Unfair: A Diaper Dimension Novel (Chapters 115 Uploaded!)

[YourFNF]

On 5/9/2022 at 8:28 AM, Personalias said:

nd given a name because if you’re going to do something suicidally stupid, you might as well do it right.

On 5/15/2022 at 11:03 AM, Personalias said:

t didn’t hurt. It wasn’t even a full slap.  I barely registered it, myself.  My eyes noticed the lightning quick blur of her hand more than my skin picked up on the light nip at the very top of my knuckles.  “Cut that out!”  Skinner quickly scooped up her flash cards and piled them into her lap.

[Babyqtboy]

I loved this story when it first started but now it feels like it’s dragging on. Lots of questions and no answers. Seems like the recent few chapters are more like stand alone stories that do little or nothing to advance the plot. 

[Ras57]

 Personalias the story is just fine with the way it is

[WBDaddy]

7 hours ago, Babyqtboy said:

I loved this story when it first started but now it feels like it’s dragging on. Lots of questions and no answers. Seems like the recent few chapters are more like stand alone stories that do little or nothing to advance the plot. 

Patience.  

As someone who is in his Patreon and way ahead of you on the story, trust me, this is not pointless sub-stories.  The point will be revealed.  In fact, if you go back and re-read a little, you might pick up on Clark's motivation for doing all this specific stuff to specific people. 

[Personalias]

20 hours ago, Babyqtboy said:

I loved this story when it first started but now it feels like it’s dragging on. Lots of questions and no answers. Seems like the recent few chapters are more like stand alone stories that do little or nothing to advance the plot. 

Everything is done with a purpose.  Everything has consequences and reasons.  Everything is a potential exploration.  Multiple threads of plot that get picked up dropped off and woven with each other.

Trust me. Enjoy the ride.

[BabyJilly_S]

All of these little victories....

After the initial shock Clark is on a bit of a roll at the moment, however I fully expect there to be some comeuppance and the currently reasonably amiable (as far as they go) Amazons that he currently deals with turn somewhat. That or he is sent somewhere where his passive resistance is far less tolerated.

After all this is called "Unfair"..... 

To be honest this last chapter did remind me somewhat of a time in my school life where we had a substitute teacher, not long out of university (or so it seemed to us). He seemed a gentle type who we wound up so much that at one point he brought his hand up and down as if he were he were going to bang loudly on the desk in exasperation, only on the way down he stopped himself. At that point I watched his spirit break...... 

Looking back of course it is rather sad, though at the time as 12 year olds we thought it hilarious....

I do hope he continued on teaching, they are rather precious. 

[Personalias]

Chapter 64: Puzzling Assessments

I stood in the OT/PT room with my gang of Little rabble rousers.  As stated previously, school therapists, all school therapists, have hectic schedules on multiple campuses and are stretched thin for resources and time.  That was good for me.  That was why my first session with both Skinner in the Speech Language Therapy room and now Sosa in the Occupational Therapy/Physical Therapy room was specifically with the three other inmates that I had won over to my way of thinking; my disciples.  That was also good.

Maxine Winters wasn’t there, either.  There was enough overlap in their schedules and caseloads that they’d often work with the same students in their shared room.  There was also just enough bureaucratic chaos from I.E.P. meetings and the like that they were just as likely to alternate using the space any given week rather than cohabitating it.

Four Littles.  One Amazon.  Not the best ratio, but better than having two Amazons to keep my eyes and ears open for. I needed to teach my new friends all at once without having to manage the interference of other ‘Grown-Ups’ or broken Littles.

Like any good educator, I’d planned my first set of lessons with the second and third sets already in mind.  Know your curriculum.  Know your schedule. Know your students.  Know your calendar.  Anticipate common hurdles along the way.

For example, the erratic nature of the therapies and a good working relationship with Beouf had made it so that Skinner, Sosa, and Winters could cherry pick who they wanted to work with Ala Carte.

“Sorry to interrupt, but can I borrow Annie, Chaz, Billy, aaaaand...Clark?”

Nothing in our I.E.P’s said a particular group of students had to be together for therapy.  Technically a Kindergartener and a Fifth Grader could be put in the same session.  Legally, there was nothing stopping me from having to sit next to Jeremy Merriwether if he suddenly developed a lisp that Skinner had wanted to rid him of and pass on to me. (Yikes, I hoped that was only hypothetical and not possible).  

Point being, as long as the minutes and boxes were ticked for the services promised, the ‘How’, ‘When’, and ‘With Whom’ were all extremely flexible. This week me and the other members of the A.L.L. had been grouped together.  Next week we might not be so lucky.  

Probably wouldn’t be.

That meant I had to coach my crew so that they wouldn’t break without me.  I was the ‘new kid’.  I was becoming the ‘trouble maker’.  Amazons were crazy, not stupid. I had to work quickly.  They were inadvertently giving me the opportunity to practice and pass on my craft.  That was good.

That’s where the good news ended.

The OT/PT room, while still having the bare, undecorated walls of the Speech Room, was filled to the gills with equipment:  Trampolines, platform swings, a closet full of Amazon gadgets and gizmos on the level of that fold out obstacle course I’d been ‘gifted’ with.  It even had a ball pit.  That’s right, there’s something supposedly therapeutic about ball pits; not even from a ‘how do we mind fuck Littles?’ standpoint.

This place was like a tiny indoor playground.  It set me on edge, but to my three comrades it was low hanging and tempting fruit.  ‘Be good and you can bounce on the trampoline or swim in the ball pit’ would be a lot more tempting than ‘if you get done playing this board game I’ll let you play with the old dollhouse’.

It was Sosa, too. Sosa was good at classroom management. Very good at classroom management.  From the way she’d interacted with my preschoolers over the years, I’d long held the opinion that she would have made a good teacher had she chosen a different degree.  Through transitive deduction, that put her much closer to Beouf on the difficulty scale.

Why couldn’t it have been Winters?  I just knew I could totally crack Winters.

Finally, the OT/PT room was directly next to my old classroom.  It was a small mercy that we walked all the way around instead of cutting through the building.  The question was was it a deliberate mercy or one built of habit?  From what tiny bits of information I’d gathered of Ambrose I couldn’t imagine her objecting to a waddling parade of Littles cutting through my room.

Yes, my room.  Never hers.  

It was the kind of thing that would remind the actual children what they weren’t and the shortest adults what they were beneath.  

If pushed too far, would Sosa snap and send me to time out in the closest classroom?  

All of that was racing through my brain as Sosa unloaded the big colorful pastel boxes sculpted out of thick plastic and the edges frayed and jigsawed together at the seams.  They were big, clumsy and cumbersome;  but not terribly heavy looking.  Each side was longer than my arm.  I could likely lift one,I thought, but if I tried for two, the second box would completely block my line of sight and risk tumbling off.  I wouldn’t have been able to get my arms all the way around it if I tried to hug it.  

So typical: Light enough that even a Little could hoist them; bulky enough to make it so they shouldn’t; and cutesy enough to make it so they wouldn’t want to if they had any kind of ego left.  Somehow this was intended to make people like me feel childish while ‘playing’ with it.

That was the only explanation I could fathom for the color scheme.  Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple; all pastel hues.  It was the kind of tripe that Pediatric and Adopted Little-centric companies tended to love.  There was a black leather cuffed hole with a rubbery black covering on the red side and opposite purple side of each device..  Part mystery sensory box, part pharmacy blood pressure machine, and part jigsaw box?  It’s function, if any, completely eluded me.

I bit my lip and dug my fingers into my thighs to hide the anxiety welling up inside of me. I wrinkled my nose and shot a warning look at Annie.  She dropped her pacifier and left it dangling from her collar.

Going into this experience, I was at a complete loss. No information that any of my students brought back or that Sosa had reported to me when I was a teacher rang any bells for these tacky things.  I’d seen ‘the birdy says tweet’ coming from miles away. Oversized pastel colored cubes was an unanticipated fork in the road.

Occupational therapy was supposed to help with fine motor skills like handwriting, typing, tracing, using scissors, and fastening buttons on clothes.  My preschoolers would come back with tracing pages and bits of construction paper they’d cut out and glued together or beads they’d strung along on some yarn.

OT was supposed to help with the basic life skills that were so prevalent and frequent in early academics.  Those exact skills were what Amazon snaps, tapes, and seat buckles sought to stymie.  Amazons didn’t want us taking off our diapers; there was no way they wanted us to be able to fasten non-snap buttons or hold a pencil.

A chilling thought:  What if I’d never heard of or seen these devices because they were exclusively for Littles?  What if inside the rainbow gadget boxes was some sort of finger mangling device, or some chemical that soaked through the skin to cause unnaturally severe arthritis or numbed the digits into uselessness?  I might stick my hands inside the hole and get jabbed enough to make them swell up into uselessness or something.

The other members of the A.L.L. were kind enough to dispel my fear. “This one?” Chaz groaned, “I hate this one!”

“Me too!”  Annie whined.

“Same.” Billy said.

I could have slapped all three of them just there. Why give Sosa the ammo to use against them in case she hadn’t picked up on their distaste?  Nevertheless, their reaction was one of annoyance, not fear.  That made sense, I assured myself.  The “Maturosis and Developmental Plateau” method favored gaslighting, conditioning, and circular logic over the more brazen approaches.

Loudly, I cleared my throat.  The others shuffled, became a tad more alert and came to a kind of loose attention. They remembered themselves and our gameplan. We’d frustrate the Amazons by playing by our rules, not theirs.

Speaking of which: Time to probe for weaknesses. “How does this work?”  Just like with Skinner, I made a point to turn and look at Billy.  I caught Billy’s eyes looking up and over my shoulder.

“Go ahead, Mr. Billy,” Sosa chirped.  “Show what you know.”  Directly behind me, Sosa’s eyes were placid pools of brown in a sea of dark tan skin beneath a crop of hair darker than even Janet’s. Sosa’s almost pleasantly plump face showed no signs of either aggravation or anticipation; merely quiet patience.  

Damn.  Damn, damn, damn!  

At her heart, Skinner had been a ‘Sage on the Stage’. All eyes had to be on her and the lesson had to be about her.  Sosa was going for a ‘Guide on the Side’ method and didn’t mind if we ‘taught’ each other.

The victory with Skinner and those last fifteen minutes of celebration had made Billy cocky and confused. Skinner wasn’t Sosa.  I could almost see the gears turning in the poor boy’s head.  Should he remain silent or address me?  Which would least play into the crazy?  “Um...I don’t know…?”

Fuck.

“That’s okay,” Sosa said. “You’ll get it.”  She was gentle, yet clinical. Practiced to the point where it was hard to tell if it was second nature.  Skinner still saw me as an old colleague.  Sosa was talking like I was just a new baby.  Like I said; just this side of Beouf. “Miss Annie, would you like to try?”

Annie looked like she was on the verge of panicking and clammed up.  Silence had been our go to.

“That’s okay. Mr. Chaz?”  Chaz stared straight ahead.  This wasn’t their first time with Sosa.  They knew she was tougher.  “Mr. Clark? Would you like to guess?”  

Sosa’s job wasn’t modifying language and vocabulary.  It really didn’t matter if we talked or not.  I exhaled and played it cool.  “Why don’t you explain it to me, Miss Sosa?” It was important to not show fear.

Sosa took a spot on the floor, and crossed her legs and positioned one of the strange puzzle boxes in her lap..  “I call this a game, but it’s really more of a diagnostic.  We do them every month or so, just to see where you kids are.”  I didn’t need to look behind me to sense the rest of my friends tense up at being called ‘kids’.

“All you have to do is put your hands in the holes.  One in the red side and one in the purple side.”” She did so, sticking her hands through the two holes and past the black curtain coverings, making it a kind of unruly, blocky muff.  A high pitched beep of an electric sensor followed by a slight whirring and wheezing noise was heard.  “Then the cuff closes. Don’t worry it doesn’t hurt.”  As if to demonstrate she tugged at the cuff.  Her arms and elbows moved and tugged back out.  It turned out that the cuff had more qualities of rubber and elastic than leather.  

She moved and tugged, and the seal around her wrists stayed with her. The black rubbery stuff turned inside out and resisted movement when she pulled at it.  She gave three exaggerated tugs, showing that even with her giant strength she wouldn’t be able to remove her hands completely from the box.  By the same measure, she pulled the box closer to her and plunged  up to past forearms.

“Then..” she paused.  Theatrically, she cocked her head to one side then the other.  “Inside each box, there’s a release mechanism. You just got to fiddle with the mechanism aaaaaand….!”

The box vibrated mechanically.  From hidden speakers somewhere in the puzzle’s confines, a “TA-DA!” sound played.  Miss Sosa grinned and removed her arms.from the cuffs and gave her wrists and fingers a quick shake.

A second after her hands were free, the box started rolling forward by itself in measured amounts.  It rotated, stopped, and twisted, the seams of each box coming apart and unfolding; new compartments coming to life, growing, expanding, and  building on each other while somewhere in the mass of plastic and lightweight steel, electronic dance music played.  Within twenty seconds where there had been a box large enough for a Little to curl up and hide in now there was a Little sized robot doing stiffly choreographed dance moves.

“Okay,” I heard Billy mumble.  “That part is kinda cool.”  Admittedly, it was impressive. Amazon engineering was second to none.  I felt a strange rush from the music, too. I felt my resting, calculating scowl relax a bit.  I chomped down on my own tongue to toughen up.  Something in the speakers operated on a similar wavelength to those damn pleasure rattles like the one Renner had tried to pawn off on me or that Beouf sometimes passed out before naps.  

The Maturosis cult preferred gaslighting over chemical and physical alteration.  It didn’t necessarily abandon it altogether.  A certain giggling savant missing her front teeth confirmed that part. Thinking about Amy steadied me enough to not be further lulled.

Half a minute later, the impossible folding of parts resumed again and where an ornate toy had been dancing now sat a bulky but colorful puzzle box.

“Any questions?”

Passive disrespect hadn’t worked. Maybe some logical disassembling might do the trick and pull at Sosa’s threads. First, the setup.  I snorted. “I can appreciate the isolation of skills by using a box so we supposedly have to use our fine motor skills and just our fine motor skills.” I pretended to look thoughtful, even though I already knew what I was going to say.  Time to take the shot.  “But it’s a trick. It’s like those seatbelts or child locks.  Little hands won’t budge it.”

Grimly, Billy shook his head. “Naw, Gibson.  It ain’t like that.”

“Would you like to see?” Sosa asked.  I was being challenged.  An Amazon challenge meant the game was rigged somehow.  It was still unwise to outright refuse the invitation.

Cautiously, I inched forward, keeping my eyes on Sosa as if she might just reach out and snatch me up.  She didn’t.  Gently, she took my hand and guided it through the first cuff.  I heard the beep and the whirring and hissing as a cuff quickly and snuggly closed in along my forearm.

I had thought it would be less snug since it had just accommodated Sosa up to her elbows.  I also thought it would be tighter; cut off circulation.  Both assumptions were false.  It wasn’t unlike the feeling of a new diaper in that it was stiff but flexible.  Noticeable upon application and removal, but increasingly easy to acclimate to and tune out if you allowed it.  “Reach in deeper.”
I did, with the barrier letting me and folding with me like a glove.  “Feel the lever?”

My hand clasped around a kind of rod. I felt ridges and gaps in it like buttons or piano keys.  “Yeah?  Are there supposed to be buttons?”

Sosa brightened. “That’s right!  If you get really good at it you can program the dance the robot does by pressing the keys in a special order!”  A quick glance back to my classmates and I saw the wrinkling  of noses and curling of lips.  Something Sosa had just said had left a bad taste in their collective mouths.

I wiggled my fingers on the rod inside the box and felt the buttons clack beneath my fingers.  There was one on the back for my thumb, too.  “So, why isn’t dancing?”

“You gotta do both levers at the same time,” Chaz said.

“Both?”  Without prompting I reached in deeper, nearly up to my shoulder.  Past the first rod was a second one. With the back of my fingertips I guessed that it was practically a mirror to the one I had just grasped.  The only problem was  I couldn't reach it.  If I stretched my hand, if I strained I could graze one massive joystick with my thumb and the other just barely with my pinky.  “Oh. Both.”

“Yup.”  Chaz already looked defeated.  What had Sosa done to this poor guy?

It wasn’t long before she did it to me.  “Let’s use both hands.”  Sosa pivoted the box around and slipped my left arm into the complimentary hole.  A beep, a whir and hiss later, I was effectively hugging the box and handcuffed to it.

Sosa left me to struggle and experiment while she slid the wrists of my companions into equally torturous contraptions.  The limitations were immediate and obvious.

I could push and pull the box. I could lift the box.  It was deceptively light.  I could stand up or get down to my knees on the carpet. It would be uncomfortable, but I could hypothetically muscle the box up enough so that I could sit down and put it in my lap.  Were I more flexible, I might have been able to nestle in between my legs.

What I couldn’t do was lift the box over my head; less a matter of weight and more the size and fixed points on my wrists at either side.  Obviously, I couldn’t fully remove either of my hands.  Try as I might, it didn’t take a minute to realize that I  wouldn’t be able to touch both levers at the same time.

I had to pivot and stretch to reach the left side, and in doing so I had to pivot and twist my right arm away.  Were I an Amazon or even a Tweener my arm span would have been long enough to do something about it.  As a Little, though? Asking me to grip both levers firmly enough to press some keys was like asking a fish to climb a tree.

“How’s the game work?” I asked, loudly.  “What happens if I make the box turn into a robot again?”

Sosa walked back around to address me. “You’ll be ready for the next stage of O.T.” Just like before, just like Beouf, Sosa was professional; inscrutable.  I couldn’t tell if she genuinely believed I could do this stupid task or not and I hated it. None of Raine’s predatory glint or Brollish’s coldness or Zoge’s doting condescension.  It almost gave me a deadly kind of false hope.

Almost.

An impossible task. An offered reward. What was I missing? A punishment? “What if I don’t?”

“We’ll keep working on it,” Sosa said simply.  “And if you need help, just ask.  We’ll stop,I’ll get you out and you can spend the rest of our session playing in the ballpit or the swing or the trampoline.  Whatever you want.”  Her voice went up a tick. Was she lying about something or just condescending to me?

“I quit,” Billy said.  I started to rotate my prison around and shoot him a dirty look.  I didn’t get a chance.  “Sorry, Gibson.  This sucks.”

Sosa took her phone out of her pocket.  “Not yet, Billy.  The diagnostic criteria says you have to try first.”   

Billy clonked his head down on the bulky hollow seeming plastic.  “Fine,” she sighed.  “Set a timer?”

“Already on it Mr. Billy.” Sosa showed a countdown app she’d pulled up.  “Let’s try... seven minutes. Then you can go play.”  I witnessed an equally desponded Annie and Chaz gaze at the phone timer as if it were a light in the darkness..

This treatment had already broken them, somehow.  Solving the puzzle wasn’t the point for me, I reminded myself.  Getting under Sosa’s skin was.   “Hey Billy,” I called over.  “Wanna play bumper cars?”

Billy perked up immediately.  “Heck yeah!”

Like two charging bucks we hunched over, and pushed our boxes into a run.  Colliding with a loud ‘KA-THUNK!’  Billy and I bumped back a step from each other and did it again.

KA-THUNK!

KA-THUNK!

KA-THUNK!

I’d thought that Sosa would say something, anything, before the first ram.  Or that she’d wince or look concerned at me and Billy acting like a couple of frat boy jackasses ramming shopping carts together.

No such luck.  She wasn’t worried about the equipment.  Amazon technology really was peerless.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the thing encasing my forearms could handle an elephant standing on it.

I was already panting by the fifth KA-THUNK.  Billy was pushing me back, getting more into the competition than the actual objective of annoying Sosa. “Careful, Billy,” Sosa said.  “You don’t want to hurt Clark.”

Billy pulled back. “Oh.  Sorry, dude.  Got a little too into it.”

Sosa answered for me. “That’s okay.  We just gotta be careful with our friends.” Damn! This wasn’t working.  How did we rob the narrative from someone who didn’t seem to care?    

A quick ping from her pocket and Sosa started texting on her phone.  Maybe there was some chink in her armor that I could exploit.

I started breathing harder.  I must have been getting out of shape. The boxes were relatively light, but light and weightless weren’t the same thing.  Still awkward as all get out to move in them. I certainly wasn’t getting any younger.

“Who’re you texting, Miss Sosa?” I asked, panting a little.

Sosa barely looked up.  “Just Miss Winters.”

That tracked, co-workers swapping notes and what not.   It wasn’t much to go on, but, “Isn’t that not allowed? Texting on your phone during student contact time, I mean?”

“Probably not.  But you’re all engaged with the diagnostic and this’ll only take a minute.”  She finished, pocketed her phone and looked down. “Oh, you’re breaking into a sweat, Mr. Clark.”  She grabbed a massive handful of tissues from a box nearby and started dabbing my forehead.  “Here, let me help.”

“Thanks,” I said out of habit.  

“You're welcome.”  

I immediately regretted my thanks.  Sosa didn’t notice.  Something wasn’t right.  I was still missing something.

“Miss Annie,” Sosa walked over.  “Do you want your pacifier?”  

“No, thank you.” Annie said.  She looked guilty, embarrassed, and more than a tiny bit uncomfortable.  I did my best to give her a look of solidarity, like I thought she was making the right choice.  Littles sucking on pacifiers wasn’t a good look if we were going to frustrate and refute our status.  Instead of returning the look, she puffed out her cheeks and frowned.

“Mr. Chaz, do you want a treat?”  On his knees, Chaz nodded, stuck out his tongue and accepted the chalky candy.  “Mr. Billy?”  

Something wasn’t clicking and it had nothing to do with the levers. Those were a lost cause, a dash of common sense would immediately prove that.  Despite common sense I wriggled and shifted a little more.  Tried to feel around the insides of the box.  Perhaps the levers were a kind of red herring and there was another closer release.

They were a red herring alright, but it had nothing to do with an alternate means of escape.  There was no escape.  What was I missing, I wondered.  Amazon mind fuckery and Amazon crazy was a bit like a magic trick; anything that the magician drew your attention to was with purpose.  Everything that they wanted you to see was to make it so you’d accidentally or implicitly discount, ignore, or miss something they didn’t want you to see.

What wasn’t I supposed to see with this?

There was no point to the levers.  Correction: There was a point to the levers but the point wasn’t to pull them. What, though?  Why would an OT with the mission to make Little’s less likely to use fine motor movements just trap our hands in a box?  How was this any different or more practical than just stuffing our hands in thick fingerless mittens?

What? Was? I? Missing?

The timer on Sosa’s phone went off.  “Okay, Billy. Do you want to keep trying?”

“No, Ma’am.  Let me out.”  Billy didn’t even seem embarrassed by it.  

“Okie dokie.”  Sosa placed the flat of her hand on the top side of the box.  “Let. Me. Help.” She groaned slightly, pressing down on the top of the box. A panel clicked, and Billy’s hands were released from the cuffs inside the box.  The release on the outside of the box was definitely something that only a giant could hope to move.

The box started vibrating and rolling forward.  The same “TA-DA’ sound effect played, and just like before, the box warped and clicked and folded and changed into a thing of wonder.  The music coming from the dancing automaton’s hidden speakers seemed louder, felt happier.

I was breathing through my mouth before I knew it.  Annie, Billy, and Chaz were frozen, too. The music stopped, and the droid folded back up into a simple looking box.  Billy wasted no more time and climbed into the ballpit, having to throw one leg over the side like he was mounting a pony.  “I guess I know what Billy wants,”  Sosa, chuckled.  “How about you?  Are you guys good?”

“Wait a second!” I interrupted.  “Why did Billy’s box do the dance and the song?  He didn’t reach the levers!”  I could feel my own face twisting into a petulant scowl.  I felt confused and bitter; angry because there were more rules to this game than I was understanding.  Despite myself, I knew I sounded jealous.

Sosa was so nonchalant as to be infuriating.  “That’s okay. He tried.”  She walked over to a mini-fridge that could have held a couple days worth of Little sized meals.

