Abuela's Favorite Seat Shrunken First Semester chapter 7 by maximally

Izzy delivered the list at two in the afternoon, on a legal pad, like a lawyer.

She'd written it in purple gel pen. Max could see that much from where he sat on the kitchen island, inside a ramekin Victoria had padded with a folded dish towel "so he wouldn't slide." He could also see that Izzy had dotted every i with a tiny skull. She had taken time on this.

"Okay," Izzy said, and cleared her throat. She stood at the end of the island with the legal pad held out in front of her like a scroll. Victoria sat on one stool with her chin on her hands. Lupe stood at the stove, stirring a pot of beans that had filled the whole downstairs with garlic and cumin. "So I went through the folder. Like, all of it. And I organized it by, um. Intensity."

"Intensity," Victoria repeated, a little faintly.

"For his comfort," Izzy said solemnly. "So you guys don't jump ahead."

"Very responsible, mija," said Lupe, without turning around.

Max put his face in his hands.

"Number one," Izzy read. "Foot rubs. Check." She made a little tick with the gel pen. "Number two: riding in boobs. Also check. Twice." Tick. "Number three: getting carried around in, like, a pocket. Or a bra strap. Or a sock."

"A sock?" said Victoria.

"There was a whole story. It's called Sock Puppet. It's, like, eleven chapters." Izzy didn't look up. "Number four: being sat on. Gently."

The spoon stopped moving in the pot.

"Number five," Izzy went on, as if nothing had happened, "being sat on not gently. Number six: getting put in a shoe. And it says here 'while she's wearing it,' so, like, that's a whole thing. Number seven: getting carried in your underwear all day—"

"Isabella."

"—number eight is, um, it's kind of a word I don't want to say in front of Abuela—"

"Isabella."

"—and then number nine is just 'vore,' with like eight question marks, and honestly I'd skip that one. I don't think it's physically possible." She lowered the pad and gave them all a sunny, helpful smile. "There's twenty-two total. I did a color code. Green is beginner."

Max raised his head out of his hands.

"I didn't write any of that," he said. "Sock Puppet? I've never even heard of—"

"Mijo." Victoria laid a fingertip gently on his head. "We talked about this. Nobody here is going to judge you."

"I'm not asking you not to judge me! I'm asking you to believe—"

"Number four," Lupe said thoughtfully.

She tapped the spoon on the edge of the pot, set it down on a folded paper towel, and turned around. She was still in the embroidered blouse and black leggings from the drive. Her braid had come halfway loose since the morning, and there was a smudge of flour on one hip. She looked at the list. Then she looked at Max in his ramekin. Then she looked down at her own body, the generous slope of it, as if she were measuring.

"Gently," she repeated.

"It says gently," Izzy confirmed. "It's green. Beginner."

"Mamá." Victoria sat up straight. "Mamá, no. He's three inches tall. You'll—"

"I'll what?" Lupe raised one eyebrow. "You think I don't know how to sit down, Victoria? I've been sitting down for sixty-four years."

"That's not what I—"

"Your papá's been sitting under me for forty of them, and he's fine." She untied her apron and hung it on the oven handle. "Besides. I have to leave by four if I want to beat the traffic on the 5. Better me than you, mija. You'll get nervous and drop on him like a sack of cement."

Victoria opened her mouth to argue. Lupe gave her the Queens look. Victoria closed her mouth.

Max looked from one of them to the other, then to Izzy. She was writing something on the legal pad. When she saw him looking, she tilted it so he could read.

#4 — Abuela — 2:07 PM ✔️

*

Lupe's spot was the big brown recliner in the corner of the living room.

It wasn't technically hers. It was technically Max's dad's, but his dad had been home for maybe two weeks this year, and for the last four years, any time Lupe was in the house, she had owned that chair. It was the only seat in the house she said could "hold a real woman." It had a permanent dent in the cushion to prove it, wide and deep and perfectly Lupe-shaped, the leather worn soft and shiny where she'd spent a hundred Sunday afternoons watching Amor Eterno with a bowl of pepitas.

Victoria carried him over in her cupped hands like she was walking a baby bird to its funeral.

"Mama's right here, mijo," she kept whispering. "Mama's right here. If anything hurts, you just yell, and Mama will pull her right off. Okay? Okay?"

