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.”