Michelle Robinson traced her fingers along the raw, tear-stained curve of her cheek and down along her neck. Her raven-black hair, ordinarily primed for maximum wow, lay in bedhead tangles against her shoulders. She anxiously bunched the ends of her locks between her palms and digits. Eyes pink and puffy from days of what felt now like infinite weeping, she brushed a knuckle over her stinging lids and gazed down at the image again on the table.

            The photograph, one she’d dug out of a dusty cabinet the day before, glinted in the kitchen light. She reached down to touch it, fingers aquiver, but picked it up all the same, and brought it up to her face again. No matter how dry of tears she felt after an entire week of this agony, she somehow managed to produce more whenever she got a closer look at the picture. Still, she couldn’t bear not to look.

            In the center frame of the picture was Michelle, just a few years younger and minus a couple laughing age lines around her eyes, smiling so broadly she might have been near bursting. In her arms she had her elder son, Alex, looking just as giddy as his mother: the days when he happily leapt into a hug without pause. More than anything in the universe, Michelle wished it was possible to recreate this photo now.

            Alex Robinson hadn’t been seen by a single living soul in six days, twenty-three hours, and forty minutes. Michelle knew, because she’d been counting, growing sicker with every passing minute and hour. One day, on her birthday, no less, the boy had just vanished into thin air. No note, no indication, no hint, no clue. His clothes were left in a heap in the living room, his belongings scattered around his bedroom. It was an absolute uncertainty, and the lack of knowing had driven Michelle to the edge in the intervening days.

            Michelle placed the photo on the kitchen table, where she’d been slumped for the last hour, leaking a steady stream of salty tears. She rested her cheek softly beside the little picture of herself and her beloved child.

            “Oh, my baby,” she sobbed. “My baby, my baby. Where did you go? Please come back to your mommy. She misses you so much.”

            Her voice cracked as she circled her fingertip over the miniature image of her boy, her firstborn, the apple of her eye. The one who’d taken time from his evening to bake her birthday cake, her favorite chocolate-coconut flavor, as a surprise for when she returned, just to make her happy. Now, she wondered if perhaps that was the final time she’d ever truly be happy again.

            The distraught woman couldn’t help but stare at the image of Alex in the picture, comparatively only a few inches tall inside the frame, and recall the last time he’d been small and helpless enough to require her full support and protection minute-by-minute. Wherever he was, if it was even reachable by human emotion, Michelle only hoped that Alex knew she, as well as Alex’s father and brother, missed him deeply and wanted to care for him again. She squeezed her puckered lips against the glossy image of her young son’s face in the picture, kissing him and leaving a distinct lip smudge on the photo.

            “Come back, sweetie. Please,” Michelle begged of the silence. Her words echoed loudly off the walls of the kitchen, despite her whisper. For a moment, she was self-conscious, fearful that Thomas, her younger son, heard her as he sat in his bedroom upstairs, distracted by video games and Legos to keep his mind off his big sibling’s disappearance. Michelle only hoped she hadn’t permanently traumatized her equally precious boy with her sorrow.

            At that moment, there was a knock at the front door.

            It took Michelle a while to generate enough willpower to stand up. She moved down the hall like a zombie, her bare toes grazing along the hardwood floor as she trudged to answer the door. She knew she looked awful, probably as if she’d just returned from a drinking bender, when in reality she’d simply been grieving for a week’s time. Against her better judgement, Michelle opened the door.

            “Hello, ma’am. Mrs. Robinson, right?” the police officer asked, standing on the welcome mat with hands folded behind his back. “I’m sorry to barge over like this, but this couldn’t wait.”

            “Yes, that’s me. What is it? Have you found something?” Michelle uttered. She stumbled forward, nose to nose with the officer. “Have you found something about my son? Is he alive? Where have you got him?”

            “I’m so sorry, ma’am, we don’t have your son, not yet. But we do have a lead. Something I think you need to hear.”

            “WHAT IS IT?” Michelle demanded. She snatched the cop’s tie in her fist, shaking him. “Tell me! Where is my boy?”

            “Again, I apologize, Mrs. Robinson. We’ve called your husband. He’s coming to the station, too. This is just something you need to see for yourself. Please, follow me.”

***

            Alex Robinson didn’t know when the last time was that he’d opened his eyes.

            His world had gone plenty dark as he’d watched the horizon go black while he and the island of chocolate-coconut dessert passed over the ivory barrier of his mother’s enormous teeth. Even then, he’d kept his eyes as open as possible. The steam of roiling saliva had burned against his skin, the sheer muscular destructive force of Michelle’s tongue below ripping through fluffy pastry and sending him careening toward his destiny: all of that, he saw. Once it appeared hopeless, though, not merely unlikely, but absolutely positive that he was, in fact, not going to be rescued, but instead eaten by his doting mother, Alex finally shut his eyes.

            And he’d kept them clenched closed since.

            At least, that’s what he assumed. By now, minutes, or maybe hours, after that fateful lurching of dark matter and cake crumbs into Michelle’s slimy gullet, Alex was still conscious. Which was strange for the teen to realize, as he was fairly certain his odds of survival would diminish once he became too deeply ensconced in the rolling rivers of spit and half-digested food. Whether he drowned in the gooey liquid, suffocated inside a glob of cake, or was simply crushed and popped like a mouse in his mother’s snake-like esophagus, Alex was more surprised than ever to discover he was still alive.

            Or was he? Was he really awake? Maybe this was just what the afterlife felt like. Maybe he was damned to exist in the warmth and shapelessness of his mother’s titanic body, all without her knowledge, for eternity. He supposed it wasn’t the worst fate possible, just so long as it didn’t hurt. At least he could be near his mother.

            Indeed, he hardly experienced the heat of Michelle’s throat now, nor the rough grazing of cake asteroids passing by. At least he’d been able to give her one last gift on her birthday. Now, Alex was simply adrift, untouched by his surroundings. What was done was done.

            Summoning the courage, the boy swallowed nervously, and at last forced himself to open his eyes.

            The sight nearly knocked the wind from Alex, or at least it would’ve, if gravity still affected him at all. He was floating, just as he’d predicted from lack of contact with any moving bodies. What he hadn’t expected to see was the environment awaiting him now, stretching all around for what felt to the humble boy like infinite miles.

            Rings, like those of celestial planets, twirling and crossing in concentric patterns, hued in shades of red, blue, green, purple, and even some colors he couldn’t identify. Each ring carried a line of orbs behind like balloons, faintly glowing in the same startling neon. It was like watching a dance of heavenly bodies, and Alex was situated in the middle of it all: his body, just as naked and vulnerable as he’d been when Michelle accidentally swallowed him, rotating end over end, providing him a full and overwhelming view of the cosmic sights beyond. At first it reminded Alex of space, as though his mother’s digestive tract contained a portal into the solar system itself, and then he realized where he’d seen this sight before. It wasn’t through a telescope.

