“There appears to be… a problem,” one of the students called out.

Micah noticed too. It was obvious, after all; he noticed halfway through their trek: the box was face down. The controls were stuck under a colossal cube that none of them could even budge together, let alone overturn.

“Yeah… looks like it.”

“Wh-what are we going to do?! I am not going to be small forever! I can’t take it!” one of the meeker boys, Randy, began to rant. “What if the whole world shrunk?! And we all have to ride rats and make weapons out of needles?! And we’d scour the land for more survivors but in reality, we’d only traveled, like, three blocks?!”

Micah peered at him, recognizing him as the one who’d initially tampered with the box. Quite the change in attitude from his gung-ho demeanor that got them into this mess. Nevertheless, he assuaged Randy’s fears.

“That’s not possible. Even if the whole payload discharged, the shockwave would only have a radius of maybe…” Micah thought for a moment. “About a fourth a kilometer. Chances are only people inside the school would be affected.”

“Really? Well, we can probably just wait for someone to come pick us up tomorrow if need be. Then figure out the size problem with the box,” another girl threw out.

“Assuming they see us,” Aidan posited.

It was a possibility that was uncomfortable to think about, the idea of one of their fellow human beings not taking notice of the group, and somehow leading to their demise through actions as innocuous as walking or even sitting down.”

“Isn’t today Friday?” Mrs. Wraith asked.

Somehow the negative air that fell over the group was even worse, as the inevitability of their needing to survive amongst possible pests and one another for over forty-eight hours with no food was a nightmarish proposition.

Suddenly, Micah’s pocket vibrated.

“Hey, buddy, I think you’re getting a call,” Aidan said, picking up the sound of the tone.

“What the heck?” one of the students said. “We all tried our phones, and they didn’t work.”

Micah could only ignore him as he smiled ear-to-ear, eagerly digging out his phone from the pocket. “Well, you all can’t even begin to fathom what I’ve done with this thing.”

Micah turned the phone on, and he could see it was a text from Mom.

Mom.

She was here. In the school!

She could save them!

Quickly relaying the missive to the group resulted in a cavalcade of reactions. Most of them began to crowd around Micah, nearly piling over the genius, trying to glimpse the phone screen’s bright text.

“‘I am here. Where am I supposed to go, colon, close parenthesis, close parenthesis’,” someone read out loud.

“I think it’s pronounced smiley smiley face, actually.”

“No, it’s really the double smile.”

“Huh, that’s a pretty good compromise. Okay, so she said ‘Where am I supposed to go, double smile.’”

“Eh, maybe it should be ‘double smiley face’,” someone disputed.

“He said colon? I could’ve sworn it was semicolon.”

“A semicolon would be smiley winky face.”

“But what about the double--”

“Can you all please shut UP?!” Ms. Wraith shrieked. Logically, it didn’t go farther than a dozen or so real-life inches, but to the miniscule party it felt a whole lot louder. Dispersing the crowd, Ms. Wraith pushed in to reach Micah. As the other teens dispersed, she knelt to Micah’s level, nearly hissing, “You have a signal down here?”

“Y-yeah.”

“Can you use it to call for help?”

“I mean, I could try. The phone can connect to towers 50 times the usual distance. It’s just that… we shrunk much smaller than 50 times. We’re, like, rice-sized. Don’t expect too much.”

“I expect that you’re doing everything in your power to get us out of this mess.”

Micah only looked down at his phone, thinking about the message to compose, one which he may not have the chance to send again if an unexpected lapse in technology occurs at a size so much closer to the actual sizes of the electrons the phone uses to perform its functions. It’s like playing golf with boulders.

After the deliberation, he settled on “HELP MOM. WE’RE SHRUNK. COME TO THE LIBRARY; WE’LL BE ON THE GROUND. PLEASE. THIS IS NOT A JOKE.”

Micah flashed the phone in front of Ms. Wraith, who evaluated it. “Hmm, grammatically, it’s rather accurate. Flow could use work, but beggars shan’t be choosers.”

Taking that as approval, Micah hit the “Send” button.

Sending.

Sending.

Sending.

Sending.

“What’s going on? What’s it waiting for?”

“I… don’t know. I’m picking up a signal, but it’s taking a long time to send out.”

“Well, when do you think that’ll be?”

Micah could only shrug as he took note of his phone’s battery. 17 percent. If this phone died before the message was out, they would be forced to wait out the weekend on the dusty ground to fend off the rats and the roaches. Not ideal.

