“Well, bye mom and dad,” April said as she walked through the living room to get to the front door. Her parents were sitting at the dinner table, enjoying their dinner.

“She’s growing up fast,” said Therese after she heard the sound of the door closing. Bill, her husband, who had already cleaned up everything on his plate, was waiting for her to finish so he could get their desserts.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Going out with her friends every night. Wouldn’t hurt her to spend some time at home once in a while.”

“You know we used to be the same back when we were her age, right?”

“If anything we were worse than her, sweetie. I know I used to make my parents mad all the time,” chuckled Bill. “God bless them, wherever they are now.”

“Well, let’s just hope she doesn’t follow your example then.” The woman smiled, but then her face turned a bit concerned. “Doesn’t this omelette taste a bit funny?” she asked her husband.

“Don’t think so,” he replied. The man, who had devoured his own in just a few bites, didn’t pay much attention to its taste.

“Must be my imagination,” said the woman as she tried another bite.

“Could the eggs be expired?” he asked.

“Nah, I’m pretty sure because I bought them today, and I checked,” she explained.

“Well, I finished the whole thing and I’m not dead yet, so you’ll probably be fine too,” he reassured her.

“Very comforting,” she commented.“Well I hate to waste food so…” She finished her omelette, leaving just a few crumbs on her plate.

The man didn’t want to waste another second. He got up from his table and went for the fridge, where he grabbed the ice cream box. “Honey, do you want some?” he yelled from the kitchen.

“Nope,” said Therese, going against her wishes. She had turned forty-four the last spring, and she felt like each year that passed, she had to try harder to keep her nice figure. Still, she could consider herself accomplished, as anybody would have said she had succeeded so far. Every time she saw herself in the mirror, she could feel proud of her body, which is not something every woman her age could say.

She looked down at her slim legs nicely sticking from the tight and short summer dress she had picked for the evening. Knowing April was about to leave them alone as she usually did, she decided she wanted to tease her husband a bit. It seemed to have worked, as his gaze more often than not was attracted by her curves, and she could almost physically feel his eyes fixed on her ass after she had grabbed some of the dirty dishes to carry them to the sink.

She waited for Bill to finish up his dessert, then they did the dishes together.

“I’ll be doing some laundry now,” she announced then. “Help me get the sheets from April’s bed.”

The man sighed. “The work day never ends,” he complained.

The two entered the teen’s bedroom, then headed for her bed.

“How is she supposed to sleep among all of this crap?” commented Bill as he and Therese had started clearing the girl’s bed from the numerous objects scattered in there.

The woman folded and stored one of her t-shirts, while he carried some of her makeup items, a fashion magazine and a half-eaten pack of crackers to her desk.

Therese grabbed a pair of shorts, wanting to store them as well, when she saw Bill holding his head between his hands.

“Are you all right?” she asked. It was something of a useless question, as he was visibly in pain.

“I...” he said, as if unable to utter anything else.

“Let me get you an aspirin,” said Therese, storming out of the room.

When she came back, holding a glass of bubbly water in her hands, Bill wasn’t there anymore. The woman went to check their bedroom, the living room, the bathroom… he seemed to have vanished.

“Has he gone for a walk?” she wondered. For now, she returned to April’s room to finish her job. She still had the glass with the aspirin in her hand, so she placed it on the girl’s desk. Then, as she went to pick the shorts she was about to fold before, she noticed her husband’s clothes on the floor.

“Huh?” she said as she grabbed his pants and shirt. “He must have changed before going out,” she thought, trying to make sense of the situation. “But why would he leave them all on the floor here? What a pain that man can be.”

Therese grabbed all the clothes and tossed them into the laundry pile, then returned to the girl’s room. As she did, however, she felt an acute pain surging through all of her body.

Wondering if that was the same sickness her husband had lamented a few minutes before, she grabbed her head, feeling the unpleasant sensation reverberating through her insides.

Then, just as she was about to scream, the pain ended. Everything had gone dark. She was naked. And she had a naked man standing right above her.

She was about to scream, but she recognized his touch and scent. “Therese”, he then heard him say.

“Bill?” cried the woman. “What the hell is happening?”

They were not in April’s room anymore, or so it seemed to Therese. The place she had been transported to was dark, oppressive, and it smelled like… her toiletry?

“Therese,” said Bill, his voice shaking. “I don’t know how to say this…”

“What is it?” she cried. “What the hell is happening to us?”

“You’re going to believe I’m mad but… I think we shrunk,” said the man.