            It was through a microscope.

            Nothing so impressive as this, of course, not in these colors or in this motion of life, but it made the most sense now, difficult as it was for his tiny brain to process.

            He’d begun shrinking in his family’s kitchen by instantly reducing to less than an inch in height, and from there had lost his stature with great speed, watching the world continually double in size around him. It was conceivable now, if the pattern continued, that he’d simply shrunk down below a size even perceptible to the human eye. That he was now watching molecules, atoms, maybe even objects smaller than that revolving like planets in a space so tight that a mere microbe represented the entire universe.
            “Hello?” the boy said into the void. His voice barely registered in his own skull, let alone amongst the endless array of rings and spheres.

            Alex trembled. He opened his mouth, wanting to scream, but couldn’t quite convince his vocal cords to function. Instead, he opened his eyes wider and allowed the tears to flow again down his cheeks. The boy didn’t care how childish or weak it made him feel to think: he knew in that instant, at the base of his humanity, what was required.

            He just wanted his mommy.

Michelle followed the officer closely behind as they entered the police station not fifteen minutes later. She’d slipped on some leather sandals as she raced to accompany the cop to his cruiser. The woman barely had time to fluff out her messy hair, and smooth down a wrinkled olive top and pair of old skinny jeans. Though she hadn’t worn make-up in days due to holing up inside her house, waiting for word from the police, she was sure her slender cheeks and ageless dimples were stained with random rosiness from all the crying. Despite this, Michelle couldn’t have cared less whether she’d entered the precinct in rags or not. She just wanted answers about her child.

            The suffering mother was led toward a conference room at the end of several winding hallways. Her husband Greg stood by the door, looking just as somber as he had all week, though still dressed in his suit and tie, as he’d handled the worry by burying himself in his job. Despite the joylessness of these past days, he smiled, embracing his exhausted wife as the police officer opened the door for them to enter.

            Inside the room were three more cops, one of them standing beside a metal cart packed with black boxes which Michelle at first mistook for computer hard drives or projectors, but after squinting for a moment, she realized she couldn’t detect what they were exactly other than machines knitted together by wires. Instead, the attention of Michelle and her husband was diverted to an unassuming man in a mustard-stained shirt at the center of the conference table, his hands laid in his lap, a calm, cool expression on his face.

            “What is this?” Michelle begged as she was guided into a chair by her husband. “Why have you brought us here?”

            “It’ll be easier if Mr. Andrews here just explains. Won’t it?” the cop who’d brought Michelle said. He took a seat beside the strange man at the center of the table, which Michelle only just now realized was a man she recognized. Hearing his name cemented it. Though she’d only seen Mr. Andrews emerge from his house a handful of times, usually just for package deliveries, he was a neighbor from down on the end of the block, living in the oldest and most rundown house in the neighborhood.

            “You folks can just call me Walter. It doesn’t matter, though,” he shrugged. The man adjusted the lapels of his unkempt jacket and ran his fingers through thinning hair. “You’re not going to like what I have to say, so I’ll just come out with it.”
            “What?” Michelle demanded. Greg gently laid a hand on her shoulder, unsuccessfully trying to calm her.

            “I’m a physicist. You could call me a theoretical physicist, I suppose, though I don’t exactly work in theories, I work in the kind of miracles that you weren’t meant to know existed for another fifteen years until I’d perfected them and won a Nobel or something,” Walter Andrews said. “For the last ten years I’ve been designing technology intended to place matter into a continually repeating state of its own being which would allow it to reduce or increase in its mass and volume in equal proportion. Essentially, changing the sizes of solid objects, especially organics. It has all kinds of applications, or at least it could. Prevent global warming, reduce hunger, you name it, but-”

            “What are you talking about?” Michelle said. She didn’t have the patience now to listen to fairy tales from a kooky neighbor when her son was still out in the world somewhere, needing aid.

            “Sorry, sorry, I know it’s a lot to take in. So the thing is, I thought the technology was only at the stage of reducing… infinitesimal bodies,” Walter explained. He avoided looking directly into the eyes of the anxious parents now. “Microbes, dust particles, things nobody would notice with the naked eye. I’d been successful with these objects in my own home, but I realized the effect would be amplified across distances, that I could test it on organic matter from further away and achieve a far greater result. So… hunger for knowledge got the better of me, as it often does, and I tested it on an object just a little further away, say, one thousand feet away. I always, always triple check my figures before a test, but just this once, I only double checked. I thought I’d locked onto an object the size of a grain of sand, something that couldn’t possibly affect anyone.”

            “Get to the point, Andrews,” one of the cops groaned.

            “But I was wrong,” Walter said, obliging. “The object… the object I locked onto wasn’t a microbe or a dust particle. It was just… a little bigger. Something that you could notice was gone if, say, they were targeted by a machine designed to reduce objects down to immeasurably small sizes.”

            Michelle raised an eyebrow, only vaguely picking up on where this insane story was going. But she’d had enough. It was making her nauseous to stand here and have these impossibilities suggested.

            “I still don’t understand what you’re trying to say to us,” Michelle said, her voice quavering. Shakily, she rose to her feet, despite her husband’s requests for her to remain seated. She pressed her palms against the table, leaning over toward the balding scientist in front of her who was currently making claims to the effect that he was a wizard. “Officers, why are we here? Why are we… why are YOU listening to this man when you could be OUT there, looking for my SON, who is still MISSING because of you?” The tears were on the verge of returning now. Michelle gritted her teeth, choking back a sob.

            “Ma’am,” one of the officers said, clearing her throat. “You may want to sit down.”

            Still guarded, Michelle sunk back into her chair and the embrace of her husband. The female cop stepped forward, hand outstretched. She reached across the table and opened her closed fist, revealing the contents of her palm.

            Inside her hand was a dog. A tiny, tail-wagging, barking dog. Probably a German Shepherd, though Michelle knew a dog of that breed couldn’t possibly exist at such a small scale: perhaps an inch long, if that. It was no toy, nor a trick of the light. Husband and wife blinked for a minute, desperately attempting to convince themselves the creature wasn’t real.

            “Mr. Andrews demonstrated his claims on Sparky, one of our police dogs, when we didn’t buy his story at first,” the cop said. “We were a little more willing to listen after.”

            “No,” Greg Robinson croaked. He shook his head without ceasing. “No, no, no. This is…”

            “So you’re saying…” Michelle gasped. Her voice was wretched and seething with sorrow, rage, despair, and wonderment, all rolled into one voice and bound by a mother’s love. The facts were coming together in her head now, united by the previously inexplicable fact of her son’s abandoned clothing on the floor. “You’re saying… you shrunk… you shrunk my son…”

            Before the officers could react, Michelle barreled at Walter. She nearly toppled him from his chair, and looked ready to choke him if there hadn’t been authorities present.