“No he didn’t!” I yelled. “He specifically said he didn’t!” Billy was too busy burying himself in rainbow colored globules to care much about me.  Worst. Accomplice. Ever.

Sosa shrugged and took out a gelatin cup.  “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “The box gets opened and the song gets played. Does anyone else want out?”

I summoned all of the charisma I could and tried to psychically persuade Chaz and Annie to stay strong.  We couldn’t let Sosa win. “No thanks,” Chaz said.  “I’m good.”

Annie huffed and stared invisible daggers towards Billy in the ballpit. “I’m fine.” She cringed and  I thought I heard her mumble something like, “Doesn’t matter anyway.”

Green gelatin wobbled past full tan lips.  “That’s fine,” Sosa said.  “Just let me know and I’ll help you out.”

More than just the mechanism in Billy’s puzzle box clicked right then.  “Guys,” I said.  “We gotta tough it out.  We’re being tricked!”  I didn’t have time or a subtle way of conveying this message.

“Just because you’re having trouble with the diagnostic doesn’t make it a trick,’ Sosa said, stirring the green goop with a fresh plastic spoon.  “You want some, Billy?”

“No!”  I shouted over her. “She just said it.   She’s trying to train you to accept help and not take care of yourself!  We get the reward if she unlocks the boxes, too.  The test isn’t really unlock the box to get the reward, it’s the sooner we give up the sooner we get rewarded!”

Chaz and Annie exchanged looks, almost dubious.

“There’s nothing wrong with getting some help if you need it,” Sosa replied calmly.

“Yeah, Clark,” Billy wiped his mouth with the back of his newly freed hand. “If it’s the sooner you give up the sooner you get rewarded, why’d I have to wait?”  This is why Sosa let us talk.  We could be used against each other.

I slammed my forehead dramatically into the plastic box. It was the closest I could come to dragging the palm of my hand over my face..  “Because it lets her set the rules, doofus. She’s literally just spoon fed you!  You didn’t even reach out or ask to take the spoon and feed yourself.  Chaz just got hand fed candy!  She’s literally babying us and covering it up with words like diagnostic or adding Mr. and Miss to our names!”   

A blob of green juice that used to be refrigerated dessert shot out of Annie’s mouth and onto the carpet.  Sosa had been so confident that she hadn’t even stopped during my accusation.

There it was, though!  That guilty glint of recognition from Sosa..The magician caught in her reflection.  The addict caught getting her fix, the cosseting fiend!   “I also helped wipe your sweaty forehead too, after you and Billy were done playing childish games.  Was I babying you, then or did you just need help?”

“I didn’t ask for you to touch me! You just got up in my space!”  Inside the box my hands were white knuckled fists.

“So you boys trying to break my things by playing bumper cars:  Not childish?”

Mentally, I stepped back. Had to tip her more off balance  “Not the point.”

“What was the point, Mr. Clark?” She put her hands on her hips.

“The point is you shouldn’t be touching people without their consent.”  It was a weak offense, considering that they were legally empowered to touch my genitals as long as there was a wipe or gloves between their skin and mine, but it was all I had.

“Pretty sure Billy asked for help, and Chaz opened his mouth.” Sosa was regaining her composure.

“I didn’t ask for you to drag tissues across my face or forehead.”

The OT opened her mouth to reply and then stopped herself. I saw all the haughty Amazon indignation flow out of her with a single exhalation.  “Fair enough.” she said.  “I’m sorry, Clark. I won’t touch you again without your consent unless it’s an emergency.”

“I”m not going to ask for help.”

“Me neither.” Chaz said. “Your candy sucks, too.”  Annie didn’t say anything, instead sucking on her lips and grimacing.

Sosa became unflappable.  “That’s your choice.” Sitting down in a chair she said. “Keep trying to solve the puzzle.  Our sessions are thirty minutes.  If you can’t figure it out by then, I’ll let you out and take you back to class.  Billy, you can keep playing.  Mr. Clark, Miss Annie, Mr. Chazz, if you change your mind, just let me know.”  She took out her phone and started texting again.

Billy didn’t play, though.  He stayed in the ballpit, sure enough, but now he looked particularly ashamed.  We all just stood there in the OT room; quietly looking at each other; unsure of what to talk about; silenced and flustered and frustrated.  

Sosa kept looking at her phone.  At least she’d stopped trying to spoon feed us.  She didn’t look mad, but she didn’t look terribly happy, either.  Neither did we.  Was this a draw?  It didn’t feel like it was a draw.

Stupidly, I spent the next several minutes subtly trying to reach the catches.  Evidently, I wasn’t subtle enough.   “What are you doing, man?” Chaz questioned me.  “You just said that we couldn’t win.  Why are you still trying?”

“Story of my life.”

“Sorry guys…”  It was Annie.  

Plastic balls rattled in the pit as Billy leaned over and out. “For what, babe?” Then he twitched and pinched his nose.  “Aw, oh man!  Agh!”

I’d been subtly squirming and wincing and quietly twisting for several minutes.  So had Annie.  I’d been trying to do the impossible.  Annie had been dealing with something more inevitable.  So that’s why her breathing had slowed and her face had stopped scrunching up.

Her hands still encased, she bobbed her shoulders.  “My bad.”  She seemed embarrassed, but not nearly as self-conscious as she should be.  By the look of things, it was like she’d just let out a particularly large belch in a crowded elevator. By the smell of things she wouldn’t want to sit down any time soon.  

“Aren’t you going to get changed?” She seemed relatively comfortable standing in her own filth. We’d torn Tommy apart for the same thing.

Her top lip upturned a bit.  “Can’t. Stuck.  Also, O.T.”

My eyebrow arched.  “Can’t Sosa change you?”  Beouf and Zoge could sometimes be stingy on the wet changes,but they at least had the decency to not purposefully let us stew in our own feces.

Sosa stood back up and lightly slipped her phone back in her pocket.  It wouldn’t be there long.  “Do you see any diapers or wipes here, Mr. Clark?  This isn’t the Little’s room or Pre-K.  And it’s Miss Sosa, thank you very much.”  So much to unpack in those few short sentences.  

What hit me more deeply was a pattern I hadn’t recognized.  Places like the cafeteria, therapy rooms and other ‘all-ages’ locations made it so that we’d have less choice to even beg for changing.  We’d just have to get used to it.  Annie looked plenty used to it, as it stood.

“Do you want her to get a rash?” I asked the Amazon.

“We’ve got about ten minutes to go.  She’s not going to get a rash in that time.”  She was right, and I wished I didn’t know that she was right.  “She can handle some poopy pants.”

“I don’t know if I can.” Chaz whispered a touch too loud.  He was the least mobile, but it was obvious he was trying to put distance between himself and Annie’s backside.  I didn’t budge.  Chaz saw me not moving and stopped himself.  “Nevermind.”

“Dang,” Billy said, still pinching his nose.  “What did you eat?”  Idiot.

Calling Annie annoyed at her boyfriend was like calling Janet a bit too friendly with me.  “You poop right next to me at least three times a week,” she snapped.  “I don’t want to hear it.”  Billy let go of his nose and leaned back sinking deeper into the pit.  He was up to his neck in more than just plastic, now.

“Sorry, Miss Annie,” Sosa said, sounding so reasonable as to be exhausting.  “I don’t have anyone here to watch the boys while I change you. I could take you all through Mrs. Ambrose’s room, get you changed, and then we could finish the last five minutes or so back in your classroom, but we can’t take the diagnostic cubes with us.”

I set my jaw.  “Nope.”  There was no chance I was going to let myself be dragged through the corpse of my old classroom.  I wasn’t about to watch Tracy school marmed up and it’d be a hot day on the mountaintop before I willingly let any of my students see me in a wet diaper.

Sosa seemed passive, but I could tell she was enjoying this, trying to play us off each other. “Billy’s already done for the day.  You three just need to let me know when you’re done.”

“Clark,” Chaz said. He didn’t say anything else. I could tell he was torn between comfort and opportunity and facing off against a sense of peer pressure and solidarity.

“No,”  Annie spoke up. “I’m not done.” A slight tensing in her face and a muffled pop from behind her signalled that she wasn’t just talking about running out the clock. “It’s fine.  I’ll wait.” She craned her neck towards Sosa.  “I don’t need help.”  I gained a new level of respect for the woman right there.

Sosa took her seat and her phone.  “Suit yourself, Annie.”

“I will, Sosa.”

“It’s Miss Sosa.”

Annie stood up a little straighter. Chaz hugged the puzzle box and heaved himself to a standing position.  Rising from the dead, Billy sat up in the ball pit and crawled back over the side. Me? I got the biggest, dumbest, craziest smile on my mug as collectively we all realized the same thing.

I turned my big dumb pastel paperweight around so that I could look directly at my ex-colleague. “What is...Jasmine?”

“Holy crap!” Chaz lit up.. “Her first name’s Jasmine?”

“Jasmine Sosa,” Annie tried the name out.  “I like it.  It’s a good name.  Jasmine.  Jasmine Sosa.  Jasmine.”

Sosa stiffened to our muffled snickering.  “I would appreciate it if you would call me by my proper name.” Sosa was still seated, but now seemed infinitely more tense.  This?  This was her weakness? This was the chink in her emotional armor?  I’d gotten so used to calling co-workers by their last name out of courtesy and caution that I hadn’t considered it.  Some people just got a bug up their shorts when ‘babies’ or ‘children’ or Littles, basically anyone they considered socially inferior got too familiar.

And thank the Adult Little League’s lucky stars, Jasmine Sosa- Jazzie, the Jazzmeister, All-That-Jazz, The Sosanator, Sosarino, Big Mama S - was one of them.

Finally out of the ball pit, Billy leaned on Annie’s cube.  “Right. Sorry. Our bad.  Miss Jasmine. Better?”

“Billy....”

Chaz lowered his head and tone, mockingly.  “Jazzie…”  

Wanna know how I know Amazons can’t fire mind bullets?  Stuff like this.

I let out half a cackle and was looking at the ceiling before I realized.  I laughed so hard my throat started tickling me and my laughter turned into coughs.  “Sorry.  Sorry!” I panted. “Sorry!” I’d have covered my mouth but somebody put a big clonky cage on my hands!”

And just like that the tension was leaving, (us anyways).  We didn’t need strange music or dancing robots to laugh and smile.  “Miss Annie, Mr. Billy, Mr. Chaz. You’re being very disrespectful!”  Some adults try to use titles like Mr. and Miss to invoke a sense of responsibility or respect in children.  It can work...on actual children.

“How are we being disrespectful?” Annie feigned like a pro. “You’re calling us by our first names, why can’t we call you by yours?”

“It’s not appropriate.”

Four voices rose up in unison.  “Whyyyyy?”  Oh, what the hell! Sometimes you’ve got to go with the classics.

“Children aren’t supposed to call adults by their first names. It’s how I was raised.”  She was close to popping.  One of us just had to squeeze.

Annie went for a kill shot. “Well, Jasmine, ma’am, we were raised to grow up, get jobs, and do everything you take for granted, but that didn’t work out, did it?”  

I leaned back in surprise and admiration. The sass! Balancing the act by adding in ‘ma’am’!  If ‘Big Baiting’ had been a sport she could make it to the pros with a performance like this!  I shouldn’t have been surprised considering how she and Billy had double teamed me at that first breakfast.

Speaking of which, Sosa was so ruffled up that she’d forgotten that one of us was completely unhindered.  Billy was slowly going in for a coup de grace. Chaz hopped up for the assist.

“I think I’m about ready to quit.  Do you mind helping me out, Miss Jasmine?”

Sosa stayed seated in her chair.  “I’m not helping you with anything until you give me the respect I deserve as your Occupational Therapist.”  Her eyes were unblinking, and her facial features controlled, but her attention was squarely on Chaz.

“We’re just respecting you like you respect us, ma’am. You call us by our first names, we call you by yours.”

The giantess puffed air out of her nostrils. “Alright,” she said haughtily.  “That’s fair.  Miss Ellis-Vermont.  Mr. Dunnet.  Mr. Grange.”  I held my breath lest I scream.  It hurt- it physically hurt- hearing Janet’s last name as my own. It didn’t take a genius to know those weren’t the others’ actual last names either.

From the smug look on Sosa’s face, she could tell she’d hit a nerve.  “Mr. Ogden.”  Billy’s disappearance was finally noticed.  Amazing that he could be that stealthy while crinkling.  “Where’s Bill-?”

“YOU MISSED A SPOT MISS SOSA!” A Little fist with far too much tissue paper shot up and got in Miss Sosa’s personal space.   ‘HERE LET ME GET THAT FOR YOU! I’M HELPING! I’M HELPING! HELPING IS GOOD! RIGHT?!”

Even sitting, the height difference between Sosa and Billy was enough that she was in no real danger of being struck.  Billy was far enough away and reaching out so that there was no momentum or force.  The fistfull paper hankies dangled tauntingly close past Sosa’s lips “HELPING IS GOOOOOOD!”  At some point in his life, Billy had definitely had a sibling that he’d played ‘I’m not touching you!’ with.

Not touching only goes so far.  “Let me help you with your phone!”  It was just sitting on her lap, in far easier reach than her lips.  What happened next wasn’t anything, more bad than bad luck really.  Billy had meant to grab the phone, not knock it out of her lap.  Not send it skidding and spinning on the floor.

It was an accident.

What I did next wasn’t.

The puzzle box was more bulky than heavy. The kind of clumsy that was easily lifted but slowly weighed on you as the minutes passed by.  I didn’t need to pick it up for very long; just long enough for momentum to send the phone underneath.  

“CLARK! DON’T!”

“Bumper cars!”

I threw as much of my body weight into the swing as I could.  Every Little bit helps.

KA-THUNK!

Everyone but Sosa froze.  Her arm jetted out and grabbed Billy by the wrist.  “Put. The tissues. Down.”

“OW! YOU’RE HURTING ME! YOU’RE HURTING ME!”  

Calmy.  Slowly.  Deliberately. Sosa let him go.  “You and I both know that’s a lie.”

“OW! OW! OW!”  Billy’s performance wasn’t working nearly as good as mine with Skinner.

Sosa wasn’t Skinner.  “Lift. The Box. Up.”  Heat was radiating off her, but her countenance was completely, precisely controlled

I did.  I lifted the box and pivoted with my hips so that I could see the damage I’d done.  I’d gone too far, but I wasn’t sure how far that was.  It was an Amazon grade cell phone that had been half-assed stomped on by a Little with a box.

I could still read the text Sosa had been working on just fine..

- Eggs

- Kale

- Celery
- Waffle Mix
- Toilet Paper

- Dog food
- Bird seed

- Bloody Mary Mix

She’d been gaslighting us while working on a shopping list.  All my force had only managed to put the tiniest crack in the screen.  An easy fix, if annoying inconvenience.

We were silent while Sosa picked the phone up and examined the damage we’d done. She didn’t look upset. I’d wished she did.

“Give me one reason why I shouldn’t write you all up.” She waited just long enough for her words to sink in.  Billy forgot to feign a hurt wrist. “Do you know what happens to Littles who get too many referrals?”  The temperature in the classroom dropped to freezing.

It was a bluff.  Had to be. Except it probably wasn’t.  .

I pretended that the ridiculous monstrosity I was trapped in was a kind of podium in a courtroom serial drama, even if I couldn’t stand up straight and keep it on the floor at the same time.  “On what grounds?”

“Disrespect.  Defiance. Thievery. Destruction of Property”  The lack of anger in Sosa was actually frightening.  I’d rather talk down a hothead than an ice queen.

“Miss Sosa, I’d like to level with you.” I didn’t wait for permission but it was a good sign that I wasn’t being cut off.  “That’s not the best idea.  You know as well as I do that Littles aren’t held to the same standard as even Kindergarteners. We could all show up topless next week and still wouldn’t be in violation of the dress code.”

“You just purposefully broke my phone. The rules still apply, Clark. You were a teacher.”

There! I had my in! My credibility!  I kept my voice level. Reasonable. Responsible.  Adult. I pretended that I was still, legally, Mr. Gibson.  I pretended that my pants weren’t peed in or that within twenty minutes give or take I’d be eating corn dog nuggets out of a highchair for lunch followed by an afternoon nap.

“Yeah,” I said. “And you and I both know that you shouldn’t have had your phone out. And I didn’t really break it. You’d do more damage if you stepped on it.  Not even Brollish would take you seriously.  Billy could have walked up, climbed on your lap, and slapped you in the face, and chances are he’d get off with a warning, and you’d get sent to some kind of de-escalation training refresher about not putting your face in slapping range.”  I couldn’t tell if Billy was excited or afraid of what I’d just said.  “Not that Billy would do that, mind you.  But you’re the adult here.”

Deep breath. Time to bring it home. “Unless we’re a danger or major regular disruption to other students, this is time out and a stern note home at best. Unless you really really exaggerate what we just did and leave out the parts where you were letting us roughhouse and getting the wrong idea...” I swallowed.

I had her.  I knew I had her before she opened her mouth back up.  “If it helps I’ll go to time out. Just leave out the other guys.  I’m sorry.”

“Clark, that’s very…”

“Mature?” Annie piped up.

“Insightful,” Sosa said.  She stood up, rubbed her temples.  “Alright. I’m sorry for losing my temper.  You’ve got about five minutes left to try and figure the puzzle out. Then we’ll go back to class.  Just...don’t push it.  Deal?”

“Deal.” We all said.  It was kind of a draw, decidedly less successful than our recent session working Skinner over, but it felt like a win all the same.

When Annie, Chaz, and I were taken out of our puzzle boxes, they didn’t dance or play music that sent our endorphins racing. More things were going on that Sosa wasn’t telling us. At least we took the long way around the building instead of cutting through my old room.

Sosa carried Chaz and he was making the most of it for both himself and us.

“Miss Jasmine?”

“No.”

“Miss J?”

“No.”

“Miss S.?”

“You know how to say Miss Sosa.  You’re not that Little.”

“Hey, Clark,” Annie whispered to me in the walkway back to class.  “How much of what you said at the end was true?  About us slapping teachers and stuff?”

My heart was still thundering from the performance.  “I honestly have no idea,” I confessed.  “I just spat out everything about discipline that I knew from teaching three year olds, stuff I think I remembered Beouf complaining about, and stuff that sounded good in my head.”

“You were just bullshitting?” Billy behind me said.

I blushed. “I mean...kinda.”

“You had me going so hard,” Billy gushed.

“It’s a good thing for Beouf that Clark isn’t taller,” Annie said back to us.

“Why?”

“He could probably do her job better than her.”

I’m still not sure how I feel about that particular compliment.

[Personalias]

Chapter 65: Little Voices: Not Okay

I’d never before been to the Oakshire Community Center.  It wasn’t because it was a known Amazon hangout or anything; everything in Oakshire was a known Amazon hangout.  Almost every space in Oakshire, if not the entire world, was built with Amazon customs, dimensions, and desires in mind.  Amazon was treated as the default.  Everything that wasn’t Amazon was the variation.

I’d just never been. The O.C.C. could have been a historic city landmark or open only a year or two as part of some city betterment program that I missed.  Prior to my adoption, it could have been the place to be on a Thursday night, or it could have been a dump coasting off of taxpayer money and generous donations.  I had had my community, and this wasn’t it.

I only knew two things about the Oakshire Community Center.  It could be reached, in part, by taking the bus, and it hosted the local budding chapter of Little Voices.  

I don’t know what I expected that night when Janet took me through the thick double doors and flashed her brand new membership card at the Center’s check in counter.  It wasn’t the heavy bouncing of basketballs and the squeak of sneakers in the gymnasium.  It wasn’t the electronic 8-bit booping of old-ass arcade, pinball machines, and fighting games that were only in 3-D instead of Virtual Reality scrambled with the muffled swearing as teenagers tried to win at foosball.  

It certainly wasn’t the chanting affirmation from not-quite-closed-enough doors going, “Today I am an alcoholic. Tomorrow will be no different. My alcoholism lives within me now and forever. I must never forget what I am…”

The door opened and Janet slipped us inside the reserved room with the Little Voices poster unfurled over it.  The tables in the room had already been folded and shoved to the periphery with a mish-mash of low-backed steel and plastic chairs forming a circle in the center.  Purses, backpacks and diaper bags were slung lazily over the backs or put neatly to their occupants sides, and the steady churning rumble of childish squeals mixed with polite conversation stopped for all of three seconds as the not quite two dozen giant faces paused long enough to regard us before going back to whatever it was they were doing.  

And in those faces I saw...

That’s when I realized…

The assembled group of tyrannical crazies were…

Kind of boring all things considered.

Honestly, it was stupid of me to expect it, but when one reads about Little Voices, and sees the commercials and propaganda, one expects a certain level of pomp and grandiosity: figures in dark hooded robes, burning incense candles over a pentagram, the chanting in a long dead tongue. I at least expected something like the conservative haircuts and white button up shirts with black ties and matching slacks that were the hallmark of half a dozen cults or cult-like political groups.

As the door closed behind us, I didn’t get that impression, but something so much worse instead.  The Little Voices meeting was just made up of...people?

They were still baby crazy Amazons, obviously, but just...people. Helena Madra and her Little Native Amy were there, obviously.  Amy leaned back, cradled in her Mommy’s arms, nursed from a bottle of milk with her eyes closed, looking somehow more immature than I remembered in the dark pink footie pajamas.  Someone was going straight into the crib as soon as they got home.

But I also remember seeing a balding man with glasses and a thin sweater, with a Little boy sitting shyly at his feet, occasionally hugging the man’s shins when he wasn’t bouncing a teddy bear in his lap.  I remember there being a girl with blue highlights bouncing a diapered woman with pink bangs on her knee.  Every time the Amazon stopped, the Little would whine behind her pacifier and look up with puppy dog eyes. This got her another thirty to forty more seconds of bouncing.  Pink Hair had to be old enough to be Blue Hair’s mother.  Somewhere in the back of my brain, I remembered my sister-in-law jokingly asking ‘who was really in charge’ when my nephew was first born.

A couple, a Tweener and her giant husband in their forties, checked their fake son’s diaper and then passed him between them for a round of giggly hugs.  A dark-skinned woman in a loose fitting dress took tablets away from the man and woman sitting at her feet and mumbled something about not wanting too much screen time.  The ‘twins’- dressed in nearly identical outfits of the same teal and pink, save for the fact that one had a skirt and the other had shorts- frowned for a moment and started playing rock-paper-scissors with each other instead.    

Oh god...what if they’d known each other before this life? What if I was staring at an ex-married couple? I chased that thought away and unfocused my vision, just taking in the whole room.

By virtue of my size, paranoia, and profession, I’ve always been something of a people watcher.  In ten years of teaching I’d had to attend an uncountable number of I.E.P. meetings and parent teacher conferences (with Tracy or someone bigger acting as a buffer just in case).  Close behind that number was all of the times accidentally eavesdropping on colleagues complaining and complimenting about parents in the lull before faculty meetings began: ‘Too involved’; ‘not involved enough’; ‘obviously doing their child’s homework’; ‘makes delicious cupcakes’; ‘finally a parent who disciplines at home’.

I’d also attended dozens of quasi-mandatory after-school functions like school carnivals, fundraisers, and open houses.  The names get lost to the march of time and piles of paperwork, but patterns emerge. There’s the parents who only show up to school functions if there’s free pizza or a giveaway of some kind. There’s the parents who volunteer at every opportunity to the point where I’ve had to remind myself that they don’t actually get paid to work at Oakshire Elementary. And obviously, there were the involved parents who still quite obviously have lives of their own, and the overworked parents that were just doing their best.  

There were the parents carrying babies on their hips or pushing them in strollers, real babies, and I’d feel a surge of relief because that felt like at least another two or three years before their crazy clock would reset.  There were Amazons with Littles who I’d feel tremendous pity for and then relief, because better them than me.

To her credit, for lack of a better term, I couldn’t always tell which parent with a second grader had their newest forever-one-year-old in Beouf’s class, but I could almost always tell which Amazons hadn’t even tried.  There was always a guarded, almost angry and definitely cruel glint in that so-called parent’s eyes; a prison guard looking for an excuse to abuse and humiliate.  People who Raine Forrest or Brollish would have gotten along fine with, or even approved of.

