It’s a piece of cake! (revised)

I thought it would be really hard to make it through the streets unseen, but luckily, most people were indoors avoiding the pandemic. Which isn’t to say that I was totally invisible. I did see a lady looking out his window catch sight of my gigantic body then slam the window shut and peek through the curtains like I hadn’t seen her. I had wrapped a tarp from the backyard around my body like a loincloth and hugged the backside of windowless buildings and weaved between trees as I tried to make my way through the alleys of the city to remain as unseen as I could. I carried Red in one of my arms, close to my chest as he carried the cookbook and a cloth tote bag full of ingredients I had him grab from the townhouse.

Red clutched to my body as I cradled him like a baby, looked up at me and asked, “Where are we going, Master James?”

“Well…” I said a bit too loudly, forgetting how much bigger my voice was. I changed to whispering again, “I think I know where we can find a big room with a big oven. It’s at the school, which should be empty right—nnnghh!” I stubbed my toe on a streetlamp and clasped my free hand over my mouth to keep myself from crying out. The streetlamp bent like a pipe cleaner where my foot hit it. Everything was so low, and small, and weak. I was having a hard enough time avoiding trashcans and not stepping on fences. The city just isn’t made for 20-foot-tall men.

“Ahh…” Red nodded in agreement as if nothing disastrous had nearly happened. “Master James might get there faster if you ate a bit more of me.”

I stopped and looked Red square in the eye with an expression of disbelief. “What?” I whispered, “no. I’m trying to shrink. I’m not getting any bigger. Look at me Red, I’m already two stories tall, I’m not eating any more of you until I’m sure we have a way to get me back to normal!”

“Yes Master,” Red said despondently.

We passed by a church, the backside of the grocery store, and the library. We came to a park, and I felt like it’d be easier to go through the park than trying to hide in the streets. I could blend in with the trees, weave through them. That turned out to also be difficult because the trees were all very close together, especially at my head height where the branches spread from the trunks. The wind picked up for a hot second and I clutched red a little too tightly. I felt him squish. I pulled him away from my body and saw I had deformed him.

“Oh gosh, I’m sorry,” I apologized. “Are you okay, Red?”

“Ggmmph” the clump in my arms said before twitching around and then shifting back into his form. “Ahm fffine!” he said cheerfully, though back in his crumbly voice. A good amount of crumbs fell off of him onto the forest floor. I didn’t think much of it at first, I was just relieved Red was okay, but a few steps later, I heard a crashing sound behind us and an inhuman cry. I turned around startled to see a family of deer, and one particular deer towering over the rest, shorter than me, but that looked to be much, much taller than it should be.

“Oh no,” I muttered. I moved towards the deer family and then they all scattered. The one giant deer left knocking over trees and tearing up bushes in its stride. I tried to search for the crumbs I dropped, but I couldn’t make them out against the dirt and leaves of the forest floor. “That’s just gonna have to wait for now,” I whispered and headed back en route to the community college.

I hunched underneath the sky bridge and carefully walked around a parked car as I stepped onto the deserted campus. It felt nice that I was in what was practically an abandoned town, a closed college campus during the summer also during a pandemic, so even though I was still so huge and carrying around a giant cake man I could relax a little in confidence no one would see me, at least, no one who’d be stopping me and asking questions. There was definitely the matter of those security cameras, but that wasn’t a priority now. I made my way over to the art building and to the large ceramic studio space. I peeked into the windows and confirmed the lights were off and no one was inside. Then I set Red down by the door.

“Okay,” I told him. “This is a clay room. I’ve seen the students drying their clay pots and stuff out here when I walk by. There’s a giant oven that they use to cook and harden their sculptures. We’ve gotta use that to make the shortcake in the book.”

“Smart finkin maffter!” Red said, while reaching into the bag to grab a milk carton.

