Erin's Living Nightmare - Ch 7

My last update before Christmas (so, only one this week) - Happy Holidays everyone, hope you enjoy the season however you celebrate it (or don't).

I wish everyone could see my life…

Erin wanted to throw herself back into the relative security of her cubicle to regroup and clear her head from the horrors of the hallway, but when she got there she discovered Chloe lounging back in her chair, tapping away at her phone as usual. After a moment of being ignored standing over her, Erin cleared her throat for attention, and Chloe looked up irritably.

“Yeah?”

“You’re – I –” Erin stuttered, incredulous at the response. “What are you doing?”

“This is where we work, isn’t it?”

“Where I work,” Erin corrected. “You should have your own desk. Hasn’t anyone set you up yet?”

“I think that was your job,” Chloe said. “Anyway, I’m here now, so what’s the big deal?”

Erin gawked, unsure if the intern was baiting her or was genuinely unclear on the problem. She was sitting in her chair, at her computer. Not even working!

Chloe had started tapping at her phone again, but gave Erin another glance, realising she wasn’t moving away. The intern huffed. “Look, if it’s such a big deal why don’t you just sit on the desk again? Honestly, I didn’t even realise you’d got out of my pocket. Did you fall somewhere?”

“I can’t sit on the desk!” Erin replied far too loudly, hushing the wider office. She overcompensated with a much quieter hiss, “I’m not small anymore, Chloe!”

The intern eyed her warily, head to toe, as if suspecting a trick. “Oh. Yeah, I guess.”

Erin was rigid with disbelief, heat rising to her face. She wanted to shove this obnoxious young woman out of the way, to yell her out of the office, or simply to scream. She’d had enough of all this – enough of her damn life and how quickly it was managing to get worse. New wish ideas quickly started coming to mind: I wish I was powerful. I wish I could make them all disappear. I wish everything was just –

“Dobson!” Yvette shouted, startling Erin. The floor manager was leaning out of her door with a thunderous expression. “In my office. Now.” She ducked back in, leaving Erin to stare unhappily at the open door.

Russel made a cooing noise and someone laughed. With no one else to turn to, Erin worriedly met Chloe’s eye, but the intern only smiled, pleased at this karma for talking back to her. Slumping her shoulders, Erin dragged her feet through the office. Which part of all this mess was her manager angry about now?

Erin went into Yvette’s office and closed the door behind her. It was a dark space, the blinds down on the window into the main office and the weather dreary through the bigger outside window. Yvette was in her throne-like leather chair, fingers steepled as she glowered at Erin’s approach. She nodded curtly to the chairs opposite (purposefully lower) and Erin sat, huddled up tight with her hands on her knees.

“Something to say for yourself?” Yvette asked, shortly.

“Um.” Erin hesitated. She was used to coming in here an opening up with blanket apologies, but usually she had some idea what injustice needed apologising for. Was it because she and Chloe had failed to do any work? Was it the distraction she’d been creating with everyone watching her miserable encounters? A fresh fear spiked in Erin’s chest. Was it Xavier? Did Yvette somehow know she’d inhaled him? Erin cringed at the thought, having enjoyed a few minutes respite from remembering it had even happened. Where had Xavier gone? He hadn’t filled her stomach like Janet’s victims, but she’d felt herself swallow him, somehow made small by her big nose. Whatever logic she tried to dismiss it with, she was grimly aware of having devoured him, and dreaded what she might see if she checked her next stool.

“For fuck’s sake,” Yvette snapped through her silence. “You’re turning this office into a circus. The last thing we needed was all the eyes of the world on what we’re up to, but there you go, always having to make a big scene of everything. You couldn’t have brought your nightmares to life somewhere else?”

What was this? After Janet and Xavier’s comments, now Yvette somehow knew what was going on, too?

“Christ,” Yvette said, exasperated as she read Erin’s confusion. She spun her computer monitor around to face Erin and pointed sharply. “You’re a global sensation.”

Erin saw herself on the screen, in a video box, with comments scrolling down to one side. The video was paused on a still of Erin sitting, tiny, beside Chloe’s plate of stew, one of the intern’s fingers just in view for comparison. She looked haggard, fitting to the title below the video: Tiny Woman Confesses All!