"Okay," Max said. He did not feel okay.

"You're not pulling me anywhere," Lupe said. She was standing by the recliner with her hands on her hips, doing a few casual stretches, like she was about to start a Zumba class. Left. Right. A neat little squat that took her almost to the floor and back up again with no effort at all. "Put him in the middle. Right in the dent. Face up, so he can breathe."

Victoria knelt and set him down, as carefully as a Jenga block.

The cushion was warm. Of course it was warm. Lupe had been sitting in it all morning. The leather was smooth and faintly sticky under his bare back, and the dent cupped him. Looking straight up, all he could see was the high, dim ceiling of the living room and, far above him, the slow white circles of the fan.

Then Lupe turned around.

It was like watching a planet change its orbit. Abuela's ass swung into view and kept coming, two vast cheeks in black leggings, each one bigger than the recliner looked from down here, stretched so tight across the shelf of her ass that he could see the faint diamond weave of the fabric straining over each cheek. Every time she shifted her weight, the whole landscape rolled. The left cheek dropped. The right cheek rose. Then they swapped, slow and heavy, like two hills taking turns in an earthquake, and the dark seam of her crack shifted with them, the leggings sucked into it.

She was three hundred and ten pounds. He was maybe half of one.

He did the next part of the math anyway, because his brain couldn't help it. If even a tenth of her weight landed on him wrong, he was going to find out what a grape felt like.

"Mamá," Victoria said tightly, "slowly."

"I know, I know."

"Gently," Izzy added from the arm of the couch. She'd brought her phone. Of course she had. "It's green, Abuela. Remember. Beginner."

"Hush, both of you." Lupe peered back at him over her own shoulder, past the slope of her back and the curve of her hip, and gave him a crinkly smile. "Ready, mijo?"

No, Max thought.

"Okay," he said.

She came down.

It wasn't a drop. Lupe had told the truth: she knew how to sit. She lowered herself the way you'd lower yourself into a hot bath, inch by inch, her thighs flexing, steady as a forklift. That almost made it worse, because it went on for so long. First the shadow covered him. Then the heat hit, a close, humid wall of warmth radiating off the black fabric before it even touched him, carrying the faint powder of her rosewater lotion and something deeper and saltier underneath. Then the leggings brushed the tip of his nose.

Then the rest of her arrived.

The weight came on and kept coming. Soft first, so soft that for a second he thought it wouldn't be so bad. Her butt gave and spread around him like warm dough, and the fabric pressed down across his face and chest and legs. Then the softness ran out, and under it was mass: muscle and bone and sixty-four years of Sunday dinners, settling and settling and settling. The cushion sank. He sank with it. The leather creaked under both of them. The air pushed out of his lungs in one long, helpless squeak.

He couldn't see. He couldn't move. He was lying face-up in her crack, wedged deep where the two great cheeks of her ass met. Their weight bore down on him from both sides, and the strained black fabric, damp with six hours of driving sweat, sealed over his face. It was dark and hot and absolutely silent except for her heartbeat, faint and slow, which came down through her body and into his.

It was gentle. Technically.

It was also the most completely he had ever been anywhere.

"Mijo?" Victoria's voice sounded very far away. "Mijo, are you okay? Mamá, I can't see him—"

"He's fine," Lupe said comfortably. He felt the words rumble down through her whole body and into his bones. "I can feel him wiggling. Can't I, mijo?"

He wiggled. It was the only answer he could give.

"See?" Lupe sounded pleased. She shifted a little, settling deeper into the recliner, and the cheeks rolled over him, first left and then right. He got one gulp of hot air in the gap before it closed again. "Ay, he's like a little heating pad. Victoria, you should get one of these for your back."

"Mamá."

"I'm kidding. Mostly." A big, warm hand came down and patted her own hip, right over him, and the weight pressed him a quarter-inch deeper. "Twenty seconds more. Let him get used to it."

Izzy was counting under her breath. Max could just barely hear her. "Fifteen... sixteen..."

He made it to seventeen.

Then Lupe shifted her weight one more time, reached for the TV remote on the side table, and Max felt the whole world above him clench and then let go.

pfff

It was a small one. A little puff, almost polite. But at three inches, nothing was small. The gust came straight down through the leggings and hit him full in the face, warm and humid and unmistakably beans, garlic and cumin and onion. For one long, eye-watering second he lived inside it. It filled the whole dark pocket of her crack and had nowhere else to go.

