The more paranoid part of me thinks they let us reach adulthood just long enough to breed so they never run out of playthings.

It’s always diapers, too. Bulky, infantile, absorbent padding is the default correction as far as Amazons are concerned. Missed a car payment? Diapers. Jaywalking? Diapers. Forgot to wear deoderant on a hot day? Diapers. Looked just too cute and defenseless and someone might just abduct you and put you in diapers? For your own safety, diapers.

When it came to diapers, Amazons were very two-dimensional. You were in them, or out of them. You were an adult or a child.

But it’s so much worse for a Little. For most Amazons, it’s JUST diapers. Most Tweeners, too. It’s a punishment. “You’re supposed to be a grown-up; act like it or else.” Time is served. You are humbled. Then you’re allowed to be normal again, most of the time.

For us, it’s threats of diapers, and losing our jobs, and being taken away from our homes, and bottles, and breastfeeding, and spanking, and enemas, and suppositories, and pacifier gags, and cribs and highchairs with restraints built in and never ever ever being allowed to try again. For us it’s “you never really were a grown-up and you just proved it.”

And so many think they’re doing us a kindness. So many feel justified in what they’re doing and don’t realize how much it scares the shit out of us. So many of these Amazons are hurting us.

And I’m all but completely convinced that it’s some kind of instinct. Some kind of built in primal desire or survival instinct that’s just gone overboard, and their own natural physical advantages make it hard to stop and far too easy to facilitate. Why else would Amazons devote so much damn time to infantilizing every single person in their wake?

I could stop right now and just copy and paste all the technological advancements that Amazons have dedicated solely to the infantilization of other people from Wikitome and it would be longer than anything I’ve written thus far. It’s their trigger. Their passion. It’s damn near their artform, martial or otherwise. There are rumors and jokes that they’re investigating faster-than-light-speed space travel for the sole purpose of the discovery of sentient alien lifeforms…so that they can baby them.

Or maybe it was interdimensional travel…I can’t remember. You can find almost anything on the internet.

In some Little communities there’s the pervasive theory that it’s all a form of control. Stack the rules of the game in their favor. Create a form of soft discrimination; soft slavery so that they’re always in control of the conversation and at the top of the social heirarchy. Punish each other just enough to seem like equal opportunists, but focus most of their energies on keeping everyone else in check.

So that’s it. Either Amazons as a group are a bunch of baby-crazed mad scientists, or they’re brilliant social engineering tyrants. I sleep better thinking it’s the former.

I still wanted to sleep when I rode my scooter into work that day. I loved my scooter. Catherine got it for me online when I first got my job. “If you’re doing this, you better do it in style,” Catherine told me. That’s Catherine talk for “A bicycle will just get you picked off around Amazons.” It was a souped-up light orange number that could hit 50 mph if it had to. I’d be roadkill on the highway, but for the eight miles between home and work, it did its job well.

In the pre-dawn light with almost no morning traffic, I was able to motor all the way to Oakshire Elementary School, dismount, take my helmet off, walk my bike out of the parking lot, and arrive at my classroom door. Mrs. Beouf was already there, waiting for me. As soon as she saw me, she opened the door so that I could store my scooter in the class closet.

“Morning, Mr. Gibson.”

“Good morning, Mrs. Beouf. How are you?”

“I’m well, yourself?”

“Ugh. I think I slept funny. There’s a crick in my neck this morning that just won’t quite work itself out.”

“I hear ya there, Clark. I think it’s about time for a new mattress. EIther that or I’m getting old.”

“No. You’re not old at all.”

“Good answer!”

We both laughed.

Small talk. This is another thing that might not have happened precisely this way, or it might have happened exactly this way close to a thousand times and neither of us noticed. Before my life turned upside down, I kept my daily anxieties at bay through a series of rituals. They were pointless, mostly. But the predictability of it was comforting in a way. And what’s more pointless, predictable, and comforting than morning small talk at work?

I closed my closet door, hopped up on one of my step stools (there were lots of step stools in my classroom), and locked it shut.