Hanging On


I’d like to say I was nonchalant as I investigated the screaming. But I was a little upset already. I stomped over to the nearest shirt. One sleeve was wiggling. I grabbed the cuff and shook.

Wallace fell out of the sleeve, across the inside of the shirt.

He looked confused. Then he looked up at me. I smiled. He wet himself. I took a step over beside him. He was very small, somewhere around knee-high to a sylph. To me, anyway. The wet stain on his shirt spread out around his feet.

I bent over and whispered, “Call me a bitch again, Wallace.” He… Well, he soiled himself further. “Eugh,” I said, but with a laugh. I grabbed his arm around the wrist.

“Let’s go see what happened to Tommy,” I said, yanking him along after me.

I wondered aloud what this new size would be called. “Sylphs are air elementals, traditionally,” I mused. Wally just whimpered beside me. “Undines are a form of water elemental. Maybe the red light that shrank you would make you a fire elemental?” I paused at the next shirt.

The bump in the sleeve had gone very, very still. Tommy was trying to hide.

I looked down at Wally. “Make you a deal, asshole. You don’t try to run away for ten minutes, I won’t break a bone in each of your legs. I don’t know where we’re going to end up, but you’ll want to be able to run, right?” Especially as he was about the size of a grasshopper.

He nodded vigorously. All sorts of willing was Wally, now. I told him to stand on the sleeve beside Tommy. I’d seen a handkerchief in Tommy’s back pants pocket. I unfolded that and stretched it out. It turned out to be a full bandana. Cowboys, whee.

Wally went and stood in the middle when I told him to. Tommy came out when I kicked the lump with my heel. They lay down in the center and I folded it up into a carrier, like the runaway boys use in Norman Rockwell paintings.

The idiots couldn’t wiggle free through the holes I left. Then I started dragging them towards the workbench.

I had an idea that Hunter and I could each take one of these assholes and come up with a game to play. Catch or hide-and-go-kick, or maybe climb up on the workbench and see how they bounced.

There was a stool beside the workbench. I was hoping to climb up the metalwork, but I had to pause.

The stool wasn’t big enough.

It wasn’t too much bigger than I was. Too big for a sylph’s dollhouse furniture, but way too small for people to keep in a garage for human use.

It was like a movie prop. I could reach the top of the seat without even jumping.

I dropped the bandana, quietly thrilled at the sounds of their heads hitting the floor. Then I climbed up onto the stool.

And standing there, my eyes were above the top of the workbench.

Hunter was in his cage. He was the same size he’d ever been, relative to the cage. And he was the same size as the two assholes.

Dammit, they were sylphs. They’d shrunk, but not to new sizes. They weren’t a new form of Undersized American, for whom the rules weren’t yet established.

Amelia would be VERY firm about the sanctity of sylph life, even these assholes. Okay, sure, she’d PROBABLY insist they were to be protected, anyway, but I could no longer pretend to be ignorant of the rules.

Damn, damn, damn, damn, DAMN!

I pinched my nose. All thoughts of revenge faded away. Okay, not all thoughts. Just the more bloody ones.

“Hunter, if that is your name,” I moaned, “does anyone else live here?”

“Just Lucifer, ma’am,” he said with great respect.

“Lucifer? That HAS to be the Dobbie,” I muttered. I scrabbled up onto the workbench. The cage was not locked, just required leverage a sylph couldn’t apply. “Okay, I don’t like or trust you, but I won’t leave you here to starve. If I let you out of the cage, what are you going to do?”

“Whatever you say, ma’am,” he promised.

“Okay.” I sprung the door and helped him out. Kneeling at the edge of the bench, I lowered him to the stool and jumped after, then jumped to the floor.

I turned to catch him. As I lowered him to the ground, I found he stood just a bit taller than my knee.

That was important for some reason. Then he asked, “What are you, ma’am?”

“I’m a seamstress,” I said, my usual answer. But… but Hunter wasn’t asking ‘what is it you do on the show?’ was he?

I looked down at where he trembled at my feet. At the bandana wiggling beside him.

They were sylphs. I was no longer a sylph.

What WAS I, now?

Heh… Like THAT question had ever been easy…

Well, that would have to wait. There were two doors, not counting the one cars went through. “Hunter, where’s Lucifer at?”

“He’d be inside, ma’am,” he replied. He pointed. “Inside the house, that is.”

“Okay, so we’re not going through there.” I wasn’t sure if the Dobbie would come to the aid of the newly sylphed fuckwits or not, but I didn’t want to risk them being able to command an attack.

So, how to open the door to the outside? I started dragging the bandana over towards the door. Even being three times the height of a sylph, I knew I couldn’t just open it. But maybe it was loose or-

Lucifer started baking his fool head off about then.

“What set him off?” I muttered. Just then, the door we were going to look at gave a loud whump, struck by something heavy.

Something that said ‘Ow!’ immediately after the impact.

