"Toffee Turns the Trick" by Charles F. Myers is a comedic science fiction story centered on Marc Pillsworth, a thirty-two-year-old advertising agency owner, and Toffee, a vivacious red-haired woman who exists as a living entity within the subconscious mind of Marc's imagination. When a peculiar inventor named Mr. Culpepper visits Marc's office promoting a product called Fixage, pills allegedly capable of arresting physical aging and prolonging life, Marc accidentally ingests two of them after his well-meaning but careless secretary Memphis McGuire mistakes them for aspirin. The pills produce a catastrophic and unintended effect: rather than freezing Marc at his current age, they reverse his physical development, shrinking him to the body of a child of approximately eight or nine years old. Because Toffee exists as a projection of Marc's mind and is physically bound to his mental state, she too is reduced to a chubby, child-sized version of herself, stripped of the glamorous figure she prizes. The newly juvenilized pair are forced to flee Marc's office when Memphis, failing to recognize her diminutive boss, summons the police. After a chaotic escape through the building's parking lot, crawling beneath cars to evade officers, Marc and Toffee inadvertently hide inside a delivery truck, where they discover Mr. Culpepper himself bound and gagged. He reveals that a pair of sophisticated criminals, Chadwick and Agatha Harper, formerly celebrated European thieves now operating in America, have been hunting him in order to steal the Fixage formula so they can exploit it for personal gain and criminal immortality. The Harpers capture the entire group and transport them to an abandoned warehouse, where they intend to torture the formula from Mr. Culpepper using a pair of elegant silver pliers. The scientist proves impervious to intimidation because he retreats into a meditative trance to develop an antidote, working out all his formulas mentally. Toffee intervenes to protect him by claiming she knows the formula and luring the Harpers with the false promise that Fixage confers true immortality, demonstrated by surviving a fall from a railing that collapses beneath her. The demonstration succeeds partly because Marc's concentrated awareness of Toffee renders her indestructible as long as his own life is not threatened. Mr. Culpepper, while in his trance, determines that whiskey serves as the antidote to Fixage, and the group covertly appropriates bottles of spirits from a table in the room. During the return journey locked in the truck, Marc, Toffee, and Culpepper drink themselves back toward adulthood while the Harpers, left unsupervised, greedily swallow large handfuls of the scattered Fixage pills in the hope of achieving immortality. The massive overdose reduces both Harpers to infants. Marc and Toffee are restored to their adult bodies. The story then follows the increasingly farcical effort to administer precisely measured doses of whiskey to the infant Harpers in order to restore them to their original pre-surgery appearances, a scheme that would render them identifiable to law enforcement without their plastic surgery disguises. This enterprise leads the group through a public library, where they are pursued by police and the outraged librarian while Toffee hurls heavy volumes at officers from atop a rolling ladder. The Harpers, crawling across the library foyer after being restored to adulthood, are recognized by police and apprehended. The adventure concludes badly for Marc and Toffee when excess whiskey reverses the chemical process, aging them both to extreme old decrepitude. They shuffle past the police unrecognized and return to Marc's office, where Mr. Culpepper administers two more pills that restore them to normal. Marc recovers consciousness in the valley of his subconscious to find Toffee has vanished from the office, as she periodically does. The story closes with a postscript in which a boyish version of Culpepper, having taken pills to gain access to Marc's office, attempts to pitch yet another sensational product, only to be chased out at high volume.
By Charles F. Myers · First published 1943 · Genre: Children's Literature, Animal Fiction, Adventure