“We’ve just gotta get inside,” I reached down to the door. There was no way I was gonna fit through it, even if it weren’t locked. I stepped back, circled around, and made my way to the loading entrance. I threw my firsts against the metal gate and they left dents in the metal. I was way stronger now as a giant. I pressed my fingers into the base of the giant metal door, and it crumpled. I lifted it up. It made a loud grinding sound as the metal deformed and crushed under my enormous pressure. I made an opening big enough that I could crawl through, and made my way into the studio. From there, I tiptoed around the tables and pottery wheels left in the dank dusty pottery hall to the door where Red was waiting. I tapped on the handle with my toe, and the door unlocked and opened. Or it was possible my magnified strength just broke the lock. Either way, Red and I were both in. I told Red to flip on the light switch and we saw the shelves and shelves of pottery left by the students last semester. “Mixing Bowls!” Red cheered as he skipped up over to one shelf of what looked to be pretty much that. Big bowls already glazed and finished, ready for use.

“Yeah, get the rest of the supplies, Red. Did you bring the spatula from my kitchen?”

“Yes!” Red started laying all the things out on a table while I stepped around thanks to the studio’s graciously high ceiling to try and find the oven. A warning sign told me not to touch the kiln while it was operating, so I guess this was what a “kiln” is. The big oven they use in cooking clay. The kiln looked like a vault. It had a handle hatch that must have usually taken two hands to open, but I twisted it open like knob. I pulled the door back and yep. This looked pretty much like a walk-in oven. I reached into it and pulled out all the stuff that was already resting in there, a few shelves of clay creations I just set on an empty shelf next to the kiln. I spent a few more minutes trying to figure out how to turn it on, only to realize I’d need to get Red to do it as the kiln’s controls were too fine for me, a giant, to handle.

Things were shaping up nicely. I found a magnifying glass and used it to read the shortcake page in the cookbook, but we hit a snag. The recipe was for strawberry shortcake, and Red pointed out that we didn’t have any strawberries.

“Didn’t I get some berries from the store?” I asked. “I thought I told you to grab those.”

“Yes, Master James, but they’re blueberries!” Red held up the pack to show me.

“That probably won’t make a difference,” I said. “A blueberry shortcake, a strawberry shortcake, they’re both short. I just need to get shorter. It says we need 6 cups… just put the whole package in.”

It ended up making a difference.

Through my instructions, I was able to get Red to help me juice the blueberries into the granulated sugar, mix the batter for the biscuits, drop in another magic stone from the book, and prep what whipped cream we could out of the milk that was still left.

“…So, do we put all of these in the kiln?” I asked as we got to the baking instructions.

“I wouldn’t know, Master,” Red said.

“Of course you wouldn’t, I just don’t think you’re usually supposed to put the whipped cream in the oven, you’re supposed to frost it afterwards like what I did with you…” The recipe in the book was being a bit less clear about this. “I think we just put all these in the kiln side-by-side and then turn it on.” We did that. I got Red to help me start the kiln and then we waited as our blueberry shortcake baked.

Once the time had passed, I twisted the knob, pulled the door open, and stared down into the man-sized oven to see our creation, born out of the pans we set on the floor in there. The confectionary creature I saw was smaller than Red, and a bit more portly, especially in the hips and belly. It looked a bit androgynous, like a fat stout lady but without boobs. Its masculinity or femininity was harder to read than Red’s had been. The Blueberry Shortcake stood to its full height, still shorter than Red, slightly shorter than I would have been if I weren’t a colossus, and the Shortcake walked out of the kiln, looked to Red, then looked up to me and asked “Master?” in a similarly androgynous voice.

“Yes, Hello,” I said. “I am James. You’re a Blueberry Shortcake. Welcome to the world, Blue. This is Red, he’s a Red Currant Cake.”

“Oh no,” Blue said politely. “I’ve been in the world for some time now. It’s only just thanks to you I have a body.” Blue smiled wide and cutely, enough to close their eyes. “Thank you ever so much for that gift.” Blue cradled their hands, at the end of layered biscuit- and-cream arms, around their large distended blue-cream belly. Then Blue dropped the smile and furrowed their brow in concern and looked up at me, and then over to Red again and asked, “Why is Master so big?”

