Little Shrimp
A Fictional Story by olajohn667.
—
A few days before everything went sideways, I came inside from the pool. It was late June, the middle of the afternoon, and I’d been swimming laps for maybe forty minutes. Nobody was home — or I thought nobody was home. My sister was supposed to be at her friend’s place. So I walked from the back door through the hallway to my bedroom, dripping chlorine water on the tile, left the bedroom door wide open because who cares, and pulled off my swim trunks.
I was standing there naked, toweling off my hair, when I heard footsteps.
I turned. My sister was standing in the hallway, maybe ten feet from my open door. She wasn’t expecting to see me any more than I was expecting to see her. She’d come home early. And she got a full, unobstructed view of everything.
I don’t know what she saw. I know what she didn’t see, which is much of a dick. I’m small on a good day — three inches soft if I’m warm, relaxed, and lucky. But right after swimming? After forty minutes in a pool that was probably five degrees too cold? I was shriveled. Completely. Less than an inch, maybe three-quarters, this tiny nub barely poking out from above my balls, which had tightened up into a tight little package. There was essentially nothing there—just a head sitting on a pair of balls, like a button on a cushion.
She stared for about one and a half seconds. Her eyes went wide. Her mouth opened.
“Omigod.”
Then she spun around and walked fast back down the hallway. I heard her bedroom door close.
I stood there with the towel frozen above my head, my face already burning. I looked down at myself. At my tiny, cold-shriveled dick, barely visible, practically inverted. I pulled the towel down and wrapped it around my waist and sat on the edge of my bed and tried to breathe.
She saw. She definitely saw. There was no ambiguity. She was looking right at me, right at it, for long enough to get a complete picture. And the picture was: nothing. A little acorn. A bump. A head sitting on balls, as she would later describe it.
I told myself it would blow over. She’d forget about it. It was a glance, an accident, no big deal. Sisters see brothers in weird situations all the time. It would fade.
It didn’t fade.
—
Four days later, Ann came over.
Ann was my sister’s best friend. They’d been close since high school, and she was over at our house constantly — so much that she had her own mug in the kitchen cabinet and her own spot on the couch. She was funny, sharp, the kind of girl who could make you laugh and cut you down in the same sentence without you even realizing you’d been cut until five minutes later. She had dark hair she always wore in a messy bun, and she was pretty in a way that made me nervous, which only made things worse later.
I was in the living room when they came in. Normal afternoon. My sister was in the kitchen getting drinks. Ann dropped onto the couch next to me, kicked her sandals off, and pulled her legs up underneath her. Casual. Friendly. The same as always.
For a while it was fine. We talked about nothing — some show they’d been watching, something going on at Ann’s work, a guy my sister was talking to on a dating app. I was comfortable. I was relaxed. The pool incident was still sitting in the back of my mind, but I’d convinced myself my sister hadn’t even thought about it since it happened. Why would she? It was a two-second accident. Nothing.
Then they started talking about getting food.
“We should get sushi,” my sister said from the kitchen. She was leaning against the counter, phone in hand, scrolling through a delivery app.
Ann perked up. “Yes. I want a dragon roll. And we should get shrimp — that tempura shrimp roll, the one with the crunch.”
She turned to me. “You want sushi?”
“Nah, I’m good. You guys go ahead.”
“Why not?”
“Just not feeling it. I had a big lunch.”
Ann looked at me. And then — I saw it happen. This tiny shift in her expression. Her eyes flickered, just for a fraction of a second, down and then back up. And the corner of her mouth twitched. Not a full smile. Not yet. Just the beginning of one. The seed of a smile, the moment before it blooms, when the person knows what they’re about to say and they’re deciding whether to say it.
She said it.
“Is it because you already have a little shrimp?”
The room went silent. I think I actually stopped breathing.
My sister’s head came up from her phone. She stared at Ann. Then she stared at me. Then she looked back at Ann. And then — like a dam breaking — they both started laughing.
Not polite laughter. Not a little giggle they tried to suppress—full, doubled-over, gasping-for-air laughter. The kind where you can’t breathe, and your stomach hurts, and tears are forming at the corners of your eyes. Ann threw her head back against the couch and kicked her legs. My sister grabbed the kitchen counter to keep from falling over. They were feeding off each other — every time one of them started to calm down, the other would snort or wheeze, and they’d both lose it again.
I turned red. Not just my face — my neck, my ears, my chest. I could feel the heat spreading through me like a fever. My hands went clammy. My throat tightened.
“It’s not that small,” I said. “It just looked small. It was cold. I was just swimming.”
This was, objectively, the worst possible thing I could have said because it confirmed three things simultaneously: that my sister had seen me naked, that what she saw was small, and that I was now defending the size of my dick to two girls in my living room on a Tuesday afternoon.
They laughed harder.
“It was so small,” my sister said, and she was almost wheezing. “It was just a head sitting on balls. There was no dick. Like, literally, I couldn’t even — there was just nothing there. It was like a little button.”