            “Where? Where is my little boy? Tell me now, or you’ll wish you’d shrunk yourself instead!”

            “I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am, Mrs. Robinson, I-” Walter began, but was interrupted as the woman’s palm smacked across his face. The sound was like that of a whip against a horse’s hindquarter. A reddened imprint of her hand was left on his cheek. The man shuddered, but nodded. “Fair enough, I’m sure I deserve that and much more, but there is a way to find him. We just have to-”

            “Hey, sorry to cut in,” an officer said, poking his head in the door of the conference room. He locked eyes with the nearest pair of officers standing guard. “We’ve just finished clearing out Mr. Andrews’ basement of evidence, brought it to the secure lock-up.”

            “WHAT did you say?” Walter shouted. He nearly jumped up from his chair, if it weren’t for the aggressive mother still standing over him and probably ready to clock him in the jaw if he made a false move. “Did you just say you cleared out my laboratory?”

            “Of course. You’ve got weapons-grade projects down there, as Sparky can attest,” the officer still holding the tiny dog in her palm said. She patted the dog with the end of her index finger. “We can’t have it just sitting in a residential area for the wrong parties to find it.”

            “No, no, you don’t UNDERSTAND. I still had a lot of my equipment powered on when I turned myself into you people earlier, don’t you see? It’s been unstable ever since I’ve been trying to reverse-engineer a way to track down this… this nice lady’s poor son. Without the right precautions, you could very well set off another reaction, one without the controlled environment of my testing parameters.”

            “What are you saying?” Michelle cried.

            “I’m saying you boys and girls in blue should get back to the neighborhood, pronto, because you may find you’re missing a few more citizens now.”

The stone patio of the Robinson’s backyard neighbors’ house lay distinctly silent and dead, despite evidence that it should be anything but. A grill, still steaming with charred hamburgers, stood idly on the side. Lawn chairs scattered every which way next to half-filled lemonade cups. A few piles of clothes draped over chair backs and on the ground. To any passerby who might’ve chanced a glance across the field of grass, it was a cookout attended by multiple neighborhood couples which had suddenly been abandoned without reason. Possibly for some kind of orgy, judging by the clothes.

            Of course, this was not the case. Down on the gritty brickwork of the patio, underneath the towering wire frames of the lawn chairs, was a tiny cluster of life. Six naked individuals, to be precise, who all stood somewhere in the pathetic range of half an inch in height. Rather than tittering with the sounds of fellow insects, though, the creatures down below were speaking human tongues.

            Six shrunken neighbors, unaware victims of the police tampering with Walter’s sensitive equipment, huddled together in absolute terror.

            “What the fuck? What the FUCK?” Mr. Dutton repeated for the umpteenth time, clutching his equally naked wife Mrs. Dutton. His jaws hadn’t stopped flapping in the fifteen minutes since the cookout was interrupted by the six of them all shrinking down. “WHAT THE FUCK?”

            “I don’t think your screaming is solving anything,” Mrs. Brown said. Mr. Brown gave his wife a supporting pat on the back. He clutched his hand subconsciously over his and his wife’s bare genitals, so his neighbors and friends couldn’t sneak a peek. “All we wanted to do was have all of you over for a nice evening, and then this happened.”

            “What do you suggest we do, then?” Mr. Foster demanded, hands on his hips. “Because I don’t see how we’re all going to get through this without becoming feed for a goddamn bird!”

            His wife Mrs. Foster nodded approvingly.

            “Let’s just try to remain calm,” Mrs. Dutton blurted. She shifted her glance from one horrified, angry face of her neighbors to the next. “We just have to get moving together, and find some help. If we stay low, out of sight, nothing can… fly by to get us, and we’ll find someone in no time. See, the Robinsons’ house is just across the way!”

            “ALL that way?” Mrs. Foster choked, squinting over what was now the equivalent of a miles-long trek just to cross Mr. and Mrs. Brown’s yard and then transition into Michelle and Greg Robinson’s. It looked like a herculean labor, especially for six middle-aged individuals, without clothes and without the athletic shape of their youth.

            “If you’ve got a better idea, we’re ready to hear it,” Mr. Brown said defensively. “I’ve mowed this lawn thousands of times. I’m sure I can guide us to-”

            “Oh, right, like cutting the grass makes you fucking Indiana Jones,” Mr. Dutton snarled.

            “This isn’t getting us anywhere,” Mrs. Brown said, jumping between the growling men. “The longer we argue, the longer it will take to find help. We have to start moving, right now. I agree. The Robinsons’ house is our best bet. I know Greg, and especially Michelle. They’re very observant, kind people and they’ll find us! Now SHUT UP, stop acting like little boys, and let’s move!”

            The three shrunken married couples shared a collective gulp as they gazed out over the jungle of grass which stood between them and salvation. Taking the initiative, then, Mr. and Mrs. Brown jumped off the stone ledge of the patio and into the dirt of the yard, quickly followed by their guests.

***

            Thomas Robinson laid on his bedroom floor, controller in hand, eyes glued to the TV screen as his digital character roamed the polygonal environment. It felt like he’d been playing video games for the entire day now, but after his mother yelled up the stairs to him that she was going with a police officer to the station for possible information on Alex, he supposed he ought to keep going. The young boy had discovered the longer he went this week without an activity to keep busy, the more frightened he felt for his big brother.

            His big brother, who’d always looked out for him, playing jokes and making fun but never truly treating him poorly. Thomas had plenty of friends whose older siblings were scarier than the bullies who occupied his grade school. Not him, though. Alex was much more of a friend, and really a role model.

            Thomas’s eye itched. He hadn’t cried yet, but he’d told himself he wouldn’t, because he wasn’t a baby. Only babies cried. He didn’t need that weighing on him, too. Instead, he kept busy, as he had to.

            The boy watched his video game character accidentally fall down a pit on the screen. He set his controller down, sighed, and prepared to try again, when he felt something under his skin. Cold, more potent than anything he’d ever felt in his life, stronger even than when he went out in biting winter air without gloves on. The boy shivered, wondering if he’d left a window open.

            Before he could ponder any further, the space of his room, already situated above him while he lay on the floor, was spinning higher into the air. Dizzy for just an instant, Thomas watched his room disappear as he sunk down, seemingly into the floor. His clothes billowed around him like parachutes as he fell flat on his face in the hills of soft cotton T-shirt, bewildered and chilly due to his newfound nakedness.

            The boy hadn’t realized he’d shrunk yet. Instead he simply remained on his stomach, yelling for help in the empty house.

