You don't know why you ever thought you were special.
Sure, there were aspects of your life that were, undoubtedly, quite special. For starters, being born affected was still less likely than being born unaffected, so you had that going for you. Secondly, you easily had to be the most unlucky and accident-prone tiny to have ever existed. Your escapades outshone any of those endured by your peers or those you read about online on tiny-only forums. Thirdly, the number of insanely gorgeous women who surrounded you was, quite frankly, equal parts crazy to imagine and statistically improbable.
And yet, even beyond that, you'd always thought of yourself as special. Like you were meant for something more, something greater. Like you were the protagonist in some crazy story, destined to be screwed over by fate at every turn, only to eventually conquer all the trials and tribulations and emerge victorious at the end. Achieving your hard-fought happy ending and riding off into the sunset. It wasn't something everyone got, but it was something you'd firmly believed in your heart was destined to happen to you.
But you weren't special. You weren't special at all, and these last six months had proved it.
After what had started as a simple day of lounging around the house and spending some time with your mom, you'd now found yourself nothing more than the sentient property of your oblivious aunt, beholden to her unaware whims and treated as nothing more than the towel that Lauren had molded you into it. In your elongated rectangular shape, dyed completely bright red, and frozen stiff with the unbreakable bond of Full Length, a towel was all you were and all you ever would be unless some miracle saved you. Aside from the pinprick of a single eye you'd practically need a magnifying glass to spot, any trace that you were a human was invisible.
And, it was seeming more and more likely by the day that the miracle you so desperately needed to escape this fate would never come.
You'd held out hope, at first. Even with the odds stacked against you. Cass' track record around you had never been good, though that was more because of some weird cosmic curse and Jenna's interference. Rio's letter had asked Cass to keep where she'd gotten the towel from a secret, and thus it seemed impossible to get back to your mother that what she thought was Rio's requested towel was actually a cross-country gift to your aunt. And Cass' predisposition to avoid as many Tinex products as she could meant she kept no Full Length solvent in her house, removing the possibility for you being accidentally freed.
Even with all of that, you'd still held out hope. Even as Cass used you for seven days in a row as her beach towel, spending hours letting you be baked in the sun, crushed by her heavy curves, and smeared all over her sand-speckled skin. Even when she openly gushed aloud about how you were the best towel she'd ever used, and she'd sworn to use you as much as possible. Even when she ran you through the wash again and again and again. Even when she went on short modeling trips, leaving you to rot in a closet or on the towel rack for days on end.
But, slowly but surely, that hope you held onto began to fade, as the torture Cass inflicted upon you with a blissfully unaware smile became more and more normalized.
True to her word, she began using you for as much as she possibly could. She laid you out across her couch to act as an additional layer of padding before a big movie marathon. She used you in place of a floor mat whenever she invited her modeling friends over, subjecting you to pounding, crushing, and smearing of dirty heels. She started using you as a sweat towel during her workouts, your body greedily sopping up her buckets of rancid sweat and hot stench of exertion. Anything that one could use a towel for, Cass put you to work.
A week became two, and then one month became two, and you began to lose track of time. Most of your days were spent blearily waking up from a night of little-to-no-sleep (surprise surprise, but towel racks didn't make comfortable beds), seeing your aunt's happy smiling face, and then enduring a day full of squashing and smashing torment. The days would end with you either being washed, or having the wash put off for later (leaving you to marinate in Cass' remnants of sweat, dirt, and grime), and then Cass would go to sleep to repeat it all in the morning.
It hurt to see your aunt so happy. You truly were the best towel she'd ever used, and she was elated to put you to use each and every day, never getting tired of your softness, sweat-soaking-up capabilities, and multi-purpose functionality. It was, without question, the most sustained contact you'd ever been in with Cass, and it broke your heart to have it in such a twisted, painful, and humiliating way. It also hurt to hear Cass chatting excitedly on the phone with your mom and Jenna, the three ladies making vacation plans and sharing funny stories.