“Conrad?” I called.

“Stand back!” he shouted. I looked around. We were… Well, my ability to gauge distances was fucked right then, but we were a good ways away from the door.

“We’re fine,” I told Hunter.

Then the door exploded. The middle of the top half burst into a zillion slivers, all of them spreading around the garage and peppering me. Just me. I turned to cover Hunter. It was a reflex. I’m not going to claim I thought it over.

Turned out that Conrad had thrown a heavy duty, terra cotta planter through the door.

When that hit the floor, it shattered, sending a wave of shards in the wake of the splinters.

More impacts, but mostly it felt like a sharp hailstorm.

Master stuck his head through the hole and shouted, “Delli! Are you in here?”

“If you don’t know,” I shouted back, “why did you commit breaking and breaking and entering?”

“I followed the bond, but then you disappeared while I was…” He ducked out of sight, then reached in to unlock the door. Seemed kind of redundant to me.

Anyway, he came in, glancing towards the other door. Lucifer was like to lose his mind in the kitchen.

“Anyway, I couldn’t feel you and thought you were dead!” Master cried. He ran over to me and dropped to his knees, sliding in close to pick me up and hold me.

I grabbed him back and rubbed my face against him. It was so GOOD to see him again, to feel him, to smell him.

But he was right. I couldn’t feel his emotions. We weren’t connected any more.

“You… You can’t feel me?” I asked. “Not, like, familiar-feel me?”

“Probably stress,” he said. He looked down at his knee. “Who’s this?”

“Three sylphs I don’t trust and don’t like, but can’t leave behind,” I said.

“Samantha would kick our ass,” he agreed. He moved me to ride on his hip, like a toddler. He grabbed a cage off of the shelf and boxed up the three sylphs.

“We’ll turn them in at the registry,” he told me, carrying us all out to the car. He was parked across the street. I didn’t recognize the street. “I’d narrowed it down to this house, the feeling that you were in there,” he was saying. He was babbling. Relief does that to Master.

Sometimes we joke about what he’d be like if he had a wife in labor. Full frontal moron is our guess.

The cage went on the floor of the back seat. He sat in the front see, holding me on his lap.

“I KNEW you were in there, but I wasn’t sure what to do, so I called the cops, but the phone didn’t work, so I went down the block. But before I got reception, the bond went dead. I thought… I thought…”

“I didn’t, though,” I said, reaching up to touch his chin.

“I’m glad!” he said. He grabbed my hand in his fist and squeezed it lovingly. “What happened in there? Why did you go away?”

“Well, I’m not a sylph anymore, so…” I guessed.

His eyes bugged out. “Hey!” he cried. “You’re bigger!”

Ten minutes carrying me around like a doll, rather than slip me into his shirt pocket, and NOW he noticed I was a giant among sylphs.

It was SO Conrad, I had to laugh. Then, well, I couldn’t stop.

He laughed with me. We, uh, we may have gotten a teensy bit hysterical, there.

He turned the dome light on to look me over.

“You’re still Delli,” he observed.

“Original issue!” I said proudly. Then I grabbed my breasts. “With a few minor after-market adjustments, of course.”

“Of course,” he nodded. “Man, wait’ll the guys see you now.”

The guys… “Oh,” I sighed. “The guys.”

“What’s wrong with the guys?” Master asked. “I understand that only one of them actually is a guy, but you know, I don’t mean-“

“Conrad, I know!” I said. “It’s just… I don’t fit in the Ark anymore!”

“We’ll buy a new carrier,” he replied. “Maybe Ray can put us in touch with someone who can make one with a room for a giant sylph. That’ll still fit under the seat in front of me…”

“It’s not the travel! I don’t fit! With the GUYS!”

“Oh.”

“Fucking yeah, OH!” I wailed. “I can’t go with the others. I’m not going to fit in your pocket. Or in the Ark. Or in the Love Nest. Or in the chair lift. Or… Or… Or in the SET!” I was horrified, now. “I can’t do my job anymore!”

“We’ll make a new Set,” he promised. I wasn’t listening.

“I’m not your smallest sylph any more!”

He didn’t reply to that. He stared at me for a second. Then he eased a hand under one armpit, another under my ass. He lifted me up to stand, feet between his legs, perched on his seat. My face was next to his chest.

“Was that important to you, Ghirardelli?” he asked.

“You focus on the littlest details,” I said, trying hard not to cry. “I was your littlest detail.”

He nodded, accepting that. Then he hugged me close. Big huge arms around me, but not as big or as huge as before, big arms drew me in to his chest.

“I don’t care any less about you because there’s more of you,” he said. I sniffled and hugged him back.

“What about Cher?” I asked. “He needs to be in charge…”

“So? Do whatever he says.”

“I mean,” I started to explain.

“You guys have been watching me with Electra for over a decade,” he said. “You KNOW that being ‘in charge’ is not a matter of who’s biggest.” He chucked me under the jaw with a fingertip. “At least, you have an example you can use to explain it to Cher.”