            “Mom? Dad?” Thomas peeped fearfully. “S-S-Someone?”

            Off in the distance, as though heard across a yawning canyon, the telephone rang.

***

            “Thomas isn’t answering,” Michelle said. Her fingers struggled to punch the numbers in her cell. She listened, crestfallen, as the dial tone went to the answering machine. “Thomas, sweetie, this is Mom. If you can hear me, just stay exactly where you are in your room, okay? Don’t come answer the phone and don’t walk around. There’s no need to be scared. Just wait for us to come back.”

            “Try again,” Greg said as he turned the wheel. The car arced sharply onto residential streets. “Honey, are you trying again?”

            “Yes, yes, I am!” Michelle fired back. She dialed and waited. “Thomas, I know this is strange, but if you can hear me, you need to stay still, wherever you are. Your dad and I are coming.”

            The couple’s car roared down the last block, coming to a screeching halt in front of their house. Beyond the trees and down the road, several police sirens called out as they followed toward Walter Andrews’ house.

            “Do you suppose he just didn’t hear the phone?” Michelle asked anxiously, jumping from the car as soon as it stopped. “Surely he’d come listen to the message after the second one?”

            “You know how he is with that video game. He’s just focused, that’s all,” Greg reassured, knowing exactly his wife’s newfound fear. “We’ll give him another ring, then go around to his bedroom window and see if we can get him to come see us.”

            “Don’t go in the house, Greg. We can’t go in the house. Not until that… that maniac gets his goddamn machines fixed, and we can walk through, without stepping on-”

            “I won’t, Michelle, I swear. I won’t go in the house. We’ll get Thomas out, and then this will all be sorted out somehow.” Despite the calmness of his words, the man sounded on the verge at his wife’s mention of the possibility of crushing their sons.

            “Come on, Greg,” Michelle said, taking her husband by the hand and guiding him at a jog toward their backyard. “We’ve got to get his attention. Oh, my baby. I hope he’s all right in there!”

            Mr. and Mrs. Brown, Mr. and Mrs. Dutton, and Mr. and Mrs. Foster had never felt more sapped of energy than in this moment. All of them naked, peppered with dust and grass stains, and drenched in sweat from the exhausting hike across the backyard, the six shrunken individuals were nearing the back patio of the Robinson family. Long ago, they’d stopped caring about trying to cover up their private areas from one another, just as easily as they’d abandoned most of their dignity. Rescue, or at least the hope of it, was in sight now. Only that mattered.

            “Oh, fuck, I think my heart is going to explode,” Mr. Dutton cried. He clutched his chest and ambled after his encouraging wife. The earth was rising now as the dirt sloped up toward the stone platform of the patio.

            “Almost there now. Don’t give up, everyone!” Mrs. Brown shouted. The grass blades, which previously loomed over all their heads like a shadowy canopy of amazonian trees, were becoming shorter and less frequent. They had open air and, more importantly, a way to be seen by their neighbors.

            “Suppose the Robinsons got small, too,” Mrs. Dutton gasped. The entire party froze at this mention. None of them had considered it either. “What would we do?”

            “We’d figure that out when we got that far,” Mr. Brown snapped. “I swear, I don’t know why we even invited you people to a cookout if you don’t trust us enough as friends to follow our lead when times are tough.”

            “Just shut up and climb up on the damn patio,” Mr. Foster shouted.

            The three couples worked together in impressive unison, boosting one another and clambering over pebbles and ropey weeds. They’d only just managed to crest over the edge and up to the patio, when the feeling returned. The coldness they’d all experienced right before shrinking, in fuller force than ever. Convulsing, the neighbors stopped in their tracks and watched with horror as the wide world around them doubled in size.

            Or rather, their size halved. Where they’d started out at a half inch, roughly the size of a thumbnail, now they were more like grains of rice. The warm summer breeze nearly bowled Mr. Brown over.

            “OH MY GOD,” Mrs. Dutton squealed, nearly fainting from the shock of it. Mrs. Foster, the closest one to her, caught the miniature woman before she could be hurt. “WHAT? WHAT HAPPENED?”

            “It… happened again,” Mr. Brown muttered uncertainly. His composure was slipping.

            “It doesn’t matter! We’re here now, and that’s what counts!” Mrs. Brown called, hoping to corral their spirits, though even her voice shook now. She pointed toward the nearest piece of the Robinsons’ patio furniture, a chair, which now stood higher than any monument she could’ve conceived. “Wait… is… is that them?”

            Over the forest of the flower beds, the six desperate neighbors could just make out two figures marching into view, so massively beyond comprehension they might as well have been imagined mirages. Even Mrs. Brown was out of encouraging words as she watched Michelle Robinson, followed by Greg, moving with purpose toward the patio. Despite the strength of the stone below their feet, the shrunken people could feel it vibrate ever so slightly as the giant Michelle Robinson’s sandaled feet slammed into the earth, rose back up, and crashed back again for a second step. She and her husband crossed the patio and disappeared behind the view of the chair.

            “HELP!” Mr. Dutton screamed first, breaking the quiet. “Help!”

            All three couples took to crying out. They ventured forth, arms waving, and neared the closest leg of the chair which now resembled an ancient temple pillar. Of course, neither Michelle nor Greg could hear them.

            “I’m going to move some of the boxes from the shed. I should be able to reach up to Thomas’s room,” Greg said from somewhere now unseen to the tiny individuals. His voice boomed in their ears.

            “Please HURRY!” Michelle begged. Her voice, despite its lilting and feminine nature, grew ever-closer and stronger as she returned to the patio. Thunderous footsteps: the weathered base of her shoe colliding with the stone, the sole of her tanned foot inside the sandal slapping achingly against the leather, and even her long, dark-green painted toes thumping inside.

            All of it echoed painfully in the ears of the unknown, quarter-inch spectators. Then, as if in answer to a prayer, Michelle came to a stop. She lowered herself into the chair, which groaned softly under her curvy weight, and set both sandaled feet down on the ground, just over spitting distance from the neighbors.

            “She’s back!” Mr. Dutton huffed, out of breath. Still clutching his chest, he charged forward, shoving Mrs. Foster out of the way. “She’s right there! Hey, lady! LADY! GOD SAKE, HELP US, DOWN HERE!”

            “Wait!” Mrs. Dutton cried, stopped in her path by Mr. Brown, who held her as the five watched Mr. Dutton sprint as best as he could across the uneven terrain of the patio. Smooth as the ground would’ve appeared to a normal-sized individual, to the reduced people marooned upon it, the earth was a battlefield of lazily laid cement fillings, leaf scraps, and fossilized insect remains. The tiny man barely managed to keep upright as he rampaged toward Michelle’s idly resting sandal containing her tanned, silky foot. The massive behemoth of flesh and leather more than beat out the size of a Boeing as he neared.

