I wanted to write something new, as well as create a new collage for this weekend’s ABC’s game entry. I didn’t have the time to do either, so it’ll have to keep. I’m happy with the way I think it will look, but in the meantime I’ll recycle a spectacular dream I had and shared at my old blog a few years ago.
C is for City. I have somehow connected part of my enjoyment of growth with a desire to protect the man for whom I have feelings, and the city in which he lives. That connection manifested itself in a dream I had once. I was shopping in the commercial center of a city, and the streets were packed with people as they entered the shops and skyscrapers that clustered to great heights every way I looked. I was moving along the sidewalk when a large crowd of people turned the corner ahead of me, screaming, running away from something, and heading my direction in a stampeding rush.
This vision was immediately followed by a thunderous blow to the ground, and an arch of rubble and crumbled cement that blasted away from the building that towered to my right as a huge fist hit its corner. As more booming footsteps shook the ground, I turned and ran with the terrified crowd, except I was groaning to myself, realizing I would have to deal with this monster. I didn’t mind the fighting; it was the changing into my superhero costume that I dreaded. See, I carried it in my purse, and I would have to change into it right there, in front of all those people. Funny how I was more affected by modesty than I was about being crushed by an oversized creature’s foot.
I fled for about two seconds before I stopped dead on my tracks; people flew past me without stopping to watch me undress (OK maybe one of them did), and take a slinky, pink satin suit that looked more like something one would swim in, out of my purse. I turned to face the humongous beast, who was a rampaging brunette (colossal humans have made it to every B-movie monster list I have seen) that rose 200′ from the pavement, wearing a pink fuzzy thing a la Edison. She stood and growled on that intersection while stomping madly on people and cars, bending to grab handfuls of victims just to fling them against surrounding buildings.
The dream changed from that sequence of events to my imagining (in the dream) what would happen once I put on my suit. I would grow instantly (the reason why I could not wear it underneath my clothes) to a height that matched this destructive creature’s, and the growth of my suit would “activate” the growth of my teammates, an Asian lady that wore a green suit, and a Caucasian blonde that wore a blue one. I pictured them both rushing to my side, and helping. Sadly, the dream ended with the certainty that the three of us would battle the female “monster” and save the city, but it didn’t move from dream imagination to dream action.
Because of the way it feels to imagine and dream of growing and fighting a scaly, furry, or skin monster, I would do it in an instant. Anything to protect my guy and the city in which he lives.
B is for Brownies. I published this recipe at my old blog about eighteen months ago. I only have a few old ABC’s entries left to publish, and playing the game—even if only with myself—means I will be following the order of the letters of the alphabet from this point on, when I create new entries for this series.
I’d been planning to create a collage to accompany my brownie recipe for quite some time, but only after I found a suitable shrunken-man source image was I able to figure out the sort of photos I wanted to take of my brownies; so the image you see above is of my window, of a curtain I sewed years ago, and of brownies I baked. I think this is the first collage I’ve published that include raw images I created, instead of stealing downloading them from the Internet.
Underbrownies
7 T. butter
1 c. sugar
1 t. vanilla extract
2 eggs
1/2 c. unbleached all-purpose flour
1/3 c. cocoa
1/2 t. aluminum-free baking powder
1/4 t. sea salt
1/2 c. chopped, toasted walnuts
1. Heat oven to 350° degrees. If you have a toaster oven then you don’t have to heat up the entire kitchen to make these.
2. Grease and flour a small pan of any shape.
3. In food processor, combine butter and sugar until well mixed.
4. Add vanilla and mix until incorporated.
5. Add eggs and mix until well blended-
-Or add it all at the same time, for all I care. The result is the same when I blend it all lovingly and in order, than when I dump it all in the processor (I do recommend mixing the butter and sugar first), nuts last, and pour into pan.
6. Bake for about fifteen minutes. Don’t overbake, or you’ll end up making chocolate rock.
7. Cool, cut in sixteen pieces, and eat one with your sweetie before you kiss him/her. Brownie breath is a guaranteed shrinking potion. It only works on men, of course.
If I receive one single philistine comment about how baking is women’s work, I’ll crush ya like a twig and snap ya like a bug.