“Maybe,” I said, soft and tentative. “So, you still wuv me?”

“That’s too silly a question to bother answering,” he said, starting the car. “Let’s go drop these guys off and get home.”

“Okay,” I said. I felt relaxed. I mean, if Master still wanted me in his stable of pets, I could handle everything else Life could throw at me. I slid off his lap and climbed into the passenger seat.

I would face the future without fear, because I wasn’t alone. Nothing else really mattered, you know?

“Besides,” he went on. “I thought you’d be most upset that you can’t wear the chinchilla any mo-“

“GOD FUCKING DAMMIT!”

---------

I stayed in the car at the Sylph Registry office on State Street. Master parked in front of the YMCA, and I was humming that song while I waited.

Conrad came back with an odd look on his face.

“What? Did they ask where you found the sylphs?”

“No,” he said. “No, they didn’t pay me much attention. I said, ‘found some loose sylphs,’ and they said ‘uh-huh.’ They didn’t ask for ID, or wave a scanner over them to see if they’re chipped.”

“Was something going on?”

He started the car again, checked the mirror and drove off. “Something on the TV about people in a panic. I think I heard ‘sylph uprising’ a few times.”

“The day has finally come!” I shouted. We shared a giggle at that image.

I was just about knee high to Master. Even if all his sylphs had grown when I did, he could still take us easily. Bend us over his knees and spank us and suddenly that had a certain appeal.

But no. No, Master and Electra were a matched set.

But I could take Cher over my knee, now… Maybe we could take turns being in charge?

Conrad shouted “Found her!” as he opened the front door. Three tiny voices shouted ‘Yay!’ One of them added, “Call Mom!”

Julie had made us all promise to keep them apprised of changes or major events, since Conrad couldn’t be trusted to. I should have remembered that, but I’d like to think the night’s events earned me a little slack.

“Yeah,” Conrad agreed, lowering me to the entryway carpet.

All three of my closest friends skidded to a stop at the sight of me.

“Hi, guys,” I said, trying to sound like banter. “Did you miss me?”

“What…happened?” Electra asked.

“I bought vitamins for all of you,” Conrad said, “but you all look alike so I accidentally gave them all to Delli.”

“Go call your mother,” I said. “The grownups have some talking to do.”

“Yes’m,” he said, walking off into the kitchen.

I sank down to the floor, legs folded. I was still taller than the others. “First one to hug me gets my fur coat!”

Cher smiled and launched himself at me, covering the foot or so between us in a flash.

I hadn’t realized how MUCH I hoped he’d be first until he was climbing up into my lap.

I held him as close as Master had held me, crying a tiny bit into his hair. Small hands took my elbow… Then both elbows.

A few feet away, Conrad was talking into the phone. “No, I haven’t been watching the news, I’ve been busy.”

He paused. It was odd that I couldn’t hear the other half of the conversation. I guess ears three times as big weren’t as sensitive as when I’d been a wee thing.

“No,” he was saying, “I can’t tell you what I was busy doing, not until the statue of limitations expires.” Two beats. “No, I’m pretty sure it’s a statue.” Another beat. “Okay, I’ll be sure to ask Electra-“

“STAT-CHOOT!” the little blonde screamed from my elbow.

“She says I’m right,” Conrad lied. There was a laugh in his voice, signaling teasing. He paced the floor for a bit, listening. “Then, no, I don’t want to turn on the news. Not during the plot development. We’ll catch up when someone figures out what’s happening.”

He walked out into the hallway, around us, to go sit in the living room, feet up on the coffee table. I stood, holding hands with Cher and Electra, and we all walked over to Master’s chair.

“No,” he said. “Just called to say hi, and Delli is alright. Just a little different. No, no, she’s fine. She just doesn’t fit her chinchilla anymore. Heartbroken.”

He pat the arm rest beside him and lifted people up one at a time. I got set on his lap. Cher immediately hopped down to sit in my lap. Very recursive, I thought.

He rested his head against my belly and purred.

Master smiled at both of us. “I think she’s adapting,” he told his mother. Or maybe his father? Mac?

“Pictures?” he asked. “How about we just, I dunno, show up on your doorstep? Tomorrow?” He was talking to his phone, but he was asking people sitting in his chair with him.

I couldn’t possibly come up with any clothes by tomorrow. I held up two fingers.

“Peace?” he asked.

“TWO DAYS!” Magic shouted.

He set the date and hung up. Then he looked at me. “Why two days?”

“Clothing, Conrad!” Electra said.

“I could get some stuff. Baby clothes…” he mused. And I could take it in and adjust faster than I could craft all-new clothes.

“I’ll need to make a list,” I said. He nodded.

“NOW!” Electra said. “What happened?”

“Well, there I was, watching TV…” I started.



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Index

23. Carrying On

25. Moving On