            And then it came again: the cold, under the skin of all six neighbors. The shrinking effect was more instantaneous this time. In a blink, all of them were cut down so low in size that a naked eye would’ve had to concentrate for at least a second to even recognize them as human. They were the size of oat grains, and that was being generous.

            “FUCK!” Mr. Dutton was even shorter on words. He tripped, unable to dodge the uneven earth, and crashed flat down on his face. In the middle distance, he could hear something new. Flesh, probably damp and humid from the heat, peeling away from leather. Soft clacking of elegant toenails against straps and shoe thongs. A heel, strong enough to crush boulders, pressing over the lip of a sandal.

            Michelle’s newly freed bare foot, rubbed raw pink by the shoe and glazed with perspiration in the soft wrinkles of her skin, loomed above. Its shadow swallowed Mr. Dutton, and then the rest of it did, as well.

            Mrs. Dutton fainted. The other four shrunken people screamed from afar. The giant woman’s foot, in the simple act of removing itself from a shoe, had come to rest on the ground. Just beneath the rounded ball of Michelle’s foot and the stone was what remained of Mr. Dutton. He’d popped like a mosquito on contact with her crushing wall of skin.

“MICHELLE!” Mrs. Brown screamed at the top of her lungs, her voice now giving out. “OH MY GOD. PLEASE, PLEASE, SEE US!”

            By a combination of fear for her son Thomas and gently whistling breeze, though, Michelle remained peacefully seated on her chair, oblivious to the fact that she’d just killed her neighbor simply by setting her foot down.

            The remaining five were beginning to scatter. Mr. Brown could no longer convince them to follow his lead. They were now so small, they had no hope of climbing off the patio again, nor up any of the furniture to get closer to a human ear. Mr. and Mrs. Foster attempted to drag the widowed Mrs. Dutton along with them, but after realizing her weight was slowing them, coolly set her down. Then they took off toward the opposite leg of the towering chair upon which their beautiful savior and possible murderer sat.

            Michelle wriggled her toes against the gritty surface of the patio beneath the chair, feeling her blood pump with increasing speed from anxiety. She kept herself from nibbling her fingernails, and instead resorted to letting off steam by bouncing the balls of her feet against the straps of her sandals.

            A gale force of wind flowed out on all sides from the building-sized monsters which constituted Michelle’s long feet. All five shrunken neighbors fell to their backs, scattered even further apart by the blast of air. Jaws dropped, then, as they watched the statuesque body of their neighbor ascending again.

            Michelle stood and began to pace. She crossed to the flower beds, meandered about, and then strolled slowly back toward the chair. Though she took all the time in the world, raising up each bronzed bare foot and planting it back into the stone with great gentility, for the world below it, it was anything but. With mighty typhoons of wind and earth-shattering weight under each heel, Michelle approached the group again, perfectly unaware.

            Against all rationale, both Mr. and Mrs. Foster were making an insane attempt to scale the back of Michelle’s leather sandal. Though it was a tough ascent, their fingers could just barely fit into the thin rivets of the stylish footwear. After a few minutes, they’d nearly reached the first opening beneath the straps, which might allow them to get Michelle’s attention when next she approached.

            Mrs. Brown tried to reach the center of the patio, where she would have a better chance of being seen. She soon found herself far from any protection, out in the burning sunlight, and easily in the path of the returning goddess of a mother.

            “MICHELLE!” the woman shrieked. She threw her arms over her head, cowering on quaking knees which refused to let her run. “MICH-”

            Her scream turned to an almost-silent squelch as her insignificant body met the gridded, dewdrop tip of Michelle’s pinky toe. The deep green paint of the giantess’ nail glinted in the light just as the meaty digit came down on Mrs. Brown’s body. No more than a little dot of goo on Michelle’s skin remained of the other woman’s memory.

            “Be careful when you climb those boxes, honey,” Michelle called out to her husband. She watched him scaling the side of the house to reach Thomas, her whole attention span squared on that bedroom window.

             Driven by adrenaline, and empty of all logic, Mr. Brown charged with righteous fury. He followed Michelle’s left foot, that which had just killed his wife, and approached as those barreling toes came to rest again. With a mad lunge, the tiny, naked man smaller than an ant threw himself into the deep, gaping crevice between Michelle’s pinky and fourth toes. Narrow as the fleshy opening might’ve appeared from above, there was plenty of room for one so small to fit.

            Mr. Brown bit and clawed, kicked and punched, screaming all the while. Unsure now if he was trying to get the woman’s attention or simply take revenge for Mrs. Brown’s death, he couldn’t have said which direction he was attacking. Buoyant, impenetrable toe flesh surrounded him on all sides, slicked by nervous sweat and punctuated by a pungent, earthy odor he could only smell now that he was truly among the woman’s foot. Coughing and hacking from weakness, and unable now to even fight his way out to the opening of his neighbor’s powerful toes, the man was clenched between opposing walls of tan skin.

            “I’m up, Michelle,” Greg announced from the side of the house. He gripped the window sill, balancing on a box. “I don’t see him in there. Just… his clothes, on the floor.”

            “WHAT?” Michelle shrieked.

            Though he vomited from fear and vertigo, Mr. Brown remained alive as Michelle’s toes absentmindedly squeezed gently back together for another step. Her foot rose, hovering longer than usual, and then dove toward her sandals again. In the confusion of tipping momentum and writhing toe flesh, Mr. Brown realized he was now upside down, his granular head poking out the bottom of the giant woman’s muscular toes. Despite the strength of her grip, the slick sweat painted over her flesh allowed him to slide, and almost to freedom.

            Down below, he saw them. Mr. and Mrs. Foster, so stupidly windmilling their arms and shrilling for attention where they stood, on the very heel of the enormous sandal. As if they had a hope. From up here, Mr. Brown could make out the wet, formed craters along the leather insole of the shoe where Michelle had deposited her enormous foot and toes countless times. As she was doing now.

            The last Mr. Brown saw of both Mr. and Mrs. Foster was in a whoosh of shadow and jammed foot skin eating up space inside the shoe. He couldn’t be certain, as they were so far away, but in his last moments of visibility, the tiny man was almost certain he heard them splatter again the winnowing valley of Michelle’s arch. Surely they’d died hand-in-hand within a spongy sole wrinkle of the woman’s foot. Odds were, no one would ever know. Their remains would wash away the next time she scrubbed a bar of soap on her skin.

            Mr. Brown’s body popped, much like his wife had, between the caving walls of Michelle’s toes as she took her first step in the sandal, its leather straps squeezing her digits that much closer such that the man’s helpless, naked body stood no further chance.