I sighed. “Right. That’s actually what I baked you for. See…” I explained. “I baked Red and then it turned out that anything that eats him grows bigger. I found that out the hard way, as you can see. And I’m hoping that when I eat some of you, I’ll get shorter again. You know, ‘Shortcake’, Shorter…”

Blue nodded in understanding then patted their big belly. It sloshed for a bit before they scraped the sides of the cream with what looked to be their fingers. Then they flusteredly plunged their other hand into the side of their hips and broke off a piece of a biscuit. The biscuit slid out further to replace the mass it had just lost as Blue lathered their blue cream onto the biscuit and then seemed to gargle their mouth before spitting out three whole blueberries that lodged into the top of the little cookie they were preparing. Then they reached up and offered it to me.

I took the tiny cookie between my fingers. this was basically a whole shortcake, but it looked absolutely minuscule to me at the size I was at. Like a cracker. I inspected it for a little while. It was possible this was gonna make me smaller, but it was just as likely that…

“Wait a second,” I told the two. I palmed the bit of cake and walked over to the loading area door. I swung myself under it and got back outside. “Better be prepared in case this makes me bigger,” I told them. It was a pretty real risk. Now that I was out in the open, I tossed the little cookie onto my tongue and swallowed.

I didn’t really taste the shortcake, but I did feel the effects pretty quickly. It felt like I was falling, the ground started coming up to meet me, the roof sailed up past me, the tarp started loosening around my hips and I had to move to tighten it like a towel as I shrank down to my normal height. I felt so relieved. with each breath I fell down a few feet until I was back to normal, with a whole blanket of a tarp covering my naked body. It had worked! The two cakes stepped through the massive hole I had left in the metal door to the studio and Red seemed elated. He dashed right out and made like he was gonna scoop me up, like the same way I had cradled him on the way here.

“It worked!” Red grinned. “Master’s all tiny again! Now you can eat as much of me as you want and there’s no worry about being stuck giant…” Red’s brow furrowed. His tone grew grim and he began stepping back from me. “Uhh… Master…”

“What?” I asked, similarly worried. I looked from Red’s face to Blue’s face and they were both staring at me like something was very clearly wrong. I was still feeling a sensation, but it wasn’t the shrinking. That had stopped. I put a finger up to my nose and squeezed it. There was an itching going on in there.

“Your face is turning blue, Master,” Red told me. “This is my fault,” Blue said shamefully.

“What’s happening to me now?” I whined and dashed over to the window, holding the tarp over myself like a cloak. I looked at my reflection, and sure enough, a dark patch of blue was spreading over my head, starting from my nose and cheeks. I looked down as I saw my neck and chest each in turn catch the deep blue color like I was having an allergic reaction to the cake. Then when it hit my belly, I felt that same second heartbeat start, that same strangely pleasurable swelling I got when I ate Red. Was I about to start growing again? I groaned and turned back around at the cakes while also holding up my arms in my field of view, watching as they too took on shades of blue and purple. Then I felt my butt smack against the back of the tarp, I turned around to look at my widening ass, but before I could, my belly swelled out again, just like when I first took Red’s cake, only this time, my head and arms weren’t getting bigger along with them. I suddenly felt like I needed to pee really badly.

“Ugh!” I cried out, exerting myself as I tried to hold it in, but my belly kept getting bigger, filling up way past where it had back in my kitchen. I dropped the tarp. I staggered backward, feeling faint. I tried to sit down, but I couldn’t even bend my knees before I felt my butt hit the asphalt. I felt myself drooling, only, it wasn’t drool. It was sweet. It was tart. It was blueberry juice coming out of my saliva ducts filling up my cheeks. “Red!” I screamed. “Help me!”

“What can I do Master!?” Red shouted. from beneath my ridiculously rotund and corpulently round belly. I could feel it getting tight and stretched out with all the fluids filling me up. He seemed desperately worried for me.