Point being, that like I’ve said before, Amazons can be charming, friendly, helpful, absolutely wonderful people provided you weren’t a Little and around them when their particular brand of crazy went off. I’d seen awful tyrants bullying people smaller than them into playing a part.  Yet I’d also seen plenty of parents, actual parents, who were good, well meaning people wanting what was best for the actual children in their lives.  

And as much as I despised it, the gathered Amazons demonstrated more and more of the positive behaviors I’d heard about through gossip, or seen from afar during an open house, or witnessed first hand at conferences and I.E.P. meetings when a student of mine had a younger sibling and the mother or father couldn’t get a sitter.

For all intents and purposes, the roles were all represented: mothers and fathers making time after work and connections for future playdates. Kids by turns clinging to their parents or commingling on the floor in the center.   It was almost disturbingly normal. There was even the slight boredom and anticipation for the start of a routine from people of all sizes in the reserved room.  Stowed in Janet’s lap, my eyes and ears picked up snippets of conversation as over a dozen social interactions and relationships played themselves out before order was called.

“Can I have a cookie?” A Little aked.

“Not right now,” their warden replied patiently.

“Can I have a cookie?”

“No, sweetie.”

“Now?”

“No cookies till after the meeting.  Ask me one more time and it’ll be no cookies at all.”

An over dramatic gasp. “Ever…?”

A cheeky smile.  “Yes…”  It was a lie and both knew it.

“Nuh-uh!”

“Just try it and find out.”

A pouty lip and a sheepish blush “No, thank you.”  I’d seen that kind of scene play out plenty of times; the only difference was the ‘kid’ hadn’t needed a laser bath to prevent them from shaving.  If I didn’t know any better, I’d have seen nature and not conditioned artifice.

I did know better.

“Evening, Carl,”  A childless man with a five o’clock shadow and slightly rumpled business attire leaned over and asked the silver fox sitting next to Janet. Damn, it would have been nice to have some stubble.

“Hullo, Frank,” the silver-haired man replied. “How’s work?”

“Good enough. Good enough.  Say, where’s Joanie?”

“She’s with her Papa Don over in the KidZone.”

“Oh, that’s good! Last time she was looking kinda restless.”

Turned out Mr. Five-O’Clock-Shadow wasn’t ‘childless’ at all.  “Daddy! Daddy! Upsie-downsies!” a Little girl in a rainbow polka dotted dress crinkled up from the middle of the floor.

“You want upsie-downsies?”  Shadow asked.  “Can you wait, sweetcake? Daddy’s talking to a friend.” The Little whined quietly and started moving her foot around the floor like she could stir it.  “Sorry, you were saying?”

“Oh just the challenges of being a modern parent,” Silver went on. “You know how some kids are,” the man’s voice went a little higher. ‘Daddy...it’s called Little Voices, not Tweener Voices. I’m tired of hanging out with all the babies!”  He stopped the impression.  “So Don’s watching her play while me and Kylie come here.”  The Little girl who must have been Kylie stretched and leaned back into her Daddy’s lap.

“Joanie’s such a good big sister.” Shadow mused.

Silver nodded, sagely. “She is.  Which is why she deserves some of her own fun.”

“Different expressions of Maturosis.  Different needs.”

“Mmmm-hmmm.”

“Hold on a second, Carl,” Shadow scooped the Little in the polka dot dress up. “Someone here needs upsie-downsies.”  He then casually dangled her by her ankles like a fish, and her giggles turned into squeals while her too loose dress folded and fell right off of her.   “Whelp, that’s what I get for putting her in that dress.”   Other than to acknowledge the squeak, nobody so much as blinked.  “How’s Donald been, will you two be taking turns with Kylie and Joanie, or am I only gonna get to talk sports via messenger from now on?”

Parents talking and multitasking while kids played around them and begged for attention.  Rough housing and playing and cuddling ensue while more mature conversations continue.  If I hadn’t known any better…

But I did…

“Ms. Hopkins at Daycare said Angie gets two gold stars for putting away all the blocks, but she didn’t even help.” A Little man older than me said to a friend on the floor loud enough for me to overhear.  “It’s only ‘cause she was a Helper before and used to bring people to the daycare” I held my breath. What were these idiots doing saying our codewords in front of the giants?  No one seemed to notice, though.  “She’s not even a good stacker at blocks, she can only go four high before they fall over!”



“Blocks are really fun,” his companion agreed. “but I don’t like having to put them away. They should invent self-putting-away blocks.”

“That’ll never happen. The Grown-Ups will put themselves out of a job if they go that far..”  They both laughed and high-fived one another. Two daycare residents in shortalls talking about blocks and teacher’s pets with the same serious fervor, whimsy, and knowing weariness that Beouf and I used to talk like just before school.  If I hadn’t known any better…

But I did…

I knew exactly what was going on.

Natives.  I was surrounded by Littles who had gone Full Native and completely bought into the propaganda.  They’d been broken to the point where they now saw in themselves and their captors exactly what their captors wanted to see.

It was enough to want to vomit up perfectly serviceable chicken nuggets.  Come to think of it, I kind of wanted to do that anyway.  

The bald man sitting directly across the circle from Janet looked at his phone. “Alright folks, it’s about that time. Weeeeeeeeee’re-”

The room sprang into chorus and my pants rustled beneath me while Janet grabbed me by the wrists and bobbed me on her lap.

“-All together again,
We’re here! We’re here!
We’re all together again,
We’re here! We’re here!
And who knows when,
We’ll be all together again,

Singing we’re all together again,

We’re heeeeere!”

Littles who had been talking about cartoons and daycare politics by the proverbial water cooler rushed to empty laps with arms outstretched like they’d found the winning lottery ticket in their non-existent pockets.  Their captors didn’t stop singing, just smiled wider and brought them up.

The second verse was the same as the first.

So was the third.

It was about that time that I sorely wished Janet had sprung for a sitter again.  I would have preferred another round of hide and seek with booze foul enough to double as gasoline to this.

From the looks on literally everyone else’s faces, I was in the minority.  It was a small mercy that Janet released my wrists and chose to hug me instead of forcing me to clap for this inane idiocy.

“So now that we’re all together again,” the balding Amazon said.  “We have some new, and new-ish, faces.  Please, introduce yourself.”

Janet spoke first.  “Hi. I’m Janet.”

“HI JANET!” The circle shouted and smiled at us.

There. There was that cult feeling I’d been expecting; oddly refreshing in a way.

“And this is Clark.”

“HI CLARK!”

“I came here last week on the recommendation of his teacher.  Made some friends.” Helena waved at Janet.  Amy waved at me.  I felt my blood pressure rise. “I liked what I saw and heard, and I like you all and wanted to participate more. So...yeah.  We’re back.”  A quiet, knowing laughter came in reply.

“Clark,” the group leader said.  “Is there anything you’d like to say?”

Caught in a train’s headlightsI  There were things I wanted to say, all right, but for my own long term health I merely mouthed “no”.

“He’s going through something of a shy phase,” Janet said. “Kind of withdrawn.”  As far as she would admit to herself, that was the truth.  I’d said next to nothing to her beyond robotic answers or requests.  “His teacher and some of the therapists say...”  she stopped herself and gave me another hug from behind.  “You know what, I’ll get into that after lap time.”

“Thank you, Janet. Next?”  

Blue Hair stood up and dangled the pink-haired Little by the armpits. “Hi guys. I’m um...Cindy.”

“HI CINDY!”

“And you already know Mary, I’m guessing.”

“HI MARY!”  

Pink Hair blushed and giggled like she was in on some grand joke; the veteran getting introduced like she was the new guy.  

Blue Hair kept talking. “Um...Mary’s my sis--”

“You’re younger.” Pink Hair interrupted, wearing a Cheshire grin.

“Ugh...fine. I’m Mary’s big, but younger, and much, much, more mature sister.”  By way of reply Pink Hair tilted her head back and stuck her tongue out.  Blue Hair mirrored the act, briefly.  “My Mom and Dad are on vacation and I’m babysitting till they get back.”

“Mommy and Daddy don’t want Sissy getting preggers or adoptin’ ‘fore she’s ready!”

A comically serious expression came over Blue Hair.  “It’s working…”

The assembly barked laughter and gave a smattering of applause as Blue Hair sat down and plopped her ‘sister’ in her lap.

“One more?”

At mine and Janet’s three-o’clock, a tall, skinny, and oddly Littleless man with glasses and curly dark brown hair stood up.  “Hello, everyone. I’m Mark.”

“HI MARK!”

“I don’t have a Little, yet”  He paused for gasps and questions. None came.  He continued. “I moved here for work, and I’m looking to adopt a Little, start a family and start giving someone who needs it my love and care.  But I want to do it right.  Little Voices is pretty big where I’m from so when I found out Oakshire had started a chapter, I signed up.”  The maternal monsters in the room might have been part bobblehead.

Don’t ask me why, but I immediately hated Mark. I held back a full blown snarl and stared at him long after he sat down and the group leader picked up the proceedings.

“So for our newbies, the way a meeting typically works is first we do about fifteen to twenty minutes of Lap Time with our babies. We teach them and one another fun little games and songs and chants to do whenever or wherever might be appropriate and fun.  It might be during a change, or tubby time, or in the car, or bed time, or just when they’re sitting in our laps like this at home.”


“Two little men in a flying saucer…!”

“Amy. Shush, baby.”  Amy finished the bottle and then lodged two fingers in the gap between her remaining teeth.

The man leading went on like he didn’t even notice Amy’s blurting.  He probably didn’t. “Then we spend the rest of the time swapping stories, teaching tricks, sharing successes, supporting one another, and reviewing the literature while our Little Ones play in the nursery down the hall.”

Reviewing the literature? I stood corrected.  This was totally a cult and I was the only one who hadn’t bought in.  I was the only Adult Little in a room full of Beouf, Zoge, and Ivy clones.

Closing my eyes, I breathed deep and exhaled.  This. Was Going. To Be. Annoying.  I wasn’t going to win this one. Not even a draw.  This was going to be so annoying.  I didn’t have my posse and was hopelessly outnumbered by people who were more like Amy than like Chaz. If I fought this, I was going to lose worse than usual.  This was going to be so damn annoying!

I wasn’t going to grin.  I would, however, manage to bear it. Doing any kind of satisfying damage here would take time..  It was just a matter of remaining quiet and looking for individual or group pain points to apply pressure to, just like with Sosa  I didn’t know any of these people half as well as I thought I’d known Sosa.  This would take time.  I considered it a practice run for Beouf.

As is the case with so many rituals in life, I don’t accurately recall that first round of ‘Lap Time’ exercises. Unlike Beouf’s Circle Time, it wasn’t the same musical pablum every visit.  More like hymns- there wasn’t a predictable rotation as much as there was a steady list of favorites that were experimented with, expanded upon, or shrank depending on any given curator’s preferences until there was a kind of communal repertoire that could be drawn upon.

1...2...3...Baby’s on my Knee.

Sweet Potatoes in the Pot

Boom Chicka Boom.

Miss Mary Mack.

The list went and goes on...

Patterned call and response songs that required no thought but lots of volume. Littles being used as props and puppets and delighting in it. That sort of thing.  I sat in silence, contributing nothing; not even physical resistance.  

“Whose turn is it to watch the nursery?” someone asked when it was done.

The Amazon husband with the Tweener wife raised his hand.  “I’ll do it!”

“Howard likes playing in the nursery almost as much as the kids,” his wife joked.

Someone added, “As long as none of us has to change him.”  More proof in the form of laughter that the giants didn’t really consider smaller folk as equals.

Much like Beouf’s class, we held hands and walked out of the reserved room and to the Community Center’s nursery.  Janet stayed behind but several other giants accompanied us; carrying crawlers and making sure stragglers didn’t fall behind or distractables didn’t wander off.  As near as I could tell, I was the only potential runner.  Neither links in my chain had a grip anywhere near resembling Ivy’s.

The nursery was slightly bigger than Beouf’s room but lacked most of the classroom amenities:  No bathroom. No sink. No projector or whiteboard. Only two cribs pushed up against a wall. A changing table out in the open against another wall. No high chairs or food storage or prep areas. No crafts.  No tables or chairs save for a single rocker.

Based on the sign outside the door, the nursery attendant was only on duty four days a week with a shift that ended at five pm. In short, it wasn’t supposed to be a daycare or classroom; just a short term sitting service while parents worked out or attended a meeting.

Wasting no time, I let go of my link in the chain and found the nicest, darkest corner to brood in. My plan was simple. Do my time. Don’t talk to anybody I didn’t have to. Go home and dream up ways to torment pseudo-science spewing teachers when the ratio of sane to mindfucked Little was slightly more in my favor.  So simple even a baby could do it.

It wasn’t quite six minutes in before Amy Madra found me and crawled up.

“Hiya Clark!”

I copied what I’d been doing with Janet. I looked past Amy, gritted my jaw, and said nothing.

“How are you liking it how’s Jessinia are you feeling better you started acting reeeeal weeeird at the zoo last time did you eat something funny oh! maybe you’re gluten free like me you really need to tell your mommy if you are it’s really super important I really hope they’ll teach us some uppey throwy songs where our mommies and daddies toss us in the air but just a lil bit I don’t like heights does Jessinia miss me why do you think he still has his fancy accent after all these years living abroad does he still have his fanciful accent?”

I did nothing.  I was going to ignore her and eventually she’d get bored and go away.

That had been the plan.  “Oh, sorry,” Amy said. “  Forgot you’re still new and not used to talking efficient. Let me slow down.  Howwwwwww issssss Jessinniaaaaa? Purple Octopussss? Pip-piiiiiip? Cheeeeeriooooo?”

I gave her nothing.  Amy had the mind of a child and like any child, if I ignored her long enough she might increase the behavior before it went extinct, but eventually she’d stop. A small gasp came from her.  “Oh, no,” she covered her mouth.  “You’re in a corner, does that mean you’re in time out I didn’t see you do anything bad and there’s no naughty stool or some Little in a cheap suit wagging his finger in this room so it’s hard to tell if you’re in trouble or not am I gonna get in trouble for talking to you while you’re in time out or did you put yourself in time out ‘cause I thought you did a really good job for a beginner so you don’t need to feel bad.”

Time out?  Fuck it.  If it meant that the crawling gap toothed nutter would leave me alone I’d let her think that.  

“Oh wait, are you pooping?”

“WHAT?!” I accidentally blurted out. That was a mistake.  “No! I’m not-!”

“If you are,” she verbally overran me, “I think that corner over there is better, it’s the least interesting corner and most people don’t look over there if you’re trying to do that thing where you hide and pretend you’re sitting on the potty while you poop. Kinda like that spot with the bookcase in Mrs. Beouf’s room….?  Do new kids like you still do that before they’re finally unpotty trained?”

The sound of plastic ripping lured my eyes over to the changing table, presently in use for all who cared to see.  I looked down and shielded my eyes, accidentally making eye contact with Amy in the process.

“Hmmm?” she had to rotate to glance back over her shoulder. “Oh yeah, I guess you wouldn’t be too used to seeing that cause of Beouf’s room, either, huh?  It’s okay, bud. You’ll get there.”  If the living embodiment of my own worst case scenario knew how much that sentiment disturbed me she didn’t show it.

A new voice decided it’d be a good time to just ruin my day.  “Hey Amy!”  Yet another strange Little waddled up to the corner.  Like Amy, the outfit his Amazon had dressed him in indicated that he likely.was being put straight into a crib after his Mommy or Daddy finished the cult meeting.  The only difference being the grippies on the soles of his feet served a useful purpose for him.

I couldn’t quite place him, or his unnaturally white hair.  Too many unfamiliar faces, not enough time and they all had the same basic fucking brain so what was the point?

“You’re Clark, right? I’m-”

“I really don’t care right now.”  I interrupted.  He went almost as pale as his hair.  

“Clark’s a new kid,” Amy said as if that explained anything.

Evidently, it did.  “Ooooooh,” the intruder said.  “That’s why he’s in the corner. I didn’t see a Grown-Up put him in time out.”

“Oh yeah, right, that’s not Caleb’s Daddy’s style.”  Amy looked relieved.  “I hadn’t thought of it like that.  See Clark? You’re not in trouble.”

Despite myself I looked over at the giant with messy hair and an untucked shirt.  Whoever he’d been changing was clean and off the table and far enough away from it that I couldn’t pick them out of the overcrowded nursery. ‘Howard’ was squirting sanitizer on his hands before starting to blow up a balloon.

“Do you think he’s pooping or pouting?” The ghost boy asked Amy.

“I think he’s just pouting.  He does that. Like a lot. Hasn’t even told me about Jessinnia.”

They were just as damned and diapered as me, but talked over me like they were the devils.  Janet and Beouf I could tolerate, for some reason.  This was a straw that was close to breaking my back.

I cleared my throat.  The guy who’d had way too much peroxide dumped on his dome looked at me.  “Oh. Yeah. Rude. Sorry. My bad.  I’m-”

“I don’t care,” I repeated.  “Just go away.  Please.”  My breath was starting to become shallow; labored.  If they wouldn’t listen to me, my mind decided, my body would scream at them.

“Consent is key…”  Amy crawled away.

“Okay. That’s fair. But can I just say something?”  This latest mosquito I was about to swat didn’t give me a chance to answer.  “It’s going to be okay.  I’ve been adopted for almost two and a half years and it gets better. Your Mommy is here because she wants to fix herself and the other Grown-Ups are all here to help her. It’s going to be okay.”

He walked away before I could curse him out.  I shook as if he’d just invoked a voodoo ritual on me.  

‘It’s going to be okay.’

Okay.

It was going to be okay.

My chest hurt and my throat tightened up with that kind, gentle, condescending reassurance.   None of this was okay.  None of it was supposed to be okay.  Perhaps I was having a heart attack just then.  Wouldn’t that have been wonderful?

Like a Robo-Nanny, I imagined my vision going into black and white, and little boxes framing potential targets in the classroom.  Mission Objective: Make Things Not Okay.

The lone supervisor had finished blowing up his balloon.  “Keepy Uppies!” he announced.  He sent that bit of thin rubber and carbon dioxide into the air.  “Don’t let it touch the ground!”

Mindfucked Littles chased the balloon’s warbling trajectory, smacking it over and over again.  “Don’t let it land! Don’t let it land! Gotta get to a billion!”  There was no teamwork involved, just scrambling and the wild thrashing of arms sending the balloon up and around in a chaotic, nigh unpredictable arc.

If they’d been smart and gentle, two to three of them could have controlled the trajectory and barely moved, instead of sending the thing wafting like a leaf on the wind. These weren’t smart Littles.  Not anymore.

I came out of the corner. Target Acquired.

“I got it!” I yelled.  “I got it!”  The red balloon, bigger than my head, tumbled down.  Down, down, down, towards my outstretched and waiting arms. “I got it!”  I sidestepped out of the way at the last second.  The balloon nestled itself on the floor.

“Awwww….” came a chorus of disappointed Natives.  “Not even close to a record.”

“You have to keep it up,” someone said. “That’s why it’s called Keepy Uppies!”

I’d keep it up, all right.  If the throng hadn’t picked up the balloon and sent it back up I might have jumped on it.  No matter. There were other things I could do.  Time for some A.L.L.-style harsh truths.

I found Pink Hair.  I walked up to her and told her, “Your fake sister is taking care of you because your fake parents are regretting adoption now that they’re getting old. That’s why they left you here.”

“Hey…!”  I walked away, not looking at her reaction. I did my best not to smile at the tremble of her voice.

The girl who’d been given the trout treatment had her polka dot dress back on when I came up.  “Everyone saw your tits when that stranger dangled you upside down.”  Then for added salt I shoved in a “Thank you.”

“What?!”  Unlike earlier, she covered her chest with the palms of her hands.

I found the two guys who were complaining about blocks and a supervisor playing favorites. Unsurprisingly, both of them were stacking plastic cubes with letters molded into them, congratulating each other on getting six whole blocks high.  It was fun kicking them down.

“HEY!”  They shouted at me, still seated on the floor.  “What was that fo-?”

“Blocks are stupid and you only care about them because you’ve lost everything else of value in your lives.”

The barest hint of a smirk found its way to me.  

“MR. CALEB’S DADDY! MR. CALEB’S DADDY-!”

“Won’t be long now,” I whispered to myself.  I marched up to Amy.  “You look ridiculous with those missing teeth, you wasted years of your life because you wanted to work in a zoo and you lost your freedom and identity because of it.”

Amy looked like the insult didn’t register.  She was so far gone it might not have.  “Oh, yeah,” she said. “I know.  What’s your point? Oh wait! Do you feel like talking now because you still haven’t told me about a ceeeeertain octopus and-”

I didn’t get to hear the rest of her ramblings.  “I think someone should be by themselves,” the Amazon Daddy told me as he lifted me off the floor.  “Must be overstimulated, or just got a case of the grumps.”

No one else talked to me for the rest of the time.

Janet found me stashed in the crib.  Alone.  Like I’d wanted to be.

“Oh Clark,” she sighed.  “What am I gonna do with you, bubba?”

[TerranV]

Nice chapter.

And yeah I can totally get how its worse realizing that Little Voices isn't some cabal of mustache twirling villains. Just normal people doing what they perceive to be right.

[Personalias]

Chapter 66: In Search of Silver Bullets

As a general rule, I don’t believe in karma; not the pop-culture version, anyhow.  I don’t believe that people who do good in the world are rewarded so that despite their suffering they’ll see a net positive and that people who do bad are punished despite their prosperity so that they’ll experience a net negative.  The world wouldn’t be like it is if that were the case.  I don’t think there’s a balancing force to the universe that puts people where they need or deserve to be; not in this life, anyways.  

Standing there in the OT/PT Therapy Room naked save for a clean diaper; alone save for Maxine Winters; I believed in one thing: Amazons talked to each other.  The double whammy my crew and I had pulled on Skinner and Sosa had made its way to the Physical Therapist through the usual watercooler gossip chain.  “I think I’m going to work with Clark one-on-one today,” she’d said cheerily enough.

Damn.  No chance to be a ‘bad influence’.  No big deal.  I could present my findings on the best ways to mess with Winters to the others at the old oak tree on the playground.  Beouf and company could only keep me from the other Leaguers for so long.  Notes could be passed.  Secrets could be whispered.  Even broken Littles like Ivy and nearly totalled headcases like Sandra Lynn and Tommy unconsciously observed an ‘Us and Them’ mentality.

An extra wrinkle was thrown in when Winters started undressing me the moment the door was closed behind us.  The world turned neon green when she yanked my shirt up over my head. My arms were all caught up in the sleeves when she yanked down my shorts.  “Why are you-?”  

Shoes and socks went off, shorts followed.  I finished taking off my shirt and was given a ‘good job!’ for my troubles.

“You could have given me a little warning, Maxine.” I muttered, searching for even a tiny glint of that outrage I’d seen when I invoked Sosa’s first name.  Not so much as a twinkle of anger.  So much for that being her weakness.  Internally, I sighed.  If life had meant for it to be easy for me, I’d have been born taller. The dig had been worth a shot.

“Sorry Clark,” she said.  “We’re going to do some crawling today and I didn’t want you to get your nice clothes all dirty.”  She put my clothes on the same chair that Sosa had occupied before.

Bullshit.  There was nothing inherently ‘nice’ about a neon green toddler t-shirt and shiny black soccer shorts with an elastic waistband.  Almost all clothing that Amazons made with Littles in mind was meant to be crawled and rolled around in.  The floor might have a dust bunny or two, but the custodial staff did it’s job.  Eat off it? No. Crawl around for a couple of minutes? Sure.  Winters just wanted to see me in my diaper.  

Whether by Janet, Beouf, Zoge, or just intuition from the baby shower, Winters knew how I felt about being seen in my plastic backed padding.  The joke was on her: Amazons saw my diaper all the time. I had become all but numb to it. The icy cold grip of paralyzing fear and embarrassment only came over me when a friend or an actual child saw me in that state.  I no longer had any Amazon friends.