            Michelle, exclusively concerned with her husband’s discovery and the safety of her son, sprinted toward the house. She took one last step upon the patio, the rubbery sole of her shoe slamming to earth with the speed of a meteor. Unbeknownst to her, the woman’s broad sandal came down hard on the peacefully unconscious body of speck-sized Mrs. Dutton, who’d fainted after witnessing her husband’s crushing.

            The final neighbor’s body smeared into a crevice of the rampaging shoe treads, and with that, all six neighbors were extinguished as simply as Michelle could ease her foot inside a sandal.

            Of course, there was no one left to mourn the secret massacre of these couples. Michelle was on a mission. She kicked off her shoes again by the house. Next she clambered up the stack of boxes, passed her husband by, and pried open the window. She lithely ducked through and set one foot, toes-first, upon the carpeted floor of her young son’s room. Indeed, there was no sign of him, except the clothes he’d been wearing that day. She heard no bath or shower running to indicate he’d simply stripped to cleanse himself. The answering machine beeped downstairs.

            Her toes scrunched at the carpet fibers in worry.

            Terrified of treading across her boys without knowing, Michelle retreated back out the window, trembling with oncoming tears.

            As the woman descended toward the earth again, sobbing into her husband’s shoulder, the woman had no idea that in that single step she’d taken into Thomas’s bedroom, she’d adopted a new passenger. Hugged naked between her dirt-powdered, sweat-greased big and second toes was Thomas: shrunken and screaming with terror just as furiously as his unaware mother above.

Michelle tapped a pencil hard against the desk of her office cubicle. Returning to work had been Greg’s idea, to help keep her mind off what was happening at home, as Walter Andrews quickly reverse-engineered his machinery to “track the energy signature of his minor mistakes,” meaning discover the targets and exact movements taken by Alex, Thomas, and the neighbors in their shrunken state. He’d made it sound like there was hope.

            Still, Michelle was sure she’d crack soon. Of all the evenings of this past week, when she hadn’t known where her elder son Alex had disappeared, this latest night was the most difficult. “Knowing” was so much more painful, and now, it seemed likely Thomas had received the same fate.

            She couldn’t lose both. Not each of her sons in a single week. The universe couldn’t be that twisted.

            Naturally, to avoid any accidents in the house, Greg and Michelle had gone to a nearby hotel for a night of tossing sleep and haunting nightmares of their lost kids. All night, Michelle rolled in bed, crying during what short bursts of sleep she could achieve.

            Through all of it, unknowingly to Michelle, each of her sons was with her: her eldest, trapped somewhere in subatomic space after she’d swallowed him, and then her younger, pinched like a prisoner between two of her toes.

            Thomas, of course, experienced every rock and ride of the difficult night. Occasionally he, too, attempted some sleep, but it was near impossible. Just as soon as he’d get comfortable, resting his tiny cheek against the massive bulwark of his mother’s inner digit, Michelle would squirm again, and Thomas would be bucked between the globes of toe flesh once again.

            In the morning, Michelle showered and changed into her work clothes with painful hesitation. She’d been sitting in her office for an hour now, listlessly, unable to distract herself with work. Hardly anything was accomplished.

            Thomas’s world, meanwhile, was made ever-more hellish from that simple, momentary decision for his mother to return to work. Before, the boy enjoyed at least some access to fresh air filtered in between his parent’s admittedly rank toes. The scent of lush grass, familiar linoleum, and starchy hotel bedsheets helped keep his head clear whenever he felt himself going numb from the piercing, acidic air of Michelle’s perspiration.

            But then Michelle went and abandoned those summer sandals, trading them for sensible heels. Not spikes, but tall enough such that much of her body weight was distributed down into the balls of her feet and, most importantly, her toes. Whatever sources of light and fresh oxygen Thomas once had were quickly stolen. The weight of his giant mother’s skin was unlike anything he’d felt before.

            Truly, without his parent having even half a notion of the cruelty of it, Thomas was imprisoned by Michelle’s foot. Not just within the walls of the shoe, nor the constricting, fleshy cell of her toes, but by darkness and heat, by lack of knowledge.

            And at last, after he’d endured this tortured stated for more than an hour at Michelle’s office, Thomas allowed himself to cry. When he did so, it came quickly and without remorse, like a baby. He wept for his missing brother, for the realization that he might never make it out of here alive, and for the probability that their mother would never know what she’d done.

            The air, already almost unbreathable, was so bitter now with salt that Thomas could hardly lift his chest for a gasp of the choking atmosphere. This cramped space which now confined the boy between his mother’s substantial, dark-green painted toes, had become a pure essence of her foot. It wasn’t merely tainted by the smell of skin and the spice of sweat: it was these things, distilled to vapor.

            Every instant now that Thomas was squeezed between his unaware mother’s toes, the boy almost imagined that Michelle’s entire foot was being jammed down his throat. Uncontrollable, unstoppable. He had to breathe to live, after all, and every time he opened his lips, the sensation of his own mother’s toes and sole were being raked down his stomach, clogging his being.

            Occasionally Michelle would rise to her feet, trudging meekly down the hall of the office to deliver reports or check in with a coworker. During these times, Thomas was granted the small blessing of the air stirring about, even if it was the same stuffy prison. On each step, Michelle’s toes closed tighter around Thomas’s delicate little body, the very wrinkles of her skin beating him from side to side, yet cushioning him from taking real harm. Each time his mother’s digits closed again, the boy wondered if this was his last moment on earth with his parent.

            Moisture was building now after several trips around the office. Liquid pooled at Thomas’s ankles, hot and sticky, the sweat in a soup state. Michelle was seated again, giving her toes time to settle into a swamp. Shapely and firm as the woman was, even she wasn’t immune to the effects of summer heat and AC problems.

            Increasingly, the pores of the woman’s mammoth foot opened up. Smooth skin cells seeped with salty excretion, dribbling in healthy rivulets into the shallow crevice of Michelle’s toes.

            Thomas’s body weighed down beneath drop after drop of sweat, slipping and sliding about the viscous muck of his mother’s toes. Just before he could be squeezed out of the clamp of two toes, though, Michelle’s flesh would contract again and keep him gripped by her unknowing foot.

            In his weakened state, as fat trickles of beaded foot sweat splashed on his face, Thomas let his thirst get the best of him. He opened his lips and slurped hungrily, feeling the hot, poisonous concoction of his mother’s sweat, flavored with shoe leather and lotion, washing down his throat. Almost instantly he gagged, spitting out what he could, only to find another portion splashing on his head. The tears came again as he noted the hopelessness of it, though of course his crying was pathetically outweighed by the volume of sweat. His tiny tears became lost into the flow of liquid and were reabsorbed into Michelle’s skin.