“Get help!” I wailed as my gigantic parade balloon of a body kept burgeoning and billowing and inflating. I could see the roof of the studio again behind my mass. I felt my shoulders getting spread and my armpits turning convex. the skin around my joints was getting all stretched out by the seemingly limitless volume of juice that was entering me from places unknown. I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I started dribbling the juice out my mouth and felt it begin gushing out my penis. I could even feeling it running out my nipples that had been stretched so far away from my head that I couldn’t reach them with my arms any more even if they hadn’t been inflated beyond mobility. I felt like I was crying. Juice was streaming out of my tear ducts, it was gushing out of every part of me. And still, I was getting bigger and bigger.

“Blue? are you still there?” I called out after I had gushed out enough that it felt like the streams had died down a bit, which must have been a long while. “Red?”

No answer. I was alone in the Art building parking lot, the size of a house. I was enormous and round and full of fluid that I was still trying to get out of me. I tried tightening my muscles. Tried flailing around. I felt like I was locked in a position like a starfish, with my arms and legs spread out as far as they could go, swaddled in fluid- filled pillows that I could still feel sensations through. I tried tightening the muscles in my core again, and it felt so weird for the feedback to feel like it was coming from 4 yards away. I couldn’t compress myself on my own. I was somehow both too big and too small to relieve myself. I began crying juice again.

I looked up to the sky and watched the clouds. I thought a bit about how I got into the situation. I worried a bit about the deer we left as a giant. I thought and worried about where the cakes might have gone to get help, or worse, had I crushed them? Was I waiting for help that was never gonna come? It wasn’t until the sky turned from gray to orange that I got my answer, and boy was I relieved to hear, “Maffter!”

“Red!?” I called out.

“Maffter! We’re back!” I heard Red’s voice, but couldn’t see him. “We brought help!”

Blue exclaimed, “That’s him! that’s Master.”

“That’s your master?” I heard a new voice exclaim in shock.

“Uhh…” I tried to crane my vantage point to try and see who they brought, but it was really no use. At the very least, I tightened my muscles around the leaky parts to try and stop the pouring for the benefit of whoever this new person was. “Who is that?”

“My name is Mac,” the voice said. “I work at the Stop-and-Shop. These food monsters showed up trying to steal strawberries and pancake mix.” Right, yeah, I said we were gonna try pancakes next if this didn’t work. “What are they and what are you?”

I groaned and then tried to explain things as best as I could for Mac, “My name is James Miller. I’m a 25 year old man. I found a magic cookbook that I didn’t know was magic. Then I baked those two. They’re living cakes. Don’t eat them or you’ll end up like me.” I tried my best to slosh here to punctuate what a predicament I was in. “We’re trying to get me back to normal by cooking the other cakes in the book. Please help!”

“Magic cookbooks?” I heard Mac laugh in disbelief. “Well, this might as well happen. This just is not my year.”

“Pleeease?” I begged.

“Okay!” he shouted up to me again. “Just hold tight, don’t roll anywhere!” then in a much quieter voice I heard him ask, “Now where’s this magic cookbook?”

“It’s in there!” I heard Red declare, and from there they seemed to go into the studio. Now I could only wait around and slosh and leak, a massive bloated blueberry out in the parking lot.

At sundown, I felt something dig into my buttcheek. It felt like a spider was making its way up my bulbous backside, then up my back. With the added weight, I felt a bit of a squish, and I felt that small bit of pressure force some of the juice out of me. As my climber made their way up to my peak where my head was enveloped by the hills of my stretched neck-skin. I saw my savior, who looked only slightly younger than me, probably freshly out of his teens, with a green visor and an apron on coming up my huge expanse of a blue back and stepping his way over to my head like he was walking through a partially deflated bounce house. In his hand, he was carrying what looked to be a skillet. He walked all the way up to my head and stood above me. I was left staring up at his apron as he towered over my head, caught in the floor made by my big blue body.

“Well, hello James,” he said, crouching down, “nice to finally see your face.”

“Is that one of the magic pancakes?” I asked, gesturing with my eyes and rocking my head to indicate his skillet.

“Yep,” he answered. “Indeed it is.” He pulled a plastic fork out of his apron’s pocket, unwrapped the cellophane plastic it had been packaged in, then carefully picked up a pancake disc from above where I could see it and brought it down towards my mouth. “Now,” He pulled the pancake away for a second. “These are plain pancakes. Just Flour and Saltwater and one of those pods from the book. Didn’t add anything. The book called that recipe a ‘back to basics’ exercise, so I think this has the best chance of you going back to normal. Red told me about the clues.”