Cass, and by extension everyone else in your life, was living full, happy, and content lives. They were moving forward with their existences, all while you toiled away as nothing more than a towel. No one had a clue where you had gone, and from as far as you could tell, it seemed like no one had cared either. Everyone else was just putting you aside and continuing to enjoy life, and you suffered each and every day wishing you could have a fraction of their freedom and happiness.
And every single day, it got just a little bit harder to put off simply accepting your fate and surrendering your conscious to an existence as your Aunt Cass' towel. It would certainly be easier than living each day with the hope and subsequent disappointment of rescue.
What...did I do to deserve this? You bemoaned, as your single nearly-invisible eye beheld the sight of Cass strolling nearer, a big grin on her face. She said something about today being a 'special day', but you hardly listened to her anymore. How special could it be, really?
*****
Lauren settled into the plane seat, her sizable rump only managing to fit into the tight confines because her daughter, who sat beside her, took up so much less room in comparison. Lauren spared Jenna a grateful smile for having not inherited her full-figured genes, and then began tapping away on the screen in front of her, eager to find a few fun movies to watch on the flight to California. This vacation had been a long time coming, and Lauren was bouncing with excitement at the prospect of two full weeks of relaxation.
It had been nearly a year since she'd last spent more than a passing day or two with her younger sister, so Lauren had been elated when Cass had called her one day to suggest planning a California vacation. Lauren had taken the opportunity without question, as some stress-relief was just what the doctor had ordered. Though she kept up a smile and a steady pace, Lauren had been on an anxious edge ever since you had vanished roughly six months ago to the day.
She had no idea where you'd gone. None at all, and it made her sad to see Jenna's face fall each time her daughter tried to jog her memory. Despite Jenna's efforts, Lauren's brain refused to give up its secrets. Lauren recalled seeing you around the house, and then perhaps asking you for a favor, but that was it. Everything else was a blur to her, and her and Jenna's efforts to turn the house upside-down and not revealed you. You were well and truly gone.
It wasn't the first time, of course. You'd vanished many times during your life, from one week to four months being the longest so far. Usually, it was some silly little reason, and half the time Lauren herself was responsible. Eventually, you'd be discovered, everyone would laugh the incident off, and then everyone would move on. You bounced back quick from setbacks, and little squishings and moldings didn't even bother you anymore. Tinies, after all, couldn't feel pain or discomfort, or so Lauren had read in a magazine once.
Still, she was your mother, and not knowing where you were unsettled her. She didn't want to reconcile with the idea that she might not ever see her little boy again, so she'd spent the past six months busying herself with work. And while her business prospered because of that drive, burnout was eating away at her, and she desperately needed this chance to get away from it all.
God bless Cass for offering this chance up. Lauren thought to herself as her movie started. That woman's a saint. This is one family vacation I've been dying for. If only Matt could be there too...
*****
Jenna was in a miserable mood. She had been for about five months.
Initially, after you'd first disappeared, Jenna could hardly go a minute without bursting into hysterics. She'd last seen you at the breakfast table, and then suddenly you were gone when she got back from Ashley's place. It seemed reasonable to her that you'd gotten smeared by your mother's body somehow, which made Lauren's obliviousness that much funnier. Or perhaps the opposite, as Lauren had been acting shifty and suspicious, which made Jenna think that Lauren did know where you were but couldn't free you, which was even more hilarious.
And so, Jenna had been content to let your situation lie. One day, then two, then a week, then nearly a month. A bit of worry began to gnaw on her as the days went on, but Jenna silenced that part of her conscious by reasoning that Lauren had merely forgotten her own son was a smushed blob on her flesh. It was funny to think about that, so she'd kept quiet, still assuming that you'd pop up at any time, none the worse for wear.
But you didn't, and the sick feeling of worry in Jenna's gut became unavoidable.
View Portfolio
Visit Notebook
Send Gift Points
Awards
Badges
Send Email
Community Newsfeed
General Discussion
Sponsored Items
Book of Trinkets
Static Items
Books
Groups
Interactive Stories
Audio
Campfire Creatives
Community Notes
Crossword Puzzles
Documents
Folders
Images
In & Outs
Madlibs
Photo Albums
Polls
Product Reviews
Quizzes
Survey Forms
Web Pages
Word Searches
More by this author