Crack of Dawn Shrunken First Semester chapter 3 by maximally

“Shhhh,” the shadow told itself. “Shh, shh, shh. Ninja mode, Fernanda.”

 

Then it walked straight into the doorframe.

 

The bonk rattled his Smash print against the wall. A pair of chunky rings clacked on wood. Somebody hissed “Puta madre” through her teeth, very quietly, the way you swear in church, and a gift bag the size of a circus tent swung into the room ahead of her, tissue paper fluffing out the top like a pink explosion.

 

Max knew that voice. Everybody within a six-house radius knew that voice. It sounded like a pack of cigarettes had learned to laugh.

 

 

She came the rest of the way in sideways, which was the only way she came through any door, and from down on the navy sheet she wasn’t so much entering the room as happening to it. At 5’3”, she wasn’t tall. She didn’t need to be. Three-fifty of sun-baked caramel curves filled the doorway the way a cruise ship fills a bathtub, and every one of them was in motion: beach-ball breasts sloshing inside a black crop top that had given up halfway down; a gut that rolled out over the waistband of her red flare jeans in a soft, stretch-marked avalanche; and, behind it all, the legendary ass, so wide that the hallway light had to go around it. Beaded necklaces clicked against her chest with every step. Her ashen black hair was piled in a bun that had clearly been slept on, and maybe driven on, too. Her under-eye bags had their own under-eye bags.

 

Then the smell rolled across the carpet and up the side of the mattress. Cheap vanilla perfume, applied with real enthusiasm. A stale ghost of cigarette smoke. And, under both, the unmistakable greasy tang of a drive-thru that had been open at four in the morning.

 

Max’s whole body went cold. The goodbye dinner wasn’t until tonight. She lived in LA. And she was never up this early.

 

“Okay, baby nephew,” Fanny whispered at the empty pillow, still squinting from the hallway light. “Don’t wake up. Aunt Fanny’s just making a little drop. Real quick, real sneaky, and then I’m passing out on your mom’s couch until somebody makes me peel a potato.”

 

She hadn’t spotted him. To Fanny, still half-blind from five hours on the 5 and whatever she’d done before getting on it, the bed was just a dark lump of navy sheet with no nephew in it.

 

“Huh.” She blinked at it. “Bathroom. Okay. Even better.”

 

She hoisted the gift bag and peered inside like she was double-checking a bomb. Max caught a glimpse of the contents from the pillow: a Ventus hoodie with the tags still on, a card with GO GET ’EM, NERD scrawled on the envelope in purple Sharpie, a fat roll of twenties held together with a hair tie, and, sitting right on top where nobody could possibly miss it, a jumbo box of condoms.

 

“Your mom sees these,” she muttered, “and I’m uninvited from Christmas again. So they go where moms don’t look.”

 

She looked at the pillow.

 

Max looked at the pillow, which he was currently sitting on.

 

 

He scrambled to his feet. “Tía, wait, I’m right here—”

 

It came out as a mosquito whine. Fanny didn’t even blink. She’d always had short arms for her size, and the bed was a long reach across a wide mattress, and Fanny had never in her life walked around anything she could just flop across. So she did what she always did.

 

She dove.

 

Three hundred fifty pounds of aunt hit the mattress belly-first with a sound like a waterbed being dropped off a roof. The box spring screamed. The whole bed became an ocean. A shockwave rolled up the sheet toward the pillow like a tsunami across a navy sea, and when it reached Max, it didn’t knock him over.

 

It launched him.

 

He went straight up. The ceiling fan spun past. For one weightless, cartwheeling second he saw the whole bedroom upside down: the poster, the corkboard, the Ventus letter on its pushpin, and, directly below, the broad brown landscape of Fanny’s back as she stretched one arm toward the pillow, her crop top riding up to her shoulder blades.

 

Her red flare jeans had not kept up with the dive. They’d stayed behind, mostly. Above the sagging waistband, two vast caramel moons rose out of the denim, parted by a deep, dark canyon that ran straight down into the jeans like a mineshaft.

 

Max’s last coherent thought before he came back down was: of course.

 

He landed dead center.

 

Warm. Soft. Dark. The canyon swallowed him to the armpits, then to the chin, then the two cheeks shifted as Fanny wriggled for the pillow and closed over his head with a slow, heavy, inevitable squelch. The world became skin. Hot, slick skin, damp from five hours of a vinyl driver’s seat, pressing in from both sides with the weight of a collapsing mattress store. The waistband of her jeans pinned his legs against the curve of her lower back like a seatbelt.

 

He knew this ass. His whole body knew it. Elevators. Hallways. The church pew at Abuelo’s birthday. A backseat road trip to Fresno he’d spent the entire summer after eighth grade trying to forget. Fanny had sat on him by accident more times than he’d been hugged by most people, and every time she’d laughed until she cried and then bought him ice cream.

 

There wasn’t enough ice cream in the world for this.

 

“Ah-ha,” Fanny announced triumphantly, somewhere far above. Muffled through the meat of her cheeks, it sounded like a radio in the next apartment. The mattress creaked as she shoved the condom box under the pillow. “Mission accomplished, bitch.”

 

Then her stomach growled.

 

It started up near her ribs and traveled down through her whole body, a long, wet, rolling grumble like a garbage truck backing down a hill, and Max felt every inch of it arrive. The walls around him tensed. Something in the dark an inch from his nose gave a small, ominous flutter.