            “Mommy…” Thomas cried, gagging on another mouthful of revolting liquid. His body spun again in the squeezing, thrashing dance of his mother’s toes, his warm skin flush to her own. “Please, please, please. Please help me, Mommy.”

            “You’re sure we can stand here?” Greg Robinson asked nervously. He stood against the wall of their household kitchen, holding his wife’s clammy hand. “Walt, or whatever the hell your name is? Is this absolutely safe?”

            “Yes, yes, I assure you,” the physicist said as gently as possible. He held up a mechanical wand, which looked to be a modified radiation detector, and held it over the cedar tabletop. “I’ve gathered enough information on the boy’s trail to know he didn’t go beyond this room or the living room, and he never stood over where you are.”

            “Don’t forget Thomas!” Michelle balked angrily.

            “I haven’t, Mrs. Robinson, honest,” the man said. “I’m still working on getting a read on his location. It took me longer to follow little Alex’s path, and frankly, that’s going to be the harder problem to solve, since it’s been a week. Our best chance is to follow the trail and hopefully find where he might’ve reduced down into the… well, let’s just say too small to see. Then maybe, maybe, I can pull him out of the subatomic realm. If that’s where he is.”

            “Just get to work, Mr. Andrews,” a cop said through the screen door, amongst several other officers gathered for support or whatever else was required of this bizarre happenstance.

            “Right away!” Walter promised. He stooped below the table, metal wand near the ground as he read off a digital tablet screen. “The reaction took place just after 6:12 PM on that night. Can either of you think of where you were then?”

            “Of course I can,” Michelle snapped defensively. After all, she’d picked over every detail of that night in her sleep, backwards and forwards, in the seven days since. “That’s when I was just getting home. I saw the cake he baked me.”

            “Well, that’s about when he shrunk, give or take,” Walter said. He moved the wand. “From what I’m seeing, he stuck around here a while, probably crawled out of his clothes… made his way to this table leg, and…”

            “Wait…” Michelle mumbled, shaking her head, unwilling to accept the possibilities now set before her. “You’re… you’re saying he was down there at 6:12?”

            “Well, by this point, it was 6:31… it takes a person of that size a while to get anywhere, you understand. Why?”

            “I… I was at the table. This table…” Michelle continued.

            “How can you remember that?” Greg asked.

            “Because I was finishing authorizing log sheets for work and had to make note of the times. I remember I authorized one at 6:28, another at 6:33…”

            “Keep moving, Walter,” a second cop instructed through the screen.

            “This is interesting. He starts to go up, slightly, here,” Walter noted. The tip of his wand rose a few inches above the ground. “He would’ve still been… maybe half an inch, right here. To be honest, I’m not positive of the physical effects, since he’s the first one to ever receive the… never mind. Point is, he must’ve climbed.”
            “Climbed,” Greg repeated. “Climbed what?”

            “Climbed me,” Michelle mouthed. Both hands went to her paled cheeks. Her eyes welled with tears at the very idea. “My… my baby boy was trying to climb onto me. To get my attention.”

            “Looks like a snag of some sort. Fluctuation in the reading here, he hit the floor again after a short climb.”

            “But he kept moving?” Michelle demanded desperately, her throat ragged. “He MOVED. Tell me he moved again!”

            “He did, he did,” Walter said. “Yep, moved around a bit here, more regular pattern. He got higher this time, must’ve made a leap judging by the arc I’m seeing here, and-”

            “Oh my God,” Michelle gasped. She almost buckled at the knees, cupping her palm over her mouth now. “Oh my GOD.”

            “What?”

            “The… the Legos. It wasn’t much, but… I assumed it was Thomas. That he built something. I would’ve sworn the pieces weren’t together when I saw it on the floor earlier, but then I…” she continued, swallowing with difficulty. “I picked them up and walked to the living room.”

            “Another correct one!” Walter congratulated, then toned down his cheery mood. “Yep, I see he stayed on a fairly even trajectory into the living room now. Resourceful, your kid. He must’ve hung onto you.”

            Michelle was devolving into tears again, her face buried in her husband’s shoulder. Her fists, whitened by fear, clenched around Greg’s hands. This information clearly wasn’t improving her outlook.

            Walter delicately made his way into the living room, stood where Michelle stood to replace the Legos in a storage box, then came back, nodding his head all the way.

            “He stayed with you the whole walk. Must be a strong one.”

            “He rock climbs,” Greg explained. “He’s very good for his age.”

            “Looks like it,” Walter said. He stooped again. “And I gather you stayed here for a little longer after that, Mrs. Robinson?”

            “Y-Yes…” she sniffed. “I got through the rest of the paperwork for the night. I remember the last one I signed… 7:16, I think.”

            “Well, the boy had another go of it, and he did much better this time. I’m seeing an almost straight line upward.”

            “I wore a skirt. He could’ve climbed that,” Michelle whimpered. Her muscles locked, her entire body in a state of near-shutdown as she imagined the very concept of her poor, helpless little boy, small as anything she could imagine, trying to clamber his way up her clothing for help. She closed her hand gently, longing to picture how things might’ve gone differently if she’d only seen him, if she’d only been able to collect him tenderly into her fingertips and protect him in the center of her palm.

            What he must’ve gone through, hoping and praying for his mother’s attention?

            “Little fall here, front of the seat…” Walter continued, missing the horrified expressions on the faces of both parents.  “…and back up he went, but not on your shirt. Irregular pattern. Could’ve been anything… probably hard to remember, but he did make it up here, and it wasn’t alone.”

            “M-My hand…” Michelle sputtered. She was sinking toward the floor now, unable to remain standing as she was forced to now live through all of this horror as an outsider with her stranded, thoughtful little son. The woman clutched both palms over her eyes to dam the tide of tears. “He got to my hand. My… my baby, he made it that far… if only I’d… if only I’d seen…”

            “You couldn’t have known, Michelle,” Greg said, following his wife to the floor. “Please. Just listen.”

            “To the table, he moved around a little, let’s see… time passed… and, up he goes again! Now, this is intriguing,” Walter said. “Must’ve been a solid, climbable object here before, something he could’ve scaled, even as he probably continued shrinking. Know of a-”

            “THE CAKE!” Michelle’s scream rattled the walls of the house and startled the cops outside. “He… b-baked… he baked me a… a… it was there… I h-had a… a piece.”

            “That makes sense. Stopped off right about…. here, then rose again… much higher than I bet your cake stood, back to the table, stuck around for a minute, and…”

            “What?” Greg roared now. It took all his self-control not to jump forward and tackle this man to the floor. “TELL US.”

