"Uuuuuuuuuuggghhh..."

    Michelle was only two hours into her shift at her new job, and it felt like twenty. The fact that she was already checking the clock every five minutes was a good indicator that things weren't going to start going by faster any time soon.

    "Maybe it wouldn't take forever if things actually happened at this dumb place..." the impatient girl muttered to herself. Her new job involved moving things from place to place at a massive storage facility... and that was about it. It was easy and straightforward, but could devolve into mind-numbing boredom. On particularly dull days such as this one, Michelle found herself wishing that anything would happen just to spice things up.

    On the other hand, one benefit of such an uneventful day was that Michelle could fantasize to her hearts content. Today, the current of her thoughts brought her to a frequently visited isle of memory: the first time her girlfriend flattened her. Equal parts intense and unforgettable, just remembering it got Michelle's heart pounding. Of course, much of her memory of the event was clouded by a horny haze, but really, that was one of the best parts.

    Michelle was shoved back to reality when she noticed the number of the row of shelves she had just passed. Her job took place in a large warehouse that reminded her nerdy ass of the ending of the first Indiana Jones movie. Of course, she was pretty sure the place didn't house anything as important as the Ark of the Covenant; otherwise, she probably would have to wear a more stringent uniform instead of the jeans and plaid button-up she wore. She turned her box-transporting-cart around and backed up a few rows to the one she was actually looking for, then scanned through the labels of the boxes to find the one she needed.

    "There we go," Michelle said to herself upon seeing the metal box. It was small enough to carry with just her hands, however, its location left a lot to be desired. Like some sort of hellish Jenga set, the box she needed was one of three that formed the base of a stack of boxes three times taller than the tall girl tasked with retrieving it.
    
    Michelle groaned at the mere thought of removing all those boxes just to get the one she needed, and her thoughts wandered to the facility's safety supervisor, Andrea. The dreaded drop of social anxiety thumped in her heart. It wasn't that Andrea was a bad person; the athletic ginger was actually very personable. The problem was that Andrea was a bit too much for the introverted Michelle at times. Even during safety training, Andrea would tease and joke with Michelle the entire time, making Michelle feel obligated to laugh about every other sentence. Michelle thought to Andrea's explanation of how to safely retrieve a storage unit from the bottom of a stack. She'd probably have to get the forklift and drive it over, then meticulously get each one down one by one, place them in the right area, then find something else to find as a new base... Then again, there were already two other boxes to support the weight...

    "...Fuck it, I'll Houdini this shit," Michelle muttered encouragingly to herself. After brushing her long and messy black hair out of her face, she bent down and started meticulously sliding the desired box out, making sure to scoot the other nearby boxes to the side to make a more balanced base for the towering stack above her. After some very concentrated pulling, Michelle finally managed to get the box out from its precarious position while aligning the others in such a way as to form a stable base.

    "Heh heh heh, I win this time, boxes." Michelle placed her hard-won trophy into her cart. She then turned back around just in time to see the rest of the boxes falling right where she was standing.

    "Eee-!"

    KRRRRSHH

    Before she could even parse what had happened, Michelle was covered by an oppressive pressure. Her entire body was pinned under it, the weight pushing down on every square inch of her body. Though she couldn't see anything but darkness, she had been put in this sort of situation enough times to figure out what had happened fairly quickly; all those boxes that she oh so carefully handled had rudely come crashing down on her, and their force had squished her flat.

    Michelle mentally assessed her current predicament. "...Shit. I can't believe I got myself squished at work." She thought to herself. "Shit, this is embarrassing! I gotta try to get these boxes off me before someone finds me like this!" 

    It didn't take more than a couple of seconds for the recently pressed patty to realize there was no way to help herself. She couldn't even lift some of those boxes with normal, three-dimensional arms, let alone with pancake-thin muscles with no leverage. She was utterly at the mercy of the heavy containers on top of her, and they were content with sitting right where they were. 

    Though she had been flattened a few times before, the constant pressure of having something so heavy remain on top of her was different from just being smashed and then taken away from whatever force smushed her. Normally there was an ever so slight relief from the feeling of being crushed as her body was left on its own, but in this case no one was around to remove that force. The weight was always pressing down, always wanting to conquer that sliver of space between it and the floor, never letting Michelle gain even a tiny bit of depth back. And, unlike when she was laminated, the pressure keeping her down wasn't just some flimsy sheets of plastic. Compared to previous outings in the realm of flatness, this one was more uncomfortable and less sexual, though the amount of pressure on her most sensitive parts was still pretty stimulating. Either way, she was hoping something would get her out of this sooner rather than later.

    Unfortunately for Michelle, later was starting to seem like the more likely of the two options. It was hard to tell exactly how much time was passing from beneath the cargo, but she could tell that it was dragging on about as long as work normally dragged along. Remembering that there weren't that many of her coworkers signed up for her shift, she began to worry that she might not even be found until the next shift started, or even later than that! In fact, the only one she was certain was working this shift was Andrea... 

