Chuxi Zhao wiped the sweat from his brow for the umpteenth time, a preemptive measure. He didn’t want his perspiration to drip onto his notes. Heaving a sigh, he glanced up towards the slit-like “windows” positioned at the ceiling where sunlight poured into the otherwise fluorescent and grim library basement. Chuxi knew better than to long for outside, however – it was the middle of August, and temperatures stretched into the triple digits. Usually the library provided a cool oasis on campus, but at some point last week the air conditioner had broken, leaving industrious students like him to suffer. Normally, he’d relocate back to his dorm or some kind of café, but the particular book he needed was “on reserve,” so he couldn’t leave the building with it.

He forced his eyes back to the page and attempted to decipher the soup of symbols in front him, but the stifling heat prevented any kind of productivity. He should be tougher than this. Back in Hong Kong, it got so hot people literally died, and neither his school nor his shoebox apartment had air conditioning back then. He supposed his time at Peking University had made him soft. Surely not as soft as the Americans, though. He looked around the deserted library basement and marveled at the waste of it all. Even in grade school, emptiness like this would be a travesty.

Admittedly, the library wasn’t completely empty. A brunette girl hunched over her work a few tables diagonal from him, suffering with him in the unbearable heat. All he could see was her back, but Chuxi felt a whimsical connection with the girl, a fellow grinder. In fact, her presence in the library was doubly impressive because the undergraduates had just begun their fall semester, whereas Chuxi and the other graduate students had been here for a month. Chuxi could see the girl’s pencil wiggling back and forth, and he could just make out her nose when she occasionally swiveled her head to scrutinize at her laptop screen. He imagined she was pretty.

Impulsively, he gave her a nod of respect that no one would see. Maybe one day he would try to talk to her. Heaving another sigh, he got back to work.

…

Chuxi awoke with a start, his body covered in sweat. His first thought: how long had he been asleep? Hopefully he hadn’t lost too much time. His second thought: where was he? He didn’t recognize his surroundings at all – he appeared to be in a massive, completely empty gray room with light coming from somewhere behind him. He spun around, but what he saw left him incredulous. Some distance away he recognized the wheels and legs of his black desk chair – all perfectly normal – except a single wheel came up to his chest. It didn’t seem possible, but somehow Chuxi had shrunk.

Not one to panic, he began walking towards the chair while running through some basic questions in his head. How had this happened? He had no idea. He hadn’t been near anything particularly unusual that might have caused this, and he’d never heard of anyone mysteriously shrinking in this fashion. He quickly abandoned that train of thought. How could he return to normal? Could he return to normal? Again, no idea. If someone had done this to him, they must’ve had ample opportunity to do whatever they pleased to him while he slept. Besides, he couldn’t fathom why anyone would actively shrink him. He quickly abandoned that train of thought as well.

While he couldn’t conceive of how this had happened or how he might fix it, both of those took secondary priority to more pressing issues: food and shelter. Whatever had shrunk him had evidently shrunk his clothes as well (jeans, black shirt), not that he needed any clothes in this heat; and since he was already inside, shelter wouldn’t be an issue either. Really, he just needed to get some food, and even that wasn’t necessarily urgent. He tried to avoid it if he could, but he could go a few days without food. Still, judging by how many people he had seen in the library since he had been here, it could be far longer before he could get any sustenance. With his backpack on the desk and well out of reach (not that he had any food in it), everything pointed to one option: it looked like he’d be talking to his fellow grinder sooner than he thought.

With his mind made up, he began navigating the city of desks and chairs. The plain gray desks loomed over him like prisons, obscuring his vision of where he hoped the brunette still worked. More immediately, previously overlooked odds and ends stood out against the white tile floor. Bits of paper, pen caps, and the occasional paper clip lay strewn across the ground, forgotten. He scooped up one of the latter, a bright orange one, and hoisted it on his shoulder. Thankfully, the paperclip didn’t weigh much, even if it was over half his height, which he estimated at somewhere around four inches. With this realization came a spike in the low-level panic he had successfully suppressed so far: he was tiny! Taking a deep breath, Chuxi redirected his nervous energy towards something more productive: adjusting his grip on the paperclip, he broke into a jog.