My skin was pale, and no hint of blush anywhere on it.  “Alright,” I said.  “So what are we gonna do?”

“We’re gonna practice reciprocal crawling.”  I was about to try and pick apart her rationale in some form or another when she preempted me.  “Crawling can strengthen your shoulders, arms, and back, and makes your wrists, fingers, and ankles more flexible.”  Damn. She beat me to it.

She’d said this kind of schpiel to I-don’t-know how many Amazon parents at I.E.P. meetings when either she or Sosa brought up crawling. “Shifting between crawling and sitting works your core, abdominal muscles, and hips, and is good for posture,” she kept on prattling.  “And learning to shift your focus from the floor to other objects in the room is good for visual tracking and hand eye coordination and rocking on all fours is an excellent source of sensory stimulation for some.”

I lightly chewed on my bottom lip.  On some level, I appreciated that she was at least talking somewhat clinically to me.  On the other hand, like so many other Typical Amazon scenarios, she was using real science to mask a completely different goal.  She just wanted me to get used to crawling around on the floor.

“That’s why we’re gonna work on crawling. And I promise,” she smiled at me.  “You’ll be able to do it.”  So much for that respect. Sosa and Winters communicating after hours: confirmed.

Winters indicated the rest of the space.  “We’re going to do a kind of hide and seek scavenger hunt. I’ve hidden rubber ducks all around the room in different nooks and crannies. Find them all and you’ll get a special prize.”

I did a quick scan.  Under a low table where my preschoolers no doubt used to do cut and paste activities with Sosa , I saw a tiny yellow rubber duck that would fit neatly into the palm of my hand.  Like an egg hunt, a few were always in the open; chum in the water to entice the kiddies to find the rest.  “How many ducks?”

“Ten.”

I chewed on my lip some more.  “Any of them hidden? Ballpit? Drawers?”

“Of course they’re hidden,” Winters said, kindly enough. “But nothing is in a spot where you can’t reach or where you’re not allowed.  I don’t want you to get in trouble.”  That made one of us.    

This could still have been another bit of gaslighting, I thought.  ‘Keep looking baby Clark, you’ll find that tenth ducky’, when really there were only nine but meanwhile I’d been forced to crawl on the carpet for close to half an hour.

“What if I don’t find them?” I asked, looking up at Sosa.

Sosa looked back down at me. “I think you’ll find them.  Most Littles are good at this game.”

“But what if I don’t?”  Amazons were like stage magicians.  What they didn’t say was often just as important as what they did. “Will you show me where you hid them if I run out of time?”

Winters chuckled.  “You’ll be fine, Clark.”  I stared at her, unblinking and resolute.  “Okay.” she sighed. “Yes. I’ll show you if you can’t find them.  No giving up, though. Most Littles are really good at this game.”

“Like Ivy?” I prodded.

“Like your friend, Chaz.”

Accidentally, I scowled.  Obviously, Chaz was good at this game.  When Amazons fuck up your equilibrium to the point where crawling is your only option, you get good at seeing the world from a crawler’s eye view.  If Chaz was getting good at this game, it was a bad thing for him.

I pushed that bit of contempt for my youngest pupil back into my subconscious, and looked for any other loopholes that might be exploited.  “Do I have to carry them all at once?”  I pictured myself having to drag around half a dozen baby duck toys in the crook of one arm, constantly dropping them.

The therapist pointed to a bright yellow plastic bucket. “Nope. When you find a duck, you just drop it in there and keep looking for more.”  

Damn.

For what it was, this seemed fair.  Too fair.  I had to be missing something.  There had to be something to entice me or frustrate me or desensitize me so that crawling seemed like a better or more natural habit than it was.   “What happens if I cheat?” I asked. “Like what happens if I get up and walk or something?”

“No prize,” Winters said simply.

“You don’t put the ducks back or in new hiding places so I have to start all over again?” That seemed like a good way to keep me on the floor.

Like a horse, Winters’s lips flapped, pushing air through them in an almost laugh.  “Nope.  I’ll just give you another chance or find something else for you to do.  Simple as that.  I’m not gonna crawl around to hide them all over again because you’re feeling cheeky, mister.”

She’d definitely been talking to Sosa.

Heh.

Maxine Winters crawling around on the floor. There’s something I would’ve liked to see. Something that if it was brought attention to in the right way, might suitably get under her skin.

Yeah… maybe...could be fun.

“”Recyclical crawling?” I purposely mispronounced the word and put on my best ‘confused kid’ face.  “Wussat?”

“Just a fancy word for crawling and taking turns with your arms and legs,” she explained. “Left leg, right arm, right leg, left arm. That kind of thing.”

I dropped to my hands and knees.  “Like this?” I pretended to ask.  I pushed my arms ahead and then hop-dragged my feet behind me. I moved like a cross between a slug and a chimp.  This was on purpose.

“No no no,” Winters told me.  “You’ve got to alternate.”

“Altercate?”

“Alternate.  Take turns with your hands and legs. Hand turn. Leg turn. Hand turn. Leg turn.”   

I did the exact same thing that I had done before.  I looked like a gorilla with two bum legs.  Now though, I parroted her oversimplified explanation. “Hand turn. Leg turn. Hand turn. Leg turn.” To some people, there is nothing more frustrating than trying to teach or explain something and getting the sense that the other person just isn’t getting it.  I’m one of those people.  So was Winters.  We can smell our own.  It’s how I knew she’d be an easy crack.  The lack of other Littles around made pride a non-factor.

It was a good thing that the movement allowed me to have my back turned or my head down.  If not, Winters might have seen the damn near maniacal grin that was peeking through my facade.

“No, kiddo, not like that. You have to move your arms and legs one at a time.”  She didn’t even notice it, not consciously, but she was already coming closer to the ground.  Closer to my level.

“One at a time? One? At? A? Time?”   Again. I did the exact same thing, only now I did it with an incredible deliberate slowness.  “One. At. A. Time.” Maxine was on her knees and looking at me the way a mechanic might look at a smoking jalopy.   

I kept my face blank and did my best to imitate the same kind of passive innocence that so many actual children did when they were trying to be a brat and get away with it.  The difference between brattiness and jackassery is chronological age.  I was too old to be a brat; didn’t mean I wasn’t having fun acting like a jackass.

An electronic ping from her pocket seemed to stir something in her brain.  “If Miss Sosa was here, we could work your arms and legs together. Show you kinesthetically”  Her eyes wandered over to the door.  “Maybe I could borrow Miss Tracy…”

Shit! She wasn’t taking the bait!  Course correct! Course correct!  “Can you show me what I’m doing wrong? Mrs. B says I’m more of a visual learner.”  The inside of my tongue tasted like turned milk just from saying it.  “Please?”

Another ping from her pocket.  “Good idea.”  Wow. ‘Please’ really was a magic word.  She got down to her knees and took a few shuffling scoots up beside me. Funny how she didn’t have to strip down to her granny panties and show off her pasty white skin and big butt.  

“Watch me closely.” She got another ping, and wrinkled her nose. She got back up to her knees long enough to reach into her pocket and look at the phone.  “Not now,” she muttered, sounding irritated.

Stupidly; carelessly; oh so fucking typically; she placed the phone on the edge of the ballpit and my eyes dilated like a junkie who had just seen his next fix.  I’d already gotten her down on her hands and knees.  I was just a few precious seconds away from getting her to crawl.  What if...just what if...I could film it?

Okay. No. That was a stupid idea.  A power fantasy within a power fantasy.  I didn’t have my crew there to run interference and there was no way that I was fast enough to snatch it, figure out her password, film her crawling around on the ground like a six month old, and then post it anywhere meaningful. She was literally just doing her job; it’s not like she couldn’t explain.  I’d just be the ‘naughty baby’ that played with the camera.  I was going to be the ‘naughty baby’ no matter what. The real question was how could I make it hurt.  

Her willingness to humor me was a weakness.  How to exploit it? “I’m gonna stand up…” I said.  “So I can get a better look.”

“That’s fair,” Winters said.  “You watching, bud?”

I nodded. “Mmmhmmm…”

Winters started properly crawling, slowly and deliberately, one limb then the other, like a dinosaur that was so heavy it had to keep three feet down to support its weight.  I inched over to the ballpit. I didn’t know what I was going to do with the phone, but I’d figure something out.   “When I say ‘reciprocal crawling’, I mean this type of crawling.  Normal everyday crawling.”  Notice how she didn’t say ‘like a baby’?  She didn’t want me to make that connection, knowing that I’d resist. It really is all about what they don’t say...

“Oooooh,” I said. “Crawling! Regular good old fashioned crawling!” I slapped my forehead. “Duh!  Do I have to do it that slow?”

The therapist rotated into a seating position.  “No, sir. You can go as fast or as slow as you’re comfortable with and at your own pace.”  Sir.  Huh. Even then, hearing it felt kind of good.  She was willing to participate too.  In a lot of ways, Winters’s act was what Sosa and Skinner had been trying to achieve.

“So what am I supposed to do?” I stalled.  “Exactly?”

The lady started to roll back over. “You’re supposed to…” she stopped and went back to facing me in a seated position.  “You’re trolling me, aren’t you?”

“Kinda…”

“You knew exactly what I was talking about all along.”

I took a step back, towards her phone. My lips retreated inside my mouth. “Maybe…”

“You’re trying to trick me into doing all the hard work for you.”

A nervous giggle from me  “No…?”

“Clark…”

Coyly, I shrugged.  “Okay. Ya got me.”

She laughed through her nose.  “They said you’d been acting up and getting tricksy.”
Was I surprised that Maxine Winters had talked to Chandra Skinner or Jasmine Sosa, or Beouf?  No, not at all.  Was I relieved that even now my acts of malice were being written off as childish pranks?  For once, yes, absolutely.  Sometimes the difference between crazy and stupid is a degree of success.  So I was going to let her be stupid and assume the best of me instead of antagonizing her directly and driving her crazy right away.

“Can you show me?” I faux begged.  “Just once?”  I pinched my thumb and forefinger together and inched closer back towards the pit.  “With the duck under the table right there?”

Good naturedly, Winters rolled her eyes. “Fine.  Points for cunning.” She rolled over onto all fours and crawled  to the most obvious duck she’d hidden. “You crawl over. Like this.”  I had my back up against the ballpit.  “You grab the ducky, like this.”  She palmed the toy.

“Do they squeak?”

“No,” she said. “But…” She crawled over to the bucket.  “When you drop it in the bucket, this happens.”

DING!

My world started spinning in the best way possible. “Heeeeeee!” What a rush!  It was like the jingling wrist rattle Renner had tried to pawn off on me, or the one given in stuffed animals in the courthouse, or the music from Sosa’s puzzle boxes, but on steroids. I stumbled back and accidentally knocked the cell phone into the ballpit.  It was like getting tickled and spun around all at the same time.  For all of half a second my guard came down and I felt positively fucking giddy despite myself.

“There’s a false bottom and a sensor,” she explained.  “When you add weight to it, it makes a happy little ringing noise.”  I picked myself back up to my feet.  “You like that, huh?”

“Yeah….” I gasped. “Wait. NO!”

DING!  

I didn’t have time to catch my breath before she dropped it in again.  The world started spinning and I couldn’t help but laugh as I crumbled down to my knees and lowered to my hands to keep balance long enough for the world to stop spinning.

Panting like I’d just survived a seven story drop, I felt my bladder empty into the front of my diaper. The unnatural combination of adrenaline, pleasure, and disorientation rocketing from zero to sixty had been enough to where I’d  had an accident.  A real one, too.   Damn.  I was planning to keep dry until at least after lunch to see if I could with all of the bottle feedings and juice breaks.

A new realization hit me.  Chaz had been good at this game.  Maybe too good.  There was a reason he was the only crawler in class.  Amy might have been good at it too.  MistuhGwiffun talked about this stuff and the drunken pleasurable sensation, but maybe there were long term side effects from too much use.  In the back of my mind, I realized how this could be addictive; up until the point where there was literally no walking away from it.

Poor Chaz.

“Clark?” Winters cut in as I caught my breath. “You okay, baby?”  I was inhaling through my nose and exhaling through my mouth to get it together. I stood up.  “Did you wet your diaper?” Damn.  No pants to hide the sudden swell or the sag, or the slight off-white discoloration. “Do you want me to take you back to your class for a change?”

Inwardly I was fuming.  Another no-win question being added to the pile of my life. I’d either be a compliant ‘good baby’ and paraded around in just my wet diaper, or give them an excuse to say that I was comfortable in my wet Monkeez.  “No,” I huffed. “I’m okay.  I’ll get changed.  After this.”  My decision came down to the phone and the opportunities it might yet provide. No chance I’d get changed, brought back, and get a chance to fuck with Winters’s phone.  She’d miss having it.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Alrighty then.  Get crawlin’, buddy.”  Wasting no time, I swung my leg over the side and tumbled into the ballpit, clattering around as rainbow hued globules buried on top of me.  “Clark? What are you doing?”

“Looking for the duck you might have hid!” I called back.  I twisted myself and groped around until my hand clasped on the bulky rectangular device.  

“Why would I put a ducky in there if it wasn’t some place I thought you could reach by crawling?”

I looked at the screen. Score of scores! She’d forgotten to lock it!  “Um...this is our first session together?  Maybe you didn’t know where I could and couldn’t crawl yet?”  She had a new text message.  

“Clark,” her voice took on a playful warning tone. “Are you stalling and trying to play?”

I opened the text message and skimmed:

❤️ Jazzie ❤️

Just saw the time

realize who youre probably with

nvm

ttyl

❤️

Jazzie?  With hearts on either side? “Clark? Are you stalling?”

Quickly I scrolled back and saw:

❤️ Jazzie ❤️

- Eggs

- Kale

- Celery
- Waffle Mix
- Toilet Paper

- Dog food
- Bird seed

- Bloody Mary Mix

The biggest dumbest grin planted itself on my mug.  I was not the world’s greatest detective.  I didn’t need to be to figure out that Sosa and Winters were more than just co-workers, or that there was more than one reason Sosa bristled at being called ‘Jazzie’.  Holy shit, this was a potential goldmine!

“Clark?”

“Huh?” Crap. I’d gotten distracted. “Uh..maybe.”

I heard Winters huff.  “Fine, but only because I’m in a good mood. Two minutes, then you’re back out and finding the other ducks for me. No more stalling.”

“Yes ma’am.”  I wanted to giggle.  I wanted to cackle.  Probably could have and gotten away with it.  As far as she knew I was getting away with something, too.  But I had to work quickly.  It might not take two minutes for her to miss her phone.

I started scrolling through to see if there was anything I could use.  Dirty talk or pictures to forward somewhere scandalous. Anything embarrassing. Anything at all. Nothing at first glance.  What I did find was:

❤️ Jazzie ❤️

Gotta take my phone to the shop

Screen cracked

                                                                                                                    I’ll get everything but the pet food.
                                                                                                                       Sorry babe. How’d that happen?

CG

Will tell you more when i get home
Why???

                                                                                                                                           Ah. That makes sense.
                                                                                                                                                                           What?

The food!!

                                                                                                                                      We are not getting a bird.

Come on

You take care of the dog ill take care of the bird

                                                                                                                               We’ll talk about this at home.

Trouble in paradise! Nice! What to do with this, though? I could taunt her about it? ‘Ha-ha! You work with your girlfriend! Aaaand you’re arguing! Jazzie and Maxie sitting in a tree…’

Nah.

I could send an interesting text. A ‘fuck you bitch’ or a less vulgar ‘I told you not to bother me at work’. Perhaps an anxiety inducing ‘We need to talk’.  That probably wouldn’t work either.  Any strife I might sew with a random texts could easily be written off with ‘Oh, the baby got a hold of it’.  

Damn.  What was I supposed to do with this gorgeous bit of gossip and how could I use it?  Sosa and Winters were dating, living together even.  Maybe married and just kept their last names.  More importantly, they were having some kind of tiff.  How to exploit that?  What could I say to turn that against them?

The sad truth was, that I couldn’t turn that against them.  Me and Cassie had our share of fights, but any attack on her would have been like an attack on me, no matter how much we’d fought the night before.  Love was funny like that.  Sometimes Love is ‘never having to say you’re sorry’.  Other times, it’s ‘nobody fucks with her but-’

I had an idea.  I’d been searching for silver bullets to use against Winters.  What I’d found, instead, was a cache of golden landmines.  Time for me to lay some.

I popped my head up above the ballpit.  Winters was turned ninety degrees and staring at the second hand of the nearby clock.  Softly, I put the phone back on the very edge. “Okay. Bored now.”

“It’s not even two minutes.” Winters turned and looked at me.

I swung my leg over and allowed myself to tumble back out onto the floor. “I know. Bored now. Let’s look for ducks.”

She brightened. “Well, alright then!”  

I started crawling around on the floor, playing two games at once.  The first game was finding ducks, the game my ex-colleague wanted me to play.  The second game was waiting long enough to plant a few ideas and not have it seem suspicious.

One-Mississippi.

Two-Mississippi

The heck was a ‘Missississippi’ anyways?  Some long forgotten unit of time that just fit the meter, no doubt. It turned out I was closer than I thought by diving into the ballpit.  One of the ducks had been artfully placed on the other side.

“Good job!” Winters clapped lightly as I crawled back around to the yellow bucket. I crawled to the bucket and gently, very gently, lowered the rubber duck down into the bottom next to its twin.

DING!

“HAAAAAAAA!”  I rolled over on my back, wanting to claw my eyes out to stop from grinning. Two seconds later, I was back on all fours. I rocked back and forth slightly, testing my balance.  I wasn’t going to be a crawler by the end of this, but smokers didn’t develop emphysema after just one pack.  Better to avoid it altogether.

“Keep going. That’s two.”

Thirty-four-Mississippi.

Thirty-five-Mississippi.

Grumbling, I started going for the one underneath the platform swing.  I doubled back to the bucket.  I reached to the rim and tilted it over.  I held my breath waiting for Winters to right it or instruct me to.  She merely observed.  Slowly, I put the duck down on the side.

Nothing.  No dings.  No complaints.  Thank goodness.

I pretended that I didn’t see the one underneath the trampoline until I got to a Hundred-Mississippi.  That was about as long as I was willing to wait. “Miss Winters?”

“Yes?”

“What’s a good way to get what you want?”

“I think I’d start with saying things like ‘please’ and ‘thank you’.”

Typical.  “Yeah,” I said. “But what if you really really want something, and they won’t let you have it?”

“Grown-Ups know what’s best,” Winters said. “So if your Mommy’s not giving you something you want, there’s probably a good reason for it.”

Not quite there yet. “I know, but…”

“But what?”

“I’m not thinking about my Janet...I mean my Mommy.”  I wasn’t thinking about Janet at all, but a good way to sell a lie is to use the target’s expectations against them.  Amazons weren’t the only magicians.

Predictably, Winters countered that with. “Same goes for Mrs. B, kiddo.”

“Not talking about her either,” I said.

“Any Grown-Up.”

I shifted onto my diaper and did my best to ignore the wet squish just barely under my butt. “Like what if it’s not a Grown-Up though?” I clarified.  “Or like, someone who’s just as much of a Grown-Up as you are?”  

Take the hint, Winters.  Take the hint!

“Like a friend?” she asked.

“Yeah”  I pretended to be lost in thought for a moment, when I was really just thinking about anything other than the text I’d just seen.

“Then you’d have to talk with your friend and try to convince them to give you what you want.”

“What if they won’t listen to me?”  I asked.

“Then I guess you don’t get what you want.”

My frown was a toddler's pantomime. “How is that fair?”

“Life isn’t fair, bud.” More to herself she added.  “Especially for Grown-Ups…”

“Yeah?” My crawling back to the bucket gave me more proximity to her. “How is life not fair for Grown-Ups?” I plopped the duck in the tipped over bucket and saw a companion in the shade of the platform swing.  Then I noticed that a waste basket wasn’t quite straight. “I was a Grown-Up. Seemed pretty fair then.  Now I gotta beg and beg and beg just to get a good stuffie from one of the other kids at Janet’s...I mean Mommy’s….Little Voices meeting.”  A gamble, perhaps, but half-truths of where I’d been and what I’d done were meant to put her mind at ease.

“Do you have a Grown-Up who can come help you work things out between you and your Little friend?”  She thought she was setting me up for a one-two punch.  Quite the opposite by my counting.

“Yeah…?”

“Grown-Ups don’t have that.”

I took the duck from beneath the trash can. “Oh...good point.” I doubled back and made sure she hadn’t put one inside the can either.  She had. Clever.  “So what do you do?”

“Are you stalling again?”

Two ducks made their way to their resting place without setting off the bell.. “No. See?”

“Good. Keep going.”

“What do Grown-Ups even argue about?”  I did my best to sound mildly curious, but not wholly interested.  Had I been any other size and not dressed as I was, such a question would seem absurd concerning my age. Feeding into her crazy was greasing the wheels I hoped, and getting her to let her guard down.  I was already moving, playing two games at once.  Of course she’d hidden a duck under the desk.

Tiredly, the PT sighed. “Lots of things.”

I was an adult trying to sound like a child trying to sound like an adult. Had to reel her in without looking like I was doing it. “Like what kind of paint to get at the paint store or something?”

“Like... pets.”

YES! Jackpot! Duck number seven joined the flock and I felt the kind of giddiness that I could conceal. “Pets?”

“Yes. Keep looking.”

I started crawling aimlessly.  It was mattering less and less if I found those last three props. “I like pets.  What’s there to argue about pets?”

Even from as far away as I was I could practically hear the annoyed exhale blow out from Winters’s nostrils. “I’ve got a friend who wants to get a pet bird.”

“What kind of bird?” I asked.

“A Rocaw.”

“That’s a type of parrot, right?”  

“Right.”

I’m not sure how a three foot green feathered monstrosity that could bite off the hand of a Little was in the same ballpark as a parrot, but to most Amazons I was in the same ballpark as a child not yet ready for potty training.  “I used to have a buddy who was a zookeeper. They said that parrots lived a long time and didn’t stop screaming. Kinda like big feathery toddlers that you don’t get to dress up or take anywhere and they smell funny.”  Amy’s random batshit that weekend might just pay dividends. I’d have to thank her except no I wouldn’t.

“Yup…Pretty much.”  Winter’s sentences were becoming clipped. Her mouth was drawn into a tight thin line. Just thinking about this was drawing back unpleasant memories of conflicts not yet resolved.  And with any luck, they wouldn’t be.

I stumbled into duck number eight in the corner where I should have seen it earlier.  “So just don’t get it. Right?”

“It’s more complicated than that.”

“How so?”

“Because my friend thinks they really wants one and I don’t.”

I crawled back, deposited it and kept going. “Why not?”  

“Because my friend wants the bird now, but I’m going to have to be the one to clean up after it and smell it and listen to its squawks and pick up the food for it when my friend is busy.  I just want a Cerbernard.”

I froze and looked up at her. “The big dog breed? With three heads?” I pretended that dogs big enough for me to saddle and ride were the most exciting things in the world.

“They don’t actually have three heads,” Miss Winters told me. “but yes.”

“I like dogs.”  Not really.  They’re big slobbery brutes and yappy annoying things that can’t be bothered or taught to even poop in a box.  But my mark liked dogs, so I liked dogs, too.

“Me too.” Winters nodded. “If I get a pet, I want one that won’t poop all over the place and isn’t squawking all the time.”  She looked over by the door.

How about that? I’d somehow missed rubber duck number nine by the door.  Sucker was giving me hints! “And if you and your friend can’t both get pets because you’re sharing money or something so you have to decide which pet is best?”

“It’s not that. It’s more complicated.

Of course it was. Even a thirty-two year old child would know that.  “Like what?”

“Hmm...how to put this?”  She fiddled with her fingers and tugged at her ear.  “Good things don’t cancel out bad things. Even if I got my Cerbernard and my friend got their Rocaw, that wouldn’t cancel the things I don’t like about having a Rocaw around.”