“What the hell?” she said, breaking free from him. She tried to move around, realizing that something warm and soft but terribly heavy was extending all over and around them, trapping them both against itself.

“Therese,” said Bill, grabbing the woman’s hand. “You need to listen to me. I don’t know how, but we just turned really, really small. I know… because I just saw you as a giant.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” said the woman, still struggling against the soft material, trying to get out from under its suffocating clutch.

“Look,” said the man. “It was like this for me too, just some moments ago. Then you came and picked all my clothes up. It was unreal. One moment I was on the floor, and the other, I was flying and I saw your face, so huge, and then I landed right here on your tit.”

“Stop bullshitting me,” said the woman, turning more and more nervous. “Where the hell are we anyway?”

“I’m pretty sure,” said the man, recognizing the familiar smell, “these must be the panties you were wearing.”

*

It started to make sense to her, as much as it seemed impossible. It explained everything so well. The momentary disappearance of Bill, the fact she had found his clothes on the ground, the fact that he was now with her, and they were both completely naked, and the gigantic clothes that covered them in that very moment.

Still, it wasn’t easy to accept. Therese wanted to deny that horrible truth with all of her vehemence.

“That’s not possible,” she told Bill. “People don’t just shrink”.

Bill couldn’t blame his wife for saying that. He probably wouldn’t have believed that story himself, hadn’t he seen her kilometric body with his very eyes.

“Whatever,” he resigned to think. “She’ll see it all once we get out of here.”

The two, holding each other by the hand, kept wading through the fabric that was trapping them. At one point, they could see the scenery change. There, and through the fibres of the fabric, they could see some of the light from outside. They had reached the end of Therese’s panties and were now standing directly under her dress, covered only by one layer of fabric. Tired of that exhausting workout, the woman let out a loud sigh and sat down to recover.

“I’m beat,” she cried out.

Bill, feeling sorry for her, sat next to his wife, and held her tight, after kissing her on the cheek. “Don’t worry sweetie, I’m with you,” he told her, trying his best to be comforting.

She let him envelope him with his arms and, mentally exhausted, drifted to sleep there.

Bill, noticing his wife had fallen asleep, took his time to consider the situation. What exactly do you do when you shrink? Nothing in his life had prepared him for such an absurd situation. Likely, they had caught some sort of rare disease. Was there a cure? Could they be saved? How should they go about this at all? There was no way they could use, or even reach, their phones at this new size. And what about April? Bill shivered at the thought of their teenage daughter coming back as a mountainous giant.

The other possibility, though, seemed even worse: his poor child had shrunk too, and was now as small as they were, naked in her own pile of clothes in some local bar or fast-food joint.

He tried not to think of all of that. For now, he decided, the only thing to do was try to get out from under his wife’s summer dress, then they would try their best to get some help.

He decided to let her rest another while, then he gently woke her up. “Come on”, he said. “We need to get out of this place.”

The couple resumed their walking. It took them a few minutes to reach the end of the dress. They could see, in the distance, the shiny gleam of the floor.

When they were finally out, the scene was chilling. They were definitely in their daughter’s room. They could recognize the carpet, the furniture in the distance, the walls, and so on. The only discrepancy was how disproportionate everything seemed. The bed that rose to their left seemed to go up forever. Around them, pairs of shoes and sandals the girl kept scattered all around the floor. The closest one, a blue flip flop that stood in front of them, stood taller than the building they lived in. They looked in awe at the platform of the gigantic shoe they were used to see at their daughter’s foot.

“How small must we be...” wondered the brunette, unable to stop looking at the immense wall right in front of her.

“Tinier than ants,” said the man, soberly.

The woman shook her head. “What the fuck do we do?” she asked, praying her husband would provide some sort of useful answer.

Unfortunately, he really couldn’t. He just remained speechless for some time, then he outlined the best plan he could think of. “We need to get help.”

“Yeah,” said the woman, looking around hopelessly. “Let me just ask the dust crumbs there.”

The couple wandered directionless around the room for some time, looking around the room, trying to find some clue, some unlikely solution.

“You think April shrank too?” asked Therese at one point.

“I’m not sure I want to know,” said the man. “If she did, that’s horrible, if she didn’t… the girl who wears those flip-flops is going to be here soon.”

Therese felt weak to her knees imagining how large her daughter had to be to them right now, had she not shrunk as well. “Still,” her husband added, his voice trembling a bit. “If she’s fine, we’ll need her to notice us somewhat. She’s the only one that can help us.”

“Honey,” said the woman, in a dead serious tone. “I’m not even sure she can see us.”