* * *
As I chose the elements for the collage above, a scene played in my head. Some will understand when I tell you that events between a shrunken man and a woman don’t always have to include sexual activities. Daily routine can become their prelude, and activities such as visiting, making friends, listening to music, cleaning the house, etc., can lay the foundation for an emotional state ripe with the right kind of tension.
In this case, the emotion I use to color interaction is a deep sense of trust combined with size-related frustration. A man that shrinks to a mere few inches in height will remember a time his wife might have baked him brownies, and he would have polished the entire plate as he watched TV, later burning those calories in the yard, or in the bedroom.
He will recall there was a time he could have closed his hand around his wife’s delicate wrist when the doorbell rang announcing relatively unwanted visitors, and he could have pulled her into his arms as he whispered, “Let’s pretend we are not home, and maybe they’ll go away….”
There is a weight pressing on him that has nothing to do with his wife’s finger or toe; a heavy feeling of helplessness as he watches his life shrink and be absorbed by his mate’s actions. The only thing that rescues him from despair is the absolute trust he feels in his beloved. It carries him as safely as her hand during moments when it seems even the air he breathes is something she allows him to have, and can take away if she so desired it; those times when his responses to disappointment regress to a child-like state; those instances when events slip away as he’s shown a shrunken man may control only that ever-changing sphere the woman that loves him declares his province; those times such as these….
“They are mine,” he said, his hips pressing possessively against the brownie closest to his hips, the one sandwiched in the middle of the stack. That tiny thrust was almost imperceptible given his size, and he seemed too angry to have meant it to be seductive, but his naked body was glued to those baked goods as though they were some sort of salvation; and that moist, warm brownie molded like clay to the shape of his body sent her thoughts adrift to other times he had moved similarly against her body.
“Honey, I can bake you more brownies after they leave, ” she said placatingly. She could see wet chocolate stains beginning to spread onto his torso and his delicious thighs, and forced herself to look away from his midriff, up to his chocolate-colored eyes. He looked good enough to eat, and he would probably taste delicious at the moment, but that sort of fun would have to wait until they were alone in the house again.
She looked over her shoulder at the bedroom door, and listened to her friends chatting in the living room. Again his voice, as diminished in volume as it now was, seemed to somehow get louder. She faced him again as he stood next to the brownies on the plate.
“I don’t want different brownies later; I want these, and I want them now!” his words ended with the whine of a child threatened by willpower much greater than his own. “You baked them for me. I’ve been waiting for you to bake me these brownies for weeks! You are going to have to give them something else to eat.” He stretched his arm along the edge of the top brownie, and his little fingers clasped it greedily. They hadn’t been out of the oven very long, but he didn’t seem to mind their warmth.
“Unfortunately I can’t help the whole house smelling like them, darling. If I had known they were coming I would have baked a double batch. Sweetie, be reasonable! You are too small to eat them all anyway! One of these little squares would last you a month- alright, a week, the way you eat sometimes.” She threw him a playful smile, but he didn’t return it.
“They should have called you first, before butting in and interrupting our weekend!”
Beginning to feel a touch of annoyance, she sighed, and watched his hair be blown back by gust of wind she had created. “Sweetie, this is the South. People don’t do that. They expect to be able to drop by casually and be served iced tea and comfort food in an impeccable home. They expect impromptu politeness, and hospitality at the drop of a hat.”
“But you are Hispanic. They can’t expect you to behave that way.” He realized immediately he had put his little foot in his mouth when her lips tightened, and when he spoke again, his voice was little more than a squeak.
“Tell them they can’t have-”
“What do you mean ‘they can’t expect me to behave that way’? And do you see me doing that? Do you really think I’m going to go back out there and tell them ‘Sorry ladies, my tiny shrunken husband is a greedy, selfish baby, and he refuses to yield even a single brownie square. We’ll have to scavenge the fridge for any leftover Chinese food that hasn’t turned, and whatever cheese we can slice away from mold we can put on Ritz crackers.”
His gaze, no longer blazing with anger, dropped for a moment.
“Well, er… um-” He shook his head softly, sinking his chin into the brownie corner the heat of his body had rounded out. His fingers dug into the still warm mass of chocolate like fish hooks, as though he could still prevent her from taking the plate away from him.