Upon turning the corner of yet another plain, gray desk he stopped in his tracks. There sat the brunette, towering over him like some secretarial Statue of Liberty. Her sheer size left him awestruck and sent his heart racing. She had her hair in a ponytail, and a pair of noise-cancelling headphones protected her ears from the oppressive silence of the library. From his position behind her, he still couldn’t see her face, but she wore a plain T-shirt and gym shorts, and her backpack sat on the ground by her chair. Nevertheless, one detail in particular got him especially excited: her feet. At some point she had (understandably) removed her shoes and socks, allowing her toes to breath, which in turn worked out perfectly for him. All he had to do was prod her feet with the paperclip in order to get noticed. Rejoicing in his good fortune (he honestly didn’t know how he could’ve gotten her attention otherwise), he ran towards the desk.

He slowed down considerably as he drew closer. His eagerness to get close to her feet was blunted significantly by the smell emanating from not only them, but also her discarded sneakers and socks. She must’ve gone on a run before coming to the library, only to have her feet fester in the sweltering heat of the library, ultimately producing the inhumane odor Chuxi presently inhaled. His current size seemingly amplified the effect, and he eyed a formerly white sock with trepidation as he skirted the edge of the desk chair towards his target. The sheer humidity of the air beneath the desk told him that these items were still wet with her sweat. As he retreated further beneath the desk, the smell of her feet intensified and penetrated his nostrils despite his best preventative efforts. A new wave of the stench hit him, seemingly with physical force, as he marched grimly past the opening of one of her pink running sneakers. When his eyes began to water, Chuxi had to remind himself that this wasn’t her fault: it wasn’t like she was purposefully subjecting him to her pungent foot aroma.

Finally, Chuxi came to a stop in front of his target, and also the source of his newly-acquired headache. He regarded the pair of feet with a mixture of apprehension and hope. She sat with her legs stretched out as far as they would go under the desk, crossed at the ankles. He felt somewhat safe where he stood across from her soles. On a whim, he craned his neck to follow her smooth, shapely legs upwards until the desk blocked the rest from view. The fact that these tremendous appendages belonged to someone was tough to reconcile.

Here, almost at the back of the generously-sized desk, her sweaty scent had reached its zenith, and Chuxi felt like he stood in a sauna derived from her feet’s secretions. He tried not to think about the unpleasantness of his predicament and set to work bending the paperclip into a long pole. However, after a few minutes of flexing and grunting, it became clear that he wasn’t strong enough. He looked at the monolithic feet in front of him, each more than twice his height. He wondered if he should just walk up and try to use his hands, distasteful as that might be. He shuddered at thought of rubbing her sweaty soles.

In the blink of an eye, the brunette dragged her feet back under the chair, shifting into another position. Her sudden yet simple movement scared Chuxi. He hadn’t felt this startled since his childhood, when he saw the bullet train for the first time. Such tremendous masses shouldn’t be able to move like that.

In any case, that settled that for him: he wasn’t going near those things. Just a twitch of one of her toes could break his arm – or worse. With this in mind, he cast about for some way to make this work, always with one eye warily keeping watch on the girl’s feet.

When his gaze settled upon her pink running shoe, he had an idea. With one hand covering his nose, he ran over to the reeking footwear and set about jamming one end of the paperclip into one of the shoelace holes. Once he felt that the paperclip was satisfactorily secure, he braced his feet against the rubber sole of the shoe, providing the leverage he needed to pry apart the paperclip. With that part straightened, he clambered back around and repeated the process, inserting another end of the paperclip and bending. After a few minutes, Chuxi had mostly bent the paperclip apart. He considered stopping and using what he had, but eventually decided to press on. He was nothing if not thorough, and besides, he wanted to have as much distance between himself and those monstrous feet as possible. He was so engrossed in this task that he didn’t immediately respond when the girl asked him what he was doing.