“A little shrimp,” Ann repeated, and she looked at me with that smile — that wide, delighted, slightly cruel smile — and she held her thumb and index finger about half an inch apart. “Like this.”
“That’s about right,” my sister said, nodding.
“It was cold!” I said again, which was true, and which also made absolutely no difference.
“Sure,” Ann said, still smiling. “Cold.”
They kept laughing. I sat there on the couch with my arms crossed, my face on fire, my stomach churning with a feeling I didn’t have a name for yet. It was embarrassment — pure, concentrated, skin-peeling embarrassment. But it was also something else. Something I wouldn’t understand for years.
That was the beginning.
Over the rest of the summer, it became a running thing. Not a constant thing — they didn’t bring it up every day — but often enough that I never fully relaxed around them. The jokes came in waves, sometimes subtle, sometimes blatant, and I never knew which version was coming until it was already landing.
The subtle ones were almost worse, because I could never be sure if I was being paranoid.
Ann would be eating something small — a grape, a piece of chocolate, a nut — and she’d hold it up between her fingers and look at me and say “Hey, look, it’s you.” Then she’d pop it in her mouth and chew, still looking at me, still smiling.
My sister would be on her phone, and I’d walk in, and she’d angle the screen away from me, and I’d hear Ann’s voice through the speaker saying “did you send him the picture?” and they’d both lose it, and I’d know — I’d know — they’d been texting about it. Maybe sharing the mental image. Maybe making jokes I wasn’t there to hear.
Once, at a barbecue, Ann asked me to grab her a hot dog from the grill. When I handed it to her, she looked at it, looked at me, and said: “Don’t worry, this one’s bigger.” My sister spat out her drink. I stood there holding the tongs, face burning, while everyone else at the table looked confused and the two of them tried to stop laughing long enough to explain that it was an inside joke.
They didn’t explain. They just said “inside joke” and let the mystery hang there, which was its own form of torture, because I knew exactly what the inside joke was. I knew they knew, and I knew that anyone who heard them laughing hard enough about a hot dog might eventually start to piece it together.
The blatant ones were brutal but at least honest.
One night we were all watching a movie. I was on the floor; they were on the couch behind me. About halfway through, Ann leaned forward and whispered something to my sister. My sister snorted. Then Ann said, loud enough for me to hear: “I’m just saying, I’ve never been with a guy who was that small. Like, I genuinely don’t know what I would do.”
“You’d be disappointed,” my sister said. “That’s what you’d do.”
“I mean, yeah. You’d be like…” Ann made a face — this exaggerated frown, this mock-disappointed pout — and then shrugged. “Sorry, but it’s true.”
“You’d literally not feel anything,” my sister said.
“Okay, that’s not fair,” Ann said. “You’d feel something. It would just be… not much.”
They both cracked up. I stared at the TV screen and didn’t turn around. I couldn’t. If I’d turned around, they would’ve seen my face, and my face would’ve told them everything — that I was humiliated, that I was angry, that I was dying inside. And maybe, if I’d turned around, they would’ve also seen something else, something I didn’t understand yet, something I wouldn’t be ready to face for a long time.
I didn’t turn around.
—
There were other moments, scattered across that summer like landmines.
Ann came over once in a bikini because they were going to lay out by the pool. She walked through the living room in this small black two-piece, and I was sitting on the couch trying not to stare, and she stopped in front of me and did this little spin.
“How do I look?”
“Good,” I said, because what else do you say?
She smiled. “You should come swim with us. Oh wait — actually, maybe you shouldn’t. We wouldn’t want a repeat of last time.”
My sister, who was coming down the stairs with sunscreen, heard this and started laughing before she even reached the bottom step.
“A repeat of what?” I said, playing dumb.
“The shrinkage incident,” Ann said. “The little shrimp sighting.”
“That’s what we’re calling it?” my sister said. “The little shrimp sighting?” She was delighted. “That’s perfect.”
They went to the pool. I stayed inside. I could hear them laughing through the open window for the next hour. I spent that hour on the couch with my phone, not looking at anything, just sitting there with the sound of their laughter filtering in and my face hot and my chest tight and that feeling — that unnamed, unidentifiable feeling — sitting in my stomach like a knot I couldn’t untie.
—
Once, Ann and I were alone in the kitchen. My sister was in the shower. Ann was sitting on the counter, eating cereal, and I was getting water from the fridge. It was quiet. Almost normal.
Then she said, without looking up from her cereal: “You know I’m just messing with you, right?”
I stopped with the water bottle halfway to my mouth. “Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
“I don’t actually care about… that. It doesn’t matter.”
“Okay.”
She looked up. “But it is small, though. Like, objectively. I’m not saying that to be mean. It’s just — your sister showed me — well, she described it, and — yeah. It’s small.”
She said it so gently. So matter-of-factly. The same way someone might tell you that your shirt is inside out or that you have something in your teeth. Not cruel. Just honest. Just a fact about my body, delivered over a bowl of Cheerios on a Wednesday morning.