“I’m offering my friends these brownies, and there isn’t a thing you can do about it. They will stay in my house for as long as they wish, and they they will eat anything they want from my fridge. And after they leave I’ll come back here and we’ll have a long conversation about your manners, and your small place in the grand scheme of my things.”
She reached for the plate, and he barely had time to jump off it and onto the bedside table where the stack- his stack of brownies had been cooling off. His pressed lips turned into a pout as he watched her walk away with them in hand.
Only now did he begin to realize there might not be any sort of sweetness headed his way this Saturday night if he didn’t work his way to her good graces. He looked down at his body. Almost the entire front of it was painted brown with melted brownie marks. He thought they could be useful.
Careful not to accidentally wipe clean any of it, he sat on the lamp base. In the distance, in the living room that felt as though it was a town away, he could hear laughter and womanly conversation, interrupted by moans of culinary appreciation as his wife’s friends devoured his brownies.
Alone, he waited.
* * *
And here’s the example file, the way I initially composed the image. There isn’t that much difference between the former and the latter.
Last night I was reading MattyBoy’s latest Math post, in which he used a ladder to illustrate his point. So I’m reading about the ladder and given how my mind lives in the gutter- in fact, sometimes I think the gutter is in my mind, but never mind.
So I’m thinking a ladder is what a shrunken man needs to climb up to those hard-to-reach places that are a woman’s… well, every part of a woman except her toes and heels, because every once in a while she grows so tall even the arch of her foot is a distant domed ceiling. Anyway, I was thinking about that, and then just a few minutes ago I tripped on the Flickr image above.
It’s fun when the universe conspires to divert me. Thank you, universe.
There are other similar images (just a few) in the author’s photostream, if you wish to take a gander. Here’s another effective use of a ladder I really like.
This is a cute little thing. I saw it and I couldn’t help thinking of a shrunken man running out of excuses on why he can’t possibly do chores around the house. The tiny appliance is several inches in height, so a small man would have to be the size of a tallish doll to get anything done with it.
But under my scrutiny, it wouldn’t matter what size he is: flea or cricket-sized, there’s work to be done. And onto a serious matter, what’s wrong with you people? Why aren’t there more collages of tiny men cleaning giant things, polishing shoes, scrubbing jewelry, that sort of thing?
I was [browser] window shopping for shoes last night when I found this pair of purple Mary Janes. I’m aware you are not exactly the sort of target audience for women’s shoes and clothes and jewelry, and while this is the sort of thing I usually share with my family or at Facebook, I wanted to place a little man between the shoes and I can’t do that for any place but here.
For $28.30, this is a really cheap pair of shoes and that means I would get what I pay for… so I’ll probably wait until I can find a pair of better quality, though no one can stop me from dreaming of them, and fantasizing about the clothes I would wear at the same time. I picked a purple blouse, and looked for plaid mustard-and-purple pants, but impossible to find. A second best is a lovely black skirt.
And since I love/hate jewelry, I would either wear a very simple silver chain, or now that my hair is a bit longer, either of these barrettes with red stones. Yes, red. Purple stones alone would be too easy and boring. Then I’d grab my shrinking spray and I’d be all set to conquer the world in style.
.
Please ignore that last line. I was just typing out loud.
Except it’s not random at all, because having very few of my own collages left to post means whatever I do upload for an entry is anything but random… and because I fully intended to show you this collage on a Saturday.
Later on I built me a couple of fingers, ring and pinkie, to complete the hand. I already had a shrunken man from working on another collage… actually I initially saved the Orlando Bloom image for this handheld image. I edited one of his arms, and voilà, I was done.
Or so I thought.
I was about to save a copy for web use when the idea of placing a bracelet around that giant wrist began to gnaw at me, so I searched through about a dozen websites before I magically stumbled upon Forkometry, and marveled at the squid-looking cuff bracelets. I have a love/hate relationship with jewelry and a love relationship with recycling, so at some point I have got to get me one of those. They are so pretty!
But not as pretty as a shrunken man sitting in the palm of my hand. I’ve had that vision in my head for a very long time, and I love to find collages that depict it with romance and gentleness, that show a little guy that feels perfectly safe in the cup of his girlfriend’s hand because that is the safest place in the world for him.
Well, safe until she starts feeling frisky and commences to tug and rip off his clothes. It’s his fault, for provoking her with his hot little doll-sized body.