“Oooooh.” I pretended that the lightbulb had just clicked. “It’s like getting two flavors of ice cream in the same bowl and you and your friend gotta eat both of them.  Just because they really like their flavor and are okay with your flavor, doesn’t mean that you wanna eat their flavor.”

There were several other real life instances in which the good didn’t cancel out the bad - for example when financial and physical needs are at the cost of dignity and freedom- but this was better for the character I was portraying.

“Exactly,” Winters said. “So no ice cream for anybody.”

“Why not just get separate bowls? I mean...don’t go over to your friend’s house?” Friend’s house.  Yeah.  As if I didn’t get it.  As if a baby couldn’t get it.  

“My friend and I..” She stopped herself. “It’s complicated. Let’s just say it’s complicated.”

“And you don’t have a Grown-Up to help settle it.”

“Unfortunately.”

“That sucks.” I said.

“It does.”

I saw my opening. Time to plant my ticking time bomb.  “Too bad you can’t decide who's more of a Grown-Up.”

My ex-colleague blinked in confusion. “What?”

“You know,” I said nonchalantly. “Figure out who’s the most mature or the most Grown-Up or whatever. You or your friend? Who makes more money? Or who does the most chores? Or pays more taxes? Grown-Up stuff.  Who’s the boss? Who’s in charge?”

Amazons: Adults should be mature and speak to each other respectfully and as equals.

Also Amazons: I have more power over you and am going to wield that power like a sledgehammer.

“It doesn’t work like that, sweetie.”

“Why not?”

”It...it...huh…” Winters paused, frowned, and then said. “From the mouths…”

Seed planted.  Fuse lit. Pick your metaphor.  I’d just primed two people whom I’d considered decent work buddies for a fight in the near future and at least one of them had no idea that fight was coming. Neither of them would suspect me.

Damn that felt good.

I patted the lump tucked into the right cuff of the Amazon’s pants.  “Found it!”  Ha! Knew there was a trick there, too!

“Good job!” Winters said.  I stood up and applauded with her like I’d just won something.  I had, in a way. “Your knees are looking a little red. Wanna get those shorts back on?”

“Sure.”

She snatched up my pile of clothes and started to redress me, starting with popping open the shorts and allowing me to step in. It felt a little weird, I’ll admit, getting the shorts back on and being wet.  Muscle and sensory memory almost demanded that I be changed.  “Shirt too. Good job!  Socks and shoes.”

“Thank you,” I said.

The giant looked at her phone, completely unaware of everything that had gone on. “Still got some time.  Do you want to go back in the ball pit?”

“No thanks. How about the trampoline?”

Approximately ten minutes later, I was being handed over to Zoge.

“He’s soaked.” she said.  “I don’t know how else he’s been for everybody else but he was a perfect angel for me. I even gave him a sticker.”  She poked the ‘Great Job!’ she’d slapped on my chest.  Pretty shitty prize.

The A.L.L. looked at me like I’d betrayed them and gone over to the dark side.  I just winked and put my finger to my lips while Beouf carted me to the bathroom, and they got enough of the hint to be relieved.  I’d share what happened later that afternoon.  Maybe not the whole thing.  They might blab if they knew Winters and Sosa were ‘friends’, but I could teach a lesson about quietly stringing along Amazons and playing to their crazy so that they make themselves vulnerable without getting mad.

All in all, an excellent session, I’d say.  Very therapeutic.

[YourFNF]

On 6/2/2022 at 10:32 AM, Personalias said:

“You know how some kids are,” the man’s voice went a little higher. ‘Daddy...it’s called Little Voices, not Tweener Voices. I’m tired of hanging out with all the babies!”  He stopped the impression.  “So Don’s watching her play while me and Kylie come here.”  The Little girl who must have been Kylie stretched and leaned back into her Daddy’s lap.

“Joanie’s such a good big sister.” Shadow mused.

Silver nodded, sagely. “She is.  Which is why she deserves some of her own fun.”

“Different expressions of Maturosis.  Different needs.”

Why do I get the feeling this would be me?

[Personalias]

Chapter 67: Tough Questions

“No! Maxine!” Sosa screamed there on the carpet of the OT/PT room.  “Don’t! We don’t have to keep the bird! I swear!”  She back crawled to the corner, trembling at the sight of her infuriated lover.

Winters held the diaper in hand, unfolding it before her cowaring girlfriend.  It wasn’t a ‘true’ diaper; not like the one I was trapped in. There were no ‘adorable’ decorations so that whoever ended up wiping Sosa’s ass on a day to day basis got to associate it with cartoon characters.  The tapes weren’t likely enough to overcome the Sosa’s strength, either.  Conditioning, psychological torture, and societal pressure would have to be the primary thing to keep Sosa wearing it. That and maybe duct tape...  

“I’m sorry, Jazzie. It’s too late for that.” Winters pronounced judgement.  “Clearly you can’t handle big girl responsibilities anymore.  You must have some Little in your family tree.  Your Maturosis has clearly expressed itself.”

“Why would you...?” Sosa shrieked.  “Why would you say that? I’m an adult! A big girl”

“Big girls don’t poop their panties.”  

Sosa rolled over onto all fours, in complete shock as she patted her muddy backside, having been completely unaware that she’d soiled herself.

I paused the fantasy.  Now how in the heck was I going to get training chocolates or any other kind of poison slipped into her food to make it happen? She freely ate the gelatin when she was putting Littles through their paces.  Maybe I could find a way to spike it?  With what, though?  

Annoyed at myself, I reset the stuffies back to their starting positions on the floor.  Winters was the big clunky elephant.  Sosa was being played by the panther.  Lion stayed flopped over on his side, representing me and my fantasy as the ultimate string puller. Gingerly, I refolded the Monkeez I’d snatched from off the changing table, and placed it in the stuffed pachiderm’s lap.

“How do I get you,” I whispered and twitched at the diaper Janet had left on the coffee table, “to put that...on her…?”

It was a nice daydream, but one that I couldn’t yet write a satisfying conclusion to.  Most of the melodrama, especially the dialogue, remained firmly inside my skull, but it helped me to visualize the blocking. However I was going to do this, it’d have to be perfect.

I leaned out and looked into the kitchen through the living room doorway.  Janet had sequestered herself with over a week’s worth of papers and worksheets to grade in various subjects.  She was falling behind.  Another thing about being a new Mommy that she was coming to regret was that entertaining me was cutting into her time grading papers.  She’d half done it to herself, trying to get a reaction, almost any reaction, out of me that just wasn’t coming.  As a result, she was buckling down and catching herself up and I was being given some much needed benign neglect.

Such neglect allowed me to relish past victories and envision what might yet happen. Part jouska, part strategizing, part revenge porn, it was my brain’s way of working through hypothetical future encounters and how I might inflict more mischief and hurt.  

If I’d been a master thief, I would have commissioned an exact replica of where my crime would take place.  If I’d been an old time detective I might have used a cork board, photos, yarn, and a strict timetable of events as best as I could predict and understand them.

I was a captured and adopted Little.  I made do with stuffies and plastic bins to pass the time.  To me it was less like playing pretend and more like arranging pieces on a chess board or staging a play; a tragedy preferably.  Using this technique, I’d already come up with half a dozen ways to get Skinner’s goat, and I might have dreamed up one or two curveballs for Zoge. Sosa and Winters though…?  I was both immensely proud that I’d started that ticking pipe bomb and utterly disappointed that I very likely wouldn’t get to see the shrapnel fly when it went off.

A large yawn bubbled up and came out of me and I let out a massive cat-like stretch.  Not quite eleven in the morning and I was dozing on my feet .  Boredom can make a man sleepy.  So can the drain and strain of making captors miserable. I’d spent most every night declaring my hatred for Janet over the baby monitor.  At least a thousand times before I’d shut up and try to sleep.  

“I hate you, Janet.  I hate you, Janet. I hate you, Janet.”

Always calm.  Always level.  I wasn’t going to give her my rage; nothing that could be written off as a tantrum.  I wanted her to feel my resentment and anger like cold icepicks into her eardrums.  I wanted to keep her up at night.

That was part of the ‘new Mommy’ experience, right? If not, I was going to make it one.

“I hate you, Janet.  I hate you, Janet.  I hate you, Janet.”

I kept this ritual going throughout the night.  Before I’d let myself close my eyes, I’d say it a thousand times to the baby monitor before laying my head back down.  If I had a nightmare and woke up, or I had to pee or whatever, that meant a thousand more ‘Hate Janets’ before I could get rest.  It was very likely I was getting more sleep in Beouf’s cribs than in my own.  

Beouf wouldn’t have stood for that particular flavor of nonsense, and there’d be enough snitches to immediately single me out assuming she somehow didn’t recognize my voice.  Beouf wasn’t above group punishment, either.  It would have been hard to keep allies if Beouf and Zoge rained down as hard as they had for Why Day. So I used the afternoons to recoup the energy used to antagonize and inspire others. That and I was legitimately tired.

With Janet and the baby monitor, I had more options.  I could pretend to be asleep when I heard her approaching footsteps or just look up and stare at her, unspeaking. A ghost that she only heard when her back was turned.  Kind of like that one cartoon with the singing frog.  Problem was Janet never came.

Which was weird.  I’d seen her half of the baby monitor here and there.  Toting me around the house, I caught sight of it more than once over the last couple of weeks. It’d be by her seat in the living room after dinner.  Once or twice when she’d almost forgotten something heading out the door, she’d doubled back into her bedroom with me in her arms. Her half of the one way walky talky was right by the nightstand. It was on. Every time.  Why wasn’t she reacting, then?
There was no way that she was turning it off and then turning it back on.  Not with that kind of consistency. Why wasn’t she coming when I taunted her, then?  She couldn’t be that patient, could she?

“If you want to hate me forever,” she’d promised, “you have that right.  That won’t change a thing about how I feel about you.”

Bullshit.

Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

Not even Beouf was that patient.

She was sleeping soundly, too, as near as I could tell.  Only one of us was developing bags under their eyes or yawning when not fueled by spite and adrenaline. Much like with Winters and Sosa, I felt like I was missing something; a piece to the puzzle, some bit of data that was going over my head or that I was taking for granted.

“This is both a great safety tool, and a great educational tool,” Skinner had promised at the shower.  What was that about?  Was I being mindfucked somehow?  More reason to avoid sleep.  

Quietly, I laughed to myself.  Wouldn’t it have been just awful if she’d gotten the sending and receiving ends mixed up?  The thing in my room didn’t have any speakers that I could see, and I didn’t hear any tossing or turning or snoring flood into the nursery in the middle of the night.  So that perfectly mundane explanation was unlikely.  Funny, but unlikely.

“Muffet Littles will be back, after a word from our sponsors!”  The Television announced.  

Inwardly I groaned.  I tolerated the television being on, only because it further obscured my activities.

“I’m growing up, I do the potty dance
I don’t pee-pee in my pants”

An inaudible growl scratched the back of my throat.  The diaper commercials on Amazon programming had a fifty-fifty chance for having an actual baby or a Little as the lead.  The training pants always had a real toddler

“Your growing child is finally mastering potty training,” the voice over announcer said. “But because accidents happen, new Easy-Ons can be taken off like real underwear, but protect like a diaper. And because Roam wasn’t built in a day, they’ve got easy open sides to help clean up the messiest accidents.”

An Amazon wets their pants and it was an accident.  Anyone smaller and it was by design.  I was shaking my head in disgust before I even knew it.

“Daddy Yay!
I’ll be big someday!”

It always came down to size, didn’t it?  

From behind me, Janet reached out and switched the  T.V. off.  “I think that’s enough cartoons for now.”    I tensed up. I hadn’t noticed her come in.  “A nice quiet weekend at home and vegging out in front of the T.V. aren’t the same thing.”

Without further comment she laid me down on the carpet and started unbuttoning my onesie.   I wasn’t that wet, but it’s hard to stay dry when you have to chug three bottles of apple juice just to look busy enough to be left alone.  

I rolled my head to the side away from the T.V. and saw the wipes, powder and fresh diaper Janet was about to change me into. She must have seen it in the elephant stuffie’s lap and gotten ideas.

No fussing or crying from me.  I laid there and took it. Ankles in the air, cold wipes. The whole nine yards.  I would give her nothing to work with.  On the bright side, being changed on the floor was still better than being tied down to a matted table; doubly so compared to Beouf’s bathroom where my own infantilized reflection taunted me through the whole process.

 “You’re not that wet,” she said, stating the obvious.  “But a dry diaper still feels oodles better than a wet one.”

I fought back the urge to scream, or quip, or argue.  I wasn’t going to give her anything to work with.  I took a deep breath, ignored the perfume coming from her or the soft scent of the baby powder she was putting on my bottom.

“Much better,” she said, taping up the Monkeez and snapping onesie back up.  She wasn’t done though.

Grabbing my hips, she started rocking me to the left and right and began chanting.

“You roll it,
You roll it,
You roll it,
You roll it,”

Each ‘roll’ signaled a change in direction. Left. Right. Left. Right.  I held my breath and tensed my stomach for what was coming next.

“And-then-you-put-the-rai-sins-in.”

Every syllable of the last line, she poked a different spot in my abdomen.  I was her ball of dough, and her tickling pokes and prods were her adding ‘special ingredients’.  It was one of the songs she’d acquired at that Little Voices meeting. Raisins. Chocolate chips. Walnuts.  Infinite potential variations and repeats. Infinite verses.

Thankfully, Janet stuck to the one.  My jaw unclenched and I exhaled.  It tickled like crazy, but I was committed to reinforcing as little of her crazy as I could manage. My silence was rewarded from the hint of disappointment I was able to glean from her fading smile.

In the long run, Little Voices might be good for me.  How rewarding would it be, over time, for Janet to see all those giggling Natives who’d long since been broken and then wonder why oh why couldn’t her Little love it like they did?  

To be clear, I didn’t expect her to reach the correct conclusion about me and my ‘Maturosis’.  I expected her to suffer an existential crisis concerning the nature of her fitness as a Mommy.  It was terrible, dark, vengeful thoughts like that helped me get back to sleep in the dark of the night after I’d woken up and been forced to evacuate my bladder or bowels into the padded seat inside my pajamas.

“Do you want to help me throw your diaper away?”  she asked.  She grabbed the wet, balled up Monkeez. and held it out for me, almost like she was offering me a chance to play with it. I sat up and made my face blank.  If I didn’t have to speak to Janet, I wasn’t going to.  
She held the putrid piss soaked plastic firm. “Yes or no?”

So much for silence.  “No.”  I made my voice as hard and clipped as possible. Janet was up to something. What, I wasn’t sure, but she was up to something.  The gears were definitely turning.

“Alrighty then,” Janet said.  She stood up and took the diaper with her back to the pail in the nursery.  With fast, powerful strides it didn’t take more than fifteen seconds for her to come back.  I hadn’t moved from my spot on the floor.  She was definitely up to something.  I braced myself for a long morning.  

My ex-friend poured hand sanitizer into her palms and rubbed them together.  She held it down to my eye level, close enough that I could see it, but still out of reach.  “Do you want some hand sanitizer?”

I gave nothing.  She might as well have been speaking to me in Yamatoan.

Her hand did not budge.  Her voice did not waver. “Do you want some hand sanitizer?” She asked.  “Yes or no?”  I made no move.  “Yes or no?”

“Yes.”

She preempted my stillness by grabbing my hands and squirting the sterilizing fluid into my hands and forcing them to rub together.  The cool feeling of the alcohol evaporating up to my wrists  contrasted with the heat burning in my ears.  I hadn’t immediately considered the game of limiting my answers to yes or no but still remaining motionless- that could have been funny- and by the time it happened Janet had literally forced my hand.

So much for that.

Janet finished washing my hands for me and picked up the powder and the wipes from off the floor. She looked backwards into the kitchen and whispered something to herself. Then she looked.down to me.  Then back to the kitchen.  Then down to me. The wheels in her head were turning.  Huh. So that’s what it looked like from the outside.

Ten seconds later two hardback books thumped on the carpet.  She went to the kitchen and returned with an enormous stack of papers. Her long peacock colored skirt pooled around her legs as she sat down cross legged on the floor in front of me.  I tensed my body, preparing myself to be scooped up and deposited in the nest between her legs. One of the books took that spot, instead. “Do you want to help me grade papers?”

I said nothing, same as before.  In this instance, my insides weren’t steeled with spite and petulance.  They felt like jelly that had been stirred by confusion.  Grading papers?  It was arguably the most adult task I’d been offered in over a fortnight.  

No.

Fuck that.

It was definitely the most adult task I’d been offered in over a fornight.

“Do you want to help me grade papers?” Janet repeated.  “Yes or no?”

“Why?”

She was already digging out a red tipped felt pen, that bitch.  “Because I think it’s important that we spend quality time together.  Even if it’s not big and flashy like a trip to the zoo. That and it’s something I know you’re good at, so I thought you might enjoy it.”

Fuck me.  Fuck me sideways.

“But I’m a…” I stopped and gritted my teeth. “But you think I’m a baby.”

“Yes,” she admitted. “It’s like your pediatrician said: A thirty-two year old baby.  I’m not a doctor but I think thirty-two is old enough to grade some spelling tests.” She peeled off some loose leaf sheets from the stack and set it on the second book she’d tossed.   “The word family is silent letters.”

“What if I refuse?”

My captor seemed thoughtful, but not overly concerned.  “Then I’ll grade them all by myself. You can go back to playing with Lion and your other stuffie friends or whatever it was you were doing before I came in.  Or do something different, I just wanted to give you the choice.”

“I...I…”  Papers.  Grading papers.  Never in a million years did I think I’d miss grading papers.

Janet held out the grading pen.  “Do you want to help me grade papers?”  She didn’t even call herself ‘Mommy’ and I had been the one to bring up the b-word.  I had next to no fresh fuel to stoke my anger. On top of all that, this was as close to how we’d been that school year before as I was likely to get.

I missed that time.

I had so little else.

“Yes or no?”

I took the pen from her and waddled over to the stack.  “Yes.”

“Well, alright then.”

Sitting down on my knees I started organizing the stack to my liking.  I mentally designated the papers I placed to my right as the pile I needed to grade, I’d use the book as a hard surface, and I’d shuffle them to the left after grading. Simple but effective.  I took the first test, slapped it down on the textbook…

And inhaled…

A lot can happen in a single breath.  I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t tempted in that moment to do something just awful: I could scribble on the tests.  I could grade them wrong on purpose.  I could tear them all up in a flurry of confetti and toss them in the air.

I exhaled…

I wasn’t going to do that.  Besides pragmatic matters like knowing I wouldn’t get to pull such a stunt twice and it might be used to justify even worse treatment, I still had a tiny bit of compassion left in me. These papers represented kids to me. They weren’t my students, but they were just kids all the same; dumb, stupid, silly, innocent kids.  Amazon or not, why would I try to hurt or mess with the hard work of a bunch of eight year olds?

I took one more breath to center myself.

All of that, and Jeremy Merriwether was in fourth grade now.  So what was the point?

I tuned out the world, and started grading. I began marking down the misspelled words, providing the correct spelling next to them where needed, then wrote the total correct as both a fraction and a percentage.  I finished each one down at the bottom right corner and put my initials in cursive.  ‘C.G.’  No reason. It just felt right.

On matters of right and wrong, about five papers in, I realized how wrong I was.  These were my kids.  A former student is always their teacher’s pupil, even after they’ve long since outgrown. I couldn’t remember their exact faces in my mind’s eye-they were likely a lot slimmer and a lot taller than they’d been four to five years prior. It’s still super hard to spend a one to two years with a kid, constantly shouting, calling, and praising their names and not have those memories stored back somewhere in your brain.

I slowed my grading and read each test, appreciating the names that I recognized, and tried to pull back images and memories from long ago and gossip around campus.

Penelope always did have good handwriting. Very detail oriented, that one.

Huh. Someone had taught Lydia M (not to be confused with Lydia Z) how to spell!  I wished I could take credit for that, but I couldn’t.  Somebody must have worked wonders on her with sight words or something.

How was Torrence Thomas still writing his name with lower case “t’s”?  He knew how to capitalize letters. He had to be doing it on purpose now.  A quick scan of his paper revealed that he had capitalized the first letter in every word.  Every word but ‘tomb’ . That cheeky little shit!

Princeton’s test came pre-marked.  Someone had circled select letters in pencil but not a word was misspelled.  In the right hand corner where I would have put my initials, in miniscule print read: “See back for joke.”

I flipped it over.  In the boy’s jagged, sloppy handwriting was written:

“If you take the W in ansWer, the H in gHost, the extra A in aArdvark, and the t in casTle; you could make WHAT but no one would hear it because all the letters are SILENT!”

An actual, factual, stupidly mirthful grin etched itself beneath my nose and I pivoted on the floor to tell Janet. “Hey Ja-!”  Oh no!  What was I doing?!  For a few precious moments I had forgotten where I was.  For a bare handful of minutes I’d allowed myself to tune out my bare legs or how thick my underwear was; how it technically wasn’t even underwear and my shirt wasn’t really a shirt. I’d let myself forget that my classroom wasn’t my classroom and that Janet wasn’t my coworker. Joking and showing off what bits of cute stupidity and even more adorable cleverness was something that teachers did with each other.  

For just a few minutes, I’d allowed myself to pretend I was still a teacher. The fantasy was more intoxicating to me than the fantasy of escape; more gratifying than a thousand tiny revenge plays enacted by stuffed animals.  Waking up from that daydream felt like running face first into a brick wall.

“Yes?”  Janet asked, oblivious to the pain I’d just caused myself.

“Nothing,” I lied. I pivoted back and started staring down at the stack of papers.  I should have torn them all up and tossed them to the ceiling.  Then Janet would never dare tempt me with this again. I didn’t.  

“Are you sure?” Janet asked.  She had that cossetting look in her eye.  If I didn’t say the right thing, I would end up in her lap.  I wanted to be left alone. I needed to use her own preconceptions against her.  

I reached out towards my stuffed cellmate. “Lion.” I said.  “Give me Lion.”
“You want Lion?”

“Yes.”

With her longer reach it was nothing for Janet to lean over pick up the leo and hand it to over.  “Here you go.  Anything else?”

I bowed my head and pretended to be preoccupied with Lion, positioning him, just so, propping him up so that he’d be guarding the front of my makeshift work surface.  Having no bones he’d be a slumped over drunken guard, but a guard nonetheless.  “No.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m. Fine.Janet.”  I slammed my eyes shut and did my best to steady myself.  I couldn’t let her see me like this. I couldn’t let her see me so close to breaking down.  If I was going to cry, it’d be on my terms and no one else’s.  It would be because I’d decided to be a jackass and scream at the world, not because I was overwhelmed by anything in particular.

“Why do you call me that?” she asked. My eyes opened.  “Why do you call me Janet?”

Finally. Something to use to sharpen myself; steel myself from more complex thoughts.  Something to be angry at!  “What do you mean?” I said.  “We’re alone. There’s no pressure or expectation that I talk about you in a certain way.  That was the deal. Or did that deal only apply to my first day in Beouf’s?”

“It’s still valid,” Janet said.  “But why do you call me that? Why ‘Janet’?”

I raised my eyebrow in challenge. I sure as hell wasn’t calling her ‘Mommy’.  “What would you prefer?”

She held out the palm of her hand as a soft, non-threatening gesture. “Nothing,” she said. “Janet’s fine.  It’s just...why ‘Janet’?” I had no idea what she was talking about and it must have shown.  “Like, unless you’re really mad and saying their whole name, you tend to call Amazons by our last names.  Why am I ‘Janet’?”

My temples started to buzz.  Was that true? I hadn’t consciously noticed before. I’d called her Grange before, hadn’t I?  When we first met?  “No...?”

“Like, I think you sometimes used to call Forrest ‘Raine’, but this feels different.”

It did.  It was. “No…?”

“Why is that?”  

Inside my own mind, I felt like the walls were closing in. I was naked. Vulnerable.  “Because you used to be my friend.”

It didn’t have the effect I was aiming for. “Mrs. Beouf used to be your friend, too. You always called her Beouf.”