 

“Ooh,” Fanny said, to herself. “Okay. That’s the Crunchwrap.”

 

“No—Tía—TÍA, DON’T—”

 

 

It didn’t hit him so much as happen around him. The cheeks shuddered. The denim waistband buzzed against his shins. Hot air blasted out of the dark and filled every millimeter of space he had left, and since that space had no exit, it just stayed. Seasoned beef and nacho cheese, first. Then a thick, sour wave of gas-station coffee. Then the deep, cozy, unmistakably Fanny base note that no amount of vanilla perfume had ever been able to cover. His eyes streamed. His lungs filed a formal complaint.

 

“Whew.” Above him, Fanny laughed her cigarette laugh. “Sorry, Maxie’s mattress. Long night. Worse choices.”

 

Max screamed with everything he had left.

 

Somewhere far away, the laughing stopped.

 

“…The fuck?”

 

The cheeks tightened around him, curious. Then the whole world rolled. Fanny pushed up onto her elbows and twisted around to look back at her own ass, which from inside it felt like a continent tipping, and Max slid six inches deeper toward the waistband before a hand came down from the sky. Two ringed fingers, each as thick as a rolling pin, pried the canyon apart like a pair of elevator doors, and morning light came pouring in.

 

Max popped out like a cork. He tumbled off the curve of her hip and landed on his back on the navy sheet, naked, glistening, gasping, and blinking up at the biggest, most confused face he had ever seen.

 

Fanny stared at him.

 

He stared at Fanny.

 

“…Maxie?”

 

“Hi,” Max wheezed.

 

For one second she didn’t do anything at all. Her eyes went huge. Her mouth fell open. Max braced himself for the scream that would bring the whole house running.

 

Instead, her whole body started to shake.

 

It started in her shoulders and spread outward until the mattress was bouncing, her breasts were jiggling, and her face had gone dark red. She slapped a palm across her lips to keep it in, but it got out anyway, a wheezing, high-pitched, helpless shriek of a laugh that she buried in his comforter so the house wouldn’t hear. She laughed until mascara ran down her cheeks. She laughed until she had to roll onto her side, gasping. She laughed until she snorted, which made her laugh harder.

 

“Oh my God,” she finally managed, wiping her eyes. “Oh my God, baby. I sat on you. I sat on you again. That’s like, a family tradition at this point.”

 

“You didn’t sit on me! I fell in!”

 

“Okay, but where’d you fall from, though?” She hiccupped, and her face finally changed. The laughing drained out of it all at once, and what came in underneath was something Max had never really seen on Fanny before. She looked scared. “Max. Baby. What happened to you?”

 

“No idea. I went to sleep. I woke up like a thumb.”

 

She scooped him up, so gently it surprised him, and held him in her palm right in front of her face. Up close, her eyes were bloodshot and her lip gloss had worn off somewhere around Bakersfield, and she was studying him the way nobody else in this family ever did: like he was the only thing in the room that mattered.

 

“Okay,” she said, mostly to herself. “Okay. Breathe, Fernanda. You’ve done this before.”

 

Max went very still. “You’ve done what before?”

 

Fanny chewed her lip. Then she let out a breath that rolled across his whole body like a warm wind off a parking lot.

 

“So. Ex-husband number three,” she said. “Gerald. Nice guy. Very specific hobbies. Our second anniversary, he decides to surprise me, and I come home and he’s standing on the kitchen counter the size of a Barbie, butt-naked, with a little bow on his head.” She waved her free hand. “Some stuff he bought online. Shrinking serum. Said it was supposed to be romantic.”

 

“Shrinking serum?”

 

“I nursed him for, like, two months after that. Fed him, bathed him, kept the cat off him.” Her mouth twisted. “And then he left me for a dominatrix in Van Nuys, so. You know. Classic Fanny.” She looked down at him hard. “Did you take something, baby? You can tell me. Aunt Fanny’s not gonna judge. Aunt Fanny invented bad choices.”

 

“I didn’t take anything! I was playing Elden Ring!”

 

“Okay. Okay. I believe you.” And she did. He could tell. Fanny had always believed him, which was half the reason she was the only one he’d ever told anything to. “So somebody did this to you. Or something. And we don’t know who.”

 

“Does it wear off? Did Gerald—”

 

“Gerald’s a whole other story, and he’s also an asshole, so let’s not use him as a medical baseline.” She held him a little closer. Her thumb stroked down his back, smelling faintly of menthols and cocoa butter. “First things first. Your mom can’t know yet.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Because she’s got a spreadsheet for move-in, mijo, and you just became the biggest line item on it. Tiny line item. Whatever.” Downstairs, a cabinet banged, and Victoria’s voice came up through the floorboards, telling somebody to please not use the good towels. Fanny’s eyes went to the door. “And because the second your mom finds you, she’ll start a group chat about it, and the second there’s a group chat, I’m the one everybody looks at like it’s my fault. And for once in my life, it isn’t.”

 

She looked down at the gift bag, still lying on its side with a Ventus hoodie spilling out. Then she looked back at him, and a slow, dangerous, very Fanny grin spread across her face.

 

“Good news, though. Your tía has a full tank of gas, two hundred bucks in twenties, and no plans until dinner.” She waggled her eyebrows. “How you feel about playing hooky with Aunt Fanny?”