hands were so big and strong and showed that I was so small. You had to look really carefully before you could see that I was a little version of somebody who used to be a big and strong grownup, now living only to serve a little girl, who wasn’t even six, who saw me just as her doll, more fun than storybooks but not as important as peppermint ice cream.

I wasn’t permitted to talk in anything but baby talk and if I rose up instead of on my hands and knees without permission she hit me back down. She made me keep my thumb in my mouth until I did it all the time. To Mrs. Thomas it was really funny to see me being pushed around the house in a stroller, being picked up and burped. I slept a lot, I have to sleep all the time since I got shrunk. Twelve hours each day or even more. And I got scared at night and woke up and couldn’t sleep for hours and hours in the dark. If Miss Rebecca woke up, she always wanted me to sleep in the bed with her and she was so big that if she rolled over on me it hurt and I couldn’t move and then I’d have to push and kick until Miss Rebecca moved or woke up. So I was tired in the day and got sleepy and sometimes Miss Rebecca made me take a nap. So she’d tuck me up in the stroller and feed me a bottle and I’d get sleepy and sleep there in the stroller and Mrs. Thomas said that I was turning into a good baby.

Miss Rebecca was having a hard time during the day, now that she was in school for the first time and it was real hard for her. It made her feel better that I was her baby, hers to figure stuff out for and it made her feel better inside to do it, to get home and have stuff her way instead of somebody else’s way.

She loved coming up with scary stuff for me that she would save me from at the very, very last minute, making me crawl over and over again right to the edge of the dining room table. Only at the last second would she pick me up and “save” me. Then she saw that she liked it better for me to go right off the edge, a twelve foot drop to me, and fall straight down, and she would catch me on the way down.

I begged her over and over not to make me do this; “Mommy, baby Bootsie scared to fall. Little baby afraid he fall wrong and mommy get in trouble with her mommy. Please, please mommy, no make baby go off big place no more.”

By now, it had been so long, so many month like this, so when I cried it was real crying, not faking it’cause I got so scared and I was afraid she would forget and hurt me and I’d die and it was so bad all the time and I cried ‘cause that was the only thing that ever made her sorry and sometimes even say she’d do different. I begged my mommy to take care of me. I sobbed and hung on to her, looking up to her, because she was what made me afraid but only she could take the scary stuff away.

And she’d say it was okay and tell me not to cry and sometimes she’d get mad and make me stop crying right now and I would though sometimes my nose would still run for a little but I always knew that this was just for now and she’d forget and in a few days she’d make me do it again.

And it happened again and again until one day she had me crawl over into the air and she didn’t catch me, she just waited until too late and I fell and I landed on her and on the floor and my head hurt and my head was bleeding. And I was sitting on her and she saw that I was bleeding on my face and she started to cry, really quiet, and she looked at me and I could see that this time she knew. She knew that I was real, not just a doll and she was sorry but she was scared too and said for me to be quiet so Mrs. Thomas wouldn’t hear ‘cause then she’d get angry at both of us and Miss Rebecca looked so scared sitting over me and I was scared of her too so I tried hard and sorta stopped crying and I looked at Miss Rebecca and she looked at me and she cleaned me off with a bunch of baby wipes and put a clean shirt on me and put me in her lap and just looked at me.

She looked down at me and I could see that she had to choose between her new game and how scared I was. She said I didn’t have to cry, that she would protect me. She patted me on the head and told me that I was her baby and would be forever and she wouldn’t make me do it again.

I think that that was the first time that to her I was a little alive person, not just a really, really special doll. I was really hers. For her to play with and do stuff with and take care of and she was in charge of me. She could see it now, that I was a person, just little, not just a doll she could break and get fixed. I really was hers, to do with what she wanted. And I didn’t have any way out and she said she was gonna keep me for the rest of her life.

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