A little glass tube was being constructed around me and a giant hand was shoving me back down all over again. “I don’t...I mean...I didn’t...I don’t…”  Reaching in and taking away my wedding ring.  “No…?”

“It’s fine. I like it.  I like ‘Mommy’ better,” she blushed, “but calling me ‘Janet’ is fine, too.”

My tongue was a desert.  “Okay…” I stopped talking again. I finished grading the spelling test, then accepted some basic algebra worksheets from her.  The weekend seemed even longer after that.

[Samriis]

It's amazing actually... how exhausting hate is... even when you have every right to.  But the crux of it is that hate MUST have a target and if it misses its mark then all you've done is make yourself miserable.  I feel for Clark... more than I have for many characters in the past because I've been there.  Hate is a lifeline than can get you through the first couple of steps through the bog of dispare, but it will eat you; mind and body.  I really hope he can find that next step, whether it be acceptance or revenge.... 

[Panther Cub]

Now THAT was beautifully done! Apply them pressure points, Clark, and hammer them!

1 hour ago, Samriis said:

It's amazing actually... how exhausting hate is... even when you have every right to.  But the crux of it is that hate MUST have a target and if it misses its mark then all you've done is make yourself miserable.  I feel for Clark... more than I have for many characters in the past because I've been there.  Hate is a lifeline than can get you through the first couple of steps through the bog of dispare, but it will eat you; mind and body.  I really hope he can find that next step, whether it be acceptance or revenge.... 

I'm personally hoping for vengeance myself. I love the DD stories, but sometimes, I REALLY wanna see some amazons suffer.

[something101]

The fact that she let him grade papers shows that she at some level understands that he really isn't a baby.

[TerranV]

2 hours ago, something101 said:

The fact that she let him grade papers shows that she at some level understands that he really isn't a baby.

Or at least acknowledges that allowing him some adult privilege would be appreciated. 

[YourFNF]

On 6/12/2022 at 11:00 PM, Samriis said:

It's amazing actually... how exhausting hate is... even when you have every right to.  But the crux of it is that hate MUST have a target and if it misses its mark then all you've done is make yourself miserable.  I feel for Clark... more than I have for many characters in the past because I've been there.  Hate is a lifeline than can get you through the first couple of steps through the bog of dispare, but it will eat you; mind and body.  I really hope he can find that next step, whether it be acceptance or revenge.... 

I've been in emotionally similar situations where I've used anger and spite to force myself to push through and get shit done; or to get through honestly outright traumatic situations... Including what I refer to as "The Year of Hell". It's so exhausting. You really can't keep it for more than a few hours at a time when going full burn. It also can change you. I'm somewhat better now but for long a time I honestly did not know what it was like to not feel low grade burn background angry. And uhhh yeah... My brain does not work as good as it used to... Stress hormones are a motherfucker....

[something101]

I take it that the next chapter is a big one? The wait is killing me 

[Personalias]

Chapter 68: A Crying Shame

Potty training isn’t natural. For anyone.  Little, Tweener, or Amazon: learning how to use the toilet is a skill that is taught, complete with procedure as well as etiquette.  Same with things like knowing how to swim or eat with silverware.  No, I’m not saying that if left to their own devices, people will pee and poop themselves for the entirety of their natural lives.  Bladder and bowel control strengthens with age and increases with natural practice and time.  In that regard, it’s just like walking. Barring a medical condition, most people will learn how to do it on their own and at about the same pace as everybody else.

Potty training is more than walking, I’d argue.  It’s a precise set of skills and social norms that are practiced and mastered to the point of it becoming second nature so that we consciously forget that much of the act and attitudes surrounding are societal constructs rather than a physical need.

Back when I was a preschool teacher, a big part of my job was potty training kids. I’d teach letters and shapes and numbers and sight words and some basic Math along with Science and Social Studies.  I did all of that.  I also did a lot of potty training.  A lot. Most of my students knew how to write their names before Kindergarten. Most could count and do basic addition.  Most knew all of their letter names and sounds.  Most.  But all of them, without exception, were potty trained by the time they left me.

I’m not an expert- I’m not sure you can be an expert at such a thing- but I’ve got experience to inform my opinions.

The kid who wets their pants and goes on about their day until an adult changes them or forces them to change definitely isn’t potty trained.  Neither, I’d argue, is the kid who feels the need to go, then yanks down his pants and pees right on the floor.  Yeah, he didn’t pee in his pants, and he purposefully undressed himself enough to keep his clothes clean, but being potty trained isn’t the same thing as being continent.  

Potty training also involves concepts like hygiene, shame, and autonomy. It’s procedures, like ‘Go into the special room and empty yourself’ and ‘clean up when you’re done’.  It’s also attitudes like ‘Don’t let anybody but the most trusted and intimate people in your life see you naked or even in your underwear’ and ‘Don’t talk about it beyond expressing the need to go to explain why you’re walking away’. It’s a skillset, but part of that skillset is social etiquette.  I’d go so far to argue that a person isn’t really potty trained, as far as society is concerned, until it’s so natural to them that nobody would think to ask if they were potty trained.  Potty training is complete when obeying social norms regarding the bathroom appears natural.

The process, attitudes, and expectations have become so ingrained into society that most people consider it less a skill and more of something that naturally develops of its own accord.  It’s why small children can be carted around in nothing but diapers and be checked and changed openly; but if they’re potty trained, the underwear stays under and concealed.  Modesty has officially become a thing.

The diaper taped to somebody’s hips is a giant flag to everyone that a given child doesn’t have the autonomy, hygiene, or sense of shame to care for themselves or be embarrassed that they can’t care for themselves.  And throughout history, Amazons have somehow used all of these unspoken assumptions to make it so people smaller than them were also viewed as children and not deserving or in possession of autonomy, hygiene, or shame.  In a completely fucked up way, Little and Tweeners are never potty trained, because the giants never stop asking us if we are.

And because it’s seen as a developmental milestone, instead of a skill, nothing less than pure perfection will ever be enough for them.  If Amazons treated sports like they treated potty training, a single missed pass or fumbled football would result in that player being fired and banned from the sport.  A missed free throw or layup would ruin your chances at making it into the Hall of Fame.  Accidentally swallowing a gulp of pool water would earn you floaty wings for life.

You get the idea.  If you’re reading this, it’s more than likely that you’ve seen it happen to someone.

On my first day as a student in Beouf’s class, Billy had told me that he wasn’t incontinent, just ‘unpotty trained’.  This was right after he’d shit his pants at breakfast and then chowed down with gusto.

I didn’t understand then.  By the middle of my third week, I was beginning to understand.

Ivy and I were at an ‘independent work’ station during centers.  “Come on, Clark,” she poked me in the arm.  “It’s your turn.”  She pointed to the towering mishmash of shining metal.  Common sense said it shouldn’t be as tall as it was, the way it leaned and zig zagged at random angles made it look like it should have come crashing down long ago.  Amazon technology and common sense rarely intersect in the big scheme of things.  This monstrosity had a magnetic field or something keeping it up and giving the stink eye to gravity.  

Tired as I almost always was, I dragged the flat of my palm over the left side of my face and groaned. “Come on Ivy.  What’s the point? We both know that as soon as I move a piece anywhere, the whole shape is gonna shift and change again.”  Come to think of it, magnetism probably wasn’t it. Not thirty seconds ago the top of the tower was pointed at the ground, but I could easily take a piece from the middle and put it on the bottom and there’d be hardly any resistance.

Tiny robots maybe?

“You’re just not good at it,” Ivy teased.

Annoyed, I huffed.  “You’re not any better.”.

“Uh-huh!” Ivy said, dramatically.  “I’m super good at this. You’re just as bad as I am good so we balance out to a happy medium.”  Whatever Ivy was before Zoge plucked her up and mindfucked her back into the cradle, she’d retained a fearsome competitive streak.

That was the point of Beouf’s program, though, wasn’t it?  Mindfuck and condition the Littles just enough so that they seemed more like ‘baby’ versions of themselves instead of dolls with a set of trained behaviors.  Like potty training, we were being trained to have certain behaviors and attitudes to the point where it was second nature to us.

Unfortunately for me, I had that same competitive streak in common with Ivy.  “Okay,” I said.  “Bet.”

“Bet?” she echoed like she’d never heard the word before.

“You be in charge. Tell me what move to make. I’ll do it. Then you do your move. Then you tell me what to do again.”

The girl looked at me; mystified.  “I”d...I’d get to be in charge?”

My teacher senses started tingling.  My foot was dangling over a landmine of sorts.  It was like my rookie year when I told a bunch of smart ass four year olds to ‘hop on over’.  With both children and adults convinced that they’re children, the use of language is very important; even with ‘good kids’.

“You’d tell me what pieces to take and where to put them.  That’s it.”

“And...and you’d listen?” Ivy’s mouth was agape.  You’d think I’d just offered her a treasure chest or a life saving operation.

“Yeeeeah…?” I almost felt sorry for her.  I didn’t, but I almost did.  “Ivy? Are you okay?”

“Nobody ever…”  She grabbed her pacifier from the clip and gave it a few suckles.  She breathed in and out through her nose.  After about ten seconds she spit it out.  “Okay. Let’s do it!  Let’s bet.  Take the zig zaggy piece over there and put it over-”

I waved my hands in front of her face to stop her.  “That’s not the bet! That’s not what bet means!”  Ivy stopped.  She looked confused but let me explain.  “The bet is I follow your directions, and if the puzzle collapses, then...then…” Crap!

“Then what?”  

I had no idea in that moment. They say go big or go home, but my home was ashes so….  “Then you’ll have to do what I say for a center!”  Brilliant!  A blank check!  

“Okay!” the twisted Little said.  “But if it’s good, I get a kiss. A Grown-Up one!”

I swallowed and exhaled.  Ivy hadn’t yet outgrown her bout of puppy love with me, and was still fixated on me being some kind of expert on ‘adultness’ or whatever. I don’t think she ‘like-liked’ me or felt any particular sexual attraction towards me.  I just happened to intersect at all the right crossroads between ‘peer’ and ‘adult’ for her.  I was a fascination.  I was a phase.  

No guts, no glory.  “Okay.” I said. “Sure.”  If I started making out with her in the middle of the room, that would definitely get two or three Amazons riled up by the end of the day.  Might make my real friends jealous that I’d pulled it off, too.  Would it really be so bad to lose?  “Yeah.  Let’s do this. What do you want me to do first?”

The Full Native Little pointed in the middle of the spire. “Take that zig zaggy piece there.” She got up from the hard plastic seat and stood up on her tippy toes and reached her hands well above her head.  “And put it riiiiiiight here.”

Standing up with her arms over her head and leaning forward, Ivy’s underwear could be seen at a glance.  Had it been actual underwear, it might have been embarrassing for her.  It wasn’t actual underwear.  As such, it was no more scandalous or humiliating for her or anyone present than her red pinafore dress. No one within thirty feet of her had any expectation for her to have shame or autonomy of any sort.  

I took the piece she’d pointed to and stood up.  “Okay. Like this?”  I stretched with one hand and pulled down on the black t-shirt I’d been dressed in, not wanting anyone to see the waistband of my own disposable undergarment.  I wasn’t nearly as unpotty trained as Ivy was.

“A little more to the left. No, the other left! No, the other-other left!”

“That’s where I was putting it the first time!”

“It doesn’t count if you mess it up on purpose!”

I stood on my toes and let go of the back of my shirt.  Fuck it. No one would care. “I’m.. Not!”  I placed it exactly where Ivy said to.  The tower shifted and contracted, becoming oblong and almost spherical.  One move had made it almost resemble an egg.

Ivy grabbed a triangle piece.  “My turn.”  She waddled around the table and placed it near the back, out of sight.  The structure contracted again, taking on the shape of a smooth river stone, the kind perfect for skipping rocks.  “Okay. One more move!”  She waddled back around and pointed to something that I thought was a paperclip.  “Put this down here, and we can make a fishy.”

This I had to see.  I plucked the paper slip sticking out of the oblong sphere and placed it near the base.  A low humming noise sounded in my ears, and the bits of scraps shifted and twisted and turned themselves.  It went back to an egg, but didn’t stay that way. From out of the egg, came a metal wire fish, bursting out and turning fragmented bits of shell into fins.  

Ivy started singing as the fish formed, the completed part wiggling slightly as it shifted giving the appearance of swimming.  “Liiiiiittle shark, do-do, do-do-do-do!” Little shark, do-do, do-do-do-do! Little shark!”

“How did you...?” I asked, scratching my head.

“We did it!”  Ivy threw her hands up and started bouncing on the balls of her feet.  “Yay!”

“How did you do that?”

“Huh?” Ivy said. “I don’t know. I’m just good at it.  Wanna see how to make a horse?”

Kinda.  “Not really.”

“Can I get my Grown-Up kiss?”  She didn’t wait for me to answer;  just puckered her lips and started maneuvering towards me.

Kissing Ivy Zoge, as it turned out, was a bit like jumping off the high dive. It was hypothetically harmless, something I could talk about with confidence to no end, and something that I absolutely dreaded now that it was a very real possibility.

Thank goodness, I’m good under pressure most days. “Okay.” I smirked. I raised my hand and called out.  “Mrs. Zoge!  Mrs. Zoge!”

Ivy stumbled to a stop and put her pacifier in her mouth.  Her Mommy wound her way out from behind the workstation she’d been supervising.  “Yes, Clark? What’s wrong?”

“Ivy said she wanted a Grown-Up kiss. Can she have one?”

Zoge looked at the metal fish kept aloft on the table by a single strand of metal.  “Since she’s playing nice, yes she can.”  She bent over and gave a big sloppy kiss on Ivy’s cheeks.  “Mwah! Mwah!”  Ivy’s eyes never left me. “I love you, Ivy”  She ruffled my hair. “I love you, too, Clark.”

I raised my hand again. “Mrs. Zoge! Mrs. Zoge!”

“Yes, Clark?”

“Am I a Grown-Up?”

“No, Clark,” Zoge replied.. “You’re a baby.” No irritation whatsoever. To her I was a silly child asking a silly question.  To me, I was a lawyer preparing my defense.

“I see…” I smiled back at Ivy.  “Thank you for clearing that up, ma’am.”

“You’re welcome, baby.”  Before she left, she lifted up the back of Ivy’s dress and pulled back my waistband.  Each of our diapers got a squeeze in front.  “You’re both soggy, but you’ll make it till lunch.”

It was true. I’d peed at least twice since being changed after breakfast. My diaper was so absorbent that I’d almost forgotten about the first time until I’d started the second time just after snack break.  I’d almost forgotten the second time, except when I stood up and felt the slight sag or squeezed my thighs together and felt the solid mass of wet padding pushing back.  The rest of the time, it was pretty easy to tune out.  Diapers were becoming just another piece of clothing in so many ways.

Neither did I flinch or cringe or tense up when Zoge was checking me.  After nearly three weeks someone like Zoge sticking her hand down my pants or making any sort of comment on them had no emotional effect on me; at least not embarrassment.

That’s how unpotty training started for me. These people had checked and changed and remarked on what was happening in my diapers to the point where I was almost numb to it.  You can only watch your reflection get changed so many times before the impact is lost.  By the beginning of that month, it was just something that happened, same as lunch, or walking to and from class.

I peed and pooped my pants because I wasn’t given any other choice.  I learned to get comfortable in a wet diaper and go about my day in one because I didn’t have any other choice. I more or less ignored teachers and other Amazons being fascinated by my crinkling underwear and wiping my butt for me because no alternative was allowed.

Amazons don’t need hypnosis or surgery to make Littles use their diapers. They just need to put Littles in them, not give them an out, and reinforce the new behaviors, etiquette, and social expectations.  In that respect, unpotty training isn’t so unlike its inverse.  Personally, I suspect that’s how they did it before they figured out hypnosis and faster forms of forcing Littles into being their dolls. After that they just got lazy and impatient.

To be clear, I wasn’t even close to completely unpotty trained.  A full diaper was still easier to sleep in than a full bladder or cramping bowels, but I wasn’t a bed wetter. Barring some of the circumstances described in previous chapters, I tended to try and wait till I had some measure of privacy to mess. Peeing was done in circumstances where I wasn’t the center of attention.

I still held onto that control and need for privacy.  I still felt my pulse quicken when someone who wasn’t taller than me saw my cartoonish plastic backed padding.  My bladder and bowels hadn’t been completely busted, but the shame and anxiety I felt with Janet slipping her fingers past the leak guards  or Beouf plopping me down on a table had pretty much evaporated.
I wasn’t bothered at all when Zoge looked to see if I’d soiled myself, and proclaimed me soggy.

For just a second though, I realized that I wasn’t bothered. That bothered me.

“You cheated,” Ivy said to me, looking like a cat that had been petted the wrong way.  “I wanted a kiss from you.”

I crossed my arms and smirked. “Am I a Grown-Up?”

“No…”  Far be it from Ivy to contradict her Mommy.

“Then how can I give you a Grown-Up kiss?”  Ivy’s nose wrinkled and she looked like she was going to say something, but I managed to sneak in.  “You said you wanted a Grown-Up kiss. You didn’t say that it had to be from me.” Like I said: With both children and adults convinced that they’re children the use of language is very important.

“You tricked me.”

Baiting Ivy was almost as fun as baiting an Amazon.  It wasn’t, really, but it almost was.  “Yeah. Too bad.  What are you gonna do? Throw a tantrum? That’ll just get us sent over there,” I thumbed over to the back door.

Ivy got one of her deer in the headlights gaze and looked at the door leading to my old classroom.  “No we won’t,” she said.

“Maybe you won’t go, but-”

“Nobody’s gonna go over there anymore.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.  “People go over there all the time.”

“Not since you got here.”

I made to deny it, but she was right.  In three weeks, no one, not even me, had been sent out of the room for punishment.  I’d been parked on the naughty stool plenty of times (though objectively speaking, not as many times as I’d deserved it).  Not once had I been sent to my own room for timeout.  No one else had either.

“Why?”  That question was not directed at Ivy.

Didn’t mean she lacked an answer. “I heard my Mommy talkin’ to Mrs. B. on the phone, but she made me promise not to tattle.”  She had her hands behind her back and was grinning like a toddler who’d peeked at her birthday presents.

I puffed my cheeks out.  “What’s it gonna ta-?”

“Kiss me.”  She was already puckering up. At this point she didn’t even want the kiss as much as she wanted the win.

“On the forehead.”

“On the lips.”

“On the cheek. Final offer.”

“Deal.”

I looked to the left. I looked to the right.  I looked in front and behind. No one was watching. A side benefit of being paired with the class’s biggest snitch.   I gave Ivy the lightest, daintiest, little peck on the cheek possible.  “Mwah. There.”

“Gibson! Noice!”

If he’d been closer I would have broken Billy’s jaw. In turns, everyone looked at me, then Ivy, then Billy, before collectively shrugging and ignoring us.  Beouf and Zoge each had a suspicious eye on me, but otherwise weren’t saying or doing anything yet.

“Just tell me,” I hissed.  “Why isn’t Beouf sending anybody else over there?”  Maybe a condescending, know-it-all Little really was a secret prerequisite of the program.

Ivy leaned in close.  “When you were gone, Billy got sent to the new teacher’s room. He came back crying real bad.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I whispered. “I know.”

“My Mommy and Mrs. Boeuf talked on the phone. They said-”

A crack of thunder blasted through the room when the backdoor swung open and battered the wall. I jumped.  The high pitched, completely terrified wail that followed drew me in.

Standing in the doorway, with a diapered Little under her arm like he was a sack of potatoes, broad shouldered and scowling, was Miss Ambrose. Her hair was done up in a terrible beehive. Her white blouse was fastened with tiny faux pearls embedded in the buttons and bits of lace were embroidered at the wrist and collar. Her skirt, dark and black, stopped past the ankles concealing her feet.  If not for her thundering, monstrous strides, she might have seemed to glide across the floor because you couldn’t see her tremendous feet.

Had she not been so ogreish and terrifying, she might have looked funny.  She didn’t look funny, however. Not at all. She was a sneering, scowling monster, the kind that Little parents used when describing Amazons to scare their children into behaving.  Like the Big Bad Wolf, she was a kind of wild animal with only the thinnest veneer of decency.  And like Little Red Riding Hood everyone else played along more out of fear and politeness rather than naivety.

“Sorry to interrupt, Mrs. Beouf,” she boomed, “but I’m calling in that favor.  I need to use your classroom for a time out!”

“Noooooooo!”  The Little wailed.  “Noooooo! I’m not a baby! Not a baby!”

Without warning, Ambrose thundered in.  My head swiveled.  Who was that?  How had one of us gotten into my old classroom?  They were getting a high five after this was over.

“NOOOOO!”  Too late, it hit me.  It wasn’t one of us.  That wasn’t a Little.  That was a child. A real one. One of my kids!  Stripped down to nothing but a diaper, Elmer, my Tweener student from last year, sobbed pathetically while draped under Ambrose’s right arm.  “I’m! Not! A….. Nooooooooo!”

“Someone doesn’t want to be a big boy and go potty when he’s told to like all the other big boys and girls!”  Ambrose said.  

Beouf stood up.  “I’m sorry Miss Ambrose but-”

Ambrose talked over Beouf. “Then someone got all antsy when I put them in a diaper just in case!”  She kept walking in like she owned the place, making a beeline for the bathroom. “But big boys don’t have to worry about wearing a diaper. They can hold it in, can’t they?”

Elmer’s response can’t be quoted as much as described as the wailing gibberish of a devastated and panicking four year old.

“Miss Ambrose, you’re interrupt-”

“Then someone couldn’t hold it in and wouldn’t wait like a big boy to be taken to the potty. Someone had an accident!  Big boys don’t have accidents.”  The door to the bathroom was always open.  Everyone in the room jumped again when Ambrose slammed it shut.

Ivy was shaking.  “They said they’d help her with time out if she helped them,” she whispered to me. “After Billy, they hoped she’d just forget.”

I’d figured it out. Elmer- one of the nicest, sweetest and brightest kids I’d ever taught- was completely potty trained.  Last year, he just quietly went whenever he needed to.  Sometimes I’d give him the opportunity and he’d take it or leave it, but the kid knew how to listen to his body and didn’t abuse the courtesy.  Ambrose was having the students take scheduled potty breaks and diapered him because he’d opted out.  Then, this ogre, this Amazon’s Amazon, stalled things until the kid’s bladder gave out and was in the process of humiliating him even further.

“Don’t close your eyes! Look what you did! That’s what the mirror’s for!”  Even with the door closed, we heard every word.  No one else was talking, and the only thing louder than Elmer’s screams was my replacement’s admonitions.   

“NOOOO!”

The sounds of tapes being ripped off the landing zone ignited a redoubling of Elmer’s cries.  All of us trapped in diapers winced and looked down at our waists.  It had been much later in life, but we’d all gone through what was happening to Elmer.  Hopefully in the kid’s case, it wasn’t permanent.

Beouf and Zoge stared at each other, paralyzed.  Beouf was clenching her fists and starting to maneuver out from her kidney table, but based on her body language, she was obviously hesitating.  She was angry, but more than that she was confused.  No one talked like that to Melony Beouf, not even Brollish.  She looked like a dog might if a cat ever managed to bark at it.

Zoge was starting to walk around the room and give empty but comforting pats on the head and shoulders to anyone who would accept it.  She started whispering kind, reassuring words in Yamatoan.

Me?  I was going to kill this bitch. I was going to waddle up to the bathroom, wait for her to open the door, scale the changing table, leap over her shoulder and rip her goddamn fucking throat out with my fucking teeth!  I’d clamp down on her mother fucking jugular and pierce her fucking rhino hide until I was drenched in her bastard blood.  I was going to be the first Little ever convicted of homicide on an Amazon. They’d have to invent new words for what I wanted to do to her.

Nobody fucked with my kids. And, adopted or not, Elmer was still one of my kids.

Ivy saw the murder in my face.  “Clark! Don’t! Just let the Grown-Ups handle it!”

“NOOOOO!  I’LL BE GOOD! I’LL BE GOOOOOOOOD!”

“Too late for that.”