From the perspective, it was clear that Chloe had been videoing the whole time, streaming their conversation. Then she noticed the numbers. The view count was in the millions, going up as she looked. Hundreds of thousands of likes. Comments were blinking into existence, flying by. Her eyes widened at the responses she managed to catch:

What a whiny little bitch.

Did she seriously use a wish to screw over her whole office?!

Oughta step on her.

I bet she’d taste good on toast.

“What is happening…” Erin uttered weakly.

“Half the world is listening to you complain about how awful your life is,” Yvette said, rotating the monitor back. “You really should’ve cleared it with me before deciding to go viral about shrinking. There are ways we could’ve gone about this that would’ve been better for the company.”

“But I didn’t post that video.”

“Oh, so it’s not your fault, that’s the line we’re taking is it? It’s always the same with you, Erin. How many times have I heard you try to brush off sloppy work by saying it was someone else’s job? Take responsibility for once.”

For once? The urge to scream returned, and Erin had to dig her fingers into the arm of the chair to calm herself. Yvette always got upset at her because she hadn’t done a good job on something that had been unfairly delegated to her. Sometimes even when someone had submitted work saying Erin was supposed to have done it, without even telling her. But her wish was going haywire with this – the nightmare of her life was right here, with this unfair treatment, yet all the world was mocking her in tiny despair.

“You need to get a handle on this ASAP,” Yvette said. “It needs to be controlled.”

“I’ll ask Chloe to take the video down,” Erin said but her manager shook her head.

“No, that’s already passed, and we’ll find a way to spin it. I’m getting requests from streaming platforms to bring cameras into the office to see what’s next. There might be some profit in it. What I’m talking about is all this.” Yvette pointed at Erin. She looked down at herself, ruffled but reasonably ordinary, wondering what particular aspect of her was disappointing Yvette now. “The nightmare wish hokum. You turning tiny, other people turning big, is there anything else I should know about? Tentacles somewhere? I could just imagine you conjuring tentacles.”

Erin quickly shook her head, shutting out the image of Xavier getting sucked up her nose.

“Well, we didn’t employ a four-inch-tall worker, so you can knock that off. And now I’ve got Janet walking around eating some good staff. You need to rein in that obsession of yours with her.”

“Obsession?” Erin echoed, trying to keep up. “Sorry, Ms Crossward, but Janet is dangerous –”

“Janet is a darling,” Yvette interrupted. “And her diet aside, her enhanced presence is going to be good for morale, but what are you doing about it?” She paused, glaring earnestly.

The line of thought didn’t make sense, so easily dismissing Janet’s murderous tendencies and lumping the problem on Erin, but she saw how this was going. Whatever extremes she was now seeing, things hadn’t changed that much. Janet was causing trouble and Erin was getting blamed. A greater, devilish esoteric power was at work, and Yvette was demanding solutions from her specifically.

“I’m trying to think of a new wish,” Erin said carefully. “I’m sure there’s a solution.”

“Give over,” Yvette said. “You’ll make things worse with that kind of behaviour.” She drew back slightly, to study Erin down her nose, with an expression that said she already had something in mind that she’d been building up to. “But… seeing as you’re already deep in this, perhaps there’s something you could do to restore a bit more order here. Explain to me, why is it that Janet is so big?”

Erin heard a subtext in there, clear enough from the dozen times when Yvette had asked Janet over some clothing or make-up she was jealous of. Why Janet and not someone else. Why not Yvette herself. The manager’s eyes burnt with expectation, the real root of her anger becoming clear. It wasn’t that the nightmare was sending the office into turmoil and had made Erin a spectacle for the whole world: it was that Yvette wasn’t benefiting from this directly, while Janet was strutting around being admired.

“I don’t know,” Erin whispered. “There are no clear rules; it just happened. She’s always been in my face, giving me extra work, teasing me.”

“I didn’t ask for your sob story again,” Yvette said. “I’m just saying that don’t you think if you’re to look up to anyone in this office, it might be the person who’s actually taken you under her wing all these years.”

Erin nodded, in obligation more than anything. Was that how Yvette really saw herself? She mostly hung out in this private office making herself unavailable, only emerging to criticise and demean Erin.