“Uh huh. Uh huh.” I nodded and opened my mouth expectantly.

“Don’t eat this until I get down.” He set the pancake down on my chin then started backing away. “You might not know how big you are, but if you start growing again, I want to be far enough away that you won’t—”

“Grow again?” I asked, worriedly.

“Well yeah,” Mac said. “From what your cakes told me, everything you’ve taken so far has made you get bigger in some way, so as far as we know that’s just what all of these cakes do, and none of them will get you back to normal.” Then he slid down my side and out of sight, leaving me with that terrifying notion and the pancake on my chin. after a little while I heard him call, “Okay! you can eat the pancake now!” as beads of blueberry sweat started racing down my forehead and I contemplated if I really wanted to.

Eventually, I just decided I was in too deep and had to try whatever I could to get back to my old size. I used my lips to move the pancake up, and then bit off a chunk, folded it with my tongue, chewed it, I could tell it was getting soaked with my berry juice spit, but I forced it back down and into my throat. There were a few seconds of stunned anticipation, before I felt the need to pee finally dissolve. I saw the normal color return to the frame of my body around me, and I felt my whole self collapse inwards as if my muscles had finally gotten strong enough to squeeze me back together. I saw the art building rise up above me again, my belly slip back under my chest. I could move my arms again. My body was still drenched in the berry juice, as was the lot below me. I looked back up to see the cakes at a distance all cheering, and then after a few seconds Mac peeked out from behind a car, along with a new figure I hadn’t seen yet. He was basically a stack of pancakes, and the layers and layers of those pancakes made him take on an appearance like a mummy wrapped in bandages. I tried standing up on the juice-soaked tarp to walk towards them, but suddenly felt dizzy and lightheaded and sat back down again. I felt extremely tired. I also felt extremely sore in my abdomen. I yawned and lightly smacked my face a couple of times to get the blood circulating again.

“Sir…” Mac said as he stepped out from his cover, “are you feeling all right?”

“Yeah yeah,” I replied, “just… just a bit dizzy.”

“Well you were just the size of a beached whale, a little dizziness is probably what’s all right.” He started moving back behind the cover. “Is it though? Is this a normal dizzy or like a ‘I’m about to explode’ dizzy?”

“No no,” I assured him, and began standing up on my own, covering my junk area with my hands as the blueberry juice slid off me and trying to wrap myself again in the tarp. “It’s a normal, tired kind of feeling.” I breathed deeply, and looked around at the crew assembled before me. “I wanna go home,” I said. “I’ve had a hell of a day.” I swished my saliva around and spat out a whole mouthful of berry juice onto the road.

“Are you sure you don’t want to check into a hosp—??” Mac began to ask, but Red already began scampering up to me with a towel he must have grabbed from the studio.

“Master needs to be clean!” Red exclaimed. “And I will take Master home!” Now he finally scooped me up, picked me up and began toweling me down.

“Do you know the way back, Red?” I asked him, between him scuffing up my hair and tumbling me through the fuzzy fabric.

“And hang on,” Mac interrupted. “What am I supposed to do with him?” Mac emphasized “him” and pointed to the Pancake mummy.

“Yo ma Mastah,” came from within those folds of pancakes. It was more unsettling to see the folds of the discs that made up the guy’s barely distinguishable face curl and bend to form sounds. More unsettling than it was when Blue or Red did it, at least their mouths were all made of the same continuous thing. This guy spoke like a stick puppet. “Yo wish is ma cammand.”

“That’s creepy,” I said, candidly. “Oh, I’m sorry, Pancake guy.”

“Creepy?” He asked.

“Uh yeah,” I tried to recover myself in the pancake’s mind. “You just… you’re a very different kind of cake, you know that?”

“He’s been calling me master,” Mac said. “I don’t want whatever’s going on here messing with my life. How do I get rid of him?”