I ignored her and walked right on by. I was jerked to a stop as she hugged me around the shoulders. “Clark! Please!”  Ivy whispered.

Fuck that sellout.  I couldn’t break her freakish iron grip, but Ivy wasn’t quick enough to stop me from slipping out.  I dropped all of my body weight to the floor, hunched my shoulders forward and scrambled on all fours away from her and towards the bathroom.  When Ambrose came out I was going to trip her up like a cat and then do a cannonball on to the back of her motherfucking skull. I’d stomp until something cracked.

A body piled on my legs. I looked back and saw Chaz. “Clark,” he said. “Stop!”

“Let me go,” I told Chaz, “or I’m going to kick you in the head.”  It was strange how clearly I was able to enunciate threats just then.

“I’m gooooOOOOOOD!”

Chaz tightened his grip on my knees in time with Elmer’s shrieks.  “Fuck you, dude. I’m not letting you.”

Annie came and sat down in front of me, blocking my view of the bathroom door.  “Ha-ha! Just Littles playing silly games! Nothing to see here. Right?”  She gave me a worried look.  “Right?”

Billy was pawing at Beouf, trying to distract so she didn’t see the scuffle. Completely unnecessary.  Her eyes were as glued to the bathroom door as my own.

Nonetheless, my crew was running interference...on me.  Ivy was saying something in Yamatoan to Zoge.  My friends and Ivy were doing everything they could to stop me and protect me from myself.  Them seeming to agree that I was being stupid was enough to wake me up from my own particular brand of crazy.  I should have been proud.

The bathroom door slammed open. Annie and Chaz scattered.  I’d made it up to Beouf’s desk so I got a good view of Elmer being carried out, and still bawling.  “If you want to act like a Little,” Ambros said.  “Why don’t you spend some time with them?  Do you want that?”

“NoooooOOOOO!”

She put Elmer down in the reading area on a bean bag.  “I’ll be right back, Mrs. Beouf. Promise.  Five minutes.”

Elmer found enough of his words to plead to Ambrose’s retreating back. “I’ll be good! I’ll be gooooooood!  I’ll go potty when you tell me to! I’ll go potty when you tell me tooooooo!”

The door thundered closed behind Ambrose. Beouf and Zoge made eye contact with one another.  “Go,” her assistant said. An instant later and Beouf was out of the room.

I got up off the floor.  I started heading to the reading center.  I was going to talk to Elmer.  I was going to comfort my kid.  I could do this.  It would be easy and it was something I was good at.

With longer legs and nothing to throw off her stride, Zoge beat me to the punch. “It’s okay, dear,” Mrs. Zoge said to the boy, kneeling and stroking his hair. “You’re not in trouble. You didn’t do anything wrong.  This is all just a big misunderstanding. You’ll see.  Sometimes even Grown-Ups make mistakes.”

Muffled noise came from the space between mine and Beouf’s rooms. Beouf and Ambrose were definitely exchanging words.  The doors were thick enough and Elmer was loud enough to where I couldn’t make out exactly what was being said, but neither of them sounded particularly happy based on the tones. I didn’t care about that. I just wanted to help my kid.  I was going to nudge Zoge aside and show her how it was really done.

What came out of poor Elmer’s blubbering innocent mouth turned my blood cold and stopped me dead.  “I’m not a Liiiiiiiittle!” he sobbed.

Zoge sighed and rubbed his back.  “I know.  You’re not.  You’re very big. You’re a very big boy.”

“I can go potty! I’m a big boy! I can grow up! I’m! Not! A! Little! I’m BIG! I’m bi-i-i-i-i-ig!”  Elmer caught sight of me, looked down at the diaper he’d been trapped into,  and devolved into further incomprehensible bawling.

Try as she might, Zoge couldn’t console the boy.  She could only hold him in her lap and gently whisper sweet nothings to him while his body racked itself with shame and humiliation.

Shame.

So much shame.

Ashamed for looking like me.

Not a Little.

He could grow up.

Elmer.

One of the sweetest and brightest kids I’d ever taught.

One of mine...

I...I...I...I...

I changed course.  The door to the Nap Room was left open a crack. Someone must have seen me slip in.  It was impossible not to.  No one called out to me.  No one came in to check on me or tried to drag me out.  Or comfort me.

Good.

It made it easier for me to pop a pacifier in my mouth and scream into a pillow.

[Personalias]

Chapter 69: Lionize

In terms of class and therapy, most of the week was unremarkable.  Just like with work, confinement, conditioning, and resisting said confinement and conditioning take on a kind of daily grind.  Things aren’t ‘fine’, but you might say they were if nothing of note happened.  Even torture can become unremarkable after a few weeks.

The time in the classroom with Beouf.  After the shakeup involving Ambrose and an actual factual crying child, Beouf doubled down to try and recondition us and stabilize emotions.  I caught the barest mutterings of her complaining to Zoge about “disrupting routines”. Beouf still casually complained about work, she just made sure to do it more quietly and in coded language when she knew I was around.

The other Littles seemed off for a day or two afterwards as well.  A four year old had been traumatized right in front of them and bawled about how he wasn’t one of us.  That had shattered more than one illusion.  It’s hard to pretend the plastic bowl on your head is a helmet when you’re standing in front of a real suit of armor.  It’s hard to think of yourself as a baby when an actual child is freaking out right in front of you.

It’s hard to imagine yourself and believe that you’re cute and cuddly and adorable and everything is right with the world in a soft pastel palette when someone looks at your situation and cries in sharing it.  Elmer’s justified freak out disrupted more than just the center schedule that day.

I’m getting off track, though.

The room’s routine went back to normal, relatively speaking, even if there was still this lingering underlying tension.

Therapy was ‘fine’, too. It was downright boring compared to the week before.

I was separated from my peers for both Occupational and Physical Therapy for one on one sessions.  Physical therapy was me being forced to crawl up stairs and balance on a platform swing, (thankfully with my clothes on).  Nothing to talk about.

Occupational Therapy was picking beads out of extremely stiff and sticky putty.  Great stuff for developing fine motor strength, if the stuff wasn’t practically cement to Little digits. Great.  Another thing that I needed help with! The stuff was so thick that it rivaled the tapes on diapers. I could tell that Sosa was enjoying watching me struggle, but she kept her mouth shut about it beyond asking if I wanted help every now and then. She didn’t give me much to work with, so I decided to mirror the relative emotional distance.

Sosa also stayed off of her phone.

Sosa also looked tired. Really tired.  Bags under her eyes that rivaled my own.  She didn’t crinkle like me, and her pants were neither puffier nor baggier to hide any extra padding, but she was definitely off.

Someone had been staying up late.  Someone had been having trouble sleeping.  Fighting with their partner maybe?  Arguments about pets perhaps?  I didn’t dare ask.  I’d wrapped Winters around my finger and lit the fuse.  If Sosa knew about my involvement, she’d likely snuff it right out.  

The strength of that particular sabotage was in my marks not knowing that I was trying to sabotage them.  Fitting considering how Sosa operated with Littles.  In a weird way it made me appreciate her relative finesse compared to some of her peers.

But no, I didn’t give into temptation to rub it in.  I asked neither one about the other. I mentioned nothing about dogs or birds or phones or anything that would so much as sprinkle salt into any wounds I’d created.  Maybe later.  Not this week.  

I was quit proud of my restraint.

That’s how Sosa and Winters went.

With Skinner, I was beginning to think I’d get to miss out on a week with her.  Skinner didn’t come to Beouf’s room to collect anyone. Not me. Not the A.L.L.  Not the regs.  I was beginning to wonder if she was sick, except that I caught fleeting glances of her around campus during transition times.  It did my ego good to think that I’d already broken her enough that she’d skip a week.  Being one-on-one with Sosa and Winters limited me to a degree; being alone in a room with Skinner would have empowered me. Skinner was the type that I could just demolish if I was alone in a room.

Being one-on-one with Skinner was also a lot less likely, I reminded myself.  Skinner had a larger caseload on campus than either of the other therapists.  There were a lot more kids in Oakshire who had speech impediments or language delays than kids with fine motor delays or muscular dystrophy.  Getting a single student, even if it was me, to herself when she had mountains upon mountains of kids to work with was a luxury she didn’t have.

Right alongside my ego, my paranoia was whispering in the back of me.  Ambrose had been a sharp reminder that I didn’t have to see them for the giants to be doing awful things.  If she wasn’t seeing her regular caseloads.  What was she doing?

Prepping a counter attack, evidently.  Changing up the routine.  Trying to catch us off guard.  

It was just after morning whole group instruction when Skinner came in through the front door. “Hello, hello! Ready for some speech?”

Ivy perked up immediately and raised her hand in the air.  “Me too? Me too?”

“Yes, Ivy,” Skinner said. “You too.”

Even Tommy and Sandra Lynn threw her shady glances.  Ivy didn’t go to therapy sessions.  She’d pretty much ‘graduated’ Beouf’s program and was being kept as professional courtesy to Zoge.  That same professional courtesy would keep me trapped there, too, thanks to Janet.

Zoge quickly beat feet back to the nap room. Beouf got up from the floor circle and jogged to her classroom closet. Both came back with their arms full of stuffed animals.  Questions and exclamations bubbled out of everyone’s mouth and tripped over each other into a discorganized babbling, but the general consensus was ‘What’s going on? What are we doing?”

Skinner took the time to sit down where Beouf had been reading us a propaganda story moments ago.  “We’re going to try doing something different, and hopefully kinda fun.” She said.  “Instead of taking you all the way to the speech room, I’m pushing in here and will teach you all at once.  Then, if Mrs. B. and Mrs.Zoge like it and you’re really good, it’s something they can do with you, too.”

“Everyone gets a stuffie,” Beouf said.  “If you like your stuffie, you can use it next time.  If not, you can get another one.  But no whining right now.  You get what you get and you don’t throw a fit. Make good choices.”

I braced myself and got ready to dig my fingernails into my forearms.  There was no telling what was inside these monstrosities.  Bells that assaulted the senses? Hypnotic songs when you squeezed?  Pheromones maybe?  Were pheromones really a thing? I didn’t know. Best not to discount the possibility.  That’s how they got you.

“Clark,” Zoge cooed. “Your Mommy made sure to get this to us just after the buses came in.”  She placed Lion right into my lap.  The dumb stuffed animal had been smuggled from the edge of my crib and into the classroom.

“Awwww!” Billy mocked.  “Gibson’s Mommy bwought him his own stuffie from home!”

I felt my ears go hot.  “Got a problem with that?”

Billy stiffened. “Nope.  Just sayin’.”  Billy got a penguin shoved into his arms.

I started turning Lion around and examining him: Dangling him. Shaking him. Squeezing him. Sniffing in. Nope.  Nothing different. Still my Lion.

“What are you doing?” asked Shauna.

“Checking for traps,” I said.

Shauna thought for a second, then said, “Good idea,” and started copying me.

“Before we continue,” Skinner said.  “Why doesn’t everybody share what their new friends’ names are?”   

“I don’t know,” Jesse said. It was a protest and a pout as much as anything else.

“Just listen,” Skinner said. “That’s what we’re doing today.  We’re gonna listen to each other using our new friends.”  Every Little with so much as two brain cells to rub together looked like Skinner had just peeled her own lips off.  Ivy nodded thoughtfully.  

What kind of pop-psychology hokum was this?  Puppet therapy? Really?! And here I was thinking that Maturosis was the dumbest crackpot pseudoscience bullshit I’d be forced to participate in during my thirty-two years of life.

Sage on the stage that she was, Skinner took our collective silence as a cue to demonstrate.  “Watch. I’ll do it.” She took a stuffed lamb and put it to her ear.  “Oh? Oh.  Okay. I’ll tell them.” She put the lamb back down in her lap.  “Everyone. This is Velma.”

“Hi Velma!”  Ivy, of course. Chances were she’d done this sort of thing before.
“And Velma wanted me to tell you that she’s really happy to be doing this and she has soooooo much to say and she’s ready to listen, too.”  Skinner looked among us expectantly.  “What’s everybody else’s name?” No one made a move or opened their mouths. Some of us decided now would be a good time to suck on a pacifier. “Go on. What’s their name? All you have to do is listen.”

Sandra Lynn broke first. “Clip Clop.”  She held up the patchwork horse that looked so worn it might have actually rivaled her in age.

Then Shauna held up her panda.  “Pam.”

And so it went like dominoes crashing down on themselves..

“Chomper”

“Rex, I guess.”

“Jason.”

“Miss Ella Bella.  Ella for short.”

“Mookie.”

“I’m thinking this is Hansen.”

Ivy held her stuffie in a death grip, wrapping it around herself like it was a boa or a blanket.  It was a purple stuffed octopus that had a top hat and monocle.  “This is Akko,” she said.  Wrong.  She was wrong. She gave the dumb fake animal the wrong dumb fake name.

“What’s your lion’s name, Clark?”

“Hm?” I said. “Oh. Uh...Lion.”

“Yes,” Skinner said. “I know that it’s a lion. But what’s his name?”

“His name,” I repeated more firmly, “is Lion.”

“Pffft…” Chaz laughed into his teddy bear.  He saw where I was going with this, or thought he did.

“Are you sure his name is Lion?” Skinner asked. “Maybe he’s a Walter? Or a Randal? Maybe his name was-?”

I held out my finger. “I’m sorry to interrupt you, Miss Skinner, but I’m trying to listen to my friend, over here.” I held the stuffie closer to my ear.  “What’s that, Lion? You’re feeling invalidated that this stranger who sold you into slavery is now going so far as to suggest other names for you? She’s invalidating your identity?  Your heritage? Your very sense of self? Wow, we have something in co-”

“Okay, okay, Clark,” Skinner interrupted. “You’re right.  He’s your lion. He belongs to you. You can name him Lion.”

“I didn’t name him Lion,” I said. “That’s just his name. I listened.”  I’d like to think that in the distant future, there will be a word that has evolved and bastardized itself but still has roots traceable back to ‘Clark Gibson’ and that it will have a singular meaning that roughly translates to ‘malicious compliance’.

“Okay, Clark.” Skinner bunched. “You and Lion have a very good point. I’m sorry.”

“Why are you apologizing to me?”

Skinner bent over and made a little bow.  “I’m sorry, Lion.”  Everyone else giggled.  Skinner blushed. She sat back up to her full height.  “What Clark was doing was very good, though, boys and girls.  He listened to Lion, told me how Lion was feeling, and spoke up for him while not being rude about it.”

“Mmmm...hmmm…”  I looked up. I hadn’t realized that Beouf was standing right behind me, quietly tapping her foot.  “Not overly rude.”

I gave my best ‘I’m just a baby’ smile to my ex-mentor.  She wasn’t buying it, shaking her head and closing her eyes.  I didn’t very much care.

“So what do we do now?” Mandy asked.  

“Let’s practice,” Skinner said.  “We can all try taking turns listening to our Speech Buddies. And if there’s anything we want to say for them, or they want to say for us, they can.  Just make sure to be clear who’s saying what.”

I exhaled.  Someone had to say it. “This is fucking stupid.”

“Clark Grange!”

I tensed up. That was literally the sternest I’d ever heard Zoge speak to anyone, and she did it saying my kinda-sorta-name. “It wasn’t me!” I said, pointing to the stuffed king of the jungle. “It was Lion. Honest! I was quoting him!”

“Maybe Lion should take a breather, then,” Skinner said.  I shot her a challenging look, daring her to take my stuffie away from me when she’d insisted I get it.  She broke eye contact first.

Beouf knelt down and gently placed her hand on my shoulder.  “No,” she said. “No. Let Lion stay, Miss Skinner. Lion’s not a part of our class and isn’t subject to the same rules. Lion’s a Grown-Up and should know to phrase things better around babies, but he’s free to speak his mind.”

“Did you…?” I was shaking with anticipation. “Did you…?”

Chaz saw the opening.  “The rules don’t apply to the stuffies!”

“Mookie says we should get changed more often,” Mandy shouted.  “She says that even though Sandra Lynn is only wet, she can smell Sandra’s pee pee pants two spaces away.” Mandy softened and leaned back.  “No offense.”

“That’s okay,” Sandra Lynn said. “You didn’t say it, Mookie did.  And she’s right.”

“Chomper thinks its dumb that we have to eat all our food at breakfast and lunch.” Tommy said, wagging his alligator.  “We’re not gonna get any bigger or stronger.  If we’re not hungry we’re not hungry, and I...I mean he...I mean he says...grr...it’s hard to do stuff when you got a tummy ache.”

“Wow, that’s some big feelings,” Skinner replied, on scripts  “Velma thinks-”

“Velma had her turn,” I said.

“So did Lion.”

“Lion’s not talking. I am.  And I’m trying to listen to everybody else.”

Skinner looked to Beouf like a drowning woman looks at a lifeguard.  The lifeguard seemed unphased to the plight.

“The books are boring and never change, Jason says.  It’s why nobody ever reads them and just stares off to space or poops during reading time.”

“Pam wants to go out to play first thing in the morning when it’s cooler and fewer people can see us.  That or be allowed to strip if it’s too hot.”

And on it went.

“Rex wonders why we gotta sit in our mess if it happens in the cafeteria? Every bathroom here has changing tables.  Would it be that hard to pack a damn diaper bag with some spares and put it on the fucking cart”  Billy held out his dinosaur like he was trying not to associate with it. “I’m quoting. I’m quoting!  He’s right though…”

And it kept going.

“Sometimes Clip Clop thinks that Mrs. B. and Mrs. Zoge are just going through the motions. That’s why we have nap time, even though our bodies don’t really need naps. Also Clark snores.”

And going.

“Hansen told me to tell you that this place is like a cage,” Chaz said. “We go to this school because it’s the same building, but we’re not a part of it.  We don’t do anything with the others and are just shut away here most of the time.  We’re display pieces. Freaks. Just look at how that one kid acted when he got dragged here.”

And going.

“Ella wants a less demeaning verb for this Bee-Ess. ‘condition’,” Annie said. “I’m not ‘suffering’ from Maturosis. I’m not ‘afflicted’ with it.  I don’t even really have it.” I sucked in my breath. Now, Beouf would lower the boom.  She didn’t and  Annie kept rambling. “How am I supposed to be a baby to you and a victim of some kind of disease? Ella wants to know.  Is it some weird attempt at love, or is it an excuse not to listen to me? If you think I’m just a child, then why use words and terminology like something is wrong with me? Amazons talk to me like I’m a toddler but use language to describe me like I’m a...a…”

“A leper?” I suggested.

“Yeah,” she pointed at my stuffie. “What the lion said.”

“Lion.”

“Right. Lion.”

Peppered throughout there was plenty of, ‘cock’, ‘shit’, ‘motherfucker’, ‘twatwaffle’, ‘asshole’, ‘dingus’, and whatnot followed by smirking naughty grins and blaming it on the stuffed animal that such and such was translating for. I honestly expected Beouf or Zoge to slam on the breaks; to talk down to us; to stop our momentum or turn our language around on us. After every curse word or complaint or criticism, I waited for them to take away the stuffies or demean us or discredit us. It never came.

By the time it was over, Beouf and Skinner were hurriedly jotting things down on notepads.  Skinner stopped performing whatever schtick and just directed traffic and conversation.  She started pointing to us in turn for our stuffed animals to air our collective and individual grievances.

“The activities suck.”  

“The rules don’t make sense.”

“Give us some kind of fuckin’ choice. We have literally none in our lives.”

For a solid thirty minutes, all we did was bitch at them.

“What’s that Akko?  Akko wants to know why people aren’t allowed to kiss or hug or touch each other without permission, but we have to hold hands everyday when walking in line. That’s very hypocritical.”  

Billy let out a low whistle. “Damn, Ivy.”  He shook.  “Rex said! Rex said! Not me!”

“What do you want us to do about it?” Skinner asked after everyone had said her piece.

“You’re supposed to be the adults,” I spat.  “You hold way more cards than we do. Figure something out.” I inhaled. “And I said that. Not Lion. You don’t want me to quote what he said.”

The Speech Therapist stood up and dusted herself off.  “I actually think this was very productive.  Would it be okay if they brought their stuffies to speech from now on?”  The question wasn’t directed at us.

Beouf looked vaguely thoughtful.  “I think that might be a good idea.  Is it okay if we used them in the classroom, too?’

“By all means!” Skinner looked delighted that some idea of hers had an application of some sort.

The three Amazons huddled up and started mumbling to each other. Likewise, my own peers started to gravitate towards me.

“Clark. Way to go, dude.” Tommy patted me on the back.  

“That was pretty cool.” Jesse added.

“You should’ve seen Gibson last week,” Billy smirked. “Grade A shit. You had to be there.”

Annie pointed to the ground. “You dropped Rex.”

“Oh sh-!” My foul mouthed friend went over and retrieved his dinosaur. “Gotta keep this guy on me to uh...translate.”  

I put Lion down by my feet.  “Yeah…”

“Clark?” Chaz poked me in the knee.  “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”  I didn’t mean it.  Not one bit.  I’d subverted the Amazons’ expectations and turned their game on them just like i’d wanted to.  It was a victory.  Classic Clark.  Vintage Gibson.  It didn’t feel like one, though.  They weren’t angry enough. They weren’t distressed.  They weren’t folding or lashing out to stuff us back into the neat little boxes they’d made for us.  Their hypocrisy wasn’t laid bare for all to see.

I’d won.  It just didn’t feel anything like a victory.  Not at all.  It just felt like I’d been allowed to whine and bitch and moan for half an hour.

And all my friends were loving it.  Chaz handed Lion back up to me. Without thinking about it, I accepted the stuffie.  All of my friends had found a renewed interest in stuffed animals.

“Akko says, ‘Domo’,” Ivy said. “That means ‘thank you’.”

I huffed. “I know what domo means, Ivy.” I felt my anger rising.  “And that octopus doesn’t speak Yamatoan. He’s Albienese.”  Irrational frustration was building.  “Don’t you see the top hat and the monocle?!”  Poor Ivy.  “And his name isn’t Akko!” I shouted. “It’s Jessennia!”

Ivy positively deflated. She didn’t cry. She didn’t stomp. She didn’t whine.  Just a bit of the happiness of being included leaked out of her face right before she slinked off.  “Oh.  Sorry.  I didn’t...I didn’t know…”

Beouf turned around and looked back at me, seeming more than a little disturbed.  I’d worked with Melony Beouf for ten years.  She was unflappable.  I’d already cussed her out and hit every pain point I’d known she might have from her personal and professional life and she remained completely unphased. She’d shoved me into a glass tube and fried every hair follicle off my body as I screamed myself hoarse and went right back to cooing at me while I passed out.  She enrolled me in her class and gave me away like a decade of camaraderie had never happened.

Something about what I’d just said to Ivy had piqued her interest. More than ‘piqued’; it bothered her.  Immensely.  For some reason, Melony Beouf looked shaken.

And I had no clue why.

[Samriis]

My heart goes out to Clark here... thank you again for a wonderful chapter 

Oh wow!  Two at once!  I'll take it an run

[Personalias]

Chapter 70: Little Voices: Games Grown-Ups Play

I sulked in Janet’s lap at that night’s Little Voices meeting; still brooding and stewing over what went wrong with Beouf.  Beouf gushed over how ‘well’ things had gone that day, and said how much of a joy it was to have Lion in the class with me.  Beouf was happy, and that meant I couldn’t be.  I felt like a chess player going over a game in my head to see where I made the wrong move.  Where had the gap in my defense been? Had I not attacked hard enough?  Had I jumped in too quickly?  

I felt like the comedic relief in my own story.  I wasn’t some idiot who didn’t know he’d been manipulated.  I’d been just with it enough to realize I was being manipulated,  but not enough to fix it back.  I was Sheriff of Nottingham, instead of his bumbling henchmen. I knew just how screwed I was and  I hated that I couldn’t figure out how to unscrew it.  What had I done wrong back there?