            “It’s… it’s just… umm…” Walter continued, his face drained of color as he put the pieces together. “Based on what you’re telling me about this cake, and where I can guess Mrs. Robinson’s head might’ve been relative to her seat, the last readable energy trail I can follow leads right up to… her, um…”

            Michelle froze completely this time, her hands uncovered from her tear-streaked cheeks, fingers wrenching through her messy black locks of hair. The quivering stopped, from the tips of her toes up to her scalp. A final, lasting breath inflated her lungs, and then emptied again.

            “Oh, God…” Greg said. He sounded out of words now, and possibly forever.

            “Yes,” Walter confirmed with a defeated shrug. “I don’t take any pleasure in telling you both this. But it… it looks an awful lot to me like… he may have gone… inside. Inside her mouth.”

            At this last word, Michelle rose again. An inhuman steeliness took hold behind her gorgeous emerald eyes. She launched herself up on her heels, hands clawed like those of a rabid jungle cat, onto Walter, pile-driving him into the side of the table. Both of them tumbled to the floor. The cops flinched, unsure whether it was safe to set foot inside.

            “NO! You’re a goddamned LIAR! None of this is fucking REAL!” Michelle’s unleashed screams of mismatched hysteria and loss sounded as though they were pulled from someone else’s mouth, the din spreading through the house with a mother’s love like an ignited flame. “You’re JUST a DISGUSTING little WORM of a man who came here to… to screw with our heads, and make us… make ME believe… that I ate my s-”

            Michelle couldn’t finish the sentence, nor say the word “son.” She rolled herself off of Walter, scrambled to her feet, and over the kitchen sink just in time to throw up into the drain. Her entire body quaked again with the sickness of it and her own lingering screams. The shattered woman slammed both palms against the side of the sink in succession, livid at all of existence, and then clutched her shoulders and crumpled to the ground in a heap. On her side, she writhed, nails digging into her skin, producing fresh tears from strained eyes. Her next words came in a low, private, desperate song to herself.

            “Oh, no, no, no, no. No, my baby, my baby. Alex, I’m so sorry, Mommy is so sorry. She’d never hurt you, honey. Oh, please, come back, come back to Mommy. Let me save you. Let me save you, my poor little baby. Let me hold you again. Just let me hold you in my hands. Oh, God. Oh God. No, no, no. NO.”

Alex wasn’t certain time still existed in this subatomic negative zone of space and color. Obviously, he hadn’t eaten, drunk, or slept during his existence amongst the nuclear rings and spheres, yet he would’ve been ready to bet anything that he’d been here a long time. At least a day. Probably longer, even. A week? Maybe a month. There was no way to be certain.

            Then, as if he was hearing sound through an entire ocean’s depth, Alex perked up. The first signal to reach his ears in all this time.

            It was Thomas. Unmistakably so. His little brother, crying out, first without shape, then in words.

            “MOM!” the young boy cried. “PLEASE DON’T STEP ON ME! MOM, I’M DOWN HERE! I’M WITH YOU! HELP!”

            Shaking his head, Alex listened for further cries, but couldn’t make any out. Had he become delusional? Or had Thomas joined him in this impossible dimension of a microscopic galaxy? Alex could only hope with all his heart that his brother hadn’t befallen the same tragic fate.

            Then, where there had been only silence and drifting color before, there came energy. Life. Sound. Something tangible against Alex’s skin. Wind?

            He couldn’t help but laugh with rejoicing to be experiencing something beyond the unending cluster of revolving electrons and imaginary particles he couldn’t name. Hands outstretched, hope restored, if only in small measure, Alex felt himself falling yet again, no longer suspended in space. He traveled down, out of the spiraling storm of this shrunken nightmare, and toward a light brighter than any he could bear to witness.

***

            “GOT him!” Walter cheered. He yanked a lever hooked to his stacked machinery on the patio. His devices whizzed with the effort of his latest, and probably final, experiment, as the cadre of waiting police officers stood around him. They cheered as well. “See, I told you I could do it, right?”

            On the floor, naked as the day he was born, and caked in a thin sheen of plasma, laid Alex Robinson: fully regrown to his previous height of five-foot-nine. His eyes remained shut just a minute and then he coughed, air filling his lungs for the first time in a week, and sensation returning to his extremities.

            Too shocked to budge from where he stood by the wall, Greg’s mouth hung open.

            Michelle, meanwhile, was already crawling across the floor with renewed zeal and pure elation. Uncaring of her son’s bare body or coat of plasma from the rapid size change, the woman threw herself over Alex’s form. She wrapped both arms and legs around his narrower limbs, her hands held first over his chest to ensure a heartbeat, then up to his face, testing the movement of his lips and eyes, to convince herself he was real.

            “Oh God… oh, God, oh God…” she repeated. For at least a minute, it seemed all the woman would be capable of doing was repeating these words and stroking her fingers aggressively through her elder son’s hair. Next she planted a hard, wet kiss on the top of his head, and after this she became too ravenous with joy to be stopped. Alex was almost overcome as his mother pressed sloppy, crazed kisses upon his cheeks, forehead, and hands. “My baby is back, my baby is back, my baby…”

            “WAIT!” Alex cried, bolting up, only to almost slip on the slick floor, as well as beneath the strength of his mother’s embracing arms, which were still locked around him. “T-Thomas! He’s…”

            “We know,” Greg gasped. “We know the same thing happened to him as you.”

            “Yeah, but… but I know… I know he’s in the same place that I was, he’s…”

            “What did you hear?” Walter demanded, shoving his way past Greg to stand over the boy. “Just remember. You heard something, didn’t you, kid?”

            “He… he said…” Alex stuttered as he stared into the face of the stranger. “He said… please don’t step on me, M-Mom. He must… he must be down…”

            Michelle looked on the verge of losing consciousness from all the mad excitement of this roller coastering day. However, she still managed to keep her body wrapped mostly around her older son as her muscles shuddered her to the floor. Delicately, the woman’s leg was outstretched, her shoe removed, and her bare toes left to flex. There was no sign of a tiny naked human body anywhere inside the sweat-slicked shoe insole, between her own toejam-flecked digits, nor beneath her pink-flushed sole.

            “This won’t hurt a bit,” Walter promised, his hands in frenzy at the controls of the shrinking device. A second blinding flash of light flooded the kitchen, a splash of plasma, and just beneath Michelle’s feet laid Thomas, equally naked and weak, but alive and breathing.

            “Oh, my babies, my babies, I’m never letting you go again,” Michelle swore. She gathered both of her sons together, despite their mounting embarrassment as the shock wore off and the realization of their exposure took hold. Miraculous tears spread anew down the woman’s cheeks. She squeezed each boy to a breast, her fingers in their matted hair, reminded deep inside of the day each child first emerged into the world and the touch of divinity she’d experienced upon seeing each of their adorable faces for the first time.

            Alex and Thomas, too tired to resist this consistently warped state of reality, could only look to one another with dumbfounded smirks as their mother hugged her children closer.