I drank my water. I didn’t say anything. She went back to her cereal.
My sister came downstairs five minutes later, and it was like the conversation never happened. But it did happen. It happened, and I remember every word of it, and I remember the way Ann’s eyes looked when she said it’s small — this calm, direct, almost sympathetic gaze, like she was letting me in on something I should’ve already known about myself.
—
The summer ended. The jokes slowed down. Ann went back to school, my sister got busy, life moved on. I went back to my normal routine, and for a while, I stopped thinking about it every day. It became a background thing — a memory I could push away, a humiliation I could file under “stuff that happened” and try not to revisit.
But it never fully went away. It just went underground, sitting in the back of my mind, waiting.
—
Years later — last year, actually — I stumbled across SPH online.
I don’t even remember how. Probably some late-night rabbit hole, clicking from one thing to another, ending up somewhere I didn’t expect. A forum. A video. A thread of people talking about being humiliated for their size, about how it made them feel, about the shame and the arousal and the way those two things tangled together until you couldn’t separate them.
And something clicked.
Not right away. Not in a flash of revelation. But slowly, over the next few days, as I kept reading, kept exploring, kept finding people describing exactly what I’d felt that summer — the heat in my face, the tightness in my chest, the humiliation that wasn’t just humiliation, that had something else growing inside it like a seed in dark soil — I started to understand.
I wasn’t just embarrassed. I wasn’t just humiliated. I was aroused.
That summer — every joke, every comment, every time Ann held up her fingers and smiled at me, every time my sister said there was no dick — it wasn’t just shame. It was shame and something else. Shame and heat. Shame and a stirring in my pants that I’d been too mortified to notice, too overwhelmed to recognize, too young and too clueless to name.
The day Ann said, “Is it because you already have a little shrimp?” I was hard. Under my crossed arms, under the cushion I’d grabbed to cover my lap, I was hard. I didn’t know it at the time. The embarrassment so consumed me, so flooded me with the heat of being laughed at, that I didn’t register the other heat, the lower heat, the one building in my groin. But it was there. It was there the whole time.
And now I know. Now I understand. Now I can look back at that summer and see it clearly — see every moment for what it actually was, see what was happening underneath the shame, see the thing I’d been running from without knowing I was running.
—
I think about Ann constantly now.
Not my sister — that’s its own complicated thing, and I don’t go there. But Ann. Her smile. The way she held up her fingers. The way she said it’s small over Cheerios with that calm, direct honesty. The way she looked at me in her bikini and said we wouldn’t want a repeat. The way she made me feel — small, exposed, seen, reduced to nothing but the size of my dick and the fact that she knew it and I couldn’t change it and she could bring it up whenever she wanted.
I goon to it. I’ll be honest about that. Late at night, in my room, I’ll close my eyes and replay those moments — the shrimp comment, the finger measurement, the it’s small, though, objectively over cereal — and I’ll stroke myself. I’ll get harder than I’ve ever been, and I’ll think about her laughing, about the two of them laughing, about being the butt of the joke, about being the small-dicked guy that girls talk about and giggle about and compare notes about, and I’ll come so hard my vision blurs.
Then I’ll lie there, sticky and ashamed and already thinking about the next time.
—
Lately I’ve been thinking about reaching out to her.
Ann. I still have her number. We haven’t talked in a while — a year, maybe more. She and my sister are still close, but I’ve kept my distance because being around her was always this complicated knot of embarrassment and attraction and something I couldn’t name, and now that I can name it, now that I know what it is, the knot has only gotten tighter.
I think about messaging her. Something casual — hey, how’ve you been, long time. And then seeing where it goes. Seeing if I can steer it. Seeing if I can get her to that place again, the place where she’s laughing at me, where she’s holding up her fingers, where she’s saying it’s small with that calm, honest voice, where she’s looking at me with that smile that says I know what you’re packing and it’s not much.
I want her to humiliate me. For real. Not as a joke, not as a passing comment, not as a summer thing that fades when the weather cools. I want her to know what it does to me. I want her to use it. I want to sit across from her at a table and have her look at me and say the things she used to say — little shrimp, it’s small, I’ve never been with a guy who was that small — and I want her to know that this time, it’s not just embarrassing. It’s something else. Something that makes me ache. Something that makes me hard.
I think about telling her about explaining the kink, about confessing what that summer did to me, about admitting that every joke she made planted a seed that grew into this. I think about the look on her face — would she laugh? Would she be disgusted? Would she be intrigued? Would she smile that same smile, the one she had when she said, “Is it because you already have a little shrimp?” and say, “I always kind of wondered”?
I haven’t done it yet. I open her contact in my phone, stare at the message field, type something, delete it, type something else, delete that too. Close the app. Open it again. Stare at her name.
The cursor blinks. I blink back.
One of these nights, I’m going to send it.
The End.
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