“Of course, I’m glad you apparently don’t see me as some office tyrant.” Yvette affected a very false laugh. “But perhaps you should go back and have a good think about how you really see others in this office, and your place in it, rather than fussing over wishes. What do you think?” She eyed Erin pointedly, the unspoken details again painfully apparent.

This was the manager’s solution? She wanted Erin to essentially change her mindset to will Yvette into a great position of power? Focus on her until she became more prominent than Janet? Erin had no doubt that their manager would be even more callous and cruel than the giantess they already had. But she wasn’t going to leave this meeting without agreeing to it, so Erin sighed, “Yes. I’ll give it a go.”

“Don’t give it a go. Make it happen.”

“Yes, Ms Crossward.”

“There’s a good girl. And no more going viral without permission. Now, do I need to call Chloe in to carry you back to your desk?”

Erin frowned. “Um. That’s fine. I’m normal-sized again.”

Yvette paused with the same distrusting expression Chloe had used earlier, as if she really saw no difference between Erin at regular size and when she’d been four inches tall. She said, “You’re quite sure?”

Erin had to check for herself, though she filled the chair and could already feel her feet reached the floor. She nodded slowly.

“Alright. If you insist. Go on, out then.” Yvette waved a hand.

Erin scrambled out of the room and paused outside to catch a few calming breaths. She had an audience, naturally, with all her colleagues looking eerily over their monitors towards her. Smiling. Janet towered over the others, her face thankfully now clean of blood. She was using a nail to pick at her teeth. Sullenly, Erin returned to her cubicle, where Chloe was lounging back with her shoes up on the desk. She was holding a hand to her mouth, her other flat on her lap, and Erin gasped at what she was holding. They were miniature copies of her, each about two inches tall, wearing the same grey top, the same burgundy skirt, their hair equally tatty. Three stood in Chloe’s palm looking worriedly about themselves while the fourth hung by an ankle from the girl’s other hand. For a desperate moment Erin hoped they were models of some sort, but they were moving, making upset sounds. The dangling one swung frantically as Chloe tilted her head back and opened her mouth wide.

“No –” Erin raised a hand to stop her, but Chloe dropped the mini-Erin in like a grape and swallowed. She gave Erin a sultry smile, reaching to her palm to pick up another one.

“I found them in the drawer. With this.” Chloe tapped a book by her feet and Erin saw with alarm that her diary was lying there. A thought journal which she must’ve brought into work by mistake – it was usually secreted away under the bed at home. In the moment that Erin was distracted by this new terror, Chloe pinched another mini-Erin by the waist and popped her into her mouth. She swirled this one around in her cheeks before swallowing.

“Can you please not do that?” Erin asked tensely, teeth tight together.

“Oh, do you want one?” Chloe said, lifting her hand so fast the remaining two Erins fell over. Erin watched them rolling across the young woman’s palm, one trying to crawl away with nowhere to go, both whimpering in fear. They were pathetic and tiny, and they were her. “It’s really tasty.”

“No!” Erin cried, snapping. “I do not want one and I don’t want you touching my things or sitting here or even being here! I want all of you to leave me alone and for all this to stop!”

Her voice echoed through the office, having left it otherwise deathly silent. Even the electronics seemed to have stopped buzzing, and all that remained was Erin’s shaky breathing. No one was smiling now, all watching her with deep concern, the same way people might watch a terrible accident.

Chloe retreated her hand, looking hurt, and closed her fingers over the remaining mini-Erins. She muttered, “I was just trying to be friendly.” Her lip quivered and her eyes glistened. Oh God. Was she about to cry?

“I’m sorry, Chloe, okay?” Erin said, much softer. “This is hard. Just –”

The intern leapt to her feet and ran, holding in tears. In an instant, she was out the office, into the hall, and Gina was hurrying after her. Everyone else was glaring, regarding Erin as a monster. She was shaking again. She just wanted it to stop…

“I should –” Erin took a step after Chloe, but paused at the sight of Janet shaking her big head. Bad idea.

“Maybe take the rest of the day off to think things through,” Yvette’s voice suggested, and she turned to find her manager watching, arms folded, from her office doorway. “Think things through very carefully Erin. I want to see big changes, and soon, if we’re to keep you on.”