“I think… that one of us should go out into the school to look for someone.”

-----

The hallway had gone from a simple corridor to a sprawling, terrestrial landscape of celestial scale. Mr. Jean, the school’s janitor, had just finished locking the garbage can in the closet when a bizarre sensation came over him, and he was now as small as a… convenient, easy-to-understand small object for size comparisons. Like, say, a grain of rice for instance. Yeah, that could work.

Mr. Jean could not ruminate on the thought, because now he could feel every step shake his bone structure and rattle his teeth. Looking out onto the beyond of the hallway, he could just barely see… a silhouette. At this size, even large things appear blurry when viewed from far away enough (or perhaps he just needed glasses). Each new footstep was another tremor through the linoleum floor, bouncing him and bouncing him again, until it came into his field of vision.

A woman.

A titan-sized woman.

Mr. Jean ran out, waving as hard as he could, screaming, “HELP! HELP! I’M DOWN HERE!”

The woman was slowing down, and for a moment, Mr. Jean was beginning to think this woman would be his salvation. Her boat-sized flats appear to have stopped just in front of him. Now all he had to do was wait for her to reach down and pick him up.

Then she bypassed him, instead heading directly to the next door down.

“Yep, looks like 207.”

KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK.

Each powerful blast reverberated from the wood and into the floor, jarring the man as he looked at the woman stare disapprovingly at the door, before reaching for the doorknob and opening it herself. A gust of wind from the displaced air knocked Mr. Jean off balance, but he was up and at ‘em in moments, only making it a few inches before the door slammed back shut nearly busting his eardrums.

“No, no, no, NO!” Mr. Jean lamented, running after the door and, upon finally reaching it, pounding on the strong wood with his fists before sinking to the ground, lamenting as he now punched the linoleum ground.

Getting his frustrations out, Mr. Jean began to stand back up to assess the situation. “Okay, so… it might take me a long time to get there, but there’s a phone in the counselor’s office. If I can--”

The door opened.

Rather, the door was knocked aside by an inconceivable force at Mr. Jean’s current size, blowing him all the way up into the air. This jarring, terrifying predicament came to an abrupt halt when he landed in the slightly-too-small entrance into a sort of dark tunnel, opening up from a larger structure that overlooked a metal basin.

As Mr. Jean tried to get his bearings, he heard the woman say, “Jesus, I am parched.”

Then she walked toward him once again. The approaching titan began to reach unfathomable proportions as she became easier to discern, with the fabric of her office clothing like colossal systems of ropes, with her hair like its own drapery of ropes, arms like… giant ropes. What is it about ropes, he wondered.

Again, it was no time to dawdle, as she crouched down and was now closer than she had ever been to Mr. Jean. The beautiful woman’s face showed slight aging, and at this size each and every nook, cranny, mole, and imperfection on her face was like a star in a pink, morning sky.

“I’M RIGHT HERE!” Mr. Jean yelled once more as the woman parted her delicate lips from one another, approaching Mr. Jean until they were like a wormhole, or an eclipse, blotting out the world above him as it became only one black, humid maw.

In that moment, Mr. Jean realized where he was.

The telltale sound of water rushing through plumbing hit Mr. Jean’s ears. He knew that sound well, but never knew how imminently terrifying such a thing could be until the moment before he was catapulted on a geyser of cold, rushing water into an eager, awaiting mouth. He landed in a tsunami that swirled and torrented and was soon replaced by more water as the woman gulped. Mr. Jean tried to exercise the little control he had over his fate as he reached for anything in the humid, cold, warm, murky, potent-smelling, slippery darkness. Was that a tooth? A potential grip betrayed no handholds, making him hypothesize it to be a cheek (if you could call the crazed and manic screams, gasps, and flails of a doomed man hypothesis). He was slammed into teeth again and again, grateful for the first, last, and only time in his life that the act of drinking did not require one to chew.

Then, it came tumbling down. Or rather, he did. The biological grotto Mr. Jean had found himself within began to incline, the movable space began to decrease as the air was expelled and the tongue began to fill the mouth. The last trickles of water began to trickle down the newly created ramp, and they sent Mr. Jean down with it in a picture not unlike the whale scene from Finding Nemo, except far more claustrophobic, and certain not to have a happy ending.

Gulp!

A final bulge traveled down her esophagus, and Sharon wiped her mouth with her sleeve, satisfied. “Ahhh.” 

And then she walked back into the classroom to wait, with only one thought:

It was so weird that nobody else was inside.