“Umm…” It occurred to me that I hadn’t really thought through what I was gonna do with all of these cakes now. There’s no way all four of us could squeeze into my townhouse forever, especially if I was likely to be changing size this much around them. It was tough, it was taxing on my mind, and I was still feeling very tired and sore from having just been trying to flex all my juices out for an hour. “I don’t…” I responded. “I don’t think he has to go with you if you don’t want him to, Mac. I’m still feeling exhausted and I can’t deal with this right now. I need to sleep. Can we just head back to my place and Pancakes can stay with me while I try to think of a plan?”

Mac gave it some pause, then turned to ask Pancakes. “Are you okay with that?”

“Yes Mastah,” Pancakes said.

“All right,” Mac shrugged, making his way over to a car. He stuck his key into it and then slid in. “But I’m keeping this,” he held up the cookbook that he had apparently left on his dash. “Clearly you can’t be trusted to just not use it.” Then he turned up to look at me in Red’s arms. “Where are you headed?” Mac asked me. “I assume I’m carrying Blueberry and Pancakes there.”

I told Mac my address. The two cakes got into the back seat of Mac’s car and he started driving slowly back to my place, with the powerful Red Currant Cake carrying me in his arms behind them. It was a peaceful night, a quiet night, and a night that I felt like I could just fall asleep on my bed of cake.

Then we arrived at my house only to find that the street had apparently been cordoned off with construction/police barriers. “What happened here?” Mac asked aloud as we pulled up to the reflective yellow barricades. Then his headlights illuminated the answer to his question as ant the size of a dog scurried up under the barricade towards the car window. Then we saw the whole crowd of ants scrawling through the street behind it, crawling on the walls and windows of my street. Mac screamed and quickly backed the car up, and Red also turned tail and carried me off.

“Hey, my phone’s back there!” I shouted, but the cakes and Mac already decided that my street wasn’t worth going back to while it was overrun with the giant ants. “I knew I should’ve made sure the door was closed before we left,” I whispered to Red as I thought back to his arm that we just left on the kitchen floor.

When we got back to the park, Mac pulled over and rolled down his window. He looked pale. Clearly that giant bug encounter spooked him. “We’re not going back there!” he declared.

“So…” I tried to think. “your place then?”

“Absolutely not!”

“Then what are we gonna do?”

Mac thought for a moment then suggested. “Sleep at the school. You already have a way in. Just find a place to lie down for the night and I’ll come back tomorrow. You’d better have a plan then!” he rolled the window up before I could object and started the car and sped off into the night. I looked up at Red’s face.

“Do we follow him?” Red asked. I sat silent for a moment. I still felt so tired, but so much stuff was happening so fast. And now I was heading a deep clacking noise that wasn’t helping anything. Red turned his head behind me, in the direction of the noise, then with a start began racing off in the direction of the Community College. “Wait, what’s that sound?” I asked Red.

“Deer,” said Red, absolutely not wasting any time putting distance between us and the… yeah.

It had been a wild day.

We came up to the school, Mac had apparently already dropped off Blueberry and Pancakes. Blue greeted me with a curtsey and “Welcome Back,” and we made our way into the darkness of the studio. I realized that it wasn’t very safe to leave the gate open though. So I decided there was really only one course of action I could take. And it was fortunate I had all the Cakes with me and no-one to stop me from doing this.

I ate some of Red, and Grew big enough that I could bend the gate back to cover the door, then I ate some pancakes to see if just on his own, he could shrink me back down to normal. And that… That turned out not to work.

Pancakes kept giving me parts of him, but that didn’t really seem to shrink me down, I was still stuck at my twenty-foot size.

“I think you might have had the right idea with making a shortcake,” Blueberry volunteered.

“Yeah,” said Red. “If we had just made you with strawberries like the recipe said, that’d probably shrink Master down without blowing up.”

So I was left having to decide if I’d rather wait for Mac to come back in the morning and try to convince him to let me bake yet another cake to get me back to normal, or I’d have to go blueberry again.

I don’t have to get into it, but yeah. I was normal sized by the time Mac came back the next morning.

Mac, however, was not.