    "Ugh, it might be better to just stay squashed than to be found by her..." Michelle thought to herself. Andrea probably wasn't the type to get Michelle fired over this incident, but she knew that she'd never hear the end of it if Andrea discovered her like this. Not to mention the embarrassment of being found by the person who explicitly told her how to avoid this exact situation would be more crushing than the box currently resting on top of her.
    
    To keep her mind off such thoughts, she tried to inch her way out of the mess she had gotten herself in. It didn't work. Whenever she tried pushing the box up and off of her, her body would only strain itself for so long before giving out. Every time she relaxed after pushing, the weight would press down further on her less tense body and squash her even flatter. Michelle's mass could only be compressed so far, so each little extra squish was causing her body to spread just a tiny bit outward. She was able to feel the mass of her body widen as her sense of touch was expanded across the surface of her inanimate captor. 

    This gave her the idea to wriggle herself out from underneath the box, since lifting it was turning out to be impossible. This also didn't work. Not only was it nearly impossible to get any movement while her whole being was pinned, she was fairly certain after a few minutes of trying that despite the edges of her body getting farther apart, her center of mass hadn't budged an inch. This meant that all she managed to do with this little burst of effort was to spread herself out even further.

    After that, she tried just sitting still and doing nothing. The weight of the box continued to press down on her, causing her to spread out more anyway.

    "Ugh! This is so stupid! Nnngh!" Michelle ranted in her head "Why were those dumb boxes stacked like that in the first place?! And why did it have to fall on me?! I am seriously so over being crushed right now! Gah!" Michelle thrashed to the best of her ability from her compromised position, but, of course, this caused her to spread out more. 

    After her brief and very ineffective tantrum, Michelle decided to just pout and wait for help to come. 

    It wasn't until a few hours later when Michelle heard the muffled voice of someone else. It was hard to tell who the voice belonged to, but the thoroughly flattened girl was happy enough to hear that she wouldn't be spending the night getting ceaselessly squashed. It wasn't much longer before Michelle heard the familiar sounds of the forklift that she probably should have used in the first place, and in no time she was blinking as light filled her vision once again.

    "Well, well, well, what do we have here?" came a bemused voice. Michelle was able to recognize it now that she didn't have however many pounds of stored materials on top of her. Andrea, the aforementioned corporate safety officer, loomed into Michelle's vision.

    The flattened girl felt her cheeks burn. "Why did it have to be herrrrrr?!"

    "I go through all the trouble of preparing all those nice safety presentations, and you go and get yourself smashed into a sheet anyway!" Though it was a reprimand, Andrea had a playful, teasing tone to her voice. After all, the situation she stumbled into was pretty ridiculous. All that time under the massive weight had caused Michelle's body to spread out all the way to the edges of the box, causing her length and width to match the container that had been crushing her. Her depth, however, was nowhere to be seen. Michelle had been reduced to nothing more than a large sheet of paper with a Michelle-ish pattern spread across the front, the features of her body smeared and pushed outward to fill out all the space.

    "Rmmm..." Michelle tried to apologize, but it was a bit hard with her face lacking any depth. It also didn't help that her blushing face, framed by her pressed hair, was still frozen in the oddly cute grimace she made when the boxes first fell on her, her mouth stuck in a shape that would have made it hard to form words regardless of depth. 

    With some effort, Andrea managed to peel Michelle from the floor, lifting the paper-thin girl with relative ease. "Now, what was the proper procedure for dealing with flattened coworkers? I'd ask you, but you don't seem to be one to remember the right procedures..."

    Michelle whimpered and averted her gaze as much as possible as she felt her face get even hotter than before.

    "Oh, maybe we fold you up and give you to the boss!"

    "Nmmm!" Michelle squeaked a panicked refusal.

    "Nah, you're right, you'd probably just get lost in the paperwork. I know! How about I turn you into a warning sign about the dangers of not down-stacking big stacks of stuff!" Andrea was clearly having a lot of fun with this situation. "You're just the right dimensions for it!"

    "Mmm!" Michelle wasn't keen on that idea either.

    "Are ya sure? We could hang you up right on the wall over there for everyone to see. I think you'd be just about the cutest safety poster around! We could even right a cute little phrase on you like, 'Make sure to be safe, or you'll be flat out of luck!'"

    "Mm-mmm!" the sheet of a girl managed to squirm back and forth a bit as her cheeks turned another shade pinker. "Oh god, maybe it actually IS possible to literally die from embarrassment..."

    Andrea pretended to ponder a bit more, "Hmmm... Well, in that case, I guess there's nothing left to do but to roll you up and take you home. I'm sure you'll make a nice throw rug or somethin'." This time, instead of flashing her playful smile, Andrea merely shrugged, "Good thing it's the weekend!"

    Michelle squeaked again, unsure of to what degree Andrea was joking, before she was quickly and efficiently rolled up into a nice, tight, and easy-to-carry scroll. As she practically hugged herself in the darkness of the neat little bundle she had become, Michelle wondered what kind of punishment would be in store for her, and if she would have been better off just staying under the box until someone else found her instead.