There are a few movies I could watch over and over again, and never get tired of them. The Secret Garden is one of them, and it always makes me cry. I can’t help it, and there’s nothing I can do about it. When the end comes, my cheeks are always wet with tears.
When it comes to the interaction between a woman and a shrunken man, there are thoughts I can’t help but have, as they come to me as naturally as those emotional tears when I watch that movie. Those thoughts don’t relate to direct intimacy between a little man and a much larger woman, but they surround it.
One of them began years ago and it has to do with theft… cookie theft, to be specific. I imagined the life of a shrunken man. What does he do every day? How does he keep his mind alert, and his body in shape? In what way does he exert his self-determinism now that he’s the size of a small toy?
Well, there are many ways, but stealing cookies from the woman he loves is one of them. She bakes them and then doesn’t let him have but a few crumbs, the way we women like to do when we go in the kitchen and prepare delicious foods that then we try to keep away from the men we love.
That’s not all she does to keep him healthy: She gives him a dollhouse where he can almost feel normal from time to time; she sews little clothes for him so he can almost feel he’s wearing normal clothes; she plans activities for him that resemble what he used to do when he was bigger, and almost make him feel the way he used to.
But then she maps his days and nights in a manner that constantly drives home how small he truly is, in the way she speaks to him, the place he occupies in the palm of her hand when she feeds him, and the diet he’s now forced to follow, for example.
Everyone likes a bit of junk food every now and then, and… well, to have to ask permission for a damn cookie, and then get a few crumbs because “he’s getting a little fat”? And the way she giggles when she emphasizes the word “little”, poking his belly with the giant tip of her fingernail, pushing him back a step, punctuating that power she has over every bit of food he receives.
What choice does a manly man have but to arm himself with an assault rifle, a grappling hook, and a healthy appetite as he plans to enter one of her realms, that environment where building-sized appliances hum and buzz, framed by counters that loom like mountains, atop which she keeps those snacks she makes?
I want a cookie, and I’m gonna take a cookie, and there’s nothing you can do about it, woman! he thinks as he inserts a 30-round magazine into his tiny AK47. You know, in case there are any bugs. A hunting rifle would be more efficient for a kill, but spray fire from a high-capacity weapon is what he requires to scatter roaches or ants.
Not that it would work, but it’s the idea of carrying a weapon “just in case” into an environment that hardly ever presents a target that he likes, and it’s the exaggeration of drama that falls into the ridiculous that I find appealing about arming a shrunken man with firepower just so he can break into his own cookie jar.
Or what used to be his cookie jar.
Now everything is hers, including his little body, but every once in a while it’s lovely to defy her and do as he pleases, and it doesn’t hurt that when he is discovered, the punishment makes it worth all the trouble he went through just to pretend for a moment that he has a single say over anything at all.
Saturday afternoon I was poking around at Flickr, looking for backgrounds as I do from time to time, acting as though I don’t have hundreds of unfinished collages to work on before I continue accumulating material, when I found this adorable image.
So tiny!
PetitPlat is the miniature work of Stéphanie Kilgast, tiny foodstuffs, dollhouse accoutrements, jewelry, all representing things in a very small scale, and perfectly adorable. Upon seeing the image I instantly thought of this collage by Gcode, one of the best shrunken-man images in the history of EVER.
"11-Aren't You Lucky" by Gcode
If you look at Ms. Kilgast’s gallery you will find photos of little dolls arranged together with the play food in a little kitchen or a tiny table, but I prefer to imagine a shrunken man that sleeps in the nude and wakes up to a delicious morning meal served in a bitty tray and brought to his doll-sized bed by the woman that owns him, keeps him and feeds him.
Today is the last day of November, and for many thousands of people, the last day they get to upload a word count at NaNoWriMo.org. As I mentioned before, this year I didn’t have the time to write 50,000 words, but I’ve been thinking about it and missing the thrill. The above is my word count chart as it looked exactly a year ago.
My story came along very nicely. It was (still is) mostly story and almost no padding, with loads of description and dialogue and almost no annoying weather-related similes or metaphors of which I’m terribly fond, but can get as tired as a late summer drizzle… that’s tired.