In between replaying the events with Lion, I couldn’t help but overhear the other Little Voices members and their Littles talking and interacting with each other. “Yes, we had a scare with her the other day,” one Amazon said to another. “I don’t know how it happened, but one of the drawers in the kitchen was open and batteries were scattered everywhere. They were right next to her playpen. I almost ran her to the emergency room. Not sure how the baby proofing got undone, but we’ve ordered some stronger ones.”  She looked down at the Little by her feet.  The doll was wearing a matching denim jumper.  The Doll had a doll.  “It’s that darn cat.”

“This is why we never had pets in my family,” the other Amazon said. “far too much work.”  I suppressed a bitter laugh.  Changing diapers for decades was fine, but litterboxes were crossing a line?  “Plus some of them are just so...small...I’d be afraid to hurt one or step on it. Or something.”

Typical.

“Yes,” the first agreed, “but the cat came with her, and they’re so adorable together. Especially snuggled up. It’s just so precious, almost makes it worth it. Although I don’t think we’ll get another one.”

The Little in the jumper took exception to this. “WHAT?!?!?!”

“Don’t worry, Bea, Kit-Kat isn’t going anywhere.”

Bored, I listened in on conversations elsewhere.

“You know that coffee shop, a town or so over, that we encouraged everyone to avoid because of their um... ‘special’ items?”

A Daddy with sandy blonde hair arched his eyebrow. “Yeah, ‘Le Grande Bebe Cafe’, right?  With the spiked chocolate milk?”

“Right. That one.  Same place where they have the Amazon with Maturosis working full time.”

“Are you sure she has Maturosis and just isn’t parading around in a diaper or something? Using it as an excuse to dress like a baby in public?”  I must have been punchy because of how hard I laughed at that.  If I was the Sheriff, these were my henchmen.  I was in a room where a bunch of pots were calling kettles ‘black’.

Janet looked down at me.  “Something funny, giggly boy?”  Her smile took mine away. Her light hug stole my laughter but at least let me listen.

“Not sure. I’ve heard rumors, but…” the woman shook her head. “Getting off topic. We won’t have to worry about them slipping anything into people’s drinks without asking. New store policy. Less innuendo. Someone had to take their Little to the emergency room for dehydration.  Didn’t know what was meant by ‘special’ chocolate milk.”

“Oh my god!”

Mentally, I disengaged. There was far too much to take in there, and the cult meeting proper hadn’t even started.

Another pair of ladies took a seat next to Janet. “How did the date go last night?”

“Oh it was going really well, until we started talking about kids and how to look after Littles.”

“Let me guess,” the first hen covered her Little’s ears.  “H-Y-P-N-O?”

“Yep, and kept going on about how good that place was.”

Ironically, both of them joined me in an unconscious shudder.

“Oh my gosh, that’s ridiculous.”

“I tried to talk to him, see if he was open minded, but I could barely get a word in edgewise. Honestly I think he may have seen one of those videos.” They both laughed. As if high and mighty Amazons could be hypnotized. How absurd!

I rolled my eyes. Of course they weren’t hypnotized. Why rely on hypnotism when they’d already broken themselves with nice comfortable propaganda and feigned empathy?

“Well I’m sorry it didn’t work out, but you know I hear Mark is single.”

My ears started burning.  Mark. Stupid, plain, milquetoast, Mark with his thick rimmed glasses and mess of black curly hair. I could never have gotten away with hair like that back before Janet started toddlerizing me.  He was the only Amazon without a Little prisoner of his own.

Even with a week between sightings, I still felt my hackles rise up at seeing him. The only thing worse than an Amazon who’d adopted was one who hadn’t yet but wanted to.  I looked up at Janet only to realize that she wasn’t checking on me.  Her eyes were also drifting across the circle of chairs, over to Mark casually chatting up two other husbandless- but not Littleless- giantesses.

“It’s about that time,” the balding meeting leader said. “Weeeeeeee’re-”

“-All together again,
We’re here! We’re here!
We’re all together again,
We’re here! We’re here!
And who knows when,
We’ll be all together again,

Singing we’re all together again,

We’re heeeeere!”

The opening hymn was always the same.  Set the tone, set the mood, set the expectations. It’s how indoctrination worked best.

“It looks like we have some new visitors with us this evening,” Baldy said. “Please, introduce yourselves.”

“Hi,” a red-haired Amazon said. “I’m Lois.”

“HI LOIS!” She bobbed a Little man with dark black hair who was absolutely quivering in her arms. He was terrified.  Traumatized. “This is Bradley.”  

“HI BRADLEY!”

“I LIKE TO PEE MY PANTS!” The new guy shouted at the top of his lungs. No one laughed. No one said a thing. New guy’s declaration about him pissing himself rang out to a near vacuum.  What’s more, he sounded excited, but not happy about it.  He wasn’t celebrating his unpotty trained state, but calling out a safeword.  “I LIKE TO PEE MY PANTS!” He was begging. Pleading.

A couple of the other Littles exchanged worried, but knowing looks. Cindy, the pink-haired older little whom I’d ruined last week whispered two words to Baldy’s Little.  I didn’t need to read lips to guess what she said.

“I just adopted Bradley,” his keeper, Lois, said sheepishly. “Money got kind of tight, and so I wanted to enroll him in a public school instead of a private daycare. But there’s a waiting list at Oakshire, and the only other accredited Maturosis and Developmental Plateau unit in the area was...” She gulped.  

“DO IT CAUSE MOMMY SAID SO!”  Tears were leaking out of the poor guy’s eyes, and he didn’t blink.  Not once.

“I didn’t do my research,” the newcomer said. “I only looked on their website. The staff seemed very nice and professional.”  Mark put his hand on her shoulder, and nodded solemnly, not saying anything.

Fuck Mark.

“I did some more digging when Bradley started…”

“I’M A GOOD BABY! POTTY BAD! CUP BAD!”

She looked like she was about to cry.  “that.”

“How long was he in there?”

Her answer came out just above a whisper. “Two weeks.”

Two weeks?  I heard my heartbeat in my ears. That? All of that? Happened in two weeks.

There was a brief rumble from the gathered.

“I don’t know why the school board doesn’t shut them down.”

“Lobbyists at higher levels. Governor.  Misinformation.”

“Those kinds of ‘therapies’ have a lot more standing...for now.”

“What about bugging them?”

“Illegal. Won’t hold up in court. Can’t record without consent.”

The newcomer drew her Little into a sobbing hug. “I just wanted him to be happy...”

The bald cult leader stood up and quieted everyone down. “The important part is you got him out of there and we’re all here to help you. Both of you.”

“Abso-fuckin’-lutely.” One of the men said.

“Carl! The children!”

Amy Madra snapped out of whateverself-induced. “FUCK!” She seemed more amused than anything “Fuck-fuck-fuck!” Helena pushed a pacifier into her lips. Amy kept happily swearing with the bulb in her mouth.  No one heard the words, but that didn’t stop her cadence. “MMMMMMMMMM! Mmm-mmm-mmm.”  Helena shushed her, but that only got her to lower the volume.

“Whelp,” someone joked. “Guess Carl isn’t watching the babies during the second half.” That lowered the tension. Even the Littles who were still with it enough to get the joke laughed.

Two weeks.  I was almost breathless.  I felt Janet hug me again, tighter than before and around the chest like she was afraid I might slip away into nothingness.  I could hear her heartbeat, feel it through her chest like a jackhammer.  I looked up and saw her looking down at me.

She kissed me on the forehead and whispered down to me. “I love you. I love you so much.”  There was fear there; guilt too; and I knew why.

“I’M NOT A BIG BOY! I’M NOT! I’M NOT! I’M NOT! I’M NOOOOOOOT!”  Bradley sobbed into his Mommy’s shoulder.

Two weeks. That poor bastard had been at New Beginnings for just two weeks and he was shouting words at the top of his lungs that didn’t sound like they belonged to him. “I’M! JUST! A! BAAAA-A-A-A-BEEEEEEE!”  It was almost a relief when he started sucking his thumb and stopped saying real words.

Two weeks.  That’s all it had taken to wreck this guy.  Cut the crying and add a pull-string into his back and he would have been perfect for an Amazon.

Janet’s grip on me only got tighter.  For once, I leaned into and returned it, and wrapped my arms upward over hers, pulling them down to me like a harness on a roller coaster.  He could have gotten into Beouf’s class.  Beouf would have broken him, sure.  But not like that.  The worst part of my day had been carrying around my stuffie, agitated that using him as a loophole to cuss wasn’t getting Zoge to clutch her at her pearls enough.  Except he couldn’t have gotten into Beouf’s class. Waiting list. And I’d snatched up the last spot. We’d snatched up the last spot.

It’s a weird feeling. Feeling privileged and doomed at the same time.  Looking at someone and having survivor’s guilt, even though you too, are a dead man.  Feeling a shared sense of guilt with your captor: If there’s a single word to encapsulate that feeling I don’t know it.

The meeting got way off track.  No silly songs or lap bounces tonight.  It was all about people sharing resources with Lois so she could ‘fix’ Bradley. Talks of ‘deprogramming software’ that was hard to find but obtainable ‘if you knew where to look' and ‘specialists’.  I heard Dr. Milton’s, my so-called pediatrician, name dropped.  Someone mentioned grants and charities that could at least help fund getting him into a regular daycare. Regular by their standards at least.

Part of me, a very small part, wanted to help.  I bit my tongue sitting in Janet’s lap, almost fantasizing about martyring myself by offering myself up and offering my spot in Beouf’s.  I wasn’t gonna do it. Not really.  There were a million reasons not to speak up, the fact that I didn’t have an actual say in where Janet put me during the day being one of them. Opportunities for vengeance was another.  What the A.L.L. might think of me was a distant but present factor.  Mostly, though, I was just scared.

Janet wouldn’t send me to New Beginnings, but I still wanted, no, needed the familiarity of my own personal hellscape that I’d been adapting to.

The meeting would have dragged on longer than that, had the other Littles not had their routines already driven into them.  “Looks like the tots are getting restless,” someone said. “Let’s get them off to the nursery and we’ll finish talking here. Let them play.”

“NOOOOOOO!”

“It’s okay. Bradley can stay with his Mommy.”

Janet reached into my diaper bag. “Don’t forget Lion.”  I took it and went to get in line, only to freeze when fresh air hit the rack of my ass. It was practically second nature by now. “Just checking. You’re good.”  I got sent away with a pat on the butt.  If Lion had had bones his ribs would have broken in my grip.

I waddled up with Lion in my arms straight to the Amazon on guard duty that night.  “Put me in a crib, please.”

“Are you tired, Clark?”

Stupidly, I looked down at my shirt or on Lion, wondering if there was a nametag or something. It’s weird when someone knows your name and you don’t know theirs.  Not that I wanted to know her name. “No,” I replied to the sandy haired woman who walked her Little on a toddler leash. “I just want to be alone.”

“Are you sure?” She asked. “We’re going to play Feather Wand in a few minutes.”  She said it loud enough so excited murmurs rippled around the holding pen.

“Yeah. I’m sure.”

“Okay dokie. Do you need a change?”

My eyes darted to the single changing table out in the open. No bathroom. Everyone could see.  “No thank you.” I brought up Lion to just beneath my eyes to hide the rosiness that was coming out of my cheeks.. “My Mommy just checked me a minute ago.”

“Oh yeah,” the guard said. “That’s right.”  She picked me up and dumped me in the crib in the back.  “Thank you for being polite, too.”

“You’re wel-...” I stopped myself and silently cursed.

She didn’t notice.  The lady unleashed her prisoner and dug through her diaper bag.  “Look what I got!” She brandished two feathers that were so perfectly black and white and proportioned that they just had to be synthetic.  “Who’s ready to play Feather Wand?”

All around the room, Little hands shot up like a Kindergarten class. “Me me me me me!”

The lone Amazon seemed singularly enchanted. “Wonderful!  Just remember the rules. Black feather makes things heavy.  White feather makes things light.  Black feather and white feather can cancel each other out,” she paused and grinned, “but I don’t think anyone’s going to bother doing that.”  More knowing laughter.  “And how many times do you get to use a feather?”

“Three times!”

“And then you-?”

“Give someone else a turn!”

“That’s right!” The sandy haired woman clapped her hands together. “I think tonight, we should start with...Kylie for the heavy wand,” she gave the black feather to a Little girl who’d been dozing in her Daddy’s lap the week prior.  “Aaaaand Paul will start with the light feather.”  The older man who had been talking blocks the way Burt Braun talked construction, got it.

“Mommy!” The Little woman in the toddler leash whined.

“Prudence...” That was enough to put a stop to it.  “We play Feather Wand enough at home. Give someone else a chance.”  The others, oddly enough dispersed and spread out of the room, but instead of looking at the holders of the wand, they started breaking out blocks and balls and other toys like the game wasn’t happening at all.  

Curious.  Very curious.

“Ready?” Prudence’s Mommy called.

“Ready!” The two Littles holding feathers said.

“Then one...two...th..oh wait!” The Amazon said. “Don’t forget kids. These wands don’t work on clothes!  So you can’t make somebody’s shoes heavy and stick them in place.”  A few of the girls raised their hands to ask a question. “And you can’t make somebody’s skirt or shirt go up.” The hands went down. “Okay. One...two...three!”

And then they just started playing quietly.  Blocks were being stacked.  Dolls were broken out and played with.  The two with the feathers? They didn’t blast off or run around. They just walked around the playroom, like pool sharks lining up their shots.

No one else was paying attention to me, but this was so bizarre that I felt the need to exclaim something.  I caught sight of Amy crawling around.  I might have been able to wave her over and ask what was going on.  

Nope.

Wasn’t gonna happen.  

I looked at Lion. Close enough. “The fuck?” I whispered to no one but him. This must be why actual children developed imaginary friends: Sometimes the world didn’t make sense and no one was around to just listen.

About a minute into it, the real game started in earnest. The girl with the black feather walked up to a girl combing her dolly’s hair with a tiny brush.  “Heavy-One!”

The girl with the hairbrush let out a yelp of surprise and dropped the pink plastic brush to the floor like it was a brick made of dwarf star matter.  “What?! Oh no! Clementine’s comb is soooo heavy!”  She pinched it between her thumb and forefingers and pretended to tug, grunting and groaning.  “Grrrr! How am I supposed to comb her hair now?”

Black feather giggled and skipped off. I kept my focus on the girl with the dolly to see if she’d break character or get distracted.  Quite the opposite as it turned out.  Unable- more like not allowed- to pick up the hair brush, she turned the doll upside down and started rubbing its head against the brush, humming happily.

“Light-One!”  Block boy used the feather on his mate, and now the guy was up on his toes holding an orange brick up over his head by the very tips of his fingers..

“Whoaaah! Whoooooah!”  The guy was acting like the piece of plastic was a hot air balloon threatening to tug him away.  “Must! Get! Block! Back on top...of tower!  Reggie! Cindy! Help!”  Almost breaking, the three pantomimed forcing the block back to the top like they were pressing on a giant spring.

As soon as the other two backed off, block boy’s buddy was back on his toes.

“I am not sitting on that,” Reggie laughed.

“I know,” Pink Hair said. “What if we build the tower up high! It’s lighter up in the air anyways so it should say!”

“Yeah! That might work.”

From the safety of the nursery’s rent-a-crib, I nodded.  I was beginning to understand the appeal of the game; from both sides.  The people with the feathers were empowered to create problems, and everyone else had to creatively solve them.  

No winners. No losers. Just an improvisation game. It looked kind of fu-

“Hey Clark!” Amy smushed her face up against the bars. I scooted to the very back of the crib. She couldn’t walk properly, her underwear crinkled, she was the only face that regularly registered to me in this place, and I had a wall to my back and still she managed to sneak up on me. “How you doin’  did you have a good week in Mrs. Beouf’s class I know the week’s not over yet but we haven’t seen each other and Friday doesn’t really count if you think about it I’ve been meaning to ask you about a ceeeeertain purple-”

“Yes yes yes,” I snapped, cutting her off. “Yes. I saw your stupid octopus. I saw Jessennia.”

Amy stopped, but only for a beat. “Oh yeah? When?”

I leaned to the side. Amy had pulled herself up to a standing position and was just barely blocking my view of the game.  “This morning.”

“Aaaaaand? Did he say anything about me?”

This nutter. This fucking Full Native nutter.  “No. He’s playing with Ivy now.  She calls him Akka.”

Amy rolled her eyes and sighed. “Oh Ivy,” she said. “I do not miss her very much.  Did you tell her she was wrong and that his name is Jessennia and he talks with an Albienese accent, you know I bit Ivy once but she didn’t bleed or anything but I warned her not to take the grilled cheese I’d put down the front of my diaper that I was saving for later cuz I didn’t have any pockets and even though it had gluten in it and I wasn’t s’posed to eat it we had picture day that afternoon.”

It took me about five seconds to process that particular stream of consciousness.  “You bit Ivy?”

“Uh-huh.”

I smirked. “Is that how you lost your front teeth?”  

The brightness and curiosity left Amy’s eyes and she sunk down. “No.”  I felt a pang in my gut. I had crossed a line. I had guessed it might be there.  I knew I was crossing it.  Didn’t stop me from doing it.  DIdn’t stop me from regretting it as soon as I did.  I didn’t apologize, either.

“Mommy, catch!” A green rubber ball sailed into the lone Amazon’s arms.  The tip of a black feather brushed it.

“HEAVY-THREE!”

The Amazon dropped like a stone, arms first onto the floor. She practically belly flopped! “Oh no!” She said like the lead in a B-Movie, “This ball is sooooo heavy! And my hand is trapped under it! Oh wooooe is me!”

“We’ll help!” The call went out. Two or three other prisoners started playing the game of trying to move it off of the lady’s hand. For extra emphasis, the Little Voices cultist kept it in her vice-like grip making the Littles have to really work to move it.

I jumped up and looked over the railing so I could see over Amy’s head.  “She’s playing?! “ I yelped. “Why is she playing?!”  Amazons didn’t play baby games! They forced Littles to play them and watched while feeling smug about themselves!

“Why wouldn’t she play?” Amy looked back over her shoulder. “Prudence’s Mommy likes playing with Littles. Most Grown-Ups do.”

I plopped back down, suddenly more interested in what Amy had to say.  “What are you talking about?”

“That’s why Mrs. Beouf does it?  Playing with us is like...her job or something.”  I glared at her to no effect. “You know sometimes I think they invented movie theaters so Grown-Ups would have an excuse to watch the fun stuff cuz it lets them pretend they’re doing it for us streaming services are really hurting their access to real art these days, ya know?”

“Beouf plays games to mess with us,” I replied. “Playing games, even these, just for fun, would be...be…considered...?”  Damn it I didn’t have a better word for it.

“Immature?”

“Yeah,” I huffed.

Completely straight faced Amy peered through the bar and said “What’s more Grown-Up than playing with Littles?”

My face was getting hot, and this time it had nothing to do with embarrassment. “Maybe paying a dentist to replace the gap in your teeth?” That’s what I should have said. That’s what I wanted to say.  That pang in my gut came back when I started to say it, though, and so I stopped.

Instead, I asked. “Why do you call them that? Grown-Ups? You’re smarter than that.”

“Thank you.”

“Not my point,” I pressed. “Why do you keep calling them Grown-Ups? Why talk like that? It’s stupid.”

“No, it’s not, it’s complete zoological sense.”  

“We’re all adults. Janet is two years younger than me.”

“Yeah, but we’re not Grown-Ups, like them,” Amy said. “Never will be, and that’s okay.”
The Amazons really got her good. I didn’t have anything to add, so she just piled on more nonsense.  “Some adult tadpoles are called toads.  Some adult tadpoles are called frogs.  But you don’t call a frog a toad or they’d get very upset.”

I tried to piece it all together.  “So a Grown-Up, to you, is just…?”

“A word for an adult Amazon.”  She shrugged. “I’m a Little, not an Amazon, so I’m an adult, but not a Grown-Up. Adult just means you’re done growin’.  That’s it. Calling them Grown-Up makes it less confusing.” She smirked. “Imagine if you just walked around calling all physically mature creatures ‘adults’.” She stopped and squeaked laughter. “Can you just imagine the signs at the zoo? Adult, adult, adult, adult, adult.”

Just when I thought I’d seen the bottom of the crazy barrel.  “Is this why Beouf looked so freaked when I brought up the octopus’s-”

“ Jessennia.”

“-righ, when I brought up Jessennia’s name?”

“Hmmm?”

I repeated myself. “She looked kind of scared when I called Jessennia by his name.  Why?”

Amy twisted her mouth and squinted. “I dunno. She used to look like that all the time.” She paused. “She was fun. I kinda miss her.  Say hi to her for me?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”  I wasn’t lying.  A potential silver bullet was a potential silver bullet.

“I like your lion,” Amy said, pointing to the stuffie in my arms. I don’t know when I started holding him again, or if I properly stopped. “What’s his name?”

“Lion.”

“That’s a good name. He looks like a Lion.”

I allowed myself a smile. “I know, right?”  I exhaled and relaxed a bit.  I really needed to lighten-

“Light-One!” A white feather snuck it’s way between the bars of the crib and tickled Lion.  Amy talking to me had drawn some attention and a feather had exchanged hands again.

Pinned to the floor by a rubber ball, the sandy haired giantess called out, “Prudence, Clark doesn’t want to-”

“WAAAAAAAAH!” I screamed, chucking Lion so hard that he bumped the ceiling and thudded on the floor. “How in the-?” I said. “How’d you do that?!”

Prudence giggled so hard she doubled over. Amy squeaked through her nose so loudly she sounded like a guinea pig.  “Hurry! Pin it down! Before it floats again!”  A couple of guys dog piled onto Lion like they were heroes throwing themselves onto a grenade.

“Ooooooh,” Prudence’s Mommy groaned, finally releasing the ‘heavy’ ball from her grip.  She stood up and continued the show of flexing her arm and shaking it’d just been released from a vice or something.  “Clark, does that mean you want to get out of the crib?  Do you wanna come out and play?”

Ever the trouble maker, I was seeing potential.  Not for now, but for later.  When the time was right.


“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. I think I will.”

[YourFNF]

5 hours ago, Personalias said:

I changed course.  The door to the Nap Room was left open a crack. Someone must have seen me slip in.  It was impossible not to.  No one called out to me.  No one came in to check on me or tried to drag me out.  Or comfort me.

Good.

It made it easier for me to pop a pacifier in my mouth and scream into a pillow.

Really hoping this bitch gets sacked over this...

3 hours ago, Personalias said:

I held out my finger. “I’m sorry to interrupt you, Miss Skinner, but I’m trying to listen to my friend, over here.” I held the stuffie closer to my ear.  “What’s that, Lion? You’re feeling invalidated that this stranger who sold you into slavery is now going so far as to suggest other names for you? She’s invalidating your identity?  Your heritage? Your very sense of self? Wow, we have something in co-”

3 hours ago, Personalias said:

“Ella wants a less demeaning verb for this Bee-Ess. ‘condition’,” Annie said. “I’m not ‘suffering’ from Maturosis. I’m not ‘afflicted’ with it.  I don’t even really have it.” I sucked in my breath. Now, Beouf would lower the boom.  She didn’t and  Annie kept rambling. “How am I supposed to be a baby to you and a victim of some kind of disease? Ella wants to know.  Is it some weird attempt at love, or is it an excuse not to listen to me? If you think I’m just a child, then why use words and terminology like something is wrong with me? Amazons talk to me like I’m a toddler but use language to describe me like I’m a...a…”

Okay this is brilliant! And masterful!

XD

[YourFNF]

3 hours ago, Personalias said:

Something about what I’d just said to Ivy had piqued her interest. More than ‘piqued’; it bothered her.  Immensely.  For some reason, Melony Beouf looked shaken.

And I had no clue why.

I wonder if Beouf thinks Clark is about to go postal?

3 hours ago, Personalias said:

Two weeks. That poor bastard had been at New Beginnings for just two weeks and he was shouting words at the top of his lungs that didn’t sound like they belonged to him. “I’M! JUST! A! BAAAA-A-A-A-BEEEEEEE!”  It was almost a relief when he started sucking his thumb and stopped saying real words.

[Moon3ye]

My brain is just exploding right now.

That was 3 chapters with so much information.

I love this story and am excited to see what happens next.