Max made a noise that no human throat had ever made.

There was a short silence in the living room.

"Ay," said Lupe. "Perdón, mijo."

And then she started to laugh.

It started as a chuckle and grew into a big, rolling belly laugh that shook her whole body, and Max felt every single bit of it. Her ass jiggled and bounced around him, both cheeks clapping against his sides. The weight lifted for a moment and then landed again, lifted and landed, like he was being gently bounced on a waterbed by an earthquake that thought something was funny.

"Mamá!" Victoria shrieked. "Get up! Get up, you're going to kill him!"

"It was a little one!" Lupe gasped, still laughing. "It was nothing! Abuelas fart too, mija! Ay, Dios, his face, I can feel his face—"

"Oh my God," Izzy was wheezing, half falling off the arm of the couch. "Oh my God, that's number eleven. That's number eleven on the list, Abuela, you skipped ahead—"

Lupe heaved herself up out of the recliner in one smooth motion, light as anything for a woman her size. The light came crashing back in, and the cool air, and the ceiling fan going round and round as if nothing had happened. Max lay flat in the dent of the cushion, gasping like a landed fish, his hair plastered to his forehead with sweat and his eyes streaming.

Three faces leaned over him at once. Victoria's was horrified. Izzy's was red from laughing, and her phone was still up. Lupe's was crinkled with unbothered amusement.

"Look at him," Lupe said fondly. "He's fine. Look, he's breathing."

"Barely," Max croaked.

"Barely's still breathing." She reached down and wiped his forehead with the pad of her thumb, which was a lot like being mopped by a pillow. "That's how you know Abuela's beans are good, mijo. They don't let you forget them."

Victoria scooped him up so fast he got whiplash and clutched him to her tits. "Mama's got you. Mama's got you. Ay, my poor baby. Mamá, you could have warned him."

"Warned him? I didn't warn myself!" Lupe was still chuckling as she picked up the remote. "Anyway, he's a big boy. It's good for him. Builds character."

*

Lupe left at a quarter to four. She went out to her car with two grocery bags full of Tupperware and the confident stride of a woman who had beaten Sunday traffic on the 5 for thirty years and intended to keep doing it.

At the front door, she turned around and plucked Max right out of Victoria's hands. She held him up to her face and gave him a kiss that left a red lipstick print from his collarbone to his knees.

"Be good for your Mamá, mijo," she said. "Do her feet every day. Mind your sister."

"Stepsister," Max mumbled.

"And Abuela will be back next weekend." She paused, and her eyes twinkled. "Maybe sooner. Maybe every weekend, if I have to. We'll see how you're doing."

"You don't have to," Max said quickly. "Really. It's a long drive."

"Ay, so sweet. Thinking about Abuela." She pressed him between her boobs one last time, one squash of warm, rosewater tit, and handed him back to her daughter. "Six hours is nothing, mijo. For you? Nothing."

Then she was gone in a slam of the car door and a crunch of gravel. Her old Buick backed out of the driveway with the radio already playing ranchera, and the house was suddenly very, very quiet.

Izzy went back upstairs, humming. Max heard the legal pad flapping in her hand.

Victoria stood in the doorway for a long moment, holding him against her chest, watching the street. Then she shut the door, and she turned around.

She didn't take him upstairs.

She walked into the living room and stood in front of the couch. It was the big cream sectional, the one she'd picked out herself, with cushions so soft you sank into them like quicksand. She didn't say anything. She just looked at it. Then she looked at the recliner, with the deep Lupe-shaped dent still in the cushion. Then her eyes dropped to the tiny boy in her hand.

Her berry lips curled into a small, thoughtful smile.

"Mamá made it look so easy," she murmured.

Max's blood ran cold.

"Mom," he said. "Mom, it's been a really long day—"

"Oh, not now, sweetie," Victoria said soothingly. She stroked his back with one finger. Her gold bangles chimed at her wrist. "Not tonight. You need your rest."

She didn't take her eyes off the couch.

"But green means beginner," she said softly. "And Mama's a very fast learner."