I like my story. It’s about a group of women that gather to relate something in common, something they share with a very naughty man that did a really bad thing to them. As they tell their stories something happens to him. He’s with them, listening to each woman’s account, as is his mother, a very powerful woman looking for something. Each of their experiences came from various ideas I had and notes I made long ago for short stories, and even a dream, all adapted to suit my writing needs.
Speaking of needs, here’s one of them, very intense, strong, powerful like a late summer storm… sort of need.
He's right where he belongs.
No, I’m talking about the shoes. I was looking for violet shoes as it is my wont to do from time to time, and I saw these on the first Google page that popped up on my screen. It was love at first sight. Oh, how I stare and drool at them! The brand is L’Autre Chose, and the price is over $200.00, so I’ll have to wait until nothing more pressing needs pecuniary attention (40-50 years), and then you bet I’ll make them mine.
Until then, I’ll picture my little guy in them, visiting, playing, slipping through that toe-peeping space, exploring, writing his name on the sole, and finally falling asleep on the soft material in the toe section so I’ll find him there, spot him just as I’m about to step into them. Of course I pretend I don’t see him, and get a very giant kick out of feeling his little hands push against my slowly descending foot as he chirps out, “No! You silly giantess! Can’t you see I’m down here?”
And of course I say, “Why, no, Little One! I certainly did not see you down there! How could I, when you are so little, tiny, small, hard to see?”
And then he gives me one of his red-cheeked, outraged looks I love to imagine.
I think I’ll find a way to put these shoes in my story when I get around to editing it.
He'll pay for what he's done to that high-heel shoe. Probably.
2007 was my third year doing NaNoWriMo, and in previous years I had a few ideas on what to write. Last year I only had one in the beginning, but it’s one I loved. The title is “All About Steve”, inspired by the collage above.
I started collecting the elements for it over two years ago, and in the beginning it was only going to be a tiny-man-and-giant-shoe image. I worked on it, finishing it rather quickly, since I only had to add the man to the shoe image. I sat in front of my computer a year ago, looking at it, thinking about the few shadows I needed to add, when I felt that thing… that tingly something in the back on my mind that tells me An Idea is about to arrive within the next few seconds, and then, POW! I saw him, his life, all about him.
I thank Bette Davis’ movie for the story title, but that’s where any vague similarity ends. I went looking for a weapon he could use, and knew exactly the one I was going to give him, and I gave him a target painted on the heel of that giant shoe. A blasphemy, heinous sacrilege for a shoe lover like me, but there’s a point to the abomination.
In the end I didn’t write anything about Steve, and saved his story for this year’s novel, which I didn’t write. I’m still planning on doing it, and I can also mention that the rifle he’s holding is a wonderful, tempting, luscious bolt-action Mosin-Nagant 91-30 sniper rifle, the kind that makes weapon collectors and lovers drool. That rifle both places Steve in great danger, and saves his life.
If his rifle seems too long, there’s a reason behind that. I also gave him a scar as I was finalizing the image. I still don’t know how he got it.
So I’ve been reading about a few pistols here and there, knowing it will be a while before I have enough extra money to spend on antiquities such as WWII Russian rifles like the Mosin-Nagant with scope, the type used to nix some of them Nazi pests by my hero Lyudmila Pavlichenko.
Number of confirmed kills: 309
But more on that some other time.
I can’t help but think that now is the best time to go out and get your high-capacity, high-caliber weapons, especially if the gun laws that passed in Chicago can now pass anywhere. Maybe. I don’t know. All I know is the tremendous stupidity of legislation that negates a person’s right to carry a concealed weapon in order to defend herself, while the bad guys—who are not going to follow a law simply because it passes—arm themselves with what they wish, by whatever means they have.
My top priority as far as home protection is to have the ability to defend my son if a home intruder or two happens to break in. Does having a high-capacity pistol help? Maybe not. Maybe I’ll be fine with a 6-round Glock, but I choose something that will allow me to shoot a higher number of bullets, something that will give me the feeling I can defend my child more effectively if I need to, something like the Springfield XDM.
Or I could choose the petite Walther PPS for my first gun, something I can take with me during walks, or to the park where bodies have been dropped and women have been raped, or anywhere my son and I visit. In any case, and whatever decision I make, the process is wonderful, and fun, and legislation free.
